December 21 - The DNC's Successful Effort to Bury the Democratic Debates; Why Drugs Cost So Much More in the US; The Reporter Who Brought Down FIFA's Sepp Blatter

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an assessment of why the Democratic National Committee headed by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz apparently buried the Democratic presidential debates to make them non-events instead of an opportunity to offer up an alternative to the hateful and divisive vision the Republican candidates are offering the country in their debates that are generating many times more audiences with record ratings. A Democratic strategist who served as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison in the White House, Mike Lux, a partner at Democracy Partners and the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies joins us. We discuss his article at The Huffington Post “What are Democrats to Do?” and the brain-dead petty politics of the DNC tipping the scale for Hillary to hurt Bernie Sanders, that ends up hurting the Democratic Party and American democracy.   

Part 2

Then, with the recent arrest of the poster boy for greed who jacked up the price of a 62 year old life-saving drug by 5,500%, we look into why drug prices in the U.S. are higher than anywhere else in the world and speak with Arthur Caplan. A Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU’s Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health, he joins us to discuss whether jailing one nasty little twerp is a distraction from the fact that the cost of the top brand-name drugs in the U.S. jumped 127% between 2008 and 2014 while they stayed the same in the UK where they pay three times less than we do, along with Brazil where drugs cost six times less and India where they cost 16 times less than we pay.

Part 3

Then finally we go to the U.K. to speak with Andrew Jennings, an investigative journalist who was the only reporter in the world banned from FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s press conferences. We discuss Sepp Blatter’s 8 year ban from soccer and whether FIFA itself should be banned as well as Andrew Jennings’ latest book “The Dirty Game: The Reporter Who Brought Down Sepp Blatter”.