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Background Briefing: October 15, 2020

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The Author of the Open Letter to Trump’s Top Doctors Asking Them to Step Down and Speak Up

We begin with the author of an open letter to his colleagues Drs. Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Deborah Birx, Brett Giroir, Robert Kadlec and Steven Hahn telling them it’s time to step down and speak up. Dr. Irwin Redlener, Clinical Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Earth Institute where he is the Founding Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, joins us to discuss his article at The Daily Beast “It’s Time for Trump’s Top Doctors to Step Down and Speak Up ENOUGH“. The author of The Future of Us, Dr. Redlener has written as a fellow physician to Trump’s top doctors arguing that “you are working for a president who is a pathological, unrepentant liar on matters big and small and defiantly uninformed about virtually every aspect of what it takes to understand and manage this terrible public health crisis.”

 

The SCOTUS Confirmation Ritual of Refusing to Answer Key Questions Then Ruling as Their Critics Feared

Then we get a summary of the absolutely useless confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett which follows the ritual of potential justices to the Supreme Court refusing to answer important questions then once on the bench, invariably ruling in the way their critics feared they would. Joining us is John Stoehr, a contributing writer at The Washington Monthly and the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a daily newsletter in which his latest article is “For GOP, the highest taboo is no longer. Treason is what you do when democracy is an obstacle.“

 

The FT’s Investigative Journalist on His New Book, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World.

Then finally we got to the U.K. to speak with Tom Burgis, an investigative journalist for The Financial Times where he was previously the paper’s West Africa correspondent, whose experiences he wrote about in his book The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth. He joins us to discuss his latest book, just out, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World.