Geopolitical Dynamics and Black Swan Events

First on today's show, Ralph welcomes author, statistician, and professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb to discuss the wars in Gaza and Lebanon and give us his take on the election results. Then, Ralph and journalist Ryan Grim speak about President-Elect Trump's cabinet appointments and what we can expect from the upcoming Trump Administration. Finally, we're joined by constitutional law expert Bruce Fein for a post-election Donald Trump legal roundup.  

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent twenty-one years as a derivatives trader before changing careers to become a scholar, mathematical researcher and philosophical essayist. Mr. Taleb’s works focus on mathematical, philosophical, and practical problems with risk and probability, as well as on the properties of systems that can handle disorder.  He is the author of many essays and books about risk and uncertainty including the New York Times bestselling The Black Swan and his latest Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life.

The supporters of Israel are getting smaller in relative economic and financial size—and of course, in technological size as well. So it's getting smaller while at the same time, Israel relies more and more on their support. So that's not a robust situation. In other words, the strategy of Israel being continuously confrontational has led to more and more confrontation, and the strategy of relying on the West is not going to pay off.

Nassim Nicholas Talib

Israel has been behaving like a child with a strong personality and been capable of winning concessions from her or his parents continuously. So that's what has been happening. But the problem is— not finding any resistance, they kept going, they kept going, and one day they realized that, ah, they went too far but it was too late. So you can rely on AIPAC to do a bunch of things, but at some point, the strategy is not going to work.

Nassim Nicholas Talib

Ryan Grim is co-founder of Drop Site News, host of the podcast Deconstructed, and co-host of the show Counter Points. He was previously D.C. Bureau Chief for The Intercept and the Washington bureau chief for HuffPost, and he has been a staff reporter for Politico and the Washington City Paper. He is the author of the books This Is Your Country on Drugs, We’ve Got People, and The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.

[The incoming administration of Trump and his Trumpsters] are very aggressive. They think they're above the law. They are greedy. They want to turn the U .S. government into a honeypot for their commercial paymasters—which include their own businesses, by the way, like Elon Musk. And when that happens—when you have greed and almost total power with the Supreme Court on your side, with the Congress under Republican control—you're inevitably going to get serious examples of corruption. You're inevitably going to get blatant corruption. 

Ralph Nader

So far, to a lot of people's great disappointment, Democrats have been pretty terrible at [going after corruption]. So on the one hand, they angered the entire support base for Donald Trump and whipped them up into a frenzy accusing Democrats of prosecuting their enemies, while at the same time not actually prosecuting them for any corruption…Now, because the Trump movement has been able to argue to its base that it feels persecuted, they are probably going to spend a significant amount of their energy going after those who they see as their persecutors. 

Ryan Grim

Time is one of [Donald Trump’s] restraints and incompetence is another. He's up against those two elements—and in-fighting. There are a number of competing factions for his attention and for his agenda and they are going to relentlessly work to undermine each other. So that factor will restrain him. 

Ryan Grim

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law.  Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

I do think there's a remedy here, and that is I think that any of the decisions made by the people who are appointed through illegal or unconstitutional recess appointments, when they take any action, you wouldn't have to comply with their actions. You can say the decisions, their orders are null and void because they weren't appointed properly.

Bruce Fein

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

News 11/13/24

1. Following Kamala Harris’ disastrous defeat at the hands of Donald Trump last week – which saw the Vice President lose the electoral college by a greater margin than Hillary Clinton and swept Republicans to power in all three branches of government – the Democratic Party blame game is in full swing. Perhaps the most prominent critical voice has come from Bernie Sanders, who issued a blistering statement in which he writes “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned the working class would find that the working class has abandoned them.” DNC Chair Jamie Harrison has dismissed this criticism, calling it “straight up BS,” but in this moment Democrats are finding it harder to wave this critique away. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, for example, echoed Bernie’s warning, writing “when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

2. Meanwhile, Donald Trump appears to be setting the stage for Elon Musk to take on a prominent position in the incoming administration. Axios reports Trump had a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last Wednesday, and was joined by Musk. Details of the call remain murky, but Trump reportedly said he “will support Ukraine” and Musk said he will continue to aid Ukraine with his Starlink satellites. Bloomberg further reports that Musk joined Trump on a call with Serbian President Aleksander Vucic, and may meet with Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago.

3. Filling out the incoming administration, CNN reports Trump has offered New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik the role of Ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik entered Congress as a moderate Republican, but has grown closer and closer to the Trump wing of the party. More recently, she rose to national prominence for her role as ringleader of the McCarthyist hearings on supposed antisemitic protests on college campuses; in actuality of course, these protests were merely demanding recognition of human rights for Palestinians. Because of her staunch Zionist bona fides, Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt celebrated her selection. Stefanik has previously boosted the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, per the Washington Post, but apparently the ADL is happy to look past that so long as she blindly backs the State of Israel.

