Episode 221- Global Politics, Sports, and Life Transitions: A Conversation with Robert Greenfield

Join us as we welcome back our favorite globetrotter, Robert Greenfield! As he navigates his recent move from Australia to Europe, he brings a fresh perspective on life, culture, and the political landscape following the pandemic. We kick off with a unique blend of sports and travel, diving into the thrill of a Detroit Tigers game, the anticipation of Detroit Lions' playoffs, and the lifestyle transition from a tropical Australian climate to chilly Europe. 

Brace yourselves as we venture into the heartland of global politics, with Robert's insightful commentary on the Ukraine War. From the European perspective to China's influence and Russia's strategy, we leave no stone unturned. Not just that, we scrutinize the role of US diplomats, the Western expenditure, and the potential repercussions of NATO's presence near the borders. As the conversation unfolds, you'll witness a comprehensive examination of the crisis that has gripped the world.

But we don't stop at world politics. Back home, we delve into the profound effects of Trump's presidency on the Republican Party and the changing face of American politics. We also explore the economic implications, NATO expansion, and the role of media in political divisions. As we wind up, we turn our gaze to California, discussing the challenges faced by cities like San Francisco and the potential role of immigration in rejuvenating the city. Tune in for this enlightening conversation that promises to educate, engage and entertain!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to this episode of season 4 of the Common Bridge, where policy and current events are discussed in a fiercely nonpartisan manner. The host, richard Helpe, is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and political analyst who has reached over three and a half million listeners, viewers and readers around the world. The Common Bridge is available on the Substack website and the Substack app. Just search for the Common Bridge. You can find the program on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. The Common Bridge draws guests and audiences from across the political spectrum and we invite you to become a free or paid subscriber on your favorite medium.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. We've got with us today one of our favorite returning guests, Mr Robert Greenfield. Robert, it's 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. So here we go, Robert, great to see you. Hey, good to see you. You've been on the road.

Speaker 1: 1:04

You've gone from Australia to.

Speaker 2: 1:06

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 sites. Of course, family, but also you got the Tiger's game at Camarica Park last night.

Speaker 3: 1:19

What a wonderful moment. I want to tell everybody here that there's nothing actually like your own hometown and honestly, I've been downtown Detroit now three times in the last couple of weeks. I did the Riverwalk, had lunch there, went past at Detroit Athletic Club, where both of you are our 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 Miquel Cabrera passed. One great tied another great. 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. Hey, winning 6-0, what can I say?

Speaker 2: 2:15

Every time the Tigers are winning. And you looked across the outfield and you saw Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions and the Lions, of course, last season championship in 1957. Since then they've been the same old Lions. What do you think?

Speaker 3: 2:32

Well, I've talked to a lot of people about it, no joking here. Dan Campbell, the head coach, he's a gambler, but you know it's a risk-reward situation in the NFL and 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 of a wonderful, all-time great, Matthew Stafford it's now turned out to be to their advantage. Okay, Stafford got one Super Bowl. The replacement, Jared Goff, is not a bad guy, and there's people like Aidan Hutchinson right here from University of Michigan and some others. So there's a new sense that the Detroit Lions this year are definitely going to make the playoffs. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 3:20

Well, I want to believe that. I really would love to see that happen. I think it would be great for the Lions. My good friend, Rod Wood, is the president of the Lions. 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. You know, completely out of the playoffs, make a run. I'll 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, Okay. 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. So that's how I'm going to process that same year. Yeah, an avid fair weather fan, which is a bit of an oxymoron, but that's the direction I'm going to go. But you've been traveling. Now am I correct that you actually moved from Australia to Europe?

Speaker 3: 4:14

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 and so it was good in some ways to be there during COVID. You and I discussed it last year the shortages, that basically being cut off, and maybe we'll talk about that a bit more in a bit about the COVID and post COVID times.

Speaker 3: 4:51

But 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, and 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 kind of 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, and 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 and while they are also topics in Australia Australia has 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.

Speaker 2: 6:00

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 Somiland areas, fairly far north, 68 parallel plus almost to the 69th parallel, and 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 were people that wear those for the rest of time probably, and I noticed two things.

Speaker 2: 6:38

That seemed to be a conflict is 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 and 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's lessons to be learned here and I think, given the media climate that we're in, we can't examine them. And people say that, if you believe, if one thing, like maybe the lockdowns, 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 puts you on the other side of the spectrum. But I'm hopeful the data can get out at some point.

