Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the role of third party presidential candidates in a race that pundits and polls are indicating Hillary Clinton has a widening lead over Donald Trump that could mean, since the strongest message Clinton has been running on is that Trump will be a disaster for the country and the world, that the urgency of voting for her will dissipate and unenthusiastic voters on the left might then turn to Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. Henry Weinstein, Co-director of the Center on Law, Equality and Race, with a joint appointment in Literary Journalism and Law at the University of California, Irvine, joins us to discuss his article at The Los Angeles Times “In the Nixon-Humphrey election, I refused to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils’. That was a mistake”, and explain why voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson is a luxury that American democracy cannot afford.

Part 2

Then we look into the proposed AT&T/ Time Warner merger in an $85.4 billion deal that has AT&T buying Time Warner which appears to be good for the banks, corporations and executives involved in the deal but bad for the U.S. consumer. Victor Pickard, a Professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform” joins us to discuss why consumers will end up paying more for this deal and getting less and why the Justice Department Anti-Trust Division should block it.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Justin Salhani, a writer and journalist based in Washington D.C. and Beirut who is a World Reporter for ThinkProgress focusing on human rights. He has an article at ThinkProgress, “Calais Refugee Camp to be Dismantled” and we discuss the eviction of over 7,000 mostly African and Asian migrants stuck in a makeshift camp called “the jungle” on the French coast at Calais who are blocked from entering the U.K. where some have relatives. With the French government moving the migrants to so-called “welcome centers”, we will examine their likely future and fate.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an analysis of the final presidential debate that is widely seen as “game over” for Donald Trump who most of the punditry and many Republicans feel crossed the line in not promising to adhere to the tradition of the loser conceding elections, a cornerstone of democracy which Trump twice refused to agree to last night, then again today, stating that he will only accept the results if he wins.  Jeff Hancock, a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who researches how people use deception with technology and whose TED talk on deception has been seen over a million times, joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Trump’s Bullshit: Why his supporters don’t care that he’s lying” and assess whether the outrage expressed by the elites over Trump’s threats against democracy will in any way influence his followers who don’t trust the media and have given up on politics as usual.

Part 2

Then we speak with John Judis, a senior writer at The National Interest and an editor-at-large for Talking Points Memo. He joins us to discuss his latest book, “The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics” and look into why the traditional political parties in Europe, the duopolies of socialists and conservatives, as well as America’s duopoly of the Democratic and Republican parties, are fraying and is some cases splitting apart. We examine the surge of populism on the right and left and the long-running and highly consequential readjustment underway as the status quo fails, pitting the “people” against the “establishment”.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the Syria tragedy from the perspective of the innocent lives devastated by this war which are chronicled in a new book by Janine di Giovanni, “The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria”. The Middle East Editor of Newsweek, Janine di Giovanni is the winner of the 2016 Courage in Journalism Award and has covered wars in Bosnia, Chechnya and Sierra Leone and joins us to discuss her efforts to get us to understand what it like for ordinary people to be trapped inside a war and her hope that we can overcome our the lack of compassion for the Syrian refugees which is reflected in fear mongering going on in our political debate.