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2016 Programs
2016 Program Archive
October 11 - Fingers Point at Saudi Arabia's Impetuous, Arrogant and Violent Crown Prince; The Grounding of the Ultimate Boondoggle, the F-35; How the Internet Has Become the New Battlefield of the 21st Century
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We begin with the growing pressure on Saudi Arabia as it becomes increasingly clear that the impetuous, arrogant and violent Saudi Crown Prince known as MBS, ordered the grisly assassination of a critic employed by The Washington Post on Turkish soil. Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and author of “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East”, joins us to discuss the uncomfortable predicament President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner find themselves in because they are so close to the young Saudi leader they have championed, in spite of his reckless and catastrophic war in Yemen and his ill-considered and unsuccessful blockade of neighboring Qatar, demanding that the Qataris shut down their influential Al Jazeera network. We assess how effective Turkey’s intelligence service the MIT appears to be based on the leaks of a lot of information incriminating the Saudis, and conversely how sloppy the Saudis have been. We will also address the larger issue of the competition underway in the Islamic world between Turkey, which champions their version of political Islam the Muslim Brotherhood, and the medieval monarchy Saudi Arabia clings to while propagating their reactionary, austere and xenophobic Wahabbi version of Islam.
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Then with the grounding of the world’s most expensive weapons system, the F-35 fighter, and the release of a GAO report that some of the most expensive and cutting-edge weapons in the U.S. military’s arsenal can be easily hacked, we speak with the primary designer of the F-16 fighter and the A-10 ground attack jet, Pierre Sprey. He joins us to discuss the essential fraud that stealth technology is since the Russians, using World War 11 radar, can easily detect our aircraft, which cost so much more to both buy, fly and maintain, with the F-35 the ultimate example of a Military Industrial Complex boondoggle. |
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Then finally we speak with Peter Singer, a strategist and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author of the new book, just out, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media”. He joins us to discuss how the Internet has become the new battlefield in the 21st century as we enter a frightening future where the truth is the first casualty as fake news becomes a non-kinetic, but violently manipulative and effective weapon in hybrid war which Russia has pioneered using tools invented in America. |
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October 10 - Trump's Torrent of Lies in His Op-Ed Against Medicare-for-All; Two-Time Pulitzer Prize-Winning National Security Reporter Greg Miller on His New Book "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy"
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We begin with the op-ed in today’s USA Today by President Trump attacking the Democrats for wanting to expand Medicare to Medicare-for-all, using the familiar tropes of “socialism”, “big government takeover!” and “bureaucrats making decisions for you instead of your doctor”. Dr. John Geyman, a professor emeritus of family medicine at the Washington School of Medicine in Seattle whose latest book, just out is, “Trumpcare: “Lies, Broken Promises, How It is Failing, and What Should Be Done”, joins us. We will discuss how many lies Trump piled into such a short space which prompted the fact-checker Glenn Kessler to write “almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood”. And since it appears that the Republicans are afraid that Medicare and its expansion is popular, and that single-payer healthcare is becoming increasingly popular among younger voters, we look into the extent to which the Republican sabotage of Medicare and Obamacare is working. With the Republicans being both the arsonists and the fire brigade as they undermine what is working for the American people so that they will be forced to go back to the model that has never worked. A model which has made American healthcare the most expensive in the world with some of the worst results. We will look into the Trump Administration’s plans to take the Healthcare.gov website offline for hours at a time for “maintenance” during the upcoming Obamacare enrollment season. |
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Then we speak with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for The Washington Post, Greg Miller, the author of the new book, just out, “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy”. We examine what has been called the political crime of the century and the greatest intelligence operation since the Germans put Lenin in a boxcar and sent him to Russia in 1917. Having investigated the Kremlin’s covert attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win the presidency from before, then during, the 2016 campaign right up to the present, with the help of the entire Washington Post’s national security team, Greg Miller has had face-to-face confrontations with many of the key players such as Mike Flynn and the former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. We assess where the Mueller inquiry is heading and when the American people will wake up to the possibility that their president is a traitor. |
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October 9 - Speculation About Nikki Haley's Sudden Departure; An Even More Dire Warning on Global Warming From the UN; "How to Save a Constitutional Democracy"
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We begin with the surprise resignation of the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley whose sudden departure has led to feverish speculation. Barbara Crossette, the former UN Bureau Chief for The New York Times who is now the UN correspondent for The Nation, joins us to discuss the extent to which Haley was forced out of her job by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Advisor Bolton. We assess whether since Trump said to Haley today in the Oval Office that “hopefully you’ll be coming back at some point in a different capacity. You can have your pick”, that Trump might dump Pence and put Haley on the 2020 ticket as his VP. Conversely, because she is seen by the White House as being too close to Mike Pence, he might find a way to dump Trump and take Haley on as his VP in 2020. There is also the speculation that the Attorney General Jeff Session will soon be fired and replaced by Senator Lindsay Graham and that the Governor of South Carolina would then appoint Nikki Haley to fill out Graham’s term in the senate until 2020. We will also get an appraisel of her tenure at the UN and how diplomats from around the world found her as the representative of Trump’s hostile, xenophobic administration that wants to undo the very purpose of the UN which is global cooperation and multilateralism, and roll back the clock to a world torn apart by the passions and perils of patriotism and nationalism which Trump recently advocated at the UN. |
