Hollywood on strike

Make Me Smart July 12, 2023

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Kai Ryssdal

Let’s go.

Kimberly Adams 

Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. It is July 13.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal, thanks for joining us on this Thursday for a new segment for which we do not have a name yet we’ve gotten some suggestions. It’s the one where we play some tape and do some analysis on the other side. We’ve had “between the lines” we’ve had “sound off,” keep them coming you know how to get a hold of us, if you’ve got a good idea for this one. Maybe it’ll be on Thursdays always. Maybe it won’t, I don’t even know. Alright, anyway, first clip, here we go. Drew hit it.

Fran Drescher

What happens here is important, because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor. By means of when employers make Wall Street’s and greed, their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.

Kimberly Adams 

So if you didn’t recognize the voice that was Fran Drescher, famously of “The Nanny,” but who was also the president of the SAG-AFTRA union, and full disclosure here, a lot of Marketplace, folks are represented by SAG-AFTRA, but not the part that just went on strike today. So that’s a different segment of SAG-AFTRA, but it is the it’s a huge deal. It’s like, what 160,000 people or something like that, but it’s the first, if you combine that with the writer strike, the actors and the writers together, it’s basically a total shutdown of Hollywood for the first time in 63 years. And when I was watching the press conference, this this particular clip really struck me. And because she was saying, what’s happening to the actors is likely to happen to lots of other industries, because streaming totally disrupted the, you know, entertainment industry, and now with AI, and, you know, proposals, you know, they they accused the other side of offering proposals, where they could, you know, take the likeness of an actor, pay them once and, you know, then use that imagery or digital whatever, in perpetuity for all sorts of other things. Anyway, lots of back and forth offers across the table that aren’t necessarily real. Anyhow, this idea that with AI, and with all these new technologies, a lot of people are going to lose jobs, or have their jobs significantly changed. She was arguing that actors may be first in this, but this is coming for other industries as well. And I thought that was very fascinating.

Kai Ryssdal 

I thought the other thing that was fascinating today, along these lines was an interview that Bob Iger the once and present CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and a guy who just had his contract extended, made in I think it was on CNBC, Iger said.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal

Iger said that the demands that the writers are making, and one assumes now the actors he feels the same way, are unrealistic and unreasonable. And I’m like, Bob, read the room. I just, it’s, he’s very savvy, usually. And that was just a big faux pas. But look, this is a very big deal. And once we all work through the queues that we have on Netflix and Hulu, and all that stuff, and realize there’s no fresh content coming, then it’s really going to start to bite and then I think writers and actors will have some leverage. Right now, though, with that backlog. I don’t think they have a whole lot of leverage.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, and that’s, that’s the thing I was wondering about, because that backlog not only includes all of the content ever made, you know, for us, but also like, all the foreign content that’s now available. Like I’ve been going deep into these, like Chinese mini-series about fantasy realms from thousands of years ago, you know, like sobbing on my couch over things that I never even thought I would worry about. Anyway, but like 49 episodes of that and so, but there’s a long queue of content for people to get to before folks really start feeling it, you know? So yeah, anyway, this is gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep. All right, next one.

Jimmy Dunne

My fear is if we don’t get to an agreement, they’re already putting billions of dollars into golf. They’ve got a management team that wants to destroy the tour. And even though, even though you could say take five or six players a year, they have an unlimited horizon and an unlimited amount of money. So it isn’t like the product is better. It’s just that there’s a lot more money that will make people move.

