Day: March 8, 2023

The Fed Chair is asked if he is OK With Putting 2 Million Americans Out of Work by Raising Interest Rates to Curb Inflation

We begin with yesterday’s testimony by Fed Chair Jerome Powell before the Senate Banking Committee in which he was challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren to explain to the 2 million American workers he was going to have fired in order to fight inflation by raising interest rates again. Joining us is Richard Parker, who teaches economics and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein Center. He is a former managing editor of Ramparts, was a cofounder of Mother Jones magazine, and serves on the editorial board of The Nation. His books include, The Myth of the Middle Class and John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.

How Best to Respond to Increasingly Extreme GOP Trolling

Then we assess why MAGA Republicans seem singularly devoted to owning the libs as they resort to more and more cruel and nasty rhetoric against minorities, trans and LGBTQ people and how best to respond to this increasingly extreme trolling. Joining us is Amanda Marcotte, a feminist author, blogger, and a politics writer for Salon. She is the author of Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself, and her latest articles at Salon are “MAGA sinks GOP trolling to genocidal lows” and “Republicans try — but can’t — distance themselves from Tucker Carlson’s lies.”

Another Thinly-Soured Article on Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines

Then finally we examine the thinly-sourced New York Times article claiming that Ukrainians working for a Polish Company rented a boat in Germany that had traces of residue from explosives found on the kitchen table and that this small group of non-state actors blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. Joining us to discuss this latest speculation following even wilder speculation by Sy Hersh is Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum, a professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and a former senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. A member of the Russian academy of Natural Sciences, he worked as a Swedish Diplomat in Moscow and served as an economic advisor to the governments of Russia and Ukraine. His books include Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It and Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path From Market Economy to Kleptocracy.