December 26 – Government by Billionaires Who Want Even More Tax Breaks; Moral Monday as a Model for a National Resistance Movement

Full Program

Part 1

We begin on this day after Christmas with some reflections on the need for morality to infuse a new opposition movement as it has done in North Carolina which for the past six years has been under the political control of Tea Party radicals financed by a multi-millionaire. With the Moral Monday movement growing by the day and making progress in reversing the damage done by the state’s right wing Republican wrecking crew and their reactionary programs and laws, we explore the possibility of Moral Monday as a model for a national resistance movement to counter the Trump Administration. With our Democratic opposition braindead and bankrupt, we discuss what will be needed as we face the aggressive national agenda of the political agents of the Koch brothers and other plutocrats who will gain even more wealth as the rest of the country is impoverished further as what is left of the social safety net is ripped out from under them.

First Henry Giroux joins us. He is a writer and the current Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada and the author of “America at War With Itself”. We discuss his article at Counterpunch “Militant Hopes and the Politics of the Disconnect”, and why for the most part, the billionaire class about to rule America in the name of populism, wants to increase inequality and social decay and accrue even more wealth as the country becomes hollowed out and more Third World.

Part 2

Then we speak with Dr. Charles van der Horst, Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, who was arrested outside the North Carolina statehouse while peacefully demonstrating against laws he saw hurting children and the poor. We discuss the growing Moral Monday movement and the need for the Democratic political opposition to move beyond the failures of identity politics and form coalitions of diverse concerned citizenry united by what people have in common as the real enemies of working Americans and the middle class show their true face and reveal their actual agenda as the Trump Administration gets underway with its ideologically-driven priorities that mirror what has been tried in North Carolina.