Day: October 14, 2020

Briefings

Background Briefing: October 14, 2020

On By gram

 

Trump Calls Out His “Army” to the Polls Just As He Called on His Militias to “Liberate” Michigan and Virginia

We begin with Trump’s call out to an “army” of militia members to act as poll watchers to “Fight for President Trump” as his ad on Twitter says directing his white supremacist supporters to a website “ArmyForTrump (dot) com”. Mary McCord, who serves as Legal Director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and is a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center who was previously the Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJs National Security Division, joins us. We discuss the likelihood that frustrated minority voters waiting in long lines on election day will be harassed by white supremacists waving Confederate flags and pointing assault rifles who have answered Trump’s call just like the recently-arrested militia members plotting to kidnap Governors Whitmer and Northam answered his call to “liberate” Michigan and Virginia. 

 

Trump’s Herd Immunity Strategy is Exactly What He Has Been Doing to Stop the Pandemic – NOTHING

Then we examine the White House’s new strategy of herd immunity promoted by the unqualified radiologist from Stanford’s Hoover Institution who now has Trump’s ear after real experts like Drs. Fauci, Redfield and Birx have been purged or ignored. Thomas Bollyky, Director of the Global Health Program and a Senior Fellow for Global Health, Economics and Development at the Council on Foreign Relations joins us to discuss his new report at CFR, “Improving Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons From Covid-19.”  We discuss how the reckless advocacy of herd immunity dovetails nicely with Trump’s disastrous response to the pandemic because it calls on the government to do nothing but let people die, which is exactly what Trump has done so far.

 

How the Covid Pandemic Will Change Capitalism

Then finally we go to the U.K to speak with Grace Blakeley, an economic commentator for The New Statesman whose latest book, just out, is The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism. She joins us to discuss how the pandemic crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state and tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions.