Podcasts about Brussels

A panel of federal judges ruled on Wednesday that many of President Trump's tariffs were illegal, a decision that has threatened to derail his trade agenda.Victor Schwartz, the wine importer at the center of the case, explains why he decided to take on the president, and Jeanna Smialek, the Brussels bureau chief for The Times, discusses what options Mr. Trump has to save his trade war.Guest:Victor Schwartz, a small wine importer and the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Mr. Trump's tariffs.Jeanna Smialek, the Brussels bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: The U.S. Court of International Trade said Mr. Trump had overstepped his authority in imposing his “reciprocal” tariffs globally.An appeals court spared the tariffs while it considered the challenge.From March: Wine businesses were struck with fears of disaster under the threat of huge tariffs.For more information on today's episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A.M. Edition for May 27. President Trump gives the European Union a reprieve on his threat to impose 50% tariffs on June 1 if a trade deal isn't reached. The WSJ's Kim Mackrael in Brussels talks us through the negotiations. Plus, Trump weighs sanctions against Russia as Moscow pummels Ukraine with drones and missiles. And Canada's new leader Mark Carney takes up the task of fixing the country's relationship with Trump. Former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson previews King Charles's historic speech at the opening of parliament. Azhar Sukri hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As President Donald Trump threatens tariffs, Brussels is also worrying about Washington using sanctions against it. In this episode of The Big View podcast, Agathe Demarais of the European Council on Foreign Relations talks about how the bloc should deploy its own weapons. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. 

1. Crucify (1 August 2008 - Dranouter, BEL) 2. Butterfly (13 October 2001 - Philadelphia, PA) 3. Marianne (21 July 1996 - Portland, OR) 4. Take to the Sky (12 June 2005 - Brussels, BEL) 5. Bachelorette (31 May 2014 - Zurich, SWI) 6. Suede (17 November 2017 - Austin, TX) 7. Professional Widow (29 October 1999 - London, ENG) 8. Beauty of Speed (14 July 2010 - Zurich, SWI) 9. Barons of Suburbia (17 September 2005 - Los Angeles, CA) 10. Roosterspur Bridge (10 March 2013 - Caprices, SWI) 11. Improv (16 November 2002 - Wallingford, CT) 12. Mad World (2 September 2005 - Austin, TX) 13. A Case of You (29 July 1994 - Raleigh, NC) 14. Spring Haze (6 October 2001 - Washington, DC) 15. Girl (29 November 2107 - Mesa, AZ) 16. A Sorta Fairytale (27 September 2017 - Essen, GER) 17. In Your Room (5 August 2014 - Chicago, IL)

APAC stocks were mostly in the green albeit with gains in the region capped following the indecisive performance stateside.US President Trump and Chinese President Xi have not spoken since the Geneva agreement, according to CNN.US President Trump is pushing the EU to cut tariffs or face extra duties with US negotiators to tell Brussels they expect unilateral concessions, according to FT.European equity futures indicate a mildly positive cash market open with Euro Stoxx 50 futures up 0.2% after the cash market closed with losses of 0.6% on Thursday.Looking ahead, highlights include German GDP, UK Retail Sales, EZ Negotiated Wage Rates, Canadian Retail Sales, Speakers including ECB's Lane & Schnabel, BoE's Pill, Fed's Musalem & Cook.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

US President Trump is pushing the EU to cut tariffs or face extra duties with US negotiators to tell Brussels they expect unilateral concessions, according to FT.European and US equity futures are trading mixed and generally reside on either side of the unchanged mark.USD shunned once again after Thursday's attempted bounce; JPY benefits from hot core inflation data overnight; GBP little moved to firmer-than-expected Retail Sales.Bonds are higher as USTs look to claw back recent losses; some downside in Bunds following German GDP but proved fleeting.Crude remains subdued whilst metals benefit from the softer Dollar ahead of US-Iran talks at 12:00 BST / 07:00 EDT.Looking ahead, Canadian Retail Sales, Speakers including ECB's Schnabel, BoE's Pill, Fed's Musalem & Cook.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

This is the audio from a video we have just published on our YouTube channel – an interview with David Frost. To make sure you never miss great content like this, subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/@spiked  Keir Starmer's ‘Brexit reset' is a comprehensive betrayal of the Leave vote. That's the verdict of Lord Frost, former chief Brexit negotiator for Boris Johnson. Here, he tells spiked why this is such a bad deal for Britain. Frost slams Starmer for handing control over food, fishing, energy and more to Brussels, and for so little in return. This surrender to the EU, he warns, is dangerous for democracy, sovereignty and the UK economy. 

"There's no other place on the planet where you can get together with owners of these communications companies and talk turkey." — Joe Marion, President, Cloud Communications Alliance As global tensions reshape the telecom landscape, the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA) is assembling top leaders for its 2025 CCA European Summit in Zaventem, near Brussels, on June 16–17. In a conversation with Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, CCA President Joe Marion offered a detailed preview of the timely and high-level agenda that will bring together executives, analysts, and policy experts for frank dialogue and strategic planning. With the theme "Navigating the Geopolitical and Economic Crossfire," this intimate 75-person summit is designed for C-level executives and decision-makers. Marion emphasized the event's relevance to both European and North American providers: "There are no walls in communications," he said, noting how cross-border policy changes, tariffs, and credit issues are affecting providers globally. Key Highlights of the Agenda: Opening Remarks by Maheen Khan, Economics Editor at The Times (London), on global polarization. Market Impact Session by Matt Townend of Cavell on the shockwaves facing European communication providers. Special Presentation from Zoom, the event's Gold Sponsor, featuring a yet-to-be-announced product update. Keynote by His Excellency Herman Van Rompuy, former Prime Minister of Belgium and first President of the European Council. Industry Insights from Dave Michels, Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz. Presentation by Destiny CEO Daan De Wever, on growing a pan-European telecom powerhouse. Panel Discussions on AI Adoption, Industry Disruption, and Strategic Partnerships. Marion noted that the conference has been designed by European members, for European members, ensuring relevance on topics such as tariffs, trade barriers, and innovation gaps between the U.S. and Europe—particularly in mobile and AI. “This isn't a trade show,” Marion stressed. “It's where real conversations happen—where partnerships are formed, deals are made, and innovation is shared.” Attendees can expect meaningful networking in a close-knit environment that fosters transparent exchange, away from the sales pitches and crowds of conventional events. Event Details: Dinner Kickoff: Evening of June 16 Main Event: June 17 at Destiny headquarters in Zaventem, near Brussels Airport Registration: cloudcommunications.com/EC25 Limited Seating: Only 90 seats available; over half are already sold. Doug Green concluded the podcast by urging attendees from across the globe to take part: “If you're in the business of communications, this is where you want to be.” For more information and to register, visit: https://www.cloudcommunications.com/events/eu-summit-2025

Preview Colleague Liz Peek reports that consumer sentiment of inflation and the economy recovered quickly from the April shocks... More later. 1884 BRUSSELS

 In this powerful episode of the Finding Harmony Podcast, Harmony Slater sits down with Ramona Rouhdoust, a healer, teacher, and founder of Let's Yoga Shiatsu. Ramona shares her incredible journey from her early life in Iran to her transition from a career in biopharmaceutical research to becoming a spiritual teacher and healer. Ramona discusses the pivotal moment when she left her high-powered job to pursue healing practices like Shiatsu, yoga, and breathwork—ultimately creating a life of deep presence, purpose, and peace. She opens up about the transformative power of breath, her connection to energy healing, and the profound impact of spiritual practices like meditation, pranayama, and spinal energetics. This episode is a deep dive into how energy healing, yoga, pranayama, and spinal energetics can help us reconnect with our bodies, calm our nervous systems, and rediscover a sense of inner sanctuary, no matter how chaotic life may become. In This Episode, You'll Learn: How Ramona's journey from science to spirituality transformed her life The impact of breathwork, pranayama, and Shiatsu on healing Why energy healing can be a powerful tool for personal growth The importance of balance between Yin and Yang practices How yoga and meditation can support nervous system regulation The role of presence and stillness in spiritual transformation Links Mentioned: Ramona Rouhdoust's Website: https://www.ramonarouhdoust.com Ramona's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lets_yoga_shiatsu_brussels/ Ramona's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/letsyoga.info/ Ramona's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RamonaRouhdoust Ramona's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramona-rouhdoust-15843a1/ Join Harmony in Brussels:  https://www.lets-yoga.info/workshops2025-1  Harmony will be teaching a 4-day immersion in Brussels, Belgium, from October 16-19. Explore pranayama, energy healing, and somatic practices with Harmony in person. FIND Harmony: https://harmonyslater.com/

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The Tories have fallen to fourth place in the latest Times/YouGov poll - behind the Liberal Democrats for the first time in six years. Plus, Keir Starmer might've landed his EU reset deal, but Boris Johnson has labelled him the 'orange-ball chewing gimp of Brussels'.Hugo Rifkind unpacks the politics of the day with Janice Turner and James Marriott. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this punchy episode of Mark and Pete, we tackle three explosive issues shaping the UK today. First, we dive into the shocking statistic that 1 in 10 Britons have no savings, revealing the fragile state of personal finance and what it means for national resilience. With household budgets tighter than ever, are we heading for a savings crisis? Next, we commemorate and critique the legacy of Margaret Thatcher as her 100th birthday is marked with celebratory events in Grantham. Love her or loathe her, the Iron Lady remains one of Britain's most divisive political figures. We explore how Thatcherism reshaped the UK—and whether the celebration is deserved or divisive. Finally, we cast our nets into the stormy waters of the UK-EU fishing rights dispute. With the Brexit fishing deal expiring soon, tensions rise over quotas, sovereignty, and national identity. Will British fishermen be left high and dry while Brussels demands more access? As always, Mark and Pete bring wit, wisdom, and a splash of theological insight to today's most pressing issues. Subscribe now and join the debate.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mark-and-pete--1245374/support.

On Nick Ferrari at Breakfast.Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has branded Sir Kier Starmer the 'manacled gimp of Brussels,' over the Brexit reset deal. Nick is joined by Shadow Foreign Secretary, Dame Priti Patel. The UK, France and Canada have threatened action against Israel over Gaza in a joint statement.A couple in Winchester have been awarded damages by the High Court after footballs were repeatedly kicked over their garden fence. All of this and more on Nick Ferrari - The Whole Show Podcast.

Tune in to the latest episode of our EUnpacked podcast series in which we try to untangle the famous or rather infamous ‘Omnibus I' package unveiled by the European Commission on 26 February this year. The proposal aims to simplify ESG reporting and due diligence obligations, responding to new political and geopolitical imperatives pushing a simplification and burden-reduction drive to boost the EU's competitiveness. Podcast host and Head of the Freshfields EU Regulatory & Public Affairs Team Natalie Pettinger Kearney is joined by Léa Bareil, ESG lead in the Brussels public affairs team together with Juliane Hilf and Vanessa Jakovich, both partners in the firm's leading ESG regulatory practice.

