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Thanks!
Brian Kruger
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We've got with us today one of our favorite returning guests, Mr. Robert Greenfield. Robert, great to see you. Today we're going to talk about what's going on in the world. So for our listeners, our readers and our viewers of The Common Bridge, sit back as Robert and I talk about whatever we find comes up. Here we go. Robert, great to see you. (Robert Greenfield: Hey, great to see you Rich.) You've been on the road. You've gone from Australia to Europe and I know you're going to domicile there, but more importantly, you came here to Southeast Michigan and you're hitting all the sights and of course, family, but also the Tiger's game at Comerica Park last night.
Robert Greenfield
What a wonderful moment. I want to tell everybody here that there's nothing like your own hometown. Honestly, I've been downtown Detroit now three times in the last couple of weeks. I did the riverwalk, had lunch there, went past the Detroit Athletic Club, where both of you are members, and last night we got really lucky because last night the Tigers not only won, they beat the division leaders, Minnesota Twins, 6-0. We had a really good pitcher, we had Miguel Cabrera. It was really a beautiful night. I think what people sometimes don't understand is the Midwest cities on these kind of balmy August nights...it's really magic, it's really special. You walk around, the crowd's warm and really it's very fulfilling and hey, winning six to nothing; what can I say?!
Richard Helppie
The Tigers are winning and I looked across the outfield and saw Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions. The Lions, of course, last seized a championship in 1957, since then they've been the same old Lions. What do you think?
Robert Greenfield
Well, I've talked to a lot of people about it. No joking here, Dan Campbell, the head coach, he's a gambler but it's a risk reward situation in the NFL. I think that he's inspired his team for the first time in a long time; the Lions were inspired. They ended the season, obviously, extremely well after starting very poorly. I think the Lions have a chance and I think that their trade, a wonderful all time great, Matthew Stafford, has now turned out to be to their advantage; Stafford got one Super Bowl. Their replacement, Jared Goff is not a bad guy and there's people like Aiden Hutchinson, right here from University of Michigan, and some others. I think that there's a new sense that the Detroit Lions this year are definitely going to make the playoffs. What do you think?
Richard Helppie
Well, I want to believe that, I really would love to see that happen. I think it'd be great for the Lions. My good friend, Rob Wood, is the president of the Lions, I'd like to see him enjoy that success as well. But I have to tell you something, I've seen this movie before. I remember many times completely out of the playoffs, make a run, come and see this team the next year, and then they turn into, as we call it, "the same old Lions." So what I've decided to do this year, I'm going to be an avid fair weather fan. So if they're doing well, I'm going to be watching and I'm going to be on the bandwagon and if they're not, I'm going to say well, same old Lions. [Laughter] So that's how I'm going to process it; an avid fair weather fan, which is a bit of an oxymoron but that's the direction I'm going to go. You've been traveling, now am I correct, did you actually move from Australia to Europe?
Robert Greenfield
So I think this is a good point to talk about post-COVID. The world has dramatically changed and I don't think that anybody knows exactly where it's going. You had your recent trip, you just finished with the Sámi, your background in Finland. I decided that Australia was, in effect, too remote; it was good in some ways to be there during COVID. You and I discussed it last year, the shortages, basically being cut off; maybe we'll talk about that more in a bit, about the COVID and post-COVID times. For me personally, I felt that I wanted to be closer to culture, to European culture. Of course I could have come back to the United States, but my wife was originally born in Hungary and her father is aging so we thought, let's do the right thing and let's go there. Now we've moved; it took a long, hard time - several months - to do that; downsize, go from a tropical, almost semi-tropical thing, now we are winterizing for Hungary. But I'm really looking forward to it. We've done 12 years of one or two months a year and now this is going to be a permanent thing. I think part of it for me is also what is happening in Ukraine, what's happening in some of the turn to the Right, what's happening in terms of immigration; these are all like massive topics. While they are also topics in Australia, Australia is a big continental island, it's not the same thing. It's very acute in the United States, in particular, and in Europe, and I thought, well, for this next phase of my life, I'd like to be close to all that.
Richard Helppie
Those are good things that you're doing and because of your success in business and your passion for culture and passion for giving back, I think it's a great opportunity for you and for Europe. Yes, Australia was very harsh; locking down, militarizing the COVID response. I just recently got back from a trip to Finland and the Lapland and Sámi land areas - fairly far north, 68 parallel plus, almost to the 69th parallel - when I got back to the United States the first thing I noticed, there were still people wearing their COVID masks in the airport. There will be people that wear those for the rest of time, probably. I noticed two things that seem to be in conflict - that no politician ran, or is even talking about, how good of a job they did during COVID, with the possible exception of Ron DeSantis. We're getting this notion like, oh, let's just move on, let's forget about it. It's like, well, wait a minute, where's the apology? Where's the I'm sorry that I wrote an executive order that said you could go down one aisle in a store, but not down the other aisle; there are lessons to be learned here. And I think, given the media climate that we're in, we can't examine them. People say that if you believe one thing, like maybe the lock-downs - which they're showing that there's really been no benefit from that - that makes you on one side of the political spectrum and if you thought schools shouldn't have been closed, that put you on the other side of the spectrum. But I'm hopeful that data can get out at some point.
