January 27 - How Banks are Helping Payday Lenders to Rip Off Billions; The Spread of Taxpayer-Funded Schools Teaching Anti-Science Ignorance; Obama Should Use His Cognitive Power in the SOTU

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an initiative by the Justice Department to go after banks who do business with payday lenders and fly-by-night online merchants that has already come under attack by Congressman Darrell Issa who is coming to the defense of predatory lenders who, in the first case brought by the DOJ, illegally withdrew $2.4 billion from the checking accounts of bank customers across the country. Benjamin Hallman, the senior financial writer for the Huffington Post joins us to discuss how without the help of big banks, payday lenders who have migrated from storefronts to the Internet, would not be able to operate outside of U.S. and State banking regulations.

Part 2

Then we examine the spread of the publically-funded teaching of creationism and climate-change denial in schools across America. Zack Kopplin, an anti-creationist activist and columnist for The Guardian joins us to discuss his new report at Slate, “Texas Public Schools are Teaching Creationism” and the for-profit charter schools that teach students Filipinos are pagans, feminists turn to the state as a surrogate husband, and that FDR’s New Deal did not help the economy but instead ushered in a new era of dependency on the Federal government.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with George Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has an article at The Huffington Post “SOTU 2014: The Cognitive Power of the President” that argues Obama has the power in his upcoming State of the Union speech to put important ideas in people’s minds that could shape the public discourse on global warming, on chemicals polluting drinking water, on the use of immoral fuels like, coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas, as well as the ability to explode the Republican worshipful myth of “job creators” by re-defining workers as “profit creators”.