Why This Episode Is a Must-Listen In an era where philanthropy is rapidly evolving—spanning from billion-dollar foundations to viral crowdfunding and crypto donations—how can we ensure our giving actually makes a difference? This episode of Inspired Money brings together an expert panel of changemakers to reveal how generosity can be smarter, more inclusive, and more impactful. Whether you're a business leader aligning profit with purpose, a non-profit professional seeking fresh strategies, or someone passionate about making a difference, this discussion spotlights actionable ways to maximize your impact. Meet the Expert Panelists Jacob Harold is a social change strategist and author of The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact. He is the former President & CEO of GuideStar, co-founder of Candid and Project Starling, a Planetary Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and Senior Advisor at Rewiring America, with a career spanning philanthropy, nonprofit innovation, and climate advocacy. www.craftingimpact.org Jamie Minden is the Executive Director at Zero Hour, a youth-led climate justice organization mobilizing communities to take action against the climate crisis. A seasoned organizer since age 13, she has led efforts with Sunrise Movement Silicon Valley, Fridays For Future D.C., and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, bringing powerful grassroots strategy and storytelling shaped by her firsthand experience with California's climate disasters. https://thisiszerohour.org Bruno Fierens is a fifth-generation member of a wealthy Belgian family and the first Belgian member of Millionaires for Humanity, an organization advocating for fairer taxation and a more just global system. Reflecting on issues like sustainability, the fight against poverty, his privileged position in society and his experiences with philanthropy, kept leading him to the same conclusion: “if someone like me is really serious about changing things for the better, fairer taxation is the core issue to act on”. He is a media trainer and former spokesperson based in Brussels and holds master's degrees in political science and communication. www.brunofierensmediatraining.be https://millionairesforhumanity.org Key Highlights 1. Philanthropy: More Than Writing Checks Jacob Harold emphasizes that strategic philanthropy requires more than reacting to symptoms; it's about “thinking structures, long-term impact, and tapping into a toolbox of solutions—from data to community organizing to storytelling.” He challenges us to ask: Are we using all the tools available, and are we learning as we give? 2. Tackling Systemic Issues Over Band-Aid Solutions Bruno Fierens shares his journey—including tangible success and frustration—supporting homeless initiatives in Brussels. His perspective: “Philanthropy is amazing and needed, but it's almost always going to work on symptoms—not enough on structural issues.” Bruno argues for systemic approaches like fair taxation alongside charitable giving. 3. Youth-Driven Action for Climate Solutions Jamie Minden highlights how today's young leaders, born into the climate crisis, are pushing philanthropy toward supporting community-driven and policy-level change. She shares, “Investing in grassroots organizations addressing policy and social change right now is vital if we want to turn the tide on climate.” 4. The Power—and Perils—of Modern Giving Platforms Panelists discuss the transformative role of technology: from social media amplifying grassroots movements to the promise (and pitfalls) of AI and blockchain in making data-driven giving decisions. Caution is raised to prioritize ethical philanthropy that elevates community needs over donor preferences, to avoid what's described as “philanthropic colonialism.” Call-to-Action

1. Professional Widow (23 August 2003 - Wantagh, NY) 2. Cruel (14 September 1999 - Cincinatti, OH) 3. Caught A Lite Sneeze (7 December 2007 - Oakland, CA) 4. Jam Band Intro (7 June 2022 - Portland, OR) / Addition of Light Divided (8 June 2022 - Vancouver, BC) 5. 1000 Oceans (11 September 2009 - London, ENG) 6. Father Lucifer (29 September 1999 - Dallas, TX) 7. Happy Phantom (7 April 1994 - Amsterdam, HOL) 8. Maybe California (8 April 2009 - Milwaukee, WI) 9. Here. In My Head (29 August 1992 - Seattle, WA) 10. Floating City (21 July 2014 - Oakland, CA) 11. Devil's Bane (1 May 2022 - Austin, TX) 12. Hoochie Woman (28 November 2007 - Denver, CO) 13. Purple People (1 December 2002 - Milwaukee, WI) 14. iieee (17 November 1998 - Lowell, MA) 15. Rattlesnakes (13 December 2007 - Santa Barbara, CA) 16. Wednesday (5 April 2023 - Brussels, BEL) 17. Cornflake Girl (28 August 1998 - Kansas City, MO) 18. Precious Things (17 August 2003 - Rochester, NY) 19. Body and Soul / Personal Jesus (27 March 2023 - 20. Take to the Sky (24 May 2022 - Cincinatti, OH) 21. She's Your Cocaine (15 July 1998 - Milwaukee, WI) 22. Raspberry Swirl (10 September 2009 - London, ENG)

Vine sfârșitul lumii sau sfârșitul sfârșitului lumii, ce spuneți? Ca în fiecare episod, am ajuns la numărul 30, Radu Naum și Cătălin Striblea se situează de-o parte și de alta a baricadei și își susțin cu argumente pozițiile luate. Și nu se ceartă, doar se lasă purtați de val… uneori. Așteptăm în comentarii părerile voastre. Vine Simion, vine sfârșitul lumii?  07:05 Vine Simion, vine sfârșitul lumii? 10:25 Pregătește-te pentru ce va fi mai rău, inclusiv pentru tine, care ai votat pentru sfârșitul lumii 11:47 Ce înseamnă sfârșitul lumii  16:40 Îmbogățirea unei clase 20:00 Ne lipsește disciplina 25:55 Clasa politică în ultimii 30 de ani 33:44 1 iunie 2025, moment hotărâtor 41:50 Care este numele unei echipe de handbal nou promovate în Liga Florilor 45:05 Ce mă fac eu cu voi? 47:53 Brussels și nu Bruxelles 51:30 Negocieri Georgescu - Simion 58:30 Începutul unei noi societăți 1:03:03 Suntem o societate neterminată

Scotland in Europe:  Our journey to the European Parliament! In this special episode of our podcast, Indypodcasters Fiona and Marlene share our exciting journey to Brussels where they joined a delegation organised by campaign groups Yes for EU and Europe for Scotland.   Our mission? To promote Scotland's place in Europe and meet with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs ) in support of an independent Scotland rejoining the EU. From behind the scenes moments to exclusive MEP interviews, this episdoe captures the warm welcome and strong support we received in the heart of the EU.  Our trip was not only inspiring for all the delegates but also formed part of the  Europe Day celebrations on May 9th with footage featured in an event held in Edinburgh and also livestreamed.  Key chapters: 00:00:21   Arriving in Brussels 00:02:53   Elise Tallaron, Heather Anderson, Alyn Smith and Marlene Halliday share their hopes for the visit 00:06:27   Emotional arrival at the European Parliament 00:11:48   Inside the Parliament 00:13:40   A message from Thomas Waitz MEP 00:18:15   Fiona and Marlene go exploring 00:20:47    Elise  introduces her team 00:21:33    A message from Vicent Marza Ibanez MEP 00:23:46    A glimpse of the debating chamber 00:24:38    A message from Olga Perez Vitoria, EFA Advisor 00:28:55    A chat with Hana from Coppieters Foundation 00:32:30    A message to our young people from Rina Hajdari and Charlotte Bechert 00:37:57   A message from Valentina Servera Clavell, EFA Campaigns 00:41:27   End of the day reflections from Heather Anderson and Alyn Smith 00:44:53   A message from Terry Reintke, MEP 00:46:19    Europe Day event excerpt from Q and A session Watch the video version of this podcast here: https://youtu.be/4L8rWoGFeJc?si=zpYPE61Kv-nDrbtC Watch the Europe Day event here: https://www.youtube.com/live/QoCJN_b5RDA?si=aiwUlBAelhQhAVCw #scotlandineurope #grassroots #scottishpolitics The Scottish Independence Podcasts team produce a NEW podcast episode every Friday search for Scottish Independence Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.  Remember to like and subscribe! Contact Us: indypodcasters@gmail.com  Visit our website https://scottishindypod.scot for blogposts, newsletter signup and more episodes Subscribe for free to our Youtube channel @scottishindypodExtra for more of our video footage and clips.  video premieres most Tuesdays at 8pm If you've enjoyed this podcast you might like to buy us a coffee?  https://ko-fi.com/scottishindependencepodcasts or choose us as your Easyfundraising good cause. Music: Inspired by Kevin MacLeod

The European Union isn't just complicit in the U.S. empire — it's helping drive it. In this episode of Dispatches, Rania Khalek speaks with Marc Botenga, a Belgian Member of the European Parliament with the Workers' Party of Belgium, about how Europe became a willing footsoldier for NATO's wars, U.S. economic domination, and Israel's genocide in Gaza.Botenga doesn't mince words. He calls Europe's role in Gaza a European genocide. He explains why supporting peace in Ukraine is taboo, how censorship is expanding under the pretext of fighting antisemitism, and why some of the European left is drifting into militarism.As one of the only anti-imperialist voices in Brussels, Botenga breaks down what it means to resist from within the halls of EU power, how “green colonialism” is dressed up as climate policy, and why hope, and international solidarity, still matter.Watch the full interview and support independent journalism: https://www.patreon.com/BreakthroughNews 

Michéal Lehane, Political Correspondent, discusses Tánaiste Simon Harris' trip to Brussels and other political issues.

EU: JUDY DEMPSEY, SENIOR SCHOLAR, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE IN BERLIN. 1914 BRUSSELS

Global stocks surged after the US and China slashed tariffs for 90 days, and Brussels is preparing to use capital controls and tariffs against Russia. Plus, OpenAI and Microsoft are rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation. Mentioned in this podcast:Who blinked first? How the US and China broke their trade deadlockWall Street stocks soar on US-China tariff reprieveEU readies capital controls and tariffs to safeguard Russia sanctionsOpenAI negotiates with Microsoft to unlock new funding and future IPOToday's FT News Briefing was produced by Fiona Symon, Sonja Hutson, Kasia Broussalian, Ethan Plotkin, Lulu Smyth, and Marc Filippino. Additional help from Simon Panayi, Breen Turner, Sam Giovinco, Peter Barber, Michael Lello, David da Silva and Gavin Kallmann. Topher Forhecz is the FT's executive producer. The FT's global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. The show's theme song is by Metaphor Music.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Romania's annulled election – and the repeat. Academic and housing activist Enikő Vincze talks to Alex about why December 2024's election result was annulled, and how Romanian politics is following the script of European politics: lawfare, misinformation, techno-populism, and "sovereigntists" who provide the same neoliberal solutions. Who are the contenders in the May 2025 election and what do they represent? To what extent do Simion and AUR represent an 'anti-system' candidacy? How do they compare to other European radical rightists? Is Romanian politics really torn between Brussels and Moscow, or is something else at play? How is the Ukraine War, and EU militarisation, playing out in Romania? Why does the Right's promise of sovereignty only provide new capitalist alternatives to neoliberal globalism? What is the state of the Left and of struggles over housing in Romania? Links: Romanian elections and the agony of neoliberalism: militarization and austerity, with or without “sovereigntists”, Enikő Vincze, Internationalist Standpoint Fractured Romania, Costi Rogozanu, Sidecar Romania Redivivus, Alexander Clapp, New Left Review  

