November 1 - How Russia is Rigging Our Election; The Left's Alarming Complacency About a Trump Victory; Abolishing the Death Penalty in California, the Nation and the World

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the concerns from inside the intelligence community about Russian involvement in our election that Senator Harry Reid referred to in his angry letter to the FBI Director Comey pointing out a double stand of not exposing Russian meddling while exposing Hillary Clinton’s possible connection to an unrelated scandal. Malcolm Nance, a globally recognized counterterrorism expert and former intelligence officer who is a regular commentator on national security affairs on MSNBC, joins us to discuss his new book “The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election”. We assess the stories now coming out at “Mother Jones” attributed to one single source that claims Trump is deeply indebted to a Russian oligarch and may be Putin’s “Manchurian candidate” and another at “Slate” that reveals the Trump Organization is communicating through a backchannel with Russia’s Alpha Bank whose founder, a Ukrainian oligarch, has ties to Putin and who also has considerable investments in Uber and the U.S. heath industry.     

Part 2

Then we speak with Arun Gupta, an investigative journalist who has written for "The Washington Post", "The Guardian", "The Nation" and "Salon" and is the co-founder of "The Occupied Wall Street Journal". He joins us in the studio to discuss his concerns that the political left in America is alarmingly complacent about a possible victory by Donald Trump and does not seem to recognize the danger he poses to American democracy, society and security. Arun argues that the underlying subtext of the Trump campaign is ethnic cleansing and that Trump and his supporters who say they want to make America great again, actually want to make America white again.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the two death penalty propositions on the California ballot, Propositions 62 and 66. Bill Zimmerman, an author, long-time activist and one of the nation’s most experienced political media consultants, joins us to discuss the work he is doing to get Proposition 62 passed which has been met with a spoiler proposition put on the ballot by police and prosecutors, Proposition 66. We discuss how ending the death penalty in California will influence the nation and perhaps the United Nations where most of the world wants to abolish it except for despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China and North Korea that the United States votes with in opposition to a global ban of the death penalty.