Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Ian Bremmer on the Situation in Venezuela; April Jobs Report; Trouble with America's Mayors; Gupta Travels to the Happiest Place on Earth. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired May 03, 2019 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[08:30:00] IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT, EURASIA GROUP: But it's not working.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: What about Russia's influence? Russia, you know, all of the stories about, there was a plane waiting on the tarmac to take Maduro. What -- what's happening with that?

BREMMER: I have no doubts that there is a plane on the tarmac. I mean, in the United States, right, I mean we actually have secure bunker in case there's nuclear war. I mean when things go badly, we make sure we have options. But that doesn't mean that Guaido was actually about to take over. It certainly doesn't mean that Maduro was about to leave. And I'm -- I'm quite skeptical that Maduro was literally ready to go, leave the country, with -- so I think -- I think that it was an option if things went really badly, and it didn't.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Russia, of course, supports the Maduro regime.

BREMMER: Yes.

BERMAN: We had John Bolton on the other day who got really pissy with me when I asked him whether or not the president would speak to Vladimir Putin about Venezuela. Why do you think the administration is so defensive about pressuring Russia or publicly talking about pressuring Russia?

BREMMER: It is interesting. I mean Bolton himself has gone really hard against the Cubans, but not the Russians, while the Russians are providing direct military support and a lot of diplomatic and economic cover for this regime.

Part of it, I think, is because they're hopeful that if more of the military swings against Maduro, that the Russians can play a useful role in working out an agreement. That's not stupid. I have heard that the Russians and Americans are planning on meeting in Helsinki on Monday on the sidelines of a broader multilateral session --

BERMAN: What could possibly go wrong in Helsinki?

BREMMER: Well, when the president's not involved directly, we kind of want this. It's an arctic council meeting, but they're going to be there and the conversation needs to be, hey, your guy isn't winning, this isn't going well for anyone, is there a way that the military can still have a significant role, in other words some carrot when it's all been stick from the U.S., but Maduro needs to be forced out because he's destroying the economy of this country.

CAMEROTA: Let's talk about the Middle East. So, Jared Kushner, the president -- one of the president's top advisers and son-in-law was tasked with Middle East peace. An ambitious assignment. What's the status? What's happening?

BREMMER: It's not a priority for anyone in the region. You now have -- I mean, five years ago, ten years ago, if you went and talked to the Egyptians, to Gulf Arabs, they would say Israel/Palestine was one of the things that was most preventing peace in the region. Now they'll tell you about Yemen. They'll tell you about ISIS. They'll tell you about Syria. They'll talk about Iraq. They'll talk about Iran. It is not even a top ten priority for many of them. And they're working with the Israelis directly, some publicly, some privately.

They like -- a lot of them like Jared Kushner. A lot of them have meant him many times. Certainly that's the case in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They'll be polite to him as a consequence of this. This deal was going nowhere. And having said that, I think that of all the things that Jared could be spending a lot of time on, Middle East peace is one that he probably can't do too much damage on.

BERMAN: It's one way of putting it.

BREMMER: Yes.

BERMAN: Let's talk about China and what appears to be some rich Chinese people's involvement in this college admissions scandal in the United States, the idea that these oligarchs pay, what, $6.5 million to get their kids into big school here. Perhaps not a surprise because of the priority put on many rich Chinese families getting their kids into these high-rated U.S. schools.

BREMMER: Yes, I mean this guy in the United States that was kind of the mastermind of the varsity blues scandal, I mean, you know, if you're going to spend the time and the capital to get to know Chinese oligarchs, a target-rich environment where there's not a lot of competition, you're really going to push up the prices.

I remember, I was living in Kazakhstan back in 1992. How is this relevant, you ask?

BERMAN: As one does.

BREMMER: Because there was one store that actually had a lot of western products. And I remember Fruit Loops, a box of Fruit Loops were like $20. And not -- no Americans were going to buy it there because we don't care. But if you were a Kozak oligarch, you wanted to buy Fruit Loops, you're going to pay $20. And they did. I watched them do it.

And so if you're Chinese and you've got a Bentley and a Ferrari and a Tesla in your front yard -- a Tesla with all the charging stations in China, right -- I mean, you know, you're going to pay $6.5 million. You found the one guy that can get your kid into Stanford and pretend that she's on the sailing team.

CAMEROTA: And if you want your Fruit Loops, you're going to eat your Fruit Loops for $20.