So even the people that follow the topic closely are stunned by the digital landscape that engulfs our children, how quickly it evolves, and the potential social cost. Two people in a unique position to explain all this are our guest today, Jeffrey Chester and Kathryn Montgomery, both from the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff is executive director of the Center, and Kathryn is its research director and senior strategist, as well as professor emerita of communication at American University. Jeff and Kathryn have been pioneers in this work and have been uniquely strong voices for protecting children. Interview Summary Let me congratulate the two of you for being way ahead of your time. I mean the two of you through your research and your advocacy and your organizational work, you were onto these things way before most people were. I'm really happy that you're joining us today, and welcome to our podcast. Kathryn, let me begin with you. So why be concerned about this digital landscape? Kathryn - Well, certainly if we're talking about children and youth, we have to pay attention to the world they live in. And it's a digital world as I think any parent knows, and everybody knows. In fact, for all of us, we're living in a digital world. So young people are living their lives online. They're using mobile phones and mobile devices all the time. They're doing online video streaming. They form their communications with their peers online. Their entire lives are completely integrated into this digital media landscape, and we must understand it. Certainly, the food and beverage industry understand it very well. And they have figured out enormously powerful ways to reach and engage young people through these digital media. You know, the extent of the kids' connection to this is really remarkable. I just finished a few minutes ago recording a podcast with two people involved with the Children and Screens organization. And, Chris Perry, who's the executive director of that organization and Dmitri Christakis who was with us as well, were saying that kids sometimes check their digital media 300 times a day. I mean, just unbelievable how much of this there is. There's a lot of reasons to be concerned. Let's turn our attention to how bad it is, what companies are doing, and what might be done about it. So, Jeff, tell us if you would, about the work of the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff - Well, for more than a quarter of a century, we have tracked the digital marketplace. As you said at the top, we understood in the early 1990s that the internet, broadband what's become today's digital environment, was going to be the dominant communications system. And it required public interest rules and policies and safeguards. So as a result, one of the things that our Center does is we look at the entire digital landscape as best as we can, especially what the ultra-processed food companies are doing, but including Google and Meta and Amazon and GenAI companies. We are tracking what they're doing, how they're creating the advertising, what their data strategies are, what their political activities are in the United States and in many other places in the world. Because the only way we're going to hold them accountable is if we know what they're doing and what they intend to do. And just to quickly follow up, Kelly, the marketers call today's global generation of young people Generation Alpha. Meaning that they are the first generation to be born into this complete digital landscape environment that we have created. And they have developed a host of strategies to target children at the earliest ages to take advantage of the fact that they're growing up digitally. Boy, pretty amazing - Generation Alpha. Kathryn, I have kind of a niche question I'd like to ask you because it pertains to my own career as well. So, you spent many years as an academic studying and writing about these issues, but also you were a strong advocacy voice. How did you go about balancing the research and the objectivity of an academic with advocacy you were doing? Kathryn - I think it really is rooted in my fundamental set of values about what it means to be an academic. And I feel very strongly and believe very strongly that all of us have a moral and ethical responsibility to the public. That the work we do should really, as I always have told my students, try to make the world a better place. It may seem idealistic, but I think it is what our responsibility is. And I've certainly been influenced in my own education by public scholars over the years who have played that very, very important role. It couldn't be more important today than it has been over the years. And I think particularly if you're talking about public health, I don't think you can be neutral. You can have systematic ways of assessing the impact of food marketing, in this case on young people. But I don't think you can be totally objective and neutral about the need to improve the public health of our citizens. And particularly the public health of our young people. I agree totally with that. Jeff let's talk about the concept of targeted marketing. We hear that term a lot. And in the context of food, people talk about marketing aimed at children as one form of targeting. Or, toward children of color or people of color in general. But that's in a way technological child's play. I understand from you that there's much more precise targeting than a big demographic group like that. Tell us more. Jeff - Well, I mean certainly the ultra-processed food companies are on the cutting edge of using all the latest tools to target individuals in highly personalized way. And I think if I have one message to share with your listeners and viewers is that if we don't act soon, we're going to make an already vulnerable group even more exposed to this kind of direct targeted and personalized marketing. Because what artificial intelligence allows the food and beverage companies and their advertising agencies and platform partners to do is to really understand who we are, what we do, where we are, how we react, behave, think, and then target us accordingly using all those elements in a system that can create this kind of advertising and marketing in minutes, if not eventually milliseconds. So, all of marketing, in essence, will be targeted because they know so much about us. You have an endless chain of relationships between companies like Meta, companies like Kellogg's, the advertising agencies, the data brokers, the marketing clouds, et cetera. Young people especially, and communities of color and other vulnerable groups, have never been more exposed to this kind of invasive, pervasive advertising. Tell us how targeted it can be. I mean, let's take a 11-year-old girl who lives in Wichita and a 13-year-old boy who lives in Denver. How much do the companies know about those two people as individuals? And how does a targeting get market to them? Not because they belong to a big demographic group, but because of them as individuals. Jeff - Well, they certainly are identified in various ways. The marketers know that there are young people in the household. They know that there are young people, parts of families who have various media behaviors. They're watching these kinds of television shows, especially through streaming or listening to music or on social media. Those profiles are put together. And even when the companies say they don't exactly know who the child is or not collecting information from someone under 13 because of the privacy law that we helped get enacted, they know where they are and how to reach them. So, what you've had is an unlimited amassing of data power developed by the food and beverage companies in the United States over the last 25 years. Because really very little has been put in their way to stop them from what they do and plan to do. So presumably you could get some act of Congress put in to forbid the companies from targeting African American children or something like that. But it doesn't sound like that would matter because they're so much more precise in the market. Yes. I mean, in the first place you couldn't get congress to pass that. And I think this is the other thing to think about when you think about the food and beverage companies deploying Generative AI and the latest tools. They've already established vast, what they call insights divisions, market research divisions, to understand our behavior. But now they're able to put all that on a fast, fast, forward basis because of data processing, because of data clouds, let's say, provided by Amazon, and other kinds of tools. They're able to really generate how to sell to us individually, what new products will appeal to us individually and even create the packaging and the promotion to be personalized. So, what you're talking about is the need for a whole set of policy safeguards. But I certainly think that people concerned about public health need to think about regulating the role of Generative AI, especially when it comes to young people to ensure that they're not marketed to in the ways that it fact is and will continue to do. Kathryn, what about the argument that it's a parent's responsibility to protect their children and that government doesn't need to be involved in this space? Kathryn - Well, as a parent, I have to say is extremely challenging. We all do our best to try to protect our children from unhealthy influences, whether it's food or something that affects their mental health. That's a parent's obligation. That's what a parent spends a lot of time thinking about and trying to do. But this is an environment that is overwhelming. It is intrusive. It reaches into young people's lives in ways that make it virtually impossible for parents to intervene. These are powerful companies, and I'm including the tech companies. I'm including the retailers. I'm including the ad agencies as well as these global food and beverage companies. They're extremely powerful. As Jeff has been saying, they have engaged and continue to engage in enormous amounts of technological innovation and research to figure out precisely how to reach and engage our children. And it's too much for parents. And I've been saying this for years. I've been telling legislators this. I've been telling the companies this. It's not fair. It's a very unfair situation for parents. That makes perfect sense. Well, Jeff, your Center produces some very helpful and impressive reports. And an example of that is work you've done on the vast surveillance of television viewers. Tell us more about that, if you would. Jeff - Well, you know, you have to keep up with this, Kelly. The advocates in the United States and the academics with some exceptions have largely failed to address the contemporary business practices of the food and beverage companies. This is not a secret what's going on now. I mean the Generative AI stuff and the advanced data use, you know, is recent. But it is a continuum. And the fact is that we've been one of the few groups following it because we care about our society, our democracy, our media system, et cetera. But so much more could be done here to track what the companies are doing to identify the problematic practices, to think about counter strategies to try to bring change. So yes, we did this report on video streaming because in fact, it's the way television has now changed. It's now part of the commercial surveillance advertising and marketing complex food and beverage companies are using the interactivity and the data collection of streaming television. And we're sounding the alarm as we've been sounding now for too long. But hopefully your listeners will, in fact, start looking more closely at this digital environment because if we don't intervene in the next few years, it'll be impossible to go back and protect young people. So, when people watch television, they don't generally realize or appreciate the fact that information is being collected on them. Jeff - The television watches you now. The television is watching you now. The streaming companies are watching you now. The device that brings you streaming television is watching you now is collecting all kinds of data. The streaming device can deliver personalized ads to you. They'll be soon selling you products in real time. And they're sharing that data with companies like Meta Facebook, your local retailers like Albertsons, Kroger, et cetera. It's one big, huge digital data marketing machine that has been created. And the industry has been successful in blocking legislation except for the one law we were able to get through in 1998. And now under the Trump administration, they have free reign to do whatever they want. It's going to be an uphill battle. But I do think the companies are in a precarious position politically if we could get more people focused on what they're doing. Alright, we'll come back to that. My guess is that very few people realize the kind of thing that you just talked about. That so much information is being collected on them while they're watching television. The fact that you and your center are out there making people more aware, I think, is likely to be very helpful. Jeff - Well, I appreciate that, Kelly, but I have to say, and I don't want to denigrate our work, but you know, I just follow the trades. There's so much evidence if you care about the media and if you care about advertising and marketing or if you care, just let's say about Coca-Cola or Pepsi or Mondalez. Pick one you can't miss all this stuff. It's all there every day. And the problem is that there has not been the focus, I blame the funders in part. There's not been the focus on this marketplace in its contemporary dimensions. I'd like to ask you both about the legislative landscape and whether there are laws protecting people, especially children from this marketing. And Kathy, both you and Jeff were heavily involved in advocacy for a landmark piece of legislation that Jeff referred to from 1998, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. What did this act involve? And now that we're some years in, how has it worked? Kathryn - Well, I always say I've been studying advertising in the digital media before people even knew there was going to be advertising in digital media. Because we're really talking about the earliest days of the internet when it was being commercialized. But there was a public perception promoted by the government and the industry and a lot of other institutions and individuals that this was going to be a whole new democratic system of technology. And that basically it would solve all of our problems in terms of access to information. In terms of education. It would open up worlds to young people. In many ways it has, but they didn't talk really that much about advertising. Jeff and I working together at the Center for Media Education, were already tracking what was going on in that marketplace in the mid-1990s when it was very, very new. At which point children were already a prime target. They were digital kids. They were considered highly lucrative. Cyber Tots was one of the words that was used by the industry. What we believed was that we needed to get some public debate and some legislation in place, some kinds of rules, to guide the development of this new commercialized media system. And so, we launched a campaign that ultimately resulted in the passage of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Now it only governs commercial media, online, digital media that targets children under the age of 13, which was the most vulnerable demographic group of young people. We believe protections are really, really very important for teenagers. There's a lot of evidence for that now, much more research actually, that's showing their vulnerable abilities. And it has required companies to take young people into account when developing their operations. It's had an impact internationally in a lot of other countries. It is just the barest minimum of what we need in terms of protections for young people. And we've worked with the Federal Trade Commission over the years to ensure that those rules were updated and strengthened so that they would apply to this evolving digital media system. But now, I believe, that what we need is a more global advocacy strategy. And we are already doing that with advocates in other countries to develop a strategy to address the practices of this global industry. And there are some areas where we see some promising movement. The UK, for example, passed a law that bans advertising on digital media online. It has not yet taken effect, but now it will after some delays. And there are also other things going on for ultra processed foods, for unhealthy foods and beverages. So, Kathryn has partly answered this already, Jeff, but let me ask you. That act that we've talked about goes back a number of years now, what's being done more recently on the legislative front? Perhaps more important than that, what needs to be done? Well, I have to say, Kelly, that when Joe Biden came in and we had a public interest chair at the Federal Trade Commission, Lena Khan, I urged advocates in the United States who are concerned about unhealthy eating to approach the Federal Trade Commission and begin a campaign to see what we could do. Because this was going to be the most progressive Federal Trade Commission we've had in decades. And groups failed to do so for a variety of reasons. So that window has ended where we might be able to get the Federal Trade Commission to do something. There are people in the United States Congress, most notably Ed Markey, who sponsored our Children's Privacy Law 25 years ago, to get legislation. But I think we have to look outside of the United States, as Kathryn said. Beyond the law in the United Kingdom. In the European Union there are rules governing digital platforms called the Digital Services Act. There's a new European Union-wide policy safeguards on Generative AI. Brazil has something similar. There are design codes like the UK design code for young people. What we need to do is to put together a package of strategies at the federal and perhaps even state level. And there's been some activity at the state level. You know, the industry has been opposed to that and gone to court to fight any rules protecting young people online. But create a kind of a cutting-edge set of practices that then could be implemented here in the United States as part of a campaign. But there are models. And how do the political parties break down on this, these issues? Kathryn - I was going to say they break down. Jeff - The industry is so powerful still. You have bipartisan support for regulating social media when it comes to young people because there have been so many incidences of suicide and stalking and other kinds of emotional and psychological harms to young people. You have a lot of Republicans who have joined with Democrats and Congress wanting to pass legislation. And there's some bipartisan support to expand the privacy rules and even to regulate online advertising for teens in our Congress. But it's been stymied in part because the industry has such an effective lobbying operation. And I have to say that in the United States, the community of advocates and their supporters who would want to see such legislation are marginalized. They're under underfunded. They're not organized. They don't have the research. It's a problem. Now all these things can be addressed, and we should try to address them. But right now it's unlikely anything will pass in the next few months certainly. Kathryn - Can I just add something? Because I think what's important now in this really difficult period is to begin building a broader set of stakeholders in a coalition. And as I said, I think it does need to be global. But I want to talk about also on the research front, there's been a lot of really important research on digital food marketing. On marketing among healthy foods and beverages to young people, in a number of different countries. In the UK, in Australia, and other places around the world. And these scholars have been working together and a lot of them are working with scholars here in the US where we've seen an increase in that kind of research. And then advocates need to work together as well to build a movement. It could be a resurgence that begins outside of our country but comes back in at the appropriate time when we're able to garner the kind of support from our policymakers that we need to make something happen. That makes good sense, especially a global approach when it's hard to get things done here. Jeff, you alluded to the fact that you've done work specifically on ultra processed foods. Tell us what you're up to on that front. Jeff - As part of our industry analysis we have been tracking what all the leading food and beverage companies are doing in terms of what they would call their digital transformation. I mean, Coca-Cola and Pepsi on Mondelez and Hershey and all the leading transnational processed food companies are really now at the end of an intense period of restructuring to take advantage of the capabilities provided by digital data and analytics for the further data collection, machine learning, and Generative AI. And they are much more powerful, much more effective, much more adept. In addition, the industry structure has changed in the last few years also because of digital data that new collaborations have been created between the platforms, let's say like Facebook and YouTube, the food advertisers, their marketing agencies, which are now also data companies, but most notably the retailers and the grocery stores and the supermarkets. They're all working together to share data to collaborate on marketing and advertising strategies. So as part of our work we've kept abreast of all these things and we're tracking them. And now we are sharing them with a group of advocates outside of the United States supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies to support their efforts. And they've already made tremendous progress in a lot of areas around healthy eating in countries like Mexico and Argentina and Brazil, et cetera. And I'm assuming all these technological advances and the marketing muscle, the companies have is not being used to market broccoli and carrots and Brussels sprouts. Is that right? Jeff - The large companies are aware of changing attitudes and the need for healthy foods. One quick takeaway I have is this. That because the large ultra processed food companies understand that there are political pressures promoting healthier eating in North America and in Europe. They are focused on expanding their unhealthy eating portfolio, in new regions specifically Asia Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. And China is a big market for all this. This is why it has to be a global approach here, Kelly. First place, these are transnational corporations. They are creating the, our marketing strategies at the global level and then transmitting them down to be tailored at the national or regional level. They're coming up with a single set of strategies that will affect every country and every child in those countries. We need to keep track of that and figure out ways to go after that. And there are global tools we might be able to use to try to protect young people. Because if you could protect young, a young person in China, you might also be able to protect them here in North Carolina. This all sounds potentially pretty scary, but is there reason to be optimistic? Let's see if we can end on a positive note. What do you think. Do you have reason to be optimistic? Kathryn - I've always been an optimist. I've always tried to be an optimist, and again, what I would say is if we look at this globally and if we identify partners and allies all around the world who are doing good work, and there are many, many, many of them. And if we work together and continue to develop strategies for holding this powerful industry and these powerful industries accountable. I think we will have success. And I think we should also shine the spotlight on areas where important work has already taken place. Where laws have been enacted. Where companies have been made to change their practices and highlight those and build on those successes from around the world. Thanks. Jeff, what about you? Is there reason to be optimistic? Well, I don't think we can stop trying, although we're at a particularly difficult moment here in our country and worldwide. Because unless we try to intervene the largest corporations, who are working and will work closely with our government and other government, will be able to impact our lives in so many ways through their ability to collect data. And to use that data to target us and to change our behaviors. You can change our health behaviors. You can try to change our political behaviors. What the ultra-processed food companies are now able to do every company is able to do and governments are able to do. We have to expose what they're doing, and we have to challenge what they're doing so we can try to leave our kids a better world. It makes sense. Do you see that the general public is more aware of these issues and is there reason to be optimistic on that front? That awareness might lead to pressure on politicians to change things? Jeff - You know, under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission identified how digital advertising and marketing works and it made it popular among many, many more people than previously. And that's called commercial surveillance advertising. The idea that data is collected about you is used to advertise and market to you. And today there are thousands of people and certainly many more advocacy groups concerned about commercial surveillance advertising than there were prior to 2020. And all over the world, as Kathryn said, in countries like in Brazil and South Africa and Mexico, advocates are calling attention to all these techniques and practices. More and more people are being aware and then, you know, we need obviously leaders like you, Kelly, who can reach out to other scholars and get us together working together in some kind of larger collaborative to ensure that these techniques and capabilities are exposed to the public and we hold them accountable. Bios Kathryn Montgomery, PhD. is Research Director and Senior Strategist for the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD). In the early 90s, she and Jeff Chester co-founded the Center for Media Education (CME), where she served as President until 2003, and which was the predecessor organization to CDD. CME spearheaded the national campaign that led to passage of the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) the first federal legislation to protect children's privacy on the Internet. From 2003 until 2018, Dr. Montgomery was Professor of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., where she founded and directed the 3-year interdisciplinary PhD program in Communication. She has served as a consultant to CDD for a number of years and joined the full-time staff in July 2018. Throughout her career, Dr. Montgomery has written and published extensively about the role of media in society, addressing a variety of topics, including: the politics of entertainment television; youth engagement with digital media; and contemporary advertising and marketing practices. Montgomery's research, writing, and testimony have helped frame the national public policy debate on a range of critical media issues. In addition to numerous journal articles, chapters, and reports, she is author of two books: Target: Prime Time – Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television (Oxford University Press, 1989); and Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (MIT Press, 2007). Montgomery's current research focuses on the major technology, economic, and policy trends shaping the future of digital media in the Big Data era. She earned her doctorate in Film and Television from the University of California, Los Angeles. Jeff Chester is Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a Washington, DC non-profit organization. CDD is one of the leading U.S. NGOs advocating for citizens, consumers and other stakeholders on digital privacy and consumer protections online. Founded in 1991, CDD (then known as the Center for Media Education) led the campaign for the enactment of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, 1998). During the 1990s it also played a prominent role in such issues as open access/network neutrality, diversity of media ownership, public interest policies for children and television, as well the development of the FCC's “E-Rate” funding to ensure that schools and libraries had the resources to offer Internet services. Since 2003, CDD has been spearheading initiatives designed to ensure that digital media in the broadband era fulfill their democratic potential. A former investigative reporter, filmmaker and Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, Jeff Chester received his M.S.W. in Community Mental Health from U.C. Berkeley. He is the author of Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy (The New Press, 2007), as well as articles in both the scholarly and popular press. During the 1980s, Jeff co-directed the campaign that led to the Congressional creation of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) for public TV. He also co-founded the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, the artist advocacy group that supported federal funding for artists. In 1996, Newsweek magazine named Jeff Chester one of the Internet's fifty most influential people. He was named a Stern Foundation “Public Interest Pioneer” in 2001, and a “Domestic Privacy Champion” by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 2011. CDD is a member of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). Until January 2019, Jeff was the U.S. co-chair of TACD's Information Society (Infosoc) group, helping direct the organization's Transatlantic work on data protection, privacy and digital rights.

