September 15 - Syria The Poisoned Chalice; Why We Support the Egyptian Revolutionaries But Not The Syrian; Will Syria Be Referred To The International Criminal Court?; New Statistics On The New Gilded Age

Full Program

Part 1

Part 2

Then we go to Beirut and speak with Lebanese-based journalist Thanassis Cambanis who writes ”The Internationalist” column for the Boston Globe and is writing a book about Egyptian revolutionaries after the fall of Mubarak. We will look into claims by the Syrian rebels that Assad is transferring his chemical arsenal to Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah and question why Americans who loved the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in Egypt seem unenthusiastic about supporting Syrians who opposed their dictatorship.

Part 3

Then we examine the humanitarian aspects of the continuing agony in Syria with Rebecca Hamilton who teaches at Columbia Law School and was a lawyer with the International Criminal Court in Darfur, Sudan. We discuss the forthcoming U.N. report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and whether it will lead to a referral of the Assad regime to the International Criminal Court.

Part 4

Then finally we discuss the new study by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty that finds the rich got richer throughout the recovery from the 2008 Wall Street crash. David Ruccio, a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame joins us to discuss the graphic evidence that we are in a new Gilded Age as the top ten percent took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting statistics a century ago.