September 4, 2025 • 38 mins
A chaotic hearing on Capitol Hill with RFK Jr as both Democrats and Republicans went after him. It is coming down to vaccines and who do you trust for your health information. We shot a drug boat out of the water putting the cartel in Venezuela on notice. The NFL starts tonight. Big jobs report tomorrow.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tom-sullivan-show--6632619/support.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tom-sullivan-show--6632619/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And Hi, how are you welcome? Welcome, walk and all
do the Big podcast. It is Thursday. Today is the
fourth day of September, year of Our Lord twenty twenty five.
My name is Tom Sullivan. And hell, it was not
your normal political food fight in the capital today. RFK
(00:47):
Junior was there and he went before. It was the
Senate Finance Committee, but they wanted to talk to him
about everything going on at Health and Human Services for
which he's in charge. And this is this is I
told you the other day.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
This is.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's very confusing because you've got people doctors, a lot
of doctors that is, they're saying that that what Kennedy
is doing is just dangerous to the health of Americans.
He doesn't know what he's doing. He's a conspiracy kook.
(01:28):
He's not a doctor. And so you got all these
doctors that are saying we know what to do and
he doesn't. And then you've got RFK Jr. That comes
out and says, no, the people that have been in
charge of the health system in our country have politicized
it and have lied to the American people. So you
(01:50):
go back. CDC in vaccines were really kind of the
focus of all of this today. Think about when the
pandemic hit, I mean before the pandemic hit. Had you
ever I think I may have heard of the CDC
because they had kind of a weird name, but I
never interacted in any way with them. They weren't in
the news. But once the pandemic came along, all of
(02:14):
a sudden, the CDC was everything. And they came out
with a COVID test early on, I mean very early,
and they spent these COVID test kits around all over
the country, lots of I don't know how much they spent,
and a couple of weeks into it, they went, oh,
(02:34):
never mind, they don't work. So they got off to
a bad start. And then they told us lots of
things that turned out not to be true. And I
still to this day, I will tell you, I look
at the COVID illness, the COVID virus. They're still out there.
There are still people getting COVID. There's still a number
(02:57):
of people suffering from long COVID. But I think the
doctors are working diligently trying to figure out how this
virus works and how to put it away. But it
hasn't gone away. And I don't think they really know
what to do. Now they've come up with some things
(03:19):
like pax slovid, So if you do come down with COVID,
you take pax slovaed and it reduces the danger of
it killing you. And there's lots of things that will
help if you get COVID. But I still think that
they are still in the woods trying to figure out
(03:42):
exactly how this thing works. And then the question comes
down to the vaccines. Do you get an annual vaccine
like you're supposed to, They recommend a flu shot. Then
you've got the schools where I mean when I was
a child, I remember my mother had to bring my
shot record over before they, you know, the start of
(04:04):
school this time of the year, the kids all have
to show their shot records or they won't be allowed
in school because they don't want a bunch of kids
in there that can have measles or whatever it might be.
So it's a lot and the bottom line out of
though you'll hear it was it was embarrassing. And this
(04:25):
goes back to my attitude about our government. This this
would not happen in a well run private sector company.
They act like babies. They act like uneducated children. They
squabble out each other. It was a food fight. These
(04:46):
are senators versus this Secretary of Health and Human Services,
and I don't know which side you believe, but it
really has come down to the point where I don't
know who to believe. I want to believe doctor, but then,
like I said, CDC has given us a bunch of
a bunch of false information in the past, so how
(05:08):
do you believe them? And then RFK just came in
and fired all the people on the vaccine Committee and
hired a bunch of new people. And the person that's
supposed to run the CDC was this woman doctor who
was went through hired a month ago, and then they
(05:31):
fired her three weeks later. I'm going, that doesn't look
like a manager knows what he or she is doing.
In this case, what the what rfk's doing. Why would
you fire somebody three weeks after you hire them. I
don't put it on the employee, I put it on
the manager. They should be a better manager. They shouldn't
(05:52):
have hired her in the first place. If they if
she if they didn't like her, they should have decided
they should have asked her the questions three weeks ago
that they asked lately, and because of the wrong answers,
they said, you're out of here. So they're just it's
who do you believe? RFK. I'm sorry. I think the
guy's weird and he's got a bunch of four years
(06:16):
conspiracy stuff, I mean, like kookie stuff. So who do
you believe? Do you believe him, or do you believe
the doctors? Or in today, do you believe the senators.
There's nobody that I put my faith and trust in.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
So let's start. I'll play a little bit of this
for you.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It was just a mess. Here you go.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
No, I did not Yes, that's a yes or no.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So you have an opportunity to call her a liar
if you say that you didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
But I'd like to see you respond to this.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
No, I did not say that to her, and I
never had a private meeting with her. Other witnesses to
every meeting that we have, and all those witnesses we'll
say I never said.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
So she's lying today to the American people on the
Wall Street Journal, Yes, sir, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
They were talking about doctor Susan Monarez, who was the
one that ran the CDC for three weeks and everybody
was calling everybody a liar. And one of the things
that RFK does, RFK Junior does is he denies that
he said something. And I've seen two or three occasions
(07:30):
where a reporter has turned around or an anchor has
turned around when he's doing an appearance in the media
and played for him the exact words that he said,
and he just shakes his head because he just said,
he denied that he ever said that. He does that
a lot, so I don't know what's wrong with him,
but he does that. Here it gets just a little
(07:51):
test here.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Most Americans will be able to get it from their pharmacy.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
For question is everyone who wants it?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
That was your promise on no identity.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
I never promised that I was going to recommend products
for which there is no indications.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
When you said, and I know.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
You've taken eight hundred and fifty five thousand dollars from
farm Assume Company, the question.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
No, I'm asking the questions here that question.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
I'm asking the questions Kennedy question. I'm asking the.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
Questions for mister Kennedy on behalf of parents and schools
and teachers all over the United States of America.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Who deserve so much better than your leadership. You did
it behind a public. Now parents who decide that they
do want their children to I'm not just making stuff up.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
You know, sometimes when you make an accusation, it's kind
of a confession.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Mister Kennedy. You choose to know.
Speaker 6 (08:50):
Answers to questions with some colleagues on I'm willing to answer,
will answer there. Someone should have asked you, maybe President
Trump should have asked you, are you a trustworthy person?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I we should have waited for an answer, then let's.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Go on to know what you're talking about. They're talking gibberish.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Your doctor, Jebbrais, you're a liar. You're back and forth.
It was four hours of that today. I will spare
you the four hours, but it was. It was sad
because it did it looked like children that were arguing
with each other. This is not a Congress, is not
running as a professional organization. And RFK Junior did not
(09:29):
act like a professional person himself. It was so so
so bad the way they behaved. So RFK Junior, he
did four hours of testimony. Meantime, down in Florida, they
are going to stop vaccine mandates in other words for
the kids going to school. If you don't have to,
(09:51):
you don't have to show a vaccine record of any kind.
I don't know where this is going to go, but
you know, you hear the doctor say, if you don't
have I don't know what the number is, eighty five
percent ninety percent of the population immunized through a vaccine
for some of these things, then the virus will spread
and then we'll all get it measles, mumps, polio. RFK Jr.
(10:17):
In the past that testified he would not fire any scientist.
