Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an assessment of whether the just-signed P5+1 deal with Iran was a clever bluff on the part of Iran to negotiated away a nuclear program they never had and never intended to have. William Beeman, a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and author of “The ‘Great Satan’ vs the ‘Mad Mullahs’: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other” joins us to discuss his article at New America Media “Iran Won the Vienna Accords by Agreeing to Stop What it Never Was Doing” and what he saw on a recent trip to Iran of a country that is self-reliant with a GDP growth, according to the IMF, of 3% last year, with less poverty that the United States.

Part 2

Then we get a flavor of life inside of Iran from the perspective of an American teenager who was transplanted from Brooklyn to Tehran and had to adapt and conform to life in an oppressive society controlled by religious police. Shaghayegh Farsijani, a former reporter and anchor joins us to discuss her new book “The Burden of My Red Lips in Tehran” and how Iranians in the diaspora feel about the possible opening up of Iran to the outside world.

Part 3

Then we speak with Dr. Charles van der Horst, a retired professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Infectious Diseases. He was arrested outside of the North Carolina State House while peacefully protesting on “Moral Monday” and we discuss the massive demonstration last Monday in Winston-Salem against the North Carolina Legislature’s naked voter suppression and blatantly discriminatory laws that are being challenged by the Justice Department, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters in a federal trial underway in Winston-Salem.    

Full Program

Part 1

We begin Hillary Clinton’s much-anticipated speech on the economy and get an analysis from Heidi Hartmann, the President of the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research and author of “Equal Pay for Working Families” and “Survival at the Bottom”. We discuss whether the Democratic front-runner for president’s attacks on Wall Street will resonate and how much Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are pulling Clinton to the left, or if the country itself has moved to the left on issues of inequality, the lack of wage growth and the need to change an economy that is rigged against the middle class.

Part 2

Then we speak with Thomas Ferguson, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He joins us to discuss the European bailout deal that the Greek Prime Minister must now try to sell to his parliament and whether the $100 billion deal is, as the out-going Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varafoukis described it, “the new Treaty of Versailles”.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the latest, in fact the 17^th candidate to enter the Republican presidential primaries, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Brendan Fischer, General Counsel with the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy joins us to discuss the career of a politician who has attracted a lot of support from wealthy donors by breaking unions in a largely blue state, but in doing so has made himself a polarizing figure who is unlikely to be able to be the president of all Americans.