March 24 – Cyprus’s Casino Economy on the Brink; A Jordanian Perspective on a Dangerous Neighborhood; “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”

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Part 1	We begin with the possibility of a financial meltdown in Cyprus if Monday’s deadline to avert a collapse of the island’s banking system is not met. James Henry, the Edward R Murrow Fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy joins us to look into whether a collapse of this “treasure island” of laundered Russian money could have broader ramifications for the Eurozone and why the lessons of the dangers of unregulated banks appear to have no impact on Wall Street’s push for deregulation and overturning Dodd-Frank.
Part 2	Then we go to Jordan for a report on President Obama’s recent trip and the refugee crisis the kingdom is facing from the civil war next door in Syria. Daoud Kuttab, who established the Arab World’s first Internet radio station AmmanNet, joins us to provide a regional analysis of the likely impact of an increasingly desperate Assad regime in its last throes provoking a wider conflict and what domino effect the fall of the Syrian dictatorship will have on the neighborhood.
Part 3	Then finally we speak with Douglas Rushkoff about his new book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”. An expert on the intersection of technology and culture who in 2004 predicted the current recession and coined the phrase “viral media”, Rushkoff argues that it’s not technology that is the problem, but our misunderstanding of time, where the priorities of the moment seem to be everything.