He has about three thousand of them. He testified he
would not. For his confirmation he would not interfere with
vaccines or the VAXs panel, and he's done both.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Fired.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The head of CDC replaced the person who took over
from doctor Susan Monev is a venture capital guy. He's
running CDC. He may be a very smart guy, but
I don't know. Seems like a venture capital guy. I'm
I'm not sure if I want to take my medical
information from him. I don't trust the CDs. I don't
(11:00):
trust RFK Junior. I don't trust the senators. I guess
it comes down to you just better ask your doctor.
The problem is if your doctor says, yeah, go get
a vaccine, go get a COVID shot or whatever it
might be, well, the pharmacies apparently are now on hold.
(11:23):
One of these doctors has that. I think it's I'm
not sure. Let's play. This is doctor David Sulkan, and
he used to be the head of the VA in
Trump one point zero. Here's what doctor Sultan had to say.
Speaker 8 (11:42):
So I don't think that this hearing did much in
terms of restoring the confidence in the system for most
Americans who are watching this, the Americans that want to
have a government that they trust and understand and frankly
that is going to be there in the next pandemic.
Should that happened, and unfortunately, all that we really saw
(12:03):
was Washington politics at it's worse today. The Secretary was defiant,
he was combat of but I don't think he did
much in terms of really shedding light on any facts
or data to be able to give confidence that this
agency is headed in the right direction, or that people
are going to be clear with advice on what to
(12:25):
do when they go to their doctor and their pharmacists.
So I don't think that this had the impact that
I think that the Secretary was hoping that it would.
I think what we saw was a fair amount of
consistency from the senators, both Republicans and Democrats, understanding that
(12:45):
this was actually warp speed, was a public private partnership
that was a dramatic success and something that frankly, President
Trump does deserve credit because that happened under his first term.
The Secretary rather than being able to build upon that
and say where we're going to go in the future,
(13:06):
how we're going to continue to build on public private
partnerships and be able to build up the resiliency of
our public health system. Really that's where he lost the narrative,
and he basically said, but it went wrong from there.
And I think again, we need to see confidence in
the system. We have a very very strong infrastructure in place.
(13:30):
America should continue to be leading in this area, and
I think that's what people want to see from government. Yeah,
I don't think there is a clear path that's been outlined.
Let's take a look at what happened today. The role
of that Senate committee is oversight, and they were trying
to do that. They were asking they were well prepared,
(13:51):
they were asking questions, they were looking for clear answers,
and I'm not sure that we got much further down
the road in terms of that. We have to have
political leadership in place that is going to restore the confidence,
and the way to do that is through science based
or evidence based policy, and so we're going to need
(14:14):
to find somebody that's going to lead these agencies, particularly
in this case the CDC, who has those qualifications. We
didn't hear a real clear, good reason why these firings happened.
We heard a difference of opinion about, you know, the
trustworthiness here, but I think the real issue is we're
(14:35):
their policy differences and what type of leader is the
Secretary looking to have in place to be able to
drive the agency and restore that confidence. And I'm not
sure that any of us got that answer today. So
that still is work that's going to need to be done.
I think that you know, we saw that the Secretary
(14:55):
has thirty one congressional letters that haven't been responded too yet.
I think we need to step up the ability to
begin to start answering these questions, to provide the transparency
in government, to get people in these positions that are
going to be allowed to follow the science to be
able to begin to restore the confidence that we need,
(15:17):
just as we're entering the fall, where we're likely to
see new respiratory conditions that are going to require people
to know what to do when they get sick.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Well, there's a guy who not only is a doctor
but also has served in high levels of government, and
he wasn't impressed at all today. Nobody was. Nobody was
even Mark Warner, Senator Mark Warner from Virginia. He's the
wealthiest senator. He made his money, had a company that
he started that was in the computer tech world. So
(15:52):
I presume he's a fairly smart guy, and he was apoplectic.
Speaker 9 (15:58):
During the Secretary of Health and Human Service. You don't
have any idea how many Americans died from COVID.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I don't think anybody knows because there was so much
data chaos coming out of chair.
Speaker 9 (16:12):
Your Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn't no matter
how many Americans died from COVID. Now let them know
if the vaccine helped prevent any deaths, and you were
sitting as Secretary of Health and Human Services, how can
you be that ignorant?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Okay, there's another little name calling. We've had lots of
name college, So how can you be yet ignorant? Actually,
Mark Theesen had an answer about that.
Speaker 7 (16:37):
Well, I think Kennedy is right that the CDC doesn't
have accurate data. So one of the things that we
learned about the pandemic was that it was that children,
particularly younger children, were completely on at risk from COVID.
There were in Germany, they they where they kept tracking
the numbers, not a single child age fifteen to seventeen
died of COVID who was healthy, who didn't have a
pre existing condition. When I tried, when I was reporting
(17:00):
this from my column in the Washington Post, I wanted
to get the CDC numbers for the United States, and
I was told we didn't have them because we don't
track that. We literally weren't tracking how many child deaths
from COVID were people who had pre existing conditions and
how many were healthy children.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That data just wasn't being collected.
Speaker 7 (17:17):
It's hugely important because I would in Germany, not a
single healthy child died, And so Kennedy is right that
the CDC really doesn't have numbers on a lot of
this stuff. And this is one of the reasons why
the Trust in our public health institutions has been absolutely devastated.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
These people told.
Speaker 7 (17:34):
Us we had to keep our kids out of school,
even though we learned that there was no risk to children.
They had to have mandated to take vaccines for an
illness they weren't in danger of. In order to get
back into school, we had to have masks, social six
foot socialism. None of it based on science at all.
And so we have a huge destruction of trust. There's
(17:56):
never been any accountability for it. There's never been a
nine to eleven commission to look into our failures in
the pandemic. And so Kennedy comes in challenging all this
and people are saying, well, you're he's a Nott and
he's a nanci vaccent. A normal American watching this doesn't
know what to believe.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
And that includes me. But remember at the back during
the pandemic it started the numbers started being questioned because
we had a weekly well I think it was updated daily.
I forget where that the source of all that was.
It was one of the universities I think in Pennsylvania.
In any case, No, no, no, it was JOHNS Hopkins
in Baltimore. And so we would have these very detailed
(18:34):
numbers every day about how many people had died, how
many recovered. We had a nice dashboard of numbers. But
then they came out and they said, well, you know,
Joe Jones was killed in a car accident, and when
they did the autopsy they found out that actually he
also had COVID, so they blamed it as a COVID death,
(18:56):
but it was really a car accident death. So it
kind of stuff that was you know, people had had
a political agenda to boost the numbers or not boost
the numbers. Doctor Sanjay Gupta has some numbers that he got.
Let's listen to him.
Speaker 10 (19:15):
I think if you were an American watching these last
three hours, you would be completely confused. He would have
been assaulted by misinformation and disinformation. You wouldn't know if
COVID vaccines cause more debts versus COVID itself. You might
think anti depressants lead to increased suicides and mass shootings.
People called each other liar over and over again. I
(19:37):
mean the term that we would.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Hear very sporadically.
