January 1 - A Year-End Review and a Preview of Our Foreign Policy; The Domestic Political Landscape Ahead After a Year of Gridlock, Extortion and Dysfunction

Full Program

Part 1

On this New Year’s Day we examine both our foreign policy, looking back to 2013 and ahead to 2014, and our domestic policy over the past turbulent year and into this election year of 2014 just beginning. The author of a new book on the history of U.S.- Afghan relations and a comparative history of the inner politics of the U.S. and Soviet Russia,  Roger Morris, who served in the United States Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, joins us to analyze the events of last year and the global landscape ahead, from Russian to China, the Middle East to Europe and Brazil to Africa. We assess our foreign policy, past and future, in a world of rising and falling powers, with much of the first world moving from democracy to oligarchy and the second and third world beset by criminal leadership, as global inequality increases and ecological plunder continues.

Part 2

Then we look at the domestic political arena with Robert Jensen, a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas and the author of “Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue”. We discuss divisions within the Republican Party with the influence of the Tea Party receding as the GOP enters an election carrying the baggage from the destructive antics of the far right in 2013. And we also explore emerging divisions in the Democratic Party between the corporate wing and the economic populists who want to campaign against the nation’s growing income inequality, while the more business-friendly centrists are concerned about a repeat of the McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry disasters that caution them to want to be more like the Republicans.