Background Briefing: October 9, 2022

 

Biden Warns We Are Close to Armageddon and Have To Take Putin’s Nuclear Threats Seriously

We begin with President Biden’s warning that we should take Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine seriously and that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.” Ukraine’s President Zelensky fears Putin is preparing the Russian people for the use of nuclear weapons and blowing up his signature bridge on Putin’s birthday is likely to push him further in that direction. Joining us is Francesca Giovannini, the Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs. She also teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and previously served as Strategy and Policy Officer to the Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, based in Vienna, and also worked as a consultant for the United Nations Crisis Prevention and Recovery Network, drafting regional and national strategies to set-up political violence early warning systems in the Levant and in the South-Pacific.

 

How We Can Build a Fair and Secure Middle Class Society

Then we examine the folly of trying to run the world’s largest economy though the Fed and how we can build a fair and secure middle-class society and speak with James Galbraith who holds the Lloyd M Bentsen Jr chair in government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In the 1970s, he drafted the monetary policy oversight provisions of the original version of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act. We discuss his article at The Guardian “The broken US economy breeds inequality and insecurity. Here’s how to fix it.”

 

Women in America and Iran are Leading the Fight For Democracy Against the Repression of Women in the Name of Religion

Then finally with women in America leading the fight to stop Trump and the GOP he dominates from ending American democracy while at the same time young women in Iran are risking their lives fighting for democracy against a regime that oppresses women in the name of religion, we speak with Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate. She is a news and politics analyst at MSNBC, and the host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law and her latest book, just out, is Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America. We discuss her latest article at Slate, “What Three Dissenters Can Do Now: Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor are perfectly aware of their situation.”