Background Briefing: June 24, 2019
Jared’s Deal of the Century Dead on Arrival
We begin with the much-anticipated “deal of the century” promised by President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to be finally unveiled in Bahrain on Tuesday and Wednesday at a downgraded summit now billed as an economic workshop at which neither of the parties to a proposed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan will be in attendance. Khaled Elgindy, a Non-Resident Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution who served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on permanent status negotiations with Israel and is the author of “Blindspot: America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump” joins us to discuss Jared’s dead on arrival peace plan. With Kushner offering the Palestinians a promise of $50 billion in investments which no country including the United States has actually put a penny of on the table, we will assess whether there is really a plan for an actual Palestinian state or whether Kushner’s plan is meant to codify Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory. With Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon, in an op-ed in The New York Times, suggesting the Palestinian leadership should accept a national suicide of their current political and cultural ethos in the hope that their surrender would result in the same kind of treatment the defeated Germans and Japanese received from the United States after their surrender in World War II, we will look into how this offer might strike the Palestinians.
Instanbul Voters Hand Erdogan a Stinging Rebuke
Then we speak with Lisel Hintz, a Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies whose latest book is “Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey”. She joins us to discuss the mayoral elections in Istanbul which were a rerun of a recent defeat for President Erdogan but this time he suffered an even greater rebuke having previously said that “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey”. We will assess whether the trajectory Erdogan has taken Turkey on towards autocracy away from democracy, is now being reversed.
Bernie Sanders’ Plan to Cancel $1.6 Trillion of Student Loan Debt
Then finally we get an economic analysis of the impact of Bernie Sanders’ plan announced today to cancel all $1.6 trillion of student loan debt held by 45 million Americans. Marshall Steinbaum, Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and the co-author of a recent report at the Levy Economics Institute: “The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation”, joins us to discuss how the Sanders plan paid for with higher taxes on the richest Americans would unleash billions of dollars in economic growth.