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Speaker 1: Friday morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. I'm Ryan Graandma here
Speaker 1: with Emily Joshinsky. Good morning Emily, Good morning Ryan. All right,
Speaker 1: so we've got a quick update. Last week we told
Speaker 1: people that we were thinking about adding some intro music,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that a lot of viewers have
Speaker 1: been asking for. The I gus still want to get
Speaker 1: a little more hyped up. Then I get them at
Speaker 1: the beginning to show that it's something to really and
Speaker 1: so your voice is very lyricistic. Lyrical is a nice
Speaker 1: way of putting it. And so we were blown away
Speaker 1: by the amount of the amount of music that we
Speaker 1: were sent. So many of you are musicians yourselves, have
Speaker 1: written music. People sent us things they'd already composed and
Speaker 1: said here, you can use these if you want. And
Speaker 1: you're really good too. You got I mean, this is good.
Speaker 1: He sent really good stuff. And other people said they're
Speaker 1: going to work on stuff and send it in, so
Speaker 1: we're going to have something fun. I also did follow
Speaker 1: up with Fish. Oh good, that's right. Yeah, he actually
Speaker 1: emailed Fish. I emailed Fish. Fish said that the problem
Speaker 1: with Tweezer and Tweezer Reprized is that Warner Music owns
Speaker 1: some of the rights and so that's difficult, but they
Speaker 1: own all their lives almost all of their live music rights.
Speaker 1: So if we want something live, that's that's still an option.
Speaker 1: But I think so many people submitted music so that
Speaker 1: we don't do that. That's what it was. The influx
Speaker 1: was so there were plenty of people that like something
Speaker 1: like that could work, plenty plenty to find plenty, lots lots.
Speaker 1: I got lots of positive feedback on that. I'm going
Speaker 1: to say that good well fish Nation is strong fish wherever,
Speaker 1: and so at the beginning of every week here there
Speaker 1: are just a couple of stories that we really want
Speaker 1: to dive into, and then by the time the show
Speaker 1: comes around, so much news has broken. We get a
Speaker 1: packed show. We have another pack show this week. A
Speaker 1: bunch of new news broke last night that we're going
Speaker 1: to get to later in the show. We're also going
Speaker 1: to talk about the hot inflation numbers that came out.
Speaker 1: Matt Stoller and Dave Dan are both going to be
Speaker 1: here later in the show to talk about that. What
Speaker 1: else were we going to talk about today? We've had
Speaker 1: so much on the dock that we've got. We're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about everything that happened with PayPal this week.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the mid terms because there were a
Speaker 1: series of debates this week that went in some really
Speaker 1: interesting directions and we have some sound bites from that
Speaker 1: that we're going to go over. The new Elon Musk news.
Speaker 1: It sounds like there'sazing investigated. There's Elon Musk news every
Speaker 1: single day, but yes, that's the new information we have.
Speaker 1: There's also new information about Donald Trump's bid to a
Speaker 1: point A special Master in the Marl Logo document case,
Speaker 1: and then both of us are going to tackle You're
Speaker 1: tackling Ukraine in yours and I'm tackling January sixth of
Speaker 1: my monologue. So we've got a really packed show, and
Speaker 1: like you said, we have editorial calls Thursday afternoons and
Speaker 1: all the news of course breaks after that, so we're
Speaker 1: just like trying to squeeze it all in here. And
Speaker 1: we can start right now with PayPal. Right, So let's
Speaker 1: start with a story that really, I think is one
Speaker 1: of the first that is really breaking through the partisan
Speaker 1: molds that our politics have been stuck in. And this
Speaker 1: is Rohit Chopra, who I think is a fascinating and
Speaker 1: dynamic figure throughout the course of his career. He's now
Speaker 1: the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and I
Speaker 1: think if you are a right winger, you should not
Speaker 1: sleep on this guy on a number of fronts. He's
Speaker 1: not going to agree with you on everything. But take
Speaker 1: a listen to what he said on CNBC yesterday and
Speaker 1: see or this week and see if any of this
Speaker 1: resonates with you. I've never actually heard of a payment
Speaker 1: system thinking that they could find someone for legal expression
Speaker 1: that their users are making We have ordered all the
Speaker 1: big tech most of the major big tech firms and
Speaker 1: payment companies to provide us with information about how are
Speaker 1: they making decisions about who they kick off their platforms.
Speaker 1: But we also need to look into whether they believe
Speaker 1: they can be finding users for legal activities. So trippers
Speaker 1: responding to a PayPal notice that went out saying people
Speaker 1: would be fined twenty five hundred dollars would just be
Speaker 1: taken from their PayPal account if they are posting messages
Speaker 1: that include misinformation that sort of broadly defined misinformation. They
Speaker 1: then revoked the policy, said that it was issued in error.
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty startling that so they should pay
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred dollars. They should pay twenty five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars right out of the bank account. Paso do they do?
Speaker 1: You think they bank with PayPal? No? But JP Morgan,
Speaker 1: whoever they bank was, should just take twenty five hundred dollars, right.
Speaker 1: And so this is what's interesting here is that you
Speaker 1: typically don't have the left right. One of the biggest
Speaker 1: concerns of conservatives in the Trump era was exactly that
Speaker 1: they would start to be getting depersoned right as it's
Speaker 1: called you know, they get de banked, they get de interneted.
Speaker 1: You cannot have a presence, you cannot access the infrastructure
Speaker 1: of the twenty first century that you need to live
Speaker 1: and bank and eat and exist and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: This is interesting because it's the left expressing concern as
Speaker 1: it should. What's always been terrifying is the left saying,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of the ends justify the means, right,
Speaker 1: that people are now so dangerous for having different opinions
Speaker 1: that then get classified as misinformation that yes, you know,
Speaker 1: we are taking you off of Google ad platforms, which
Speaker 1: is essentially a monopoly, or we are revoking your ability
Speaker 1: to sell this book that's critical of sort of transideology
Speaker 1: on Amazon, and we're just going to keep going down
Speaker 1: the list Operation choke point right. Yeah. And you would
Speaker 1: have liberals who would defend that approach, and they would say, well, look,
Speaker 1: this is a private company. You know, they can do
Speaker 1: what they want. And if you don't want to have
Speaker 1: your twenty five hundred dollars taken from you, then don't
Speaker 1: spread misinformation online like that. I agree with us, right,
Speaker 1: so like publicly agree with us. Otherwise we will classify
Speaker 1: what you say is misinformation right. And what's critical here
Speaker 1: is that Choper who has actual power. Those are people
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Facebook actually, well the people who run Facebook,
Speaker 1: and but Choper has real power as the head of
Speaker 1: the CFPB. And so his emphasis I think on the
Speaker 1: word legal and focusing on legal versus illegal. He's like,
Speaker 1: on what grounds does PayPal believe that it can come
Speaker 1: after a user for legal behavior that isn't even on
Speaker 1: their platform? And he's his clear answer is they cannot.
Speaker 1: And so he's pushing he said, all these different big
Speaker 1: tech platforms, and then there isn't there's not just the
Speaker 1: principle here that I think that Chopra and others who
Speaker 1: you know are are part of kind of his his
Speaker 1: kind of antitrust and kind of corporate skeptical ecosystem on
Speaker 1: the left. There's there's also an end goal here, which
Speaker 1: is to say, no, you don't make these decisions. The
Speaker 1: people make these decisions, and the people make these decisions
Speaker 1: through their representatives and representatives right the laws. So if
Speaker 1: there's a law written that is constitutional that you have violated,
Speaker 1: then there are consequences like that's that's a criminal justice system.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a system that is based in you know,
Speaker 1: one person, one vote, representative democracy. We're not going to
Speaker 1: have a system where somebody has unchecked power, unchecked private power,
Speaker 1: and it's just going to use it against somebody that
Speaker 1: they don't like. And I think good for Choprah for
Speaker 1: standing up for people whose politics he doesn't agree with,
Speaker 1: right and people who in many cases are actually disenfranchised, marginalized,
Speaker 1: extremely low income in situations that are like that's that's
Speaker 1: disproportionately people who are going to end up getting fined
Speaker 1: before misinformation and disinformation. And it's not to say it's
Speaker 1: only going to affect you know, the sort of poor
Speaker 1: rural Trump voter, but it's it is going to affect
Speaker 1: people like that way more than it's going to affect
Speaker 1: the people who generally CFPB officials are interacting with who
Speaker 1: happen to love Joe Biden or whomever else whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And Operation Joke Point I think was really the first
Speaker 1: part of this, which is basically that we're looking into
Speaker 1: purchases or for instance, banks not allowing you to buy
Speaker 1: firearms with their credit cards. This is where a lot
Speaker 1: of the fears started bubbling to the surface because it
Speaker 1: does generally violate the precedent that we have in this
Speaker 1: country that it's like if you are a bank, if
Speaker 1: you are you know, PayPal, if you are whatever it is,
Speaker 1: you have that line, right you are if people are
Speaker 1: doing things that are legal as a private company and
Speaker 1: is not in your business interest and it is not
Speaker 1: sort of in your ethical interest to prevent people from
Speaker 1: doing their legal conducting legal activity based on partisan ideology
Speaker 1: or just ideology in general. That then cascaded into moves
Speaker 1: we saw from social media companies. And this is why
Speaker 1: when Jim Jordan says that Lena Khan is a Marxist
Speaker 1: and Lena Khan, you know, shouldn't be FTC chair who's
Speaker 1: an ally of Rohopra. Yes, the FTC chair Lena Khan.
Speaker 1: Conservatives shouldn't be empowering Lena Khan to break up tech
Speaker 1: companies through the FTC and shouldn't be giving her more
Speaker 1: sort of ammunition to take that on because she's a Marxist.
Speaker 1: It's like allegedly she's she's played you know, footsie with Marxists,
Speaker 1: as some people might say, which is ridiculous. I spoke
Speaker 1: to a student. She spoke some like most student groups
Speaker 1: nowadays have some socialist Yeah, she's on the left. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's no question about it. She's progressive in the same
Speaker 1: way of Hittropa is a progressive and it's an extremely
Speaker 1: positive sign. And I think that's why we're talking about this,
Speaker 1: that a progressive has an actual sort of old school
Speaker 1: a c l U approach to civil liberties. Right and
Speaker 1: and speech and on open open platforms have become coded
Speaker 1: as right, which is which is awful and is not
Speaker 1: going not not headed in a good direction. So it's
Speaker 1: good to see people who are on the left pulling that,
Speaker 1: trying to pull trying to pull that back. I'm curious
Speaker 1: and so but that and they're gonna have They're going
Speaker 1: to then tussle with people on the left, some some
Speaker 1: liberals who are going to say no, no no, no, free
Speaker 1: speech is just you know, it's just a stalking horse
Speaker 1: for you know, white nationalism or whatever. So that's the
Speaker 1: problem that the left is going to have to sort out.
Speaker 1: The right is going to have to compete with the
Speaker 1: kind of Reaganomics folks, like the right wing folks who
Speaker 1: are going to say, whoa, whoa, where is this heading?
Speaker 1: We're now you're going to allow the government to tell
Speaker 1: a major company like PayPal, how it can run its business.
Speaker 1: People who for me, populists, people who believe in kind
Speaker 1: of people powered government, would say yes, course, like everything
Speaker 1: is all power derives from the consent of the governed.
Speaker 1: So yes, of course if we if we don't like
Speaker 1: PayPal doing something like taking twenty five hundred dollars from people,
Speaker 1: then we're going to tell them not to do that,
Speaker 1: like that's that's what a democracy is. But on the right,
Speaker 1: so there is there is a libertarian strain over there
Speaker 1: that gets very nervous about this kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: how is that shaking out? Yeah, they and they would
Speaker 1: say in a free market, that's how we determine these things, right,
Speaker 1: just another democracy, this is how we determine these things.