Robert Greenfield
Rich, I think you hit it, the last sentence was perfect. The data. Let's go to the most critical one - children in schools. I think that the post mortem from the Left should be a big time mea culpa. I really believe that because if you look at everything from mental health, to drugs, to school attendance, getting kids back, [they] lost one, two, three years, that kind of thing, which are going to be very difficult, if ever, for a lot of children to be able to make up. But I think that the post mortem is really number one. I think we should focus on it by topic. I think the number one topic that everybody should focus on in this country is the children. Now, you can argue about isolating nursing homes or something; did it work in New York and New Jersey, probably not. Did it work somewhere else? Maybe, yes. But I think the children, nobody can argue that that has been a major negative on how COVID was handled. I don't know. What do you think?
Richard Helppie
Well, look, I think that it is. I mean, the funerals, weddings, deaths, the events that happened were impacted and people are now starting to think well, was that necessary. But clearly, there never was a case for closing schools. Even today you have Dr. Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten, the head of the largest teachers union, who were staunch advocates of closing schools saying, no, no, no, they never said that schools should be closed. Here in Michigan during the too late, too little governor debate, our current governor said, what, the kids were out of school three months, and like, okay, show me you're out of touch and you're an elitist without saying you're out of touch and an elitist. So we've damaged the kids; we can't get back to examining it because we keep saying what about the next pandemic? I think that surely there will be one, maybe it might be one hundred years from now, maybe two days from now, but we've got to be better prepared, and we've got to reach some kind of consensus. But listen, COVID is one of those overriding matters and I think we're trying to get back to some other items in the news. You mentioned the Ukraine war; tremendous implications. If you recall, at the beginning of the war, it was like, well, how many weeks is it going to take Putin to dominate Ukraine, and now we're into the war a year and a half. NATO has now added Finland and Sweden. You're very well versed in the European continent, what do you make of the Ukraine war? Where is it today and is there any hope of this ending?
Robert Greenfield
Well, first I want to touch on the lighter end, but important, which is how the Europeans feel about it, which I'd also like to hear your thoughts on that. But from my speaking to Europeans, I have a son in Netherlands and a French background and, obviously, now Hungary, and I speak to Europeans a lot - here's my take. My take is the Europeans want to, at this point, ignore it. They do not want to deal with it anymore. They want to go on with their lives and they're perfectly happy to see Germany re-arm itself, which is a big deal. Or they're perfectly happy to see the Americans do the surrogate situation by providing arms and weapons; they don't mind that at all. They've also constructed LNG (liquified natural gas) terminals, so they're not dependent any longer on Russian natural gas. The European economy has adjusted to the Ukraine-Russian war, Russia invasion of Ukraine. That to me is a very unsung, undiscussed story. You hear it a little bit on the BBC every once in a while but that doesn't count either because the Brits are no longer inside Europe, so they're not very trustworthy, they always want to pick at it a little bit. But I really believe that the Ukraine situation now has settled into almost - and this is the tragedy of it - a World War I style trench warfare. If you look at, even the last couple of weeks, you're seeing that the NATO guys and the US military - and even the analysts on TV are all saying - progress is slow, losses are horrific. It's not going to end anytime soon. I don't think...one of the things about the military that I've learned over my lifetime is they don't learn very well. So if you're going to have...the Russian are so entrenched in these places, they've had years in the Donbass and other regions to be able to build fortifications. There's no way that a frontal assault is going to go through that, number one. We've seen a hundred movies on it; it doesn't work. World War II, on the other hand, we saw Germany drop in parachutes; done, over. Well, what does Ukraine not have? An air force. So they're not going to be able to drop in people behind the lines and do anything like that. That's just a simplistic example. What I think is happening now - this is again, a critical moment for Ukraine - is the West is tiring of the enormous amount of expenditure. I happened to be in Grayling a few days ago, up in northern Michigan - it's the lower peninsula but the northern part - they're doing bombing runs, everybody's figured out all their equipment, which Howitzers to use. I think that Ukraine has got a real problem. What do you think?
