Day: November 4, 2019

“The Silence of the Republican Lambs”

We begin with the transcripts released today by the House Intelligence Committee of the recent depositions by the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and the former top advisor to the Secretary of State, Michael McKinley and speak with Nina Khrushcheva, a Professor in the Graduate Program of International affairs at The New School and the co-author of “In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones”. She joins us to discuss her article at Project Syndicate “The Silence of the Republican Lambs” and analyze the extraordinary situation where a U.S. Ambassador who represents our country, not our president, was threatened by an American president who trashed her in a phone call to Ukraine’s president hinting darkly that bad things could happen to her. The idea that top officials in our government could feel threatened by the country’s leader harks back to Stalin’s Soviet Union and in her article Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the former Soviet leader who succeeded Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, writes about the complicit silence of the Republican enablers of Donald Trump like Lindsey Graham and Trump’s generals who have now been purged, quoting a Soviet dissident poet. In the 1960’s Alexander Galich criticized Soviet apparatchiks who were dutifully following Stalin’s orders as “Those who were silent became the bosses, because silence is gold. Keep silent, you will be on top”.

Trump Threatens to Cut off Federal Fund to Fight California’s Wildfires

Then with Donald Trump threatening to cut off federal funds to fight California’s wildfires, we speak with LeRoy Westerling, a Professor of Management of Complex Systems and Co-Director of the Center for Climate Communication at the University of California, Merced who studies the relationship between climate and wildfires. Coincidentally Trump’s threat comes at the same time when the Trump Administration announced its formal withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord which will take effect one year from now.

Why Aren’t Democrats Making a Stand on Auto Emissions and Gas Mileage?

Then finally we look into why the Democrats appear to be silent on the issue of Trump’s reversal of efforts to limit auto emission and improve gas mileage given that transportation is the greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. Leah Stokes, Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara who specialized in climate politics, joins us to question why it is that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are proposing the radical reduction in driving polluting vehicles that we need.