February 20 - Targeting Ukraine's Oligarchs; Blowing the Whistle on $20 Billion in Missing Oil Revenues; Obama Cuts the Chained CPI from His Budget

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the escalating violence in Ukraine and speak with the Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center Matthew Rojansky, who is an expert on the states of the former Soviet Union, in particular, Ukraine. We will discuss the rising death toll and whether or not the targeted sanctions the EU are imposing on the regime’s leaders and oligarchs who support Yanukovyich, will cause some of the oligarchs to switch sides if they want to travel to the West to visit the hordes of cash they have stashed abroad.

Part 2

Then we look into the ousting of the head of Nigeria’s central bank who blew the whistle on $20 billion in oil revenues that can not be accounted for out of the $67 billion in oil revenues the state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation received from the sale of oil between January 2012 and July of 2013. The former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, the author of “Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink”, joins us to discuss the entrenched high-level corruption inside of the opaque state oil company and how it impacts the largely impoverished 170 million Nigerians already beset by a bloody insurgency that could lead to a civil war between the Christian south and the Muslim north.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the President’s decision to drop the chained CPI Social Security cut from his 2015 budget and speak with Eric Kingson, the founding co-director of Social Security Works which launched and staffs the Strengthen Social Security Coalition that he co-chairs. We discuss the possibility that Obama may have recognized the futility of trying to reach out to the Republicans, and in this election year will show some moral leadership to help elderly, poor and unemployed Americans who have been sacrificed on the alter of deficit reduction at a time when deficits are falling to record levels.