Richard Helppie
First of all, I defer to your knowledge. I can tell you that during my time in Finland, and I didn't talk to a lot of people, but one hundred percent of the people I spoke with said they're really happy to be in NATO. And there's a saying in Finland that - I won't get this quite right - but the enemy may not always come from the east, because it may have flanked you. So they know that the enemy is to the east on that big border. I asked what do you think if there are US bases coming through Lapland and through Finland and F-35s are here, it's going to change your culture; ultimately there's going to be American troops on the ground there. Also, if you're Vladimir Putin and if you look at the geography there...I was about 40 kilometers from the Russian border - close enough, by the way - I actually asked the fella there, so how close can you get? He goes, you can get about three kilometers but there are signs that say go back, go back, go back. Not reading the language, I thought, that's a journey I wasn't going to do so I didn't do that. But if you look at the geography, very close to Murmansk, huge Russian naval presence, and if I'm Vladimir Putin, and I'm thinking I've got NATO assets within a stone's throw of my huge navy yards and my submarines and such, I'm going to be concerned. It'd be like the Russians or the Chinese setting up in Tijuana and looking at our bases in San Diego (Robert Greenfield: Or Cuba.) or Cuba - who knows if that could happen again. So when I think about this, and I speak with a lot of people and talk to you about the Ukraine war, the decisive event that could end the war could also end the world. If Ukraine, absent nuclear weapons, could mount an offensive and pressure regime change in Moscow, that basically is guaranteeing a nuclear response and when the first one goes, they're all going. Ukraine's capitulation; now you've got subjugated people literally on the border with NATO countries. So I think we're in a tremendous dilemma here and I don't know enough about the Chinese and what they're trying to do in terms of brokering of an end to this.
Robert Greenfield
Well, you put in a lot of things that are [cross talk] there are three parts there. First of all, I think you're absolutely right. Really glad to hear the Finns are responding positively. I'd heard that but I hadn't actually spoken to anyone. And you're absolutely right, Murmansk, all that stuff. Obviously, Putin has lost that entire idea. So he's now got a border that's really close and he's surrounded, north-south, and Ukraine is the sweet spot in the middle. I think Putin and regime change is a serious subject for the West. Again, I'm sorry to say but the Europeans, they just think that Russia is going to muddle along here. Russia has got demographic issues, Russia has got every possible thing. John McCain made the famous saying that it's nothing more than one big gas station and it's true that Russia has got issues. My issue with Putin is - of course, nobody is supportive of Putin in this country at least - if he goes, who is he replaced by? The replacement, generally speaking, most people think will go more rightward. I have written quite a bit on the Russian Empire, the Russian Empire idea, the growth from Peter the Great - so called the Great - all the way up to presidents, and essentially, Russia has never had a democratic government. It's never gone through that. I think there were five or six years of Yeltsin and that was about it as he was drinking his way through his regime. So there's really not any history there. The Russian people, we cannot count on the Russian people to say they've had enough. They will hunker down, they will gut it out and they'll wait for the next guy to come in. So I don't think that there's an easy answer yet. He's mentioned China. China's, of course, very interesting and they're kind of like the wildcard. China obviously wants to extend its influence everywhere in the world and there's no better place than in - well, two places - the Middle East, where they're now the best friends with MBS, the Saudi prince in Saudi Arabia, when he's not doing golf deals, that kind of thing. And then the other place is, obviously, in Russia. So they're trying to sit down anywhere they can. Now my view is, while I'm not a Chinese Communist Party supporter, anybody who can get anyone to sit down...because let's go back to the point; I don't think Ukraine can win this thing. I don't think Russia can win this thing and I don't think the world can afford another X number of years at 50, 100, 200 billion dollars a year and churning up people forever. So somehow, somebody's got to be a broker in this. Now, obviously, China's going to come in as shifted to the Russian side but the US is at the table, too. And I want to say this about the US diplomats, they've handled it pretty well so far. The question is, if China comes in, will Putin be able to use China as a way to extricate himself because, don't forget, the entire eastern end of Russia is totally at risk. Right now the Chinese are in there building new cities; they, literally, are controlling everything out in the far east of Russia. So the the issue for Russia is: our issues are many, the solutions are few. You mentioned the nuclear side. I don't think that Putin wants to go down as the guy who ended the world. I just don't think so. I feel like what he's doing here is he's fine trying to find a way that he can keep everything he's got, get some kind of North Korea/South Korea style ceasefire type of thing, and then he can regroup for another day.
Richard Helppie
Well, I would hope that would be the outcome. But let me tell you, last week, I'm in the cab going from the hotel in Helsinki to the airport and the cabbie, who is from Casa Blanca, had a special program on - it was in English and it was about, in 2056, how the Russians had defeated NATO and the United States and George Bush the third, who was president, was being led through Red Square in handcuffs as was a descendant of Hillary and Bill Clinton, and that they had toppled the US government. They did honor the soldiers that fought, but they were going to try, convict, and execute all the leaders of the United States. That was on the program. I thought, well, that's an interesting view. And then the BBC narration came in, it talked about this is what many of the Russian troops believe that's what they're fighting for, the end game is that the United States is no more. So I'm trying to reconcile Vladimir Putin putting that stuff out, getting people to die for the notion that Russia will run the world with, hey, I'm defeated, I've got to back off. I don't know how he gets from where he's at today to some kind of back-off.
Robert Greenfield
My view is this - and I listen to reports too, with interviews of Russian people, etc. - what you just mentioned there is Fantasy Island. Again, I'll go back to my Grayling example, the United States spends a trillion dollars on military, give or take a hundred billion.
Richard Helppie
Right. I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm just saying this is what they're saying.
