June 11 – Murdoch’s Media Empire Handed to Favorite Son; Republican Fallback Plans To Finish Off Obamacare; Ideologues Are Crippling Recovery and Undermining an Otherwise Healthy Economy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the retirement of the media baron who changed American politics by creating a Soviet-style propaganda arm for the Republican Party, Fox News, which unleashed junkyard dogs posing as journalists to ramp up partisan friction and polarize our politics to the point of dysfunction and paralysis. Award-winning investigative journalist Karl Grossman, Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York, joins us to discuss Rupert Murdoch’s handover of his media empire to his son James, who previously oversaw his father’s newspapers and TV network in Britain and was engulfed in the phone hacking scandal that led to a parliamentary enquiry which prompted his transfer to the company’s headquarters in New York.

Part 2

Then we look into the apparent Republican plans to finish off Obama’s signature achievement the Affordable Care Act, if the Supreme Court rules against it and takes away healthcare insurance from 6.4 million Americans who now have it, many for the first time. Sarah Lueck, a Senior Analyst in Health Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the co-author of their new report “New Republican Proposal Would Leave Millions Uninsured or Underinsured”, joins us to discuss how the Republicans will extend temporary help to the immediate victims of the ruling in return for making sure there are many millions more who will have no health coverage in the future.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dimitri Papadimitriou, the President of the Levy Economics Institute and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics at Bard College. He is the co-author of a new Strategic Analysis “Fiscal Austerity, Dollar Appreciation, and Maldistribution Will Derail the U.S. Economy” and we discuss the report and how destructive political ideology is crippling recovery and undermining an otherwise healthy economy.