December 3 - A Fourth Netanyahu Government in Israel; How Falling Oil Prices are Impacting Russia and Putin's Rule; Yet Another Failure to Indict a White Police Officer in the Killing of a Black Man

Full Program
 

Part 1

We begin with the collapse of the ruling coalition in Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s call for a new election and speak with Lisa Goldman, the Director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the New America Foundation who is a co-founder and contributing editor to 972mag.com, a progressive digital magazine based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. We discuss the likely makeup of a fourth Netanyahu government that is likely to be more right wing than the current one given the firing of the centrist Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and the Finance Minister Yair Lapid on Tuesday night that signaled the end of Netanyahu’s third governing coalition.

Part 2

Then we examine how much the drop in oil prices is impacting Russia and President Putin’s rule as the ruble drops precipitously and Russian government officials revise their GDP forecast downward for 2015 from a growth of 1.2% to a recession of 0.8%. Paul Sullivan, a Professor of Economics at the National Defense University and a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown and Senior Fellow in Future Global Resource Threats at the Federation of American Scientists, joins us to discus how much Western sanctions play into Putin’s narrative that the West is out to destroy Russia and serve to distract the Russian people from the wholesale theft of the country by Putin and his cronies.

Part 3

Then finally we look into yet another failure to indict a white police officer in the killing of a black man and speak with Brian Levin, a former NYPD police officer who is now a criminologist, civil rights attorney and professor of justice and Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino. We discuss the anger and dismay that many feel because no charges were brought against the police officer in spite of the use of a choke hold banned by the NYPD since 1985 and the ruling by the medical examiner that the victim's death was a homicide.