Background Briefing: August 27, 2020

On By gram

 

The Cult-like Quality of the GOP’s Capitulation to Trumpism

We begin with an appraisal of the Republican National Convention which ends tonight with a keynote address by President Trump along with speeches by Mitch McConnell, Ivanka Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Franklin Graham, and speak with Mike Lofgren, who has spent twenty-eight years working in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted and he joins us to discuss the cult-like quality of the Republican party’s capitulation to Trumpism and the elevation of the Trump family dynasty as the future of the GOP with Donald Trump Junior seen as a future star of the party along with the QAnon congresswoman from Georgia and the Trump loyalists Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Mike Pompeo. We assess whether this tyranny of a corrupt and deranged minority will end in November or that they will morph into the Biden resistance and further the division and hatred Trump has visited upon the land.

 

Economic Distress Grows With No Unemployment Benefits and Protection From Eviction

Then we examine the growing economic distress as a result of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic now exacerbated by the cutoff of unemployment benefits and the end of a moratorium on evictions, and speak with Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. She has co-authored several editions of The State of Working America, and is the co-author of a new report at The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment,  “Workers and the COVID-19 Recession: Trends in Unemployment Insurance, Claims & Benefits, Jobs, and Unemployment.”

 

How Big Pharma Price-Gouges on Drugs Taxpayers Invested Billions of R&D in

Then finally we speak with Alexander Zaitchik, a freelance journalist and the author of The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America. He has an article at The New Republic, “How to Break a Big Pharma Monopoly on a Covid-19 Vaccine” and we discuss how the big pharma company Gilead is being sued by 46 state’s attorneys general for price-gouging on a drug the taxpayer invested billions in the research and development of and which a CDC scientist found might be helpful in treating Covid-19.