November 12 - The Unpaid Kurdish Peshmerga's Offensive Against ISIS; Drug Arrests of Members of Venezuela's First Family; The Transition to Democracy in Myanmar / Burma

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the military offensive underway against the Islamic State in Northern Iraq near the Syrian border involving U.S. Special Forces and 7,500 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters (who incidentally due to falling oil prices have not been paid in months). Max Hoffman, a Policy Analyst on the National Security and International Policy team at the Center for American Progress who focuses on Turkey and the Kurdish regions, joins us to discuss the capture of the important Highway 47 that cuts off the Islamic State in Mosul and shuts down their export of stolen oil from the main oil field they’ve captured.   

Part 2

Then we will look into the arrest on drug trafficking charges involving 800 kilos of cocaine by the DEA in Haiti of the “son” and nephew of Venezuela’s First Lady, who goes by the title of “First Combatant”.  Javier Corrales, a Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of “Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chavez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela” joins us to discuss the almost complete media blackout in Venezuela in reporting the arrests and how, once the news eventually filters out through social media, it will affect the upcoming December 6 elections for a new National Assembly.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with an expert on Myanmar/Burma about the sweeping victory by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy who in the next five months will transition the country away from a 25 year-long brutal and kleptocratic rule by a military junta that seized power after Ms. Suu Kyi won the country’s last democratic election. An anthropologist who studies Buddhist practices, Juliane Schober, the Director of the Center for Asian Research at Arizona State University, joins us to discuss the likelihood of a complete transition to democratic rule and the reasons why the military are giving up power, although they are retaining one quarter of the seats in parliament.