Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/15/23 CounterPoints: Bernie Social Security, Pompeo JFK Files and Snowden, BBC Raided for Modi Doc, Texas Woke Tax, Gretchen Whitmer Ford Plant, Cost of Thriving, Ohio Derailment Coverup

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Bernie Sanders introducing a bill to boost Social Security Benefits, an interview with Mike Pompeo over JFK files and Edward Snowden, Indian authorities raiding BBC offices after broadcast of Modi documentary, Texas and Florida declaring they won't work with "woke" ESG banks, Gretchen Whitmer accepting the 2,500 jobs for a new EV Battery factory in Michigan after Glenn Youngkin refused in his own state, the ever rising cost of Inflation on Families, and rail road worker Matthew Weaver joins us to talk about the Ohio train derailment coverup.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support with our new intro music. Emily, what did you think of that? I loved it. It was pumping me up. But I think there's some people who are going to have completely mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, the thing that made CounterPoints unique is that we had this incredibly jarring, silent opening, and now you get to get pumped up like a regular morning show. Well, we can still nix it, go back to that. So Emily, you're joining us from Wisconsin, is that right? Where are you? I'm in Puerto Rico,

so about as far from Wisconsin as is possible. The first vacation I've taken in years, but I had to be here for counterpoints. Joining us on your vacation. Since you're not in the studio, you don't know that we're actually starting with something different than what we talked about. York Times, that they are trying to pierce the attorney-client privilege and go after one of Trump's attorneys in the document case to try to get him to testify. This is in the classified documents case that they still have going against Trump. You might have seen that alerted on your phone just now. But what's your reaction to this? Do you think that there's sort of a public momentum. Like the court of legal affairs is very different than the court of public opinion.

The court of legal opinion versus the court of public opinion is a huge distinction. And to the extent that they also started looking for these documents and Joe Biden's different residents and the think tank. And then they went through Mike Pence's office and his residence. That was all motivated by the court of public opinion. It was really just like, hey, we need to see what's going on in case we end up, you know, we end up in a really untenable situation.

And in fact, they did find themselves in an untenable situation. Ryan, the other question I have for you is I'm curious what you think about that same question, but also with the news today about the news in the last couple of days about what's happening in the case in Georgia, Fulton County, where the prosecutor was, as we covered a couple of weeks ago, wants to keep the grand jury testimony and the grand jury report basically under wraps until they're ready to release it. And we think we expect that she is going to indict Donald Trump. Right. And all of this just to me just takes way

too long. Like, what do you what what is everybody waiting for? Like, if you if you if you have the goods on somebody, just move on. And this this thing where you're waiting, Merrick Garland taking what, two years to decide to move. And then at the last minute, he punts it over to a special prosecutor, taking two years down in Georgia. I understand it takes a long time to interview witnesses, to collect information, to move forward. But you're right. I mean, it does seem like this is heating up, just as we're kind of entering into the Republican nomination contest. And I think the problem for Trump here is that if you're looking at this from 30,000 feet away and you're not following this very closely, it does look like everybody's finding classified information. And maybe even this Georgia thing

seems to kind of lump in there with it. But if you get into the details, Trump was the one, Trump was the only one of all of these people who kind of was actively monkeying around with people who were trying to get back the information. He said, I unclassified the documents, right? No, he unclassified them all in his mind, right? It's like Michael Scott, I declare bankruptcy. Yes, exactly. He declared bankruptcy again. With Biden and Pence, their lawyers found it and they immediately kind of reach out to the National Security Archives or they reach out to the Department of Justice and say, hey, we found these classified information. With the other,

it was like boxes are getting moved around. Mar-a-Lago is just a den of spies, which isn't exactly Trump's fault, but it's going, you know, that's going to attract a whole bunch of, you know, foreign intelligence agencies who are going to try to penetrate that type of situation. So, you know, for him to have just classified documents just kind of lying around or as trophies to kind of show off puts him in a different category than Trump. And the Georgia thing, that's going to be wild because that really is going back to something real, like his attempt to mess with the election in Georgia. What's your read on the Georgia prosecutor? Yeah, but to your first question about the momentum, we have learned that Joe Biden had

apparently classified documents. We don't know how classified, we don't know what they were about in the garage next to his Corvette in a house that Hunter Biden was living in apparently and had access to. And so when Hunter Biden is engaged in really high level foreign lobbying where he's trading on his name and there's documents there, it does, whether or not, I think there are substantive reasons for concern in both the Trump and the Biden case, because presumably there are intelligence assets of foreign countries, both in Mar-a-Lago and around Hunter Biden, maybe even around Mike Pence. So there is a real substantive question. We still don't know the real nature of many of these documents, but that I think really does take some of the momentum away from this particular pursuit

of Donald Trump. Now, the Georgia one, this is the most serious, I think, legal threat to Trump that I have seen in the last several years. I don't know about you, but to me, this is the one that actually carries weight. And so if it gets sort of tacked on to the ticky-tacky ones, I don't know that that's super helpful for the folks in Fulton County, Georgia. Yeah, no, it's going to get exciting. We're going to keep watching that. I think what they ought to do, just declassify all of the documents

and then let everybody just decide, all right, who had the worst documents? And if it's the nuclear codes, redact the nuclear codes and also change your nuclear codes. Like, you know, best practices on nuclear codes, when you have a new administration, you do new nuclear codes, right? That's reasonable. No, we can agree on that.

Yeah. So moving on to social security, which I think actually represents a wedge that kind of points right at the most, probably the most important kind of realignment going on in politics over the last, you know, 20 or 30 years. And that's the kind of class realignment or de-alignment going on inside the two parties with Social Security working as a spotlight shining right on the strange situation that we're fighting. And we can get more into that in a moment. But Bernie Sanders, we can put up this A1. So Bernie Sanders is out with his new bill to expand and strengthen Social Security. He expands and strengthens by basically raising taxes on the rich. He lifts the cap on payroll taxes for people making more than $250,000 a year. They don't get higher Social Security benefits, but they're going to pay more

in payroll tax. People at the bottom are going to see a 10% to 15% increase in their Social Security benefits. And the actuary says that this would solidify the program for the next 75 years. And they use a 75-year window. And so you've heard a lot from Republicans saying that they want to strengthen Social Security, warning about the insolvency problem. It's our favorite euphemism here on CounterPoints. Exactly. Basically, there's two ways to do it. You can bring more tax money in or you can reduce benefits. And so now Bernie Sanders has put his cards on the table. He's like, all right, here's my idea. Let's raise taxes on the rich to fund it. So how are Republicans going to respond to this? Because now if they say strengthen, it's like, oh, so you support Bernie Sanders' plan? Oh, if you don't support Bernie Sanders'

plan, then you do support benefit cuts at least down the road, right? There's a guy on the right, I think he's at the Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedel, who does a lot of these calculations from the conservative perspective. And even he concedes, he has said, this is in the HuffPost article, that the 75-year mark, or gap with Medicare, which is a very, very serious problem without implementing dramatic tax hikes on the middle class or cutting. And so the math is still really, really tough if you combine the problem that we have with both Social Security and Medicare. And Brian Riedel has looked at some of these numbers. And one of the most interesting things is that the average American is coming out on top in terms of what they put into Social Security, Medicare and what they get out.

