January 22 – The Bizarre Political Drama Underway in Argentina; Will the ECB’s QE Jump Start the Ailing Eurozone?; Obama’s Belated Epiphany

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the political drama underway in Argentina where the country’s top prosecutor was murdered hours before he was to appear before the Congress to reveal a government cover-up of Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in which 85 people died. Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, joins us to discuss the bizarre reversal of Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner who first claimed the prosecutor’s death was suicide, but is now saying it was not, even though the prosecutor was charging that she was involved in a plot to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing.

Part 2

Then we examine the European Central Bank’s infusion of 1.1 trillion Euros into the ailing eurozone economies with Quantitative Easing similar to what the Federal Reserve has done to revive the U.S. economy. Joining us from London is economist Stephany Griffith Jones, a Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London and the Director of the Financial Markets Program at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. We  discuss the connection between Europe’s economic slump and the rise of right wing parties and the report by Oxfam released on the eve of the gathering of the global elite now underway in Davos, Switzerland that finds more than half of global wealth is controlled by 1% of the world’s population.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Michael Brenner, a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburg and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We discuss his article at The Huffington Post “Obama’s Epiphany” and Obama’s State of the Union speech that Michael Brenner argues is six years and three elections too late, and the gap between the president’s rhetoric and the current political realities.