Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the under-reported destruction of the country of Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East that is being destroyed by the richest country in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Charles Schmitz, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who has researched and written extensively on Yemen, joins us to discuss how the Saudis are destroying Yemen’s infrastructure and blockading the country’s food supply that is causing a humanitarian crisis the U.N. has warned is catastrophic. But meanwhile the Saudis have effectively blocked a U.N. inquiry into the dire situation in Yemen.

Part 2

Then we speak with Bob Dreyfuss , an investigative journalist who has written extensively on Iraq, Iran, the war on terrorism, and national security. He is the author of “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam”.  We discuss his article at The Nation “The U.S. Massacre in Kunduz Exposes the Bankruptcy of Obama’s National Security Policy” and examine how Obama has handled the wars he inherited from George W. Bush in a region Obama would clearly like to get out of but circumstances keep sucking him back into the quagmires.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland who was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and was recently an advisor to the State Department.  He is the author of “The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East” and we discuss whether the recently concluded deal with Iran has presented the U.S. with more options in dealing with Tehran or has it cemented a closer relationship between Iran and Russia to work against American interests?  

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Supreme Court’s new term and examine the cases they have decided to take up which involve the issues of voting rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, the future of public sector unions and abortion. Aziz Huq, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago who is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joins us to discuss why the court took up these politically-charged cases and whether existing rights will be stripped away by the conservative majority, weakening laws that will have a direct impact on the lives of most Americans.

Part 2

Then we assess the deal reached by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that faces a skeptical Congress in an election year and may or may not end up as a crowning legacy for Barack Obama. Adam Hersh, a Senior Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue joins us to discuss his article with Joseph Stiglitz at Project Syndicate, “The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade” and how the TPP tried to extend the brazen gouging underway with over-priced drugs in the United States that are couched in terms of protecting intellectual property.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with James Gelvin, a professor of History at UCLA whose research focuses on Syria, and discuss the piecemeal destruction of the UNESCO World Heritage site at Palmyra in Syria where a Roman arch that had stood for 2,000 years was blown up by the Islamic State today. While up to 300,000 Syrians have died in Syria’s civil war, and most of the country lies in ruins, with half of the population refugees, we try to understand why these nihilistic jihadis are destroying the past in order to usher in their apocalyptic vision of a future.