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August 5 - A Romney/Netanyahu Middle East Foreign Policy?; "Mitt Romney's Wimp Factor"; Did Romney Take an IRS Tax Amnesty in 2009?
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We begin and go to Israel to speak with Avraham Burg, the formed Speaker of the Knesset. He has an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, ”Israel’s Fading Democracy”, and we discuss the portent of a war with Iran that a Romney presidency might lead to, given Romney’s recent belligerent pronouncements in Israel and his closeness to Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister. |
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Then we speak with Michael Tomasky, a special correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He has the cover story in the current issues of Newsweek, “Mitt Romney’s Wimp Factor; A Mouse in the White House” and we discuss whether a candidate who dodges reporters, fears his base and hides his taxes, is too insecure to be president. |
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Then finally we discuss the possibility that Mitt Romney is hiding his past income taxes that he refuses to make public because he participated in an IRS 2009 tax amnesty that 35,000 wealthy Americans, who had hidden their money abroad, took advantage of. Edward Kleinbard, a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California who served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, joins us to discuss his recent article at CNN, “Why Won’t Romney Release More Tax Returns?”. |
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| MUSIC: Jose Gonzalez - How Low; LCD Soundsystem - Time To Get Away; Titus Andronicus - Four Score and Seven; The Beatles - Taxman |
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August 2 - Kofi Quits UN-Arab League Syrian Peace Mission Impossible; Refugees in Lebanon Inflame Sectarion Fissures; The Filmmaker of "Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry"
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We begin with today’s resignation by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan, who quit as the UN-Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. David Scheffer, who led the U.S. delegation in U.N. talks establishing the International Criminal Court, joins us to examine the human rights situation in Syria that continues to deteriorate while the U.N. Security Council remains paralyzed.
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Then we speak with Habib Battah, a Beirut-based journalist, media critic and author of the blog BeirutReport.com about the spillover into Lebanon from the war next door in Syria and what a defeat of the Assad regime will mean for Hizbollah’s influence in Lebanon. We also discuss Habib Battah’s article at Al Monitor “The Good and Bad Muslims of Western Media”. |
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Then finally we are joined in the studio by Alison Klayman, the film maker of the award-winning feature documentary “Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry” that opens nationwide on Friday. She lived in China from 2006 to 2010 and followed the artist and activist Ai Wei Wei for two years gaining unprecedented access to his life and work, resulting in an inspiring film about a great artist who almost single-handedly has taken on the ruthless regime of repression that keeps China’s corrupt and cruel Communist Party in power.
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| MUSIC: Xavier Rudd - Let Me Be; Bonobo - Kiara; Bob Marley - Get Up Stand Up |
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August 1, 2012 - An Emerging Superpower Goes Dark; The Tea Party Takes Texas; Gore Vidal Remembered
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We first go to New Delhi, India and speak with Dr. Sumit Ganguly, the Chair of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, and discuss the apparent political paralysis in India where the politicians in charge do not seem to have any idea of what went wrong and why hundreds of millions of citizens lost power for days. |
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Then we speak with Miriam Golden, the Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She is just back from India where she has been studying the power grid in India’s largest state and was there during the blackouts. |
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Then we look into the Tea Party victory in Texas where an ex-CIA officer and extremely conservative Republican Lieutenant Governor, running for the U.S. Senate, was defeated by a conservative extremist who was promoted by Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Sean Hannity and lavishly supported with outside money from Grover Norquist, Dick Armey and the Koch Brothers. Matt Angle, who directs the Texas Democratic Trust and the Lone Star Project, joins us to discuss whether the further purging of the GOP establishment gives Democrats an opening with rejected refugees from the Republican Party. |
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Then finally we pay tribute to Gore Vidal who passed away yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 86. Over the decades the Pacifica Archives have captured Gore Vidal’s acerbic critiques of the life and times of the American Republic as it struggles to survive the American empire, and we play some excerpts of his speeches and interviews. |
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| MUSIC: Das Racist - Sit Down People; M. Ward - Requiem; Pete Seeger - Down By The Riverside; |
July 31 - The Growing Municipal Bankruptcy Crisis; Who is Hiding Trillions Offshore; Escape From a North Korean Gulag
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We begin with an analysis of what is behind the rash of municipal bankruptcies which could lead to a crippling debt crisis at the state and local level where most Americans receive their essential services. Robert Johnson, the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking joins us to discuss this growing crisis and what to do about it. He has an article with Thomas Ferguson at the Los Angeles Times “Municipal Bankruptcy: The Lessons of California”. |
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Then we examine the world of hidden money and the extent to which Mitt Romney has used offshore tax havens to shelter some of his money. James Henry, an economist and investigative journalist who was the former chief economist at McKinsey and Company and is the lead researcher on the Tax Justice Network’s recent report, “The Price of Offshore Revisted”, joins us. |
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Then finally, as floods ravage the nuclear-armed but impoverished and food-deficient North Korea, we are joined in the studio by Blaine Harden, the author of a new book “Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West”, a story that sheds new light on the repressive conditions inside the hermit kingdom of the God-like new boy leader Kim Jong Eun, which is about the only person born in a North Korean labor camp to have escaped and survived. |
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| MUSIC: M. Ward - Post-War; The Beatles - Taxman; Fionn Regan - Campaign Button; Bob Dylan - I Shall Be Released |
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July 30 - Mitt's Ideas of Economic Disparity Anger Palestinians; The Damning U.S. Senate Report on the For-profit College Racket; Riots Near the Magic Kingdom
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We begin with Mitt Romney’s latest gaffes at a fundraiser in Jerusalem on Monday where he said that the disparity in wealth between Israelis and Palestinians was due to cultural differences, prompting the Palestinian authority to decry his remarks as a racist statement. A former legal advisor to the Palestinian Negotiating Team at the Annapolis bi-lateral peace talks in 2008 and a Senior Policy Advisor to the Commissioner-General of the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency, Leila Hilal joins us to discuss the remarks and Romney’s factual inaccuracies as well. |
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Then we discuss the U.S. Senate report out today following a two-year investigation into for-profit colleges that documents exorbitant tuition, deceptive marketing, and abysmal student outcomes which are the norm in an industry almost entirely subsidized by the taxpayer. Deanne Loonin the Director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center joins us to discuss a 32 billion dollars-a-year racket funded by taxpayers that uses the G.I. bill to rip off minority students and vets, leaving them with crippling debt and worthless diplomas. |
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Then finally we investigate the riots in Anaheim, California, a majority Latino community that has no Latino representation on the City Council with Latinos making up less than a quarter of the police force, whose officers were involved in recent shootings of Latinos that sparked the on-going protests. Martin Lopez, a community and labor organizer and Eric Altman the Executive Director of the Orange County Community Organized For Responsible Development, joins us to discuss the lack of majority representation in this troubled community. |
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| MUSIC: The Strokes - You Talk Way Too Much; Crosby Stills Nash and Young - Teach Your Children; Shabazz Palaces - Echo From The Hosts That Profess Infinitum; KRS One - Sound of Da Police |
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