Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the FBI Director’s remarks before the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago where James Comey said “far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years”, attributing the surge of violence in part to the idea that police are being restrained by the so-called “Ferguson effect”. A former police officer Philip Stinson, a Professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University who researches police crime and police integrity, joins us to discuss the small rise in the number of police officers charged in fatal shootings compared to the up to 1,000 Americans, who will be killed by U.S. police this year.

Part 2

Then we examine the lack of a serious debate about America’s economy as income inequality rises and populist anger on the right and the left emerges in this elections season. The author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States”, Michael Lind, the co-founder of the New America Foundation and Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program joins us.  As Wall Street thrives and Main Street languishes, we will discuss the Republican obsession with tax cuts for the rich and how the Democrats are blinded by the orthodoxy of balanced budgets while globally there is an overabundance of capital looking for somewhere to invest as consumers run out of purchasing power because jobs pay less and wages have not risen since the 1970’s.

Part 3

Then finally we try to make sense of the elections in Guatemala where a comedian with ties to the country’s murderous Army that is tied to the drug trade and accused of genocide against the Guatemalan people was just elected. Victoria Sanford, a cultural anthropologist who has spent years uncovering evidence of genocide in Guatemala, joins us to discuss why the unqualified Jimmy Morales is no joke, despite the fact that here in the U.S. unqualified outsiders like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are leading the Republican polls.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the eighth hearing into the deaths of four Americans in terrorist attacks in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. A friend and colleague of the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Wayne White, who served as Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia and was a former State Department Intelligence analyst on Libya joins us. We discuss the highly-charged partisan nature of this redundant, repetitive hearing into a manufactured scandal whose motivation the Chairman of the Benghazi Select Committee Trey Gowdy claims was because “we owe them (the victims) the truth”.

Part 2

Then, now that it appears that Congressman Paul Ryan will be the next Speaker of the House following a supermajority vote of the Freedom Caucus to support him that fell short of enough votes to endorse the Congressman, we examine whether Paul Ryan can put a kinder, gentler face on the fractious Republican House caucus. Joel Rogers, a professor of law, political science, public affairs, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison joins us to discuss whether the Wisconsin Congressman will bring his Ayn Rand-influenced radical libertarian political philosophy to the third highest office in the land.

Part 3

Then finally, with Pakistan’s Prime Minister in meetings at the White House on Thursday, we will discuss the issues of Pakistan’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal that his high on the agenda. Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the American Federation of Scientists who is the lead author of a new report in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists “Pakistani Nuclear Forces, 2015”, joins us to discuss Pakistan’s concentration on building and deploying low-yield tactical battlefield nuclear weapons that raise concerns that they lower the nuclear threshold and could fall into terrorist hands.