August 7 - Iraq Unravels in a Humanitarian Catastrophe; John Dean on the 40th Anniversary of Nixon's Resignation; Obama's Defense of Net Neutrality

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the humanitarian crisis in the north of Iraq where Iraqi Christians and Yazidis are fleeing the murderous Islamic State fighters who, according to conflicting reports have captured the important Mosul Dam. David Phillips, the Director of the Peace Building and Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and author of “Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco”, joins us to discuss conflicting reports that the U.S. has bombed two towns I.S. had seized, and assess why the Obama Administration is clinging to the futile hope an inclusive Iraqi government can be formed when the country has already all but disintegrated.

Part 2

Then we speak with John Dean, who was legal counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and whose testimony helped lead to Nixon’s resignation on August 9, forty years ago. The author of a number of bestsellers, we discuss John Dean’s latest, just out, “The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It”. We trace the new evidence John Dean has uncovered of Nixon’s cover-up of a crime that he had no knowledge of, the Watergate break-in, and try to understand the deep character flaws that drove this president who had engineered great foreign policy achievements, to destroy his own presidency over a “two-bit burglary”.

Part 3

Then finally, we get an assessment of the implications of President Obama’s recent forceful defense of net neutrality that contradicts the direction that his own hand-picked head of the FCC appears to be heading in. Michael Copps, who was an FCC commissioner from 2001 to 2011, and is currently the head of the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause, joins us to discuss the enormous grassroots pressure building on the head of the FCC ahead of the upcoming vote on the future of the Internet, and whether it will be enough to counter the money and lobbying power of the giant cable and telecom monopolies.