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Briefings

Background Briefing: April 8, 2020

On By gram

 

Bernie Sanders Withdraws From the Presidential Campaign

We begin with the suspension today by Bernie Sanders of his presidential campaign telling his supporters “I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win”, then while acknowledging the campaign is ending but the movement is not, he referred to the support he has amongst the young, adding “the future of the country is with our ideas” then in a tweet he noted that “while the campaign ends, the struggle for justice continues on”.  Robert Hockett, a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School who is a public finance advisor to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and helped write the Green New Deal and the Loan Shark Prevention Act as well as helping Senator Elizabeth Warren write the Accountable Capitalism Act and Senator Bernie Sanders’ counterpart The Corporate Accountability and Democracy Plan, joins us. We discuss how Bernie will stay on the ballot in all states that have yet to hold their primaries in the hope of gathering more delegates in order to have influence over the Democratic platform. But now that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee to challenge Trump, it is not clear how Bernie and Biden will work together although Bernie said he was committed to working with him to defeat Trump. Meanwhile Trump could not contain his glee in a flurry of tweets blaming Elizabeth Warren from siphoning progressives away from Sanders and announcing weirdly that “the Bernie people should come to the Republican party”, then in caps “TRADE.”

The Supreme Court Intervenes in Wisconsin to Protect Voter Suppression

Then we look into the motives behind the Supreme Court ruling against extending the voting in Wisconsin while refusing to even hold oral arguments via video conferences on important and pressing issues like making public Trump’s taxes and Deutsche Bank’s records of his dealings with the Russians. Caroline Fredrickson, a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Centre for Justice and President Emerita of the American Constitution Society whose latest book is The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success, joins us to discuss how Trump and his right wing Supreme Court justices are helping out Daniel Kelly, a right wing Republican on the ballot for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in order to maintain Republican voting purges which will be adopted nationwide ahead of the November elections.

The Folly of Employer-based Health Insurance with 47 Million Unemployed

Then finally we speak with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler a practicing primary care physician and distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the City University of New York’s School of Public Health as well as a clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. She is a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and joins us to discuss the folly of employer-based health insurance in the face of massive unemployment and her new study at the journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, “Intersecting U.S. Epidemics: COVID-19 and Lack of Health Insurance”.