Full Program

Part 1

We be begin with the giveaway to Wall Street that was cynically masked as a pro-farmer bill, “The Commodity End-User Relief Act”, which passed in the House by 246 to 171 designed to help Wall Street banks and the Koch Brothers avoid regulatory scrutiny allowing for riskier trades of the kind that brought about the 2008 crash. Bartlett Naylor, the financial policy advocate at Public Citizen, who served as the chief of investigations for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, joins us to discuss the Republican strategy of cutting enforcement budgets and imposing cost-benefit analysis as a way to undermine oversight and slow down implementation of the Dodd-Frank Reform Act, and the president’s promise to veto the bill because “it offers no solution to address the persistent inadequacy of the CTFC’s funding”.

Part 2

Then we examine the warning by Senator Patty Murray, who negotiated the last budget deal on sequestration relief with Congressman Paul Ryan, that Republicans are heading for another government shutdown unless they make a similar deal that sequester relief is done equally for defense and non-defense spending.Jim Manley, a 21 year veteran of the U.S. Senate where he served as senior advisor to Majority Leader Reid and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, joins us to discuss whether Republicans are capable of avoiding another government shutdown this fall.

Part 3

Then finally we assess the implications of a new survey by the Pew Research Center that finds at least half of Germans, French and Italians are against using force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia, with only 38% of Germans seeing Russia as a threat to its neighbors and only 29% blaming Russia for the war in Ukraine. Andrew Michta, a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “The Limits of Alliance: NATO and the EU in North and Central Europe”, joins us.

Full Program

Part 1

We be begin with the remarks by President Obama at the G-7 summit where he criticized the Supreme Court saying they should not have taken up the second challenge to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, in a legal challenge Obama described as “bizarre” because the law is working, pointing out the ambiguous phrasing that is the basis of the King v. Burwell case brought by conservative activists could be fixed “with a one-sentence provision”. A legal scholar who frequently argues before the Supreme Court, Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean and distinguished professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law joins us to discuss whether Obama is preparing the country for the possibility the Supreme Court will make a politically-charged ruling to destroy his signature achievement resulting in the denial of healthcare for 6.4 million Americans.

Part 2

Then we examine the surprising upset in the Turkish parliamentary elections that thwarted President Erdogan’s plans to become the country’s all-powerful leader as president of a republic with a weakened parliament and a ceremonial Prime Minister. Edmund Ghareeb, an internationally recognized expert on the Kurds and the first Mustafa Barzani Scholar of Global Kurdish Studies at the Center for Global Peace at American University joins us to discuss the key role that Turkey’s Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic Party played in stopping Erdogan’s power grab.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the results of the G-7 summit at a castle in the Bavarian alps where German Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to get a recalcitrant Japan and Canada to sign onto a commitment to “decarbonize the global economy” by phasing out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century. Daniel Keleman, the Jean Monnet Chair, Director of the Center for European Studies and a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University joins us to discuss the embarrassing comparison that the small German state of Bavaria produces more solar power than the entire United States.