December 6 - General Flynn and Son's Peddling of Fake News; Pentagon Buries Evidence of $125 Billion in Waste; The Former Head of Exxon as Secretary of State?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the consequences of General Michael Flynn and his son and other top members of the incoming Trump Administration spreading fake news which resulted in an attack on a Washington pizzeria popular with families and children by a supporter of family values who had a real gun and believed an online conspiracy theory Flynn and his son were peddling that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the pizzeria.  An Internet and technology policy lawyer, Leslie Harris, the former President of the Center for Democracy and Technology, joins us to discuss what happened at her neighborhood pizzeria and the reckless and dangerous behavior of the next National Security Advisor General Flynn and his son. We will also look into how Republican pressure on Facebook to get rid of supposedly “biased” human oversight and use algorithms instead, led to the proliferation of fake news and a deluge of outrageous fabrications and hate speech aimed at the Clintons that helped elect Trump. 

Part 2

Then we examine a Washington Post expose of how the Pentagon buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste so their next budget under the next Administration will be laden with pork from a massive spending binge promised by Trump. Mandy Smithberger, the Director of the Straus Military Reform Program at POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, joins us to discuss how little outrage has been expressed in Washington as top Republicans with oversight like Senator John McCain, ignore the report and plan to throw more money at the Pentagon. 

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Cleo Paskal, who is a Trudeau Fellow at the University of Montreal’s Center for International Studies and a Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. An expert on the geopolitical, security, and economic consequences of environmental change from global warming, she joins us to discuss the possibility that Trump will choose the former head of Exxon as his Secretary of State, at a time the oil giant is under investigation for actively suppressing evidence of the contribution to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.