This episode is brought to you in association with FIFA+. Click below to get your free FIFA+ account and watch live club and international football from around the world: ⁠www.tinyurl.com/FIFAPlusSweeper In Part 1, Lee tells Paul all about his travels and experiences in Bruges and Brussels. What did he witness first-hand outside a train station in the capital that shocked him to his core? Which Belgian football stadium is a contender for Europe's ugliest stadium? How did fourth-tier Crossing Schaerbeek bring their championship trophy onto the pitch at full-time? And which unlikely participants joined in the Belgian Cup trophy lift? In Part 2, there's a ‘Best of Britain' section with stories from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. What were Bodø/Glimt fans trading for tickets to the Europa League semi-final against Spurs? Which Northern Irish club famous for its burgers has finally earned the respect of its rivals? How has Scotland taken inspiration from the UEFA Champions League? And why is VAR making its debut in Wales…in the seventh tier?! Join The Sweeper on Patreon: patreon.com/SweeperPod Support The Sweeper on Buy Me A Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/sweeperpod Belgium's brilliant goal-line clearance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unogut8fyOY Editor: Ralph Foster Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I veckans avsnitt pratar vi om sura pengar som ni lyssnare och flashbackare tvingats betala.Det blir också Emmas egna frågor, civilkurage och kristnas syn på AI.Väl bekommet och tack till Patronerna som stöttar oss själsligt, ekonomiskt och mentalt på:https://www.patreon.com/FlashbackForeverEmmas tråd: https://www.flashback.org/t1151000 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Father of Reaganomics, David Stockman, joins us to explore the complex world of international trade and its impact on investors.  Key insights include: Challenging conventional wisdom about trade policies Understanding economic forces that drive investment opportunities Gaining expert perspective on global economic trends Stockman provides a candid analysis of current trade strategies, revealing: The true drivers of economic competitiveness Potential pitfalls of protectionist approaches Critical insights for strategic investors The episode cuts through political noise to offer clear, actionable economic intelligence for informed decision-making. Smart investors look beyond headlines to understand the deeper economic forces shaping their financial future. Resources: Check out David Stockman's Contra Corner Newsletter Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/553 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai    Keith Weinhold  0:01   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, I sit down with a long time White House occupant who was the official economic advisor to an ex president. We get the real deal on tariffs and what they mean to you. Trump gets called out and the ominous sign about what's coming six months from now, today on, Get Rich Education.   Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being the flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com   Corey Coates  1:14   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold  1:30   Welcome to GRE from Brookline, Massachusetts to Brooklyn, New York and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you are listening to get rich education, just another shaved mammal behind this microphone here. I recently spent some time with the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman, in New York City, and sometimes an issue so critical surfaces that real estate investors need to step back and understand a broader force in the economy. Three weeks ago, here, I told you how the second and third way, real estate pays you. Cash flow and ROA are sourced by your tenants employment and the future of your tenants employment is influenced by tariffs and other policies of this presidential administration. This is going to affect rates of inflation and a whole lot of things. Now, an organization called the American Dialect Society, they actually name their word of the year, and this year, it is shaping up to be that word, tariff. In fact, Trump has described that word as the most beautiful word in the dictionary. And I think we all know by now that a tariff is an import tax that gets passed along to consumers when it comes to materials used in real estate construction that's going to affect future real estate prices. Well, several key ones so far were exempted from recent reciprocal tariffs, including steel, aluminum, lumber and copper exempted. Not everything was exempted, but those items and some others were but who knows if even they are going to stay that way. And now, when it comes to this topic. I think a lot of people want to make immediate overreactions in even posture like they're an expert in become an armchair economist, and I guess we all do a little of that, me included. But rather than being first on this and overreacting, let's let the policy which Trump called Liberation Day last month when he announced all these new tariffs. Let's let policy simmer a little and then bring in an expert that really knows what this means to the economy and real estate. So that's why I wanted to set up this discussion for your benefit with the father of Reaganomics and I today. In fact, what did Reagan himself say about tarrifs back in 1987 this is part of a clip that's gained new life this year. It's about a minute and a half.    Speaker 1  4:13   Throughout the world, there's a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition. Now there are sound historical reasons for this. For those of us who lived through the Great Depression, the memory of the suffering it caused is deep and searing, and today, many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period called the Smoot Hawley tariff greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery. You see at first when someone says, Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs, and sometimes for a short while at work. Price, but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is first, home grown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition, so soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens, markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.    Keith Weinhold  5:50   Now, from what I can tell you as a listener in the GRE audience, maybe you're split on what you think about tariffs. In fact, we ran an Instagram poll. It asks, generally speaking, tariffs are good or bad? Simply that 40% of you said good, 60% bad. Over on LinkedIn, it was different. 52% said they're good, 48% bad. So it's nearly half and half. And rather than me taking a side here, I like to bring up points that support both sides, and then let our distinguished guests talk, since he's the expert. For example, if a foreign nation wants to access the world's largest economy, the United States, does it make sense for them to pay a fee? I mean, it works that way in a lot of places, when you want to list a product on eBay or Amazon, you pay them a fee. You pay a percentage of the list price in order to get access to a ready marketplace of qualified buyers. All right. Well, that's one side, but then the other side is, come on, let's look at history. Where have tariffs ever worked like Where have they ever been a resounding, long term success? Do they have any history of a sustained, good track record? I generally like free trade. Then let's understand there's something even worse than a steep tariff. There are quotas which are imposed, import limits, trade limits, and then there are even all out import bans. What do terrorists mean to the economy that you are going to live in and that your tenants live in? It's the father of Reaganomics, and I on that straight ahead on Get Rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold.   you know what's crazy? Your bank is getting rich off of you. The average savings account pays less than 1% it's like laughable. Meanwhile, if your money isn't making at least 4% you're losing to inflation. That's why I started putting my own money into the FFI liquidity fund. It's super simple. Your cash can pull in up to 8% returns, and it compounds. It's not some high risk gamble like digital or AI stock trading. It's pretty low risk because they've got a 10 plus year track record of paying investors on time in full every time. I mean, I wouldn't be talking about it if I wasn't invested myself. You can invest as little as 25k and you keep earning until you decide you want your money back, no weird lock ups or anything like that. So if you're like me and tired of your liquid funds just sitting there doing nothing, check it out. Text, family to 66866, to learn about freedom, family investments, liquidity fund, again. Text family to 6686   Hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine, at Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Caeli Ridge personally. Start Now while it's on your mind at Ridge lendinggroup.com, that's ridgelendinggroup.com.    Hey   Robert Helms  9:28   Hey everybody. It's Robert Helms of the real estate guys radio program. So glad you found Keith Weinhold in get rich education. Don't quit your Daydream.   Keith Weinhold  9:48   when it comes to White House economic policy like tariffs, taxes and inflation, don't you wish you could talk to someone that's often been inside the White House. Today, we are even better. He was the official advisor to an ex president on economic affairs, a Wall Street and Washington insider and Harvard grad. Today's guest is also a former two time congressman from Michigan. He's a prolific author, and he is none other than the man known as the father of Reaganomics. He was indeed President Ronald Reagan's budget advisor. He was first with us last year, but so much has happened since. So welcome back to the show. David Stockman,    David Stockman  10:26   very good to be with you, and you're certainly right about that. I think we're really in uncharted waters. Who could have predicted where we are today, and therefore it's very hard to know where we're heading, but you have to try to peer through the fog and all the uncertainty and the noise and the, you know, day to day ups and downs that's coming from this White House in a way that we've never seen before. And I started on Capitol Hill in 1970 so I've been watching this, you know, for more than a half century, actually, quite a while. And man, it's important to go through all this, but it's sort of uncharted waters.    Keith Weinhold  11:04   Sure, it's sort of like you wake up every day and all you do know is that you don't know. And David, when it comes to tariffs, I want to give you my idea, and then I want to ask you about what the tariff objective even is. Now, to be sure, no one is asking me how to advise the President. I'm an international real estate investor, but I do most of my business in the US, and I sure don't have international trade policy experience. It seems better to me, David, that rather than shocking the world with new tariffs that kick in right away, it would have been better to announce that tariffs begin in, say, 90 days, and then give nations space to negotiate before they kick in. That's my prevailing idea. My question to you is, what's the real objective here? What are terrorists proposed to do? Raise revenue, onshore companies merely a negotiation tactic? Is the objective? Something else?    David Stockman  12:00   Well, it might be all of the above, but I think it's important to start with a predicate, and that is that the problem is not high tariffs abroad or cheating by foreign competitors or exporters. There is a huge problem of a chronic trade deficit that is not benign, that does reflect a tremendous offshoring of our industrial economy, the loss of good, high paying industrial and manufacturing jobs. So the issue is an important one to address, but I have to say, very clearly, Trump is 100% wrong when he attempts to address it with tariffs, because foreign tariffs aren't the problem. Let me just give a couple of pieces of data on this, and I've been doing a lot of research on this. If you take the top 51 exporters to the United States, our top 51 trade partners, and this is Mexico and Canada and the entire EU and it's all the big far eastern China, Japan, South Korea, India, you know, all the rest of them. If you look at the and that's 90% of our trade, we have 2.9 trillion of imports coming in from all of those countries, and the tariff that we Levy, this is the United States, on those imports, is not high. It's higher than it was in the past, mainly because of what Trump did in the first term, but it's 3.9% now compared to bad times historically, decades and decades ago. That's relatively low. But here's the key point, if we look at the same 51 trading partners in terms of the tariffs they levy on our exports to China and to the EU and to Canada and Mexico and South Korea and all the rest of them. The tariff average, weighted average that they levy is 2.1% so let me restate that the average US tariff is about twice as high 4% around things as what our partners imposed 2% now the larger point is whether it's 4% or 2% doesn't make a better difference. That's not a problem when it comes to 33 trillion of world trade of which we are, you know, the United States engages in about five and a half trillion of that on a two way basis, import, export, in the nexus of a massive global trading system. So he's off base. He's wrong. The target is not high tariffs or unfair foreign trade. Now there are some people who say, Well, you're looking at monetary tariffs. So in other words, the import duty they levy on, you know, exports to South Korea or India or someplace like that, right? And that, the real issue, supposedly, is non tariff barriers. For instance, you know, some governments require you that all procurement by government agencies has to be sourced from a domestic supplier, which automatically shuts out us suppliers who might want that business. Well, the problem is we're the biggest violator of the non tariff barrier in that area. In other words, we have something like $900 billion worth of state, federal and local procurement that's under Buy America policies, which means EU, Mexico, Canada, China, none of them can compete. Now I mention that only as one example, because it's the kind of classic non tariff barrier, as opposed to import duty that some people point to, or they point to the fact that while foreign countries allegedly manipulate their currency, but you know the answer to that is that number one, overwhelming, no doubt about it, largest currency manipulator in the world, is the Federal Reserve. Okay, so it's kind of hard to say that there's a unfair trade problem in the world because of currency manipulation. And then there is, you know, an argument. Well, foreign governments subsidize their exporters. They subsidize their industrial companies, and therefore they can sell things cheaper. And therefore that's another example of unfair trade, but the biggest subsidizer of tech industry, and of a lot of other basic industry in the United States is is the Defense Department. You know, we have a trillion dollar defense budget, and we put massive amounts of dollars in, not only to buying, you know, hardware and weapons and so forth, but huge amounts of R and D that go into developing cutting edge technologies that have a lot of civilian applications that, in fact, we see all over the world. That's why we're doing this broadcast right now. The point is that problem is not high tariffs because they're only low tariffs. The problem is not unfair trade, because there's all kinds of minor little interferences with pure free markets, but both, everybody violates those one way or another due to domestic politics. But it's not a big deal. It doesn't make that big a difference. So therefore, why do we have a trillion dollar trade deficit in the most recent year, and a trade deficit of that magnitude that's been pretty continuous since the 1970s the answer is three or four blocks from the White House, not 10,000 miles away in Beijing or Tokyo. The answer is the Federal Reserve has in the ELLs building there in DC, not far from the White House. Yes, yes, right there, okay, the Eccles building the Fed has a huge, persistent pro inflation bias, sure. And as a result of that, it is pushed the wage levels and the price levels and the cost levels of the US economy steadily higher, and therefore we've become less and less competitive with practically everybody, but certainly a lower wage countries nearby, like Mexico or China, far away. And you know, there's, it's not that simple of just labor costs and wages, because, after all, if you source from China, you've got to ship things 10,000 miles. You've got supply chain management issues, you've got quality control issues, you've got timeliness issues. You have inventory carry costs, because there's a huge pipeline, and of course, you have the actual freight cost of bringing all those containers over. But nevertheless, when you factor all that in, our trade problem is our costs are too high, and that is a function of the pro inflation policies of the Fed. Give one example. Go back just to the period when the economy was beginning to recover, right after the great recession. And you know the crisis of 208209 and I started 210 unit labor costs in manufacturing in the United States. Just from 210 that's only 15 years, are up 55% that's unit labor costs. In other words, if you take wage costs and you subtract productivity growth in that 15 year period, the net wage costs less productivity growth, which is what economists call unit labor costs, are up 53% and as a result of that, we started, you know, maybe with a $15 wage difference between the United States and.China back in the late 1990s that wage gap today is $30 in other words, the fully loaded way at cost of average wages in the United States. And I'm talking about not just the pay envelope, but also the payroll taxes, the you know, charge for pension expense, health care and so forth. The whole fully loaded cost to an employer is about $40 an hour, and it's about $10 in the United States and it's about $10 an hour in China. Now that's the reason why we have a huge trade deficit with China, because of the massive cost difference, and it's not because anybody's cheating. Is because the Fed, in its wisdom, decided, well, you know, everybody will be okay. We're going to inflate the economy at 2% a year. That's their target. It's not like, well, we're trying to get low inflation or zero inflation, but we're not quite making it. No, they're proactive. Answer is, we've got to have 2% or the economy is not going to work. Well, well, 2% sounds well, that's a trivial little number. However, when you do it year after year, decade after decade, for a long period of time, and the other side is not inflating at the same rate, then in dollar terms, you have a problem, and that's where we are today. So this is important to understand, because it means the heart of the whole Trump economic policy, which is trying to bring manufacturing home, trying to bring industry back to the United States, a laudable objective is based on a false diagnosis of why this happened, and it is unleashed ball in the china shop, disruption of global economic flows in relationships that are going to cause unmitigated problems, even disaster in the US economy. Because it's too subtle, when you think about it, the world trade system just goods. Now, we've not even talking about services yet, or capital flows or financing on a short term basis. The World Trade in goods, merchandise, goods only is now 33 trillion. That is a hell of a lot of activity of parts and pieces and raw materials and finished products flowing in. You know, impossible to imagine directions back and forth between dozens and dozens of major economies and hundreds overall. And when you start, you step into that, not with a tiny little increase in the tariff. To give somebody a message. You know, if our tariffs are averaging 4% that's what I gave you a little while ago. And you raise tariffs to 20% maybe that's a message. But Trump didn't do that. He raised the tariff on China to 145% in other words, let's just take one example of a practical product, almost all the small appliances that you can find in Target or even a higher end retail stores United States or on Amazon are sourced in China because of this cost differential. I've been talking about this huge wage differential. So over the last 20, 25, years, little it went there now 80% of all small appliances are now sourced in China, and one, you know, good example would be a microwave oven, and a standard one with not a lot of fancy bells and whistles, is $100 now, when you put 145% tariff on the $100 landed microwave oven is now $245 someone's going to say, Gee, are we going to be able to sell microwaves at $245 they're not certain. I'm talking about a US importer. I'm talking about someone who sells microwaves on Amazon, for instance, or the buyers at Walmart or Target, or the rest of them, they're going to say, wait a minute, maybe we ought to hold off our orders until we see how this is going to shake out. And Trump says he's going to be negotiating, which is another whole issue that we'll get into. It's a lot of baloney. He has no idea what he's doing. Let's just face the facts about this. So if orders are suddenly cut back, and the flow that goes on day in and day out across the Pacific into the big ports in Long Beach in Los Angeles is suddenly disrupted, not in a small way, but in a big way, by 20, 30, 40, 50% six or seven months down the road, we're going to have empty shelves. We're going to have empty warehouses. We're going to have sellers who suddenly realize there's such a scarcity of products that have been hit by this blunderbuss of tariffs that we can double our price and get away with it.   Keith Weinhold  25:00   Okay, sure. I mean, ports are designed. Ports are set up for stadium flows, not for surges, and then walls and activity. That just really doesn't work.   