Full Program

Part 1

We begin with commercialism trumping democracy reflected in the recent statement by the head of CBS, Les Moonves, who said the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”. Victor Pickard, a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania joins us to discuss the symbiosis between the TV and cable monopolies and Donald Trump who serve each other’s interests as the press enables Trump with up to two billions dollars of free publicity covering his headline-grabbing antics which feeds their ratings and generates their profits with little to no regard for the public good which used to be an obligation the mainstream media had for the use of the public’s airwaves.

Part 2

Then we get an unusual critique from the left of Bernie Sanders and his campaign from Kevin Drum, a political blogger at Mother Jones where his latest article is “Here’s Why I never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders”. He joins us to discuss his concern that in calling for a revolution that may not come about and not offering inspiration is service of attainable goals, the likely failure of the Sanders’ campaign will result in a net increase in cynicism about politics with Bernie’s young followers giving up in disgust.

Part 3

Then finally we examine Puerto Rico’s debt crisis with Charles Venator Santiago, Professor of Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory with the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the University of Connecticut. He joins us to discuss Congressional inaction in the face of Sunday’s default on a $422 million debt payment and the deceptive campaign by so-called vulture funds, shadowy hedge funds that are blanketing the airwaves with ads featuring middle class Puerto Rican grandmas worried about losing their life savings when it’s all about the vulture funds squeezing every last dollar out of the island.  

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President's stinging rebuke of the economic plans being offered up by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz which Obama described as "fantasies". Economist Bruce Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Regan and deputy assistant for economic policy in the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration, joins us to discuss the absurdity of Trump's economic plans that would add $9.6 trillion to the deficit in a decade while Cruz's plan would add $8.5 trillion over the same period. We also discuss a prescient article Bruce Bartlett wrote for Politico last July "A Moderate Republican's Case for Trump: Only Trump Can Make the GOP Sane Again - By Losing in a Landslide to Hillary Clinton". 

Part 2

Then Matthew Rothschild joins us in the studio. He is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the former editor of The Progressive Magazine and we discuss his efforts to get money out of politics in Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker has benefited greatly from outside billionaire money that has financed a reactionary agenda in the state. We also discuss the presidential race now increasingly narrowing to a Clinton/Trump face off that, in this year of the outsider, could see Donald Trump elected as the next president of United States.

Part 3

Then finally historian Alfred McCoy joins us in the studio to discuss President Obama's pivot to Asia and the strategy that underlies it and the possibility of the U.S. and China drifting into a new Cold War. A TomDispatch regular, Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of "Policing America's Empire: the United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State" and a forthcoming book on U.S. global power "Ending the American Empire".