August 1, 2012 - An Emerging Superpower Goes Dark; The Tea Party Takes Texas; Gore Vidal Remembered

Full Program

Part 1

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.

Part 2

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.

Part 3

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.

Part 4

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.