4. Another Trump administration staffing decision which has drawn scrutiny is the supposed appointment of Massad Boulos, father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, as “US point man for Lebanon,” per the Times of Israel. Boulos, a Lebanese-American billionaire, told the Lebanese network MTV “People see that Biden and Harris failed to end the wars and failed to even return the American hostages from Gaza…Lebanese Americans are migrating to [the] Republican Party and to Trump because they feel that Trump is their only hope to end this war, and end all the wars… so we can start talking about rebuilding Lebanon and Gaza.” However, this dovish tone is at odds with Trump’s promises to Right-wing Zionists, meaning one faction or the other is in for a rude awakening.

5. In more Middle East News, a potential political earthquake is unfolding in Israel. According to the Times of Israel, the chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has allegedly been accused of using security camera footage from the Prime Minister’s Office to blackmail an IDF official into “changing protocols of government meetings related to the October 7 Hamas attack…the attempts to alter the meeting minutes centered on how much knowledge Netanyahu had of the potential for a Hamas attack immediately before October 7.” Specifically, this report insinuates that Israeli intelligence was aware of “activation by terror operatives of dozens of SIM cards.” A curious detail of this scandal is that U.S. media has largely failed to report it at all. As of now, the most high-profile American journalist to cover it is none other than legendary investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh.

6. Back on the home-front, the Democrats are failing to safeguard the National Labor Relations Board. Trump has already made it abundantly clear that he will do everything he can to rollback the Biden-era gains for unions and their workers. Bloomberg reports that in addition to “defang[ing]” the NLRB and dismissing the Board’s crusading General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, “business advocates are…urging Trump to make the questionably legal move of firing all the Democrats on the labor board, so that he can more quickly unwind the union-friendly rulings of the Biden years.” Per JacksonLewis, the NLRB currently has “a 2-1 Democratic majority. In June 2024, Biden renominated current Board Chair Lauren McFerran (whose term expires on Dec. 16, 2024) to a third term and nominated Joseph L. Ditelberg to fill the Board’s vacant Republican seat. The Senate, however, has not yet confirmed these nominations. If McFerran is confirmed for a third term, the Board will maintain a Democratic majority until at least August 2026, when Member David Prouty’s term expires. This extended majority could lead to the continuation and expansion of pro-labor policies and decisions. But if the nominees are not confirmed by the Senate prior to Trump taking office, they will likely be filled by Trump appointees and the Board will return to a Republican majority.” In a word, if the Senate acts fast they could shore up the NLRB until late 2026 – but if they fail to act in the lame-duck session, Trump will be able to stack that Board like he has so many other institutions, up to and including the Supreme Court.

7. In more NLRB news, Matt Bruenig, via his Substack NLRB Edge, reports that a major unfair labor practice charge he filed against Bloomberg LP successfully forced the firm to change their standard employment agreement. The charge alleged that Bloomberg LP was “maintaining illegal confidentiality, coworker non-solicitation, and customer non-solicitation rules…[which] violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act.” Bruenig argued that “a reasonable employee would read them as prohibiting …publicizing working conditions, soliciting coworkers to leave for a competitor as part of a broader course of protected activity, and soliciting customers to engage in a solidaristic consumer boycott of the company.” Beyond the wonkish improvements to Bloomberg employment agreements however, Bruenig emphasizes that he was “able to get these changes…without ever revealing the identity of the person [he] was working for,” a loophole rarely used by lawyers. He notes the obvious value in doing so, writing “if an employer does not know which of their employees is behind the charge, they cannot retaliate against them. Thus, it is possible to get your employer to comply with the NLRA without incurring any personal risk.”

8. Another major story from NLRB Edge concerns the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. Put simply, Amazon was accused of interfering with the 2022 rerun union election at the facility via “Unlawful Confiscation of Union Materials…Surveillance and Coercion…[and] Disparate Enforcement of Rules.” The Administrative Law Judge overseeing this case agreed Amazon had violated Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, among other findings, and therefore ordered a second rerun election. He also issued a cease and desist order demanding Amazon “stop unlawfully removing union literature and engaging in surveillance of employees' protected activities.” While there is no guarantee a third election will yield different results, it is encouraging to see the NLRB stand up to corporate titans like Amazon.

9. Our final two stories today concern education. First, in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reports that since 2023, “The state’s average SAT score dropped to 948 out of 1600, an 18-point decline.” This is now the third year in a row that Florida’s SAT scores declined. In addition to the overall SAT scores, “Florida’s SAT math score dropped eight points to 455 - among the lowest for the ten states that, like Florida, test more than 90% of their graduating seniors.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made “anti-woke” education reform a centerpiece of his administration, leading many to attribute this decline to his leadership. The Sentinel reports “The Florida Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.” 

10. Finally, to end on a positive note, Sacramento State University has “announced the creation of Sacramento State Native American College, the first of its kind in California, offering students an inclusive, Native-based education that fosters connections to community and tribal government.” This college will reportedly “offer a diverse range of programs that integrate academic excellence with tribal values, traditions and community engagement,” and while “All students will minor in Native American Studies, with an emphasis on Native American Leadership, [they] can pursue any major the University offers.” Per California law the college is “open to students of all races and backgrounds who are interested in learning about Native life, history, and culture,” and the University notes that “Sac State also is home to the nation’s first Black Honors College, which offers a comprehensive curriculum focused on the Black and African American experience.”

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.