Tag: Inequality

Briefings

Background Briefing: March 3, 2021

On By gram

 

Time to Join the Fight Against the Party of White Supremacy’s Attempt to Rewrite History

We begin with yesterday’s testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray in which he had to repeatedly shoot down Republican attempts to rewrite history by blaming Antifa for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. With a recent poll indicating that 58% of Republicans believe the Capitol riot to have been “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters”, we speak with a 40 year veteran of fighting to curb the influence of racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacists groups, Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and author of Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream. We look into a leak from the American Patriot Three Percent Militia group’s website revealing the names and addresses and photographs of 500 of its members who are either in the active-duty military or retired or are members of police forces or the Border Patrol.

 

A Former Colleague of Senator Hawley’s on Whether the FBI is Investigating Hawley’s Ties to the Insurrection

Then we speak with Frank Bowman, a Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law and a former federal and state prosecutor who was a colleague of Josh Hawley at the Law School before Hawley became a senator about the strange questions Hawley asked of the FBI Director in yesterday’s hearing which many saw as Hawley’s attempt to find out what the FBI knew about Hawley’s own involvement in the riot.  At the very least it was Hawley who was the first senator to object to President Biden’s Electoral College victory and in doing so slowed things down to the extent the certification would have been over and VP Pence out of the Capitol before the mob breached the Capitol. 

 

Going After Billionaires Who Pay Millions to Hide Trillions

Then finally, with Senator Warren having introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, an annual wealth tax on households with more than $50 million, we speak with Chuck Collins, who directs the Program on Inequality and co-edits Inequality.org at The Institute for Policy Studies about his new book, out soon, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. He joins us to discuss his article at MarketWatch, “We should tax billionaires’ wealth to help pay for pandemic recovery.”