Background Briefing: August 6, 2018

On By gram

 

Trump’s Regime Change Plan for Iran Will Backfire

We begin with the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions against Iran beginning on Tuesday which the Trump administration argues unconvincingly is not about regime chance, but aimed at modifying the Iranian regime’s behavior. Nader Hashemi, the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver joins us to discuss growing unrest in Iran over increasing economic hardship expected to worsen with the new sanctions. But if there is to be widespread protests as there was in 2009 with the Green Movement, Trump, Bolton and Pompeo’s real intentions to have regime change are likely to backfire. Because the Iranian people who most want to get rid of the mullah’s will be arrested or killed by the people with the guns, the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, who are the least effected by the sanctions. They will take over the country and impose an even harder line regime than the one now that has at least the fig leaf of democracy. So Trump might succeed in bringing about regime change by destroying Iran’s economy but what emerges will be so much worse than the regime we have now, particularly for the Iranian people. Meanwhile China will buy more Iranian oil and India, Iran’s biggest customer, will continue to do so too.

 

Trump Tweets Himself Into More Legal Jeopardy

Then we examine the possible legal consequences of Trump’s impulsive tweets in response to a Washington Post article which suggested the president was worried about the legal jeopardy his son Donald Jr. faces from the meeting in Trump Tower with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Paul S. Ryan,the Vice President of Policy and Litigation at Common Cause who recently authored Common Cause’s complaint on the Trump Tower meeting to the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice, joins us to discuss the ignorance Trump and his lawyers have displayed in claiming it is totally legal to get opposition research from a hostile foreign power.

 

How the Republicans Shut Down the Most Successful Minority Voter Registration Organization

Then finally we speak with Peter Dreier, Distinguished Professor of Politics and Chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. He joins us to discuss his article at Dissent Magazine, “The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On” about how Republican activists targeted the nation’s most successful minority voter registration organization ACORN and put it out of business in 2010. Had ACORN still been around in 2016 there is no way Trump would have won in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and if ACORN were around today, the Democratic Blue Wave in November would be big enough to overcome the Republican campaign of suppressing the votes of minorities.