David Stockman  25:08   And let me just get in that, because you're on a good point. In other words, there is a complicated supply line, supply chain, where, you know, stuff is handed off, one hand to another, ports in China, shipping companies, ports here, rail distribution systems, regional warehouses of you know, people like Walmart and so forth, that whole supply chain is going to be hit with a shock. Everything is going to be uncertain in terms of the formulas that everybody uses right now, you know that you sell 100 units a week, so you got to replace them at the sales rate, and you put your orders in, and know that it takes six weeks to get here, and all this other stuff, all of the common knowledge that's in the supply chain that makes it work, and the handoffs smooth and efficient From one player in the supply chain to the next, it's all going to be disrupted. But the one thing we're going to have is we're going to have shortages, we're going to have empty shelves, and we're going to have price which I'm sure that Trump is not going to start saying price gouging of a you know, right? But that's not price gouging. If you have a you know, go to Florida. We have a hurricane. Where we live in Florida and New York, we have a hurricane. All of a sudden the shelves are empty and there's no goods around, because everybody's been stocking up getting ready for the storm. And then all of a sudden, the politicians are yelling that somebody's price gouging, because they raised their prices in a market that was in disequilibrium. Well, that's not price gouging. That's supply and demand trying to find a new balance basic economics. You know, when the demand is 100 and the supply is 35 okay, but I'm kind of getting ahead here, but I think there's very good likelihood that there's going to be a human cry right before, you know, maybe in the fall or right before Christmas, about price gouging and Trump then saying, Well, I was elected to bring prices down and bring inflation under control. It's out of control because all of these foreigners raised their prices. And no, they did, and it was the tariff that did it, and all the people in the supply chain are trying to take advantage of the temporary disruptions. So I think people have to understand, and I can't say this, and I don't like to say it, because I certainly didn't think the other candidate in the last election had anything to offer in terms of dealing with our serious economic problems in this country. I'm talking about Harris. But the fact is, Donald Trump has had a wrong idea for the last 40 to 50 years of his adult life. In that core idea is that trade deficits are a sign of the other side cheating. They're a sign that you're being exploited or taken advantage of or ripped off, or it's not at all okay. Trade deficits are a consequence of cost differences between different jurisdictions, and to the extent that we've artificially, unnecessarily inflated our costs. We need to fix the problem at the source. He ought to clean house at the Federal Reserve. But the problem is, Trump wants lower interest rates when, in fact, the low interest rates created all the inflation that led to our loss of competitiveness and the huge trade deficits we have today. So to summarize, it is important to understand, do not have faith in Trump's promise that we're going to have a golden age of economic prosperity. We are going to have a economic disaster, and it's a unforced error. It's self inflicted, and it's the result of the wrong fundamental idea of one guy who's in the oval office right now throwing his considerable weight around and pushing the economy into upheaval that really is totally unnecessary. He should have done what he was elected to do, and Matt's work on getting production up and costs down, that's not going to be solved with tariffs. David, I have another important point to bring up. But before we do just quickly, are those two to 4% tariffs you mentioned earlier. Those are the tariff levels pre Trump second term correct.    We could clarify that those are for the year 2023 that was the latest full year data that we have with great deal of granularity.    Keith Weinhold  29:56   The point I want to bring up is there any history? That tariffs actually work. Some people cite the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act from the 1930s and that it drove us deeper into the Great Depression. And David, on the one hand, when we think about, do tariffs actually work? If Indonesia can make shoes for us for $11 why would we want to onshore an activity like that? That is a good deal for us. And then, on the other hand, you have someone like Nvidia, the world's leading semiconductor company, they announced plans to produce some of their AI supercomputers entirely on American soil for the first time recently. And you have some other companies that have made similar announcements. So that's a small shred of evidence that tariffs could work. But my question is, historically, do tariffs actually work?    David Stockman  30:44   That's a great question, and there's a huge history. And you can go back all the way the 19th century, where Donald Trump seems to be preoccupied, but what he fails to recognize is that they worked in the 19th century because they were revenue tariffs. It wasn't an effort to, like, bring jobs back to America. We were booming at the time. Jobs were coming to America, not leaving, and it was the federal government's main source of revenue. Because, as you know, prior to 1913 there was no income tax, right? So that was one thing. Okay, then when we got into the 20th century and host World War Two, it became obvious to people that the whole idea of comparative advantage, going all the way back to Adam Smith, and that enhanced a global trade where people could specialize in whatever their more competitive advantage is, was a Good thing. And so we had round after round of negotiations after World War Two that reduced tariff levels steadily, year by year, decade by decade. So by the time we got to the 1990s when China, then, you know, arose from the disaster of Mao and Mr. Dang took over and created all the export factories and said, It's glorious to be rich and all these things is we got red capitalism. But if we start in the 1990s the average tariff worldwide, now this is weighted average on all goods that are bought and sold or imported and exported, was about 9% and there were have been various free trade deals done since then. For instance, we had NAFTA, and the tariffs on Mexico and Canada and the United States went to zero. We had a free trade deal in 212 with South Korea. This never comes up, but the tariff on South Korean goods coming the US is zero. The tariff on us, exports going to South Korea is zero because we have a free trade agreement, and it's worked out pretty well with South Korea. Now we're not the only ones doing this. Countries all over the world. The EU is a total free trade zone in economy almost as big as the United States that used to have tariff levels between countries. Now it's one big free trade zone. So if you take the entire world economy, that 9% weighted average tariff of the early 90s, which was down from maybe 2025, 30, pre World War Two in this Smoot Hawley era, was down to 2.25% by the time that Donald Trump took office, the first time around in 2017 now 2.25% is really a rounding error. It's hardly when you have $33 trillion worth of goods moving around, you know, container ships and bulk carriers and so forth all around the world, and air freight and the rest of it, rail. 2% tariff is not any kind of big deal, as I say in some of the things I write, it's not a hill of beans. So somehow, though 45 years ago, Trump got the idea that tariffs were causing a problem and that we had trade deficits, not because our costs were going up owing to bad monetary policy, but because the other guy was cheating. Remember, this is Trump's whole view of the world. It's a zero sum game. I win, you lose, and if I'm not winning, is because you're cheating. Okay? In other words, I'm inherently going to win. America's inherently going to win unless the other guy is cheating. Now, Trump sees the world the same way that I think he looked at electrical and plumbing contractors in the Bronx, you know, in the 1980s and 1990s when he was developing his various Real Estate projects. These are pretty rough and tumble guys. It's a wild, easy way to make a living. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of pretty rough baseball that's played that mentality that the other guy is always trying to screw me, the other guy's always cheating, the other guy's preventing me from winning, is, is his basic mentality. And it's not Applicable. It's not useful at all to try to understand the global economy. Try to understand why America's $29 trillion economy is not chugging along as strongly and as productively as it should be, why real wages are not making the gains that workers should be experiencing and so forth. So he ought to get out of this whole trade, tariff trade war thing, which he started, I don't know how he does, it's a little late, and focus on the problems on the home front. In other words, our trade problem has been caused by too much spending, too much borrowing, too much money printing on the banks of the Potomac. It's not basically caused in Beijing or Tokyo or Seoul or even Brussels, the European Union. And we need to get back to the basic and the real culprit, which is the Federal Reserve and its current chairman, Paul, if he wants to attack somebody, go after the Fed. Go after Paul. But ought to give them a mandate to bring inflation to zero and to stop fooling around with everything else and to stop monetizing the public debt that is buying government debt, take care of your own backyard first before you start taking, yeah, sure, yeah, exactly. You know, I've been in this for a long time. I start, as I said, I started on Capitol Hill. There have been a lot of protectionist politicians, but they always argued free trade is good, but it has to be fair trade. And you know, we have this example in our steel industry, for instance, where we producers abroad are competing unfairly for one reason or another. But the point I'm getting to is they always said this is an exceptional case. Normally we would go for free trade, but we got to have protection here. We got to have a temporary quota. Even when I was in the Reagan administration, we had a big argument about voluntary quotas on Japanese car exports, and I was totally against it. I thought the US industry needed to get its act together, get its costs down. Needed to get the UAW under control, because it had pushed wages, you know, way, way, way too high terms of total cost. But they argued, yeah, well, you're right, but we have to have 10 years in order to allow things to be improved and adjusted and catch up. So this is only temporary. This is just this. Yes, this is protectionism, but it's temporary. It's expedient that we can avoid and so therefore we'll make an exception. But there is no one, and most of these people were, you know, in the payroll of the unions, or they were congressmen from south to South Carolina going to bad for the textile industry, or congressman from Ohio going to bat for the steel industry, whatever, but there was no one who ever came along and said tariffs are big, beautiful things, and we need to have permanent high tariffs, because that's the way we're going to get prosperity back in United States. It's a dumb idea. It's wrong. It's disproven by history and people. Even though Trump has done a lot of things that I like you know, he's got rid of dei he's got rid of all of this green energy, climate crisis nonsense, all of that that he's done is to the good when you come to this basic question, how do we get prosperity in America? The answer is, through free market capitalism, by getting the government out of the way, by balancing the budget and by telling the Fed not to, you know, inflate the economy to the disadvantage that it has today. That's how you get there. And Trump is not a real Republican. Trump is basically what I call a status. He's for big government, right wing status. Okay, there's left wing, Marxist status, then there's right wing status. But you know, all of this tariff business is going to create so much corruption that it's almost impossible to imagine, because every day there's someone down there, right now, I can guarantee it at the, you know, treasury department or at Commerce department saying, but we got special circumstances here in terms of the parts that we're making for aircraft that get assembled in South Korea or something, and we need special relief. Yes, every industry you're doing is putting in for everybody's going to be there the lobby. This is the greatest dream that the Washington lobbyist community ever had. Trump is literally saying he put this reciprocal tariff. You saw the whole schedule. That he had on that easel in the White House on April 2, immigration day. It was called Liberation Day. I called it Demolition Derby Day. There was a reciprocal tariff for every single country in the world based on a phony formula that said, if we have $100 million deficit with somebody, half of that was caused by cheating. So we're going to put a tariff in place closes half of the difference. I mean, just nonsense, Schoolboy idiocy. Now it is. I mean, I know everybody said, Oh, isn't it great? We've finally got rid of the bad guys, Biden, he's terrible, and the Democrats, I agree with all that, but we replaced one set of numb skulls with another set. Unfortunately, Republicans know better, but they're so intimidated, apparently buffaloed by Trump at the moment, that they're going along with this. But they know you don't put 145%tariff on anything. I mean, it's just nuts. David, I feel like you're telling us what you really think and absolutely love that.    Keith Weinhold  41:04   Interestingly, there is a Ronald Reagan clip about tariffs out there in a speech that he gave from Camp David, and it's something that's really had new life lately. In fact, we played the audio of that clip before you came onto the show today, Reagan said that he didn't like tariffs and that they hurt every American worker and consumer as Reagan's economic advisor in the White House. Did you advise him on that?    David Stockman  41:27   Yes, I did. And also I can give you a little anecdote that I think people will find interesting. Yeah, the one time that he deviated in a big way from his free trade commitments was when he put the voluntary export quota on the Japanese auto industry. That was big. I don't remember the exact number, but I think it said they couldn't export more than 1.2 million cars a year, or something like that the United States. And the number was supposed to adjust over time, but we had huge debates in the Cabinet Room about those things, and at the end of the day, here's what he said. He said, You know, I've always been for open trade, free trade. I've always felt it has to be fair trade. But, you know, in this case, the Japanese industry came to us and asked for voluntary quotas, so I didn't put up a trade barrier. I'm only accommodating their request. Well, the Japanese did come to him and ask. They did, but only when they were put up to it by the protectionists in the Reagan administration who, on this took them on the side, you know, their negotiators and maybe their foreign minister. I can't remember exactly who commerce secretary and said, If you don't ask for voluntary quotas, we're going to unleash Capitol Hill and you're going to get a real nasty wall put up against your car. So what will it be? Do you want to front for voluntary quotas? Are we going to unleash Congress? So they came to Reagan and said they were the Japanese industry said they're recommending that he impose voluntary restraints on auto exports. That was just a ruse. He wasn't naive, but he believed what you told him. He believed that everybody was honest like he was, and so he didn't understand that the Japanese industry that was brought to meet with him in the Oval Office had been put up to, it been threatened with, you know, something far worse, mandatory quote is imposed by Congress. But anyway, it's a little anecdote. What happened? On the other hand, he continued to articulate the case for small government sound money. We had deficit problems, but he always wanted a balanced budget. It was just hard to get there politically. And he believed that capitalism produces prosperity if you let capitalism work and keep the government out of the marketplace. And there is no bigger form of intervention and meddling and disruption in the capitalist system, in the free market, in the marketplace, than quotas on every product in every country at different levels. They're going to have 150 different countries negotiating bilaterally deals with the United States. That's the first thing that's ridiculous. They can't happen. The second thing is they're going to come up with deals that don't amount to a hill of beans, but they'll say, we have a deal. The White House will claim victory. Let me just give one example. As we know, one of the big things that Trump did in the first administration was he renegotiated NAFTA. And NAFTA was the free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada, United States. Before he started in 2017 the trade deficit of the US with Mexico and Canada combined with 65 billion. And he said, That's too big, and we got to fix NAFTA. We have got to rebalance the provisions so that the US comes out, not on the short end of the stick 65 billion. So they negotiated for about a year and a half, they announced a new deal, which he then renamed the United States, Mexico, Canada agreement, usmca, and, you know, made a big noise about it, but it was the same deal with the new name. They didn't change more than 2% of the underlying machinery and structure, semantics. Well now, so now we fast forward to 2024 so the usmca Trump's pride and joy, his the kind of deal that he says he's going to seek with every country in the world is now four years into effect. And what is the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico today, it's 230 5 billion okay? It's four times higher now than it was then when he put it in place. Why? Because we have a huge trade deficit with Mexico. Why because, you know, average wages there are less than $10 an hour, and they're $40 an hour here. That's why it has nothing to do with a bad trade deal. It has to do with cost differences.    Keith Weinhold  46:27   David, this has been great, and as we're winding down here, we have a lot of real estate investor listeners tell us what this administration's overall policies, not just tariffs, but overall policies, mean for future employment, and then tell us about your highly regarded contra corner newsletter.    David Stockman  46:45   Well, those are that's a big question. I think it doesn't mean good, because if they were really trying to get America back on track our economy, they would be fighting inflation tooth and nail to get it down to zero. They would be working day and night to implement what Musk came up with in the doge that is big spending cuts and balancing the budget. They're not doing that. They're letting all these announcements being made, but they're not actually cutting any spending. They would not be attempting to impose this huge apparatus of tariffs on the US economy, but they're not doing that. So I'm not confident we were going in the wrong direction under Biden, for sure, and we're going in an even worse direction right now under Trump. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, I put out a daily newsletter called David stockman's Country corner. You can yes signers on the internet, but this is what we write about every day, and I say A plague on both their houses, the Democrats, the Republicans. They're all, in many ways, just trying to justify government meddling, government spending, government borrowing, government money printing, when we would do a lot better if we went in the opposite direction, sound money, balanced budgets, free markets and so forth, so. And in the process, I'm not partisan. You know, I was a Republican congressman. I was a budget director of the Reagan administration. I have been more on the Republican side, obviously, over my career than the Democrats, but now I realize that both parties are part of the problem, and I call it the uni party when push comes to shove, the uni party has basically been for a lot of wars abroad and a lot of debt at home, and a lot of meddling in the economy That was unnecessary. So if you look at what I write every day, it tries to help people see through the pretenses and the errors of the unit party, Democrats and Republicans. And in the present time, I have to focus on Trump, because Trump is making all the noise.    Keith Weinhold  48:59   100% Yes, it sure has kept life and the news cycle exciting, whether someone likes that news or not. Well, David, this has been great. In fact, it sounds a lot like what Reagan might have told me, perhaps because you were a chief economic informant for him, smaller government, letting the free trade flow and lower inflation. Be sure to check out David stockman's contra corner newsletter if you like what we've been talking about today, just like it was last year, David, it's been a real pleasure having you on GRE today.    David Stockman  49:30   Well, thank you very much. And these are important issues, and we've got to stay on top of them.   Keith Weinhold  49:41   Oh, yeah. Well, David Stockman truly no mincing words. He doesn't like tariffs. In summary, telling GRE listeners that the problem with trade imbalances is inflation attack that instead quell inflation, don't impose tariffs. A lot of developing nations and China have distinct advantages over manufacturing in the United States, besides having the trained labor and all the factories and systems in place, think about how many of these nations have built in lower costs they don't have to deal with these regulatory agencies, no EPA, no OSHA, and not even a minimum wage law to have to comply with. And here in the US get this, 80% of American workers agree that the US would benefit from more manufacturing jobs, but almost 75% disagree that they would personally be better off working in a factory themselves. That's according to a joint Cato Institute in YouGov survey. It's sort of like how last century, Americans lamented the demise of the family farm, yeah, but yet, they sure didn't want to work on a farm themselves. Now there are some types of manufacturing, like perhaps pharmaceuticals or computer chips that could likely be onshore, because those items are high value items. Their value can exceed the cost of being produced in the USA, but a lot of these factory goods, not again. If these topics interest you do a search for David stockman's contra corner, or you can directly visit David stockman's contra corner.com. Big thanks to the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman on the show this week. As for next week, we're back more toward the center of real estate investing. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream. Y   Unknown Speaker  51:42   nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC   Keith Weinhold  52:02   You know, whenever you want the best written real estate and finance info, oh, geez, today's experience limits your free articles access and it's got paywalls and pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers, it's not so great. So then it's vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that adds no hype value to your life. That's why this is the golden age of quality newsletters. And I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point because even the word abbreviation is too long. My letter usually takes less than three minutes to read, and when you start the letter, you also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's all completely free. It's called The Don't quit your Daydream. Letter, it wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be easier for you to get it right now. Just text GRE to 66866, while it's on your mind, take a moment to do it right now. Text GRE to 66866   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, getricheducation.com.  

