Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
January 3 - Fiscal Cliff Deal Done Without Transparency; Wall Street's Big Lie Loses; Jared Diamond on His New Book "The World Until Yesterday"
|
|
LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM | |
|
|
We begin with Mattea Kramer, a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to making complex federal budget information transparent and accessible. We discuss the lack of transparency behind the recent much heralded fiscal cliff deal, the contents of which are only now coming to light. |
 |
|
|
Then we discuss how the big lie lost with William Greider, the national affairs correspondent with The Nation where he has an article “The Big Lie Loses”. With the phony “fiscal cliff” drama now over, before the next one begins over the debt ceiling, we examine whether the Wall Street titans responsible for our collapsed economy will be able to continue punishing the wrong people for the nation’s economic ills by demonizing popular federal programs like Social Security which they blame for the deficits instead of their own reckless greed. |
 |
|
|
Then finally best-selling author Jared Diamond joins us to discuss his latest book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” The author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”, and a professor of geography at UCLA, he spent decades with tribes in the remote New Guinea highlands and he brings the wisdom of the natural world back to our troubled “civilized” lives beset by obesity from corporate food, paranoia from mindless media and planetary destruction from compulsive consumption. |
 |
Tags:
January 2 - The Next Cliff Looms; A Paltry Deal Not a Grand Bargain; One Year Later is Iraq About to Blow Up?
|
|
LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM | |
|
|
We begin with an analysis of what is in the so-called fiscal cliff deal with Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect where he has a new article “The Endless Cliff”. We discuss the manufactured and self-inflicted phony crisis we just got through and the next crisis looming over the debt ceiling where, in spite of the president’s warning, the wrecking crew in Congress could do some serious damage. |
 |
|
|
Then we look into how long the world’s only superpower can continue to be the global hegemon when it has such a broken and dysfunctional government. David Rothkopf, the CEO and Editor-at-Large of Foreign Policy Magazine joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Cliff Deal Hollow Victory for the American People” and the end-of-the-year farce on Capitol Hill that produced such a paltry deal instead of the “grand bargain”. |
 |
|
|
Then finally, on the one year anniversary of the U.S. exit from Iraq, we look into growing rebellion in the Sunni Anbar province and the threats by al Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite leader, to use force to put it down. Robert Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist who has written extensively on Iraq and is the author of “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam” joins us. We discuss how the winner of the Iraq war, Iran, is now losing in Syria and that defeat could embolden Iraq’s restive Sunni population who are already chaffing under al Maliki’s heavy-handed rule. |
 |
January 1 - Will Republicans Pay a Price For Their Obstructionism?; Why There is no Left in America
|
|
LISTEN FULL PROGRAM | |
|
Part 1 |
We begin with an analysis of how Washington is failing us and who is to blame with David Halperin, a senior fellow at Republic Report and a former White House speech writer and special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. We discuss the radical takeover of the Republican Party and the flagrant fealty the Republican right has to the millionaires and billionaires, while on the left there is the obvious lack of a countervailing force to tip the balance just a little in favor of the vast majority of the American people. |
 |
|
Part 2 |
Then we explore further why the country’s politics have moved inexorably to the right with Salvatore Babones who is a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney, Australia and is an associate fellow at the Institute For Policy Studies in Washington D.C. We discuss his article at Truthout “There is No American Left” and try to determine what can be done to revive the political left in America so that government represents the 99% not just the 1%. |
 |
December 31 - A Government Exempt From Having to do Their Job; Obama's Pyrrhic PR Victory; Is President Chavez on His Death Bed?
|
|
LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM | |
|
Part 1 |
We begin with the latest news on the cliffhanger over the so-called fiscal cliff that has America’s elected representatives entangled in a drama of their own making while they haggle at the last minute over doing their job which apparently, unlike the rest of us, they are exempt from having to perform or be fired. Paul Glastris, the editor of The Washington Monthly, joins us to try and make sense of what is happening, or not, on Capitol Hill. |
 |
|
Part 2 |
Then we hear from Harvard economist Richard Parker the co-founder of Mother Jones who serves on the editorial board of The Nation. We discuss how President Obama has skillfully played the public relations game against bone-headed Republican ideologues, but at the same time, while trying to avert a self-inflicted wound on the American economy, the overall damage to the already tattered image of government sinks from dismay to disgust. |
 |
|
Part 3 |
Then finally we examine the secrecy surrounding the deteriorating health of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez with Caracas-based journalist Virginia Lopez who covers Latin America and Venezuela for Britain’s Guardian newspaper and Sky TV. We discuss the very real possibility that President Chavez has days or weeks to live and whether his anointed Vice-President Nicholas Maduro will be able to win a new six year term if the popular and charismatic leader is not inaugurated as planned on January the tenth. |
 |
December 30 - Broken Government and a Government Going Broke; How the NRA Protects Criminals; A Possible Breakthrough in the Israeli/Palestinian Deadlock
|
|
LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM | |
|
|
As we go to air the House is set to begin last-ditch deliberations on the so-called fiscal cliff following the convening of the Senate one hour ago. Keith Poole, Chair of Political Science at the University of Georgia and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at U.C. San Diego joins us. He is the author of “Polarized America”, “The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Rights” and “Ideology & Congress”. We discuss the role of ideology and money in the latest standoff between a president who promised to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes and the Republicans who are determined to protect tax cuts for the top one percent. |
 |
|
|
Then we speak with a former Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms William Vizzard about how the NRA protects criminals while claiming to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens. We discuss how Congress, at the behest of the NRA, have passed laws that make it impossible for law enforcement to share data on guns used in crimes; who sells them, buys them and uses them in committing murders and armed robberies. |
 |
|
|
Then finally we go to Amman, Jordan and speak with Daoud Kuttab a leading Palestinian journalist who is at the forefront of revealing what could be an historical shift in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute over land and sovereignty that has been deadlocked for over 40 years. We discuss the secret negotiations going on between the Israelis and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that could lead to an breakthrough deal first reported in Daoud Kattub’s article in The Atlantic “Are Palestinians Ready to Share a State With Jordan?” |
 |
Tags:
RSS Latest Radio Programs
Pacifica App
