January 2 – The Next Cliff Looms; A Paltry Deal Not a Grand Bargain; One Year Later is Iraq About to Blow Up?

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Full Program	LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM
Part 1	We begin with an analysis of what is in the so-called fiscal cliff deal with Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect where he has a new article “The Endless Cliff”. We discuss the manufactured and self-inflicted phony crisis we just got through and the next crisis looming over the debt ceiling where, in spite of the president’s warning, the wrecking crew in Congress could do some serious damage.
Part 2	Then we look into how long the world’s only superpower can continue to be the global hegemon when it has such a broken and dysfunctional government. David Rothkopf, the CEO and Editor-at-Large of Foreign Policy Magazine joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Cliff Deal Hollow Victory for the American People” and the end-of-the-year farce on Capitol Hill that produced such a paltry deal instead of the “grand bargain”.
Part 3	Then finally, on the one year anniversary of the U.S. exit from Iraq, we look into growing rebellion in the Sunni Anbar province and the threats by al Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite leader, to use force to put it down. Robert Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist who has written extensively on Iraq and is the author of “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam” joins us. We discuss how the winner of the Iraq war, Iran, is now losing in Syria and that defeat could embolden Iraq’s restive Sunni population who are already chaffing under al Maliki’s heavy-handed rule.