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has criticised the Taoiseach for saying Brussels should crack down on what he termed Hungary's "abuse of vetoes" at EU Council meetings. We hear from Shona Murray, Europe Correspondent for Euronews, and Fianna Fail MEP Billy Kelleher.

SwingerI spent the last week in Dublin in the Four Courts as part of the outworking of my case against the BBC's Spotlight programme nine years ago. But more of that when it's over which could take another fortnight.On the morning that the case started our Gearóid phoned me to say that his father-in-law Paddy ‘Swinger' McBride was dead. The news was a great shock. I had spent a half hour or more a few days before chatting with Paddy in his home. He was just out after a spell in hospital, and although he was ill his spirit was strong and he was full of craic and talk about the current politics, his son Patrick's Man of the Match performance for Antrim against Armagh, the need to build Casement and how a son of Tony Benn could behave the way Hillary Benn does.Israel's reign of terrorAs this column goes to press the Israeli government is calling up tens of thousands of army reservists for a full scale military invasion, subjugation and occupation of the Gaza Strip. After almost 20 months of genocide against the Palestinian people the Israeli state is now embarking on its final solution – the displacement of two million people and the mass murder of more Palestinians.Last Saturday was World Press Freedom Day – but not in Gaza. In the year and a half of this current reign of terror by Israel at least 211 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip while the international press corps is denied access to report on events in that huge concentration camp. Britain and most western and European states are silent on this. They are silent also on the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against two million people, many of them children, who live in Gaza. According to UNICEF over three hundred thousand children under the age of five are suffering severe malnutrition.Commission on the Future of IrelandAs momentum in the demand for Irish Unity grows the work of Sinn Féin's Commission on the Future of Ireland continues to expand.In the last two months the Commission has held a Mid Ulster Peoples Assembly in the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Bellaghy; a Tionól Pobail Bhaile Ghib in County Meath; a climate crisis conference - One Island, One Environment – in Dublin and an EU & Irish Unity- What next?- event in the European Parliament in Brussels.

