If the United States government is the largest energy consumer in the world, asks Nation contributing editor Christian Parenti, why doesn't it use its massive buying power to support real green, clean energy technologies--instead of subsidizing the catastrophic failures of oil giants like BP?

Parenti joins us in studio to point out that if the U.S. post office switched to electric cars, that subsidy alone would bring down the price and create infrastructure for the rest of the country. He also talks Bill Gates, more green technologies, and the war in Afghanistan.

Across the United States, the brutal and dysfunctional juvenile justice system sends queer youth to prison in disproportionate numbers, fails to protect them from violence and discrimination while they're inside and to this day condones attempts to turn them straight.

So wrote Daniel Redman in a terrifying new article in The Nation this week, where he investigated the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the juvenile justice system. Redman joins us via Skype, along with Gabrielle Prisco of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York, to talk about the way the justice system fails all youth--and the reasons LGBT youth wind up in the system more often than straight teens.

Finally, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation, has some words for "the false apostles of austerity."