June 26 – Nervous Regimes in Jordan, the Gulf and Saudi Arabia; The Ideological Inconsistency of the Populist Right; The Filmmaker of the New Feature Documentary “Citizen Koch”

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting in Paris with top Saudi, Emirati and Jordanian diplomats ahead of a meeting in Saudi Arabia with King Abdullah on Friday. Ramzy Mardini, who served in the Office of the National Security Advisor to the Vice President and on the Iraq desk at the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs joins us to discuss the stunning success of ISIS in Iraq that has deeply unnerved the Jordanian regime that now has the terrorist organization on its borders with Syria and Iraq, which also has the authoritarian Sunni monarchs in the Gulf reconsidering their support for Jihadist radicals and concerned about a possible rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.

Part 2

Then, as Tea Party Republicans move to shut down the Export-Import Bank that was created early in FDR’s New Deal, we speak with Michael Lind, the co-founder of the New America Foundation and author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States”. We discuss his article at Politico “Why Big Business Fears the Tea Party” and the ideological inconsistency of the populist Right who oppose crony capitalism and the Export-Import bank for subsidizing U.S. manufacturers while supporting agricultural subsidies and the Military Industrial Complex, as well as the hypocrisy of their backers like the Koch brothers who have applied for Ex-Im loans.

Part 3

Then finally Carl Deal joins us. He is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose latest film is the new feature documentary “Citizen Koch” opening nationwide Friday. We discuss the latest political scandal in Wisconsin involving Governor Scott Walker who is featured in the film, and the growing influence of dark money in determining our politics as well as the outsized role of the Koch brothers in funding a myriad of fronts and so-called “social welfare” 501C-4 outside political groups that protect the anonymity of billionaire donors.