Speaker 3: 7:30

Rich, I think you hit. The last sentence was perfect.

Speaker 2: 7:33

The data.

Speaker 3: 7:34

Okay, and let's go to the most critical one is children in schools. I think that the post-mortem from the left should be a big time there, couples, and I really believe that because if you look at everything from mental health to drug to school attendance, getting kids back to lost one, two, three years, kind of things which are going to be very difficult, if ever to, for a lot of children to be able to make up. But I think that the post-mortems really number one. I think we should focus on it by topic, okay, and I think the number one topic that everybody should focus on in this country is the children. Amen, okay. Now, whether or not you can argue about isolating nursing homes or something, did it work in New York or 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 about?

Speaker 2: 8:44

that. Well, look, I think that is. I mean the funerals, weddings, deaths, events that happened were impacted and people are now starting to think well, was that necessary? But clearly there's never was a case for closing schools. And even today you have Dr Anthony Fauci and Randy Weingarten, the head of the largest teachers union, who were staunch at the kids of closing schools, saying no, no, no. They never said that schools should be closed. And 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, just 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 and we can't get back to examining because we keep saying what about the next pandemic? I think that you know, surely there'll be one there. Maybe it might be a hundred years from now, it might be two days from now, but we've got to be better prepared and we've got to reach some kind of consensus. But listen.

Speaker 2: 9:42

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 the 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 European continent. What are you making of the Ukraine war? Where is it today and is there any hope of this ending?

Speaker 3: 10:15

Well, first thing, I'm going to start on the lighter end, right but important, which is how do 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 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 rearm 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 conducted or constructed LNG terminals, so they're not dependent any longer on Russian natural gas. So the European economy has adjusted to the Ukraine.

Speaker 3: 11:14

Russian war, russian invasion of Ukraine that to me is a very unsung, undiscussed story. You hear it a little bit on a BBC things every once in a while, but that doesn't count either, because the Brits are no longer inside Europe and 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. And so 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 you know one of the things that the military that I've learned over my lifetime is they don't learn very well. And so if you're going to have a, and 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 make go through that. We've seen a hundred movies on it. It doesn't work.

Speaker 3: 12:25

World War II, on the other hand, we saw Germany drops in parachutes down 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. So, and that's just a simple, simplistic example. So what I think is happening now this is again a critical moment for Ukraine, and that 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 the lower peninsula but Northern part they're doing bombing runs. Everybody's figured out all their you know their equipment which Howard serves to use. I think that Ukraine has got a real problem. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 13:14

Well, a first of all, I'd refer to your knowledge. I can tell you that during my time in Finland and I didn't talk to a lot of people, but 100% of the people I spoke with said they're really happy to be in NATO. And there's a saying in Finland I won't get this quite right, but the enemy may not always come from the east, because you may have flanked you, so they know that the enemy is to the east on that big border. And I asked, I said what do you think about if there's US bases start coming through Lapland and through Finland and F-35s are here? It's going to change your culture with, ultimately, there's going to be American troops on the ground there.

Speaker 2: 13:52

And also if you're Vladimir Putin and you're, if you look at the geography, there I was about 40 kilometers from the Russian border close enough, by the way, I was actually. I asked the fellow there. I said how close can you get? He goes. You can get about three kilometers, he said, but there's 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 it.

Speaker 2: 14:18

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 now I've got NATO assets within a stone's throw of my huge Navy yards, my submarines and such, I'm going to be concerned. It'd be like the Russians or the Chinese setting up in Tijuana, right, and looking at our bases in San Diego or Cuba yeah, well, we, 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, ukraine, if absent nuclear weapons could bound an offensive and pressure regime change in Moscow, that basically is guaranteed a nuclear response, and when the first one goes, they're all going and Ukraine's capitulation. Now you've got a subjugated people literally on the border with NATO countries. So I think we're in a tremendous dilemma here and I don't know, do you know enough about the Chinese and what they're trying to do in terms of brokering of an end to this?

Speaker 3: 15:30

Well, you put in a lot of things in there.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yes, sorry.

Speaker 3: 15:33

There's two parts, 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 you know I hadn't actually spoken to any. So that's, and you're absolutely right, we're mass called that stuff and obviously Putin's lost that entire idea. So he's now got a border that's really close and he's surrounded okay, north, south, and Ukraine is the sweet spot in the middle. So I think Putin is in.

