It has to do with politics, it has to do with trump, and potentially tax reform. Megan this story cuts to the heart of the issue. Campaign promises and agenda items they thought were going to be easy to get through, tax reform, just the situation they popular onrm is both sides of the aisle. The situation they found themselves in is the coalition they need to stitch together is harder than they thought. Oliver peter always has great analysis. The conversation the past week is since the healthcare bill failed, what does it mean for tax reform . What did you like about his take on this . Megan peter always has great insight and analysis, and for trump to think tax reform will be easier than health care reform, we have to put this into context. Health care reform was a defining promise of almost every republican for seven years and collapsed in 17 days. Tax reform is something republicans and democrats have had on the agenda for two decades. Bringing personal rates down, in particular that corporate rate from already 5 to make us more competitive, is seen as something both parties are aligned by. When you talk about bringing taxes down, you need some way to replace that revenue and getting it to a revenue neutral stage. That is tough indeed. Oliver this is an easy transition, but in the politics section, you look at the balkanization of the republicans. That is what is happening, right . He has an in fight between his party and what each constituent wants. Megan as a former Washington Bureau chief, we cannot underestimate the Ripple Effect of what happened with health care reform. What it reminded people of is journalism, pundits it talks about whether the republicans are ready to govern. It talks about how they have been an Opposition Party for eight years, are they ready to put these agenda items forward they need to get past . They need 60 in the senate. They can only lose 20. This is a real minefield. The Trump Administration learned some lessons. If that bill had gone to the floor you would see more moderates. Oliver you have great analysis. Shifting gears to the cover story, something it is about espn. Tell us what you found most fascinating. Megan i grew up watching sportscenter. My youth was spent on that. What the story delves into what has traditionally been viewed as one of the biggest cash cows in entertainment. It is facing threats from something that is facing every other competitor in their space, people are no longer consuming tv and the way they used to consume tv. They are watching on mobile, buying skinny cable bundles, ondemand, on their phones, so espn the amount espn has been able to extract is a higher premium price than other cable channels is under threat. Oliver it is fascinating when we see a juggernaut start to rethink its own approach. Espn is in lots of homes. Even with the declines come almost 90 million homes. For each home, they get seven dollars per month, so that is a business worth around 7 billion a year. That is before advertising and a jason companies. Lets talk about espn, because it has been the holy grail for cable for some time. Cs can is a vertically integrated Media Company, in the sense that the production and the broadcasting is happening in the same place. You see a zillion satellite dishes on the ridge. Its a Media Company a little bit apart. Its a good hike from basically where the center of the media you get there and you see this amazing, basically the centerpiece of the espn campus, the studio. A cathedral. Ng in the two sportscenters together, and there is a glass between them, so it feels like one big room, it is like 10,000 square feet. That is a little bit bigger than the nave, which is the Central Cathedral at notre dame. It gives you a sense of this business, which is all about the and amazing spectacle of sports. It is one of the few mass cultural phenomenon set exists today. When you go there and see this amazing studio, it was only open two years ago but it feels like a relic of a time when sportscenter and this single , it istion for sports shifting a little bit away from espn. What i think is interesting, you described this extremely cutting edge tech, or at least it was when you built it, hovering displays. Did they go wrong though . Why now is it deemed somewhat archaic . Guest there is debate about where it went wrong. About whether it went wrong. It is pn like they are doomed at all. Sellthink the product they and the cable bundle will continue. They point to a couple of things. One is the new overthetop bundles. Companies like hulu is about to do one. They say sports is a universal thing. So we are going to be the one to sell it to you. They are changing their format. Carol sportscenter is changing. Sportscenter was like the nightly news, two funny but largely inoffensive people giving you a broadview of the world and a short amount of time. What they are trying to do is make it personality focus. Scott van pelt is their big star and midnight. The idea is to create something that is doesnt have that lets just get every Single Person and america watching us at the exact same time. Espn does not think they are doing anything wrong. They think we have lost a few subscribers. We have some challenges on the digital side, but they are not ripping up their format. Carol turning espns revolution into a cover image was the job of the art director. We had a number of different ideas, as we usually do. The one idea that caught a lot of attention and a few laughs was this idea of the homemade placard like in the crowd that for some reason does not address the team or player, but the network itself. This is a fun interplay with the art direction and the editors trying to figure out new combinations of espn. Oliver there is a lot of espn is flashy, obviously, but you guys chose to make it very