Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Ron Kovic, whose birthday it is today. He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War and was paralyzed from the chest down in combat in 1968 and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Along with Oliver Stone, Kovic was the co-screenwriter of the 1989 Academy Award-winning memoir “Born on the Fourth of July” which starred Tom Cruise as Kovic. He joins us to discuss the re-issue of a new edition of his book “Born on the Fourth of July” with a forward by Bruce Springsteen, and his latest book just out today, “Hurricane Street”, which chronicles the activism that Ron Kovic and other wounded veterans had to resort to by staging sit-ins and hunger strikes to get the healthcare and treatment that he and other disabled Vietnam vets were promised and deserved. By occupying a U.S. Senator’s office, the Washington Monument and bathrooms in the White House, Kovic and his comrades changed how Veterans Affairs hospitals cared for our wounded Vets.

Part 2

Then on this Independence Day we examine the need for a Declaration of Economic Independence and the implementation of a new Economic Bill of Rights which President Franklin Roosevelt declared in his last address to the nation. William K. Black, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Minnesota and a Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City joins us to discuss the extent to which populist anger today in both the U.K. with the “Brexit” vote and in the U.S. with the Sanders campaign on the left and the Trump campaign on the right, are a result of the failure of Tony Blair’s New Labor policies in the U.K. and Bill Clinton’s New Democratic programs in the U.S. which have left working class voters treading water at the bottom while the rewards from increased productivity and trade deals go to the top.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with officials confirming Turkish media reports that the suicide bombers who killed 45 people and wounded 240 at the Istanbul airport came from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and speak with an expert on jihadism in Russia’s Caucasus and the former Soviet Union, Gordon Hahn, a professor and researcher at the Terrorism Research and Education Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. The author of “Russia’s Islamic Threat” and “The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond”, he joins us to discuss why the several thousand jihadis from Russia and the former Soviet Union who have joined the Islamic State or “daesh” are so hardcore and are used as the tip of the spear in terms of asymmetrical warfare which “daesh” is resorting to more and more as it suffers mounting losses on the battlefield.

Part 2

Then Virginia Lopez joins us in the studio. She is a Caracas-based journalist who covers Latin America and Venezuela for Al Jazeera English and we discuss the rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela where Venezuelans are storming supermarkets and attacking food delivery trucks as basic food supplies and staples grow scarcer. We examine the looming collapse of an oil-rich country in an economic freefall with political paralysis and next to no security for its citizens as the National Guard can no longer control the long lines at the supermarkets nor prevent journalists from covering the reality of everyday life that the government tries to censor and continues to deny.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the Fragile States Index of 2016 just released by The Fund for Peace and speak with J.J. Messner, the Executive Director of The Fund for Peace where he leads many of their security and human rights implementation programs. We discuss which countries are the most fragile and which are the least, and alarming trends for the future of Europe following the refugee crisis and the “Brexit” vote.