January 22 - The Geneva II Peace Talks Open Amid Bitter Acrimony; Just 85 People are as Wealthy as Half of the World's Population; Gates's Memoir "A Political Psyop Disguised as a Candid, Tell-All Memoir

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Geneva 11 talks that began in Montreux, Switzerland amid acrimony and testy exchanges between Syria’s foreign minister and the head of the UN. A specialist on Syria and US and Iranian strategic competition in the Levant, Aram Nerguizian, a senior fellow and chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies joins us to discuss the bitter negotiations underway between the warring parties and the need for the outside parties in this proxy war, Iran and Saudi Arabia to reach some sort of agreement or Modus Vivendi.

Part 2

Then we look into the report just released by Oxfam, “Working For The Few” that finds just 85 people on this planet are as wealthy as half of the world’s population, the poorest 3.5 billion. Rodrique Tremblay, professor emeritus of economics and international finance at the University of Montreal and author of “The New American Empire” and “The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles”, joins us to discuss the impact this report will have on the 2014 World Economic Forum underway in Davos, which last Thursday issued an assessment that income disparity was one of the “Ten Global Risks of Highest Concern in 2014”.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with veteran Senate and House Staffer, Mike Lofgren, the author of “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted”. We discuss his article at Truthout “Gates Agonistes” and look into the political agenda behind the release of Robert Gates’s new book “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense at War”, which Mike Lofgren calls “a political PSYOP disguised as a candid, tell-all memoir.”