Speaker 3: 16:05

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's got demographic issues, russia's got every possible thing, and John McCain made the famous thing is saying that it's nothing more than one big gas station, and so it's true that Russia has got issues. My issue with Putin is, of course, nobody is a supporter of Putin, in this country at least. If he goes, who's he replaced by? And 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 you know from Peter the Great, so-called the great right, all the way up to presence, and essentially Russia has never had a democratic government, it's never gone through that. I think there was five or six years of Yeltsin and that was about it, as he was drinking his way through his regime, right? So there's really not any history there. And the Russian people we cannot count on the Russian people to say they've had enough, they will hunker down, they will, they will gut it out and they'll wait for the next guy to come in. So I don't think that there is an easy answer.

Speaker 3: 17:26

You mentioned China. China's, of course, very interesting, and they're kind of like the I don't know the wild card, right. So 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, you know 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 well, I'm not a Chinese, china and 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 you know another X number of years at 50, 100, 200 billion dollars a year in turning up people, and forever. So somehow there needs to come to. Somebody's got to be a broker in this. Now, obviously, china is going to come in and shift it 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.

Speaker 3: 18:43

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 western end or eastern end of Russia is totally at risk. Right now. Chinese are in there building new cities. They literally are controlling everything out of the far east of Russia. So 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 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.

Speaker 2: 19:43

Well, I would hope that would be the outcome. Let me tell you, last week, when I'm in the cab going from the hotel in Helsinki to the airport and the cabbie, who is from Casablanca, had a Russian 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 III, 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 and 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 and I thought, well, that's an interesting view. And the BBC narration came in that had talked about.

Speaker 2: 20:40

This is what many of the Russian troops believe, that that's what they're fighting for is. The end game is that the United States is no more. And 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 and I got it back off. I don't know how he gets from where he's at today to some kind of back off.

Speaker 3: 21:08

My view is this, and I listened to reports, to interviews of Russian people, et cetera. What you just mentioned there is that's 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 right.

Speaker 2: 21:28

And I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm just saying this is what they're putting out.

Speaker 3: 21:31

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 is trying to come up, but they are nowhere near close. They may be close in 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.

Speaker 3: 22:00

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 sorry, 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, 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 rearming, japan is rearming, so what we're having now is a global arms race, but the US and China are the two key protagonists, not Russia.

Speaker 3: 22:48

Russia, as we've seen in Ukraine, is really a second-rate military when you've got guys that had very little training, could not only hold their own blow up the first fouries 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, because Zelensky may be the toughest guy in green t-shirts in the history of the world, but he's not going to win this war. I definitely think he's not. Putin's not going to win this war, minus in the US military doing its operation whatever they want to call it and then flying over everybody, and that's not going to happen.

Speaker 2: 23:56

This is a place that I've been in agreement with you that we are too militaristic. I believe the United States has military installations in 95 countries. Hartens back to how the Roman Empire was stretched out. We have stretched our currency so it has worked 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. And look, we just got done with the football championships, the soccer championships, where only three of the US players stood to sing their national anthem and we had lots of people say 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 and we don't have enough economic resources because we've devalued the dollar. No money, no shared purpose. That sounds to me like a defeated empire coming up.

Speaker 3: 24:55

Well, look again, you throw a lot of subjects in there.

Speaker 2: 24:59

I can't help it.

Speaker 3: 25:01

I think the let's just I would call it civics right? 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. We were now 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.

Speaker 3: 25:34

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 a word piss them off. You know, use those words Now. Donald Trump is excellent at it. Ron DeSantis is not Okay. 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.

Speaker 2: 26:17

Part of it is. This is that Ron DeSantis does talk about those things and does talk policy wants, 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, and 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 developed, well developed elitism. They really don't even see it in themselves. But again, prototypical would be raised in the East Coast, went to a New York school, went to Washington, worked in Washington, got the bug. They're there, they're surrounded by people exchanging conventional wisdom and they don't manufacture anything, they don't grow anything, yet they think they're bad at it. And 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.