Speaker 10 (19:39):
It was used so many times today there was just
it was just very hard to piece together. I think
one thing I think is important is that there's constantly
been this tension between the Make America Healthy Again movement,
which I think a lot of people agree with fundamentally
because we're not a very healthy country, but it is
so entangled with this discussion around vaccines. And I think anytime,
(20:05):
you know, Secretary Kennedy was sort of asked about vaccines,
he would sort of rely on this idea that we're
not a very healthy country. Those are two distinct things.
I was very confused by many of these things. And
I think one thing I agree with Secretary Kennedy on.
I don't think a lot of times they were looking
for answers for him on specific questions. One of the
(20:26):
big ones was what was the real value of Operation
Warp Speed? What did that really do President Trump others
have said this was one of the greatest scientific achievements.
Senator Cassidy said he should President Trump should be nominated
for a Nobel Price. Let me just show you something
really quick, because I think when it comes to data,
people say, look, we don't trust the corporations to give
(20:47):
us data, we don't trust the government to give us data.
And we run into this as reporters all the time.
I don't know if we have this data from the
Commonwealth Fund. A lot of times we search for data
from other organizations that are that are not taking funding
from from private or governmental organizations. If we don't have it,
I can sort of tell you the numbers here. But basically,
so between December twenty twenty and November twenty twenty two,
(21:09):
what did the vaccinations do in the United States? Prevented
eighteen point five million hospitalizations and avoided three point.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Two million debts.
Speaker 10 (21:18):
I put this up because, again trying to cut through
some of the clutter here, everyone's going to keep saying, well,
Pfizer's presenting that data. I don't trust that CDC is
presenting that data. I don't trust it. So who are
you going to trust? Who are you going to trust?
And I think that's fundamentally what this is going to
be about over the next who knows how long. There
are many states and including DC, where it is very hard,
(21:41):
if not impossible, to get a COVID vaccine right now,
and that is because pharmacists are relying on the Advisory
Committee to make these recommendations. The Advisory Committee, as you know,
is dismantled. And then we're going to see if there's
even a meeting sometime later this month. But right now
pharmacists are sort of bound in many states to what
those a sub recommendations are. Could you go to a doctor,
(22:02):
could you pay for it yourself? Could you get it
off label? Perhaps, but as was pointed out several times today,
it is far harder today than it was even a
month ago or certainly a year ago to get the
shot if you want it. And that really goes for
anybody in the country, at least in these states.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
And it's a patchwork, you know.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
So it's it's really challenging and very confusing, far more
confusing than it needs to be. We know the specifics
that he said, it's no longer recommended for pregnant people
or healthy children. Pregnant people, by the way, are often
they're an increase risk. And the end of the EUA
as well.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, so not talking about mandates, but just talking about availability.
Can you get a COVID shot if you want to?
And you heard doctor Gupta saying that the pharmacist are
relying upon that committee, and the committee was fired and
now they got to have another meeting with the new
committ It seems a mess. It seems like the whole
(23:00):
thing today was just total chaos, and it seems like
that's the way our health system in this country has
has been running and is still running, speaking of a
total mess and changing subjects. So the mayor of New
York the race here is Mam Donnie is ahead, He's
got forty some percent in the polls of a chance
(23:22):
of being elected. And Cuomo is I forget, he's behind
twenty some percent. And Curtis Sliwa is the Republican, He's
at like twelve percent, and then the current mayor, Eric Adams,
is at seven percent. So the story leaked out of
(23:43):
the White House that the White House is going to
get Curtis Sliwa and Eric Adams jobs in the federal
government so that they will drop out of the race
for mayor, and then it would be a nose to
nose race between Cuomo and Mam Donnie. Here's Karl Rove
talking about it. First of all, I think the fact
(24:04):
that it was announced, it leaked out that this attempt
was supposedly being made to offer a job at hud
to Adams and to find a slot for Curtis Sliwa,
I think it probably means that they attempted it, and
it's not going to work out. It certainly gave mom
Donnie a chance to go on the offense against Donald Trump, who,
(24:27):
after all, in the city of New York got about
a third of the vote thereabouts. And so I'd say
right now, tactical short term victory for Mim Donnie because
we're not talking about what he believes and the weird
positions he's taken, particularly in the past. Instead we're talking
about is Donald Trump trying to defeat him?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Hard to do.
Speaker 11 (24:47):
Particularly if it's one thing that this had happened in June,
it's another thing when it happens less than ninety days
from the election. I think this is this all works
to mom Donnie's benefit at this point because he gives
him a chance to not talk about you know, I
got a lot of free stuff and I don't have
any way to pay for it, and I said ugly
(25:09):
things about the New York Police Department, and rather than
being talked about those, he goes on the offense against
Donald Trump, who's favorable ratings in New York have to
be pretty low.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, speaking about chaos. So this race is chaotic, and
AOC is pushing the Democrats to support ma'am Donnie because
Hakim Jeffries, who's a congressman from Brooklyn, and the head
of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is a New York Senator.
(25:40):
Here's AOC greipen.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
I am very concerned about the example that is being
set by anybody in our party. If an individual doesn't
want to support the party's nominee now, it complicates their
ability to ask voters to support any nominee later, whether
that is mayoral, presidential.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
What have you look Think about what she just said.
Speaker 11 (26:06):
She just said that no matter how outrageous the views
of a Democratic candidate are, every Democrat has to endorse them,
particularly the leaders. Mamdami is on record with anti Israel comments,
anti Jewish comments.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Think about what he said about the police.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
In New York.
Speaker 11 (26:21):
Here it is the New York Police Department is a racist,
anti queer, a major threat to public safety. That's what
he says about the News had said in the past
about the New York Police Department, defunded, dismantled, and the
cycle of violence. He's blaming violence in New York on
the New York Police Department. That's the kind of thing
(26:42):
that could get him into trouble and probably why Hakim
Jeffreys and Schumer taking some distance.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, that's gonna be an interesting one to watch, only
from the standpoint of I'm not sure if President Trump
isn't playing three dimensional chess here, because if he does
something that everybody can see in New York that he
he's supporting Cuomo to beat ma'm donnie, and people in
New York do not like Donald Trump, then they will
not support Cuomo. And therefore, ma'am Donnie looks like he's
(27:11):
got it made. But you never know who's going to
come out on election day, and we're about knotty days out.
We haven't talked about the drug boat, the one that
the US military just blew it out of the water,
and it was a bunch of they say it was.
(27:34):
The intel on it was it was a drug boat
that was bringing drugs from Venezuela and heading eventually to
the United States. So the military focused in on it
and kaplow in the water. Eleven people were killed and
all the drugs went to the bottom of the ocean.
(27:55):
So Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and basically his purview,
let's listen to what he said.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
Let me say this.
Speaker 13 (28:04):
The United States has long, for many, many years, established
intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boots.
We did that and it doesn't work. In addiction, doesn't
work because these drug cartels what they do is they
know they're going to lose, you know, two percent of
their cargo. They bake it into their economics.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So what do you think, I mean, I think if
it's this way that we In fact, President Obama I
called him the obominator because he would send drones over
the top of various terrorist organizations somewhere in the Middle
East and blow them up out of the sand. And
this is the same thing. This is a designated terrorist organization,
(28:45):
and it is it's the same thing. We just we
blow them out of the water instead of out of
the sand. Ian Bremer Well, he talks about whether this
is going to go bigger into maybe a full blown
war against Venezuela.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Because it's not just blowing up a boat.