Kai Ryssdal 

So that was a guy by the name of Jimmy Dunne. He’s a member of the PGA Tour Policy Board. He’s the vice-chairman. And as you know, if you follow the news this week, you know that Richard Blumenthal Senator from Connecticut, hauled them before his committee to say, “what are you doing PGA? Getting together with LIV golf?” Which is funded by the Saudi government and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. And that’s just really bad and Dunne in the PGA Tour saying this is the only way we can survive. And the Senate basically is saying, really? I mean, I’m not a golfer. I follow golf peripherally, but this just seems like a very bad look for the PGA, it is not a done deal as of yet, right? Because there’s a bunch of board approvals that has to happen. And one wonders whether federal regulators, were gonna get involved. But it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, but he’s telling the truth there, it seems, because, you know, LIV Golf was getting ready, they were offering ungodly amounts of money to these players, to basically jump ship from the PGA Tour, and come to them, and it was it was going to destroy the PGA Tour, and they were suits and counter suits and all these other things. What is infinitely fascinating to me is these same members of Congress who are like, accusing the PGA Tour of doing something bad by working with the Saudis are likely to be the same members of Congress, who will vote to send weapons to Saudi Arabia, and who will continue to you know, we continue to buy oil from Saudi Arabia. And I get that, you know, the geopolitical things are very different from the commercial things, but it’s a little bit of a disconnect there.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ya know, it’s a lot of a disconnect. It’s a lot of disconnect. But there’s more to come on the story. So, yeah, more to come on the story, as with the strikes, we’re two for two on more to come with this story. What’s next?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. All right. What’s the next clip?

James McGovern

It’s outrageous that the rules committee last night managed to mess up a bipartisan bill and put it on a path toward becoming a hyperpartisan one, by loading it up with every divisive social issue under the sun.

Kimberly Adams 

Hoo, boy. So I have been watching C-Span today about because the House of Representatives is debating the National Defense Authorization Act. This is legislation that they do every year that funds the military, right. And as he said, in that clip, who I should say, who was talking, oh, House Representative James McGovern. He was saying it’s usually a bipartisan thing, because everybody likes to go back to the district saying that they supported the troops. Nobody wants to take money from the troops until you get a very conservative house majority that sees this as and we talked about this before, when there’s must pass legislation like I don’t know, a debt limit deal, you might want to attach all of your social priorities to it to try to get those over the finish line. So what’s happening is that let’s see. They, on Wednesday, they approved a rule that basically allowed 80 amendments to get voted on on this legislation. And those amendments include a lot of those social issues. And let’s see, I’m looking at the latest here. On Thursday, they adopt the house adopted half a dozen of these amendments of from the conservative wing of the house, including limits to diversity initiatives, prohibitions on gender affirming care in the military, and a rollback of the Pentagon’s abortion policy. So what that means is when this bill goes up for a final vote, it will have these amendments attached to it, which very likely means that will fail because none of the Democrats are going to get on board. There may be a couple of Republican defections, and it 100% will not get through the Senate like this. So huge piece of legislation. And messy real messy right now.

Kai Ryssdal 

So this is serious question, actually, which I ask you in your capacity as an observer of the Washington political scene. Then what happens?

Kimberly Adams 

I think the same thing that happened with the debt limit deal, they wait and they go back and forth. And McCarthy is in a really bad situation. Because, you know, he hasn’t delivered on some of the promises to get things done for the conservative majority that he had to do in order to get the speakership. And they were really pushing him to allow these amendments, and it seems like he did, and they’ve made it through. So I think what’s going to happen is it’s going to pass the House maybe looking like this, like a very conservative NDAA, you’re gonna have military leaders not able to say anything, because they generally try to stay out of stuff like this. The Senate is gonna knock it down, and then they’re gonna go back to negotiating. And, you know, you don’t really have a government shutdown of the military. So right, just, it will be probably level funded until they sort out something.

Kai Ryssdal 

So so in the past with 2018, in the house, right, that’s what you’re saying?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, probably it was. I don’t know, I really don’t know. Because like some of this stuff, some of these, like, some of these initiatives, some of these amendments, I think are going to be real problematic, even for, like for some moderate Republicans, because remember, these folks have to go back to their districts for, you know, to get reelected on a somewhat regular basis. And some of these amendments going through our our issues. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know about this one.