But what's even more interesting is to see how many benefits are going back to very wealthy Americans. We're talking about upper middle class and upper class people, that there are a lot of people getting benefits. And the restructuring might be another way to look at this. But that doesn't preclude tax hikes. It certainly doesn't preclude tax hikes on the rich. But it is interesting to think that what we can do with Social Security, if we tax the rich, basically at that level, then you leave Medicare without much to do in terms of increasing taxes from that point. I think when it comes to the wealthy getting Social Security, I think for everybody who makes more than $400,000, who made

more than $400,000 over their career a year, if they want their Social Security checks, they should have to go down to a Social Security office and stand in line every month. And also maybe even pee in a cup. Do all the degrading things that they make poor and working class people do to get their benefits. That way, if somebody really wants their Social Security benefits that they paid into, hey, you can have them. Here's the address of the office. You got to physically go down there and get it every month. But more seriously, what they could do is just kind of raise taxes a little bit more on the rich. So that way, okay, yeah, you're getting it, but there's a progressively higher

tax rate on you. So we're just basically taxing it back. You can have it. We're taking it right back. But Mike Rounds, Senator Mike Rounds was on, I guess, I think it was Fox. We'll find that out in a second. One of these cable networks talking about Social Security. Let's roll A2 here. He's pointing specifically to the plan that your colleague, Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, released when he was leading the Senate GOP's campaign arm, which says, just to quote, all federal legislation sunsets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again, unquote. Do you support that plan? I kind of look at Social Security the way I would at the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We're never going to not fund defense. But at the same time, every single year, we look at how we can make it better.

And I think it's about time that we start talking about Social Security and making it better. We've got 11 years before we actually see cuts start to happen to people that are on Social Security. And I think it'd be very responsible for us to do everything we can to make those funding programs now and the plans right now so that we don't run out of money in Social Security. Okay, that was obviously not Fox. The next clip we have is Fox Business. But what was your reaction to that? Because all of these Republicans are getting hit with this Rick Scott thing. Like, hey, man, do you agree with this guy who wants to sunset Social Security and Medicare over five years and then re-up them?

And then you have somebody like Mike Rounds who says, yeah, we should keep looking at it. Democrats seeing that are like, thank you. We're just going to hammer you with this. What was your reaction to it? The White House was giddy when Rick Scott put out that plan. I mean, it was palpably giddy in Washington that the Democrats, the DNC and the White House was just tap dancing that day because they knew this was their midterm weapon. And Mitch McConnell was furious. And for all my problems with Mitch McConnell, he's absolutely right to continue, you know, throwing the blame over to Rick Scott. Now, that plan, by the way, had a lot of really, really good stuff in it. But this one thing that was buried in it, basically, it wasn't a huge aspect of that plan. It was just killer.

And I was involved in a lot of conversations. I remember talking to Republicans, some high level Republicans, even back in unless you do, to the point we just had, tax the rich at a crazy high rate. And then you're still left with either Social Security or Medicare. Like the math just doesn't add up, but they love to talk about it. And they don't want to seek any options that involve taxation. And on the other hand, nobody wants to seek any options that involve cuts. So there's no restructuring plan that fits the bill. And that's why I think people like Mitch McConnell are like, just shut up about it. Now, you can interpret that one way, which is they're going to say one thing publicly and do the other thing when the debt ceiling negotiations come.

I think a lot of people are right to have that skepticism. But I will say the mood among Republicans in Washington was basically furious with Rick Scott that that got into the plan. It feels like it could be the Republican version of defund the police, where you really only had like one or two Democrats, you'd say Cori Bush or say, did one interview where she says defund the police. But in general, it's, you know, they're marching with people who support defund the police, or they're saying we ought to reduce funding from the police and move it over to social services. And then Republicans just, him over the head with it for multiple election cycles in a row, saying that you are for defund the police, Democrats, the party of defund the police.

I would suspect Democrats are just going to do the reverse to Republicans with this over time. That's a perfect parallel because if Republicans really believed that they needed to do entitlement reform, like they desperately had this Paul Ryan commitment to entitlement reform, it would have been a priority for them in 2017. But Republicans are politicians just like Democrats and politicians are categorically cowards because they want to continue being reelected, which means they don't want to touch entitlements. They might want to talk about it at the Chamber of Commerce meetings, but they don't want to actually do it, except for a few sort of deficit hawkish, nerdy types that love doing the math and et cetera, still think the Tea Party era was all

about the debt deficit, which it never really was. Sager likes to make that point. It's a good one that the Tea Party was sort of more cultural than really a movement to cut the deficit. But all that is to say, I think the defend the police parallel is a really, really apt one. And that's why you just see some real true believers that floated every now and then. But the real seriousness about making those cuts,

they're too cowardly to do it even if they wanted to. And I don't suspect that they actually really want to. And I want to play this clip of Buddy Carter because it's interesting to see how a kind of rank and file House Republican is talking about this. And I also want to play the clip because I love the kind of jerk store insult that he comes up with at the very beginning of this. Let's roll A3. And remember, it took him about a week after the State of the Union to come up with this putdown. So let's roll A3 here. This supposedly State of the Union address that Tuesday night, it was more of a state of confusion address. I mean, Senator Biden wanted to suspend the Social Security, Medicaid and

Medicare, and now he's claiming that Republicans want to end it? No. It's ridiculous. We have always said we want to preserve it. We want to stabilize it. We want to save it. That's what we want to do. Now, he can continue to ignore it if he wants to, but I'm going to tell you, it's got to have attention. We've got to do something about this. We've got to address this situation.

Otherwise, it's not going to be there. And that's why Republicans are trying to do our best to save this program, to preserve it, so that it'll be there for generations to come. It's not a state of union, it's a state of confusion. Yes, and we're going to stabilize, secure, strengthen. He just was whipping everything out. Yeah, but I think the problem for Republicans, tell me if you agree with this, is that if voters hear Republicans say that they want to save Social Security, they want to strengthen Social Security, whatever they want to do with Social Security, they get nervous. Like, I don't think voters want Republicans talking about Social Security, period. No, no, because voters are smart.

They understand that those are euphemisms. They're not dumb. And Republicans, when they talk like that, treat voters as though they are dumb. And just to be clear, I do think like Cori Bush on Defund the Police or whomever else, there are true believers in the Republican conference and in the Senate that absolutely do want to cut these programs. They do want to do that. But the party as a whole, even if they did want to do it as a whole, they want to get reelected more than they want to make those cuts. I'm not saying that it's because they're all, you know, morally upstanding people who want to protect benefits. I think it's because they're cowards who, even if they believed it needed to happen, wouldn't have the political guts to do it. From your lips to God's ears, let's hope. Let's move on to this great interview that John Stossel did that went under the radar with Mike Pompeo, rumored 2024 presidential candidate, former CIA director and secretary of state under President Trump. Fascinating and wide-ranging interview in which he really got pressed on several things, but we wanted to look at a couple.