Speaker 3: 27:23

I think you're right, because I had moved decidedly from the left towards the middle. I call myself Senator Left. Now I think that the in particular, washington, okay, and New York, but Washington in particular, if you listen to all the media, the pundits, everybody else, they're all. And I'm going to use a Joy Reid example, okay, which I'm sure you'll be happy with. Joy Reid is on MSNBC.

Speaker 3: 27:47

I was watching last week as Trump was indicted in Washington DC. She was doing her little personal history on January 6th and she said well, if nobody knows, she's a black woman who was, 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 you know, all day long all we could think about was were they going to smash into the black history museum? I'm like what US Capitol was being. And she went on in great detail about the Black History Museum and I'm thinking are we this off on the topic here where we're supposed to be, about Trump? A conspiracy, yes or no?

Speaker 2: 28:43

right, but let me play off that a little bit. Robert, you mentioned civics, three co-equal branches of government, and we've had this constant drumbeat, or a drip, 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, last two Democratic presidents, in Barack Obama and in Joe Biden. Now, of course, our current vice president of course got a discount. That gets you just crazy things all the time.

Speaker 3: 29:09

But we call it inappropriate.

Speaker 2: 29:12

Well, it's word sound.

Speaker 3: 29:13

You're inappropriate laugh.

Speaker 2: 29:14

Yeah, I'm not going to make a joke about who's cocaine was, I'm not going to do that. 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 is 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 viewership, listenership and readership 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.

Speaker 3: 30:25

Well, that leads me to. Well, first of all, I understand that, and I think just yesterday, amy Coney-Darrott and Justice Roberts Chief Justice Roberts voted with the three liberals on ghost guns. Okay, so that's not all one side or one side of the other. There is some in between. So I think the liberals may have a point on 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.

Speaker 3: 31:02

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, in his life story. But looking at it just from the broader context, my view is that all of the kind of jury selection is now. It's almost like you're 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.

Speaker 3: 31:40

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 all got all these sycophants all running around talking about things in Congress. We don't have a Congress that is, you know, center left and center right. We have a Congress that is extremes on the end. Now Biden managed to get some bipartisan stuff through infrastructure chips, a few other things where everybody said, yeah, we need to do those, you know kind of thing. But we are to polarized and if you're to polarized at the congressional level, what you end up having is polarized districts and then you end up having as polarized judges and you end up having as 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. We need to start talking about basic patriotism, basic civics, basic things about what it is to be an American, and stop the arguing on both sides. It does not serve us well.

Speaker 2: 32:43

Well, the contest is between two entrenched parties, and when you get their idea that hey, wait, we're here and we're here forever Democrats, republicans, and 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, a political party or no political party is probably a good idea. We need a thought of revolution. That to me seems to be our best opportunity, don't?

Speaker 3: 33:21

you think? Let me ask you a question. You're here all the time. All I hear is independents are growing, growing, growing and the parties are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 33:29

That is absolutely what's happening, but there's no voice for independent, 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 will say well, you must be in the camp of Donald Trump, and 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.

Speaker 2: 34:14

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 that'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, and 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, and that's. I think we're in a very dangerous place right now.

Speaker 3: 34:46

Well, you're think about this.

Speaker 2: 34:47

Let me just, let me just fill this out Sure.

Speaker 2: 34:49

Sure, think if the Democrats had said you know what? We screwed up. We nominated Hillary, 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 to 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 an 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 independence.

Speaker 3: 35:50

So again, you're so good at doing these things. My feeling is we 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 disruptor. If you want to talk about disrupting technology, donald Trump is the great.

Speaker 2: 36:10

Wait a minute, donald Trump is a technology.

Speaker 3: 36:12

No, no, no. Can I take a breath? I'm going to take a breath.

Speaker 3: 36:14

You're like a technology when you have a disruptor, you don't know exactly where it's going to go right, you don't know what it's going to wipe out. Brian talked earlier about print business, right, nobody knew exactly. He was smart, he got, he figured that one out pretty early. Good for him, but a lot of people didn't figure it out right. So what I think with Donald Trump is we look at him as the great disruptor. That's fine. The question is where is Donald Trump take? To me, the biggest question is which way is he taking the Republican Party? I've been listening to some very I know the answer to that Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 36:56

Okay, and I can say it like this, because it's my show taking them down the shitter. Okay, that's where he's taking them. I know, I know.