In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China's Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges. How are logistics nodes developed? Who lives in these nodes of connection, and how do they navigate the shifting tides of global ambition? Our conversation spans local politics, logistics, labor, railway connectivity, and geopolitics, offering a multidimensional view of border hubs where the global meets the local. These sites are not only shaped by supply chain logics but also by mounting geopolitical rivalries, as powers compete for infrastructural influence across continents. Dr. Kębłowski paints a vivid picture of Małaszewicze, once a booming railway town employing over 10,000 people, now economically depressed but still strategically vital. While geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—have disrupted trade flows, they haven't derailed Małaszewicze's importance. The town's traffic has rebounded, a testament to its logistical centrality. Dr. Kębłowski discussed the hopes of renewal spurred by the BRI and how local leaders have actively tried to position Małaszewicze on the global map—courting Chinese delegations, lobbying Warsaw, and crafting narratives of international relevance. He shares insights into how these symbolic and practical efforts illustrate both the ambitions and the limitations faced by peripheries striving to assert their place in global politics and connectivity networks. GUEST BIO: Wojciech Kębłowski is an urban researcher, photographer, and Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with affiliations at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He will begin a new professorship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in June 2025. His research sits at the intersection of urban, transport, and political geography, and draws on critical social and decolonial theory. It spans three main areas: the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport, the urban geography of Global China, and alternatives to capitalist urbanism, including circular economy and degrowth practices. Wojciech's research is global in scope, with fieldwork and collaborations in diverse cities in Western Europe (Aubagne, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Madrid), Eastern Europe (Sopot, Wrocław, Tallinn), China (Chengdu) and Cuba (Santiago). He uses a range of qualitative methods and is interested in photography as a research tool and a creative practice. Wojciech is involved in several international research projects, including LiFT (on fare-related mobility transitions), CARIN-PT (on flexible and on-demand transport), and previously led PUTSPACE and CIRCITY, focused on public transport and circular economies, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Liz Pelly has been closely following the evolution of Spotify and other music streaming services and the effect they have had on the music sector and musicians themselves for several years. Her book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria, 2025), paints a depressing picture of how the company has exploited the popularity of playlists to grab a larger share of the money we spend on recorded music. Along with the record companies, Spotify has done this at the expense of musicians themselves and especially those is less popular areas like jazz and classical. I spoke to Liz at an event in Brussels organised by music venue Ancienne Belgique. Later we were joined by Jozefien Vanharpe of Leuven university, professor of intellectual property law, and Nick Yule of AEPO Artis, an association for collecting societies for performing artists. This is Simon Taylor with a podcast for New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

P.M. Edition for May 8. Who is Robert Francis Prevost, the Catholic Church's 267th pontiff? WSJ reporter Drew Hinshaw answers that question from Vatican City. Plus: the U.S. agrees to a new trade deal with the U.K.—while the European Union draws up a list of American tariff targets. WSJ's Kim Mackrael has the details from Brussels. And, the Federal Aviation Administration could modernize the nation's air-traffic control system in the next few years, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says Congress needs to front the funding. Victoria Craig hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Akasha Mudra ~ Schubert - Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 Second Movement (Andantino) - Alfred Brendel ~ Star Whisperer (29 October 2011 - Brussels, BEL)

Political correspondent, Paul Cunningham reports from Brussels on the EU's planned response to the US should it fail to strike a trade deal with Washington.

In this episode of the Sound of Economics, we look at Germany's budget outlook under new Chancellor Friedric Merz and whether much-needed reforms to the so-called debt brake put Berlin on a collision course with Brussels. Host Rebecca Christie is joined by Bruegel's director, Jeromin Zettelmeyer, and Bruegel non-resident fellow, Armin Steinbach, to discuss the legal and economic implications. How can the EU encourage Germany to spend more on defence and security without unraveling the new fiscal rules? Does the EU need to redo its debt safeguards again? Relevant research: Germany's fiscal rules dilemma, Bruegel Analysis, Armin Steinbach and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, 24 April 2025 Will EU fiscal rules prevent Germany from using its new national borrowing space? Bruegel newsletter, Armin Steinbach, 28 April 2025

In this special (and slightly jet-lagged) episode, Dani and Giacomo record straight from Brussels, Belgium—and no, the podcast name Muscles by Brussels wasn't inspired by Jean-Claude Van Damme.  They reflect on their European travels through Amsterdam, Heidelberg, and now Brussels, sharing real talk on what it's like to stay plant-based while abroad. They discuss the difference between travel for work vs. actual vacation, why they're not tracking macros on this trip, how they try to weave in fitness habits without stressing, and the subtle-but-important label differences between vegan and vegetarian foods across countries. Have you traveled as a vegan? Let us know your tips and stories—we'd love to hear them!✨ Helpful Links and Resources:

Sofia-Brussels-Washington: From Serfdom to Freedom to Self-Accomplishment: Finding the American Dream by Michael Gloukhov Sofia-brussels-washington.com Amazon.com Sofia-Brussels-Washington: From Serfdom to Freedom to Self-Accomplishment: Finding the American Dream is a memoir of Michael Gloukhov's remarkable life from his war-torn youth to his thriving adulthood. Michael Stoianov Gloukhov was born in June 1944 during the heaviest bombing of Sofia by the US Air Corps. His parents were forced to divorce because his father was an officer in the pre-communist Royal Army. Michael graduated in 1963 and was conscripted in the Bulgarian Army for two years. To avoid membership in the Communist party, he declined to go to Reserve Officer's School and went instead as a Private in the mechanized Infantry. Eventually, he escaped to Belgium, followed by his mother and little sister. He earned a degree in Political Science while he drove a taxicab and in the 1980s became an international radio broadcaster with the Bulgarian Service of the Voice of America. Gloukhov joined the US Navy Reserve in 1987 at the age of 43, serving all over the world due to his unique, multifaceted background. He is currently married to the former Miss Dobrinka Droumeva and has a son, Ryan, who is now aged 30.About the author After spending over 33 years in the computer and information technology industry, Richard decided to take an early retirement to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional writer and published author. Richard is a leader in the computer industry, serving as Vice President of Consulting at Software Techniques and Beck Computer Systems before settling down as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe's. During his twenty-year tenure at that esteemed company, he focused on computer security and preparing for the possibility of disaster. In addition to creating hundreds of articles for the web and blogs, Richard actively works as a professional ghostwriter. In that role, he has completed books on a wide variety of subjects including memoirs, business volumes, and novels. Because of his in-depth background in software management and computer security, Richard has ghostwritten a number of major books in those areas.

Just when you thought the story was over, the questions only deepen. Hosted by Sally Leydon - Marion’s daughter and the voice you know from The Lady Vanishes - The Missing Matter picks up the trail after the March 2024 coronial findings. With over 22 million downloads behind it, this fan-funded follow-up launches on its own new feed, ready to chart a fresh journey into the unknown. Join Sally and her investigative team as they: Revisit key locations from Australia to Europe, chasing every lead Deploy scent-tracking dogs in the hunt for Marion’s final resting place Travel worldwide—from Japan and London to Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg and Lille Reflect on the coronial findings, the excitement of live events, and the planning stages of an epic research trip Subscribe now at Apple Podcast subscription for the show early and ad free from Monday May 12th.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He had the votes, he had a new coalition sealed in writing and ratified by party members, so it seemed like a formality. But Friedrich Merz's lifelong dream of finally becoming German chancellor had to be deferred by a few hours, with the 69-year-old Conservative falling at the first hurdle as backbenchers sent a signal. A hastily organised second round cancelled out what history may decide to be just a blip. But still, why did Merz fall six seats short in the first secret ballot? Who rebelled inside what now seems like a fragile coalition between Conservatives and Social Democrats?Germany's Trump and Putin-backed far-right co-leader was quick to call for snap elections. Alice Weidel was savouring her revenge after German domestic intelligence last week qualified her Nazi-rooted party as an extremist group, a status that could in theory lead to a ban for an AfD that polled second on 20 percent in February's elections. The moment of wavering in Berlin is also rattling the script in Brussels and Paris, both of which bank on the return of Germany as a strong and steady driver of reform; a nation that just scrapped its fiscal purity rules to level up after decades of chronic underfunding of infrastructure and defence.Now, with the new coalition in Berlin looking over its shoulder, with far-right challenges in upcoming Romanian and Polish elections, all of Europe is asking: will the centre hold?