Speaker 14 (29:06):
First of all, the Trump administration considers Maduro to be
a legitimate target. They don't see him as head of state.
They see him as a terrorist and the leader of
the cartel. They have a fifty million dollar bounty on
his head and the military that they have sent off
(29:27):
of Venezuela's coast, including a nuclear submarine, some two thousand marines,
significant numbers of battle vessels. This is not to take
out a small boat and kill eleven drug dealers or
drug transitters. This is clearly a message directly at the
Maduro regime. And I think at a minimum you are
(29:51):
looking at escalation that feels like a blockade. At a maximum,
you're probably I think it's more likely than not that
you're going to see some direct strikes on targets in Venezuela.
Now are those targets at the regime itself or at
gangs and cartels? And how's the Venezuelan military going to
(30:12):
respond if they start feeling like, you know, Tomahawk missiles
targeting them.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
That's a very interesting question.
Speaker 14 (30:20):
The markets, i mean, Venezuelan bonds have blown out over
the last twenty four hours levels we haven't seen in decades,
because certainly they're seeing that there's a lot of risk
around this existing regime. Marco Rubio made a tour trip
down to Mexico in advance of this and has gotten
a complete go ahead and promises of cooperation from the
(30:43):
Mexican government, which was seen as essential by the United States.
Now President Shanbaum has not wanted to talk about details
specifics to the public in Mexico specifically, because you know
they'll be concerns about sovereignty, they'll be nationalists backlash, But
there has been support there.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Columbia, on the other hand, you've got a.
Speaker 14 (31:03):
Very unpopular leader far to the left who has been
largely sympathetic to the Maduro regime. And I think there
you'd have a big crisis in their relationship with the
United States. It could break off diplomatic relations. But I
do want to make clear here no one's talking about
the boots on the ground and a policy of regime
(31:24):
change that the Americans would be involved in affecting. And
as much as Trump says he wants to end wars,
and he's put a lot of effort into that, successfully
in some cases at the margins, unsuccessfully of course, in
the case of Russia, Ukraine and Israel Gaza. But Trump
has no problem using the military with target strikes at enemies,
(31:48):
and we've seen that with Iran.
Speaker 5 (31:49):
We saw in his first term with Iran, and.
Speaker 14 (31:51):
I think his view would be Venezuela is much more
akin to that than it would be. You know, suddenly
the United States is going to be in a multi
year morass the way it was RockA Afghanistan.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
So we see you where this goes. And there's of course,
if you're a Trump supporter, you're cheering the fact that
good he's doing something about making the drug cartels pay attention,
that he's not going to just roll over and we've
done nothing to stop the drugs coming in our country.
So this may be the beginning of all of that.
(32:22):
On the economy, the big story is tomorrow morning, eight
thirty Eastern time, the jobs report for the month of
August comes out. I don't know if you're going to
believe the numbers no matter what they are. Today ADP
came out with their private sector jobs report and they
said that the private sector created only fifty four thousand
(32:44):
jobs last month. It was estimated to be slow. It
was estimated to be seventy five thousand, turned out to
be worse than that, at fifty four thousand. Steve Leisman
over at CNBC's kind of their economic guru, was just
chat with his fellow staffs on on the set this
morning about what he's observing about jobs.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
But the first two pages layout on it.
Speaker 15 (33:09):
They layout an economy at saw Street, little economic activity
for districts had modest growth.
Speaker 5 (33:16):
And then the Challenger report this morning.
Speaker 15 (33:20):
Layoffs up thirty nine percent, adding pharmaceuticals in finance to
the sectors that we're seeing layoffs.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
So I'm Steve, have you seen it?
Speaker 15 (33:30):
I ended up with more concern about the economy after
yesterday's data and this morning's challenge.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Is there anything to know that the falling participation rate
is masking a much higher Yes it could, all.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Right, So they're seeing this slowing down in the labor markets.
Not a Richardson, the chief economist over to ADP. She
has the details on the slowdown that she sees.
Speaker 16 (33:51):
No, I think it's been in stasis for about a
year now. But we have to look at the broader context.
This is an economy that was kind of whipsawed by
the great as a nation. A lot of people are
pretty happy where they are and they're staying put, so under.
Speaker 17 (34:05):
Our worker happy where they are unemployed employed. But also
this is you know, firm behavior. Employer behavior has changed
quite a bit since the pandemic, and you can see
it in the hours worked. Right now, average hours is
about two hours less a week according to ADP payroll
data than it was.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Before the pandemic.
Speaker 16 (34:26):
That's consistent with a hiring pattern where you're keeping people
on payroll but they're working fewer hours. Before you cut
a job, you'll cut an hour, and so what we're
seeing is maybe an underemployed worker as opposed to an
unemployed worker, which is a meaningful difference. It's also easier
to add hours when things pick up, So the flexibility
(34:48):
we're seeing now is an hour's work, not just in
growing and shrinking your headcount.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
Fetch.
Speaker 16 (34:54):
There's a lot of things happening in healthcare, whether it
is labor shortages we're seeing. We're seeing an aging demographic
take root in that industry. So if you look at
the average age of nurses and doctors and healthcare aids,
it's going up. You're seeing that retiree segment tenures shortened
because people are leaving the field post pandemic.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Immigration is going to have a huge.
Speaker 16 (35:18):
Factor a sector like healthcare, or part of it is supplied,
part of it is having the dollars to hire. A
lot of that sector is built in on grant money.
If that grant money dries up in education and healthcare,
you can't get, you can't hire. In the same way
that all of this is playing out into a weaker
(35:39):
education and healthcare number that we've been tracking for quite
a while. This is not new for ADP payroll data.
It is a distinction with the BLS data. We have
seen weaker healthcare growth for the better part of a year.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
So speaking of money, well, I'm here at work today.
Gives I did not win. Neither did you had the lottery.
Now it's one point seven billion dollars, So we'll see
what happens next draw. NFL football kicks off tonight. Yes,
(36:12):
it's the Cowboys versus the Philadelphia Eagles in Philadelphia, super
Bowl Champs. So that's going to be on NBC tonight.
As NFL football gets underway, there's a big gathering at
the White House. I don't know if you got your invite,
but a lot of the big, big, heavyweight tech CEOs
are all invited to the White House tonight. They're going
(36:33):
to have some festivities out on the paved over Rose Garden.
I don't know what they're going to do, but I'm
sure the President's going to hit them up for something.
It'll be interesting to see if he hits them up
for part ownership of their companies. Anyways, tech CEOs at
the White House tonight NFL, I'm sure some of them
(36:54):
would rather watch the NFL game the kickoff, and we'll
buy you a lot of tickets and we'll see what
comes out of all of that. We have Wall Street
today anticipating tomorrow morning's jobs report, and I think, no
matter what they think about the jobs report, whether we'll
be good, better, and different, I think most people on
(37:16):
Wall Street today were buying because of the fact that
you've got it's going to have to take a real
crushing blow on those job numbers to knock the fed
off of the decision to lower interest rates coming up
in about ten days. So on Wall Street today, the
dal Fin eached up three hundred and fifty points, the
(37:37):
Dow at forty five six, twenty one, SMP up fifty three,
NASDAC up two hundred and nine, price of goal after
a couple of days of big rallies fail today thirty
dollars down to thirty six oh five, and oil down
sixty plus cents to sixty three dollars, and some change
(37:57):
for one barrel of oil. Thank you for coming by today.