Speaker 1: And then build your own PayPal and then you build
Speaker 1: it and they shut it down. Well, and this question
Speaker 1: shuts it down, and you're ready to focus on rite
Speaker 1: tripa talking about whether this is legal, because I actually
Speaker 1: think that's an open question. You know, whether it's legal
Speaker 1: for PayPal to conduct its business in this way. Well,
Speaker 1: spreading misinformation is legal, it was his point. They're punishing
Speaker 1: a person for legal behavior. Legal behavior, right, you might
Speaker 1: find it unethical or it moral or wrong, but it's
Speaker 1: not illegal. And there's a question of whether PayPal. According
Speaker 1: to PayPal, you stated the bar till too, it was
Speaker 1: open till too, but that was too late. You should
Speaker 1: have been home earlier. We're taking twenty five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: We're joking about that. But once you sort of give
Speaker 1: that power over and it goes into different directions, and
Speaker 1: you have the like awfully divided Trump era that we've
Speaker 1: been living in, you can the mind sort of boggles
Speaker 1: the possibilities. Or you have people tracking periods that's asking
Speaker 1: like this a miscarriage, Did you get an abortion? You
Speaker 1: stayed at the bar till two am? And then did X,
Speaker 1: Y and Z? And the government they buy the data
Speaker 1: from the company and use it in a trial against
Speaker 1: whatever it is, or it just it's snow stop. It
Speaker 1: absolutely just opian. And yeah, it's absolutely being sort of
Speaker 1: worked out on the right. But I think because the
Speaker 1: right was victimized by this before the sort of contemporary
Speaker 1: left was the I guess old school free marketeers were
Speaker 1: really I think had a chilling experience. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: why you hear a lot of talk about common Carrier framework,
Speaker 1: applying Common Carrier framework to actual common carriers like banks,
Speaker 1: or well not so much banks, but like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: two banks nationalize the banks and that's their problem. It
Speaker 1: gets to that place. Yeah, and they're actually where it
Speaker 1: should go, building up conservative internet companies right now for
Speaker 1: fear of this, but when the left can sort of
Speaker 1: break that. It's really been hard for the left to
Speaker 1: weigh in because the risk has not been worth the
Speaker 1: reward of speaking out like Rohet Trumpe did, because the
Speaker 1: risk is that you then get piled on and say
Speaker 1: you're you're emboldening white nationalism and white supremacy, whereas the
Speaker 1: reward would be what like some retweets from conservatives and
Speaker 1: John Schweppe speaking of which the American Principals Project, we
Speaker 1: have this element A two. He's saying, you know, this
Speaker 1: is a big opportunity R Troupe sort of breaking this mole.
Speaker 1: The other area, this is John Shreppy at the American
Speaker 1: Principal's Project. He says, we have a major opportunity for
Speaker 1: bipartisan cooperation on protecting consumers from PayPal and other big
Speaker 1: tech payment processor processors. Common carriage was significant oversight seems
Speaker 1: to be the way to go. So let me just
Speaker 1: say that again, significant oversight, and that's coming from John
Speaker 1: who does really good work over at the American Principals Project.
Speaker 1: And you do hear a lot of that from conservatives,
Speaker 1: and I do think it has busted through kind of
Speaker 1: the typical free market dogma consensus, at least in the
Speaker 1: conservative movement. Whether that translates into Republican policy is a
Speaker 1: different question, as is the question of whether it translates
Speaker 1: into democratic policy from regulators and lawmakers. Yeah done, common carrier,
Speaker 1: strong regulation, let's do it. I was on CNBC a
Speaker 1: couple of years of year to twenty seventeen to talk
Speaker 1: about scoop about Steve Bannon wanting to make Facebook and
Speaker 1: some others a utility, right, and they started challenging, started
Speaker 1: challenging me to like defend it. I'm like, this is
Speaker 1: his idea, but okay, if you want me to defend it,
Speaker 1: let's do it. Here. It is the CNBC ladies like,
Speaker 1: I'm not even on Facebook. You don't have to be
Speaker 1: on Facebook, So why does it need to be able
Speaker 1: to tell us, Look, I drank well water growing up,
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we don't have a water utility. Like get
Speaker 1: out of here, Like I don't drink water. I'll find
Speaker 1: that all video and share it. But anyway, we have
Speaker 1: the midterms are getting wild. They are so so we're
Speaker 1: going to turn now to a mid midterm update and
Speaker 1: we're going to start with a surprisingly close race in
Speaker 1: the state of Utah. Now, who would have expected us
Speaker 1: to be talking about Utah at this point, But a
Speaker 1: year or so ago, Evan McMullen saw saw what he
Speaker 1: believed was an opportunity. He made his case kind of
Speaker 1: behind behind the scenes, but also publicly to whoever, but
Speaker 1: whoever would listen, that Hey, Democrats are not remotely competitive
Speaker 1: in Utah. If if I can show that I am
Speaker 1: a viable challenger to Mike Lee, I think that Democrats
Speaker 1: will all fizzle away and will then come over and
Speaker 1: back me, and then I will be close to having
Speaker 1: a shot against Mike Lee. I've read some demographic data
Speaker 1: that if you looked at Utah as any other state
Speaker 1: and stripped Mormonism out of it, which is impossible beause
Speaker 1: it wouldn't exist really without it, but let's say that
Speaker 1: you could that it would be either purple or blue
Speaker 1: just based on urban, suburban and rural demographics. If those
Speaker 1: urban suburban and roll voters voted like urban suburban and
Speaker 1: roll voters everywhere else in the country. It's a blue
Speaker 1: state because Salt Lake City and its suburbs make up
Speaker 1: such a huge course. There's nothing outside of there. It's
Speaker 1: just desert once you get outside there. But because of
Speaker 1: the social conservatism embedded in Mormonism, it has been a
Speaker 1: rock solid Republican state. But at the same time, because
Speaker 1: of the inflection of morality embedded in it, there were
Speaker 1: so uncomfortable with Trump, Like it's much more so than
Speaker 1: evangelical movement for instance. Yeah, and this is a huge
Speaker 1: focus of a really great book people should pick up,
Speaker 1: which is called Alienated America by Tim Carney, where he
Speaker 1: looked at actually not the general election results in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: but the primary election results on the Republican side in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen to analyze which communities supported Trump right away
Speaker 1: and which we're still backing people like Ted Cruz and
Speaker 1: Mark Arrubio and Utah. Was a great case study because
Speaker 1: he found places that have high social capital and high
Speaker 1: marks of civil society tended to reject Trump in the primary,
Speaker 1: and places without it rolla Wisconsin, they roll Pennsylvania's rost
Speaker 1: belt towns. They embraced Trump right away, and so Mike
Speaker 1: Lee is then presiding over the state that has really
Speaker 1: high social capital and really high then aversion to Donald Trump. Right,
Speaker 1: So Trump is like feeds off the carcass of Reaganism,
Speaker 1: like it thrives in atomization and misery, like alienation actually
Speaker 1: well alienation that is that has been induced by our economics,
Speaker 1: in our culture. And so because of the strength of
Speaker 1: the Mormon community in Utah, those community bonds have have
Speaker 1: held together a level of of kind of social contentment. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know that without without papering over the many abuses
Speaker 1: and all the other uh you know problems I would
Speaker 1: have with the church. What it what it does is
Speaker 1: it does create community. And in a place of community,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to pit people against each other and
Speaker 1: tear people down. It shields you from the ravages of
Speaker 1: of economic hardship, and demagoguery is not going to play
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, well because you're less right, you're you're
Speaker 1: you feel lestest in franchise and you are lestes like
Speaker 1: this is so they were, but they're not going to
Speaker 1: be democrats. So they're drag They were dragged, kicking and
Speaker 1: screaming into this Trump coalition. And so McMullen, who ran
Speaker 1: a kind of independent bid for president that a lot
Speaker 1: of people made fun of ridiculous, gotten a lot of
Speaker 1: name recognition out of that, and then harlaid that into
Speaker 1: this Senate race. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 1: He's still he's still something what was it five or
Speaker 1: six seven points behind in the five point thirty polling,
Speaker 1: But he's he's climbing like he does, seem like he's moving.
Speaker 1: Some poles have it very close, and Mike Lee certainly
Speaker 1: is acting like it's close. Let's go ahead and play
Speaker 1: this Mike Lee clip on Tucker Carlson this week. Well,
Speaker 1: I've asked him. I'm asking him right here again tonight,
Speaker 1: right now. Mitt if you'd like to protect the Republican majority,
Speaker 1: give us any chance of seizing the Republican majority once again,
Speaker 1: getting it away from the Democrats who were facilitating this
Speaker 1: massive spending spree in a massive inflationary binge, please get
Speaker 1: on board, help me win reelection. Help us do that.
Speaker 1: You can get your entire family to donate to me
Speaker 1: through leefersenate dot com. I'd invite all of your viewers
Speaker 1: to do the same because this is a race that's
Speaker 1: getting closer and closer because Evan mcmohen can continues to
Speaker 1: raise millions of dollars from progressive Democratic donors nationwide or
Speaker 1: a help bent on getting rid of me and replacing
Speaker 1: him with Evan McMullen. Yeah, well, so he's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: So Mike Lee won his prior races by huge margins.
Speaker 1: So he won in twenty ten by about thirty percent,
Speaker 1: he won in twenty sixteen by about forty percent, or
Speaker 1: about forty points. And he's right because if you look
Speaker 1: at the way Evan McMullen is running, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you get his press releases, they're absolutely hilarious. This
Speaker 1: is a headline from one of them. On October eleventh,
Speaker 1: Republican member of the January sixth Committee, Representative Adam Kinsinger
Speaker 1: endorses Evan McMullen for US Senate. That is not a
Speaker 1: way to win Republican votes in any other state, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that it actually really works in Utah.
Speaker 1: He's running as a former undercover CIA agent. That's something
Speaker 1: he constantly talks about. So this is clearly a campaign
Speaker 1: where he is breaking in money from big money progressives
Speaker 1: and well progressives in air quotes, and he is running
Speaker 1: really for that sort of like v you viewership, wine, mom,
Speaker 1: vote right and Democrats love kinsing and chaining and those folks.
Speaker 1: So so you're also appealing to Democrats by citing your
Speaker 1: support from those particular Republicans. And the Democrats did not
Speaker 1: run a counter to Lee. They're going they're backing the right,
Speaker 1: and that's smart. His guest was right that Democrats be like,
Speaker 1: why are we going to bother exactly like if somebody
Speaker 1: else is going to take an actual shot, why are
Speaker 1: we just going to put some toty up here just
Speaker 1: to lose before we move to the Ohio Senate race,
Speaker 1: which is fascinating. What's your what's your guests? How is this?
