Ramaswamy: Why Did Unions Back a “Tech Bro” Union-Buster?

[0:04] In this episode, Ohio Congressman Bob Latta jumps on the Big Beautiful Bill rebrand bandwagon.

[0:12] What did Trump’s Christian Bias Task Force find? What happens when you put an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, former heroin addict, in charge of public health? And an Ohio Union Council endorses a candidate from a party that wants to end unions. Who is the drunk making that decision? This is Secular Left with Doug Berger. An independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[0:59] Now, we know that President Trump specifically and the Republican majority in Congress are basically con men, con people, because there’s some women involved, which means they sell us a bill of goods, they put lipstick on a pig, and make us try to force their views on us. And we know that they’re lying and we know it’s not what they claim it is, but yet they do it anyway. And so the other day on September the 3rd, I see this report from The Hill. It’s a political outlet in D.C. The title of it was, White House Pushes Republicans on Big Beautiful Tax Cut Bill Rebrand. And what it is, is that the White House has found out that Trump’s big, beautiful bill, the one that cut Medicaid and SNAP and supposedly gave tipped workers a tax cut, which is negligible, but it gives a massive tax cut to the wealthy.

[2:17] His Big Beautiful Bill is polling terribly with the people. The Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll in June found that nearly two-thirds, 64% of the public, holds an unfavorable view of the one Big Beautiful Bill and nearly twice the share who view the bill favorably, which was only 35%. The budget reconciliation bill includes tax and budget cuts, much of which affect health care, is viewed unfavorably by large majorities of Democrats, 85 percent, independents, 71 percent, but favorably by 6 in 10 Republicans, 61 percent. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who identify as supporters of President Trump’s Make America Great Again MAGA movement, a large majority, 72 percent, view the bill favorably. In contrast, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who don’t identify as MAGA supporters view the bill unfavorably, 66%.

[3:20] So the White House has decided that it needs a rebrand. And what they want people to call it, or what they want Republicans to call it, is the working families tax cut. And they had a meeting, a closed-door meeting with the Republicans in Congress and told them to rebrand it. And wouldn’t you know it, the same day that that report in The Hill comes out, I get an email from Congressman Bob Latta. He is the Republican representative of the 5th District here in Ohio, where my hometown is, Finley.

[4:00] And in his email, his district email, it says, Dear Friend, on the 4th of July, Congress passed and President Trump signed the Working Family Tax Cuts into law, which will make America safer and stronger, deliver historic tax relief, ensure Medicaid helps our most vulnerable for generations to come, invest in rural hospitals, and supports the hardworking families, farmers, and small businesses that help keep our community safe. In Ohio’s 5th Congressional District thriving. So he’s already using the new branding of the working family tax cuts. And he has little bullet points. It says, Real academic relief for hardworking families, extending and expanding the child tax credit, bolstering our military capabilities and national security, ensuring tax relief for seniors and all Americans, strengthening Medicaid, and no taxes on tips, overtime or Social Security, prioritizing energy dominance and reducing fraud, waste and abuse in our federal government. And the big, beautiful bill does really none of that. In particular, I want to talk about the Rural Health Transformation Program.

[5:16] It’s $50 billion over five years to help cover costs of care at rural facilities. What happened was when Trump’s administration wanted to cut Medicaid, a lot of that money that was going into Medicaid was going to rural hospitals, hospitals out in the boomsticks out in the country that don’t normally have any other funding sources but the federal government to stay open. And a lot of those hospitals complained and said, hey, if you cut our money, if you cut our funding, we’re going to have to close. Thank you.

[5:52] So what they did was instead of cutting it all out, they left $50 billion over five years. And they called it that we’re increasing investment. We’re making an investment. They’re not making an investment. What they’re doing is they’re putting back some of the money that they took out needlessly. All right. And the other thing, too, when you talk about the no taxes on tips over time of Social Security, that also is not what it seems. So according to an article in the American Progress website titled Despite No Tax on Tips, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is Bad for Tipped Workers, they give a couple of examples. Well, the first big thing to know about this no tax on tips is that most people who get tips and rely on tips are low-income workers. And so for a majority, a large majority of these workers, this so-called no tax on tips is not going to affect them at all because they don’t have a tax, they don’t owe taxes.