We'll be back again tomorrow. Hope to see you the
And Hi, how are you welcome? Welcome, walk and all
do the Big podcast. It is Thursday. Today is the
fourth day of September, year of Our Lord twenty twenty five.
My name is Tom Sullivan. And hell, it was not
your normal political food fight in the capital today. RFK
(00:47):
Junior was there and he went before. It was the
Senate Finance Committee, but they wanted to talk to him
about everything going on at Health and Human Services for
which he's in charge. And this is this is I
told you the other day.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
This is.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's very confusing because you've got people doctors, a lot
of doctors that is, they're saying that that what Kennedy
is doing is just dangerous to the health of Americans.
He doesn't know what he's doing. He's a conspiracy kook.
(01:28):
He's not a doctor. And so you got all these
doctors that are saying we know what to do and
he doesn't. And then you've got RFK Jr. That comes
out and says, no, the people that have been in
charge of the health system in our country have politicized
it and have lied to the American people. So you
(01:50):
go back. CDC in vaccines were really kind of the
focus of all of this today. Think about when the
pandemic hit, I mean before the pandemic hit. Had you
ever I think I may have heard of the CDC
because they had kind of a weird name, but I
never interacted in any way with them. They weren't in
the news. But once the pandemic came along, all of
(02:14):
a sudden, the CDC was everything. And they came out
with a COVID test early on, I mean very early,
and they spent these COVID test kits around all over
the country, lots of I don't know how much they spent,
and a couple of weeks into it, they went, oh,
(02:34):
never mind, they don't work. So they got off to
a bad start. And then they told us lots of
things that turned out not to be true. And I
still to this day, I will tell you, I look
at the COVID illness, the COVID virus. They're still out there.
There are still people getting COVID. There's still a number
(02:57):
of people suffering from long COVID. But I think the
doctors are working diligently trying to figure out how this
virus works and how to put it away. But it
hasn't gone away. And I don't think they really know
what to do. Now they've come up with some things
(03:19):
like pax slovid, So if you do come down with COVID,
you take pax slovaed and it reduces the danger of
it killing you. And there's lots of things that will
help if you get COVID. But I still think that
they are still in the woods trying to figure out
(03:42):
exactly how this thing works. And then the question comes
down to the vaccines. Do you get an annual vaccine
like you're supposed to, They recommend a flu shot. Then
you've got the schools where I mean when I was
a child, I remember my mother had to bring my
shot record over before they, you know, the start of
(04:04):
school this time of the year, the kids all have
to show their shot records or they won't be allowed
in school because they don't want a bunch of kids
in there that can have measles or whatever it might be.
So it's a lot and the bottom line out of
though you'll hear it was it was embarrassing. And this
(04:25):
goes back to my attitude about our government. This this
would not happen in a well run private sector company.
They act like babies. They act like uneducated children. They
squabble out each other. It was a food fight. These
(04:46):
are senators versus this Secretary of Health and Human Services,
and I don't know which side you believe, but it
really has come down to the point where I don't
know who to believe. I want to believe doctor, but then,
like I said, CDC has given us a bunch of
a bunch of false information in the past, so how
(05:08):
do you believe them? And then RFK just came in
and fired all the people on the vaccine Committee and
hired a bunch of new people. And the person that's
supposed to run the CDC was this woman doctor who
was went through hired a month ago, and then they
(05:31):
fired her three weeks later. I'm going, that doesn't look
like a manager knows what he or she is doing.
In this case, what the what rfk's doing. Why would
you fire somebody three weeks after you hire them. I
don't put it on the employee, I put it on
the manager. They should be a better manager. They shouldn't
(05:52):
have hired her in the first place. If they if
she if they didn't like her, they should have decided
they should have asked her the questions three weeks ago
that they asked lately, and because of the wrong answers,
they said, you're out of here. So they're just it's
who do you believe? RFK. I'm sorry. I think the
guy's weird and he's got a bunch of four years
(06:16):
conspiracy stuff, I mean, like kookie stuff. So who do
you believe? Do you believe him, or do you believe
the doctors? Or in today, do you believe the senators.
There's nobody that I put my faith and trust in.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
So let's start. I'll play a little bit of this
for you.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It was just a mess. Here you go.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
No, I did not Yes, that's a yes or no.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So you have an opportunity to call her a liar
if you say that you didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
But I'd like to see you respond to this.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
No, I did not say that to her, and I
never had a private meeting with her. Other witnesses to
every meeting that we have, and all those witnesses we'll
say I never said.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
So she's lying today to the American people on the
Wall Street Journal, Yes, sir, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
They were talking about doctor Susan Monarez, who was the
one that ran the CDC for three weeks and everybody
was calling everybody a liar. And one of the things
that RFK does, RFK Junior does is he denies that
he said something. And I've seen two or three occasions
(07:30):
where a reporter has turned around or an anchor has
turned around when he's doing an appearance in the media
and played for him the exact words that he said,
and he just shakes his head because he just said,
he denied that he ever said that. He does that
a lot, so I don't know what's wrong with him,
but he does that. Here it gets just a little
(07:51):
test here.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Most Americans will be able to get it from their pharmacy.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
For question is everyone who wants it?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
That was your promise on no identity.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
I never promised that I was going to recommend products
for which there is no indications.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
When you said, and I know.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
You've taken eight hundred and fifty five thousand dollars from
farm Assume Company, the question.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
No, I'm asking the questions here that question.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
I'm asking the questions Kennedy question. I'm asking the.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
Questions for mister Kennedy on behalf of parents and schools
and teachers all over the United States of America.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Who deserve so much better than your leadership. You did
it behind a public. Now parents who decide that they
do want their children to I'm not just making stuff up.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
You know, sometimes when you make an accusation, it's kind
of a confession.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Mister Kennedy. You choose to know.
Speaker 6 (08:50):
Answers to questions with some colleagues on I'm willing to answer,
will answer there. Someone should have asked you, maybe President
Trump should have asked you, are you a trustworthy person?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I we should have waited for an answer, then let's.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Go on to know what you're talking about. They're talking gibberish.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Your doctor, Jebbrais, you're a liar. You're back and forth.
It was four hours of that today. I will spare
you the four hours, but it was. It was sad
because it did it looked like children that were arguing
with each other. This is not a Congress, is not
running as a professional organization. And RFK Junior did not
(09:29):
act like a professional person himself. It was so so
so bad the way they behaved. So RFK Junior, he
did four hours of testimony. Meantime, down in Florida, they
are going to stop vaccine mandates in other words for
the kids going to school. If you don't have to,
(09:51):
you don't have to show a vaccine record of any kind.
I don't know where this is going to go, but
you know, you hear the doctor say, if you don't
have I don't know what the number is, eighty five
percent ninety percent of the population immunized through a vaccine
for some of these things, then the virus will spread
and then we'll all get it measles, mumps, polio. RFK Jr.
(10:17):
In the past that testified he would not fire any scientist.
