July 26 – The Threat of Homegrown Right Wing Terrorism; Is China Dumping US Treasuries?; Turkey Attacks ISIL and the PKK

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the latest incident of domestic terrorism with the shooting rampage in a cinema in Louisiana carried out by an admirer of Adolph Hitler who was an anti-abortion fanatic with an extensive record of mental illness, yet was able to purchase the handgun he used to murder innocent young women, legally. David Schanzer, Professor of the Practice and Director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security in the School of Public Policy at Duke University joins us. He had a recent article at The New York Times “The Growing Right-Wing Terror Threat” and we discuss how while 74% of the nation’s police and sheriff’s departments listed anti-government violence at their top priority, compared to 39% who listed jihadist-inspired terrorism, Washington appears to be fixated on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Part 2

Then we look into a story doing the rounds on the Internet that Goldman Sachs in alarmed that China is dumping U.S Treasuries while hundreds of billions in capital is flowing out of China. Scott Kennedy, the Director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of “Beyond the Middle Kingdom”, joins us to discuss whether there is any instability with the Chinese economy that has had record sustained growth for some time, and how significant its current slowdown is.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Edmund Ghareeb, an internationally recognized expert on the Kurds and Iraq. He is the first Mustafa Barzani Scholar of Global Kurdish Studies at the Center for Global Peace at American University and we discuss the Turkish military assault on both the Islamic State in Syria and the Kurdish PKK in Iraq, breaking a two-year truce between Turkey’s military and the PKK.