Speaker 1: He ended up winning election night by five points, and well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, looking at you closer, real clear politics polls
Speaker 1: have him up five, three, five, six, and five. Those
Speaker 1: are the most recent ones, and there's not great polling
Speaker 1: in this race. That looks like I went all the
Speaker 1: way back to May and June polls just enlisting off
Speaker 1: those five most recent ones on RCP. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to say because the polling, I think, in general, the cycle,
Speaker 1: I mean pollsters are worried about how bad their numbers are,
Speaker 1: and so I would guess probably he. I don't think
Speaker 1: Michael is going to lose. Whether it's a terrifyingly close
Speaker 1: margin for him or a five point healthy margin is
Speaker 1: a different question. And now he has also said, and
Speaker 1: this is the key point, that he will not caucus
Speaker 1: with either party. McMullen. Yeah, So if it's if there
Speaker 1: are fifty Republicans, he's like Bernie, know all, Bernie caucus
Speaker 1: is right. He does. Although when he was elected to
Speaker 1: the House, the Democratic caucus would not allow men. They said,
Speaker 1: they said, you can be in our caucus for committee purposes,
Speaker 1: but we will not let a socialist come to our
Speaker 1: actual meetings. That was the that was their rule. So
Speaker 1: if there's fifty Republicans, forty nine Democrats plus their their
Speaker 1: independence like Bernie and Angus King, and then McMullen. If McMullen,
Speaker 1: it's not who he cauxes with, that's not what matters.
Speaker 1: It's who he votes for for a majority leader. So
Speaker 1: if he votes for Schumer for majority leader but doesn't caucus.
Speaker 1: So the fact that he said he wouldn't caucus with
Speaker 1: Democrats doesn't actually mean that he won't help them Krats
Speaker 1: control the chamber, so that I think we would I
Speaker 1: think that's what would happen. I think if his internals
Speaker 1: were higher, maybe we would hear that question being taken
Speaker 1: more seriously by Democrats. I don't know. I would think
Speaker 1: if you Todd Democrats had a good indication that he
Speaker 1: was going to beat Mike Lee, they would really want
Speaker 1: answers to that question, right, because maybe they have the answers,
Speaker 1: maybe they do well, that's true. But if mull is
Speaker 1: McMullan is just going to get in there and vote
Speaker 1: the exact same way that Mike Lee would, they don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of good reason to keep pushing so
Speaker 1: hard for him. So in Ohio there are two people
Speaker 1: that would vote very different ways. Tim Ryan versus j
Speaker 1: d Vance is a race that I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: thought they'd be talking about October fourteenth, or whatever, whatever
Speaker 1: it is. It's it's closer than Georgia right now, according
Speaker 1: to you know, the five thirty eight polls. It's it's
Speaker 1: very hard to believe because it would for Tim Ryan
Speaker 1: to win, it would require everything putts say they understand
Speaker 1: about the electorate zation to be wrong. It would also
Speaker 1: require a significant number of Republicans who are registered Republicans
Speaker 1: voted for Trump, you know, vote Republican up and down
Speaker 1: the ticket, to cast their ballot for Tim Ryan. It
Speaker 1: would also require a ton of young people, women and
Speaker 1: also men who like very much support abortion rights and
Speaker 1: want and want to come out who wouldn't have come
Speaker 1: out otherwise, or Republican women to switch sides. Like a
Speaker 1: lot has to go right for Tim Ryan. But the
Speaker 1: polls are showing that this is a real race. There
Speaker 1: was a debate this week, and let's let's go through
Speaker 1: several of these clips from last night. Here's the first one,
Speaker 1: Kill and confront the extremist movement of which jd Vance
Speaker 1: unfortunately is a part of right. Who says that the
Speaker 1: President of the United States is intentionally trying to kill
Speaker 1: people with fentanyl. Who says that the election was stolen
Speaker 1: jd Vance does, who runs around with Ron desandis the
Speaker 1: governor of Florida who wants to banned books, running around
Speaker 1: Lindsey Graham, who wants a national abortion band. You're running
Speaker 1: around with Marjorie Taylor Green, who's the absolute looniest politician
Speaker 1: in America. This is a dangerous group and we do
Speaker 1: need to confront it. And that's why I'm running to
Speaker 1: represent the exhausted majority Democrats, Republicans and independence against the extremists.
Speaker 1: So I've always expected this race to be tighter than
Speaker 1: people thought, just because Tim Ryan, I think is generally
Speaker 1: underestimated and the spread the RCPA average right now has
Speaker 1: Vans up by point eight I do think JD. Vans
Speaker 1: is going to win. I do think he's run a
Speaker 1: really interesting in a campaign that shows a Republican Party
Speaker 1: going in a direction that's probably a better one from
Speaker 1: where it was before. But to be up by point
Speaker 1: eight percent in that RCP average, again, I don't know
Speaker 1: that our polling right now is great and even polsters
Speaker 1: themselves are worry miss Ohio totally. And we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about Wisconsin too, which Ron Johnson was crushed by
Speaker 1: bad polls the last time he was up for election,
Speaker 1: and we saw how that turned out. So we also
Speaker 1: have an another clip then of JD. Vance's response to
Speaker 1: Tim Ryan, and you can see it. Actually, I think
Speaker 1: this is the first Tim Ryan abortion one. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: so we'll play the next one here said repeatedly on
Speaker 1: the record that I think that that girl should be
Speaker 1: able to get an abortion if she and her family
Speaker 1: so choose to do so. But let's talk about that case,
Speaker 1: because why was a ten year old girl raped in
Speaker 1: our community, raped in our state in the first place.
Speaker 1: The thing the media and Congress and Ryan, they talk
Speaker 1: about this all the time. The thing they never mentioned
Speaker 1: is that poor girl was raped by an illegal alien,
Speaker 1: somebody that should have never been in this state in
Speaker 1: the first place. You voted so many times against border
Speaker 1: wall funding, so many times for amnesty. Tim, if you
Speaker 1: had done your job, she would have never been raped
Speaker 1: in the first place. Do your job on border security.
Speaker 1: Don't lecture me about opinions I don't actually have. It's
Speaker 1: a good performance in the debate from Jadie Vance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you were right. That was his response to the
Speaker 1: abortion band argument from Tim Pryan. I don't think that
Speaker 1: people are going to find that credible, really, because it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's say that this particular person never came to the
Speaker 1: country illegally and never raped this particular ten year old girl.
Speaker 1: That doesn't that doesn't eliminate rape, Like we're still going
Speaker 1: to have rape, We're still going to have incest. And
Speaker 1: so you're you're going to have to have You're going
Speaker 1: to have to design policies that take that into account.
Speaker 1: I mean, so he says at the end, you know,
Speaker 1: I think a ten year old who's rape should have
Speaker 1: access to abortion, but he's still part of If he
Speaker 1: is elected, it will allow states like Ohio to go
Speaker 1: forward with bands right that don't take that, don't take
Speaker 1: those exceptions into account. Whether or it's whether it's Ohio
Speaker 1: or somewhere else, I don't know. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: she was able to from the report sheold to go
Speaker 1: to Indiana, right, she Well, whether she actually had to
Speaker 1: go is a different question. There was this idea that
Speaker 1: doctors in Ohio were afraid at the moment to post
Speaker 1: row right, which is what abortion everybody predicted would happen.
Speaker 1: But the response from pretty much every Republican was pretty
Speaker 1: much every Republican was the laws, like, let's design laws
Speaker 1: that don't cause this level of confusion. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think that's an open question, but I would if
Speaker 1: I had to predict, I would say Republicans, any laws
Speaker 1: Republicans passed would likely be designed to stop things like
Speaker 1: that from happening, because they're more concerned about their politics
Speaker 1: anyway than they actually are about life. A lot of Republicans,
Speaker 1: not all of them, but a lot of them are
Speaker 1: more concerned about the politics but anyway, and from jd
Speaker 1: Vance's response there, you can see the fact that he
Speaker 1: is very concerned about the politics and the optics of
Speaker 1: it and the way that it affects power weighs very
Speaker 1: heavily on them, and that's why a lot of Republicans
Speaker 1: in the GOP establishment didn't really ever want Roe to
Speaker 1: go anywhere, despite all of their claims to be ready
Speaker 1: to overturn Row, etcetera, etcetera. I just think that saying
Speaker 1: the solution is to eliminate rape, it's like that, great,
Speaker 1: we'd like that if that happened, but that's not going
Speaker 1: to happen. I mean, I do think one of the
Speaker 1: things Democrats miss in the conversation about the borders that
Speaker 1: they'll constantly point to statistics which are true. In many cases,
Speaker 1: there are real studies that show illegal immigrants commit lower
Speaker 1: levels of crime than native born Americans do. Are people
Speaker 1: who are here without documentation commit or illegally commit crimes
Speaker 1: at a lower rate than native born Americans do. But
Speaker 1: the point remains that if somebody is in the country illegally.
Speaker 1: We don't want to add to already bad crime problems.
Speaker 1: And one way to not add to already bad crime
Speaker 1: problems is to not let people into the country illegally. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I think that's an issue worth debating on its own.
Speaker 1: But I just don't think it's relevant to the abortion question,
Speaker 1: is my point. Like your abortion policy has got to
Speaker 1: be what your abortion policy is, independent of crime rates,
Speaker 1: independent of immigration policy and crinative drug policy, Like abortion
Speaker 1: policy is its own thing. I mean, he did answer
Speaker 1: that question based on policy, But I see what you're saying, right,
Speaker 1: and we'll see if that satisfies people. So and next, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, roll the let. I'm not even gonna guess
Speaker 1: which clip it is. This is Ron Johnson, This is
Speaker 1: ro Johnson. Ron Johnson debated one more. No, I think
Speaker 1: we're so we have free here, we got one more. Oh,
Speaker 1: we've one more rivance. Okay, I was wrong, Okay, thank you,
Speaker 1: one to one, all right, one more, one more. And
Speaker 1: I think the problem is when you have guys like JD.
Speaker 1: Vance who can't stand up to anybody, Like just a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago in Youngstown on the stage, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: said to jd Vance, all you do is kiss my
Speaker 1: ass to get my support. He said that that's bad
Speaker 1: because that means jd Vance is going to do whatever
Speaker 1: he wants. Mitch mcconald's given him forty million, he's gonna
Speaker 1: do what he wants. And Peter Teal gave him a
Speaker 1: fifteen million. He's going to do what he wants. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing that's most troubling about this lack of
Speaker 1: courage is that after Trump took jd Vance's dignity from
Speaker 1: him on the stage Youngstown, jd Vance got back up
Speaker 1: on stage and said, start shaking his hand, take a picture, saying, hey,
Speaker 1: aren't we having a great time here tonight. I don't
Speaker 1: know anybody I grew up with. I don't know anybody
Speaker 1: I went to high school with that would allow somebody
Speaker 1: to take their dignity like that and then get back
Speaker 1: up on stage. We need leaders who have courage to
Speaker 1: take on their own party. And I've proven that. And
Speaker 1: he was called an as kisser by the former president.
Speaker 1: Oh that was a good one. He landed that blow,
Speaker 1: although Trump really set him up for it. Does Trump
Speaker 1: want the guy to lose? Jadie Vance? Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think so. I think miss McConnell wants him to lose.
Speaker 1: I don't think Donald Trump does. Trump just can't help
Speaker 1: the laugh lines like what's Trump thinking there? He's not.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's just plainly yeah. I mean, I'd be
Speaker 1: surprised that Trump this far in. But that's the thing,
Speaker 1: right he and I think to some excentence what people
Speaker 1: like about him is he's not like coming out and
Speaker 1: being strategic and calculated in the same way that like,
Speaker 1: why is miss McConnell in August bashing Republican Senate candidates, Well,
Speaker 1: because he's trying. That's part of a strategy, not just
Speaker 1: you know, Mitch McConnell talking. Donald Trump often just gets
Speaker 1: out there and talks like he would talk to anyone.
Speaker 1: Anyone could be in front of him, and he'll say
Speaker 1: basically what's on his mind? Right, Yeah, Usually it it'd
Speaker 1: have to be a private recording of a politician to
Speaker 1: get something that's set. Honestly, Now, you can imagine a
Speaker 1: bunch of Trump voters hearing that and be like, okay,
Speaker 1: then good. Yeah, he's just going to be a completely mindless, loyal,
Speaker 1: you know, sick a phant for Trump. He's got he's
Speaker 1: got my votes. I'm with Trump, and Trump knows that.