Speaker 3: 37:05

You like to talk about data? Okay. 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 right Kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 37:29

What is happening to state parties? Well, you can say well, independence. But actually what my understanding is and you'd know this because your person is quite successful with your career is 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 packs, super packs. 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 came where the candidates come. They're not coming from there anymore. People basically do their own thing, raise their own money.

Speaker 3: 38:08

Look at, the best example I can give you is Kent in Georgia. Kent refused to show up to the Republican State Party convention, went out and kicked state state C Abrams bum. Okay, 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, you know, a 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 with the same way that he's doing and the media throwing it in, you know, and making him in bigger and bigger kind of thing? Has he damaged the Republican Party at the state level significantly?

Speaker 2: 38:59

Absolutely, and 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 to where he thought he could win, and so today, though, what has happened is that the media complex is. Well, that's what Republicans are, and the Republicans that we used to have the Mitt Romney Republicans, the George Bush is the wing of the party that said look, we're going to work with the other side, we're going to. It's going to be strong defense, it's going to be a 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? There are no place and I do play that at the feet of Donald Trump. I actually said, back in 15, I said the only good thing about Trump being nominated is he'll 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 100% 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 F in front, we got to do something different. They bring out the most establishment guy with all the baggage. He's got no longer in his prime and that's what we get served up with and then let's play.

Speaker 2: 40:20

I would contend with you, as this didn't start with Donald Trump at all. No, trump, there's a popular that it was Tea Party, whatever Unresponsiveness of government, people feeling that they are no longer represented, and you have this false populist and Donald Trump. Had the I think the chips been just 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 would have won had Sanders been that. And again, 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.

Speaker 3: 41:19

You know the 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, but which, by the way, gave us a downgrade. Thanks a lot, fitch and the other guys that also downgraded it yesterday.

Speaker 2: 41:36

I don't know if it was Moody's or someone else. It was Moody's, yeah.

Speaker 3: 41:38

So we're. 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.

Speaker 3: 42:00

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 tears according to your skill, and you know, a carpenter doesn't make the same thing as the McDonald's kit. Okay, kind of thing. That's what they do in Australia. It essentially eliminated, along with OSHA, okay, which can stop, you know, abuses and those kind of things. It eliminated a lot of the need for unions.

Speaker 3: 42:31

What we end up doing is we are working on a paradigm in this country that is outdated. The rest of the world hasn't moved on. You can argue about socialist capitalism of Finland, or you know the Scandinavian countries, the Scandos, right, kind of thing, or you can argue about it. You know 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. And so not only is Joe Biden standing up there and saying unions, which is a lot of people say, yeah, good, but what does that mean exactly? You talked about the. I'm sorry, I'm getting off message.

Speaker 2: 43:07

This is great, oh, I you know we talked about the teachers.

Speaker 3: 43:10

Okay, I personally feel that the teachers unions in the United States and I listen to them all the time, you know, and I watch the kind of things they say you know moms are no longer moms, you know they're birth persons. Right, 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 teacher's 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. Well, mommy's not here. Birth person is picking you up. You know, 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 close it down because they have their own health concerns. Well, you know, 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 I don't know exercise class. I know I'm going to be criticized for this.

Speaker 2: 44:06

It's a great trouble now.

Speaker 3: 44:08

But the bottom line was that teachers union did not help solve that problem. They doubled down, doubled down, doubled down. So go back to the overall union picture. Yes, it worked with UPS recently. Okay, ups drivers got it, we're a service economy. No, it's not working with UAW right now.

Speaker 3: 44:27

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 and this old kind of strategy of balkanizing and then somehow cobbling things together, my view is this if we paid people and we're moving that way, by the way, the states are moving that way and players are moving that way because they have to right but 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 unions. Now, that's an anathema for people on the left. I know I'll be criticized, but I know countries that it works that don't have unions and they have high wages and they have high happiness levels and satisfaction, and the Scandinavian's are number one.

Speaker 2: 45:19

Indeed Well, just having returned from Finland and talked with a lot of people there because Finns, we all like to talk a lot Everybody is kind of got the same standard of living and this is the important part and no one resents somebody making an enterprise and doing really, really well, and there's a fellow that's done something that's like a kin to Walmart and nice 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, and 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, is a key role with that, and later today and it'll be actually published before this comes out I'll be talking with Greg Jibara about the strike in Hollywood and what does labor do in the presence of artificial intelligence?

Speaker 2: 46:15

So getting a economy where everybody has a chance and where there's housing and 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 the repurposing 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.