[7:11] So basically what happened is this no tax on tips isn’t giving them any money. It’s just reducing their taxable income by however much the tips that you’re deducting. So if you don’t owe any taxes and you declare $10,000 worth of tips, you will continue not to owe any taxes. So you’re not getting anything. It’s on paper. It’s a paper tiger type deal. So the American Progress website, Center for American Progress website, had some examples. They had three. And the one I wanted to point out was this fake guy that they have named Jack. He’s a 60-year-old high-end waiter. He’s single and he lives in Nebraska. And it has his taxable income of $80,000. The standard deduction that he can take is $15,750. That leaves him a tax income tax due for 2025 of $9,049. Well, he deducts or he declares $25,000 in tips, and that will decrease his taxes due by $5,500.

[8:33] So his tax thing, he’d have to determine his taxes, would be on $5,500.

[8:43] Well, it’s a little bit of a catch-22 because they also took away the tax credit that you get for getting your health care through the Affordable Care Act. In order to encourage people to get their health care through the exchanges, they provided a tax cut. Well, the Republicans took that away because they don’t like the ACA and they want people to stop using it. They want them to go back to private insurers, and so they got rid of it. They got rid of the tax cut. So this Jack then would have to pay $7,513 for his premium for his health care because most waiters and hospitality workers don’t get insurance through their employer. So even though he gets $5,500 income decrease, that is less than the amount that he had to pay for health insurance. So by the end, after he does all his math, he is out $2,013 for the year. That’s out of his pocket.

[10:01] And not to mention the fact that not everybody qualifies for the tax, the no tax on tips. Not every job where you get a tip is eligible. And they have to come up with a formula, not a formula, but a chart of jobs that do that. So that’s how awful this big, beautiful bill is, because nothing that the Republicans have said about it is actually true when you look at it. You know, they’re cutting snap, and that hurts farmers. And Representative Lada is all for the farmers. The other thing, too, was eliminated taxes on Social Security benefits. Again, that only benefits people who have a large amount of income because if you had a large amount of income, then they would tax your Social Security benefits. They don’t tax everybody’s Social Security benefits. If you don’t owe any income taxes, then you wouldn’t be paying anything on your Social Security benefits anyway. So again, that benefits wealthy individuals. It doesn’t benefit a common person.

[11:22] Oh, and that is the other thing, too, I was going to mention about that. No tax on tips is it deals with income tax. It does not deal with payroll taxes, which is the FICA that pays for the Social Security, pays into Social Security and Medicaid. It also does not lessen your state or local taxes. It’s just on income tax. You know, like I said, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. They’re trying to sell you a bill of goods and they call it a rebrand because it’s not pulling very well. And it’s not pulling very well because people actually are kind of smarter than most than what they think. And so I just thought that was interesting today that that I got that email from Bob Latta on the same day that I read that article about the rebrand. And no matter what they call it, the one big beautiful bill or the working family’s tax cut, it is a crock of crap, a crock of smelly crap.

[12:25] Compliments of Donald J. Trump.

[12:26] Music.

[12:36] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[12:43] Music. When I am compiling these episodes to publish, I read a lot. I read articles, magazine articles, newspaper articles. I read websites and blogs and sub stacks and things like that. And it gives me ideas on how I can do a deep dive on something. And other times when it’s a topic that I’m interested in and somebody has done it better than I could do it, then I want to give them props and send you over to them and read what they have to say about it.

[12:43] We’ll see you next week.

[13:32] Back in April, Trump instituted his anti-Christian bias task force. And the members that made up of the group included a failed beauty queen who was fired by Donald Trump. Um, then we had, uh, somebody from, uh, the First Liberty law firm, uh, even had Dr. Phil was on the task force and it was chaired by the Lieutenant Governor of Texas.

[14:06] And so they had this big show in April of their first meeting that was available on YouTube. And then we didn’t hear anything after that. Supposedly, they were supposed to have more public meetings, but they didn’t. They published their initial report. And according to Hemant Mehta at the Friendly Atheist, it was published in June or completed in June, but it wasn’t released to the public until this week. And so he does a very good deep dive on this report. And just as we all suspected, they found really no bias, no government bias towards Christianity specifically. And that’s what they were looking for. They were looking for biases specifically towards Christianity. They didn’t even, they had a Jewish rabbi on the task force, but they didn’t talk about Judaism. All they did was they just raised some grievances that we’ve heard for decades from the right. And so I’ll go ahead and throw the link to Hemet’s article on the Friendly Atheist. Read it. It’s great. And I highly recommend it.

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[15:32] Now that the Trump administration has actually put in charge of Health and Human Services an anti-vax conspiracy theorist named Robert Kennedy Jr. And some of the actions that he’s taken has played into his own biases over vaccines. That whole issue has come back up into the public again. If you remember from back during the pandemic, right-wingers were complaining about having to take a COVID vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine, and being prohibited from going into public places without proving you’d been vaccinated. They also complained about the mask mandates. You know, anything that was done to try to mitigate the pandemic, they politicized and complained about and went to court in some cases.

[16:34] I just remember the Columbus Dispatch photo of all these anti-mask people pounding on the doors of the Capitol of the Statehouse in protest. And of course, Dr. Amy Acton, who was the health department director who signed many of these orders that closed things down, was forced out of office when Governor DeWine caved to these right wingers towards the end of the pandemic and he decided to stop doing the mitigation. And because of that, the Republican Party in the state of Ohio is directly responsible for the unneeded deaths of over 20,000 people in the state of Ohio. In the country, we had an estimated deaths of at least a million people, both from not getting, because it took so long to get the vaccinations ready, of course. But then we also had many people who died because they refused to take a vaccination. And then they wondered why they were almost near death when they finally caught COVID. it. And see, that’s the thing. The old saying is that science is true whether you believe it or not.

[17:58] So we have that. And then it came out just recently, like last week, that the state of Florida was going to end all vaccine mandates. In case people aren’t aware that many states, Ohio included, have mandates for vaccinations for children to attend school. It’s mumps, rubella, measles, polio. Those are the main ones. So in many cases, you have to either get a vaccination or notify the state or the local authority why you didn’t get the vaccination. And it has to be because of either religious reasons or medical reasons. Like your child can’t get vaccinated because of a medical reason. Like if they get a vaccination, it could harm them, that sort of thing. And, of course, I don’t agree with the religious reasons at all. There shouldn’t be a religious reason to be exempted from vaccines. But anyway, so Florida was going to do it with all those vaccination mandates. They asked the Florida Surgeon General, who is an anti-vaxxer.

[19:15] You know, how did they, what did he find out about vaccinations that made him do that? and he admitted that he didn’t do any study at all. Again, he was operating based on his own internal biases that are wrong. So now you’re going to have a rehash of where if they follow through on it and it finishes up and they get rid of the mandates, is you’re going to have a nexus in Florida of many of these childhood diseases coming back with a vengeance. And so, you know, and people say, well, it should be your choice whether or not you get a vaccine. The thing is that the vaccine is different than, let’s say, smoking. You know, if you choose to smoke, that’s on you.

[20:12] Unfortunately, most people don’t realize that smoking is regulated because it can harm other people. And that’s the thing that we need to look at is Johnny getting chickenpox isn’t just about Johnny getting chickenpox. Because if Johnny gets chickenpox, he could give chickenpox to little Amy down the street, Tyson a couple blocks over. You know, he could give it to Curtis, who is immune compromised and couldn’t get a chickenpox vaccination.

[20:52] So these families that decide that their kid’s not going to get vaccinated think it’s just about them. And that’s not it. It’s not even close to it. It’s about other people. It’s a lack of compassion and a lack of compassion. Yeah, it’s a lack of compassion and it’s a lack of empathy for other people to where you demand that you do you have a singular right to decide for yourself whether or not you get vaccinated. Because your choice ultimately affects other people. Whether you think it does or not, it does. You know, the reason why we have these vaccinations is because these diseases were a problem, massive problem, before these vaccines came about. That’s why these vaccines were developed. And people are like, well, we don’t know about these foreign substances being put in your body. Well, we do because these vaccines have been around. The polio vaccine has been around since the 1950s. You know, the MMR has been around at least since the 1960s.

[22:10] And you would think that, you know, being 40, 50, 60 years old, we would know by now if there was any major problems with them. And to be fair, there can be problems.