Speaker 1: Trump knows that. So this is humiliating. Though, good lord,
Speaker 1: that was really that was humiliating. That was well done
Speaker 1: on Tim Ryan's part. And it was Youngstown, which is
Speaker 1: where Tim Ryan is from. And one one Tim Ryan stat.
Speaker 1: I did a story a couple of years ago where
Speaker 1: I looked at the one hundred poorest districts in the
Speaker 1: country and who represented each And if you looked at
Speaker 1: something like the forty poorest districts in the country that
Speaker 1: were majority white, they're all there's only one, as I recall,
Speaker 1: that was represented by a white Democrat. It was Tim Ryan.
Speaker 1: Really interesting and again that's why Tim Ryan, I think
Speaker 1: has been underestimated because he's pretty fluent in the conversation
Speaker 1: that resonates, but his voting record is a real problem
Speaker 1: for him in the same way that Vance took as
Speaker 1: we were just talking about the abortion question and moved
Speaker 1: it to the border and moved it to these issues
Speaker 1: where if you are a sort of twenty twenty two Democrat,
Speaker 1: you are sort of out of touch then with those communities.
Speaker 1: And what I like about him is in his authenticity
Speaker 1: is the yoga thing that he does. So he's all
Speaker 1: into this like yoga and mindfulness stuff, which like good
Speaker 1: for him, But what that shows is that you're secure
Speaker 1: in your working class roots. Like politicians who are not
Speaker 1: secure in their working class roots will will go into
Speaker 1: a bar and just be deeply nervous about what they're
Speaker 1: going to order. There's this classic clip of Obama going
Speaker 1: into a bar in Pennsylvania being like, I don't want
Speaker 1: any that fancy, youngling. Give me one of the local
Speaker 1: local beers that y'all drink. It hurts. And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we drink yingling. It's not fancy, it's it Actually it's
Speaker 1: pretty bad, but we drink it. Yeah. And so you
Speaker 1: want somebody who's authentic enough to themselves that they will
Speaker 1: look at a menu wherever they are in order what
Speaker 1: they want. And so Tim Ryan's like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I might get made fun of this for this, but
Speaker 1: I'm into mindfulness. I'm into yoga, and I think you
Speaker 1: should be too, because I think it will make you
Speaker 1: feel better. And there are so many working class people
Speaker 1: who are into mindfulness in yoga, and that the working
Speaker 1: class is not some monolithic just like a NASCAR beer
Speaker 1: belly guy and a lot of NASCAR beer belly guys
Speaker 1: are into mindfulness. It's like people contain multitudes. What NASCAR races?
Speaker 1: Are you going to Dover downs? I grew up near Dover.
Speaker 1: They're into mindfulness. I mean there are some right like
Speaker 1: you're going to find some. I think it's it's I
Speaker 1: actually don't disagree with that point at all. I do
Speaker 1: think though, that it's where Tim Ryan's voting record as
Speaker 1: he tries to sort of work his way up the
Speaker 1: chain in twenty twenty two politics and tries to climb
Speaker 1: the political ladder. That's what makes it more difficult now
Speaker 1: because that will say, right, he has not genuinely changed
Speaker 1: where he stands on things like the border, and really,
Speaker 1: I mean he might be talking that way, but he
Speaker 1: really hasn't and that's a problem. So Wisconsin, we have
Speaker 1: one more clip. We're going really long on this segment,
Speaker 1: but that's because there's so much news this week. There
Speaker 1: were debates, and Wisconsin is one of the places that
Speaker 1: had places that had a debate on Thursday night between
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes who's the Democratic candidate, and incumbent
Speaker 1: Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican. Let's take a look at
Speaker 1: this clip. There was also an instance where Senator Johnson
Speaker 1: had to be sat down by the FBI and warned
Speaker 1: that he may be a Russian asset. We can't trust.
Speaker 1: We cannot trust Senator Johnson to protect democracy abroad because
Speaker 1: we can't even trust Senator Johnson to protect democracy here
Speaker 1: at home. Mister Johnson, you do have a chance on
Speaker 1: o that, and then will also you do have a
Speaker 1: chance on a rebuttle. We'd also want to ask you
Speaker 1: that question about Ukraine. Well, first of all, I wish
Speaker 1: President Biden were more concerned about defending every inch of
Speaker 1: US territory against the invasion on our southern border. I
Speaker 1: certainly would want to get a full accounting of what
Speaker 1: we've already allocated. You know what the weapons have you
Speaker 1: know what weapons we sent to Ukraine, what we need
Speaker 1: to replenish in our own stockpile. I've been to Ukraine
Speaker 1: repeated land. I've been the chairman of our ranking member
Speaker 1: of the European Subcommittee on Foreign Relations. I was at
Speaker 1: President Selinski's inauguration. The Ukrainian people want what we want.
Speaker 1: They want freedom. You have another thirty seconds. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: you have still another thirty seconds. Okay. On the question
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. Okay, So the Ukrainian people what we want,
Speaker 1: want what we want. They're defending their children, their freedom.
Speaker 1: I think it is good for us, freedom of the peoples,
Speaker 1: to hang together and provide them the defensive weaponry so
Speaker 1: they can defend their territory. But again, I want a
Speaker 1: full accounting. And in response to the wild charge of
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Governor Barnes, the FBI set me up with a
Speaker 1: corrupt with a corrupt briefing and then leap back to
Speaker 1: smear me. I am, that's right, that's sorry. He is
Speaker 1: referring to corruption with the FBI, which I've been trying
Speaker 1: to uncover and expose. Okay, So Ron Johnson is one
Speaker 1: hundred percent correct there, and the media's laughter speaks to
Speaker 1: the media's laughter. The audience's laughter speaks to an alternate
Speaker 1: universe the media has created, which is insane because in
Speaker 1: a healthy, functioning democratic ecosystem, the media would have as
Speaker 1: much curiosity about the corruption of the most powerful law
Speaker 1: enforcement agency in the country, which actually did set Ron
Speaker 1: Johnson up. They briefed him on It's exactly what they
Speaker 1: did to Donald Trump with the dossier where James comy
Speaker 1: briefed Donald Trump with the dossier so that the FBI
Speaker 1: could leak to the media that Donald Trump had been
Speaker 1: briefed on the dossier and then inject that into the conversation.
Speaker 1: It's exactly what they did with Ron Johnson, and the
Speaker 1: laughter I thought was really interesting. It's not a winning
Speaker 1: campaign issue, I don't think, but it is clearly an
Speaker 1: example of how terrible the media coverage of the FBI
Speaker 1: has been. Yeah, I mean I watched that and I
Speaker 1: enjoyed seeing Ron Johnson get laughed at. But then I
Speaker 1: was like, FBI actually did kind of set him up,
Speaker 1: because like so they come in and they and they breathe,
Speaker 1: and they say, hey, we just want to warn you
Speaker 1: that you're at risk of getting targeted by Russian disinformation
Speaker 1: and other agents and assets. And he's like okay, cool,
Speaker 1: and it's like, of course, thank you, by the way,
Speaker 1: thanks for the heads up. And then it's like a
Speaker 1: later come in the media reports that he's been warned
Speaker 1: by the FBI that he's a stooge. So yeah, that
Speaker 1: is if you're Ron Johnson, you're like, you kind of
Speaker 1: did set me up. And then they set him up
Speaker 1: double because then he has to say that the FBI
Speaker 1: set him up and he looks like an idiot, which
Speaker 1: he says that, yeah, say, Eric Swawell, we're a Republican.
Speaker 1: And the FBI came to him and said, you're at
Speaker 1: risk of the girlfriend of yours is a Chinese spy, right,
Speaker 1: you're at risk, And he actually did like, this is
Speaker 1: phobia we actually have knowledge of. But let's say they
Speaker 1: came to him and said, you're could be the subject
Speaker 1: of Chinese disinformation. And let's say he didn't do anything.
Speaker 1: Let's say he noticed that when Fengfang was a courting him,
Speaker 1: it seemed like it could be a spy because obviously,
Speaker 1: and he then is if he's a Republican, the FBI
Speaker 1: leaks that to the media to make him look like
Speaker 1: he's in bed with China even if he isn't, which
Speaker 1: this case he was. But it's just a classic FBI
Speaker 1: move And it did happen to Ron Johnson, and the
Speaker 1: fact that the audience is laughing to me, was a
Speaker 1: really sad indictment on our media. Meanwhile, Ron Johnson did
Speaker 1: and I don't want to let him off the hook
Speaker 1: completely here, It did admit to participating in what is
Speaker 1: alleged to be a crime, which is the fake elector scheme.
Speaker 1: And he said this. I'm gonna read this because he
Speaker 1: said said this to a local report. I was like,
Speaker 1: he just said it. He said, my involvement in that
Speaker 1: attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds.
Speaker 1: I got I think. I fielded three texts and sent two.
Speaker 1: Johnson told the reporter I had virtually no involvement. Literally,
Speaker 1: my involvement lasted seconds. So he fielded three texts. The
Speaker 1: text asked asked him, hey, can you get Mike Pence
Speaker 1: to put these fake electors basically fake electors before the
Speaker 1: House so that they will then not affirm Biden as president.
Speaker 1: He sent two texts. He sent texts to forget who
Speaker 1: like the vice president's chief of staff, maybe Pence himself.
Speaker 1: Those details are out there. He was then told no,
Speaker 1: we're not doing this crime. And so he's like, so, my,
Speaker 1: so you can't you can't blame me for this. It's like,
Speaker 1: say you texta hey, you want to do this crime.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, let's not do this crime. Like you
Speaker 1: were still involved in that. So just just the fact
Speaker 1: that it lasted what he says, seconds, that's separate from this,
Speaker 1: this separate FBI thing that where they're calling him a
Speaker 1: Russian asset or whatever. But I didn't want to let
Speaker 1: Ron johnson segment go by without you do love that clip,
Speaker 1: Whereas I think what Ron Johnson is doing there is
Speaker 1: saying like the media coverage of this is blowing it
Speaker 1: out of proportion. And I think it's true that the
Speaker 1: media coverage is blowing it out of proportion. I don't
Speaker 1: disagree with you that there's still something that shouldn't have happened.
Speaker 1: He worked with the conspirators to be the funnel to
Speaker 1: get to Mike Pence, a scheme to illegally and illegitimately
Speaker 1: undermine the lawfully elected electoral college people. He's so that
Speaker 1: the actual president would not be nominated. I think that's like,
Speaker 1: it's hard to blow that out of proportion. I I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make him like a high level conspirator. It
Speaker 1: means he's someone who, as he said and he admitted
Speaker 1: it right that he bag man, he passed informational, not great.
