Background Briefing: December 10, 2020

On By gram

 

The GOP’s Authoritarian Move From Voter Suppression to Outright Voter Theft

We begin with the “Christian” crook Texas’s AG Ken Paxton’s lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election of Joe Biden that has now been joined by the Republican AG’s of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia. James Moore, the Emmy Award-winning bestselling author who publishes regularly at Texas to the World, joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Ken Paxton: The rank hypocrisy of the Texas AG’s election case.” With Republican voter suppression being bad enough, now the GOP is embarking on an outright anti-democratic steal of an election of the kind authoritarian countries like Belarus routinely engage in. We will discuss this affront to democracy and the rule of law and whether Paxton is angling for a pardon from Trump since the FBI is investigating how he arranged for a campaign donor to give his mistress a job while his wife was trying the get the Texas Senate to overturn the laws her husband had violated in a securities scam for which he is under indictment.

 

An Investigation Into a Bailout by Qatar of Jared Kushner’s Bad Investment

Then we speak with Adam Klasfeld, a Senior Investigative Reporter and Editor at Law and Crime News where his latest article is “Congressional Democrats Are Now Investigating Whether Kushner Used Trump to Get Himself a Billion-Dollar Qatari Bailout.”  We examine the efforts underway by Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Joaquin Castro to investigate the bailout of the Kushners bad investment at 666 5th Avenue by Qatar following Jared Kushner’s collusion with MbS of Saudi Arabia and MbZ of the UAE to blockade Qatar after the Qatari Finance Minister had turned down Kushner’s father for a $ billion bailout.

 

Healing the Wounds of Those Who Feel the Democratic Party Abandoned Them

Then finally, given that Jared Kushner is the poster boy who makes the notion of an American meritocracy a lie, we speak with Michael Sandel, who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University whose BBC series “The Public Philosopher” explores the philosophical ideas lying behind the headlines. He joins us to discuss his latest book, just out, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good and we explore how to heal the divide in this country which has driven Americans without a college degree into the arms of Trump in reaction to what they feel is an abandonment of them by the Democratic Party and a putdown by the coastal elites.