[22:25] Just like any medical procedure or medical treatment, there can be side effects. There can be a bad outcome. But just because little Timmy down the street died from a vaccination, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, that shouldn’t then equal, well, we’re just going to get rid of vaccinations. Because then you can make the argument about getting rid of guns. You know, you hear that all the time. Well, that was just a lone wolf guy and he just killed four people. So we shouldn’t get rid of guns because that will punish everybody else. And that’s what you’re doing. When you get rid of vaccination mandates and you slander vaccines so bad that the numbers go down and people stop doing it, that’s what then you do, is then you harm other people. You allow other people to be harmed. And that is not for you to decide. You know, just like you demand that you should have the right to do it or not, you’re not giving that same choice to the people down the street who may or may not be able to survive if they get sick, if they get measles, or if they get rubella, or any of the other childhood diseases.

[23:49] And that is what’s wrong with this country right now that people think that stuff that they see on the internet like they’re smarter than scientists they’re smarter than medical doctors, and that is just i don’t know that’s just the epitome of arrogance that you think you know more because some soccer mom in Missouri did a YouTube video.

[24:20] And it’s ridiculous. Now, what I’d like to see is these anti-vaxxers, these people that don’t like vaccines and want to have these rights, I want to see you stop going to the doctor completely. Because you can’t go to a doctor and get treated for what ails you if you don’t trust vaccines. Because then you’re being a hypocrite. Just like our Senator, John, John Houston. He, he was commented and he commented in public that, that he had some concerns about vaccine mandates, but I can bet you dollars to donuts that he’s fully vaccinated. And so is his kids and his rest of his family. And that’s just dangerous talk from ignorant people.

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[25:18] In case you don’t know, I live in Ohio, the great state of Ohio, that has been under the control of the GOP for about 26 years now, where they had their party members in the governorship and the state legislature and the major offices like attorney general and the secretary of state. So I have personal experience with the Republican Party’s agenda because it’s happening here in Ohio almost on a daily basis.

[25:56] So I kind of had a weird chuckle when I read in the Toledo Blade, my local paper on August the 29th, that the headline was Northwest Ohio Trades Council endorses Ramswamy for governor. Vivek Ramswamy, who is best buds with Trump and Elon Musk. He didn’t get appointed to be the senator. John Houston got appointed to that. And so now he’s going to run for governor in 2026 as a Republican. And the Northwest Ohio Building and Construction Trade Council endorsed him. Now, for those who don’t know, the Northwest Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council is an association of unions, labor unions in the Northwest Ohio area. Covers all the counties, Williams, Defiance, Fulton, Lucas, Hancock, Henry. I think that’s everybody. Wood. I think that’s pretty much everybody. So like electrical unions and pipe fitters and who else?

[27:09] Concrete workers, et cetera, et cetera. They have representatives on this council. And what they do is they lobby, political lobbying and other lobbying for issues that are important to their members. And so when I saw this headline the other day, it kind of startled me because…

[27:34] But Ramaswamy is not pro-labor. In fact, the Republican Party is anti-union, anti-labor. And so in the comment section online on the article, I wrote, it says, it seems odd they would endorse someone from a party that wants to eliminate their member unions and supports right to work. But hey, I guess they had a price and he paid it. And the other thing, too, about Ramswami is that he is a so-called tech bro, where he made his money on financially dubious companies and kind of like Elon Musk, or at least he likens himself to Elon Musk. And one of the things that he did was, like Elon Musk, is he moved his company to Texas.

[28:31] And he also has been quoted in newspaper articles of bad-mouthing Ohio workers, calling them lazy and inefficient. And he wants to be the governor, and he got an endorsement from a labor union. Now, we also know that Ramaswamy is a sycophant of our current dictator-in-chief, Trump. And we know for a fact that Trump is also anti-union. And so in this article in The Guardian paper, it says, for this Labor Day, the Donald Trump administration has draped in enormous manner outside the U.S. Labor Department with his portrait and the words, American workers first.

[29:11] It says, Trump was elected on promises since repeatedly pledged that he would fight for workers and forgotten Americans. But many labor advocates say that Trump has consistently put corporate interests first in his second term, as he has taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous. Despite his vow to help coal miners, Trump halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving them without a quorum so they can’t take any action. He stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively. He just tore up their union contracts. He also has proposed ending minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home care and domestic workers.

