Full Program

Part 1

We begin with how much foreign policy has been an issue in this midterm election and speak with David Rothkopf the CEO and publisher of Foreign Policy Magazine and the author of the new book “National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear”. We discuss how much exaggerated fears of Ebola and the Islamic State might have impacted Tuesday’s election and look into why Americans are prone to overreact to foreign actors like Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the Islamic State who can sway elections, and why we take the bait from terrorists whose expressed aim is to terrorize us and spread fear.

Part 2

Then we go to Mexico City and speak with Dudley Althaus, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who covers Mexico and Central America and joins us to discuss the capture of the fugitive mayor and his wife who are accused of ordering the police in Iguala, the third largest city in Guerrero State, to fire on students, 43 of whom were then handed over to a drug gang and have been missing since late September. We discuss how public anger in Mexico has exploded as a result of this latest of many drug gang-related atrocities, undermining President Pena Nieto’s assurances that the country has turned the corner in the decades-long war on drugs that has cost over 150,000 Mexican lives with 22,000 missing. 

Part 3

Then finally we go to Madison, Wisconsin for what may be the only good news for progressives coming out of the midterms that the Republicans are expected to sweep, and get an update from a state whose aggressively conservative governor Scott Walker has bitterly divided the electorate. Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and a former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General and Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee joins us to discuss the unexpectedly high turnout in this key governor’s race and whether Obama will be able to get any judicial nominations through a Republican-controlled senate. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the economy and the end of the Fed’s quantitative easing program which curiously has been anti-climactic and has not precipitated an exodus from the record high stock market. We get a macro economic analysis from Harvard economist Richard Parker, the former managing editor of Ramparts, a co-founder of Mother Jones and a member of the editorial board of The Nation, we also discuss the reasons why the American Left are likely not to show up at the polls on Tuesday, thus allowing the Republicans to take over the U.S. Senate and increase their control of the House by electing many Tea Party candidates who will move the country further to the Right.

Part 2

Then we hear from Michael Brenner, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who attended the recent gathering of the U.S. Intelligence Community in Austin, Texas where the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper appeared smug and triumphant that the U.S. spy agencies have dodged the bullets of Edward Snowden’s revelations and have successfully held up the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture while failing to notice the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, thus blinding the Commander-in-Chief President Obama who has been excoriated in the press and by the Republicans for not standing up to terrorists.

Part 3

Then finally, we speak with Sarah Morris, a senior policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. She is the co-author of their new report “The Cost of Connectivity” and we discuss why, in the country that invented the Internet, is costs more to get access to the Internet as the cable and telecomm monopolies who control the pipe into the home increasingly charge more for less, and while the rest of the advanced world continues to outstrip us is access to high-speed broadband at much lower costs.