February 4 – Karzai’s Latest Double-Dealing; The Trillion Dollar Farm Bill; Sugar is Not Only Making us Fat, It’s Killing Us

Full Program

We begin with the latest revelations of duplicity and double-dealing by Afghan President Hamid Karzai who has been conducting secret negotiations with the Taliban without informing his American and NATO allies. Marvin Weinbaum, the former Afghanistan and Pakistan Analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the US Department of State joins us to discuss what Karzai is trying to achieve with these secret talks while he continues to refuse to sign the deal he brokered for security after Western troops leave.

Then we look into the giant trillion dollar Farm Bill the president is expected to sign that cuts food stamps and alters direct payments in farm subsidies which up until now have paid farmers whether they plant crops or not. Dr. Daryll Ray, the Chair of Excellence in Agriculture Policy, professor of agricultural and resource economics and Director of the Agriculture Policy Analysis Center at the University of Tennessee, joins us to discuss the winners and losers in this bill and why we have farm subsidies in the first place.

Then finally we speak with Laura Schmidt, a Professor of Health Policy in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who wrote the commentary for a new study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention published in Monday’s Journal of the American Medical Association that finds Americans are consuming too much sugar and that sugar is killing us. We discuss these new findings that show that not only does sugar make us fat, it also makes us sick, and contributes to cardiovascular disease, the major cause of death in America.