June 28 – Talks Collapse as Greek Banks Run Out of Money; Assessing the “Liberal Spring”; The Pope’s Call for Moral Accounting on the Environment

Full Program

Part 1

We be begin with the collapse of the last-minute talks over Greek debt with the Greece’s Finance Minister walking out on the European creditors then the Prime Minister calling for a referendum scheduled for next Sunday, which is well past the June 30 deadline of Greece defaulting on its IMF debt. Costas Panayotakis, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York joins us from Greece for an update on a tense situation where ATM’s are running out of money leading to the likelihood that banks will be closed on Monday.

Part 2

Then we speak with Ian Haney Lopez, a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and a Senior Fellow at Demos. He is the author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class” and we discuss what is being referred to as the “liberal spring” when deeply divisive and all-consuming political issues of race, healthcare and sexuality were settled in a week of dramatic change in victories for social tolerance, healthcare for the previously uninsured and the rejection of symbols of reactionary racism.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the Pope’s encyclical on the environment, “On Care For Our Common Home”, which makes the fate of the earth in the face of global warming such a compelling practical issue to be addressed that it has become a moral one. George Lakoff, a Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “Moral Politics” and the “All New Don’t Think of an Elephant” joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post “Pope Francis Gets the Moral Framing Right: Global Warming Is Where the Practical and the Moral Meet” and the moral accounting the Pope is calling for.