Refugee Organizations Stressed, ACA Replacement Proposals, Fate of the Obama Movement after ’08

Coming up on today’s show:

• Organizations that help refugees have been scrambling since President Trump’s travel ban was implemented nearly two weeks ago. David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee talks with us about some of the implications of the ban for refugees, organizations, and the West’s reputation. 

• After promising before the election that they would repeal the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, with great haste, Republicans have backed off that timeline. Now they’re proposing a multitude of replacement plans — or are they “repair” plans? WNYC Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich helps us sort them all out. 

• Could you, in 2017, make a living at the same work your parents did a generation ago? We asked listeners to tell us, and your answers reveal an America in which many jobs simply no longer exist as a viable route to financial stability and security. 

• People protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline have been closing their accounts at banks doing business with the project. Now, the City of Seattle has decided to do the same. In a unanimous vote earlier this week, the city council agreed it will cut ties with Wells Fargo. We spoke with council member Kshama Sawant about what that means for Seattle as well as other cities and states who could make similar decisions. 

• New CIA chief Mike Pompeo is in Turkey to meet with officials there on a trip that apparently was not meant to be publicized. BuzzFeed Middle East correspondent Borzou Daragahi speaks with us about the trip and what it means for Turkey-US relations, especially as they pertain to fighting ISIS.

• In the recent presidential election, many young working-class people, especially white ones, revealed a distrust of a US economic system that often leaves them out. Some people were surprised, but Jennifer Silva, an assistant professor of sociology at Bucknell, wrote about this phenomenon years ago. She joins us to talk about the ways in which institutions are failing Americans, especially those without excess family resources to rely on. 

• Around the same time that Silva was conducting her field research, presidential candidate Barack Obama was tapping into an extraordinary amount of energy, especially from young Americans. He built a movement and a volunteer network that was essentially without precedent. After the election, that movement was going to continue to change the world. Until it didn’t. Author Micah Sifry joins us to explain how all of that was squandered.