Full Program

Part 1

We begin with arguments heard before the Supreme Court today over a federal judge in Texas’s blockage of President Obama’s executive actions to shield some 4.3 million undocumented immigrants from deportation known as DAPA and DACA. Nicholas Espiritu, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center who was on the amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Texas v. United States and was in the Supreme Court today, joins us to discuss the possibility of a tie in the evenly divided court and whether the gridlock created by Republican obstruction in seating another justice to replace Scalia is also a factor in this case since the president was forced to act in response to congressional inaction on immigration reform which appears to be part of a Republican strategy of obstruction to create gridlock and paralysis in Washington.

Part 2

Then we examine the sudden reversal of Saudi Arabia on a pact to freeze oil production at the OPEC meeting in Doha which was ordered by the country’s de facto ruler the 30-year- old Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, upending a decades-long Saudi policy of having technocrats run the oil ministry not members of the ruling House of Saud. Youssef Ibrahim, a columnist and risk consultant focusing on the oil sector and the Persian Gulf, who served 18 years as senior regional Middle East correspondent for The New York Times and 6 years as Energy Editor of The Wall Street Journal, joins us to discuss how the “boy”, as he is referred to, is making all the Kingdom’s key decisions and is doubling down, even if his decisions have turned out to be bad.

Part 3

Then finally we get an update on Venezuela whose oil minister is blaming the U.S. for the Saudi OPEC decision that will have a devastating impact on Venezuela’s crumbling economy that has the oil-rich country in risk of becoming a failed state. Virginia Lopez the Senior Correspondent for Al Jazeera who covers Latin America and Venezuela, joins us to discuss the growing anarchy in one of the world’s deadliest countries where the poor make up most of the victims of a failed socialist “revolution” in which rhetoric can no longer mask reality.  

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the strike by 40,000 Verizon workers that has drawn the support of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and examine why Verizon is cutting workers loose with nearly 40% fewer workers today than it had a decade ago. A telecommunications analyst for over 30 years, Bruce Kushnick, the Chairman of Teletruth and Executive Director of New Networks Initiative joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post “Verizon CWA and IBEW Union Members Go On Strike: America’s Communications Future is at Stake” which reveals a massive fraud by the Telecom monopolies to whom customers have paid over $400 billion to build out fiber optic broadband like Fios only to have Verizon switch that money to more profitable wireless infrastructure resulting in the U.S. having the worst and most expensive broadband cable service in the developed world.

Part 2

Then we speak with Tom Hayden, a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society who was active in the anti-war movement then went on to serve in the California legislature for 18 years. He now writes for the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle on the Brown Administration’s climate change policies and we discuss his article at The Nation, “I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind” and why he now supports Hillary Clinton, as well as his concern that a terrible friction is brewing between the two Democratic camps left in the primary.

Part 3

Then finally we hear from a supporter of Bernie Sanders, the economist James Galbraith, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and author of “Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know”. He joins us to discuss the announcement today by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC that five of the biggest banks in the country cannot credibly be unwound without another bailout from taxpayers, and why he thinks Bernie Sanders could better reign in Wall Street banks that are now “too bigger to fail”.