Lessons From the Chicago Riots 50 Years Later
On this 50th anniversary of the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago we will begin with Marilyn Katz, a writer, consultant and long-time political activist. She was head of security for the anti-war group Students for a Democratic Society at the time and we will look back at this key moment in our history as the forces of the establishment clashed with an insurgent anti-establishment counter-culture protesting a senseless and endless war in Vietnam. We discuss the role of television carrying the riots into the living rooms of America with the CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite commenting on the air on August 25, 1968 as the convention began that “The Democratic Convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it”. Amid the mayhem outside and the chaos inside the convention, the unpopular Democratic candidate, the then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination and was subsequently narrowly beaten in the general election by the law and order candidate Richard Nixon. This has led many historians to conclude that the televised riots, later referred to as the “police riots”, cost the Democrats the White House and prolonged the Vietnam War under Nixon. With a resistance movement growing in opposition to the unpopular Trump Administration today, we explore lessons learned fifty years later on how to bring about regime change in America.
Student Loan Ombudsman Quits as Trump Dismantles the CFPB
Then with the resignation today of the ombudsman overseeing the $1.5 trillion student loan market in protest to the White House’s open hostility toward protecting the nation’s millions of student loan borrowers, we will speak with David Halperin, a senior fellow at Republic Report. He was a special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee and joins us to discuss how the Trump Administration is aggressively dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to free up predatory lenders to indenture America’s students with a lifetime of debt and worthless diplomas.
The UN Accuses Burma’s Government of Genocide
Then finally we examine the report issued by the United Nations which finds six senior military officials in Burma-Myanmar guilty of genocide against the Rohinga Muslim minority, 700,000 of whom have fled for their live to Bangladesh. A specialist on Burma-Myanmar, David Steinberg, distinguished Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies at Georgetown University, joins us to discuss the irony that a government ostensibly led by the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace has been referred to the International Criminal Court for “indiscriminate killing, gang raping women, assaulting children and burning entire villages”.