September 26 – Is Government by Extortion the New Normal?; Was It Ever This Bad in Washington?; Revelations that the NSA Spied on U.S. Senators

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Mike Lofgren who has spent 28 years working in Congress as a Senior Analyst on the House and Senate Budget Committees. He is the author of “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted”. We discuss the latest threats by House Republican to both shut down the government and risk the full faith and credit of the United States unless they get all of their legislative wish list.

Part 2

Then we speak with the former Chief Investigator for the Senate Banking Committee Bartlett Naylor to find out whether government by extortion is the new normal in Washington since the House Republicans are abandoning the very process of negotiation and compromise laid out in the Constitution. And whether there was ever a time in the history of the American government where laws that were passed and upheld by the Supreme Court were held hostage by a small faction of extremists prepared to both shut down the government and destroy the economy unless the law they don’t like was repealed.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the latest declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive on a six-year NSA domestic spying program “Minaret” that targeted 1,650 individuals, including prominent Americans like Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali and the humorist Art Buchwald. Matthew Aid, a leading intelligence historian who obtained the documents joins us to discuss the revelations that the NSA spied on two prominent U.S. Senators, Frank Church and Howard Baker and his article in Foreign Policy “Secret Cold War Documents Reveal NSA Spied on Senators”.