Background Briefing with Ian Masters

The Third Anniversary of the Hamas Attack on Israel and How Netanyahu's Ignoring of Warnings is Impacting the October 27 Election | How France's Record Debt Underpins the Lack of Investment in Education as Students Protest Nationwide | How we Can Live Like a Citizen and Change Mindsets and Our Country backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

Will Brazil Join the Rightward Shift in Latin America Following Chile, Honduras and Colombia? | Sam Altman Says We Should Accept "Bad Things" With AI. What Could Go Wrong? | What Is in The Epstein Files That Trump is So Afraid Of and Will Todd Blanche and Kash Patel Shred Them if the Democrats Win in November? David will be joining Ian for a live conversation next Sunday October 11th at 6:30pm at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland. You can purchase tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/david-cay-johnston-with-ian-masters-in-oakland-tickets-1999799812071 backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

A "Christian" Crusader In Charge of the Nuclear Arsenal Who Is Invested in the End Times Should Scare Us All | "Everyone Got Pete Hegseth Wrong" | How Citizens are Fighting Back Against ICE Cruelty Their Taxpayer Money Is Funding backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

September 30, 2026 by Ian Masters

As Trump Warns the Communist Menace Is About to Take Over the Country, We Enter The CPUSA's Shadowy Lair | Having Cowered the Press Away From Investigating Trump's Ties to Putin, We Explore What Possible Compromat Putin Has on America's Pedophile Protector backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

Trump Meets With Xi Praising the Chinese Press While the American Press is Absent Due to Trump's Idiotic Ban | The Corrupt Pay-To-Play Allegations Against Senator Susan Collins | The Decades-Long Campaign to Replace Our Elected Government With Corporate Rule By the World's Richest Men Building a New Political Order

How Will the Bombshell Pay to Play Corruption Report on Senator Susan Collins Impact the Maine Senate Race? | A Report on Today's UN General Assembly Speeches With Trump Threatening to "Annihilate" Iran | How Trump's Mentor Roy Cohn Brought the GOP Back From a Political Wilderness and Shrunk the Democratic Left For Decades backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

Democrats Should Focus Their Campaign on Corruption and Its Link to Affordability, Not Authoritarianism | How a Documentary NAZA Has Israel in Turmoil But If Seen, It Could Force a Reckoning on Gaza |The Need For a Shadow Supreme Court and a Speaker Johnson-Led Coup on January 3, 2027 backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

We begin with the Fed raising interest rates today by a quarter of a percent with an expectation there will be another increase to 4.1% later this year. Joining us to discuss how this is a response to inflation at 3.7% in July, in part caused by Trump's war on Iran, is Robert Hockett, the Edward Cornell Professor of Law and Finance and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University. He has first-hand experience working at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and continues to consult for a number of US federal, state and local legislators and regulators. His latest books are Money from Nothing Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve, Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal and most recently, Spread the Fed: Distributed Central Banking for Productive Monetary Policy. Then we look into the Senate's blocking of the crypto-friendly Clarity Act in a rebuke to billionaire crypto bros trying to buy the next election while building unpopular data centers to manufacture crypto which has been a huge boon for criminals and scammers engaged in ransomware attacks etc. Joining us is Mark Hays, the Associate Director for Cryptocurrency and Financial Technology with Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress where he works to ensure effective regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency and other financial technologies. Previously, he was the Anti-Money Laundering Campaign Director at Global Witness. Then finally we speak with Donald Moynihan, the Gerald Ford School's J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Previously he served as Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy Chair of Public Policy and the director of the La Follette School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He co-directs the Better Government Lab, which looks for technology and other types of interventions to help government improve access to the social safety net and has an article at his Substack, "China Thank Trump: The Big Winner of Trump's Assault on Higher Ed is America's Chief Geopolitical Rival." We discuss how Trump has untethered himself from reality as he destroys America's economy, alliances, health, education, science, environment, soft power, rule of law, diplomacy and now our military. backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing

Trump and Mike Johnson's Plan to Steal the Election, Not On November 3 But On January 3, 2027 | Trump Rejects Guardrails on AI In a Race To the Bottom Which China Will Win | Trump Blames Zelensky For the Price of Gas And Diesel While Putin Escalates to Destroy a Country He Can't Conquer backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social linktr.ee/backgroundbriefing