Patt Morrison for Weds, June 10

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

1-3 p.m.

 

1:00 – 1:30

OPEN

 

 

 

1:30 – 2:00

Revisionist Branding: From GMAC to "Ally"

Remember how Philip Morris, the big tobacco company, changed its name to Altria, which sounded like nothing in particular? That’s so nobody could really figure out it’s a tobacco company. Now some of the biggest corporate flame-outs are re-branding themselves for much the same reasons – AIG to AIU and GMAC to Ally, among others. Are companies trying to put their troubled pasts behind them, or at least out of the public’s mind?

 

Guests:

Ingrid Martin, Professor of Marketing at CSU Long Beach

 

 

[NPR NEWS]

 

2:00 – 2:30

How do you Spell “Change” in Farsi? Apparently it’s not A-H-M-A-D-I-N-E-J-A-D

What is the biggest issue facing the candidates in Iran’s presidential election this Friday?  Is it Iran’s potential construction of nuclear weapons?  Is it rehabilitating Iran’s relationship with the United States, or its outright hostility toward Israel and other Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf?  Ironically enough, just as it was here in the U.S., it’s the economy stupid:  Iran’s slumping economy, badly hurt by falling oil prices, is center stage for Iranian voters choosing between two mildly reformist candidates and the fiery incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  With the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei lurking over the entire process, do Iranians have a real choice for president?

 

Guests:

Suzanne Maloney, senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy

• Among her many former positions, Maloney was a policy planning staff member at the Department of State until 2007; before that Maloney was the project director of the Task Force on U.S.-Iran Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Trita Parsi, founder & president of the National Iranian American Council; adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute

• Parsi was born in Iran but moved with his family at the age of four to Sweden.  Parsi’s father was a political prisoner of both the Shah and then the Ayatollah after the revolution.

 

 

2:30 – 3:00

OPEN