On Wednesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Tensions continue along the Lebanon-Israel border. USA TODAY Congress, Campaigns and Democracy Reporter Karissa Waddick talks about the importance of young blue collar voters this election. A government watchdog blames leadership at the Education Department for a bungled FAFSA rollout. The Justice Department files an antitrust lawsuit against Visa. Tropical Storm Helene is forecast to become a Category 3 hurricane as it hits Florida Thursday. Former USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Emily Le Coz talks through some of the other deadly incidents involving the ship operator in the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson, and today is Wednesday, September 25th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, the latest, as Hezbollah says it targeted Mossad in Israel. Plus, we talk about the power of younger blue collar voters this election and how the ship operator in the Baltimore bridge collapse had other deadly incidents.
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Hezbollah said its fighters fired a rocket targeting the Mossad spy agency headquarters near Tel Aviv earlier today. Israeli military said a missile was intercepted by air defense systems after it was detected crossing from Lebanon. Warning sirens sounded in Tel Aviv. There were no reports of damage or casualties. The Israeli military has been carrying out heavy airstrikes this week, targeting Hezbollah leaders and hitting hundreds of targets deep inside Lebanon. Hezbollah has blamed Mossad for the recent assassination of its leaders and the explosions of communication devices. Since Monday morning, the Israeli offensive has killed more than 500 people in Lebanon, according to the country’s health minister. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah has fired hundreds of missiles and rockets at Israel in recent days as the months of conflict across the border with Southern Lebanon has intensified. Also today, Israel said a drone crossing into Israeli territory from Syria was intercepted by fighter jets.
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Between 2010 and 2019, the number of students enrolled in four-year colleges dropped by 14%. Vocational-focused community colleges, meanwhile, saw a 16% uptick in enrollment between 2022 and 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. It’s clear that more young people are ditching college for vocational training and the workforce. And if energized, this group of Americans could play a major role in the 2024 election. I spoke with USA TODAY Congress, Campaigns and Democracy reporter Karissa Waddick for more. Karissa, thanks for hopping on today.
Karissa Waddick:
Thanks for having me, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So Karissa, I want to hear a little bit about some of the conversations you’ve had in reporting this piece. Really, what are some of the major issues that young blue collar voters care about right now?
Karissa Waddick:
So, anxieties about economic power are a through line across voter demographics that we talk to, and that is particularly the case with this group that I describe as Gen Z blue collar voters. They are really concerned about affordability of things. A USA TODAY Suffolk University poll found that the majority of people between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the US economy is either stagnating or is in a recession. And experts I talked to said that youth in the workforce are feeling these pains more acutely than their college-educated peers because they’re experiencing adult life sooner, right? So, they are feeling concerned about different parts of the economy than people in college. Where college students might be more concerned, say, about student debt, those in the workforce are thinking more about job creation and whether they can afford their grocery bill, whether they can afford childcare. Things like that is really what they’re focused on right now.
Taylor Wilson:
A lot of young working-class adults are tuned out of politics, as you write in the piece, Karissa. Do we have any firm numbers showing this? And what might draw them back in?
Karissa Waddick:
So, the Harvard Youth Poll, which is a longtime survey, they released it on Monday, and that found that among people aged 18 to 29, those without a college education said that they would probably or definitely not vote in November, right? And that’s compared with just 7% of their college educated peers. That same poll found that 76% of the non-college population said they weren’t politically engaged at all, and that’s compared with about 60% of those who had either attended college or who are currently in college. So across the board, these youths are just feeling more disenchanted at the political process than people who are college and who are college educated.
Taylor Wilson:
And both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have offered up some proposals that might be of interest to blue collar members of Gen, Z. Karissa, what have they said about apprenticeship programs in particular? And how else are they approaching some of these issues we’ve outlined that young working-class Americans really care about?