Robert Greenfield
I understand what they're putting out but my view of this is everybody out there knows that. The one thing the United States does the best, better than anybody, is military. We have the best technology, we are everywhere. Now China's trying to come up but they are nowhere near close. They may be close to the South China Sea by surrounding Taiwan or something but they're nowhere in the Indian Ocean. They're nowhere in any of these other places. The United States is a - if you really want to talk about a topic - I feel like we are too highly militaristic in this economy; we take too much out of the economy to go into the military. One of the better results - I'm surprised I have to say better results - one of the only positive things besides NATO expansion is that NATO countries are now finally doing the Trump idea; well, maybe not the Trump idea, but the Trump push, for the two and a half percent of GDP going into their defense. That means the United States is not going to carry the burden. I already mentioned, Germany is re-arming, Japan is re-arming so what we're having now is a global arms race. But the US and China are the two key protagonists, not Russia. Russia, as we've seen in Ukraine, is really a second rate military. When you've got guys that had very little training that could not only hold their own but blow up the first forays by the Russians for several months, now they're dug in, that's a different situation. But my view is, just to kind of close my thoughts on this, what we've got in the Ukraine-Russia war is a long term slog, and we're going to have to find a way out of that. Otherwise, all we're doing...we've learned everything we need to know about the Russians and what they can't do, not what they can do. I think what we need to do now is find a way to have some type of ceasefire for everybody's benefit. Zelinsky may be the toughest guy in a green T-shirt in the history of the world but he's not going to win this war. I definitely think he's not. Putin is not going to win this war minus the US military doing its operation, whatever they want to call it, and then flying over everybody and that's not going to happen.
Richard Helppie
This is a place that I'm in agreement with you, that we are too militaristic. I believe the United States has military installations in 95 countries, it harkens back to how the Roman Empire was stretched out; we have stretched our currency so it is worth less and less; that's inflation, same thing that the Romans did. And then to fight a war you need to have economic resources and you have to have patriotism and a shared objective. Look, we just got done with the football/soccer championships, where only three of the US players stood to sing their national anthem. We have lots of people who said, well, that's fine, they get to do that. I wonder, in a future generation...we've taken the Pledge of Allegiance out of the schools, we've changed the definition about what a good citizen is. We don't have enough economic resources because we've de-valued the dollar - no money, no shared purpose - that sounds, to me, like a defeated empire coming up.
Robert Greenfield
Well, that...again, you've thrown a lot of subjects in there...
Richard Helppie
I can't help it. [Laughter]
Robert Greenfield
I think the...I would call it civics. Remember when we were growing up we had a civics class, you learned about what is the government, how does the government function, we did our Pledge of Allegiance, so on and so forth. So we had a very clear idea of who we were as Americans; not that there wasn't prejudice or a lot of other issues but we all had that shared common purpose that you're talking about. I think that what we have on both ends...but I definitely agree with you. Let me give you an example. If Ron DeSantis would stop talking about "woke" and if he started talking about some of the things that you just said, his numbers would go up, because what he does...if you want to upset the other side - sorry to use the word "piss them off" - use those words. Now Donald Trump is excellent at it, Ron DeSantis is not. So you want to start going after something to make a change in the mindset and to try to bring people together you can't just say, I'm going to bring people together. You have to talk about things exactly that you say. Why don't we reintroduce civics? Why don't we reintroduce Pledge of Allegiance? Why don't we have these kinds of ways as opposed to divisive racial politics.
Richard Helppie
Part of it is this, Ron DeSantis does talk about those things and does talk policy wonks and here's what the media complex reports him as, oh, he's not charismatic and they don't talk about what he talks about in policy substance, they want to talk about the culture wars. I think that one of the issues we have in the country is we have people between New York and Washington and on the West Coast, that have well developed elite-ism; they really don't even see it in themselves. But they...again, prototypical would be raised on the East Coast, went to a New York school, went to Washington, work in Washington, got the bug, they're there, they're surrounded by people exchanging conventional wisdom. They don't manufacture anything, they don't grow anything, yet they think they're better. Then you look at the condition of their cities...and now we're going to really be off track because I start to think about immigration.
Robert Greenfield
I think you're right, because I had moved decidedly from the Left towards the middle; I call myself center left now. I think that in particular, Washington and New York, but Washington in particular, if you listen to all the media, the pundits, everybody else, they're all in - I'm going to use a Joy Reid example - which I'm sure you'll be happy with. Joy Reid is on MSNBC. I was watching last week as Trump was indicted in Washington, DC, and she was doing her little personal history on January 6, and she said, well, if nobody knows she's a black woman, she keeps telling everybody she got affirmative action into an IV and that's made her career. So she's really all in, full on. And she was talking about, oh, my gosh, on that day, I was right there. And they said, well, where were you? Oh, about 40 miles away in Virginia and she said, but I was right there and all day long all we could think about was, were they going to smash into the Black History Museum. I'm like, what? The US Capitol was being...and she went on in great detail about the Black History Museum. I'm thinking, are we this off on the topic here, where we're supposed to be about Trump, a conspiracy, yes or no?
