Background Briefing - Monday, November 22, 2010

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Hello and welcome to The Daily Briefing, I'm Ian Masters and today we will look into a number of stories and issues in the news. We will begin in a moment and go to Tokyo, Japan, to speak with Steve Clemons, who directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and founded the Japan Policy Research Institute, along with Chalmers Johnson, who passed away on Saturday and whose legacy we will discuss. Uniquely prescient in warning that our democracy is in the process of being lost as the Republic struggles to survive the Empire, Chalmers Johnson made the reverse journey of the neocons, from a champion of the Vietnam war to the author of such important books as Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis and Dismantling the Empire. We will assess the impact today and tomorrow of this American original, Chalmers Johnson.

Then, following a report from Bloomberg News cited in Monday's New York Times lead editorial of unprecedented amounts of money from health insurance companies laundered by the Chamber of Commerce, we will talk with an insurance company insider on what the insurance giants want to retain in the new healthcare reform bill and what they want the new Republican Congress they helped elect to repeal. Wendell Potter, the former head of PR for CIGNA and Humana joins us to explain their strategy and talk about his new book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.

Then finally we will discuss the $100 billion EU/IMF bailout of Ireland with David Lynch the author of a new book, When The Luck Of The Irish Ran Out: The World's Most Resilient Country and its Struggle to Rise Again. A senior writer with Bloomberg News in Washington DC, he focuses on the intersection of politics and economics, twin crises the Irish government and economy are now beset by as other economies in the Eurozone, Portugal and Spain show signs of catching the contagion