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2011 Program Archive
October 13 - Iran is Not on the Ropes; A Texas Populist on Perry and the Occupy Wall Street Movement; "The Man Nobody Knew"
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With mounting skepticism about the plausibility and strategic purpose of an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in the United States, we begin with an expert on Iran, Flynt Leverett, who served as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration before resigning over Middle East policy. We discuss the inner workings of the Iranian regime and assess how they see their foreign policy working since many analysts now suggest Iran’s influence in the region is waning. |
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Then we are joined by Jim Hightower the former Texas Agriculture Commissioner who lost his job to Karl Rove and Rick Perry and is now a popular populist voice on the radio and in his nationally syndicated columns. We discuss the pay-to-play Texas governor and his chances of becoming president as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement and other subjects. For info on the announced event, click here |
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Then we are joined by the son of a former CIA spymaster, whose mysterious life and death is profiled in a new documentary feature “The Man Nobody Knew”. Emmy award-winning filmmaker Carl Colby offers a probing history of the CIA in this personal memoir about his father and the strange and secretive world he grew up in. |
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October 12 - A Voice of the Working Class Emerges; The Price of Civilization; California's Cruel Prison System
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We begin with Jesse LaGreca who has been active with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement since the beginning. His confrontation with a Fox News producer went viral on the Internet, although predictably Fox News chose not to air Jesse’s eloquent response to the Fox propagandist’s dismissive questions. Jesse did appear last Sunday on ABC’s incestuous Beltway gabfest “This Week”, where he pointed out to the patronizing pundits that he was probably the first working class guest they had ever had on their program. |
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Then we speak with Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the author of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity”. With one political party embracing ignorance and denial and the other unsure of what it stands for, we will discuss Jeffrey Sach’s urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundation of a national prosperity. |
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Then finally we speak with veteran political correspondent Bill Boyarsky about California’s cruel prison system and how the burgeoning prison population in the United States relates to unemployment, as millions of mostly minority young men are warehoused by the prison industrial complex that profits from laws like California’s Three Strikes that continues to feed inmates into the system. |
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October 11 - A Bizarre and Brazen Plot; A Founder of Iran's I.R.G.C. on the Plot; Republican Bigotry Will Pay Off For Perry
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We begin in a moment and examine the explosive allegations leveled by Attorney General Holder at a press conference today, announcing the arrest of an Iranian/American involved in an alleged plot with Iran’s Al Quds force to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. Dr Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council joins us to shed some light on this bizarre and reckless plot. |
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Then we speak with a former founder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Moshen Sazagara to try to understand who authorized such a brazen assassination of a close confident of the Saudi king on American soil. We will discuss the reasons behind tensions between the Iranian regime and the Saudis as Iran suffers foreign policy setbacks in the region with the Syrian regime it supports teetering and rival Turkey assuming a more assertive and leading role in the region. |
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Then with the latest Republican presidential debate underway, we look into religious bigotry that may play a decisive role in whether Mitt Romney gets the nomination or not. A former insider in the right wing evangelical movement Frank Schaeffer joins us to discuss why Christian fundamentalists consider the Mormon Church a cult and why they will en masse vote for Governor Perry, who Mitt Romney has demanded should repudiate bigoted comments made by a pastor close to the Texas governor. |
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October 10 - How Wall Street Sees the Protests; Egypt's Sectarian Tinderbox; A Confab of Washington Insiders
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We begin with a Wall Street insider who was a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, to get a reading on how Wall Streeters are reacting to the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations. Nomi Prins joins us to explain how the demonstrators on the street have little to no effect on those inside the tall buildings, 62% of whom are expecting higher bonuses this year, while much of the rest of working America is being downsized or terminated. |
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Then we go to Cairo, Egypt to find out who is behind the violent assault on Coptic Christian demonstrators that left 25 dead and more than 270 wounded. A former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Yasmine El Rashidi joins us to explain what happened and why, as the Copts, who make up over 10% of the Egyptian population, feel more and more helpless and threatened by Islamists and the army, who instead of protecting them from sectarian violence, mowed them down with tanks. |
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Finally we hear from Steve Clemons, the Washington Editor-at-large for the Atlantic, who organized a forum last week in Washington that featured top Obama Administration officials Joe Biden, Bill Daley, Valerie Jarrett and Tim Geitner etc., along with the likes of Antonin Scalia, Marco Rubio and Dick Cheney. We find out what transpired and what was learned from this conclave of Beltway titans. |
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October 9 - Something's Happening in the Streets; America's Decade in the Graveyard of Empires; An Update From the D.C. Demonstrations
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We begin with Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society who helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam war. Now a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, he has a recent article in the New York Times “The Left Declares its Independence” and we discuss the emerging “Occupy Wall Street” movement in terms of populist movements of the past and try to determine its political direction as we head towards a crucial election year. |
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Then, on the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, we speak with Thomas Barfield, an anthropologist who has been visiting and studying Afghanistan for fifty years. As we continue to spend eight billion a month in a war-torn land of mud brick villages, he provides a perspective on the American decade, in a country often described as the graveyard of empires. |
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Then finally we go to the on-going demonstrations in Washington DC against the war in Afghanistan and speak with one of the protest organizers Kevin Zeese of October2011.org, an organization which seeks to end corporatism and militarism. He served as Ralph Nader’s press secretary and spokesman in 2004 and has been a political activist since graduating from George Washington Law School in 1980. |
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