March 11 – Putin’s Vulnerability is Banks, Not Tanks; The Senate Intelligence Committee Takes a Stand; Are the Oligarchs in the New Gilded Age Getting Off Lightly?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the growing possibility that the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine could turn into a war, and get an analysis of Putin’s greatest vulnerability, and that is from banks, not tanks. The largest foreign investor in Russia up until 2005, Bill Browder, the chief executive and founder of Hermitage Capital, joins us to discuss the billions Putin and his cronies have stolen and parked abroad, palatial wealth which by comparison makes the just-deposed Yanukovyich look like a minor thief. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky was murdered by the Putin regime and we’ll look into whether the 2012 U.S. law, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, could be applied to Putin.

Part 2

Then we speak with a former CIA veteran Melvin Goodman about Senator Feinstein’s powerful speech condemning the CIA for intimidating the Senate Intelligence Committee she heads and accusing the agency of possibly spying on her Senate staffers. We discuss the extraordinary efforts the CIA is making to suppress the 6,000 page report on the Bush/Cheney era’s secret torture and rendition program and assess whether this report will see the light of day given the apparent resolve displayed by Senator Feinstein Tuesday, who up until now has appeared to have had a cozy relationship with the intelligence community she oversees.

Part 3

Then finally we look into an editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times “The Democrats Stand Up to the Kochs” and discuss how Democrats in the U.S. Senate are starting to fight back against the Koch brother’s effort to buy a Senate led by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky who has promised his benefactors that he will “be the leader of the forces that take on the war on coal”, clearing the way for the Koch’s to pollute at will. Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale University and author of “The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in the First Age of Terror” joins us to discuss how much the oligarch’s in the new Gilded Age are getting off lightly.