JFK and Edward Snowden. Let's roll the first clip from that. Why'd you fight to keep the JFK files secret? Because I was trying to keep Americans safe. And by the way, don't paint with too broad a brush. 99.6% of the JFK files are public today. But it was 60 years ago. John, not everything was 60 years ago. I don't want to spend a lot of time walking through this, but suffice it to say the definition of a document covered by this statute that you're referring to, it's a little bit wonky, but suffice it to say if Congress holds a hearing tomorrow on the Kennedy assassination, the documents generated tomorrow will be part of those files. Those would be tomorrow, they'd be 60 seconds old,

not 60 years old. And last thing I'll say is there are things that happened 60 years ago that are still important to keep in the vault. There are lots of things that happened that long ago that still are appropriate not to release. Think of names and addresses and families. And by the way, there's also no value in them. These don't hold the dark secrets that everybody wants to just hold up as the bogeyman. I saw the UFO files too. We've got bigger problems in America, lots of bigger problems. Just because something is kept secret, why not not go to the darkest corners? But it's a lot of fun. I'm happy to go there with you if you'd like. I had a chance to see not all of those documents, but most of them. The news value of them is grossly overrated, and the desire to keep them secret, the motivation,

the rationale for keeping them secret is wholly justified. So yeah, the context of this, of course, Tucker Carlson recently said on his show that he invited Mike Pompeo on to talk about why he had made the decision to not release these documents. And Carlson also said that he spoke with somebody who had direct access to those documents and that that person said, indicated that the CIA itself was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. So that's Carlson's reporting. Carlson said Mike Pompeo, who never turns down an opportunity to come onto his show, declined the opportunity. He did agree to do an interview with John Stossel. Good for John Stossel for pressing him. Should we take Mike Pompeo's word that there's nothing to see here? Ren, you know this better than I do, but what he's talking about, that this 60-year thing is absolute nonsense. If Congress were to hold a hearing

tomorrow, that it would be in the JFK files is sort of hilarious. And I think he almost knew it when he was saying it was funny, which is why he added that second answer, which is that he goes on to say in the interview, potentially there are human sources that are still alive that might be compromised by it. And that, I think, is his real contention, that if there are people who are still alive that might be implicated by potentially releasing the percentage of documents, which is small, but obviously important because they haven't been released despite the timeline, that these confidential human sources might be the problem. And Ryan, you mentioned the Tucker thing, and this is a

great time to bring up a theory I know both you and I are interested in, that a legal scholar, and the name escapes me at the moment, floated, which is that potentially, is Donald Trump Tucker Carlson's source? Who would have access both to Tucker and to those documents? Is it Donald Trump himself that told Tucker Carlson the CIA was involved in this assassination? And then you can, when you sort of fill in that blank, if that's the case, that the remaining JFK files sort of definitively prove that link, Mike Pompeo can say maybe to himself and to the country in a vague way that he still needs to keep Americans safe and that the news value is low, potentially because everybody already knows about the JFK files,

the JFK assassination's relationship to the CIA. So you can sort of see the intellectual gymnastics that might go into rationalization like that. Yeah, and if you go back and look at the syntax of the quote that the person gave to Tucker Carlson, this person that had direct access to these files. He said the quote was something like, it's all fake. It's not the country that we thought it was. And when you think about the different quotes that Carlson reads on air, and you think about how Trump speaks and thinks, you're like, oh, that's funny. That actually might be, Trump might be his source.

I don't know if that, that doesn't necessarily inspire me with more confidence than less. But it does make me want to see the documents. Like, well, okay, what are these? And Pompeo's argument to me isn't serious because there are such things as redactions. If there is an 80-year-old who was undercover in Mexico City in 1960, and when they were 20 years old, then you can redact that name. And they have redacted enormous amounts of the files that they have released so far. And so if that's really what it is, then just go ahead and release it. But let's play the Edward Snowden clip where he presses him on these questions and gets some rather kind of stark answers from Pompeo. Edward Snowden, the man who told the world about the federal government

sweeping top-secret domestic spying program, is on the move. After Snowden fled America, Pompeo said... We've had the traitor Edward Snowden steal that information. He should be brought back from Russia and given due process. And I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence. He should be executed? He's a traitor? Yes.

What the NSA is doing every single day, its ordinary course of business, is violating not only the laws as written, but likely the Constitution. What he told the American people about, courts said, was illegal. Both of those thoughts can be held in one's head at the same time. So what should he have done? You can't steal stuff, John. You can't steal American secrets. It's unacceptable.

Even if your justification is noble, he put my friends at risk. He put your family members or your cousin or your friend who's serving in a submarine fleet somewhere in the world, he put their lives at risk. And he did it by stealing American stuff. And that by definition is unlawful. And he did fleet somewhere in the world, he put their lives at risk, and he did it by stealing American stuff, and that by definition is unlawful, and he did it in a way that he knew put their lives at risk. What's one example that no longer would threaten somebody? How does he threaten somebody? Well, the information that he stole and then provided to the world shared,

I'm trying to figure out how to do it without being the same man that he is, shared patterns of American activity in our naval fleet. This is dangerous, John. That's not noble. That's not sharing something the government's doing that's bad. And it wasn't his mission set. His mission set was to be mischievous and undermine the United States of America. Make no mistake about it. Edward Snowden's intentions were to weaken the United States of America. And he did. What was your reaction to that? So he also in the interview didn't know when Stossel brought up that there was a previous whistleblower. Pompeo said he hadn't heard that another person had attempted to blow the whistle by talking to Republican staffers, by the way, Republican congressional staffers, intelligence staffers, with this

information and had ultimately been punished. That actually a lot of people had been punished in the process of trying to blow the whistle on the NSA's post 9-11 activities. And Pompeo basically said he wasn't familiar with the fact that that had happened. And so if I'm in Edward Snowden's case, do I morally know whether or not he did the right thing? It's hard for me to say. I think there's a real question there. But at the same time, Edward Snowden is clearly a victim of the impossibility that our government created surrounding blowing the whistle on the NSA. And the value, I think it's pretty easy to argue, the value of what he revealed is outweighed, the sort of cost benefit. The benefit of what he revealed is outweighed by the cost.

And we continue, I think, to learn more proving that's the case. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I also think that there's something revealing about his use of America and America's secrets. And it raises the question of what is the definition of America and America's secrets. And it raises the question of what is the definition of America? And for Pompeo, clearly what he means by America is the American government, like that the American government has sole custody of all of these secrets. Whereas I think most people would think of America as we the people, that there is a collective ownership of these things and that the people have a right to this information.

Now, the government has a right to try to keep important secrets and it ought to do that to keep people safe. If it fails at doing that, it has remedies. It can fire those people. It cannot hire those people in the future. It can take away their security clearances. But everyone in this country has a First Amendment right to speech. Whether you work for the government or not, you have a First Amendment right to speech. And all of us as Americans have a right to know whether or not our government is

breaking laws. And I think your point is a great one that, okay, let's say that Edward Snowden had tried that route. Oh, we don't have to say because we know that people have tried it in the past and they haven't gone anywhere. So you can't set up a situation where nobody can kind of blow the whistle legally and then also say, well, that's your only avenue. Oh, it doesn't work? Too bad. Whoops. Yep. No, exactly.

And just as we wrap up, I want to make a final comment. I think it's great that a former CIA director is actually running for president because that means he will be peppered with a lot of questions. Good for John Stossel for asking those questions. And I look forward to hearing more people question Mike Pompeo on these issues. And coincidentally, the last CIA director to serve as president is thought to have possibly been involved with the very conspiracy. Don't worry about it. Pompeo does not want more documents to be released upon. So, yeah, another CIA director.

I can't imagine him. And last question for you. I can't imagine him as a credible Republican candidate. But what do I know? Could he be? You know, I think he's good on a huge issue, good from the perspective of a Republican voter on a huge issue for them, which is China. So that is a top priority for the average Republican voter.

