Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the House GOP Leader’s announcement Monday that Representative Trey Gowdy will be heading up the Select Committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attack about which Gowdy claims he has “evidence of a systematic intentional decision” by the Obama Administration to withhold untold amounts of documents from Congress. The co-author of “The Benghazi Hoax” Ari Rabin-Havt, host of “The Agenda” on Sirius XM, who has an article at USA Today “Benghazi Investigation a GOP Political Ad”, joins us to discuss how the relentless Republican sideshow designed to sully Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions has turned into a clown car, and whether the Democrats will participate in this farce or boycott the hearings.

Part 2

Then on the forth anniversary of the 2010 “flash crash” of the stock exchange on Wall Street where the market tanked 1,000 points and a trillion dollars evaporated in the blink of an eye, a glitch which to this day no one is sure how and why it happened, we speak with Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She has an article at The Huffington Post “Derailing the High-Speed Trading Bullet Train Before it Crashes Our Economy” and we discuss how computerized high speed trading dominates the market today and the need for a financial transaction tax on Wall Street that the Europeans are implementing to discourage speculation and short-term trading.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the Supreme Court decision on the separation of Church and State that now allows explicitly Christian prayers to open public meetings, stemming from a case brought by local constituents of the township of Greece, New York, who objected to their Town Council inviting Christian ministers to open meetings with an invocation to Jesus Christ. Best-selling author Frank Schaeffer, who comes from a prominent evangelical family who helped establish the Religious Right as a powerful political force in American politics, joins us to discuss a majority opinion by five conservatives Catholics over the objections of a minority of three Jewish justices and one liberal Catholic.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the head of the FCC’s pushback at the annual meeting of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association where Chairman Wheeler warned the telecom and cable giants that the lack of competition in their industry was hurting consumers and that the FCC intended to write tough new rules to enforce net neutrality. Timothy Karr, the Senior Director of Strategy for Free Press joins us to discuss the widespread skepticism that instead of reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers as the courts have urged the FCC to do, Wheeler and the FCC intend to kill net neutrality by allowing cable and telecom monopolies to charge content providers payola for preferential treatment on the pipes they control into the home.

Part 2

Then we examine the possibility that national and international outrage over the botched execution in Oklahoma will lead a majority of Americans and the Supreme Court to rethink the wisdom and morality of capitol punishment. Randall Coyne, who teaches criminal law, capital punishment and constitutional law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, joins us. He has represented condemned prisoners in California, Oklahoma and Texas and was trial counsel on the defense team in the United States versus Timothy McVeigh and we discuss how much longer the U.S. can stand alone amongst advanced democracies tinkering with the machinery of death.

Part 3

Then finally on this May Day which workers around the world except in the United States celebrate, we speak with Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston who is a contributing editor to The Nation. We discuss the looming issue of income equality that is gaining traction in this election year with the new book by Thomas Piketty “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” a runaway best-seller, and assess the likelihood that working Americans will have a greater voice in their government that is largely responsive to the 1% in our money-driven political system.