Ralph welcomes back Professor Adolph Reed to talk about whether Biden’s racially and gender diverse cabinet will actually translate into a real shift of power to the people or follow the same old corporatist playbook. And Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, returns to argue for a full impeachment and conviction of Donald Trump no matter how long it takes.
Professor Adolph Reed is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a volunteer on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and a co-organizer of Higher Ed for Bernie. He is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with race and class in American society and writes regularly for The New Republic as well as The Nation.
“When you get down to it, Biden, like any one of these elected officials at… any level is going to be as good or as bad or as strong or as weak as the political forces that he feels he has to respond to.”
Professor Adolph Reed, Professor Emeritus in political science at the University of Pennsylvania
“Once you accept and even find a way to craft a… left politics around a fundamental mindset that corporate power is just nature and there’s nothing we can do about it– except maybe make some little penetration against the very edges of it, or reshuffle allocations within the fundamentally unequal regime of corporate power– then you can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. You can’t win anything. You can’t challenge it.”
Professor Adolph Reed, Professor Emeritus in political science at the University of Pennsylvania
Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar, who previously appeared on this program in 2019 to outline thirteen articles of impeachment for President Trump, and October 2020 to outline fourteen reasons President Trump was a “clear and present danger” and should be removed from office. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.
“It’s important that the House present the case solidly with evidence. There’s no need to rush it really fast to accommodate Mr. Biden’s program. If it takes a little bit longer, it does. Because this impeachment trial is for the ages. It’s for a precedent that hopes to prevent a reoccurrence for a hundred, two hundred years for posterity. And we can’t compromise their liberty because Mr. Biden wants to get a few weeks’ advance running start on his domestic program. That can wait.”
Bruce Fein, author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy
“Lets face it, Biden has a very easy act to follow.”
Ralph Nader
“Our civil service has been degraded, devastated, hollowed out. A lot of great scientists and other professionals in the federal executive branch have been pushed out or just retired in disgust because they were basically overridden, like a lot of the scientists at the centers for disease control. Or they were given window (dressing) jobs… they were put in an empty office and shunted aside and not allowed to do anything… There’s going to be a lot of that and we’ve got to see what it is.”
Ralph Nader
Cleaning Up Trump’s Mess