Speaker 1: I don't think it makes him like this high level
Speaker 1: part of the conspiracy. In general, all that is to say,
Speaker 1: the midterm racist this is a race that had a
Speaker 1: pole come out this week that had Ron Johnson now
Speaker 1: up six. It was a poll that had him down,
Speaker 1: the Marquette University poll that had him down about a
Speaker 1: month ago. So there's been a disaster for Democrats. Yes,
Speaker 1: there and Mandela Barnes, they obviously knew going in, had
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of defunded the police type leftist
Speaker 1: activist baggage, which we've talked about here before. Now getting
Speaker 1: hit for a bunch of r T appearances, which is
Speaker 1: not great for liberals, not great. Not I think they've
Speaker 1: kicked our T off all the people Russian disinformation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. A court filing that we got notice of
Speaker 1: on Thursday actually revealed, according to Twitter, that Elon Musk
Speaker 1: is being investigated in relation to his acquisition or his
Speaker 1: attempted acquisition of Twitter. Here's according to the CNN Business
Speaker 1: It is not clear which agencies may be carrying out
Speaker 1: the probe, and Twitter did not identify what specific actions
Speaker 1: by Musk US officials may be investigating. Twitter's filing merely
Speaker 1: said authorities are looking into Musk's quote conduct linked to
Speaker 1: the deal. Now we're going to also get into in
Speaker 1: this segment this news about Donald Trump. The Supreme Court
Speaker 1: has rejected his plea for intervention in terms of the
Speaker 1: special master question. But Ryan, first, if we if we
Speaker 1: just narrowly focus on Musk here, what does what do
Speaker 1: you think could be the purpose of this investigation? What
Speaker 1: could they be looking into? Well, at at a minimum level,
Speaker 1: we know that he made investments of the size that
Speaker 1: require disclosure and then did not disclose in a timely fashion.
Speaker 1: And the reason you have to make these disclosures is
Speaker 1: because investments of that size can can move the stock.
Speaker 1: And if you know that you're making that investment but
Speaker 1: nobody else does, then you can just front run your
Speaker 1: own money and just and just ride it on the
Speaker 1: way up. Which so that that appears to be something
Speaker 1: that the SEC could be looking at. That would be
Speaker 1: an sec thing. SEC investigators are quite familiar with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: They've they've they've monkeyed with him in the past over
Speaker 1: he got he got doined for his like four to
Speaker 1: twenty tweet, I think I'm going to sell it at
Speaker 1: four to twenty or something like that, and then it
Speaker 1: like moved stock and he's you know, he does stuff
Speaker 1: you can't do based around securities laws. So there might
Speaker 1: be some cure securities law investigation. You know, there could
Speaker 1: there could be questions about the seriousness of the original bid.
Speaker 1: I think there ought to be what's called a scifius review,
Speaker 1: which I forget what that precisely stands for. It's foreign influenced.
Speaker 1: It's like, basically, if there's ever going to be a
Speaker 1: major investment by foreign by foreign either companies or people
Speaker 1: into some type of critical American infrastructure, there's a sifious
Speaker 1: investigation to make sure that this is this is not
Speaker 1: undermining American national security, and that if it is, that
Speaker 1: there are safeguards put up so that it doesn't happen
Speaker 1: like that would happen, say, if Oracle and TikToker, you know,
Speaker 1: engaged in talks, or if the UAE wants to buy
Speaker 1: like an American port, there would have to be a
Speaker 1: sifious review. And if a lot of his financing is
Speaker 1: coming from China or elsewhere, it SEMs like it would
Speaker 1: warrant that kind of review. Yeah. And actually, the way
Speaker 1: this entire deal has unfolded with so much negotiation actually
Speaker 1: happening on Twitter, because what you say publicly in a
Speaker 1: situation like this obviously is relevant to the deal at hand.
Speaker 1: So with all of that happening in this particular situation,
Speaker 1: that means I would be shocked if there wasn't federal
Speaker 1: probe federal probes into the way all of this unfolded.
Speaker 1: So whether or not it's serious is a different question.
Speaker 1: But just whenever you're sort of hashing through these things
Speaker 1: so publicly, then of course there are going to be
Speaker 1: I think, you know, people looking into it and different agencies,
Speaker 1: and so I'd be surprised if it was even just
Speaker 1: one no, that could very well be Yeah. And also,
Speaker 1: if you're an investigator, you're watching this unfold, you're jockeying
Speaker 1: for this one. This is a career maker. And yes,
Speaker 1: that's true. And I don't think Elon Musk is Obviously
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is not stupid. I think he This entire
Speaker 1: deal has been indicative of that sort of billionaire hubres, right,
Speaker 1: like you have enough money to make anything basically go
Speaker 1: away or happen or whatever it is, we'll see. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is kind of testing the theory of the case.
Speaker 1: I still think his whole play was to create a
Speaker 1: kind of public rationale for why he would be selling
Speaker 1: his Tesla stock in a way that would not tank
Speaker 1: Tesla stock in doing so because he wanted to cash
Speaker 1: out at the peak before he's this thing crashed. Just
Speaker 1: I think yesterday there was a number van as we're
Speaker 1: saying we're now short, we're recommending a short on Tesla.
Speaker 1: And so if he could get out of his Tesla
Speaker 1: holdings or a significant chunk I think he sold eight
Speaker 1: billion in his Tesla holdings, then that right there is worth.
Speaker 1: Whatever drama this is going through, the timing was certainly interesting.
Speaker 1: Now another high profile investigation, there was news on that
Speaker 1: front yesterday in terms of the Supreme Court actually said
Speaker 1: no to Donald Trump asking for intervention with a special Master.
Speaker 1: Here's from the case. The application of vacate the stay
Speaker 1: entered by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh
Speaker 1: Circuit on September twenty first presented of Justice Thomas and
Speaker 1: by him referred to the Court is denied. Ryan, What
Speaker 1: do you make of that? Legal analysts who looked at
Speaker 1: this appeal filing came away with the impression that this
Speaker 1: was a client who demanded that his lawyers appeal, and
Speaker 1: he didn't care why they appealed or what grounds they appealed.
Speaker 1: Do something, and you can imagine Trump like do something
Speaker 1: like I actually paid you this time, so file and uptrail,
Speaker 1: go write to the Supreme Court. And he could hear
Speaker 1: go to it down before the election, he said, this
Speaker 1: is my Supreme Court. Like, go to my Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Because he loves my my generals, my judge, Ken, my Kevin,
Speaker 1: go to my judges, go to Miami and tell Amy
Speaker 1: that she promised that she, you know, take care of me.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's what happened, but I mean I
Speaker 1: think he think he has mentality, yes, and so his
Speaker 1: lawyers are like, fine, we'll write an appeal. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure that his lawyers were completely expecting this to be rejected.
Speaker 1: You think, so, yeah, yeah, and yeah. I think a
Speaker 1: part of it also is that this is all playing out.
Speaker 1: I mean, the raid was in August, and it's the
Speaker 1: August before a midterm election cycle. Keeps it in the news.
Speaker 1: But from the Trump perspective, I mean, anything that slows down,
Speaker 1: obstructs knew what the media and Democrats would refer to
Speaker 1: as like blockbusters or smoking guns from coming out, and
Speaker 1: in the timing of this very sensitive three month period,
Speaker 1: I think makes sense. And you've got a big conflict
Speaker 1: because Trump loves to be in the news, but the
Speaker 1: Republicans don't want Trump to be in the news. Democrats
Speaker 1: love it when Trump's in the news. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: liked at Trump's truth social feed yesterday and he is
Speaker 1: not like at all running from any of this. He's
Speaker 1: completely he was tweeting. He does. He loves it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I shouldn't say tweeting. He was true thing,
Speaker 1: tons and tons of links, you know, links all that
Speaker 1: were flattering towards him and opposing the perspective of the
Speaker 1: Democrats in the media. But he's not, you know, he's
Speaker 1: not staying silent and laying low right, He's doing that
Speaker 1: thing like ideal, Like somebody compliments the story I read.
Speaker 1: I retweeted you retruth I retruth it. I don't think
Speaker 1: you're on true Social I got it on there though
Speaker 1: I was on parlor. Were you? Oh? I wasn't on parlor?
Speaker 1: What did you think of it? First day I got
Speaker 1: on there, it was like, let me see what people
Speaker 1: were up to, and I went and checked out like
Speaker 1: Mike Lee's feed he was doing it's like December. He's
Speaker 1: doing election denial stuff. And I jump over to his
Speaker 1: Twitter feed and he's just doing like normal Senate stufffent
Speaker 1: just two completely different messages for two different platforms. Interesting. Interesting, Well, Ryan,
Speaker 1: you have I keep trying to make points happen, like
Speaker 1: make it points. What's your point? Like, what point do
Speaker 1: you want to make today? What's your point? So President
Speaker 1: Biden said recently that the world today is closer to
Speaker 1: nuclear armageddon than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Now,
Speaker 1: potential armageddon sounds like a pretty big deal to me,
Speaker 1: and you'd think that it would bring world leaders together
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what we can do to
Speaker 1: avoid this totally avoidable armageddon. Except there's no evidence from
Speaker 1: the US side that the Biden administration is taking this seriously.
Speaker 1: Behind off the cuffer marks at a fundraiser, which is
Speaker 1: where Biden made that armageddon remark. And doesn't take a
Speaker 1: foreign policy or a military expert to know that the
Speaker 1: best way to end the immediate risk of nuclear armageddon
Speaker 1: is to end the war that has produced that risk,
Speaker 1: And this is where Biden is failing to take a
Speaker 1: leadership role. The obvious reality here is that Russia started
Speaker 1: this war and only Russia can end it. But that's
Speaker 1: led to some glib assessments of how it can be ended.
Speaker 1: Here's the Finnish Prime Minister, for instance, being asked to
Speaker 1: respond to Biden's comment. President Biden said last night that
Speaker 1: we may need an offramp to avoid a armageddon offramp.
Speaker 1: What do you mean from the conflict, way out of
Speaker 1: the conflict, out of the conflict. The way out conflict
Speaker 1: is to Russia to leave Ukraine. That's the way out
Speaker 1: of the conflict. Thank you well, yes, of course, that
Speaker 1: would be very nice. It would also have been great
Speaker 1: if Putin had not invaded in the first place. Now
Speaker 1: Here are a lot of commentaries arguing that really Putin
Speaker 1: had no choice but to invade Ukraine because NATO pushed
Speaker 1: up against his borders. But it doesn't take much to
Speaker 1: be able to hold two thoughts at the same time.
Speaker 1: NATO deserves criticism for pushing closer to Russia than it
Speaker 1: said it would, and also Putin is a grown up
Speaker 1: who decided to invade on his own. The invasion was wrong,
Speaker 1: and it's also been a catastrophe so far for Putin,
Speaker 1: for Russia, for Ukraine, and for everybody around the world
Speaker 1: suffering because of it. So it would be nice if
Speaker 1: he would just walk out, but that's not going to
Speaker 1: happen easily now. All along the eastern Ukrainian Front and
Speaker 1: now into the southern front, Russian forces have been collapsing,
Speaker 1: though as mud season sets in, some of it has
Speaker 1: stabilized recently. That city Izsium that you see there was
Speaker 1: thought recently to be firmly in Russian hands. Now it's
Speaker 1: not even close to the front lines anymore. And the
Speaker 1: reinforcements from the mass mobilization aren't going to do much
Speaker 1: to help. And this is tragic because people who wanted
Speaker 1: no part in this war the same way most Ukrainians
Speaker 1: wanted no part in this war, are now dying for it.
Speaker 1: But here's a good example of how well this new
Speaker 1: force is operating. And for those of you listening on
Speaker 1: the podcast, what we're showing here is a Russian tank
Speaker 1: merging onto a road and then running over a landmine
Speaker 1: that even the drone above could see a road just
Speaker 1: completely filled with land mines and just cruise right over
Speaker 1: it and get blown up. Now we can see where
Speaker 1: this war is headed. The question is where exactly the
Speaker 1: boundaries in the end will be drawn, and that's a
Speaker 1: question that's better answered at the negotiating table. Engaging in
Speaker 1: negotiations wouldn't me and Ukraine has to stop its counteroffensive.
