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Country music rapper Breland talks to Dennis Miller about his musical influences, the process of blending musical dramas, and his upcoming tour.

The US and its allies have moved to implement new sanctions against Moscow, as Russia’s central bank moves to double interest rates, while the ruble sees it worst day on record. We’ll discuss the latest central bank action, and whether it will soon include the Federal Reserve. Plus, we’ll take a look at how the new measures are already impacting global markets. And the latest tensions sent oil prices back to $100 per barrel. We’ll break down why the markets are concerned, and how long the latest rally is likely to last.

All this geopolitical hot air was always going to be about gas, and, predicting that, before all the horse trading and brinkmanship began, we caught up with two independent energy experts, Irina Slav and Ben Aris. They cut through the noise and give some useful context to the fundamental problems Europe and the UK now face to – quite literally – keep the lights on.

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Antony Loewenstein, author of ‘Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe’ and co-founder of Declassified Australia. He discusses the failed attempts of the US and other allied occupiers of Afghanistan to plunder Afghanistan’s resources, the original Soviet desire to exploit the vast mineral wealth, Erik Prince’s attempts to convince Donald Trump to privatize the Afghan war and run Afghanistan with a private army, economic catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan and the disappearance of Western concern for Afghans following their exit after the Taliban victory, Biden’s plan to split $7 billion of frozen Afghan central bank assets to benefit families of victims of 9/11, and much more.

We are told Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine is to ‘demilitarize’ and ‘denazify’ the country. Negotiations are likely to start soon. What kind of Ukraine can we expect after the special military operation has come to an end?

CrossTalking with Patrick Henningsen and George Szamuely.

While Ireland has been an independent country for a very long time, old ties between Britain and the Republic have remained tight. Millions of Irish people live in Britain, can vote in British elections, and travel freely back and forth without let or hindrance. But the strains are now starting to show. The Irish government hybrid of once fierce enemies Fine Gael and Fianna Fail is in clear trouble, and beset by all kinds of scandals. We asked Chay Bowes, a campaigner and entrepreneur based in Dublin, to tell us more.

Glasgow’s Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ “work-in” back in 1971-2 was the opposite of a strike. The British government had ordered the men to down tools, but the workers insisted they work on to save their jobs in an industry that was in slow decline. The movement’s leaders – Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie, Sammy Barr, and Sammy Gilmour – led 8,500 workers in a protest about under-investment in Scotland’s shipyards and, in doing so, captured the country’s imagination. Now, to mark the work-in’s 50th anniversary, a new musical, ‘Yes! Yes! UCS’, telling their story, is about to go on tour across the UK. We invited playwright Neil Gore and actor/musician Janie Thomson aboard Sputnik to fill us in.

On the show, Chris Hedges discusses America's inner and outer wars and its nexus with capitalism and empire with Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University Nikhil Pal Singh.

The internal violence in the United States, militarized police, and the largest prison system in the world, along with America’s endemic racism, are mirrored in the foreign wars that have been fought almost continuously by the United States since the end of the 19th century. These inner and outer wars, argues historian Nikhil Pal Singh, are intimately connected. The gunning down of unarmed black people in American cities is expressed outside our borders in the gunning down of unarmed Muslims in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, often by militarized drones. The prison-industrial-complex at home is given form in the myriad of overseas black sites where victims, kidnapped and transported to other countries by the CIA, are held in secret, tortured, and killed.

What happens internally and what happens externally are part of the same racial ordering of capitalism and empire, an organic whole. The ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terror’ are the logical conclusion of the racial wars that stretch back to the European invasion and conquest of North America. “Foreign policy and domestic politics develop in a reciprocal relationship and produce mutually reinforcing approaches to managing social conflict,” Singh argues. There is a cross-pollination between those who manage our inner and outer wars. William Casey oversaw the Phoenix Program, which “neutralized” over 26,000 suspected members of the Viet Cong through torture and assassinations, and went on to help found the Manhattan Institute that formulated the ‘broken windows’ policing strategy in poor communities, used to justify heightened police surveillance, daily harassment, brutality, over-arrests, and the dehumanization of poor people of color.

Search and stops by police at home are no different from ‘cordon and search’ operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Night raids in Fallujah look like night raids in Oakland. The photos of brutalized prisoners at Abu Ghraib have their corollary in the photos taking by white lynch mobs in the south. Richard Zuley, accused of torturing prisoners in Guantanamo, was a member of the Chicago police unit that tortured black suspects in the Chicago police department’s own secret black site. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in his 2003 memo seeking to justify torture turned to an 1873 case of Modoc Indian prisoners for a legal precedent. The code name for the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was, not accidentally, Geronimo. America has from its founding made war on racialized enemies, always described as subhuman and condemned as incapable of being civilized.

Nikhil Pal Singh's new book is ‘Race and America's Long War’.

The former evil empire standing up to the empire of lies. When Vladimir Putin announced his decision to demilitarize Ukraine, he wasn’t just resurrecting the ghost of the Cold War, he made it clear that US-Russian animosity never really ended. How hot and bloody could it get? To discuss this, Oksana is joined by Timofei Bordachev, programme director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

On this episode of Going Underground, Afshin Rattansi challenges the former vice chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Russia’s Duma, Natalya Narochnitskaya, over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The challenges posed to the former Russian politician include the Kremlin assuring the world Russia was not going to invade Ukraine, whether Putin’s Russia is acting like the US and NATO in their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the painting of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and part of the population as neo-Nazis, why Putin didn’t answer Zelensky’s efforts for talks before the invasion, civilian casualties in Ukraine, and more.

The US economy is struggling and everyone seems to have a different understanding of why. Lee Camp looks into the causes of the current labor struggles, some of the wackier symptoms of an economy in collapse, and a potential policy-based solution. Camp also reports on a new religious crusade against the LGBTQ community, Google’s admission that they’re still spying on us, and much more. Naomi Karavani reports on an abortion pill available since the 80s that could help address some of the US women’s rights movement’s issues if it were made more widely available. Finally, Jaffer Khan looks into the latest move from the mercenary capitalist Erik Prince.