When Dieufort Florissant first came to the U.S. from Haiti 23 years ago, he would wire $100 or $200 to his parents in Croix des Bouquets. Once he got on his feet, he wired $500 every month.

Now the big banks want to get in on that money, which adds up to $100 billion annually in remittances flowing from all across America. Advocates say mainstreaming this money will help bring immigrants into the fold by moving money from the shoebox under the bed into the home mortgage.

Guests:

Dimetrios Papademetriou, President, Migration Policy Institute

Don Terry, Manager for the Multilateral Investment Fund, Inter-American Development Bank

Back in the 60’s, civil rights activist charge that newspaper executives, who were almost always white, ignored and marginalized the movement. Forty years later, one Southern newspaper decided it was about time to acknowledge the omission. In bold type, on the front page, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald Leader noted with regret its failure to cover the civil rights movement.

Guests:

Linda Blackford, reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader

Gerald Smith, professor of history at the University of Kentucky

Calvert McCann, amateur photographer

James Klotter, state historian of Kentucky.

With its 20 electoral votes and its mix of urban and rural, rich and poor, the Buckeye state is a swirl of blue and red. That means it’s up for grabs — which is why both campaigns are logging so many miles and spending so many millions on political ads there. Ohio’s ethnic and economic mix also makes it a great testing ground for the national debate over what voters want.

Guests:

Mark Munroe, Chairman, Mahoning County Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign

Catherine Candisky, reporter for The Columbus Dispatch

Eric W. Rademacher, Co-Director of The Ohio Poll at The University of Cincinnati.

Ken Lay, the former head of Enron, seized the headlines Thursday when he was indicted on a host of charges that accuse him of lying and defrauding employees and investors and colleagues. Lay attracts attention because his own company, even in ruins, stands as the prime example of what went wrong with corporate America.

The promise of obscene profit drew accountants and regulators and auditors, into a belief that almost anything was acceptable, if you believed you could get away with it. Even today the story of Enron and corporate America is less about the law, which seemed easy to bend, and more about morals and ethics.

Guests:

Dr. Barbara Lay Toffler, former head of ethics and responsible business practices at Arthur Anderson and author of “Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed, and the Fall of Arthur Anderson.”

Rob Davis, a former Enron employee

Robert Prentice, a professor of Business Law at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas.

The Senate is expected to declare that almost all of the CIA’s allegations about Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons as well as its links to Al Qaeda are almost entirely false. And while the report will be damning in its criticism and broad in its recommendations, it is sidestepping the question that many Americans want answered: Did the White House twist the intelligence to make a case for war?

Guests:

Faye Bowers, National Security correspondent, Christian Science Monitor

Philip Giraldi, 16 year veteran with CIA counterterrorism office.

For close to 150 years, America locked away children that doctors deemed “defective.” Hundreds of thousands of them were warehoused in institutions up into the 1970s. They were marched through state IQ tests which identified them as imbeciles and morons — though often their only defect was being poor or parentless. Their punishment was routine physical and sexual abuse.

Very few of the men and women who were in these institutions speak about those bleak years. One of them, a man called Fred Boyce, told his story, and it’s now featured in a book called “State Boys Rebellion.” We meet the author, and hear Fred’s stories of life inside.

Guests:

Michael D’Antonio, Pulitzer Prize-winning jounralist and author of “The State Boys Rebellion.”

Fred Boyce, former Fernald School resident.

Citing the rarely invoked “state secrets privilege,” Attorney General John Ashcroft has effectively squelched any further discussion of the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who’s been talking about mismanagement and missed intelligence at the bureau both before and after 9/11.

Edmonds was eventually fired from the FBI. She sued the Department of Justice, but a Bush-appointed federal judge threw out her case, saying that even the discussion of her charges in court posed a threat to national security. Edmonds plans to appeal.

Guests:

Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator.

Michael Kirkpatrick, attorney at the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Guests:

Faye Bowers, National Security correspondent, Christian Science Monitor

Philip Giraldi, 16 year veteran with CIA counterterrorism office.

Broadcasting from the garage of his home in Paradise, California, Bill Goldsmith is a radio rebel.

Fed up with the McRadio sound coming from most commercial radio stations he is riding the internet wave and introducing listeners to the sounds of Radio Paradise. His internet music station is commercial free. He calls it an “old fashioned radio for the 21st century.” It’s a place where dissatisfied music lovers, looking for something other than Britney Spears, can go to hear music that is not part of a pre-packaged corporate play list.

They want what’s increasingly hard to find, and that is the passion and the personality of a DJ who still believes after 35 years in the business that it really is all about the music.

Guests:

Bill Goldsmith, Radioparadise.com

Kurt Hanson, Publisher of RAIN, Radio and Internet Newsletter.

A year ago Army General John Abizaid took over as head of U.S. Central Command and declared that troops were fighting a “classic guerilla-type war” in Iraq. But it seems that describing the conflict, didn’t make it any easier to fight.

In the 12 months since, hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Some are hoping the American military can step to the sidelines now that the Iraqis are assuming more responsibility. But there are more and more questions being asked about what went wrong, and what the U.S. might have done to better manage the insurgency. Some say it’s a failure of leadership and strategy.

As the largest and best-funded army in the world still struggles to identify and find the enemy, others ask if the U.S. is still fighting old wars instead of learning from this one.

Guests:

Mark Mazzetti, Defense Correspondant for the Los Angeles Times

Annia Ciezadlo, correspondant for The Christian Science Monitor

Douglas MacGregor, Colonel with the Center for Technology and National Security at the National Defense University and author of “Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights”

Owen Cote, Associate Director of MIT’s Security Studies Program and Co-Editor of International Security and adjunct Lecturer at the JFK School of Governement at Harvard University.