[30:03] And he killed a Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage. And so he is definitely not pro-labor and neither is Juan and Swami. Now, somebody suggested in the comments to that article that the Trades Council endorsed him because he supports building more data centers. And now we know that there are some ecological problems. And economic issues with building data centers. Data centers are these large buildings that use a massive amount of power and a massive amount of water to cool computers.

[30:55] It’s a data warehouse. It’s where they have like Facebook and TikTok and e-commerce sites and things like that. And so there’s a lot of data centers being built around the state. Some consequences of that is the electric prices that people pay are going to go up because these electric companies need to provide more power to these data centers. And so they have to build more infrastructure, which means that they pass that expense on to consumers, not to businesses. The other thing, too, is these computers are very, very hot. They need to be cooled, and so they use water-based cooling systems, kind of like what you find in modern office buildings. When I used to work in an office building, it was called a chiller. And basically what it was, it was a big tank where cold water would percolate through these baffles, and the air would be passed through these baffles and exchange the heat. With the cool air from the water, and then that would get circulated back into the building. So this is essentially how they are cooling these massive racks of computers. The other thing, too, about data centers is they do not provide as many jobs as you would think.

[32:23] Mainly, probably half a dozen workers at most, because these are all digital electronic systems that they don’t need any very much labor. Just somebody to man a console, and if there’s a problem, to swipe out a drive or do a backup or something like that. There isn’t a lot to do there, so it’s not like it’s going to be creating massive jobs. But what the Building Trade Council has found was that they need a lot of workers to build these facilities. So I’m guessing that was probably the price that Vaswamy paid to get their endorsement. And so we don’t even have to go to Trump, too, to find out what’s going on with unions in Ohio. The Republican Party in Ohio have attacked unions incessantly. They wanted to undo the state requirement that state contracts would have to use union wages when they did projects. We also had, in 2011, an attempt to prevent public service employees from having collective bargaining. They were going to take away their union rights, and they did do that. And then the unions rose up and got a petition started and got it put on the ballot and people rejected that law and it was repealed.

[33:52] And so I just find it just very ironic that a union council would support a Republican.

[34:01] And unfortunately, we know what’s going on with that. I mean, it was all unions was all part of Project 2025 when we were talking about Project 2025. The Project 2025 agenda would let big corporations secretly hire union busting consultants to provide behind the scenes help in manipulating and scaring workers. The Project 2025 would make it illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions. also lets employers take away unions mid-contract, lets employers retaliate against union organizers. It would let employers create their own sham company unions, which is something that some companies have done in the past. And if you want to talk about workers’ rights, they want to let states gut national overtime and minimum wage laws and let states ban labor unions, Let employers stop paying overtime. Repeals labor and wage protections for workers on federal projects. Restricts unemployment insurance.

[35:14] It privatizes unemployment insurance programs. That’s a big thing for the Republicans and Trump is they want to privatize everything. They want to cut assistance to workers whose jobs were sent overseas. And so that’s the other ironic thing, too, is Trump, when he was running, he was talking about putting workers, American workers first and bringing these jobs back to the states, to the United States. To jobs that were stolen from us by other countries. They weren’t stolen. The Republicans worked to make it easier to offshore these jobs. And now he’s fixing a problem that his party created.

[36:02] And the other thing, too, that I heard about was that the Trump administration wants to— The reason why they’re doing these massive raids and deporting these people, the immigrants, is to open up jobs that they can then tout saying, look at all these open jobs we have and trying to force American workers to take these menial jobs that only illegal immigrants would take. And that’s another part of this that they’re talking about. So the fact that the Northwest Ohio Trade Council endorsed Vivek Ramswamy is just ridiculous. And I think if I was a member of a union that’s in that council, I would be complaining to my union reps about it. You know, I don’t care individual union members if you have,

[37:03] if you support Trump for your obviously bigoted reasons, because that’s a lot, plays a lot into it. But the fact that your union council is supporting a party that wants to see you not have a union anymore, I think that’s something you need to bring up with your union leadership.

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[37:34] Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using the Amplify Studio. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

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