Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the rash of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish cemeteries and Community Centers with 500 headstones desecrated at a Jewish graveyard in Philadelphia less than a week after a similar outrage in St. Louis. Brian Levin, a Criminologist, civil right attorney, professor of criminal justice and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, joins us to discuss the more than 160 bomb threats made to over 60 Jewish Community Centers since January. And with anti-Semitic incidents on the decline prior to this, we will look into what factors might be involved in this upsurge of hate in the country that coincides with the arrival of the Trump presidency. We also discuss Trump’s slow reaction to these hate crimes and his response to Jewish reporters who raised the issue to Trump only to be met with hostility and evasion.

Part 2

Then we explore how technology is disrupting democracy and if used maliciously, could undermine it further. Johan Bollen, a professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing who previously was a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, joins us to discuss the recent article in The Guardian that investigates the role of algorithms in social media and the activities of Robert Mercer, the right-wing billionaire who is close to Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon and Nigel Farage and the war he is waging on the mainstream media by creating a multi-million-dollar propaganda network that funds Breitbart, proliferates “fake news” and spreads global warming denial disinformation.  

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Roxana Tiron, who covers defense business, national security and Congress for Bloomberg News, about the historic increase in defense spending Donald Trump is proposing for 2018 with an extra $54 billion being added at the expense of cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department whose budgets are $8 billion and $50 billion respectively, compared to the $600 billion that goes to the Pentagon. We also examine Senator John McCain’s criticism of the addition 10% in defense spending which he thinks is not enough. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump’s remark in an interview today that the U.S. “has fallen behind on nuclear weapons capacity” and “we’re going to be at the top of the pack”. William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Initiatives Program at the Center for International Policy and author of “The Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex” joins us to discuss the enormous spending spree Trump is about to embark on by throwing money at the military industrial complex in additional military spending yet to be defined, and making America great again by going back to a Cold War nuclear arms race with the Russians. We assess what the strategy is behind wasting more money on the Pentagon and the DOE’s nuclear weapons “modernization” plans, as well as blowing billions on a wall on the Mexican border. Is this a repeat of the Reagan strategy to ramp up defense spending to blow up the deficit in order to foreclose all other domestic spending and force cuts on Medicare and Social Security?

Part 2

Then we speak with Washington-based journalist Adele Stan who is a weekly columnist for The American Prospect. She has been at today’s Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC and we  get an update on the speeches by Betsy DeVos and the joint appearance by Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon where the alleged power behind the throne, Bannon, attacked the press as the enemy in a battle that is “going to get worse” while telling the gathering of right wing movers and shakers that Trump had their backs and he was “maniacally focused” on delivering on his campaign promises”.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the frosty meeting that took place in Mexico City between Secretary of State Tillerson and Mexico’s Foreign Minister and Interior Secretary where concerns were raised about the human rights of Mexicans living in the United States facing deportation. Shannon O’Neil, a Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Two Nations Indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the Road Ahead”, joins us to discuss the contrast between Tillerson’s conciliatory tone and Trump’s fighting words today about kicking out “really bad dudes” in what he called a “military operation”.