February 23 - More Nuke to Make America Great Again; Bannon Vows His War With The Press Will Get Worse; Tillerson Conciliates While Trump Inflates

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”.