January 26 - Greece's New Prime Minister and Finance Minister; The Obama/ Modi Summit and the U.S./ India/ China Strategic Triangle; The Tea Party Republican Presidential Hopeful’s Iowa Freedom Summit

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the new government in Greece led by Alexis Tsipras the head of the left wing Syriza Party, whose first act was to form a governing coalition with a right wing anti-immigrant party Independent Greeks. Economist James Galbraith, a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, joins us. He wrote an op-ed back in June at The New York Times with Greece’s now-new Finance Minister Yanis Varoukasis, “Only Syriza Can Save Greece”, and we discuss how Syriza, which is an acronym for “Radical Coalition of the Left”, can meet the expectations of its voters and get out from under the debt burden and the austerity imposed by Greece’s creditors which the new finance minister described as “fiscal water-boarding policies that have turned Greece into a debt colony”.

Part 2

Then we examine the substance behind the atmospherics of President Obama’s visit to India where he watched the colorful Republic Day parade of mostly Soviet and Russian military hardware with India’s Prime Minister Modi, the first American head of state to do so in 65 previous parades. Ashley Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served on the National Security Council staff as a special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning and Southwest Asia, joins us to discuss the revival of the nuclear power deal between the two countries and efforts to persuade India to deal with global warming.

Part 3

Then finally we look into this last weekend’s Iowa Freedom Summit of Tea Party Republican presidential candidates, and get a report from Robert Leonard who covered the 2008 and 2012 Iowa caucuses for KNIA/KRLS Radio in Knoxville and Pella, Iowa. He has an article at Salon.com “The world has gone to hell: A weekend at the Iowa Freedom Summit” and we discuss the performances of the crowded bench of Republican presidential hopefuls who showed up in this important primary state, and the notable absence of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, bobby Jindal and Rand Paul.