And Pompeo probably checks a lot of boxes on that note. Nikki Haley is obviously announcing her run for president today. Someone who I don't think checks a lot of boxes on China and the economy and national security in the same way Pompeo might. But two almost similar candidates in a way, kind of hawkish pre-Trump figures. So it'll be interesting to watch the race evolve. All right, well, moving to China and India, if we can put up this C1 here. So the Indian authorities have now raided the offices of the BBC in India in retaliation for the Modi documentary that we've talked about here. We previously talked about this documentary in the context of Twitter and YouTube both agreeing to take it down after demands made by the Indian

government that they do so. This is a documentary that looks into Prime Minister Modi's role in a brutal massacre back in, I believe it was 2002. It's a two-part documentary and has been called propaganda and basically banned to be viewed in India. Some students tried to view it. Some were detained by police. Others at other universities tried to view it were pelted with stones. It's becoming not just a cultural moment in India, but also a free speech touchstone in the country, but also relates to free speech debates here in the United States, because Elon Musk did finally comment on Twitter's decision to comply with India's request to block any sharing of the BBC documentary. And he said, look, his comment was basically, look, I'm running three companies.

I don't have time to fix every problem that's going on with Twitter all over the world. What do you people want from me? And that was several weeks ago. It is still being banned. Twitter's offices actually were raided before Elon Musk purchased the company by Indian authorities because the pre-Musk Twitter was actually pretty aggressive in rejecting a lot of these demands from the Modi government, which led to a raid of their offices. So what was your reaction when you saw that Indian stormtroopers are moving in to a media organization's office?

Well, yeah. And according to CNN, these were tax authorities that were raiding the office and not letting employees in. And the first thing I thought about actually was a CNN headline that asked this week, I mean, this is headlines that are happening concurrently, is the iPhones made in India era about to begin? Look at that. And so again, you have a situation very similar to what was happening in China in some very important ways, which is that companies like Apple are about to entangle themselves very, very deeply in another country where leadership, I'm not talking about the people, but while people in the government share a different set of values about what that government should look like and how that government should function and what the relationship between the people and the government should look like. So, for instance, in that article, you have a top minister in India saying that Apple wants to go from making 5% to 7% of its products in India to 25% of its products in India. This is a huge jump.

Foxconn wants to start doing more business in India. Obviously, that's a huge iPhone manufacturer that has done most of its operations in China for a very long time, had huge problems. We covered that here extensively just a couple of months ago when it came to workers upset about the zero COVID policy. Tim Cook has recently said that India is hugely exciting. That's his direct quote. And there's also an interesting point in the CNN article, which talks about how Samsung ended up already moving, shifting a lot of its operations, it's a lot of its manufacturing from China to India because of rising wages in China, the rising cost of labor in China, meaning here are some poor people we can exploit in another country to keep costs low for us. And so this dynamic is now emerging when it comes to India. The Wall Street Journal,

this is our last element, is reporting that more and more CEOs are about to make trips back to China or already have. We're talking Volkswagen, Mercedes. We're talking about Albert Bourla of Pfizer and Tim Cook of Apple flirting once again over in China with their benefactors in the Chinese business community and Chinese government to the extent that those are separate. But this is going to pose a really difficult, I think, question for Apple and to see Tim Cook in particular, just diving right back into the deep end in a way that so reminds me almost eerily of the early days of our sort of China merger. There seems to be the same naivete.

I don't know. It's not naivete. It's cynicism, I guess, Ryan. Right. And you see the same process unfold continuously. The factories start in kind of the north of the United States as they unionize and costs grow there. Labor costs grow there.

They move down to the south where they have fewer unions. As those factories start to unionize, they move from there to Mexico and elsewhere in Central America. Then when those costs get too expensive, then they move over to China. Now that it's getting expensive in China,

they're moving from there over to Southeast Asia and over to India too. And I'm curious if you take that Indian number seriously, you know, we have to take the source with a grain of salt. This is an Indian minister who has an incentive to kind of pump up how much business Apple is gonna be doing in there. The 95% of the manufacturing that gets done in China

is done because the Chinese government subsidized the development of these factories over the last 20 to 30 years to a significant degree. So how quickly do we think that this could actually happen in India? Or is this something of a bluff that Tim Apple, my favorite name for that guy that Tim Apple would be using against China to try to just say, look, look, we do have leverage against you because, look, India, they're desperate for us and we're investing heavily over there. Well, a couple of things. That's a great question, because on that point, one, if it's getting I mean, this is all about the bottom line for them. There's no sort of moral argument for China in the way that they were making, you know, around WTO.

I think, you know, they've really basically just given up on that. So at this point, it's all about the bottom line. And if there are lower wage costs in India, then I think that's extremely tempting, especially if they start getting showered with subsidies. And on top of that, if India is taking backseat to the sort of geopolitical tensions with China, especially over Taiwan, that we have this sort of military conflict getting increasing or potential military conflict getting increasingly, increasingly hot, then they have supply chain concerns that come along with another question about the bottom line. And so the financial risks of continuing to do business in China versus what they might see as a lack of financial risks in India, I think that would be enough it is cynical, again, to make this bet on India, when, to your point, Ryan, we're seeing tax authorities raid a media outlet over apparently a documentary. You can see in similar ways how our idea of liberal democracy or classical

liberalism is, again, going to clash in a way that might not necessarily be a rising tide lifting all boats. And the Indian government's response was, look, if the BBC hasn't done anything wrong, they don't have to worry about these inspections by these financial authorities. It also reminded me of prohibition. If you remember who was doing the bashing in the doors of all the saloons and all the bootleggers, those were Treasury Department officials. So, you know, it's certainly ESG, the kind of protests against ESG done by Texas and Florida. They crunched a bunch of their numbers. Essentially, what they found is that Florida and Texas, by refusing to work with major banks that embrace kind of ESG standards now have much less demand

for their bond floats. And as a result, they're paying somewhere between, you know, 35 and 55 basis points higher, which in the case of Texas accounted accounted for about $500-plus million, and probably something similar for Florida, given the roughly equal size of their economy. So in other words, to borrow the exact same amount of money, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars more so that they don't have to work with these companies that they consider to be politically incorrect. The whole thing to me, just hilarious.

Christina what's her name, Pushaw, the Ron DeSantis spokesperson, she actually liked one of the responses to my tweet up there that said, look, it's just 35 basis points is a fair price to pay to not have to deal with these woke banks. And she liked that. So we're in this weird place where there's an acknowledgement that, okay, this actually is costing the taxpayers of Florida more money, but from their perspective, it's worth it. And that the fiduciary responsibility to get the lowest interest rate on the loans is outweighed by the political necessity to push back against the trend of ESG. What do you think? Is the price worth it?

I'm so glad we're talking about this article because I have a completely different perspective on it than you do. I thought it was just dripping with this classist condescension for— Oh, it was. I don't disagree with that. Oh, it was amazing. Yeah, these like red state cultural conservatives who don't know what's in their own interests. They're too dumb to vote based on what's actually in their interests. You heard over and over again. But in a sense, I think the tweet that Christina Pichard liked, you would probably find a whole lot of Floridians, whether they are middle class, upper class, agreeing with that. I don't know about the low income bracket. I think that's probably a very different question. But I think

you would get a lot of Floridians saying, hell yes, it's the same sentiments you find with two other areas. One, reshoring, and second of all, tariffs. The sort of corporate press was sitting in their air conditioning studios talking about how the soy tariffs, for instance, were just crushing soybean farmers in the Midwest, the ones that Trump had implemented. And then they would send, you know, some sweaty correspondent out to talk to farmers at the state fair and the farmers would all be like, hell yeah, we support the tariffs. It needs to happen. And you get a similar sort of sentiment from a lot of people when it comes to reshoring. There are mixed attitudes about that in the country. But hey, for instance, if it costs a little bit more to bring jobs back here to make things in America, would you prefer that?

