August 24 - Comparing a Stupid Government Shutdown to the Insanity of a Default; The Author of "The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism"; Could Trump Undo Protection of 27 National Monuments?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Trump’s threat to shut down the government in order to get his border wall and compare that act of stupidity to the monumental catastrophe which failing to raise the debt ceiling would be with the United States defaulting on its debt and ruining its full faith and credit as the world’s best bet as THE place to invest your money. Jared Bernstein, a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the former Chief Economist and Economic Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and a member of President Obama’s economic team, joins us to explain the vastly different degrees of a self-inflicted wound a default would be compared to a government shutdown. We assess the hope that there are some adults in the room who could constrain a reckless and ignorant president in league with the nativist ideologues of the Tea Party House Freedom Caucus whose economic illiteracy is only surpassed by their xenophobic zeal to wall off America from the Latino and Muslim hordes. 

Part 2

Then we speak with Henry Giroux, a world renowned educator, author and public intellectual who currently holds the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest about his latest book, “The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism”. We discuss Trump’s alarming response to the recent disgrace of neo-Nazi’s descending on Thomas Jefferson’s home town and Jefferson’s warning that “an ignorant people cannot remain a free people” in the context of a failing education system and growing civic ignorance compounded by social media that has given rise to our Kardashian culture.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the Secretary of the Interior’s plans to review 27 national monuments ordered by President Trump that threatens to open up federal land protected under the Antiquities Act to mining, logging, drilling and grazing. Robert Keiter, the founding Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah and author of “To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea”, joins us to discuss the likelihood that a blizzard of lawsuits will ensue if Trump is to be the first ever president to abolish a national monument designated by a predecessor.