Richard Helppie
Let me play off that a little bit, Robert. You mentioned civics; three co-equal branches of government. We've had this constant drumbeat or a drip, drip, don't trust the judiciary, don't trust the Supreme Court. And we've heard it from the president of the United States - the last two Democratic presidents - from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now, of course, our current vice president, [we've] got to discount that because she says crazy things all the time.
Robert Greenfield
We call it inappropriate.
Richard Helppie
Well, it's worth saying...(Robert Greenfield: Inappropriate, laugh.) Yeah. [Laughter] I'm not going to make a joke about whose cocaine it was, not going to do that. [Laughter] But if you think about the undermining of the fundamentals - and I've actually read way too many of these because this is a quote off of an MSNBC legal analyst - it doesn't matter if Alan Bragg's case is any good or not, Donald Trump has to face a Manhattan jury. And then in some of these cases, oh, he's going to have to face a Washington DC jury, and I'd like to remind our viewer, listeners and readers, Mark Sussman was caught red-handed making up a story about a connection between Trump Tower and a bank in Russia - which is technically impossible - planting it with the FBI and he was acquitted by a Washington DC jury. So if we're going to get into this tribalism, is there any reason to think that one side or the other is going to give up and say, you know what, we've got to have one justice system?
Robert Greenfield
Well, that leads me to...first of all, I understand that and I think just yesterday, Amy Koney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts voted with the three liberals on ghost guns so it's not all one side or the other, there is in between. So I think the liberals may have a point at some of the areas that they're talking about. But every time - and we'll talk about affirmative action in a bit - every time one of these comes up, there is a strong case to be made for what I would call a reset. Something that was true maybe 50 years ago, is not necessarily true today, and the way it was applied over the last 50 years increasingly may have not been to anybody's advantage; there's the story of Clarence Thomas, as you know, his life story. But looking at it from the broader context, my view is that all of the jury selection is...it's almost like if you choose a jury in a certain area you're going to get that outcome. It's the same way with judges; you choose a judge, you're going to get a stay of this or you're going to get a block of that. So I think what we've done in this country is...and unfortunately, it goes back to Congress. We all know that with Congress, we've got all these sycophants running around talking about things in Congress. We don't have a Congress that is just center left and center right. We have a Congress that is extremes on the ends. Now Biden managed to get some bipartisan stuff through - infrastructure, CHIPS, a few other things - where everybody said, yeah, we need to do those. But we are too polarized and if you're too polarized at the congressional level, what you end up having is polarized districts, and then you end up having these polarized judges, and you end up having these polarized jury pools, those kinds of things. So I think it goes back - I don't want to go back to be circular here - but I think it needs to go back to where we are talking about basic patriotism, basic civics, basic things about what it is to be an American, and stop the the arguing on both sides. It does not serve us well.
Richard Helppie
Well, the contest is between two entrenched parties. When you get their idea that hey, wait, we're here and we're here forever - Democrats, Republicans - then you've got this media system that feeds off of that and now the media system is getting aligned even further with one or the other. It makes it difficult to get things done. But a better civics education would say, look, political party or no political party, is probably a good idea. We need [inaudible] of revolution that, to me, seems to be our best opportunity.
Robert Greenfield
Let me ask you a question. You're here all the time. All I hear is that Independents are growing, growing, growing, and the parties are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. What do you think?
Richard Helppie
That is absolutely what's happening, but there's no voice for Independents because the noise is for the nutcases and the far extreme and it's a dangerous thing. If you raise a question about whether there's political prosecution or there's weaponization of the justice system, then someone says, well, you must be in the camp of Donald Trump. They can't hold in their heads that Trump was not fit to be president of the United States. He was in there because the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for obstruction, destroying data, she was not prosecuted for having this private server, which, as you know, is very difficult to set up, yet people have got this belief that somehow Bill Clinton happened to meet Loretta Lynch on a tarmac in a private plane. It just didn't happen. Anybody who's ever been on a private plane knows that, but people wanted to believe that. So now you've got the table set and we get a guy like Trump. Trump, I don't think he expected to win, but he sure didn't know how to do the job and it became all about Donald Trump. I think we're in a very dangerous place right now. Think if the Democrats had said, you know what, we screwed up. We nominated Hillary, we shouldn't have done that. Let's figure out how to get a better candidate to the table. Let's win this thing next time around. Now fast forward, we're about 2024, Biden and Trump are running neck and neck - and 70% of the voters don't want Trump and don't want Biden. How do we break through this? Because if the Republicans nominated any of their five or six solid candidates, Joe Biden is going to lose 70-30. If the Democrats came up with anybody reasonable, they beat Trump, I think by even greater margin, but here we are. So my contention is that the Republicans and the Democrats are broken beyond belief, only believing they have to beat the other side, not to do something to serve the people, to your point about the bigger expansion of Independents.
Robert Greenfield
So, again, you're so good at doing these things...my feeling is, we've got to go back to Donald Trump because everything starts with Donald Trump. You can have Hillary and everybody else but Donald Trump is the great disrupter if you want to talk about destruction technology, Donald Trump is...