You get a lot of people saying yes. And it's just like the article, for instance, in Bloomberg cites that Larry Fink himself has said that ESG is a good thing, as though that's supposed to be the persuasive argument. No, if you go tell Floridians, if you explain to them the bullshit that BlackRock is pulling around the country and say, yeah, you're going to pay a little bit extra in taxes because we don't want Florida to be entangled with financially, complicit with what BlackRock is doing, man, I think you would get a pretty resounding sentiment. I think you've got to respect Republicans for wielding power here. If they really believe that this is a mission that is important to them and they're willing to then admit that they're going to spend more money financing their debt in order to push back against it, you do have to credit them. And I appreciated Christina acknowledging that that is what was going on, because there would be a tendency to say,

ah, you know, there's other reasons that you're paying more for your financing, although Bloomberg's analysis is pretty rock solid. And I agree with you. I think that on this sense, I think that from the left, I think people would say like, yes, if it helps do something about runaway climate change, then we would be willing to pay a little bit more. If it brings manufacturing back to the United States, we'd be willing to pay a little bit more. If it supports unionized labor, we'd be willing to pay a little bit more. And, you know, if it supports a higher wage, because you often see people say, well, if you pay, you know, $15 an hour wage, then, you know, your Happy Meal is going to cost another 15 cents. And a lot of liberals

say, fine, I would rather pay that 15 cents and have, you know, a living wage. Well, 15 isn't a living wage anymore in a lot of areas. But the point is the same. So what's nice about it from my perspective is that it has moved us out of the free market dogma. Now we're debating how as a democratic society we ought to be moving resources around. And I think that's what we ought to do, rather than just pretending that we're all just going to be hands-off and, you know, wherever the chips fall is the fairest way for it to shake out. No, you're really right about that. And that's an important point that it actually is, I think, both a political benefit and obviously a moral one for politicians like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott to be honest that this is a cost, that this is a hidden tax, to borrow the exact phrase from the Bloomberg article that said,

I think it's also really important, the climate stuff is a little bit different, but like the S and the G part of that, of ESG, it's really important to acknowledge that in many cases, if not most, it is a corporate PR smokescreen so that they can continue to act like BlackRock does. Chevron has all of the E. They will spend all day talking about the E and how good they are on the E. They will give to charities that support the E, and it's nonsense. It's a way for them to cover their own asses because they're doing very bad things, and they're doing them behind closed doors. So they try to bring good things into public. Might it funnel some money into some

good causes? Sure. But if you look overall at many, many of the people that are benefiting from ESG dollars, there are people that corporations are just using as human shields, as charitable shields to continue doing bad behavior because they, at the end of the day, are corporatists. They are capitalists. They're doing what they think is best for their bottom line, which is to be able to advertise how good they are on ESG. And it allows them to go to cocktail parties with their heads held high without actually doing anything. So, I mean, it's a very, the Bloomberg article was hilarious. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. And we can put that Bloomberg article up, that next element there. But yes, Lee Fong at The Intercept, if you Google his reporting and ESG, you'll find a number of good stories that

he's done. Some of them exposing how private prison companies will score super high on ESG scores. He interviewed one CEO whose lawyers told him, you know, the fact that like your mother was half Asian American means that you can qualify as a minority and then your ESG score will go up X amount because now you can say that it's a minority run like company or something like that. And the CEO himself was like, this is completely absurd. And so to me, there is an enormous amount worth criticizing ESG over. I think that while wokeness is the thing that gets talked about as the kind of crux of this and that sells, I think, a little bit better. I think it's actually the E that is the actual kind of power center where this debate is being held. And if you listen to Republicans sometimes and kind of right-wing Democrats who are critical

of it, they'll often very quickly go to, this is going to hurt us when it comes to energy independence. You're like, ah, okay, this is going to hurt us when it comes to energy independence. You're like, okay, this is about fossil fuels. This is actually a fight over energy and oil and gas rather than what we're cloaking. We're cloaking it in kind of culture war stuff, but it's actually a raw kind of money and power fight over the future of energy in America. That's my guess. How much of it do you think is actually about that and is just disguised as a culture war issue? I think that's a good point. And it's actually an important point to the conversation we were

just having, which is it gives these corporations an off-ramp. They're bolstering the sort of necessary off-ramp that they have when it comes to oil and gas, right? They know that they can't depend on oil and gas forever, so they can divert some of their resources with charitable sort of public relations smoke screens to building up infrastructure that they will later benefit from. It's actually sort of a genius little scheme that they have going on there. And they can, you know, maybe it's beneficial. Maybe you disagree with me in some sense, think that that'll go to a sort of net benefit. But again, these are corporatists.

They're doing it for their bottom line. Well, speaking of bottom lines, let's move to Michigan, which just announced that it was the winner of a $2.5 billion investment from Ford into a new battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, which was basically right smack in the middle of the state. It will create 2,500 direct jobs. The multiplier on that, they said, was something like four. So you're talking about 10,000 jobs supported in the area. Plus, once you get to that, you're talking about building an entire kind of economic engine for an area. I think this is maybe 30, 40 minutes. You might know this area better from Kalamazoo. What makes this entire fight so fascinating is that this was an investment that Ford had been kind of taking around the country to see what would be the best spot to plant it. And it made news because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin withdrew Virginia and said,

we don't want your money, calling it basically a front for the Chinese Communist Party. Crystal Ball reported on this a couple of weeks ago. Let's run a little bit of her monologue on that. Governors go to great lengths in order to attract these types of jobs into their own states. But here, Governor Youngkin has gone in the total opposite direction in what at first blush might seem a surprising move. Here's the Washington Post, quote, efforts by Ford Motor Company to consider locating an electric battery plant in Virginia over concerns that the automaker's partnership with China created a security risk. Quote, we felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America, Youngkin said Wednesday night to reporters after delivering his State of the Commonwealth speech

to the General Assembly. Emily, is there any way to defend Glenn Youngkin here, or is this as bad as it looks? I have a couple possibilities I think might be going on. Emily, is there any way to defend Glenn Youngkin here, or is this as bad as it looks? I have a couple possibilities I think might be going on. One, I don't know that this is true. It's a guess. I do wonder if he knew that it was going to Michigan and then made a statement about withdrawing to look tough on China as people are floating his name as a potential presidential contender. And then what do you think about that? Yeah, we don't want your stupid factory anyway. Get out of here. Exactly. Those grapes look sour. Exactly. I want those. It allows him to, yes, yes, to take a really bold stance. On the other hand, it's tough because I think the type of voter that he wants to appeal to, and Virginia and its rural areas is very, very red, actually probably doesn't want to get completely entangled in a company that is also entangled with China. But I think Crystal and you are raising a really interesting point, which is Glenn Youngkin, Mr. P.E. Barron, Patagonia vest wearing champion of the new rights, champion of

the populist right. I mean, it's always been a very strange conception or a strange caricature of what Glenn Youngkin actually is, because he did talk so, I think, capably about some cultural issues, especially education, when he was on the campaign trail and he won in an upset over Terry McAuliffe. But then that slots him into this position of populist because he checks off some of the cultural boxes that he might not check off when it comes to economic issues

because, again, we're talking about a guy who was a P.E. like magnate, basically. So that's a real tension. He's from Carlyle Group. That's the P.E. firm that he was at, right? Yeah, it is. And I actually remember, it just, it reminds me of what we were talking about in the last segment. I reported this a couple of years back, I think, that Glenn Youngkin had signed a letter when he was at the head of the Carlisle Group diverting funds to BLM. So again, you just see where this tension exists with Glenn Youngkin as sort of a populist champion and Glenn Youngkin as also a business champion. And Carlisle, while Youngkin was there, did enormous amounts of business with China. So I would suspect that his advisors have been telling him, OK, this is a huge vulnerability for you.

