Penalty Killer

President Obama is scheduled to sign the $787 billion economic stimulus plan into law at a ceremony in Denver today. Tomorrow in Phoenix, Obama is expected to tackle the home mortgage crisis and roll out a plan to stem the huge rise in foreclosures. While there has been much discussion in the media on the state of the US economy, what about the rest of the world? From Greece to Guadeloupe, from Italy to Indonesia, from Chile to China, from Egypt to India, countries across the globe are feeling the heat of the recession that started over a year ago in the United States. We speak to economist Martin Khor of the Third World Network based in Malaysia.

With 99 percent of the votes counted Wednesday morning in the Israeli election, Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima Party was in first place with twenty-eight seats, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party was a close second with twenty-seven seats. They are both claiming victory but would need coalition partners to gather the sixty-one seats needed to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset. For analysis of the election results, we are joined by two guests. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is an independent Palestinian lawmaker and democracy activist. He joins us from Washington, D.C. And on the line from Beersheba, Israel is Neve Gordon, a professor of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University and the author of Israel’s Occupation.

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity reveals that the number of global warming lobbyists has increased by more than 300 percent in the past five years. In the past year, some 770 companies hired over 2,000 climate change lobbyists and spent an estimated $90 million to influence federal policy on climate change. We speak to the report’s lead author, Marianne Lavelle.

We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had originally projected. On Wednesday, Field told a Senate panel droughts caused by global warming could make parts of the American Southwest dangerous to live in.

Will President Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects? The answer may lie in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the last enemy combatant imprisoned in the United States. We speak to investigative journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

In his latest column for the New York Daily News, Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez writes, “Last year alone, Amalgamated Bank’s profits provided more than $23 million to UNITE HERE for its everyday operations. Some leaders of the union accuse one of the country’s most powerful labor leaders, Andy Stern, of the Service Employees International Union, of scheming to seize control of the bank in a corporate-style takeover.”

Ali Mazrui has been an intellectual giant in African studies for the past four decades. In 2005, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines named him among the top 100 public intellectuals in the world. Mazrui has met Nelson Mandela, Ghana’s founding president Kwame Nkrumah; he had tea with the Indian prime minister; he met with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in his tent; he’s met with the Queen of England; and was forced out of Uganda under Idi Amin. Today, a conversation with Pan-Africanist professor Ali Mazrui.

As Israelis go to the polls in the country’s early general election, we speak with former US President Jimmy Carter. His latest book is We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Will Work. President Carter says he wrote the book because President Obama is “facing a major opportunity and responsibility to lead in ending conflict between Israel and its neighbors.” President Carter writes, “The time is now. Peace is possible.”

President Obama is speaking before a joint session of Congress Tuesday night in what is being described as the first State of the Union address of his presidency. While the economy is expected to dominate the agenda, Obama will also talk about his top foreign policy initiative: the war in Afghanistan. Last week, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 US combat troops to Afghanistan. The new deployments will begin in May and increase the US occupation force to 55,000. Today, we spend the hour looking at US involvement in Afghanistan with five guests: Anand Gopal, Afghanistan correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor; Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story; Gilles Dorronsoro, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and documentary filmmaker Kathleen Foster.

At his first news conference, President Obama emphasized the importance of removing “safe havens” for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said he had no timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. We speak to Cherif Bassiouni, a former UN human rights investigator in Afghanistan. He was fired in 2005 after releasing a report criticizing the US for committing human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

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