Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the intensifying diplomatic row between the U.S. and India following the arrest and strip-search of India’s deputy consul general in New York on fraud charges for paying her female housekeeper less than was stated on the work visa. Dr. Sumit Ganguly, the Chair of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University joins us. He is just back from India where condemnation of the U.S.A. has reached a fever pitch, with scant mention of the feudal conditions that the underpaid housekeeper has been kept in.

Part 2

Then we look into the apparent conflict of interest that the new owner of the Washington Post has, as the head of Amazon, who have a $600 million contract with the CIA.  John Hanrahan, a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism who was a reporter for The Washington Post and is the author of “Government by Contract”, joins us. We discuss Jeff Bezos’s priorities and his newspaper’s objectivity in covering the CIA, when as the sole owner of the Post that he bought for $250 million, his company has government contracts for cloud-based data storage worth a lot more.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the real story behind the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, and the role of Wall Street banks who saddled Detroit with $1.6 billion in highly profitable complex loan deals that have extracted $300 million from Detroit with another $300 million to come, while public employees wait at the back of the line for eviscerated pensions that will now pay pennies on the dollar. Ross Eisenbrey, the Vice president of the Economic Policy Institute who has an article at CNN “What Bled Detroit Dry? (Its not pensions)”, joins us to discuss the winners and losers in the looting of Detroit and the city’s unnecessary demise and liquidation imposed on it by a partisan Republican governor.

Full Program

Part 1

We will begin with the Federal Judge Richard Leon’s ruling against the NSA’s collection of phone company metadata on Americans and speak with Laura Moy who is a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizen’s rights in the emerging digital culture. We discuss the likely impact of the ruling that does not stop the NSA’s collection but is expected to further expose their activities in open court.

Part 2

Then we assess the likely outcome of the meeting in the White House with 15 CEO’s who head the country’s leading Tech giants. They recently published a full-page open letter to the president urging that the NSA be reined in, and followed up Tuesday by lobbying the president in person to reform the NSA because its activities are hurting their businesses. Christopher Sprigman, a Professor of Law at New York University and Co-director of the Engleberg Center on Innovation Law ad Policy joins us to discuss his recent article in The Atlantic with Jennifer Granick, “U.S. Government Surveillance: Bad for Silicon Valley, Bad for Democracy Around the World”, as well as the international blowback against NSA spying that is hurting these Tech giant’s bottom line.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Michelle Richardson, the legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office who focuses on national security issues. We discuss growing public outrage against government intrusion on our privacy that is beginning to force the Congress to act, and the gathering momentum on the legal front buoyed by Judge Leon’s ruling, as well as the role of the Press who so far appear to have largely sided with national security concerns over civil liberties.