Month: June 2021

Briefings

Background Briefing: June 6, 2021

On By gram

 

Manchin Kills the “For The People Act” as Not Sufficiently Bipartisan

We begin with the death blow to American democracy dealt by Senator Joe Manchin who announced in an op-ed that he will not vote for SB1, the For the People Act, because he does not consider it sufficiently bipartisan. Joining us to discuss the future of voting rights and paralysis in the senate is Ira Shapiro, who spent 12 years on the senior staff in the United States Senate and as Counsel to the Majority Leader Robert Byrd, the mentor of West Virginia Senator Manchin. The author of Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?, he joins us to discuss his article at The New York Times, “How Joe Manchin Could Make the Senate Great Again.” We assess what can be done to overcome the politics of sabotage and the deliberate obstruction by Mitch McConnell who vowed to destroy Obama’s presidency and has promised to do the same with Biden’s, and whether a deal can be made with the few moderate Republican senators to pass a bipartisan version of SB1.

 

Thom Hartmann on How the Democrats Should Fight Back

Then we speak with Thom Hartmann, the host of the nationally and internationally syndicated talk show, the Thom Hartmann Program and New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy From the Ruling Class. He joins us to discuss the fight to save American democracy and his article at BuzzFlash, “Democrats Need to Start Dealing With Republicans as They Would Deal With the Klan.”

 

Canada’s Trudeau Calls on the Catholic Church to Take Responsibility for the Cultural Genocide of First Nations Children

Then finally we examine the horrendous discoveries made in Canada of mass graves at so-called schools for First Nations children run by the Catholic Church at which cultural genocide and cruelty took place, prompting Prime Minister Trudeau to call on the Catholic Church to stop resisting the release of documents and to take responsibility. Linc Kesler, associate professor at the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the former Director of the University of British Columbia’s First Nations House of Learning where he was also the University’s President of Aboriginal Affairs, joins us to discuss what native Americans have always known, that white Americans and Canadians are now just learning about.