Speaker 1: In fact, continuing the offensive while talks are going on
Speaker 1: and while the Russian army is collapsing, would give Russian
Speaker 1: negotiators that much more reason to give major concessions. The
Speaker 1: counter argument is that no, Russia started this, and the
Speaker 1: US and EU should fund Ukraine's military until they've driven
Speaker 1: every Russian soldier off of every inch of Ukraine, maybe
Speaker 1: even including CRIMEA okay, fine, but as a few miles
Speaker 1: of border one way or the other really worth nuclear war.
Speaker 1: Biden knows how close we came to armageddon during the
Speaker 1: Cuban missile crisis, and if he thinks we're there again,
Speaker 1: we have to take that seriously. The Russian Foreign miss
Speaker 1: are said this week that Russia is open to talks
Speaker 1: with the US to end the war, and if we
Speaker 1: are serious about avoiding armageddon, how can we refuse that.
Speaker 1: Sergei Lavrov's comments were reported by the Russian state news
Speaker 1: agency TASS, which said, quote, Russia never rejects a dialogue.
Speaker 1: Should an offer for a meeting between Putin and Joe
Speaker 1: Biden on the sidelines of g twenty summit be filed,
Speaker 1: Moscow will review it if someone believes that a signal
Speaker 1: for such meeting has already been made. Such belief is
Speaker 1: based solely on Biden's we'll see remark. This is obviously
Speaker 1: rather for journalists speculations rather than for real politics, Lavrov noted. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the US claim that they are completely open for talks
Speaker 1: with the Russian Federation, advocate political resolution of the current
Speaker 1: situation Ukraine and around it. But is the evil Russians
Speaker 1: who reject all proposals for contacts, Lavrov said, It is
Speaker 1: a lie. I can tell you right here. If Turkey
Speaker 1: is interested in organizing talks between Russia and the West,
Speaker 1: then it can raise the issue during the meeting between
Speaker 1: Putin and Erdowan in Astana. We have heard nothing besides
Speaker 1: public statements now about Vladimir Zelenski, Lavrov said, quote. He
Speaker 1: will find a way to explain all this and preserve
Speaker 1: his face. He is a performer. He's a performer, after all,
Speaker 1: There is a lot of performers on that side right now.
Speaker 1: He also said, if we talk about Nazis, then the
Speaker 1: German Nazism Hitler united most European states under his own
Speaker 1: banner in order to attack and destroy the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: Now approximately the same group of countries with some variations,
Speaker 1: supports Zelenski. But Zelenski, of course is no Hitler because
Speaker 1: he does not decide on actions against Russia. He has
Speaker 1: ordered to do concrete things. Now, let's set aside for
Speaker 1: a moment that Hitler analogy, which has to be the laziest,
Speaker 1: most absurd one I've ever heard. Perhaps that because Europe
Speaker 1: was once occupied by Hitler and now Europe is backing Ukraine,
Speaker 1: says that Zelenski is basically Hitler. Accept he's weak, like
Speaker 1: a puppet Hitler. But behind the insults in the Bravado
Speaker 1: is a public claim of being willing to negotiate, which
Speaker 1: shouldn't be surprising given the turn the war has taken
Speaker 1: against Russia. In the interview, he even mentioned some things
Speaker 1: he wanted to negotiate, including the prevention of an arms
Speaker 1: race in space, which, okay, fine. A space arms race
Speaker 1: treatise seems like a fine thing, so let's sit down
Speaker 1: and talk about it. If the fear is that Russia
Speaker 1: hasn't been punished enough for their invasion of Ukraine, I
Speaker 1: think it's safe to set that aside. Russia is in
Speaker 1: a massively weaker position today than they were just before
Speaker 1: the invasion. Before the war, they had to facto control
Speaker 1: of Crimea in some parts of the Domebos. If they
Speaker 1: end the war severely weakened but retain control of Crimea
Speaker 1: and some parts of Domebos, is that really an outcome
Speaker 1: that is so horrifying that we need to risk nuclear
Speaker 1: armageddon to stave it off. And I think what's interesting
Speaker 1: here is this, there's this well before the January sixth,
Speaker 1: Committee voted to subpoena Donald Trump yesterday, sources familiar with
Speaker 1: their plans. That's a quote leaked them to NBC News,
Speaker 1: which reported members want to put the move in the
Speaker 1: public record, despite acknowledging how unlikely it'd be for Trump
Speaker 1: to comply. So let's put that in the context of
Speaker 1: another headline from yesterday, this one in Bloomberg. Core US
Speaker 1: inflation rises to forty year high, securing big FED hike.
Speaker 1: Labor Department data released yesterday show the September Core consumer
Speaker 1: price index increased six point six percent from last year,
Speaker 1: which puts it at the highest level in four decades.
Speaker 1: That's for the Core consumer price index now, according to
Speaker 1: the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Increases in the shelter,
Speaker 1: food and medical care indexes were the largest of many
Speaker 1: contributors to that spike. Now consider another report from the
Speaker 1: last two weeks. This one was published by the Dallas Fed. Quote.
Speaker 1: Despite the stronger wage growth, due to the tightness of
Speaker 1: the labor market, a majority of workers are finding their
Speaker 1: wages falling even further behind inflation. Their analysis found for
Speaker 1: workers who experienced a decline in their real wage in
Speaker 1: second quarter twenty twenty two, the median decline was eight
Speaker 1: point six percent. There's also a land war in Europe
Speaker 1: careening to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Whatever you think
Speaker 1: of our policy. So all that is to say, Democrats
Speaker 1: believe it's worth their time, in the public's time to
Speaker 1: extend the January sixth Committee public hearings into the fall
Speaker 1: for the sake of what they admitted to NBC is
Speaker 1: basically a stunt because Donald Trump's not responding to that subpoena. Now,
Speaker 1: stunts can serve political purposes, sure, and that's exactly what
Speaker 1: Democrats want from this latest hearing, but that's not even
Speaker 1: good politics. After wrapping the highly produced summer hearings, Liz
Speaker 1: Cheney and the Committee kept teasing that there would be
Speaker 1: more to come in the fall, before the midterms election,
Speaker 1: before the midterm elections, and before the committee expires at
Speaker 1: the end of the year. The goal was and is
Speaker 1: to keep every Republican candidate under the shadow of January
Speaker 1: sixth and Donald Trump ahead of election day. If you
Speaker 1: can keep it in the news, you can force candidates
Speaker 1: to talk about it, eating into time that would otherwise
Speaker 1: be spent talking about gas prices, inflation, the border, education,
Speaker 1: and declining wages. The Trump centric strategy failed miserably in
Speaker 1: Virginia's gubernatorial election last year because voters have other concerns,
Speaker 1: whether or not Democrats want them to. But Democrats did
Speaker 1: not learn because they continue to be blinded by their
Speaker 1: rage against Donald Trump and his voters. The most charitable
Speaker 1: version of this January sixth strategy is that elected Republicans
Speaker 1: enable Trump, so they should have to constantly answer for
Speaker 1: what happened on January sixth in order to prevent it
Speaker 1: from happening again. Thus, in this most charitable version of
Speaker 1: their logic, Democrats are morally obligated to do all they
Speaker 1: can to hold Republicans accountable for what they see as
Speaker 1: an incitement of violence. Again, I think Trump ack did
Speaker 1: horribly before and after the twenty twenty election, ended extra
Speaker 1: damage to the country by spreading reckless nonsense about the results.
Speaker 1: I also cover January sixth in person and heard him
Speaker 1: tell everyone to go to the Capitol peacefully and saw
Speaker 1: the crowd get whipped into a frenzy as it marched
Speaker 1: on Constitution Avenue. So while Donald Trump contributed to the
Speaker 1: violence on January sixth, there is no question about that.
Speaker 1: I think it cheapens our collective definition of incitement to
Speaker 1: apply it to someone who also called for peaceful action. Now,
Speaker 1: despite their endless sanctimony, democrats fixation on January sixth is
Speaker 1: not virtuous. It is about their power. It's an election strategy.
Speaker 1: It exploits a tragedy in a way that will almost
Speaker 1: certainly create others. These norm breaking stunts are not worth
Speaker 1: getting Democrats back in power, because Democrats will use their
Speaker 1: power in ways that create more Donald Trump's and more
Speaker 1: January sixth. They know their policies are going to worsen
Speaker 1: inflation and cut wages, They do not care. They think
Speaker 1: the public suffering is worth it for them to keep
Speaker 1: or gain power. In the process of orse public trust plummets.
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton and Careye, Jean Pierre and Stacy Abrams did
Speaker 1: immense damage to the country by casting undue doubt on
Speaker 1: the legitimacy of earlier elections, than the media did amense
Speaker 1: damage to the country by pretending Democrats did no damage
Speaker 1: to the country in the course of their election doubts.
Speaker 1: This is why the Obama era FBI and Clinton campaign
Speaker 1: cooked up a hoax to disqualify Trump the ends they
Speaker 1: believe justified the means Trump needed to be stopped, no
Speaker 1: matter how this is not a partisan strategy, of course,
Speaker 1: It's actually kind of the inevitable nature of politics. We
Speaker 1: talked just last week on the show about how pro
Speaker 1: life voters will elect men like herschel Walker, regardless of
Speaker 1: his personal character, because they believe the end of outlawing
Speaker 1: abortion justifies the means of voting for a man of
Speaker 1: questionable character. But in a healthy democracy, the media would
Speaker 1: not be colluding with Democrats. They would not be allowing
Speaker 1: them to pass off their cynical politics as virtuous governance.
Speaker 1: Our tech companies would hold both parties to equal standards,
Speaker 1: and Democrats then would have much less incentive to hold
Speaker 1: bizarre show trials produced for television that shatter congressional precedent
Speaker 1: because the media would hold them accountable for this ridiculous
Speaker 1: use of their time rather than cheerleading their efforts. Right now,
Speaker 1: every member of Congress should be scrambling to support workers
Speaker 1: and families, busting their butts just to stay above water.
Speaker 1: They should be devising a sound approach to the nuclear threat.
Speaker 1: They shouldn't have time for much else, but they've somehow
Speaker 1: found plenty of it. And that tells you all you
Speaker 1: need to know about our government right now, and it's
Speaker 1: how you get more great recessions and more January sixths.
Speaker 1: Our ecosystem is totally out of whack, and our public
Speaker 1: and private sectors just keep throwing gasoline on the fire.
Speaker 1: We have a really interesting segment now when we're going
Speaker 1: to bring in Matt Stoller and David Dayan, who are
Speaker 1: going to debate in a really I think, substantive, deep
Speaker 1: interesting way what's been happening with the Federal Reserve and
Speaker 1: inflation in the last several months. So we're excited to
Speaker 1: bring in Matt and David. This week, new hot, hotter
Speaker 1: than expected inflation data came out, which has produced expectations
Speaker 1: that the Federal Reserve is going to continue ratching up
Speaker 1: its interest rates. There's been a kind of paradoxical response
Speaker 1: from the stock market in the last couple of days,
Speaker 1: the stock market shooting up rather than crashing as some
Speaker 1: people expected that it might. So we're going to be
Speaker 1: joined now by Matt Stoller and Dave Dayan, two friends
Speaker 1: of the show who we're going to We're going to
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the relationship between the Federal
Speaker 1: Reserve policymaking employment unemployment. And started here by a tweet
Speaker 1: of mine that got Matt mad, which then led to
Speaker 1: this segment. So the housing market will totally crash, but
Speaker 1: with interest rates like this, only cash buyers will be
Speaker 1: able to capitalize more upward distribution of wealth facilitated by
Speaker 1: the Fed. This was in response to somebody posting a
Speaker 1: chart showing that the average thirty year fixed mortgage rate
Speaker 1: had climbed to seven point one four percent. Uh So,
Speaker 1: Matt and other people point out, Hey, you guys complain
Speaker 1: when fiscal when monetary policy is too loose and fuels inequality,
Speaker 1: and you say that's creating an upward, upward redistribution of
Speaker 1: wealth and then when monetary policy is tight, you complain
Speaker 1: that it's shifting policy up and that in fact, the
Speaker 1: increase in lending costs is actually going to hit a
Speaker 1: lot of rich people as well. Uh, And so we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're going to unpack all of that. And I
Speaker 1: think this is an interesting conversation because all of us,
Speaker 1: including Emily, want higher wages, want a competitive and strong economy.