And so this might be a way that he thinks he's going to then push back against it. To me, it probably goes way too far because it is brutal for him that it's Ford. And, you know, there are people in Michigan who are like, you're kicking Ford out for for that it's ford and you know there are people in michigan who are like you're kicking ford out for for being a front for the chinese communist party like if we can't have a ford plant then what what plants can we have and also if you're not willing to have any manufacturing you know in your state uh that has a linkage along the supply line with china then you're basically not going to have any manufacturing. Like that's basically what you got.

Yeah, and that also makes me think potentially more about the theory that he sort of, whether or not he actually knew these were going to Michigan, maybe he had a very strong suspicion that they were going to Michigan and used it as an opportunity then to signal on China. Because if he did do a lot of business with China at the Carlyle Group, you'd think he would be friendly enough to take the jobs and then also take the, you know, if he knows this is already a vulnerability for him, he would take the jobs, especially since it's Ford, and then continue to have positive ties with China. It's

sort of a win-win because, again, it's Ford. We're not talking about a Chinese company. But to your point, if you're just going to grandstand over any company with any ties in the manufacturing supply chain to China, it's going to be impossible to have manufacturing jobs in Virginia. Right. There's basically no company that you're going to be able to find that doesn't have some supply connection. Now, obviously, a battery plant is going to be the most. But if you're going to dislodge China from a monopolistic kind of control of that, you're going to have to first build up some capacity. You can't just flick a switch and instantly have a kind of self-sustaining domestic clean energy industry when you've allowed China so far

to basically lock down pretty much a global monopoly on it. So it does mean that, yeah, you basically just can't do anything if you're a governor who doesn't want to be at all involved with China. It also reminded me, a lot of populists over hundreds of years have said the thing we need are term limits. And I get that because it's like this is how you get back at those career politicians. But guess what? Because Virginia has a single term limit on its governorship, as soon as that person gets there, they're no longer thinking about Virginia voters. They're thinking about where they're headed next. And so he's thinking more about Republican primary presidential voters probably than he is Virginia voters because he doesn't have to face them for reelection. And so folks out in southwest Virginia all of a sudden have no power over him or have no sway.

All right, Emily, what's your point today? All right, well, I want to talk about a cost of thriving index, a really interesting project that was released on Monday or Tuesday by American Compass, a right of center think tank that sort of seeks to shake off the old Republican economic orthodoxy, the sort of free market dogmatism and propose some ideas that would actually help working class Americans, even if they make the Republican Party kind of uncomfortable. They do a lot of really great work. And I think the cost of thriving index is one example of that and well worth talking about. So instead of relying on simple inflation calculations to try to measure what has changed between earlier decades of the 20th century and now, one of those things that's been hard for people to kind of put their finger on, instead of just using that simple inflation metric, they came up with this cost of thriving index, which takes a ratio of nominal costs to nominal wages. And so the cost of thriving index uses a ratio of nominal costs to nominal wages instead of just relying on simple inflation. So you can see that the index then has gone up just an incredible amount since 1985 to 2022. You have about $18,000 and then a median weekly income of $443. That's for your 24-year-old full-time worker versus your annual expenses of $75,000 in 2022, along with a weekly income of about $1,200 in 2022. So you can

compare that to 1985 and look at the ratio. And the ratio is fascinating to see how that has exploded. And I really like what American Compass puts in the survey that it released, or this report that it released. It says, this quote explains what economists cannot, that with all of these technological innovations and advancements, quote, something important has been lost. So Ryan, I wanted to get your take on this ratio way of finding a metric to figure out kind of something economists have had a hard time putting their finger on. What has changed for the average American, especially for the average American family where you have or you intend to have one kind of breadwinner, typically the man, so that you don't have these insane child care costs, which is also more in line with people's preferences generally in polling, whether you agree with that or not. It's a hard thing that economists have had sort of nailing down. So what do you think about the ratio method?

I think that's the only reasonable way you can do it because I think that's how people experience it on a day-to-day basis. The only other thing I would try to add in is the precarity of the situation. You know, back in the 50s and 60s and even through into the 70s, people had a sense that the life that they were living at that moment was still going to be the life that they were going to be living the next year, the year after, the year after that. And also that life would get better for their kids and for their kids' kids. And so that enabled you to then eat some of the indignities, perhaps, because you were trading it for some sense of economic security going forward. Whereas now, as you're describing, people have fallen much further behind because the costs, particularly

education, healthcare, childcare, like you said, have ballooned and have outpaced wages. Whereas food prices have stayed pretty steady. When I was in college, you were paying the same at Wendy's that you're paying now, 20 years later, but you're absolutely not paying the same for college. You're not paying the same for healthcare. You're not paying the same for housing, et cetera. And so on top of that, if you throw in the fact that you don't have any certainty that what your situation is now is going to be your situation a year from now, and you also have kind of the shredding of a social safety net, then that adds an enormous amount of anxiety to it. Because if you feel like, all right,

there's some more precarity in the job market, but at least I know if I fall, I'm going to be protected, I'm going to be able to bounce back, then you might feel a little more comfortable, and maybe even willing to take some risks. But if you don't feel that, then you're just going to be protected. I'm going to be able to bounce back. Then you might feel a little more comfortable and maybe it was willing to take some risks. But if you don't feel that, then you're just going to have constant anxiety, even if the numbers are matching up for you. Even if you're making ends meet, you're not sure you're going to continue to be able to do that. And as that shows, you're certainly not able to put anything away. And as housing prices, you get out of control, the one access to real wealth creation for middle as housing prices, you get out of control, the one access to real wealth creation for middle class people, which is people would buy a house when they're 25

years old and be in good shape 30 years later as a result. And so, Emily, my question to you would be, given this reality, what kind of policies and politics is the right willing to embrace to kind of do something about this, to do something about these runaway costs? Well, that's why I wanted to talk about this particular index, because one of the things that the right debates sort of within itself is whether or not wages have actually stagnated. And a lot of the problem is if you're just looking at the CPI versus wages, it's just hard to put your finger on that. And so moving to this ratio formula is one of those things that can help put in very stark perspective to this sort of bespectacled, well-paid expert class in Washington, D.C., what the average American is experiencing and why there's malaise. Here are the numbers

that can actually sort of put this into perspective as opposed to having these debates about CPI, which is not, to the point you just outlined, going to be the most helpful because you have this mismatch where prices for TVs have plummeted. I mean, it's insane how low TV prices have gone and other electronic goods and sort of things like that versus the skyrocketing prices of health care and education. So relying on something that looks more like a ratio than that just basic calculation, I think, is one of those things that hopefully can help start the process of settling that debate on the right. Because if you still don't get it, you need to, because your policy prescriptions will be way off if you don't. Yeah, I think it's important that our politics really start to measure these things, because there's that old saying, you can't fix what you don't measure, and the things that you measure,

those are the things you're able to fix. And the more you keep things kind of out of the political conversation, you make them apolitical, then they just soar. And so that's why I'm so grateful to Bernie Sanders in 2015 for kind of bringing the cost of college into the political conversation because it wasn't really a political question before that. In other words, it wasn't something that was contested in the political arena. It was just something that people said, well, that's unfortunate. I guess we better maybe do a few tax credits here or there for middle-class people to help them afford these

