Background Briefing: September 11, 2019
The Falling Out between the Adelsons and the Netanyahus
We begin on this 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and speak with veteran Washington correspondent Jim Lobe who was chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Services and runs the influential LobeLog website. With Trump now trashing the just-fired tireless hawk John Bolton who apparently we can thank for preventing the photo op of the Taliban who harbored Osama bin Laden, shaking hands with the leader of the free world at Camp David. But now that Trump’s biggest donor Sheldon Adelson has seen his protégé booted from the White House, we will assess how Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu might feel about losing a like-minded hawk who has been anxious to bomb Iran. And we will also examine Netanyahu’s campaign promise that if he is reelected, he will annex nearly a third of the West Bank along the Jordan River to capitalize of what Netanyahu calls the “unique one-off opportunity” of having such a compliant enabler as the Trump Administration, boasting that thanks to “my personal relationship with President Trump, I will be able to annex all of the settlements in the heart of our homeland”.
The Looming War Between Trump and California Over Fuel Efficiency
Then we speak with Jody Freeman, Professor at Harvard Law School and the founding director of the Law School’s Environmental Law and Policy Program. She served as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House and joins us to discuss her op-ed in The New York Times “The Auto Rule Rollback That Nobody Wants, Except Trump” and the looming war between Trump and the State of California over the president’s peculiar obsession of undoing anything Obama achieved. Even in this case when increased fuel efficiency has the support of major auto manufacturers Ford, BMW, VW and Honda and it means cleaner air, less global warming and trillions saved at the pump by American consumers.
The Latest Chapter in the Brexit Drama
Then finally we get an update on the turbulent and tortured politics of Brexit in the U.K. and speak with Rob Ford, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester and author of “Revolt on the Right” which examined the rise of UKIP, the U.K. Independence Party. He joins us to discuss the latest intervention by the courts in Scotland ruling that Boris Johnson misled the Queen, something the Supreme Court will decide on next Tuesday which could put Her Majesty in an awkward spot, caught between the “leave” and “remain” poles of a divided country.