Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Supreme Court’s new term and examine the cases they have decided to take up which involve the issues of voting rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, the future of public sector unions and abortion. Aziz Huq, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago who is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joins us to discuss why the court took up these politically-charged cases and whether existing rights will be stripped away by the conservative majority, weakening laws that will have a direct impact on the lives of most Americans.

Part 2

Then we assess the deal reached by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that faces a skeptical Congress in an election year and may or may not end up as a crowning legacy for Barack Obama. Adam Hersh, a Senior Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue joins us to discuss his article with Joseph Stiglitz at Project Syndicate, “The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade” and how the TPP tried to extend the brazen gouging underway with over-priced drugs in the United States that are couched in terms of protecting intellectual property.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with James Gelvin, a professor of History at UCLA whose research focuses on Syria, and discuss the piecemeal destruction of the UNESCO World Heritage site at Palmyra in Syria where a Roman arch that had stood for 2,000 years was blown up by the Islamic State today. While up to 300,000 Syrians have died in Syria’s civil war, and most of the country lies in ruins, with half of the population refugees, we try to understand why these nihilistic jihadis are destroying the past in order to usher in their apocalyptic vision of a future.  

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the second day of Russian airstrikes in Syria that are not targeting the Islamic State as Putin promised, but are bombing other rebel fighters who are enemies of the Islamic State. Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brooking Institution joins us. He previously was a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff on the Levant and we discuss how the Russians now appear to be plunging into a proxy war while the U.S. is licking its wounds from its failed interventions in prior proxy wars, as Obama shows reluctant to repeat past mistakes.

Part 2

Then we examine a possible palace coup underway in Saudi Arabia and speak with David Hearst, the Editor of Middle East Eye, where a letter from an unnamed grandson of the late king has just been published that blames the current King and his young son, who is effectively running the kingdom, for endangering the monarchy’s survival warning; “we will not be able to stop the draining of money, the political adolescence, the military risks,and the methods of decision making, even if that implied changing the king himself”.

Part 3

Then finally we look into who funded the Tea Party and are they getting their money’s worth as the so-called “Freedom Caucus” in the House threatens another government shutdown in December with one of their own, Kevin McCarthy, poised to take over as Speaker of the House from John Boehner who quit because he was tired of the endless battles with the fractious and nihilistic Tea Party Caucus. Thomas Ferguson, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who conducted research into who funded the Tea Party, joins us.