May 10 – Putin’s Parade; A Post-Mortem on the UK Elections; Will Greece Get Through This Coming Week’s Crisis?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the commemorations on the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War 11 in Europe and discuss the boycott of the Victory Day parade in Moscow by Western governments with Nina Khruscheva, a Professor in the Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School and the author of “The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind”. She has an article at Project Syndicate “Putin’s Parade” and we examine the difference between the vanquished Germans who today are peaceful and prosperous, and the victorious Russians who today are enslaved by aggressive propaganda and patriotic delusions while their new czar and his cronies steal the county’s wealth and future.

Part 2

Then we get a post-mortem of the recent elections in the U.K. from Harold Clarke, a Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Studies at the University of Texas. He has been the co-investigator of the British Election Study at the University of Manchester where he is a visiting professor and is the author of “Affluence, Austerity and Electoral Change in Britain” and we look into the growing assertiveness of the Scottish Nationalists and the demise of the Labour Party whose crippling loss was the Scottish National Party’s gain.

Part 3

Then finally we go to Athens, Greece to get an update on the financial crisis as Greece teeters on the brink of default with Tuesday’s $840 million payment to the IMF looming and fears that there is no credible plan to reach an agreement with Eurozone creditors or a Plan B if the country defaults. Dimitri Papadimitriou, the President of the Levy Economics Institute joins us to discuss how Greece can ride out this coming week as its economy come to a crunch.