Speaker 1: The question is how to get that either given the
Speaker 1: tools that are practically available to us, and also the
Speaker 1: tools that are legally and actually available, but political constraints
Speaker 1: keep them from being discussed. So, Matt, what what what? What?
Speaker 1: How would you? How would you describe kind of your
Speaker 1: your thoughts about how well folks like me think about
Speaker 1: Federal interest rate piles FED FED interest rate policy. Right, So,
Speaker 1: over the last I guess six to nine months, maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit, maybe about a year, the FED has
Speaker 1: been tightening its monetary policy, which is to say, it's
Speaker 1: been raising interest rates and shrinking its balance sheet, so
Speaker 1: taking money out of out of the banking system. And
Speaker 1: the result is that the stock market has gone down significantly.
Speaker 1: It's not about about thirty percent or so. But another
Speaker 1: result is that housing prices are starting to go down,
Speaker 1: rent increases are finally slowing, Crypto has crashed, mergers are declining,
Speaker 1: and meanwhile, unemployment is still at three point five percent,
Speaker 1: and you see help wanted signs everywhere. So what's what's
Speaker 1: effectively happening is billionaires are losing a lot of money
Speaker 1: and Wall Street is losing a lot of power. It's
Speaker 1: not really touching ordinary people. Yet we do have a
Speaker 1: serious problem with runaway inflation. So what I don't I mean,
Speaker 1: I think what I'm seeing here is that the Fed
Speaker 1: for the last ten years has been pushing money into
Speaker 1: Wall Street. I mean, that's what the Fed does. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't when they say when people say raises or
Speaker 1: lowers interest rates, like Ryan, when you talk about that,
Speaker 1: first of all, it does more than that. But it's
Speaker 1: not There is no one interest rate. It's not like
Speaker 1: your credit card interest rates go down when the Fed
Speaker 1: cuts interest rates. The Fed is simply lowering and raising
Speaker 1: interest rates for Wall Street, right for like Apollo, the
Speaker 1: giant private equity giant, for Goldman Sachs and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth, but not for you. And this is
Speaker 1: deliberately put into statutes. So it was in the Cares
Speaker 1: Act in twenty twenty, which was the response to the pandemic.
Speaker 1: And what that means is that when the FED prints money,
Speaker 1: and the FED is printed about nine trillion dollars or
Speaker 1: so over the last ten years, which at a run rate,
Speaker 1: if you just take an even run rate of how
Speaker 1: much the FED used to print, it's about nine hundred
Speaker 1: years of money. What that does is it fundamentally distorted
Speaker 1: the economy over the last ten years or so, so
Speaker 1: that we have garbage things like crypto, we have the
Speaker 1: dramatic expansion of private equity, you have nonsense speculation like
Speaker 1: game Stop and things like that. It's really reshaped our
Speaker 1: economy in incredibly dangerous ways. And the FED is pulling
Speaker 1: back on that and starting to reverse that. And what
Speaker 1: we're seeing is the speculative hot air is coming out
Speaker 1: of the economy. A lot of the bad sectors that
Speaker 1: shouldn't exist, like crypto, are falling apart. Private equity is
Speaker 1: having real trouble financing mergers which they use for arson.
Speaker 1: You're seeing fewer stock buybacks. This is good, This is
Speaker 1: getting rid of the financialization of the economy. Now there
Speaker 1: is a serious danger. There is a risk of unemployment
Speaker 1: because what the FED has done is it's effectively has
Speaker 1: the working person in a hostage situation, saying the only
Speaker 1: way that we can affect the economy is to give
Speaker 1: money to Wall Street or take money from Wall Street.
Speaker 1: And if we take money from Wall Street, then working
Speaker 1: people are going to get hurt. But that's a fundamental
Speaker 1: hostage situation. We now have a situation where we run
Speaker 1: away inflation. The only way to address it is to
Speaker 1: actually start pulling money out of Wall Street. That's what
Speaker 1: the FED has been doing. It's a good thing. The
Speaker 1: problem is, and this gets to your question, the way
Speaker 1: the left thinks about monetary policy. They don't think about
Speaker 1: the distortions of the economy up there. They just think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, if the FED gives money to Wall Street,
Speaker 1: which is not the way that they think about it.
Speaker 1: But they say, if the FED lowers interest rates, which
Speaker 1: is a much more antiseptic way of saying the same thing,
Speaker 1: then that's good for housing, it's good for working people,
Speaker 1: it's good for wages, and it's really not. What it's
Speaker 1: good for is the people who are getting the money,
Speaker 1: and it's good for warping our economy in really problematic ways. However,
Speaker 1: and This is to your point. If the FED continues
Speaker 1: to pull money out of Wall Street, it will break
Speaker 1: the fragile financial arrangements that have been set up that
Speaker 1: are fundamentally toxic, but that are still what our economy
Speaker 1: relies on. It'll break those arrangements and that will cause
Speaker 1: serious bankruptcies, unemployment, things like that. That it will cause
Speaker 1: real suffering, but that was sort of inevitable anyway. That's
Speaker 1: a result of the last ten to fifteen years of
Speaker 1: bad monetary policy and fiscal policy. So we are going
Speaker 1: to have to pay for what has happened over the
Speaker 1: last ten years, and I think we should pay now.
Speaker 1: What we are seeing as the Fed titans monetary policy
Speaker 1: is a lot of the speculative hot air is coming
Speaker 1: out of the market, and that is fundamentally a good thing.
Speaker 1: So that's my argument. What is Matt getting wrong from
Speaker 1: your perspective, David, Well, let me just say that I
Speaker 1: think that's brilliant and I always learn a lot. I
Speaker 1: always learn a lot from him. Uh. You know, I
Speaker 1: am going to disagree with him some in this case. Uh.
Speaker 1: First of all, uh, if if the situation was such
Speaker 1: that this uh uh uh you know, increase in interest rates,
Speaker 1: Uh was actually bringing down inflation. Uh, then then then
Speaker 1: maybe this would be something that was you know, there
Speaker 1: there would be a relationship where it would be positive.
Speaker 1: I see no evidence that the the increase in interest
Speaker 1: rates is having much of an effect on inflation. Interest
Speaker 1: rates can't deal with the situation in Ukraine. Interest rates
Speaker 1: can't deal with continued waves of COVID in China. We're
Speaker 1: still seeing very high interest rates right now. It's not
Speaker 1: due to wage increases. Real wages are down, but they
Speaker 1: interest rates continue or inflation continues to be very high
Speaker 1: despite this continued ratcheting up, and as Matt says, it
Speaker 1: is going to have a cost eventually on the labor market.
Speaker 1: That is the explicit goal is that is what Jerome
Speaker 1: pal has said he wants, is a softening of the
Speaker 1: labor market and the ability essentially he's not saying it
Speaker 1: in these words, but the ability to throw people out
Speaker 1: of work and to increase interest rate. Some people like
Speaker 1: Larry Summers are saying it explicitly that the unemployment rate
Speaker 1: needs to be five percent or more, which translates into
Speaker 1: millions of people losing their jobs. The idea that Matt
Speaker 1: has is that well, we're going to have to pay
Speaker 1: the piper at some point, and this is taking money
Speaker 1: and power away from Wall Street. I question that to
Speaker 1: a certain extent. Twenty twenty one was a real outlier
Speaker 1: in terms of mergers and acquisitions. Let's just focus on that.
Speaker 1: It was the highest levels that we have ever seen
Speaker 1: pretty much. But according to a report from DC Advisory,
Speaker 1: deal activity at least in the private equity space is
Speaker 1: going to hit the levels of twenty eighteen to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty this year, which were the three previous highly highest
Speaker 1: yearly activity levels on record. It's not going to hit
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one levels, but it's not like it's coming
Speaker 1: back to some impoverished level. There's still about three trillion
Speaker 1: dollars of what we call dry powder in the private
Speaker 1: equity markets, which is money that has not been deployed
Speaker 1: to buy companies. There's still plenty of room to run there,
Speaker 1: and the private equity industry is pretty skilled in figuring
Speaker 1: out ways to get out of trouble, even in an
Speaker 1: unfavorable environment for them. I would point you to this
Speaker 1: failing Citrix deal, which is a merger which is now
Speaker 1: going to cost banks a ton of money because they
Speaker 1: made the deal in a certain interest rate environment. Now
Speaker 1: interest rates have gone up and they're going to have
Speaker 1: to spend a lot more to make this deal. The
Speaker 1: way that deal was structured, the private equity companies that
Speaker 1: were creating this merger with Citrix invested no new cash
Speaker 1: into the deal, and there were these preferred shareholders who
Speaker 1: were other private equity firms who allegedly made investments, but
Speaker 1: they have the right to claim all proceeds for the
Speaker 1: sale of one of the companies in the deal. Private
Speaker 1: equity is very skilled at figuring out ways to wriggle
Speaker 1: off the hook, and they're doing so with things like
Speaker 1: what are called continuation funds, which is they just sell
Speaker 1: companies to themselves so they don't have to real lies
Speaker 1: the losses that they have on their various portfolio companies.
Speaker 1: So my point is that the idea that this is
Speaker 1: punishing Wall Street, I think is a little bit dubious.
Speaker 1: I think there are ways in which Wall Street is
Speaker 1: relatively unaffected. And of course, when interest rates go up,
Speaker 1: banks do pretty well. They get to increase the interest
Speaker 1: rate that they charge on consumer loans. What we do
Speaker 1: know is that while housing prices are falling a little bit,
Speaker 1: the cost of housing, at least for mortgages. You know,
Speaker 1: buying a mortgage has grown way up. I mean, mortgage
Speaker 1: rates are at seven percent right now, so the monthly payment,
Speaker 1: which is what matters here, is going way up. And
Speaker 1: that's why we're seeing activity in housing markets at levels
Speaker 1: that we haven't seen since everybody was sitting in their
Speaker 1: homes at the very beginning of the pandemic. So this
Speaker 1: is not good necessarily for housing. And the other thing
Speaker 1: that it does is it is it makes home builders say,
Speaker 1: this is not a good time to build, This is
Speaker 1: not a good time to create housing. And of course
Speaker 1: the reason that we have distorted and unaffordable housing markets
Speaker 1: is there's simply not enough housing out there, and a
Speaker 1: situation like this creates less housing being built. This is
Speaker 1: the problem that we had directly after the financial crisis,
Speaker 1: when we had a decade basically of flat home building.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that's a positive necessarily for individuals either,
Speaker 1: because over time this is going to create this continued
Speaker 1: gap in the amount of housing we need, the amount
Speaker 1: of housing demand that there is. You know, it argues
Speaker 1: for a need for social housing or some other way
Speaker 1: to get out of this cyclical rut that you get
Speaker 1: when you rely housing on the public market. Those are
Speaker 1: some of my my points on and David, on that point,
Speaker 1: I'm mater curious for your response on this. You talked
Speaker 1: about a lot of kind of other policy levers outside
Speaker 1: of monetary policy that could improve these situations, and I
Speaker 1: guess from my perspective, I agree. You know, definancializing the
Speaker 1: system is is a is a necessary. Is something that
Speaker 1: is necessary to be done in it. And if this,
Speaker 1: if this accomplishes it without destroying the labor market, that's great.