He has about three thousand of them. He testified he
would not. For his confirmation he would not interfere with
vaccines or the VAXs panel, and he's done both.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Fired.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The head of CDC replaced the person who took over
from doctor Susan Monev is a venture capital guy. He's
running CDC. He may be a very smart guy, but
I don't know. Seems like a venture capital guy. I'm
I'm not sure if I want to take my medical
information from him. I don't trust the CDs. I don't
(11:00):
trust RFK Junior. I don't trust the senators. I guess
it comes down to you just better ask your doctor.
The problem is if your doctor says, yeah, go get
a vaccine, go get a COVID shot or whatever it
might be, well, the pharmacies apparently are now on hold.
(11:23):
One of these doctors has that. I think it's I'm
not sure. Let's play. This is doctor David Sulkan, and
he used to be the head of the VA in
Trump one point zero. Here's what doctor Sultan had to say.
Speaker 8 (11:42):
So I don't think that this hearing did much in
terms of restoring the confidence in the system for most
Americans who are watching this, the Americans that want to
have a government that they trust and understand and frankly
that is going to be there in the next pandemic.
Should that happened, and unfortunately, all that we really saw
(12:03):
was Washington politics at it's worse today. The Secretary was defiant,
he was combat of but I don't think he did
much in terms of really shedding light on any facts
or data to be able to give confidence that this
agency is headed in the right direction, or that people
are going to be clear with advice on what to
(12:25):
do when they go to their doctor and their pharmacists.
So I don't think that this had the impact that
I think that the Secretary was hoping that it would.
I think what we saw was a fair amount of
consistency from the senators, both Republicans and Democrats, understanding that
(12:45):
this was actually warp speed, was a public private partnership
that was a dramatic success and something that frankly, President
Trump does deserve credit because that happened under his first term.
The Secretary rather than being able to build upon that
and say where we're going to go in the future,
(13:06):
how we're going to continue to build on public private
partnerships and be able to build up the resiliency of
our public health system. Really that's where he lost the narrative,
and he basically said, but it went wrong from there.
And I think again, we need to see confidence in
the system. We have a very very strong infrastructure in place.
(13:30):
America should continue to be leading in this area, and
I think that's what people want to see from government. Yeah,
I don't think there is a clear path that's been outlined.
Let's take a look at what happened today. The role
of that Senate committee is oversight, and they were trying
to do that. They were asking they were well prepared,
(13:51):
they were asking questions, they were looking for clear answers,
and I'm not sure that we got much further down
the road in terms of that. We have to have
political leadership in place that is going to restore the confidence,
and the way to do that is through science based
or evidence based policy, and so we're going to need
(14:14):
to find somebody that's going to lead these agencies, particularly
in this case the CDC, who has those qualifications. We
didn't hear a real clear, good reason why these firings happened.
We heard a difference of opinion about, you know, the
trustworthiness here, but I think the real issue is we're
(14:35):
their policy differences and what type of leader is the
Secretary looking to have in place to be able to
drive the agency and restore that confidence. And I'm not
sure that any of us got that answer today. So
that still is work that's going to need to be done.
I think that you know, we saw that the Secretary
(14:55):
has thirty one congressional letters that haven't been responded too yet.
I think we need to step up the ability to
begin to start answering these questions, to provide the transparency
in government, to get people in these positions that are
going to be allowed to follow the science to be
able to begin to restore the confidence that we need,
(15:17):
just as we're entering the fall, where we're likely to
see new respiratory conditions that are going to require people
to know what to do when they get sick.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Well, there's a guy who not only is a doctor
but also has served in high levels of government, and
he wasn't impressed at all today. Nobody was. Nobody was
even Mark Warner, Senator Mark Warner from Virginia. He's the
wealthiest senator. He made his money, had a company that
he started that was in the computer tech world. So
(15:52):
I presume he's a fairly smart guy, and he was apoplectic.
Speaker 9 (15:58):
During the Secretary of Health and Human Service. You don't
have any idea how many Americans died from COVID.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I don't think anybody knows because there was so much
data chaos coming out of chair.
Speaker 9 (16:12):
Your Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn't no matter
how many Americans died from COVID. Now let them know
if the vaccine helped prevent any deaths, and you were
sitting as Secretary of Health and Human Services, how can
you be that ignorant?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Okay, there's another little name calling. We've had lots of
name college, So how can you be yet ignorant? Actually,
Mark Theesen had an answer about that.
Speaker 7 (16:37):
Well, I think Kennedy is right that the CDC doesn't
have accurate data. So one of the things that we
learned about the pandemic was that it was that children,
particularly younger children, were completely on at risk from COVID.
There were in Germany, they they where they kept tracking
the numbers, not a single child age fifteen to seventeen
died of COVID who was healthy, who didn't have a
pre existing condition. When I tried, when I was reporting
(17:00):
this from my column in the Washington Post, I wanted
to get the CDC numbers for the United States, and
I was told we didn't have them because we don't
track that. We literally weren't tracking how many child deaths
from COVID were people who had pre existing conditions and
how many were healthy children.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That data just wasn't being collected.
Speaker 7 (17:17):
It's hugely important because I would in Germany, not a
single healthy child died, And so Kennedy is right that
the CDC really doesn't have numbers on a lot of
this stuff. And this is one of the reasons why
the Trust in our public health institutions has been absolutely devastated.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
These people told.
Speaker 7 (17:34):
Us we had to keep our kids out of school,
even though we learned that there was no risk to children.
They had to have mandated to take vaccines for an
illness they weren't in danger of. In order to get
back into school, we had to have masks, social six
foot socialism. None of it based on science at all.
And so we have a huge destruction of trust. There's
(17:56):
never been any accountability for it. There's never been a
nine to eleven commission to look into our failures in
the pandemic. And so Kennedy comes in challenging all this
and people are saying, well, you're he's a Nott and
he's a nanci vaccent. A normal American watching this doesn't
know what to believe.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
And that includes me. But remember at the back during
the pandemic it started the numbers started being questioned because
we had a weekly well I think it was updated daily.
I forget where that the source of all that was.
It was one of the universities I think in Pennsylvania.
In any case, No, no, no, it was JOHNS Hopkins
in Baltimore. And so we would have these very detailed
(18:34):
numbers every day about how many people had died, how
many recovered. We had a nice dashboard of numbers. But
then they came out and they said, well, you know,
Joe Jones was killed in a car accident, and when
they did the autopsy they found out that actually he
also had COVID, so they blamed it as a COVID death,
(18:56):
but it was really a car accident death. So it
kind of stuff that was you know, people had had
a political agenda to boost the numbers or not boost
the numbers. Doctor Sanjay Gupta has some numbers that he got.
Let's listen to him.
Speaker 10 (19:15):
I think if you were an American watching these last
three hours, you would be completely confused. He would have
been assaulted by misinformation and disinformation. You wouldn't know if
COVID vaccines cause more debts versus COVID itself. You might
think anti depressants lead to increased suicides and mass shootings.
People called each other liar over and over again. I
(19:37):
mean the term that we would.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Hear very sporadically.
Speaker 10 (19:39):
It was used so many times today there was just
it was just very hard to piece together. I think
one thing I think is important is that there's constantly
been this tension between the Make America Healthy Again movement,
which I think a lot of people agree with fundamentally
because we're not a very healthy country, but it is
so entangled with this discussion around vaccines. And I think anytime,
(20:05):
you know, Secretary Kennedy was sort of asked about vaccines,
he would sort of rely on this idea that we're
not a very healthy country. Those are two distinct things.