Richard Helppie
Wait a minute, Donald Trump is a technology...[cross talk, laughter]
Robert Greenfield
Not like a technology...you know when you have a disruptive (Richard Helppie: He's the new internet.) When you have a disrupter, you don't know exactly where it's going to go. You don't know what it's going to wipe out. Brian talked earlier about the print business, nobody knew exactly...he was smart, he figured that one out pretty early, good for him, but a lot of people didn't figure it out. So what I think with Donald Trump is we look at him as the great disrupter, that's fine. The question is, where is Donald Trump? To me, the biggest question is which way is he taking the Republican Party? I've been listening to some very...
Richard Helppie
I know the answer to that. (Robert Greenfield: Go ahead.) Okay, and I can say it like this because it's my show: taking them down the shitter, that's where he's taking them. [Laughter] I know, I know...
Robert Greenfield
You like to talk about data. So I was reading some data today. In Colorado, the lights are out at the Republican Party headquarters. They're paying the bills, but there's no staff. In Michigan, right here, they're in a small one room condo. Why are...and I could give you a lot of...the Democrats in Florida, they're nowhere. What is happening to state parties? You can say, well, Independents, but actually what my understanding is...and you know this because you're a person who was quite successful with your career, that Citizens United made it so that people don't have to stay in the party, they can do their own kind of thing. They can do their own PACs, super PACs, they can run like Michael Bloomberg, throw away a billion dollars and say, I don't want to run after six weeks, whatever they want to do. But the parties were always where the donations came. They always come from where the candidates come. They're not coming from there anymore. People basically do their own thing, raise their own money. The best example I can give you is Kemp in Georgia. Kemp refused to show up to the Republican state party convention, went out and kicked Stacey Abrams bum; I mean, he really won big time. There was no doubt about it. There was no like, oh, my gosh, there might have been some fraud or whatever, it was there and he did it without the help of the state Republican Party. Why? Because they were all election deniers on the side of Trump. So let's go back circular and I want to ask you this question, this to me is really important. Has Donald Trump damaged the Republican Party to the point - especially by carrying on the same way that he's doing and the media throwing it in and making him bigger and bigger - has he damaged the Republican Party at the state level significantly?
Richard Helppie
Absolutely. Trump's running on the Republican ticket. So first of all, he's not a conservative, he has been a Democrat. He's an opportunist going where he thought he could win. Today, though, what has happened is that the media complex says, well, that's what Republicans are. The Republicans that we used to have - the Mitt Romney Republicans, the George Bush, the wing of the party that said, look, we're going to work with the other side, it's going to be strong defense, it's going to be private sector incentives in the economy, it's going to be social safety net, we're going to compete - where is that Republican Party today? They are no place and I do lay that at the feet of Donald Trump. I actually said back in '15, I said the only good thing about Trump being nominated is it will destroy the grip of the Republican establishment. And I said the only good thing about him being elected president - which I didn't think was going to happen - was that it would destroy the establishment of the Democratic Party. I was one hundred percent wrong about that second part because the establishment of the Democratic Party reacted, and instead of saying wait a minute, we just lost to Donald Trump, we've got to do something different, they bring out the most establishment guy with all the baggage - he's no longer at his prime, and that's what we get served up with. And then I would contend with you that this didn't start with Donald Trump at all. Trump, there's a popular...that it was (Robert Greenfield: Tea Party, whatever.) unresponsiveness of government, people feeling that they are no longer represented and you have this false populist in Donald Trump. I think had the chips been played instead of manipulated, you would have had Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as the candidates in 2016. My belief is that Sanders would have beat him because Sanders wouldn't have lost Pennsylvania, and he wouldn't have lost Michigan. So you'd have to say that there was some place that Hillary Clinton won that Trump wouldn't have won had Sanders been [in]. I admire Bernie Sanders, not necessarily for his policies, but the fact he is a populist and he's got the right agenda and he's willing to compromise. But his time has passed. Again, my main point is that it didn't start with Donald Trump. Trump's a symptom, he's not the disease.
Robert Greenfield
I agree with everything you said, obviously, there was the Tea Party and there was a lot of the stuff that happened, including the debt ceiling was all [inaudible] which, by the way, gave us a downgrade, thanks a lot, Fitch. And who were the other guys that also downgraded us?
Richard Helppie
Yesterday. I don't know if it was Moody's or someone else.