BREMMER: You're going to pay $20 for your Fruit Loops. Absolutely.

CAMEROTA: Ian Bremmer, thank you.

BERMAN: Bremmer, Fruit Loops and Kazakhstan. The beginning of a story --

CAMEROTA: Only Ian Bremmer.

BERMAN: How will it end?

All right, the April jobs report just released. Very, very solid news for the jobs situation in the country.

Christine Romans breaks it down. She breaks all the numbers down. I was trying to find out when, because it didn't say. Next, it turns out.

CAMEROTA: Next. Next. Yes.

And see what happens when victims and offenders of violent crimes meet face to face on the new CNN original series "The Redemption Project" with Van Jones. It's Sunday night at 9:00 p.m., followed by "United Shades of America" with W. Kamau Bell at 10:00.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:38:40] BERMAN: All right, breaking news, the Labor Department has released the April jobs report and, frankly, it is huge.

CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans joins us now with the breaking details.

Romans, historic numbers.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, this is another month of very strong job creation. I mean, 263,000 net new jobs. That's the most since January. January was strong. I mean we're averaging here more than 213,000 new jobs a month over -- over the past year or so.

But here's the historic number, that unemployment rate, 3.6 percent. That's the lowest since 1969. I mean these are generational lows in terms of the unemployment rate. And when you look some of the job categories, like women and African-Americans, African-American women in particular, those numbers are doing very, very well.

Look at the sectors here. Business and information services, strong job creation there. Construction, again. There's a bit of a renaissance in the housing market this spring. Mortgage rates remain very, very low.

Manufacturing saw a rebound of 4,000. Manufacturing has been a strong spot in the Trump administration. About a half a million jobs in the Trump administration created in manufacturing.

I want to look quickly at the futures market and what the markets are going to make of this. This is a really strong economic report, another one, after a very strong GDP report last week. Could this mean that the Fed should be maybe not on the sidelines, maybe raising interest rates? At least for now, you can see that the futures market is saying that investors like what they see. Kind of a Goldilocks scenario in the economy right now, very strong, no signs of inflation.

[08:40:12] CAMEROTA: You know, Christine, the Democrats like to say that this is President Trump riding President Obama's coattails, but is that true or is this a strategy that President Trump and the White House have done that have juiced these numbers to this level?

ROMANS: Look, the recovery is ten years long. And we did see strong job recovery in the Obama administration. You will remember that Donald Trump and his team, they didn't believe those numbers when those numbers were in the Obama administration. Now they do believe them today. This is now a sustained recovery.

Look, there are things that the Obama -- that the Trump administration did that helps this, cutting regulations, right? There's also the -- sort of this feeling of a more pro-business, rightly or wrongly, a pro-business feeling, a flip -- a switch has been flipped here and so you've got hiring confidence. Also, demand is stronger for these companies. When they need to hire somebody, they hire somebody.

But this is probably, as one of our writers at CNN Business said is as good as it gets in the labor market. At some point you're going to run out of workers. We ever more job openings today than we have workers who are out looking for jobs to fill them and a little bit of a mismatch in the skills lines.

BERMAN: And people predict a slowdown at the end of last year for the first and second quarters. That appears not to have happened here.

ROMANS: No, that appears not to have happened. Wages here, I'll point out, because this is important. For a lot of you it's what you get in your paycheck is how you feel about the labor market, 3.2 percent is the wage growth. So, I mean, it's a little bit better. You know, you're seeing a better paycheck. But certainly you don't see inflation roaring ahead here.

BERMAN: All right, Christine Romans, great news on the economy.

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: Thank you very, very much for that.

All right, despite spending months at a time in frigid temperatures and complete darkness, people in Norway are among the happiest in the world. CAMEROTA: Explain that.

BERMAN: Friluftsliv (ph) -- Friluftsliv make people very happy.

CAMEROTA: The secret to happiness.

BERMAN: Yes, I think Dr. Sanjay Gupta covers that when he brings us their secret to happiness, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:46:00] CAMEROTA: Well, Baltimore is waking up with a new mayor this morning after their last one resigned in scandal. And she's not the only mayor in America facing controversy, it turns out.

John Avlon has a particularly delicious "Reality Check" this morning.

John.

JOHN ALVON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, the swamp is still well stocked. Concerns about corruption have been rising in the USA with one city showing it's only getting worse.