I was very confused by many of these things. And
I think one thing I agree with Secretary Kennedy on.
I don't think a lot of times they were looking
for answers for him on specific questions. One of the
(20:26):
big ones was what was the real value of Operation
Warp Speed? What did that really do President Trump others
have said this was one of the greatest scientific achievements.
Senator Cassidy said he should President Trump should be nominated
for a Nobel Price. Let me just show you something
really quick, because I think when it comes to data,
people say, look, we don't trust the corporations to give
(20:47):
us data, we don't trust the government to give us data.
And we run into this as reporters all the time.
I don't know if we have this data from the
Commonwealth Fund. A lot of times we search for data
from other organizations that are that are not taking funding
from from private or governmental organizations. If we don't have it,
I can sort of tell you the numbers here. But basically,
so between December twenty twenty and November twenty twenty two,
(21:09):
what did the vaccinations do in the United States? Prevented
eighteen point five million hospitalizations and avoided three point.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Two million debts.
Speaker 10 (21:18):
I put this up because, again trying to cut through
some of the clutter here, everyone's going to keep saying, well,
Pfizer's presenting that data. I don't trust that CDC is
presenting that data. I don't trust it. So who are
you going to trust? Who are you going to trust?
And I think that's fundamentally what this is going to
be about over the next who knows how long. There
are many states and including DC, where it is very hard,
(21:41):
if not impossible, to get a COVID vaccine right now,
and that is because pharmacists are relying on the Advisory
Committee to make these recommendations. The Advisory Committee, as you know,
is dismantled. And then we're going to see if there's
even a meeting sometime later this month. But right now
pharmacists are sort of bound in many states to what
those a sub recommendations are. Could you go to a doctor,
(22:02):
could you pay for it yourself? Could you get it
off label? Perhaps, but as was pointed out several times today,
it is far harder today than it was even a
month ago or certainly a year ago to get the
shot if you want it. And that really goes for
anybody in the country, at least in these states.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
And it's a patchwork, you know.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
So it's it's really challenging and very confusing, far more
confusing than it needs to be. We know the specifics
that he said, it's no longer recommended for pregnant people
or healthy children. Pregnant people, by the way, are often
they're an increase risk. And the end of the EUA
as well.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, so not talking about mandates, but just talking about availability.
Can you get a COVID shot if you want to?
And you heard doctor Gupta saying that the pharmacist are
relying upon that committee, and the committee was fired and
now they got to have another meeting with the new
committ It seems a mess. It seems like the whole
(23:00):
thing today was just total chaos, and it seems like
that's the way our health system in this country has
has been running and is still running, speaking of a
total mess and changing subjects. So the mayor of New
York the race here is Mam Donnie is ahead, He's
got forty some percent in the polls of a chance
(23:22):
of being elected. And Cuomo is I forget, he's behind
twenty some percent. And Curtis Sliwa is the Republican, He's
at like twelve percent, and then the current mayor, Eric Adams,
is at seven percent. So the story leaked out of
(23:43):
the White House that the White House is going to
get Curtis Sliwa and Eric Adams jobs in the federal
government so that they will drop out of the race
for mayor, and then it would be a nose to
nose race between Cuomo and Mam Donnie. Here's Karl Rove
talking about it. First of all, I think the fact
(24:04):
that it was announced, it leaked out that this attempt
was supposedly being made to offer a job at hud
to Adams and to find a slot for Curtis Sliwa,
I think it probably means that they attempted it, and
it's not going to work out. It certainly gave mom
Donnie a chance to go on the offense against Donald Trump, who,
(24:27):
after all, in the city of New York got about
a third of the vote thereabouts. And so I'd say
right now, tactical short term victory for Mim Donnie because
we're not talking about what he believes and the weird
positions he's taken, particularly in the past. Instead we're talking
about is Donald Trump trying to defeat him?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Hard to do.
Speaker 11 (24:47):
Particularly if it's one thing that this had happened in June,
it's another thing when it happens less than ninety days
from the election. I think this is this all works
to mom Donnie's benefit at this point because he gives
him a chance to not talk about you know, I
got a lot of free stuff and I don't have
any way to pay for it, and I said ugly
(25:09):
things about the New York Police Department, and rather than
being talked about those, he goes on the offense against
Donald Trump, who's favorable ratings in New York have to
be pretty low.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, speaking about chaos. So this race is chaotic, and
AOC is pushing the Democrats to support ma'am Donnie because
Hakim Jeffries, who's a congressman from Brooklyn, and the head
of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is a New York Senator.
(25:40):
Here's AOC greipen.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
I am very concerned about the example that is being
set by anybody in our party. If an individual doesn't
want to support the party's nominee now, it complicates their
ability to ask voters to support any nominee later, whether
that is mayoral, presidential.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
What have you look Think about what she just said.
Speaker 11 (26:06):
She just said that no matter how outrageous the views
of a Democratic candidate are, every Democrat has to endorse them,
particularly the leaders. Mamdami is on record with anti Israel comments,
anti Jewish comments.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Think about what he said about the police.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
In New York.
Speaker 11 (26:21):
Here it is the New York Police Department is a racist,
anti queer, a major threat to public safety. That's what
he says about the News had said in the past
about the New York Police Department, defunded, dismantled, and the
cycle of violence. He's blaming violence in New York on
the New York Police Department. That's the kind of thing
(26:42):
that could get him into trouble and probably why Hakim
Jeffreys and Schumer taking some distance.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, that's gonna be an interesting one to watch, only
from the standpoint of I'm not sure if President Trump
isn't playing three dimensional chess here, because if he does
something that everybody can see in New York that he
he's supporting Cuomo to beat ma'm donnie, and people in
New York do not like Donald Trump, then they will
not support Cuomo. And therefore, ma'am Donnie looks like he's
(27:11):
got it made. But you never know who's going to
come out on election day, and we're about knotty days out.
We haven't talked about the drug boat, the one that
the US military just blew it out of the water,
and it was a bunch of they say it was.
(27:34):
The intel on it was it was a drug boat
that was bringing drugs from Venezuela and heading eventually to
the United States. So the military focused in on it
and kaplow in the water. Eleven people were killed and
all the drugs went to the bottom of the ocean.
(27:55):
So Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and basically his purview,
let's listen to what he said.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
Let me say this.
Speaker 13 (28:04):
The United States has long, for many, many years, established
intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boots.
We did that and it doesn't work. In addiction, doesn't
work because these drug cartels what they do is they
know they're going to lose, you know, two percent of
their cargo. They bake it into their economics.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So what do you think, I mean, I think if
it's this way that we In fact, President Obama I
called him the obominator because he would send drones over
the top of various terrorist organizations somewhere in the Middle
East and blow them up out of the sand. And
this is the same thing. This is a designated terrorist organization,
(28:45):
and it is it's the same thing. We just we
blow them out of the water instead of out of
the sand. Ian Bremer Well, he talks about whether this
is going to go bigger into maybe a full blown
war against Venezuela.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Because it's not just blowing up a boat.
Speaker 14 (29:06):
First of all, the Trump administration considers Maduro to be
a legitimate target. They don't see him as head of state.