Speaker 3: 47:12

Yeah, I think the we never talked about immigration, which is the number one issue, but number in that top five has got to be housing in the United States, anywhere in the world, but definitely in the United States, and 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 and 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 horrific, has been through renewables. So what's happened in a lot of places that the market responds? The market actually says, well, we may be doing West Texas crude and we're still pumping away, but these summers are now. We don't have to talk about climate change. We got to react to climate change and where the reacting is is through wind and through solar.

Speaker 3: 48:18

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, right, and energy costs in particular, not just water, but energy costs, and I find it that I'm not like a 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, and 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, well, what can we do here to make sure that our energy system doesn't collapse? This?

Speaker 2: 49:14

year.

Speaker 3: 49:15

Again, yeah, again, exactly, and look how fast they did that.

Speaker 2: 49:19

Well, California's issues are solvable if there's political will. And I just think if they cut their marginal state income tax in half, people would pivot and go back in there 13.3 at the top yeah indeed, and they're wondering why people are leaving in mass. One of the other issues that we have is in the cities, and since we're talking about California, I mean it's not specific to California, it's just crime.

Speaker 3: 49:44

San Francisco.

Speaker 2: 49:45

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. There are many years.

Speaker 3: 49:54

You've lived there.

Speaker 2: 49:55

Okay, so you know what 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.

Speaker 3: 50:10

Okay, so I wrote a recent answer on my blog. Thing that I do is San Francisco, the new Detroit.

Speaker 2: 50:19

Okay, Needless to say I got it Detroit's on the way. Detroit doesn't have half the problem.

Speaker 3: 50:25

Yeah, I got it. I got a bit. Detroit's on the way up, push back of that one, but I'm trying to draw a focus and by the way, detroiters this is Robert Greenfield will give you his license plate number.

Speaker 2: 50:37

I'm just kidding.

Speaker 3: 50:38

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 is the poster child for leadership, the transition leadership which was Black leadership that was not prepared to run a major city and over time it ran down as people abandoned as they moved to the outer suburbs. Oakland in particular was taking a lot of business. The big three pulled out of Detroit. So Detroit is the is.

Speaker 3: 51:22

When you look at something and say if you start losing population, what's left behind and what's left behind quite often is not paying their taxes, they're not highly educated. It's not an auger kind of thing. Look at San Francisco. It's a different problem. But my point is that Detroit may do some good things on the downtown but they don't have the people. There's not a population based 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 old new Guatemala city or something that kind of thing. Detroit's got to repopulate or it cannot survive as even a mid-sized city.

Speaker 3: 52:06

San Francisco has a stupid problem, okay, 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?

Speaker 3: 52:27

Okay, 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 deal. He looked at Silicon Valley and coveted all those companies, got him 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, $400,000 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 90, this is their number $90,000 per homeless person. Okay, and they're still homeless. So nothing is working right in San Francisco. Then comes the tech fallout in COVID. Nobody wants to go back to the office. A lot of those people moved to.

Speaker 3: 53:28

Texas. They're hanging out in Austin, going to you know those nice concerts, or they may move anywhere in the country to be able to do that and 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 33% vacancy rate. You've got horrible stories where people have little shops, you know, and then there's there are people defecating outside. They've got the tents everywhere. They got the shootup thing in Tenderloin. Everything that you could possibly do wrong is being done in San Francisco and 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. It's. They have the money, they have a beautiful place. Everybody wants to go visit San Francisco, but they, they managed to push it into a very dire situation and they're not changing.

Speaker 2: 54:25

Well, this is the thing that's astonishing. So you mentioned the defecation of 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, and 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. That was the actual policy response. Talk 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.

Speaker 2: 55:04

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, so you have to go into shelter, you have to get with 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.

Speaker 4: 55:42

And 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 in. He always drops into the studio in Ann Arbor depending on where he is around the world, and we love having him in. So this is the end of part one. Join us next week on episode 222 for part two of Rich's Conversation with Robert Greenfield.

Speaker 1: 56:04

Thanks, for joining us on the Common Bridge. Subscribe to the Common Bridge on Substackcom or use their Substack app, where you can find more interviews, columns, videos and nonpartisan discussions of the day. Just search for the Common Bridge. You can also find the Common Bridge on Mission Control Radio on your Radiogarden app.