Full Program

Part 1

We begin with criminal charges filed by the Justice Department against five Chinese army officers for hacking corporate secrets from Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, Solarworld, Allegheny Technologies, Alcoa and the United Steel Workers Union. June Dreyer, a professor of Political Science at the University of Miami and author of “China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition”, joins us to discuss today’s charges which are the first time the U.S. has charged a state actor in a criminal cyber espionage case, in this case the People’s Liberation Army unit 61398 for acting on behalf of Chinese state industries in competition with U.S. corporations.

Part 2

Then, with the House about to vote on the 2015 defense budget that has rejected the Pentagon’s efforts to cut spending, we speak with William Hartung, the Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex”. We will explore why a war-weary country that recently made it clear it did not want to go to war in Syria, that is spending more on defense than the next 12 countries in the world combined, including four times what China is spending and eight times what Russia is spending, is allowing its representatives in Congress to bust the agreed upon budget caps to throw more pork at military contractors for expensive weapons systems that don’t work.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dr. Robert Lustig, the author of “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease”. He is a pediatric endocrinologist who has spent the last 20 years treating childhood obesity and studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, metabolism and disease, and we look into efforts underway to impose soda taxes to curb the intake of sugar amongst children as well as the similarities of resistance coming from the food industries to prior resistance from the tobacco industry about the danger to health from their products that now contain health warnings. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the escalating fight against the Koch Brothers in the U.S. Senate where the Majority Leader announced Thursday he plans to hold a vote that would “grant Congress the authority to regulate and limit the raising and spending of money for federal political campaigns”. A long-time observer of Congress and politics, Norman Ornstein, who write a weekly column for The National Journal and The Atlantic called “Congress Inside Out”, joins us to discuss the strategy behind the increasingly combative rhetoric coming from Harry Reid who has vowed to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United, McCutcheon and Buckley v. Valeo decisions.

Part 2

Then we speak with Mark Ames, the founding editor of the satirical Moscow biweekly “The eXile” who is a senior editor at PandoDaily where he has an article “Sorry America, Ukraine isn’t all about you”. In contrast to the current alarmists versus the apologists debate over Putin’s assertive new Russia that either attributes the Ukraine crisis to the actions of an evil empire-builder or blames the West for pushing Putin into a corner where he had no choice but to grab Crimea, we discuss the missing piece and that is Putin’s domestic agenda that Mark Ames sees as being remarkably similar to Nixon’s appeal to the silent majority in Red State America.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the fading political fortunes of Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan who first appeared as a charismatic modernizer but this year has stumbled from one crisis to another and now seems to be digging the hole deeper with his insensitive and callous handling of a mining disaster that has left about 300 miners dead with 150 missing. Asli Bali, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who deals with Turkish issues and visits Turkey often, joins us to discuss how this apparently tone deaf leader maintains a hold on Turkish politics.