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Then we get an analysis of the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued and even more alarming warning of the rapid pace of global warming which has eclipsed earlier projections of catastrophic and irreversible damage if temperatures were to rise to 3.6 degrees by 2040, to now show that the dire effects will come sooner at the 2.7 degree mark. Robert Stavins, a Professor and the Director of the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the lead author of three reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, joins us. |
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Then finally we speak with Aziz Huq, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is the co-author of a new book, just out, “How to Save a Constitutional Democracy”. We discuss how the new Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh is likely to use his position on the court to be a zealous partisan making sure the Republicans control the House and Senate so as to prevent his own impeachment, and what citizens can do to reform our democracy to make it harder for authoritarian populist like Trump to entrench their power. |
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October 8 - Trump Declares There is a War on Men; The Mysterious Disappearance of a Saudi Dissident; The Global Struggle Between the Forces of Decivilization and Recivilization
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We begin with Lynn Stuart Parramore, a Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a cultural historian who studies and writes on the intersection of culture, gender and economics. She joins us to discuss her article at NBC News, “After the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, should American men be afraid?” and the latest war declared by Donald Trump, the war on men. We will look into the insecurity amongst white men that Trump is exploiting as an historical shift is underway globally which means that in the future, simply being born white will no longer confer privilege. She argues that just as the Lord watched over the peasant and the master feared the slave, those with the most power and privilege who have the most to be afraid of, are the ones determined to keep all the goodies and privileges for themselves. Meanwhile Congress has not passed any laws whatsoever related to sexual harassment in the workplace since the #MeToo movement emerged in spite of the fact that men have a lot to gain from a fairer, more egalitarian world opening up opportunities for mutual trust and respect between men and women leading to better working lives, better politics and even better sex. |
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Then, with Turkey’s President Erdogan challenging the Saudis today to produce videotape of the missing dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi exiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which he entered days ago and has not been seen since, we speak with Ali Al-Ahmed, the founder and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs. A scholar and expert on Saudi political affairs and Saudi-American relations, he joins us to discuss the lame excuse offered to Khashoggi’s employer The Washington Post by Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the U.S., that the video cameras at the consulate were not recording that day and how Saudi Arabia’s new Crown Prince and President Trump’s best friend is conducting a reign of terror in the kingdom. |
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Then finally we speak with Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about her now book, just out, “A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security”. With the Saudis appearing to have brazenly killed and possibly dismembered a prominent dissident and journalist on foreign soil and the Chinese arresting the head of Interpol, we will analyze the global struggle between the forces of decivilization and recivilization. |
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October 7 - Trump Stokes Men's Aggrieved Entitlement; Will a Fascist Get Elected in Brazil?; A Month Ahead of a Critical Election - The State of Voting in America
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We begin with the Kavanaugh effect reflected in Trump’s recent rhetoric that expands on male victimhood which he used successfully in the 2016 campaign to convince the white working class they are being marginalized by minorities who are taking away their jobs and feminists who are taking away their manhood. Now with Senator McConnell dismissing female protesters as “a mob”, Republicans are embracing the victimhood of a privileged white male to expand their base of beleaguered and oppressed men to make the case that not only has Kavanaugh been wronged, but his unfair treatment by the Democrats and the media shows that any man can be victimized in the era of the #MeToo movement. Robert Jensen, a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin whose work has focused on the radical feminist critique of sexuality and men’s violence as well as questions of race through a critique of white privilege and institutionalized racism, joins us. We discuss President Trump’s remark following his victory celebration after seating Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, which suggests the contentious confirmation has now become a trial over masculinity and embattled manhood. In response to a reporter’s question about what would he say to young men in America, Trump replied “Well, I’d say that it’s a scary time for young men in America when you could be guilty of something you may not be guilty of”. |
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Then we examine the elections underway in Brazil in which the leading Trump-like presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro is even more open and extreme in expressing his authoritarian tendencies saying an opposition female candidate is not worth raping and that he would prefer a dead son to a gay son. Joining us for an update on whether Bolsonaro will get the 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff is Maria Luisa Mendonca, the Director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights who is also a professor in the international relations department at the University of Rio de Janeiro. We assess the fate of Brazil’s fragile democracy and whether the country will return to a right wing dictatorship. |
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Then finally, with a month to go before the critical midterm elections, we analyze the state of voting in the country following the record low turnout in the last 2014 midterms in which only 140 million Americans voted, the lowest turnout since 1942, followed by just over 25% of American adults voting Donald Trump into the presidency in 2016. Allan Lichtman, a political historian at American University who has studied both the American right and the presidency, joins us to discuss his new book, just out, “The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present”. |
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