$60,000 a year costs for colleges. Out-of-state public colleges costing $50,000, $60,000. And it was Sanders coming in saying, no, this, this is a political question. This is a decision that we may need to make democratically. And so at least, at least it's on the table part of the conversation and the same, uh, for, for healthcare. I feel like we're not quite there yet with housing, uh, that, uh, that it's something that gets talked about in the press all the time, but it's not really something that you see a lot of politicians proposing things that might actually get done. Build Back Better had several hundred billion dollars going toward housing policy, but when it got stripped down to becoming the

Inflation Reduction Act, it was the first thing that know, gone out of here. Yet it is so central to what is making life so difficult for, you know, 90% of people in this country. It's one of those things that, like, even the people in the top 20%, you know, are like, are just getting killed by it. No, you're right. And one thing that worries me, and maybe that's why there aren't a lot of solutions proposed, because one of the things that worries me is you hit an impasse here. When you look at, for instance, the relationship between subsidies of education and health care and the costs of both of those industries. Now, nobody's saying that has to be the case, but historically in the United States, we've seen, for instance, subsidies

increase the cost of education. We've seen subsidies in some ways increase the cost of healthcare. And so if we do the same thing with housing, not all of these proposals involve subsidies to be sure. But that's another thing that like you and I might disagree in some cases on whether the subsidies are responsible for the hikes. And that makes it hard for policymakers to come to an agreement on, or at least an agreement that isn't like cronyism, like we've seen in the healthcare space specifically. So if I was to do something that might put a dent in your optimism, that's what I would say.

Well, there you go. So I was listening. I was only looking down because I just got a call from say. Well, there you go. So I was listening. I was only looking down because I just got a call from our next guest, Matthew Weaver. We're going to check to see if he's ready. He is a union railroader in Ohio. He's the elected legislative director for the Ohio Brotherhood up there, the BMWED. And he's also a member of the rank and file Railroad Workers United, which is a caucus that we've talked about here before. And so we're going to get Matthew Weaver on here to talk about the chemical disaster in East Palestine

in a moment. All right, to talk about the ongoing disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, we're joined now by Matthew Weaver, who is a 28-year railroader, member of the BMW ED. He's also the elected legislative director in Ohio for the union. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us.

Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to join you. I appreciate it. Yeah, you got it. And so, you know, one of the things that I've seen being discussed in political circles in relation to this disaster, I've seen a lot of people saying, look, this doesn't actually have anything to do with PSR, with precision scheduled railroading. So you guys are out there just trying to shoehorn everything in to this issue that we've talked about a lot on this show, but it doesn't fit. The facts of the case just don't line up. It has nothing to do with why there was this disaster. I wanted to get it from your perspective as a railroader. What do you think were some of

the kind of general structural causes that led to a situation where something like this could happen? Well, it would be false for me to speculate on the real cause until the NTSB report comes out, but I can tell you from discussing with machinists and car shop workers that the inspections have been rushed. It used to be two guys working four to five minutes per car to inspect a car for departure. Now it's one guy, 90 seconds or less. So that's time involved in inspecting those axles, those journals, those bearings, and all other components of the railcar. Now, on the side of government, that's another big question. There's been a lot of sort of back and forth within Ohio about who might bear responsibility

for lax standards, and then the fallout is another question entirely. What can you tell us about the government's sort of oversight of the railways in Ohio and how that could have potentially related to what we're seeing unfold in East Palestine? Well, I can discuss, you know, many articles that we've seen about railroad lobbyists, campaign finance, watching big money in this industry skirt, try to skirt laws, limit laws, delay enforcement. And that's kind of the problem. The braking systems are Civil War era. You know, this is an old industry, but there are some improvements that can be made to avoid things like this.

Let's talk a little bit about that because it seems like there are kind of two ways that you could, kind of from an industry perspective, go about making it less likely that this is going to happen. One would be the one that you alluded to, which is allow mechanics who are inspecting the trains more time so that they can actually inspect it. Because there's been some reporting that this had something to do with a busted axle. If you're underneath the train, you only have 90 seconds, you might not have enough time to spot the problem that is going to lead to an axle breaking. The second is the other thing you alluded to, better braking systems to basically modernize this post-Civil War technology that we've been relying on.

So what would it take to get us to a place where they're actually implementing these braking systems on trains that are carrying these hazardous materials? It would take an investment in the infrastructure. I mean, electronic braking, they have the technology out there. They did improve tankers. The problem is, is that would upset the shareholders. In an industry with skyrocketing profits, profit margins that are, you know,

they're screaming to work for a 55% operating ratio when you're talking food industry working at 90, you know, 90%. So it's all about profit over people. And we depend on the regulators to regulate and ensure safety. And that's where I believe we're going to find a failure here. You know, there were a lot of comparisons I'm sure you've seen of people saying, why does small town Ohio look like Chernobyl in the past week or two? And I want to ask a question that maybe the answer we don't really want to know because it's frightening. But from your perspective as somebody with a lot of insight into this, just across the board, what other kinds of safety issues that are not being sort of adequately

attended to either on the corporate side or on the government side exist in your mind? Are there potential crises looming that sort of, again, as somebody with insight into this, keep you up at night knowing the lapsed standards are out there? Well, I mean, from my perspective, from the maintenance of weight perspective, I think it's deferred maintenance. You know, you don't, you put a bandaid on a broken leg. We don't fix things till they break. Preventative maintenance often seems to be lacking because they even call us maintenance in the way instead of maintenance of way. It's, but this, this is not, this is mechanical as far as I know, and it sounds like a hot bearing, hot journal, a hot box detector caught, but it was too late. I get the impression that this ran for 20 miles without those conditions.

So perhaps we need more detectors. We need to address these issues. Right, and you've been, as you said, a railroader for 28 years now. How have you seen the industry change in that amount of time? In other words, what were inspections looking like before? What was maintenance looking like before? We've lost 30% of our manpower of rail labor in the last eight, nine years. They're just not, the numbers aren't there.

The manpower is not there to do the work. There's something going on with having conductors inspect the cars or inspect the connections with the hoses. I don't know all the details on that. And much of this is mechanical rather than engineering. And I work for the engineering department. And since we're talking to a national and international audience, I want to ask just a pretty basic question. Is there anything you wish people understood about the industry that as it's come into the sort of front of our political discourse, our discourse in general with the strike last year, and now again with this insane story out of Ohio,

is there anything you wish people understood or you think maybe they misunderstand about the industry? I believe that the public doesn't understand how powerful the industry is, how the subsidies the railroads got for building across the country, you know, and the power they have. You know, I testified for the Ohio House Transportation Committee about crossing safety and two-man crew, and there were seven lobbyists in the back of the room listening in on what I was having to say. It's a very powerful industry. I was actually just going to ask you about that because as the legislative director for your union in Ohio, what is it like when you go to the state capitol? I mean, what are you up against there and how hard is it for you

to get a hearing in the halls of power in Ohio? It seems very difficult. We've been trying for multiple years to get a crossing safety bill in that simply adds and other on-track equipment to the laws so that the public acknowledges that we have track equipment, we have inspectors' trucks, there's more than just trains on the tracks. And we've failed at that in Ohio. I believe 31 states have a crossing safety bill for that purpose, but not Ohio. So it's very difficult because the money the railroads have is tremendous. And as you say, you can't just fix things when they're broken.