simple. Eliminate everything outside with a simple explanation here. The funny thing is people make these signs to get attention, and covers are also meant to get attention, and im sure this guy was not expecting it to be on a magazine cover, but it works. It is something that is very sports related and also works for the story. Oliver up next, competing against major rivals. Carol Vladimir Putins most vocal adversary inside russia. This is Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am carol massar. Oliver i am oliver renick. Carol the man that president Vladimir Putin may worry about the most inside russia. Oliver i talked about alexei navalny. Alexei navalny is perhaps the man Vladimir Putin fears the most in russia. He is an opposition candidate. He is touring the hinterlands of russia trying to get his name recognition out there. He is barred from going on television. Kremlin officials try not to say his name. Less than half the russian population know who he is. Oliver you must be onto to something if you are not allowed on russian tv. Tell us what the protest movement entails. It is all about corruption. He has just put out a film talking about the, really detailing the eyepopping corruption and the money that putin and his supporters have taken from the state. This protest movement happened in 80 cities across eight time zones. That surprised the kremlin, and that would probably surprise navalny too. About 60,000 people came out across 80 cities. About 1000 people were arrested. There is an election next year. Oliver what is he doing right now if he does not know he will be able to run . What is he trying to accomplish . Hes trying to get his name out there and get people fired up about what he sees as historic levels of corruption from putin and the oligarchs and supporters that surround him. Oliver when we think about somebody subverting geopolitics and the status quo, we see this happening around the world. Are there any parallels with what he is doing, pushing back on the government, versus other populist movements around the world or general subversion of the norm . Possibly. The message he is taking to the hinterlands, the provinces, the regions is one of economic populism. Putin is trying to get the country out of the deepest recession they have had since he has been in power because of the oil price. He is spending big on defense and infrastructure around the cities. Navalny is going to workingclass towns all over russia and saying, how much of this largess are you getting . You are a hardworking russian. We should be less focused on trying to restore the greatness of the russian empire and get some of these people a living wage and get them above the poverty line. Carol remember when President Trump said he saved 1100 jobs at that plant in indiana . Oliver it is not that simple. We talked about how government contracts played into carriers decision. The plant makes gas furnaces and an electric cousin called fan coils. They are simple technology, especially in the universe of United Technologies, which also makes jet engines. Where can you get the costs down . A lot of costs are defined by the Global Market and the same for everybody, so they believe they have to look for labor costs and being cheaper, and they can find those in mexico, and that industry broadly has been moving not just to mexico, but elsewhere overseas for many years and the other competitors have been moving down there for the past decade, but United Technologies was not making furnaces down there. It got to the point where the board of directors thought it was time to ship that production down there and benefit from three dollar an hour wages when they are paying 25 an hour in indianapolis. Carol to go back to that moment where mr. Hayes says he is for globalization and planning to move the carrier plant, then a month later, he is in the white house with President Trump and then at the carrier factory in indianapolis saying we will keep these jobs in america. Especially for a Company Carrier in itself had been manufacturing in mexico since 1969 or something, so what happened in that month . Was it politics and pressure from the white house . In a word, yes, carol. Donald trump a week or two after the election, he saw an nbc nightly news broadcast in which a carrier worker said, mr. Trump we dare you to do what you said you were going to do and save this plan. Trump put in a call for greg hayes of United Technologies come and they spoke for less than 15 minutes. Trump said, look, you have to say this plan. Hayes pled his case. Trump did not care really. So if you are greg hayes, you are thinking i will save 65 million a year on this plant, a tiny portion of 60 billion in revenue, and the federal government, partly in the person of mr. Trump, has their fingers on our defense contracts, which are many billions of dollars, so although trump never brought up the defense contracts, he did not have to, so mr. Hayes turns to indiana and gives them a nice little deal and says, im going to keep the plant open, but that comes with caveats. One of the things they promised to do was spend 16 million in upgrades, including automation, and mr. Hayes said then and told us again that automation is likely to lead to fewer jobs. He is still a fervent believer in globalization. He has no regrets about the initial decision to close the plant, and i dont think he has any regrets about this. They hope to move forward from here. Carol up next, berlins epic struggle to build a new airport. Oliver the Central Banks bondable to cyber attacks. Carol this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Oliver welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am oliver renick. Carol i am carol massar. You can also listen to us on the radio. In the technology section, hackers are beginning