“Ethical Markets highly recommends this common sense for Fareed Zakaria. A needed wake up call!
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Today’s guests and topics, plus: the battle over voting rights; Taiwan and Beijing show down over pineapples; ‘net-zero’ targets lack specificity; Iran’s veiled history; and assessing Meghan’s moment …
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
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March 21, 2021
On Today’s Show
As Republicans propose state laws to limit early, mail-in, and absentee voting, a Financial Times essay by Lauren Fedor calls voting rights “the battleground that could determine the next US election.” Citing efforts in Georgia, Fedor notes that GOP proposals in that state would “do everything from sharply restricting access to absentee voting to preventing in-person early voting on Sundays—something Democrats say amounts to a brazen attack on black voters, who have historically cast ballots as part of ‘souls to the polls’ efforts at African-American churches. … Republican officials defend their actions, with many saying outright the changes would increase their chances of winning.”
Democrats are waging their own campaign at the federal level. In 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a Democratic House bill would reencode the mandate that some counties must submit voting changes to federal review. Another “includes provisions for automatic voter registration, a requirement that states guarantee a time period for early voting, and the restoration of voting rights for offenders who have completed their sentences.”
On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
First, after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently pledged that the US would stay ahead of China as America’s “pacing threat,” Fareed warns that the Pentagon has found a new reason to spend.
“Welcome to the new age of bloated Pentagon budgets,” Fareed says, “all to be justified by the great Chinese threat.” The US has many more nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers than China, and it already spends more on defense than the next 10 biggest defense-spending countries combined, so it should have no reason to panic.
“Having spent two decades fighting wars in the Middle East without much success, the Pentagon will now revert to its favorite kind of conflict,” Fareed says: an expensive cold war with a nuclear-armed adversary.
Next: The US rankled two of its top rivals in one week, as President Joe Biden agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “killer,” and as top US officials argued with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska. Fareed discusses these developments, plus Europe’s ongoing struggles against Covid-19, with a panel of Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, Economist Editor in Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, and US Navy Adm. (ret.) and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis, who has just coauthored a novel about a fictionalized war between the US and China in 2034.
After that: When the Covid-19 pandemic began, many predicted the developing world would see the worst of it. Not so: Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The New Yorker that some countries in Africa and South Asia have had a relatively mild experience with the virus. Fareed asks Mukherjee why.
Finally, as calls to end the filibuster grow louder on the left, Fareed examines how banishing this Senate procedure might help heal America’s polarized democracy.
The Battle Over Voting
As Republicans propose state laws to limit early, mail-in, and absentee voting, a Financial Times essay by Lauren Fedor calls voting rights “the battleground that could determine the next US election.” Citing efforts in Georgia, Fedor notes that GOP proposals in that state would “do everything from sharply restricting access to absentee voting to preventing in-person early voting on Sundays—something Democrats say amounts to a brazen attack on black voters, who have historically cast ballots as part of ‘souls to the polls’ efforts at African-American churches. … Republican officials defend their actions, with many saying outright the changes would increase their chances of winning.”
Democrats are waging their own campaign at the federal level. In 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a Democratic House bill would reencode the mandate that some counties must submit voting changes to federal review. Another “includes provisions for automatic voter registration, a requirement that states guarantee a time period for early voting, and the restoration of voting rights for offenders who have completed their sentences.”