March 13 - Ukraine's Threat From Within; Class Warfare in Venezuela; Libya Heading for an East-West Partition

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the looming possibility of a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine as tanks, artillery and troops mass on the Russian side of the border. Robert English, a Professor of International Relations at USC, who has an article in the Los Angeles Times “Ukraine’s Threat from Within: Neofascists are as Much a Menace to Ukraine as Putin’s Actions in Crimea”, joins us.  We discuss how the presence of extreme right wing elements in the new Ukrainian government are playing into Putin’s propaganda, like waving a red flag in front of a nervous bull, and that the U.S. and the E.U. should denounce these elements and seek compromise with Russia.

Part 2

Then we look into the continuing street battles and demonstrations in Venezuela in which both student protesters and national guardsmen have been killed. David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office of Latin America who has researched Venezuela for the last twenty years and lived their for ten years, joins us from Caracas to provide and update on this increasingly polarized confrontation between a government supported by the majority who are poor, and the country’s middle class who are fed up and frustrated by shortages of basic commodities, soaring inflation and rampant crime.  

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dr. Mansour El-Kikhia, a Libyan/American author, columnist, activist and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas San Antonio. We discuss the Libyan parliament’s dismissal of the country’s Prime Minister for failing to stop a North Korean tanker loaded with oil from a rebel-controlled terminal from escaping to sea, and the growing division between the lawless tribal West of the country and the separatist East now in control of a number of oil terminals, but divided between secular rebels and militant Islamists.