But the problem's a lot bigger than just Washington. On Thursday, we got a reminder because Baltimore had its second mayor resign in a decade. Former Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh was considered a reformer, but nobody saw the children's book kickback scandal coming. In fairness, it was a pretty novel scam. You see, the mayor decided to self-publish a series of children's books called "Healthy Holly." Nothing wrong there. Now, granted, there were some quality control issues, like having one of the main characters names misspelled, along with the word vegetable.

But, hey, this wasn't a crime against grammar. No, Mayor Pugh's problems ruse when it was revealed that her book sold to the tune of nearly $800,000. That's a huge success. The only problem is they sold to massive organizations, like the University of Maryland Medical System, where Mayor Pugh was on the board. And health care provider Kaiser Permanente, which was awarded a city contract worth tens of millions of dollars. In that kind of situation, it didn't seem to matter that many of the books were reportedly never delivered or sat unopened in warehouses, or in one instance weren't even printed at all.

But Mayor Pugh resigned after being absent from city hall for a month, allegedly because of pneumonia. And she was contrite in her resignation statement. But back in March, she spent a big part of her first apology doing this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CATHERINE PUSH, FORMER BALTIMORE MAYOR: It's about teaching children to walk, run, crawl, skip, dance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: That's right, she used a press conference about her sketchy children's book series to sell her sketchy children's clothing line.

But while Pugh's the latest casualty of city hall, there have been a dressing number of mayors who have resigned due to everything from criminal behavior to criminally bad judgment over the last few years.

For example, the mayor of Nashville, Megan Barry, resigned after making sweet music with her bodyguard and pleading guilty to bilking the city out of thousands of dollars.

Six months before that, the mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, stepped aside after at least five people accused live him of sexual abuse, including a younger cousin. And he denied the allegations and has not been charged.

And who can forget San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who allegedly asked his press secretary to, quote, get naked. He was later sentenced to three months home confinement and three years' probation.

Now, Dan McQueen resigned as mayor of Corpus Christi, Texas, after local media discovered that his hand-picked chief of staff has also his live-in girlfriend, a violation of common sense and, more importantly, city policy.

But that was Mayberry-style skullduggery compared to the mayor of Fairfax, Virginia, who resigned after being busted trying to trade sex for meth. Or the Marionville, Missouri, mayor who stepped down after defending a friend, his murderous KKK later (ph) with anti-Semitic slurs.

And, finally, the mayor of San Marino, California, who resigned after tossing his dog's business into his neighbor's lawn. Now, to his credit, he voluntarily stepped down, reportedly disgusted with himself. But after hearing about this rouges (ph) gallery, we should all feel a little disgusted. Maybe some of this is just baboonish corruption, others born of bad judgment by people who never should have come near city hall. Still others bear the hallmarks of low stands in one-party towns. But Washington is a restocked swamp, but local politics seems to need a serious spring cleaning.

And that's your "Reality Check."

CAMEROTA: Mayors behavior badly on MTV tonight.

BERMAN: I mean that was like the libido in like -- in like city hall. I mean, who knew?

AVLON: It's --

CAMEROTA: So gross.

AVLON: Yes, mayors behaving badly, we could definitely make a series of.

CAMEROTA: Yes, that's a reality show.

All right, thank you very much, John. BERMAN: All right, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he's on a new mission in his CNN original series "Chasing Life," traveling across the world to find the secrets of living better for the mind, body and soul. For this week's episode, he goes to Norway to find out why a country that spends three months a year in freezing cold and complete darkness is also one of the happiest places in the world.

Here's a preview.

[08:50:01] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, Sanjay, we're ready here. And when you feel like jumping, you just jump in.

Now you can start swimming slowly towards me. Move both arms and keep your head up. That's good. Just swim. Good work. Hey, grab my hand, bother.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That was a lot of stinging on the face, but I felt my blood pressure just go way up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. And I actually heard that you started to breathe very deeply and very quickly.

GUPTA: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Without the suit you would become critically hypothermic within minutes.

GUPTA (voice over): Even with a rescue suit, I can tell you, this is not a situation you want to find yourself in. It's hard to talk. I feel nauseated. All signs that point towards hypothermia.

GUPTA (on camera): Just standing up you start to feel a little light headed. I felt my heart rate really slow down.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

GUPTA: That was -- that was very noticeable when my heart rate started to slow.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: That looks horrible.

