Full Program

Part 1

We begin with author and media critic Robert McChesney and discuss the real winners in the elections so far, and that is the media monopolies who will rake in a record five billion from TV advertizing in 2012, up from 2.8 billion in 2008. Robert McChesney has an article in the Nation “After Citizens United: The Attack of the Super PAC’s”.

Part 2

Then we examine the serious First Amendment questions that Mitt Romney’s official position in the hierarchy of the Mormon religion raise, with Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, who previously taught at Harvard Law School where he was a classmate of Mitt Romney’s. We discuss the functional equivalent to the Mormon Pope and his College of Cardinals sitting in their Salt Lake Vatican City giving orders to an Archbishop, President Mitt Romney.

RETRACTION: Exaggerated claims of Romney's connection to the Mormon Church heirarchy made in this interview are corrected in the January 22nd program.

Part 3

Full Program

Part 1

Part 2

Then Michael Hudson joins us, he is the President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Professor of Economics and an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law. We discuss the downgrading of a number of European countries and the on-going Euro crisis as well as Michael Hudson’s article in a major German newspaper “Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy”.

Part 3

Then finally with President Obama hosting Jordan’s King Abdullah today at the White House, we examine why Jordan has not gone the way of other countries as the “Arab Spring” sweeps the region. The Editor of The Middle East Report, Pete Moore, who a Professor of Political Science at Case Western University joins us to explain how the Kingdom, that has the same socioeconomic grievances as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria, is holding together.