Karissa Waddick:
So, when it comes to apprenticeships, both Trump and Harris have suggested that they would allow people without four-year college degrees to fill some federal government jobs. They’ve both also expressed a desire to come to the table and increase the number of available apprenticeships in the US, but the way that they would approach that is a little bit different. So Trump, when he was president, proposed this policy to allow industry and trade groups to develop and oversee their own apprenticeship programs, allowing the private sector to take a hold of this. Whereas, the Biden administration has got to modernize and expand the government program, the national apprenticeship system, that oversees apprenticeships to the Department of Labor. So, there’s a little bit of a different approach there.
When it comes to other policies, we hear constantly that housing is a major concern for voters, particularly young voters. Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a $25,000 down payment assistance to first generation home buyers and a $10,000 tax credit for first time home buyers. There are some concerns among economists that that policy could lead some home prices to go up. Trump, on the other hand, has said that he’s considering tariffs of up to 20% on imports to protect working-class jobs like the jobs that these young people hold, but economists have warned that that proposal could raise prices for American families.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Karissa Waddick covers Congress, Campaigns and Democracy for USA TODAY. Thank you, Karissa.
Karissa Waddick:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
For those students who chose to go the college route, applying for financial aid was a challenge this year. Yesterday, it became clear just how hard it’s been. For example, a student born in the year 2000 could not complete the free application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, until March, several months late. If that same student tried to call the federal government for help, they likely got nowhere. Some four million calls to the Federal Education Department helpline for struggling families went unanswered from January through May. Those are just some of the problems that derailed the rollout of long-awaited changes to federal college financial aid this year.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal government watchdog, released two damning reports yesterday that revealed new details about the extent to which the effort went sideways. The findings paint a picture of a flawed government agency that knew well in advance there were problems that could have dire consequences, but pushed forward anyway under pressure to meet a mandate from Congress. Investigators blame the Federal Student Aid Office, the arm of the Education Department charged with helping people pay for college, including overseeing the FAFSA and student loan policy. You can read more with a link in today’s show notes.
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Tropical Storm Helene is expected to hit Cuba today with risks of mudslides and flooding before reaching major hurricane strength tomorrow as it hits Florida, according to the National Weather Service. The forecast for Helene to transition from a potential tropical cyclone to a Category 3 hurricane appears to be the fastest progression ever predicted for a depression by the National Hurricane Center. Helene is expected to pack 115 mile an hour winds as it makes landfall along or near Florida’s Big Bend tomorrow evening, with widespread wind, rain, and storm surge impacts. You can follow along with usatoday.com.
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The Justice Department has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa, accusing the company of running a debit card monopoly that imposed billions of dollars worth of additional fees on American consumers and businesses. The lawsuit filed yesterday accuses Visa of stifling competition and tacking on fees that exceed what it could charge in a competitive market. More than 60% of US debit transactions are processed on Visa’s debit network, allowing the company to charge over $7 billion in fees each year, according to the complaint.
While Visa’s fees are paid by merchants, the Justice Department said costs are passed along to consumers through higher prices or reduced quality. Visa argues that it’s just one of many competitors in a growing debit space, and called the lawsuit meritless. The litigation is the latest in a string of lawsuits targeting monopolistic behavior filed during the Biden administration. The Justice Department filed antitrust lawsuits against Ticketmaster and Apple earlier this year, and Google lost an antitrust lawsuit to the department last month.
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The ship operator in the Baltimore bridge collapse had other deadly incidents in recent years. I spoke with former USA TODAY investigative reporter Emily Le Coz to learn more. Hello, Emily. Thanks for hopping on The Excerpt today.
Emily Le Coz:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Emily, what is this shipping company, Synergy Marine Group, and what’s its history, really, with deadly incidents that we’ve seen in recent years?
Emily Le Coz:
This is a company that while they may own ships, their primary business is managing ships. So, they manage fleets for other companies or owners of ships. Synergy Marine Group has been involved in multiple deadly and injurious accidents over the past five years. Some of those incidents involved collisions with other ships, causing the other ship to sink, where people drowned or were missing. There were incidents in which seafarers were struck with mooring lines, and mooring lines are those huge ropes that tether ships to a berth when they’re at port. Those ropes can be very taut, sometimes slip loose, and when they snap back, they can do so with pretty fatal force. There’s incidents in which people were crushed or caught in heavy machinery incidents, where people went into enclosed cargo holds and were asphyxiated by toxic air, you name it. It’s a very dangerous industry, and what we found is Synergy is not an outlier here in terms of these types of accidents. They seem to be pretty common across all the major shipping companies that we looked at.