Sanjay joins us now.

Sanjay, how cold is that water?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I didn't really enjoy watching that even.

The water was -- I mean the water was super cold. I -- you know, I don't even know what the temperature was. We were 270 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And, you know, it's interesting there. It's a place that was mentioned is plunged into total darkness for three months out of the year.

But they do a lot of this hypothermia research in Norway because they have to. You know, fishermen falling into the water, trying to resuscitate people in these situations. And so they wanted me to experience it, to see what it was like, you know, to actually have hypothermia, that diving reflex where your heart rate really starts to drop and your body temperature drops very quickly as well. It's a wild experience, but something I'll never forget.

BERMAN: It wasn't the most flattering bathing suit you've ever worn, Sanjay, I will say.

GUPTA: You've seen my flattering ones, John. I appreciate that.

BERMAN: I just -- I just think -- I just think, if you're looking, you know, for good beach wear, you may want to go another way.

CAMEROTA: Go to the Internet.

GUPTA: Right.

BERMAN: What does happiness have to do with health and longevity? What's the correlation there?

GUPTA: There's a lot of correlation. And, you know, I think people have known this anecdotally for some time that happiness and health are inextricably linked.

What we found so fascinating as we -- as we dove into this topic was that there's these big studies now. When you ask people to self-assess their happiness and then test various things. So in the case of heart disease, for example, people who self-assessed as being more joyous, being nor content with life were less likely to have heart disease. Maybe an obvious one.

Their immune systems were boosted as well. There was a study where they had hundreds of people who, again, asked to assess their emotions and then purposely exposed to the cold virus and they found that people who self-described as being more pleased with life were less likely to develop the cold. Like our immune systems can be boosted that quickly in response to emotion. So it can have short-term effects, it can have long-term effects overall on survival.

I mean, again, the -- when we talk about the mind/body connection, people think of that as a nebulous thing. It is becoming increasingly real. And in places like Norway, they've been studying this for a long time.

CAMEROTA: Yes, but, Sanjay, I still don't get it, how does diving into freezing cold water make you happier?

GUPTA: Well, you know, the thing about Norway, so you think, OK, cold, 270 miles north of the Arctic Circle, dark, at least in the northern part of Norway, for a good chunk of the year. Why are they among the happiest people in the world? And what you realize in some ways is that it's in part not because of

the environment, I mean, not despite the environment, but because of the environment. Meaning that, you know, when you have challenges every day and you overcome those challenges, is that part of what happiness is all about, versus just living on a beach all the time where you may have a certain level of happiness, but you don't get to experience those peaks of happiness. Like it was -- it was euphoric once I actually went through that experience. And if we could show that --

CAMEROTA: Once you survived.

GUPTA: Show -- if we could show that graph again just real quick because you get an idea of where the United States fits in. These are some of the happiest countries in the world, obviously, on the left. The United States, 19th in the world. You know, we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We spend $3.5 trillion on health care every year. But we're not maybe as happy as we should be and our longevity is 43rd in the world, expected to go to 64th in the world by the year 2040.

So we could fix both -- we can improve, I should say, in both those areas.

BERMAN: It made me happier watching you jump into the freezing cold water, I'll tell you that right now. So it served a dual purpose.

GUPTA: (INAUDIBLE) next time with your beard, John Berman.

BERMAN: Yes. Exactly. Well, I think it's like a two piece. Think two piece next time.

All right, be sure to watch "Chasing Life" with Dr. Sanjay Gupta tomorrow at 9:00 p.m.

[08:55:02] CAMEROTA: OK, no to this story, menstruation is, of course, an essential fact of life, but in many parts of the world it's considered taboo. And this not only makes monthly periods extremely stressful for girls, it also limits what they can achieve. So this week's CNN Hero is ensuring that females stay empowered.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FREWEINI MEBRAHTU, CNN HERO: In Ethiopia, most women and girls do not have access to sanitary pads. Many girls stay at home during their period. They're scared and ashamed. Half of the population is dealing with this issue, but no one is willing to talk about it.

I knew that I have to make a product that helped these women and girls to get on with their lives.

All I want is for girls to have dignity, period.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: All right, to see how Freweini's factory is empowering women and girls or to nominate your own CNN Hero, go to cnnheroes.com.

BERMAN: All right, we just got new information, the stunning jobs report, unemployment at a near historic low. Much more on this and what it means for everyone in the country right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

END