Kai Ryssdal 

The only other thing I want to add to this, and it’s a little bit tangential, but it’s but it’s relevant, because it’s also about the culture wars and social issues coming to the military. I can’t let this opportunity pass not to remark on Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and his absolute freeze on military promotions and nominations. In light of the Department of Defense’s support, abortion rights after the overturning of Roe. And senator Tuberville has now held up because one person can bring the Senate of the United States to a complete halt. And that actually is just an indication of how broken the Senate is. But But anyway, it’s horrible is holding up 250 nominations and promotions including the incoming chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the incoming commander of the Marine Corps, in addition to a bunch of lower level, but still senior officers, and that’s bad on like 97 different levels. And it’s just I don’t enjoy that at all. That’s all. I just think that stinks.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, this fits in with what we were talking about the other day with the Department of Justice, right, that there are more and more parts of the US government that used to be seen as neutral or away from the politics that maybe never were, but at least we’re seeing that way, IRS, you know, and are increasingly becoming viewed as or forced to be partisan issues move in that Overton window. Overton window being the, it’s a political science term for sort of the space of accepted ideals of what is acceptable and not in society. It’s a very simplistic explanation of it. Anyway, it’s moving. Yeah, yes.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right. We got one more, I think, yeah, let’s go.

Mary Daly

Yeah, one of the surprising things about the economy is just how much momentum it continues to have. So what’s been notable is if you started at beginning of the end of last year, December, if you looked at the summary of economic projections that the FOMC put out in December, it was for forecasting slower growth than we have now.

Kai Ryssdal 

So that was Mary Daly. She is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was talking about, obviously, the economy and rate hikes and and the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee at Brookings, and I think you know, she’s she’s, look Daly’s a straight shooter, and she’s saying what she thinks is gonna happen, which is a couple more rate hikes there. There will be definitely at least one more in their meeting on the 25th and 26th. And then I think there might be another pause, frankly, they’re going to they’re going to skip August, because they always go to Jackson Hole. So the next meeting will be in September after the July meeting. They might pause on that one, because as we learned yesterday, you know, inflation at the consumer level down to 3%, which is a third of what it was a year ago. But, but I think signs are pointing to a hike, maybe two and then we might actually have a sustained pause.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, like Bostic said, this is the hard part.

Kai Ryssdal 

This is the hard part. Exactly. Right. That’s exactly right.

Kimberly Adams 

Resilient consumers, it’ll be interesting to see how things go on. That artificially created shopping day that we love. So it’s, it’s bad. I don’t know if you remember, but one time I went a year without buying anything off Amazon. And it was like…

Kai Ryssdal

I do remember. Yeah

Kimberly Adams

I mean I did, and it It was so fascinating. And I think I should recreate that and see if I can do it again, because I think it will be much harder now than it was then. Because there have been a lot of things that I’ve looked for lately where I tried to find somebody else selling it and could not. And especially with all the businesses that shut down during the pandemic, it will be very interesting how much harder it would be than then. Yeah. All right, that is it for us today. But before we go a quick correction on yesterday’s story about insurers pulling out of Florida I was all wrapped up in it and I said State Farm but I actually met Farmers Insurance, you know, (Farmer’s Insurance tune), that one, not the other one.

Kai Ryssdal 

There you go. All right. We are back. Tomorrow for economics on tap. Join us on YouTube 3:30 Pacific, 6:30 Eastern. Catch up on what dwinks we’re, dwinks? Drinks we’re having along with more news on business and the economy and reading recommendations from the team, by signing up for our Marketplace Make Me Smart newsletter, which is at Marketplace newsletters at marketplace.org/newsletters. So just look them up. They’re findable that’s what I’m saying they’ll fined them. Find anything.

Kimberly Adams 

It’s on the internets.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s right. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s episode was engineered by Drew Jostad. Ellen Rolfes writes the aforementioned newsletter. Our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kimberly Adams 

Marisa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.

Kai Ryssdal

Boom. 15 minutes.

Kimberly Adams

Yay, I know right on the nose. 14 according to my clock.