to target regional Central Banks across europe. The hackers target and attacked the weakest link and a network. It is not hard to imagine that Smaller Banks in smaller countries, poland, but other banks in india, bangladesh, are weaker compared to the u. K. Or the u. S. , so hackers see those banks as Access Points for the network. Oliver what is interesting, when you think of hacking into a bank, there are varying degrees of protection. What is it about Central Banks that has been becoming a target . Is there anything ideological behind it . This is a good question. There is certainly an ideological attack as well which pairs with the money Central Banks represent. When we mentioned some attacks for example by an anonymous, a group of hackers who claimed some attacks against those institutions, it is targeting governments that restricts the freedom of the internet, or they see Central Banks as a vulnerable financial spot for government they dont like as well. Carol i feel like we are all living in this world where we understand there are going to be hacks on all kinds of institutions, including global Central Banks, but the point is it has already been happening and is expected to happen even more in terms of cyberattacks to global Central Banks. Yes, it is expected to happen more and become more public. If the Central Banks have been able to hide somewhere or divert attention when they have been subject to attacks, this will not be the case in the future. Oliver staying in europe and the Global Economic section, berlin is having a tough time finishing a worldclass airport. Berlin brandenburg airport was supposed to be a fancy, new airport to serve berlin and its growing tourism industry. It was supposed to go online in 2012. Four weeks before the plan launch date, they said, well, we cant open. It will not open, and that caught everyone by surprise and it has not open since. Oliver what happened to german engineering . How is it breaking down . That is a good question. I could make a lot of money if i knew what is going on there. Not a lot of people actually know the ins and outs, but what we know is this, lots of planning faults, lots of technical faults appeared shortly before the launch dates and in the years after. They have worked for almost five years trying to fix 150,ooo planning faults and mistakes, and they have come a long way, but there is no set opening date, so that its a big problem for the region. Carol 150,000 planning mistakes, engineering projects, delays, and problems, but this seems extreme. Any idea, the people overseeing the project . What seems to be the problem . When the airport was starting to be planned there was supposed to be one big Construction Company basically building the entire project. The government decided, well, that will be too expensive. We will do it ourselves, and that created a whole set of problems and intertwining issues that werent coordinated correctly, so in the end, one problem led to another, and now we have this big mess that everyone is trying to fix, so basically the experts are saying the Planning Company doing this project is lacking the oversight the deep insight into what is going on and that some of the mistakes are so bad that people have said you should actually tear this airport down and build a new one, but of course thats not going to happen. Oliver wow. This is costing roughly 14 million a month. What was the original plan . Were they going to shift all the Airline Travel to this one airport in germany . What are the main hubs holding up and how well are they holding up . Good question. This new, shiny airport was supposed to be the one main hub for berlin. Berlin now has to Bank Existing airports. It used to happen three. One was close. Now they have one in the western part of the city, and one in the eastern part of the city. In 2006, they used to serve 18 million passengers. Today, they are serving 33 million passengers, so air travel has grown massively in berlin. The Airport Operating Company has extended both airports, but the plan was to shutter both once this new airport opened. Carol up next, apple attempts to win over frustrated after theyll of hers. Oliver the struggle to get lithium out of the ground and into your electric cars. Carol this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Oliver welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am oliver renick. Carol i am carol massar. Trading donkeys in china will soon be as easy as swiping a smart phone. Oliver you will hear about amazons supersize ambitions for supermarkets. Carol a new gold rush, this time for lithium. Oliver all that ahead on Bloomberg Businessweek. Oliver we are back with megan murphy to talk about some more must reads. This is a bizarre story in the market section, a donkey exchange. Megan it is how and china, the latest in all markets and odd exchanges. Wrong keys is something where the price has gone up dramatically. There is a shortage now, a shortage of donkeys being born. And china, donkey skin is used in medicine. They have become a rare commodity and people are scrambling to exchange them. Oliver it is not a great outcome for the donkeys themselves, but at least it points to the proliferation of markets. Another big story that is a conversation about retail, amazon keeps getting its tentacles into everything. You look into their insistence to be in the grocery business. Megan it goes to the heart of stuff people dont know about amazon. We always think about it dominating the exchange of everything, one click away, right . Their insistence on being a bigger member of this grocery market is difficult because you have perishables and that supply chain. What is interesting is they are trying to go backwards and setting up brickandmortar stores. They will have live amazon stores. They t