Just when you thought the story was over, the questions only deepen. Hosted by Sally Leydon - Marion’s daughter and the voice you know from The Lady Vanishes - The Missing Matter picks up the trail after the March 2024 coronial findings. With over 22 million downloads behind it, this fan-funded follow-up launches on its own new feed, ready to chart a fresh journey into the unknown. Join Sally and her investigative team as they: Revisit key locations from Australia to Europe, chasing every lead Deploy scent-tracking dogs in the hunt for Marion’s final resting place Travel worldwide—from Japan and London to Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg and Lille Reflect on the coronial findings, the excitement of live events, and the planning stages of an epic research trip Subscribe now at Apple Podcast subscription for the show early and ad free from Monday May 12th.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the pantheon of great Van Damme action flicks from the 1980s and 90s, 'Hard Target' (1993) undoubtedly stands out as one of his best. As hunky Cajun ex-Marine, Chance Boudreaux, the mullet-wearing 'Muscles from Brussels' struts his more sensitive side while also exhibiting the sort of superhero antics that would put Schwarzenegger to shame, like firing a pistol while standing on a moving motorbike and - famously - punching a snake. He has his director to thank for one of his most iconic roles: John Woo, the 'heroic bloodshed' maestro fresh from his ballistic Hong Kong masterpiece, 'Hard Boiled' (1992), and determined to make an impact in his American directorial debut. The resulting concoction is pure Woo - a slow-motion bullet ballet of epic proportions which cemented his position as one of cinema's greatest directors of action. Joining me and 'Life of Action' author Mike Fury to discuss this milestone in movie mayhem is Christina Newland, lead film critic at the i Paper and a contributing editor to Empire Magazine. As three dedicated Jean-Claude Van Damme fans, we unpick the reasons why we think his appeal is more inclusive than that of his action contemporaries - people like Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, and Chuck Norris - and the lasting legacy that John Woo has had on action cinema. This episode was recorded live at the Nova Cinema in Woking, UK, in November 2024 as part of the British Film Institute's Art of Action season. A huge thank you to the crew at the Nova Cinema and the people of Woking who attended the show, and the Independent Cinema Office and Film Hub South East for helping to organise the event.LINKSChristina Newland on Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/christinalefou.bsky.socialChristina Newland's website: https://www.christinanewland.co.uk/Christina Newland on Substack: https://substack.com/@christinanewlandSubscribe to 'Sisters Under the Mink' on Substack: https://christinanewland.substack.com/Buy 'She Found It at the Movies: Women writers on sex, desire and cinema': https://www.waterstones.com/book/she-found-it-at-the-movies/christina-newland/9781912157181'Act Like a Man: Jean-Claude Van Damme' by Christina Newland: https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/act-like-a-man-jean-claude-van-dammeBuy 'Hard Target' on 4K UHD from Kino Lorber: https://kinolorber.com/product/hard-target-4k-uhd 'Hard Target' review on Kung Fu Movie Guide: https://bit.ly/HardTarget1993Jean-Claude Van Damme profile on Kung Fu Movie Guide: https://bit.ly/VanDammeKFMGJean-Claude Van Damme on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcvd/John Woo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_woo_filmmaker/'John Woo's Next Film Is ‘A Half-Musical' With Sparks', Empire Magazine: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/john-woo-half-musical-sparks-exclusive/'Celebrate Renowned Hong Kong Action Classics, Storytellers, And Film Icons With Shout! Studios' New Home Entertainment Series Hong Kong CInema Classics': https://www.shoutstudios.com/press/celebrate-renowned-hong-kong-action-classics-storytellers-and-film-icons-with-shout-studios-new-homMike Fury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themikefury/Mike Fury's website: https://www.mikefury.net/Visit the Nova Cinema in Woking: https://www.novacinema.com/Learn more about the BFI's Art of Action season: https://www.bfi.org.uk/art-actionA huge thank you to Independent Cinema Office (https://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/) and Film Hub South East (https://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/film-hub-south-east/) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China's Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges. How are logistics nodes developed? Who lives in these nodes of connection, and how do they navigate the shifting tides of global ambition? Our conversation spans local politics, logistics, labor, railway connectivity, and geopolitics, offering a multidimensional view of border hubs where the global meets the local. These sites are not only shaped by supply chain logics but also by mounting geopolitical rivalries, as powers compete for infrastructural influence across continents. Dr. Kębłowski paints a vivid picture of Małaszewicze, once a booming railway town employing over 10,000 people, now economically depressed but still strategically vital. While geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—have disrupted trade flows, they haven't derailed Małaszewicze's importance. The town's traffic has rebounded, a testament to its logistical centrality. Dr. Kębłowski discussed the hopes of renewal spurred by the BRI and how local leaders have actively tried to position Małaszewicze on the global map—courting Chinese delegations, lobbying Warsaw, and crafting narratives of international relevance. He shares insights into how these symbolic and practical efforts illustrate both the ambitions and the limitations faced by peripheries striving to assert their place in global politics and connectivity networks. GUEST BIO: Wojciech Kębłowski is an urban researcher, photographer, and Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with affiliations at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He will begin a new professorship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in June 2025. His research sits at the intersection of urban, transport, and political geography, and draws on critical social and decolonial theory. It spans three main areas: the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport, the urban geography of Global China, and alternatives to capitalist urbanism, including circular economy and degrowth practices. Wojciech's research is global in scope, with fieldwork and collaborations in diverse cities in Western Europe (Aubagne, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Madrid), Eastern Europe (Sopot, Wrocław, Tallinn), China (Chengdu) and Cuba (Santiago). He uses a range of qualitative methods and is interested in photography as a research tool and a creative practice. Wojciech is involved in several international research projects, including LiFT (on fare-related mobility transitions), CARIN-PT (on flexible and on-demand transport), and previously led PUTSPACE and CIRCITY, focused on public transport and circular economies, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China's Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges. How are logistics nodes developed? Who lives in these nodes of connection, and how do they navigate the shifting tides of global ambition? Our conversation spans local politics, logistics, labor, railway connectivity, and geopolitics, offering a multidimensional view of border hubs where the global meets the local. These sites are not only shaped by supply chain logics but also by mounting geopolitical rivalries, as powers compete for infrastructural influence across continents. Dr. Kębłowski paints a vivid picture of Małaszewicze, once a booming railway town employing over 10,000 people, now economically depressed but still strategically vital. While geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—have disrupted trade flows, they haven't derailed Małaszewicze's importance. The town's traffic has rebounded, a testament to its logistical centrality. Dr. Kębłowski discussed the hopes of renewal spurred by the BRI and how local leaders have actively tried to position Małaszewicze on the global map—courting Chinese delegations, lobbying Warsaw, and crafting narratives of international relevance. He shares insights into how these symbolic and practical efforts illustrate both the ambitions and the limitations faced by peripheries striving to assert their place in global politics and connectivity networks. GUEST BIO: Wojciech Kębłowski is an urban researcher, photographer, and Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with affiliations at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He will begin a new professorship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in June 2025. His research sits at the intersection of urban, transport, and political geography, and draws on critical social and decolonial theory. It spans three main areas: the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport, the urban geography of Global China, and alternatives to capitalist urbanism, including circular economy and degrowth practices. Wojciech's research is global in scope, with fieldwork and collaborations in diverse cities in Western Europe (Aubagne, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Madrid), Eastern Europe (Sopot, Wrocław, Tallinn), China (Chengdu) and Cuba (Santiago). He uses a range of qualitative methods and is interested in photography as a research tool and a creative practice. Wojciech is involved in several international research projects, including LiFT (on fare-related mobility transitions), CARIN-PT (on flexible and on-demand transport), and previously led PUTSPACE and CIRCITY, focused on public transport and circular economies, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Microsoft wants to grow its presence in the European Union, but the bloc worries that trade tensions with the U.S. could cause trouble down the line. WSJ reporter Edith Hancock reports from Brussels. Plus: Strain at Microsoft doesn't end with geopolitics. A rift has been growing between its boss, Satya Nadella, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. WSJ reporter Keach Hagey has the inside scoop about what's gone wrong. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found Click On Picture To See Larger Picture The Spain, Portugal and France blackout caused by green energy. The [CB] will try to force empty shelves and try to convince the people that it's Trump, this will fail. Retailers have been preparing and other nations will fill the gap. The fake news is pushing a recession, the numbers tell another story. Banks will be obsolete. Think Andrew Jackson. The [DS] players are now being held accountable for election interference. This is just the beginning, the narrative will continue until Trump and team shows how they over-through the US Gov and duly elected President in 2020. Trump has the [DS] exactly where he wants them and they are getting weaker and weaker.   (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); Economy https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1917219854861451569 EU Admits It's Stuck Under US Tech Giants' Thumb  The European Union has admitted that it cannot break free from the dominance of US tech companies, Politico reported on Wednesday, citing the draft of the International Digital Strategy for Europe set to be released in June. Brussels has reportedly admitted that freeing itself from the dominance of US tech companies is unrealistic, and that "cooperation will remain significant across the technological value chain." EU states remain dependent on US tech companies, and US President Donald Trump's stance on Europe has the bloc fearing for its sovereignty in global technologies, including social media and cloud services. Another concern is linked to the ability of US law enforcement bodies to get access to data processed by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the paper said. The draft of the strategy also signals that the EU has very few fresh ideas that may help Europe become an important player in the global technology field, the paper added. Source: sputnick.com https://twitter.com/SchmittNYC/status/1917224051191304619 BINGO – Longshoreman Union Announce Opposition to President Trump's Tariff Program   “The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) unequivocally condemns the recent tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed.” [SOURCE] All these moves are so transparently political, it almost makes you laugh.  However, that said, we are now in a better position to understand exactly how the Democrats and Deep State operatives will weaponize the supply chain along with their union orcs. In the next phase of the anti-Trump tariff agenda, approximately 3 months from now it will begin, we will see/hear a constant drumbeat of empty shelves, missing parts and missing products.  Whether factually true, or whether the shortages are an outcome of a strategy by the ILWA to assist the shortage narrative, the overall objective will be to blame President Trump for everything from shortages of medicine to shortages of parts to fix, repair or maintain consumer products. Source: theconservativetreehouse.com https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1917263959108862343 Trump to Sign Executive Order Providing Automakers Tariff Relief President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday relaxing some of his 25% tariffs on autos and auto parts. The directive is the result of conversations directly with domestic auto manufacturers, a senior Commerce Department official said on a call with reporters.   The administration will offer automakers that finish their vehicles domestically a 15% offset of the cost of the tariffs. Automakers can choose how to allocate the offset.

Prof. Glenn Diesen: [LIVE from Brussels]: What Europe Fears.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I chat with SCMP Senior Europe Correspondent Finbarr Bermingham, who joins from Brussels where he's been covering the EU-China relationship in fantastic depth and with great insight.3:17 – EU-China relations in early 2025: the effect of the 2021 sanctions, who advocated for engagement versus confrontation with China, and the importance of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI)13:49 – How Brussels initially reacted to the rupture in the transatlantic alliance 17:14 – China's so-called charm offensive 21:03 – The idea of de-risking from Washington 23:10 – The impact of the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky 24:55 – Europe's dual-track approach with China and shift toward pragmatism 29:35 – National interests versus EU unity regarding Chinese investment, and whether Brussels could extract concessions 35:20 – Brussels' worry over Trump cutting a deal with China 38:06 – Possible signs of China's flexibility on different issues40:25 – The lifting of the sanctions on European parliamentarians 42:21 – The decrease in calls for values-based diplomacy, and whether securitization is happening in Europe47:05 – How the EU might address tensions over China's industrial overcapacity 50:17 – The possible future of EU-China relations, and whether the transatlantic relationship could go back to normal55:50 – The knee-jerk element of looking past EuropePaying It Forward: Ji Siqi at SCMP, Cissy Zhou at Nikkei, and Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou at Rest of WorldRecommendations:Finbarr: The Stakeknife podcast series; Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe; and the 20th anniversary edition of Wilco's album, A Ghost Is Born Kaiser: The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At least nine people have been killed after a car ploughed into crowds at a Filipino cultural event in Vancouver. Yousef Vardeh is a Filipino-Canadian who witnessed the incident from his bao-bun food truck and watched as his customers were hit. Also in the programme: Iranian officials say they have contained a deadly fire following an explosion at one of the country's largest ports; and we speak to the Serbian students running from their home country to Brussels to lobby the EU.(Photo: An ambulance is parked at the site of the Lapu Lapu day block party. Credit: REUTERS/Jennifer Gauthier)

Dean has released about 20 albums, starting with three '88-'90 with Galaxie 500, then he started fresh in New York as Luna, releasing seven albums and some EPs through 2005 (plus a later reunion), then continued with his Luna bassist and now spouse Britta Phillips as Dean and Britta for five albums, interspersed with now four albums under his own name and other miscellaneous projects. We discuss "We're Not Finished Yet" (and listen at the end to "The Cloud Is Coming" from That's the Price of Loving Me (2025), "Love Is Colder Than Death" from Emancipated Hearts (2013), and "23 Minutes in Brussels" by Luna from Penthouse (1995). Intro: "Strange" by Galaxie 500 from On Fire (1989). More at deanwareham.com. Hear more Nakedly Examined Music. Support us on Patreon.

Scientists have made a huge leap in a highly technical practice known as coherent quantum communications. The WSJ's Aylin Woodward breaks down what that is and the effects it could have on everyday life. Plus, our Brussels-based reporter Kim Mackrael takes us through the trade implications of the European Union's fines on Apple and Meta Platforms. Katie Deighton hosts. We want to hear from you! Our recent series “Chatbot Confidential” looked into privacy risks when using generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. Do you have a question about using these chatbots and your privacy? Record a voice memo and send it to tnb@wsj.com or leave us a voicemail at (212) 416-2236. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices