January 3 - Fiscal Cliff Deal Done Without Transparency; Wall Street's Big Lie Loses; Jared Diamond on His New Book "The World Until Yesterday"

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Part 1	We begin with Mattea Kramer, a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to making complex federal budget information transparent and accessible. We discuss the lack of transparency behind the recent much heralded fiscal cliff deal, the contents of which are only now coming to light.
Part 2	Then we discuss how the big lie lost with William Greider, the national affairs correspondent with The Nation where he has an article “The Big Lie Loses”. With the phony “fiscal cliff” drama now over, before the next one begins over the debt ceiling, we examine whether the Wall Street titans responsible for our collapsed economy will be able to continue punishing the wrong people for the nation’s economic ills by demonizing popular federal programs like Social Security which they blame for the deficits instead of their own reckless greed.
Part 3	Then finally best-selling author Jared Diamond joins us to discuss his latest book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” The author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”, and a professor of geography at UCLA, he spent decades with tribes in the remote New Guinea highlands and he brings the wisdom of the natural world back to our troubled “civilized” lives beset by obesity from corporate food, paranoia from mindless media and planetary destruction from compulsive consumption.