Robert Greenfield
I think it was Moody's. So we're down a tick. The issue with Donald Trump is one issue. But when you mentioned Bernie Sanders, does the United States want to have a complete makeover of its society? The answer is the majority says, no, we do not want to have a makeover of society. Does the majority of the United States think that unions now bring benefits? The answer is yes. But why? Because we don't have a national federal minimum wage. I can tell you other countries deal with this without having union issues. What they do is they raise the national minimum wage in tiers according to your skill. A carpenter doesn't make the same thing as the McDonald's kid. That's what they do in Australia, essentially, along with OSHA which can stop abuses and those kinds of things; it eliminated a lot of the need for unions. So what we end up doing is we are working on a paradigm in this country that is outdated. The rest of the world has moved on, you can call it; you can argue about socialist capitalism of Finland or the Scandinavian countries or you can argue about it...some other countries, some people do it better, some people do it worse. But what we're doing is we're doing it the old way. Not only is Joe Biden standing up there and saying unions, which a lot of people say, yeah, good, but what does that mean exactly? You talk about...I'm sorry, I'm getting off message...talk about the teachers. I personally feel that the teachers' unions in the United States - I listen to them all the time and I watch the kinds of things they say; moms are no longer moms, they're birth persons. There's a lot of rubbish that has happened here that is not necessary. Sure, let the left Woke say whatever they want to say but you don't have to adopt that at the teachers' union level. You don't have to start saying, we're not going to call mothers mothers now. Now we have to call them some odd name. Oh, Mommy's not here, birth person is picking you up; come on, this is absurd. Again, on the teachers, would they close down the schools? Who did they close down the schools for? Not for the benefit of the students, they closed it down because they have their own health concerns. Well, I'm sorry, but we need to look at maybe the teachers need to get better health care. Maybe the teachers need to go into exercise class. I know I'm going to be criticized but the bottom line was the teachers' union did not help solve that problem. They double down, double down, double down. So go back to the overall union picture. Yes, it worked with UPS recently, UPS drivers got it. We're a service economy. No, it's not working with UAW right now. The UAW leader is not leading a good negotiating strategy. I talked to UAW guys; she's not doing it. So the problem with the unions is this old kind of strategy of vulcanizing and then somehow cobbling things together. My view is this. If we pay people - and we're moving that way, by the way, the states are moving that way, employers are moving that way because they have to - if we move towards a place where people are making a living wage and they are also protected by federal things such as OSHA and other kinds of things so we don't have abuses, there's going to be less reason for for unions. Now, that's anathema for people on the Left. I know I'll be criticized but I know countries where it works that don't have unions and they have high wages and they have high happiness levels and satisfaction. The Scandinavians are number one.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. Well, just having returned from Finland and talked with a lot of people there - because Fins, we all like to talk a lot - everybody has kind of got the same standard of living. This is the important part; no one resents somebody making an enterprise and doing really, really well. There's a fellow that's done something that's akin to Walmart, and now he's put hotels and everything else around that and everyone in the area is cheering for doing this. In this country, though, we thrive on the polarization. The unions I think, have their place, I think unions have helped improve the lot in the United States, particularly in our region here with the UAW as a key role with that. Later today - it will be actually published before this comes out - I'll be talking with Greg Jbara about the strike in Hollywood and what does labor do in the presence of artificial intelligence. Getting an economy where everybody has a chance, where there is housing, there's food, and there's education, clean water, clean air; that's what all citizens of the world - all Americans, in particular - should be striving for, we should be able to have that. Today we're pricing Americans out of the housing market. I believe, if I have my facts correct, that for a young person to save for a down payment for a starter home in California, it takes 100 years - the numbers just don't work. Here in Ann Arbor, the city has gone into buying properties, or taking and re-purposing their properties to affordable housing levels because they can't compete with the private developers. They've got to find that balance because they can't just have market rents and market prices on buying a residence because people that are working can't afford it.
Robert Greenfield
I think the...we haven't talked about immigration, which is the number one issue, but in that top five has got to be housing in the United States; anywhere in the world but definitely in the United States. You have places that are over-regulated like California, then you have places that are probably under-regulated like Texas. But in response to that, also, sometimes Red states do things that are pretty innovative. I'm very heartened to see on the energy side, as an example, in Texas - you may be aware of this - one third of the energy that has been produced this hot season, which has been a horrific, has been through renewables. What's happened in a lot of places was that the market response, the market actually says, well, we may be doing West Texas crude, and we're still pumping away but these summers are...now we're not talking about about climate change, we are going to react to climate change, and the way they're reacting is through wind and through solar. One third, in Texas, of their energy - I'm going to repeat that again - is not a small thing. So when you are a homeowner, it's not just your mortgage, it's also your energy costs; and energy costs, in particular, not just water, but energy costs. I'm not like big pro-market only, I think that Biden's done some very good things on promoting those kinds of areas but really, at the end of the day, you look at how many dollars you make as a person; your housing costs, your energy costs - and energy includes travel, going back and forth to work, people are back at work. These are the kinds of things I think that people are really concerned about. California has not done it well, let's be honest, they've not done it well. I'm not saying Texas is great, because they got a lot of sprawl but at least Texas, when they're looking at it, they're saying, hey, what can we do here to make sure that our energy system doesn't collapse this year?
Richard Helppie
Again. Yeah (Robert Greenfield: Again.) exactly.
Robert Greenfield
And look how fast they did that.
