December 18 - India's Fury Over the Treatment of its Diplomat in New York; The New Owner of The Washington Post's Conflict of Interest With the CIA; The Real Story Behind Detroit's Bankruptcy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the intensifying diplomatic row between the U.S. and India following the arrest and strip-search of India’s deputy consul general in New York on fraud charges for paying her female housekeeper less than was stated on the work visa. Dr. Sumit Ganguly, the Chair of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University joins us. He is just back from India where condemnation of the U.S.A. has reached a fever pitch, with scant mention of the feudal conditions that the underpaid housekeeper has been kept in.

Part 2

Then we look into the apparent conflict of interest that the new owner of the Washington Post has, as the head of Amazon, who have a $600 million contract with the CIA.  John Hanrahan, a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism who was a reporter for The Washington Post and is the author of “Government by Contract”, joins us. We discuss Jeff Bezos’s priorities and his newspaper’s objectivity in covering the CIA, when as the sole owner of the Post that he bought for $250 million, his company has government contracts for cloud-based data storage worth a lot more.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the real story behind the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, and the role of Wall Street banks who saddled Detroit with $1.6 billion in highly profitable complex loan deals that have extracted $300 million from Detroit with another $300 million to come, while public employees wait at the back of the line for eviscerated pensions that will now pay pennies on the dollar. Ross Eisenbrey, the Vice president of the Economic Policy Institute who has an article at CNN “What Bled Detroit Dry? (Its not pensions)”, joins us to discuss the winners and losers in the looting of Detroit and the city’s unnecessary demise and liquidation imposed on it by a partisan Republican governor.