They see him as a terrorist and the leader of
the cartel. They have a fifty million dollar bounty on
his head and the military that they have sent off
(29:27):
of Venezuela's coast, including a nuclear submarine, some two thousand marines,
significant numbers of battle vessels. This is not to take
out a small boat and kill eleven drug dealers or
drug transitters. This is clearly a message directly at the
Maduro regime. And I think at a minimum you are
(29:51):
looking at escalation that feels like a blockade. At a maximum,
you're probably I think it's more likely than not that
you're going to see some direct strikes on targets in Venezuela.
Now are those targets at the regime itself or at
gangs and cartels? And how's the Venezuelan military going to
(30:12):
respond if they start feeling like, you know, Tomahawk missiles
targeting them.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
That's a very interesting question.
Speaker 14 (30:20):
The markets, i mean, Venezuelan bonds have blown out over
the last twenty four hours levels we haven't seen in decades,
because certainly they're seeing that there's a lot of risk
around this existing regime. Marco Rubio made a tour trip
down to Mexico in advance of this and has gotten
a complete go ahead and promises of cooperation from the
(30:43):
Mexican government, which was seen as essential by the United States.
Now President Shanbaum has not wanted to talk about details
specifics to the public in Mexico specifically, because you know
they'll be concerns about sovereignty, they'll be nationalists backlash, But
there has been support there.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Columbia, on the other hand, you've got a.
Speaker 14 (31:03):
Very unpopular leader far to the left who has been
largely sympathetic to the Maduro regime. And I think there
you'd have a big crisis in their relationship with the
United States. It could break off diplomatic relations. But I
do want to make clear here no one's talking about
the boots on the ground and a policy of regime
(31:24):
change that the Americans would be involved in affecting. And
as much as Trump says he wants to end wars,
and he's put a lot of effort into that, successfully
in some cases at the margins, unsuccessfully of course, in
the case of Russia, Ukraine and Israel Gaza. But Trump
has no problem using the military with target strikes at enemies,
(31:48):
and we've seen that with Iran.
Speaker 5 (31:49):
We saw in his first term with Iran, and.
Speaker 14 (31:51):
I think his view would be Venezuela is much more
akin to that than it would be. You know, suddenly
the United States is going to be in a multi
year morass the way it was RockA Afghanistan.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
So we see you where this goes. And there's of course,
if you're a Trump supporter, you're cheering the fact that
good he's doing something about making the drug cartels pay attention,
that he's not going to just roll over and we've
done nothing to stop the drugs coming in our country.
So this may be the beginning of all of that.
(32:22):
On the economy, the big story is tomorrow morning, eight
thirty Eastern time, the jobs report for the month of
August comes out. I don't know if you're going to
believe the numbers no matter what they are. Today ADP
came out with their private sector jobs report and they
said that the private sector created only fifty four thousand
(32:44):
jobs last month. It was estimated to be slow. It
was estimated to be seventy five thousand, turned out to
be worse than that, at fifty four thousand. Steve Leisman
over at CNBC's kind of their economic guru, was just
chat with his fellow staffs on on the set this
morning about what he's observing about jobs.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
But the first two pages layout on it.
Speaker 15 (33:09):
They layout an economy at saw Street, little economic activity
for districts had modest growth.
Speaker 5 (33:16):
And then the Challenger report this morning.
Speaker 15 (33:20):
Layoffs up thirty nine percent, adding pharmaceuticals in finance to
the sectors that we're seeing layoffs.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
So I'm Steve, have you seen it?
Speaker 15 (33:30):
I ended up with more concern about the economy after
yesterday's data and this morning's challenge.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Is there anything to know that the falling participation rate
is masking a much higher Yes it could, all.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Right, So they're seeing this slowing down in the labor markets.
Not a Richardson, the chief economist over to ADP. She
has the details on the slowdown that she sees.
Speaker 16 (33:51):
No, I think it's been in stasis for about a
year now. But we have to look at the broader context.
This is an economy that was kind of whipsawed by
the great as a nation. A lot of people are
pretty happy where they are and they're staying put, so under.
Speaker 17 (34:05):
Our worker happy where they are unemployed employed. But also
this is you know, firm behavior. Employer behavior has changed
quite a bit since the pandemic, and you can see
it in the hours worked. Right now, average hours is
about two hours less a week according to ADP payroll
data than it was.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Before the pandemic.
Speaker 16 (34:26):
That's consistent with a hiring pattern where you're keeping people
on payroll but they're working fewer hours. Before you cut
a job, you'll cut an hour, and so what we're
seeing is maybe an underemployed worker as opposed to an
unemployed worker, which is a meaningful difference. It's also easier
to add hours when things pick up, So the flexibility
(34:48):
we're seeing now is an hour's work, not just in
growing and shrinking your headcount.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
Fetch.
Speaker 16 (34:54):
There's a lot of things happening in healthcare, whether it
is labor shortages we're seeing. We're seeing an aging demographic
take root in that industry. So if you look at
the average age of nurses and doctors and healthcare aids,
it's going up. You're seeing that retiree segment tenures shortened
because people are leaving the field post pandemic.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Immigration is going to have a huge.
Speaker 16 (35:18):
Factor a sector like healthcare, or part of it is supplied,
part of it is having the dollars to hire. A
lot of that sector is built in on grant money.
If that grant money dries up in education and healthcare,
you can't get, you can't hire. In the same way
that all of this is playing out into a weaker
(35:39):
education and healthcare number that we've been tracking for quite
a while. This is not new for ADP payroll data.
It is a distinction with the BLS data. We have
seen weaker healthcare growth for the better part of a year.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
So speaking of money, well, I'm here at work today.
Gives I did not win. Neither did you had the lottery.
Now it's one point seven billion dollars, So we'll see
what happens next draw. NFL football kicks off tonight. Yes,
(36:12):
it's the Cowboys versus the Philadelphia Eagles in Philadelphia, super
Bowl Champs. So that's going to be on NBC tonight.
As NFL football gets underway, there's a big gathering at
the White House. I don't know if you got your invite,
but a lot of the big, big, heavyweight tech CEOs
are all invited to the White House tonight. They're going
(36:33):
to have some festivities out on the paved over Rose Garden.
I don't know what they're going to do, but I'm
sure the President's going to hit them up for something.
It'll be interesting to see if he hits them up
for part ownership of their companies. Anyways, tech CEOs at
the White House tonight NFL, I'm sure some of them
(36:54):
would rather watch the NFL game the kickoff, and we'll
buy you a lot of tickets and we'll see what
comes out of all of that. We have Wall Street
today anticipating tomorrow morning's jobs report, and I think, no
matter what they think about the jobs report, whether we'll
be good, better, and different, I think most people on
(37:16):
Wall Street today were buying because of the fact that
you've got it's going to have to take a real
crushing blow on those job numbers to knock the fed
off of the decision to lower interest rates coming up
in about ten days. So on Wall Street today, the
dal Fin eached up three hundred and fifty points, the
(37:37):
Dow at forty five six, twenty one, SMP up fifty three,
NASDAC up two hundred and nine, price of goal after
a couple of days of big rallies fail today thirty
dollars down to thirty six oh five, and oil down
sixty plus cents to sixty three dollars, and some change
(37:57):
for one barrel of oil. Thank you for coming by today.
We'll be back again tomorrow. Hope to see you the
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com