Day: April 20, 2023

What Will it Take For the Supreme Court to Deal With Reality and Politicians to Ignore the NRA?

We begin with yet another shooting atrocity in America, this time a six-year-old and her parents were shot by a neighbor after a basketball rolled into his yard. Joining us is John Donohue, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has written numerous publications on gun control policy and is the author of Shooting Down The More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis. We discuss his article at The Atlantic, “The Problem America Cannot Fix: The public supports many sensible gun measures, but flaws in our democracy make us unable to adopt them” and assess whether public outrage could reach a point that would force the Supreme Court to deal with reality and politicians to ignore the NRA after say 100 or more Americans are mowed down by a mass shooter in one incident, now that gun massacres are almost a daily occurrence.  

Growing Pressure From the Clarence Thomas Scandal on the Supreme Court to Adopt a Code of Ethics

Then with the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin sending a letter today to Chief Justice Roberts inviting him to testify about a code of ethics in response to the burgeoning scandal involving Justice Thomas, we examine what it will take for the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics regime that the rest of the judiciary is subject to. Joining us is Craig Holman, the Government Affairs Legislative Representative for Public Citizen where he works on Capitol Hill on campaign finance and governmental ethics. Previously, he was Senior Policy Analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

How Wall Street Dictates to CEO’s of the Military Industrial Complex Have Led to the Ukrainians Running Out of Ammunition

Then finally we look into how Wall Street’s drive to financialize every aspect of the economy with CEO’s focused on stock prices rather than what they produce has derailed trains, harmed health care, bottle-necked supply chains, and made it harder for the U.S. military to supply Ukraine with ammunition which is not a priority for the Military Industrial Complex. Joining us is 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 we discuss his article at Common Dreams, “’Free-Market Dogma’ Creates Disasters from East Palestine to Ukraine.”