Richard Helppie
Well, California's issues are solvable if there's political will. I just think if they cut their marginal state income tax in half, people would pivot and go back in there. (Robert Greenfield: 13.3 at the top.) Yeah, indeed. And they're wondering why people are leaving en mass. One of the other issues that we have in the cities - since we're talking about California, I mean, it's not specific to California - is crime. (Robert Greenfield: San Francisco.) Yes, San Francisco is a tragic story for those that have had the privilege of visiting there or doing business there; done both many, many times. (Robert Greenfield: I lived there many years.) You lived there. Okay, so you know (Robert Greenfield: In the city.) what a beautiful, wonderful spot that was, and it is just denigrated to the point where it's dangerous, it's dirty, and I don't hear any political will for coming back from that.
Robert Greenfield
Okay, so I wrote a recent answer on my blog thing that I do: San Francisco is the new Detroit, okay. Needless to say...
Richard Helppie
Hey, hey, hey, [Laughter] Detroit, Detroit's on the way...Detroit doesn't have half the problem. Detroit's on the way up.
Robert Greenfield
Yeah, I got to push back on that one. But I'm trying to draw...
Richard Helppie
By the way Detroit, this is Robert Greenfield, we'll give you his license plate number...I'm just kidding.
Robert Greenfield
Please don't chase me down. I'm trying to draw some focus on the first issue, which is who runs the cities? I think Republicans talk about that. Democrats don't want to talk about that. Detroit was the, is the poster child for the transition leadership, which was black leadership, that was not prepared to run a major city. Over time it ran down as people abandoned, as they moved to the outer suburbs, Oakland (county) in particular was taking a lot of business, the Big Three pulled out of Detroit. So Detroit is...when you look at something and say if you start losing population what's left behind? What's left behind, quite often, is not paying their taxes, they're not highly educated. It's not Ann Arbor, okay. Look at San Francisco, it's a different problem. But my point on it, Detroit may do some good things on the downtown, but they don't have the people. There's not a population base now in Detroit to support even that fantastic downtown that's being built. Somehow Detroit's going to have to use immigration or something, make whole new Guatemala City or something, that kind of thing. Detroit's got to repopulate or it cannot survive as even a midsize city. San Francisco has a stupid problem and they have a stupid mayor, I'm sorry to say, London Breed. I've watched her on TV. I've seen all the specials. Basically, her answer is - when they say what can you do about fixing San Francisco? - her answer is, I was born here and I went to school here. Okay, that's good, now, what's your plan B? What's happened in San Francisco is they made Willie Brown - friend of Kamala Harris, as you know - Willie Brown became the mayor, of all things, of San Francisco and he essentially made deals. He looked at Silicon Valley and coveted all those companies, got them to come there - Salesforce, everybody else, Autodesk everybody else. They all built big. They drove out all the middle class people, you got a bunch of millennials in there making 200, 300, 400 thousand dollars a year, things were kind of going okay, homeless was building up, there was plenty of money, though, to throw at the homeless. I don't know if you know what they spent last year in 2022. San Francisco spent - this is their number - $90,000 per homeless person (Richard Helppie: Oh, boy.) and they're still homeless so nothing is working right in San Francisco. Then comes the tech fallout and COVID. Nobody wants to go back to the office. A lot of those people moved to Texas. They're hanging out in Austin going to those nice concerts or they may move anywhere in the country to be able to do that. They're having a hard time to get talent to come back to the office so they're losing tax base, they're losing the CBD, Union Square has 33% vacancy rate. You've got horrible stories where people have little shops and then there's people defecating outside, they've got the tents everywhere, they got the shoot up thing in the tenderloin. Everything that you could possibly do wrong is being done in San Francisco. I think it comes back to, in my view, leadership because San Francisco is not Detroit, they had all the money. It's not like somebody abandoned them and ran off to Oakland County. They have the money, they have a beautiful place, everybody wants to go visit San Francisco but they managed to push it into a very dire situation and they're not changing.
Richard Helppie
Well, this is the thing that's astonishing to me, you mentioned the defecation in the streets and I remember when that started there was not a lick of concern on the political left which dominates that region of the country. The response - and I kid you not - was an app where you could report piles of poop so that the city would come out and clean it; that was the actual policy response. Talking about retailers leaving Union Square; well guess what, when you don't prosecute shoplifters and somebody can come in and take hundreds of dollars of your merchandise, you're not going to stay there. It's common sense. Now in recent days, I've been reading about San Diego saying we've got open beds for homelessness, we're ending this camping in our town, you can't camp here. You have to go into a shelter, you have to go into one of the other programs or you have to leave town and they're going to clean it up block by block. We have to be compassionate but also people that are out on that street, their rights cannot supersede the rights of other people. If we accept that Americans should have the right to walk down the street without stepping in human poop, allowing someone to put that out there is an infringement on those rights.
Brian Kruger
With that, we're going to wrap up part one of what's going to be a three part series of Rich's conversation with Robert Greenfield. We love having Robert Greenfield and he always drops into the studio in Ann Arbor, depending on where he is around the world. We love having him on. This is the end of part one, join us next week on episode 222 for part two of Rich's conversation with Robert Greenfield.
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