Speaker 1: From from my perspective, what I would have liked to see,
Speaker 1: and maybe we'll still get to see it, is what
Speaker 1: can a tight labor market do to our politics and
Speaker 1: to our political economy if it's allowed to persist for
Speaker 1: several years? In other words, if you have workers who
Speaker 1: are empowered in becoming militant in the workplace, which which
Speaker 1: you're seeing, now, what what does that look like? How
Speaker 1: does that change our politics? What do they start demanding?
Speaker 1: Do those workers then start demanding that the you know,
Speaker 1: private equity be basically taxed out of existence? Because you know,
Speaker 1: private equity absolutely benefits from this loose monetary policy, but
Speaker 1: they are but they're also a regulatory creation of kind
Speaker 1: of the of the basically the you know, Carter and
Speaker 1: Reagan area benefit either, right, so you could you just
Speaker 1: like they were created by policy, they could be uncreated
Speaker 1: by policy and also by marginal tax rates that make
Speaker 1: speculation in crypto, make make all of the bubble financialization
Speaker 1: stuff that you're talking about that makes that impossible right now. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's no way we're getting marginal rates up there. But
Speaker 1: what if the tight market, a tight labor market persists,
Speaker 1: creates a labor movement and then is able to fix that.
Speaker 1: What they start demanding is a Republican Congress. That's what
Speaker 1: they're demanding. Like what people want is to deal with inflation.
Speaker 1: That's that's just what people want. And you know, it
Speaker 1: sounds callous that Larry Summer says we need to get
Speaker 1: you know, we need the labor, we need fewer jobs
Speaker 1: out there, and but like that's what people want, and
Speaker 1: like we just sound like idiots pretending that inflation isn't
Speaker 1: this massive problem and that we don't want millions of
Speaker 1: people thrown out of work, because it sounds mean people
Speaker 1: are saying their main problem is inflation, and like we
Speaker 1: just sound like morons by being like, oh this is
Speaker 1: this is good for labor, and like working people are saying,
Speaker 1: we don't like this situation. That's just ya. What about
Speaker 1: that is is not you know, I just mentioned so
Speaker 1: the FED is not helping the inflation situation. Well, I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think there's a difference between raising
Speaker 1: interest rates and and and shrinking the balance sheet. So
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about that because
Speaker 1: because raising like increasing the balance sheet right, was explicitly
Speaker 1: about the FED going in and buying financial assets, particularly
Speaker 1: risky financial assets like the the risky loans that that
Speaker 1: private equity firms would need to finance their takeovers and
Speaker 1: other sort of stuff out there. And because they were
Speaker 1: you know, kind of going out to the edges and
Speaker 1: sort of putting and and forcing investors to go down
Speaker 1: the yield curve and buy riskier stuff, it incentivized much, much,
Speaker 1: much more speculation. So we're not just talking about raising
Speaker 1: or lowering interest rates. We're talking about financial operations where
Speaker 1: Federal Reserve traders would go in and buy specific assets.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really dangerous because it is actually
Speaker 1: having the FED sort of doing fiscal policy, which is
Speaker 1: the purview of democratic institutions. So I just want to
Speaker 1: put that on. I want to distinguish between those two things.
Speaker 1: The other point is the Citrics deal was negotiated in March,
Speaker 1: when we were still in this like crazy moment, when
Speaker 1: all there was basically free capital. You would not see
Speaker 1: banks negotiating a citric steal or pe firms doing a
Speaker 1: centric steal today. So I just want to point that out,
Speaker 1: Like I think Elon Munk's purchase of Twitter is like
Speaker 1: a citric style. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to get
Speaker 1: out of it for that reason. He sought to buy
Speaker 1: it when the market was frothy, and now he's trying
Speaker 1: to get out of it. And the banks going to
Speaker 1: lose a lot of money on that debt too, but
Speaker 1: that's because they committed to it in March April May.
Speaker 1: I forgot exactly when he said he was going to
Speaker 1: buy it. There's no way that that acquisition would be
Speaker 1: he wouldn't put forward that acquisition today. That's possible. I
Speaker 1: mean literally this morning Kroger and Albertson's combined. I mean
Speaker 1: the idea that there's no kind of that there's this
Speaker 1: truff of activity in m and a and in Paight,
Speaker 1: I just don't think it's true. Look, there absolutely is.
Speaker 1: You said there is twenty twenty one. But first of all,
Speaker 1: it was not an anomaly, right, it was a record,
Speaker 1: But it was a record because we passed a law
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty called the Cares Act, which said the Fed,
Speaker 1: he's going to buy risky assets and this is my
Speaker 1: organization came out and said, you wrote about this, and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Warren talked about this. This is going to fuel
Speaker 1: a merger boom, and it indeed did that. And now
Speaker 1: the thing is about projections, right when they say, oh,
Speaker 1: private equity is going to go back to twenty nineteen numbers,
Speaker 1: which of course is too high. These are projections, right,
Speaker 1: And one of the things that's happened is that the
Speaker 1: you know, the projections have been consistently wrong and overestimated activity. Now,
Speaker 1: I look, I think we can all agree that we
Speaker 1: would prefer to go back to a world where we
Speaker 1: had a competent government that was managing markets in a
Speaker 1: much more deliberate way, that we could push money and
Speaker 1: actually build more housing, that we could get rid of
Speaker 1: this financialized economy without having to kind of crush the
Speaker 1: labor market. We could have, you know, we could organize
Speaker 1: things the way that we did in the depression, in
Speaker 1: World War two and in the nineteen fifties, where you
Speaker 1: just had a lot more analysis and understanding of our markets,
Speaker 1: and we wouldn't have semiconductor shortages and all these different things.
Speaker 1: But that's not the world we live in. Like fundamentally,
Speaker 1: we've been making the argument, I say, kind of collectively
Speaker 1: for the last ten to fifteen years that we need
Speaker 1: more government competence and more deliberate management of markets, and
Speaker 1: we're starting to have some impacts, but we have not
Speaker 1: success in building that infrastructure. Yet. All we have is
Speaker 1: the FED and that sucks. Okay, it's a bad situation,
Speaker 1: but it is reality. That's all we got. And we
Speaker 1: got inflation now, and it's you know, and we all
Speaker 1: know that it takes a while for the FED to
Speaker 1: you know, it takes a while for like monetary policy
Speaker 1: to hit the economy. I want to prefer a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff. I was talking about shortages in February
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty. We didn't do any of the things
Speaker 1: that we needed to do. So this is all we got, right,
Speaker 1: and inflation is a huge problem. Unemployment just isn't. We
Speaker 1: have got to be serious about where we are. And
Speaker 1: you also have to look at Wall Street, the stock market,
Speaker 1: the bond markets have collapsed. You cannot tell me that
Speaker 1: this has not had an impact on billionaires in Wall Street.
Speaker 1: The ability to finance deals is much lower. And yes
Speaker 1: you can point to deals, important deals. We definitely need
Speaker 1: a revamp of anti trust policy. You guys know I
Speaker 1: care about that and want that. I mean, it's sort
Speaker 1: of in process, but the reality is this is all
Speaker 1: we got right now. This is the only lever we got.
Speaker 1: So we got bad choices on both sides, and I'm
Speaker 1: saying it is a better choice to say, let us
Speaker 1: stop the party on Wall Street, let us stop the carnival,
Speaker 1: let us stop amplifying asset prices, which includes housing prices,
Speaker 1: and start to take them down. And that is what
Speaker 1: is happening, and it's causing a lot of pain. Obviously,
Speaker 1: seven percent mortgage rates, it's terrible if you're trying to
Speaker 1: buy a house. But the reality is the reason for
Speaker 1: that is housing prices skyrocketed because of FED policy, and
Speaker 1: when you start to fix things, it's really painful. But
Speaker 1: the alternative would be housing prices continuing to go up
Speaker 1: at ten twenty percent a year, which is not sustainable
Speaker 1: and is much worse. So we got to be serious
Speaker 1: here about and look at the world from the perspective
Speaker 1: of the billionaires and not just say, oh, well, people
Speaker 1: are getting wages wage increases here and there, when real
Speaker 1: wages are actually going down and been for the last
Speaker 1: year or so. Last word to you, David Quickly, I mean,
Speaker 1: I agree that it's a bad situation. I'm glad you
Speaker 1: agree with me. It's a bad situation what the Fed
Speaker 1: is doing, and it does it does take time to
Speaker 1: move through monetary policy through the economy, and that's why
Speaker 1: the labor market is still you know, unemployment is still
Speaker 1: at three point five percent. But nobody believes that what
Speaker 1: the Fed is doing is going to leave the labor
Speaker 1: market unaffected. I mean, we already saw in the last
Speaker 1: Josh the Jolts report, we saw that that open positions
Speaker 1: fell by one point one million jobs in the last
Speaker 1: in the last month, So we're heading in that direction.
Speaker 1: We are heading toward a recession. It is true that
Speaker 1: the loss of say five million jobs, relative to three
Speaker 1: hundred million people experiencing inflation, it's always going to be
Speaker 1: the case that more people look at that inflation and
Speaker 1: say I don't want this. But what doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: for those five million people who are going to experience
Speaker 1: a depression and for the millions of people are going
Speaker 1: to experience a recession and have all of the attendant
Speaker 1: problems associated with that, that doesn't mean that that's you
Speaker 1: know that there's this sort of John Stuart mill greatest
Speaker 1: good for the greatest number situation going on. Well, David
Speaker 1: and Matt, there's a ton more to say on this,
Speaker 1: and we want to have you guys back, but we'll
Speaker 1: get thirty seconds, but we're not going to get the
Speaker 1: show out on times. We got to do this quickly.
Speaker 1: Alternative like should the bed continue the speculative boom? Or
Speaker 1: what's the alternative here? I think the alternative is dealing
Speaker 1: with this in a more holistic way, with you know,
Speaker 1: using the power of Congress to deal with the real
Speaker 1: drivers of inflation. I don't I'm not convinced that the
Speaker 1: FED is dealing with the real drivers and inflation just
Speaker 1: by crushing demand. There are supply side issues, there are
Speaker 1: corporate profits issues that you've written about, and I don't
Speaker 1: think that what the FED is doing gets to that
Speaker 1: and the FED can't make it rain in California. So
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about this next week. Week after I
Speaker 1: want to have you guys back on to continue this conversation.
Speaker 1: Welcome in and talk about the gold standard. There you go, excellent,
Speaker 1: perfect today. So Matt Solar, American Economic Liberties Project, what's
Speaker 1: your substack. It's a big, big, and still it's a
Speaker 1: contributor here at Breaking Points, Cannut Day Day and editor
Speaker 1: at the American Prospect. Thank you guys so much for
Speaker 1: joining us. A programming note for next week, we'll be here.
Speaker 1: We'll be here on Monday and Tuesday. Crystalin Saga are
Speaker 1: going to be out. They'll be back after that, and
Speaker 1: then we'll be back again on Friday. The last if
Speaker 1: you were very confused, our counterpoints Friday airing on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: It was a unique thing for a for a holiday weekend.
Speaker 1: But we'll be here Monday and Tuesday filling in for
Speaker 1: Crystaline Sager. We're excited. We already have like half of
Speaker 1: Monday show planned. So my stuff that got bumped from
Speaker 1: the day, stuff that got bumped from the day good interesting,
Speaker 1: which but it'll get bumped probably probably, so so pessimistic
Speaker 1: and reasonably so. Everybody, have a great weekend, see you soon.
Speaker 1: We'll see you Monday.