Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
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We begin with President Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday where, instead of attending the annual White House Correspondent’s dinner, he fired up his base with attacks on the press in a dangerously divisive speech that essentially casts the majority of Americans who did not vote for him as the enemy. Timothy McCarthy, a Lecturer on History, Literature and Public Policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of “Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism”, joins us to discuss the GOP’s drift from conservatism to nationalism under Trump and how he has segregated his alienated followers into an alternative universe in which his voters believe their leader’s lies while dismissing the mainstream media as “fake news”. Meanwhile Trump courts the same mainstream media that he trashes seeking their approval if not their praise.
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Then we speak with Jody Freeman, the founding director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law and Policy Program and co-author of “Global Climate Change and U.S. Law”. She served as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House and we discuss yesterday’s peoples climate marches to raise awareness of climate change and Trump’s remarks yesterday about “beautiful clean coal” and his not-so-veiled threat to pull out of the Paris Accords. |
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Then finally, with the latest GDP numbers showing this quarter’s anemic economic growth of 0.7%, we speak with Bernie Sanders’ economic advisor Stephanie Kelton, who served as Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. She joins us to discuss Trump’s one-page-plan to make the American economy great again and her article in the Real-World Economics Review “Can Trumponomics extend the recovery?” |
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Taking listeners deep into the underlying issues and forces that shape our world.
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