Right. Right. And we had had Devin Mance, a railroader from North Dakota on earlier, and he was mentioning one of his, he also does maintenance away, and one of the things he does, he's driving basically a big pickup truck over the tracks looking for looking for flaws kind of making sure that things are are running so the train can move over smoothly so is that the kind of crossing that you mean that you're that you're trying to make sure that as a as a pickup truck is

driving along the tracks that you're not going to get slammed uh by a big rig coming in the other direction yes um often our trucks our on-track equipment, does not foul the main, foul the tracks so the gates don't go down. I was putting a crane or a boom truck on the tracks in Toledo some years ago, and I had to jump up on the high-rail gear up on the bumper because I was almost hit because somebody not paying attention. You know, the gates weren't down. I had the flashers on, but you know, they, it's a dangerous scenario at the crossings and we have had people die in those instances.

Right. And it's a public safety danger too. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. And what, what would be, what's, what do you hear when you talk to lawmakers and say, hey, can you just add this? Like, what is the railroad's pushback? What is the lawmaker's problem with? It seems to me that that should be the bare minimum. And in that circumstance, it is difficult for me to comprehend because it would save the railroads liability as well, because it puts more emphasis on public responsibility to acknowledge that there's more than trains on the tracks. But it seems like the carriers are always pushing back against the unions.

This is a real safety issue. Well, and one last question from me is just in the last week or so, do you sense a different maybe sentiment arising among regulators and maybe even the companies as they reckon with the incredible destruction and the scale of the problem that was caused in Ohio? Do you sense that maybe this is an opening for real change or do you sense maybe more of a cover-up in motion or an attempt to just sort of paper it over, put a giant band-aid on it and keep on moving? I think it's a very good opportunity to stripe while the iron's hot and get media attention. I've had a lot of

interviews. We've talked to a lot of people. Railroad Workers United, railroadworkersunited.org is probably how you got my contact info. And they've had a media committee that's been out in droves and we have to keep the attention. I do know a big issue on bargaining was the attendance policy.

And at least four unions in the last 10 days have gotten sick days at CSX. And that's a promising step forward. And there were no concessions in getting that. Yeah, I think that's important for people to understand, because when you wage a public fight and you raise national attention on an issue, even if you don't win the ultimate victory in the Senate, for instance, sometimes it puts so much pressure that you end up winning anyway. So how did you end up with those sick days through your railroad? Honestly, I give a lot of credit to the new CEO who came from Ford. I met him twice on the second time I met him.

I told him that I forgot to mention that now that he's the CEO, perhaps he can talk to other CEOs from the Class 1 Railroads and get us sick days. He said, you know, Matt, that's a good idea. I don't believe it'll happen in this round of bargaining, but I'll work on it. And he's leading by example. So you don't see me often giving credit to company officials, but I appreciate that we have paid sick days now. Right, and it's not the kind of thing they're going to do if they're not pressured. Right, right. Correct. Well, Matthew, I really appreciate you joining and be safe out there.

Thank you. And it's not a thing they're going to do without attention. So I appreciate the media attention. You guys are really helping us get the word out there because the public doesn't know. People thought we had sick days and we had zero until last week. Yeah, it's really crucial. It's really crucial. Thanks so much, Matthew. Thanks, you guys. I appreciate the opportunity. Right, so they continue to discover more, or they continue to announce more chemicals that were on that train.

They announced just yesterday. The disaster continues to unfold. They actually published a list of everything that was on that train. I noticed it seemed like half the train was malt liquor. There has not been any reporting yet on what happened to the malt liquor there. I assume that that went up in that outrageous chemical blast that I think you appropriately described as kind of looking like Chernobyl in the middle of Ohio. Emily, do you sense that this is a wake-up call? Pete Buttigieg appeared publicly recently and didn't even mention anything going on in East Palestine. How many disasters are going to happen under Pete Buttigieg's watch at the DOT? I mean, seriously, it's just a never ending supply of disasters from America's

transportation infrastructure under Pete Buttigieg's nose. So, yeah, I don't know if there's any momentum when you look at the fact that that's what our management, it's not just Pete Buttigieg. He's representative of, I think, something much broader, which is this technocratic precision. The precision word is such an important part of this, this like precision technocracy that we've built as a country. And so it doesn't just require a shift, it requires a paradigm shift.

It doesn't just require momentum shift. It requires a paradigm shift. It doesn't just require momentum. It requires momentum to literally change the sort of structure of how we manage these things. And with that, I mean, I guess, I don't know, maybe I would, I imagine you're in the same boat. I'm just, I feel eternally pessimistic because to actually like really shift the paradigm is such a different question. But when I asked Matthew that question about what sort of maybe keeps him up at night, I mean, that's the Chernobyl thing is like, it's really what I mean by that. You know, the fact that all of a sudden you have this Chernobyl-like cloud hovering over small town Ohio, that's exactly like, we only hear about these things when they happen, right? We don't know what's happening.

Nobody can pay attention to the infrastructure, you know, minutia and every given problem every second of the day. And so we don't know what's sort of lurking in the shadows, but we know the infrastructure is failing. So God only knows truly what is to come if we don't get our act together. Right. And it isn't, like you said, only Pete Buttigieg, but it also is Pete Buttigieg. He has responsibility as transportation secretary for this, and he needs to be doing something like this. You're right. He's been dealt a really difficult hand as transportation secretary, but at the same time, crises like that are opportunities to show leadership, and he just has simply decided not to do that. And it's just utterly confounding because if you are as ambitious as he is, if you're eyeing the presidency, it seems like you would take these opportunities to start

cracking some heads, cracking some railroad CEO heads, cracking some airline CEO heads. Instead, it just seems like the McKinsey-ness is just so deeply kind of ingrained that he just can't see his way to that. And it's going to be to his political detriment, I suspect. I don't see how he recovers from this. And, you know, it's not as if Pete Buttigieg's political career is even in the top 10 of the most important things when it comes to these crises. But that is going to be some of the fallout, I think. And, you know, he hasn't really shied away from media, which sort of tells me more about where his motivations really lie. It's not like he's been hiding from the media as these disasters unfold. I think he's happy to go out there and talk about it. And that makes me think that he really wants a job where he can go out there and

talk about things instead of, or in lieu of perhaps really, you know, doing things. You're right. Except this one. He hasn't really had much to say about this one. That's true. That's true. I met with the strikes. All the other ones. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they're like, yeah. except this one, he hasn't really had much to say about this one. But yeah, that's gonna- That's true, that's true. I meant with the strikes. All the other ones, yeah, absolutely. But so that's gonna do it for this episode of CounterPoints.

Emily, thanks for beaming in from Puerto Rico. Very much appreciate that. This time next week, I will be in Mexico preparing to watch a couple of days of Phish concerts. I will not be joining you from there. We'll get somebody else in the desk for you. Maybe people can suggest who they want in the comments section. I don't think we've roped anybody into it yet.

But I will be thinking of you guys. I promise. We'll be thinking of you guys. Uh, I promise. We'll be, we'll be thinking of you. Maybe we'll, uh, smoke a J, uh, to be in solidarity with Ryan when he said that at the fish concert. I would, I would, I would appreciate that. Not breaking America. We'll get Sager to do this in your honor. There you go. Excellent. All right. Well, we'll see everybody soon. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line

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