Taylor Wilson:
So yeah, Emily, how does Synergy’s safety record really compare to the maritime shipping industry on the whole? What did you find here?
Emily Le Coz:
So, the maritime shipping industry is, on the whole, a very dangerous industry. It always has been. Also, when these seafarers are out at sea, they are really isolated. So, the company might have all kinds of mandates and safety measures in place, but once they’re out at sea, it’s just these few seafarers. These ships have maybe 20 to 25 people on them. And so, they’re encountering a lot of conditions out at sea that, despite all of the safety measures, they might still incur risk.
Unlike other industries, the data on the shipping industry is fragmented and inconsistent. And so, you would have to hit up multiple sources in order to get a tally of those incidents, which is what we did as part of this project. And even then, you are not getting an accurate number. They’re not consistently reported, and even when they are, they’re not always available to the public.
So, Synergy has had at least 31 people injured, at least three who have gone missing and at least 17 who have died. That’s all the incidents of that type that we could find since January of 2019. How that compares to the other ship managers? Among the top 10 largest that we looked at, there were 117 incidents overall in that same time period in which people died, went missing, or were injured. Synergy had the most deaths, but it did not have the most incidents overall, nor did it have the highest rate of ships reporting a death or injury in the past five years.
Taylor Wilson:
Have we heard from either Synergy or others in the industry about some of these safety issues we’ve outlined?
Emily Le Coz:
They have told us on the record that obviously safety is a huge concern for them, as well as their industry peers, and that they are always working hard toward getting to zero deaths, zero injuries. Synergy also has noted, as we have in the story, that it’s really hard to get an accurate tally of these incidents. It’s hard to compare them effectively to their peers. The data is very nebulous, and nobody actually knows the true count of these incidents for every single one of these companies.
Taylor Wilson:
Emily, it seems that global shipping is this complicated web that’s difficult to monitor. Can you help us understand why that is? And who do solutions fall to moving forward to try and prevent similar tragedies from happening like what we saw in Baltimore last year?
Emily Le Coz:
The industry in general has grown much bigger. The ships are bigger, they’re more complicated. There’s a lot more digital things that are happening on that ship. And in a certain sense, it’s made things more convenient and also maybe more environmentally friendly, right? If you can ship just as much on one vessel as previously you had to do on three vessels, hey, you’re saving fuel and time. On the other hand, because of that digital savvy, they’ve reduced the crew levels. So, whereas before you might have had a crew of 30 people, now you’re dealing with a crew of 20 people. The solution might be more manpower.
In the case of specifically what happened with the Dali, the solution is mandatory tug escorts every time the ship maneuvers in and out of port. As far as tracking it, that’s also another issue, and there’s been a lot of conversation about the International Maritime Organization being the central repository for this data, which right now it does provide some data, but we also found incidents that were not in its database. And so, there needs to be a concerted effort in buy-in from all of the industry and all of the different nations that are part of this industry, “This is how we’re going to collect the data, and this is what’s required to be reported. And here’s where it’s going to go. And it’s going to be available to the public.” And right now that’s just not happening.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Outstanding journalism on this. Emily Le Coz is an investigative reporter with USA TODAY. Thank you, Emily.
Emily Le Coz:
Thanks.
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Taylor Wilson:
Anti-viral treatment has changed HIV from a death sentence to something patients live with during a normal life expectancy. But why in the four decades since the onset of the HIV pandemic do we not yet have a viable cure? My co-host Dana Taylor spoke with Dr. Sharon Lewin about what’s on the horizon for the roughly 40 million people globally living with HIV. Tune in after 4:00 PM Eastern Time right here on this feed to hear their conversation.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you’re on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I’m Taylor Wilson, and I’ll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.
