January 24 - Handing Over the Environment to Big Oil; Will Trump's "America First" Bring Back Jobs?; Trump Keeps Comey Inside the Tent

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump’s executive orders to revive the Keystone XL pipeline that was rejected by Obama and the Dakota Access pipeline that was stalled by the Army Corps of Engineers because of protests from the Standing Rock Sioux. Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University joins us to discuss the broader issues involved in the reversal of energy policies to deal with climate change from global warming. With Trump’s installation of global warming deniers in his cabinet, we look into the choice of an oilman to head up the State Department, Rex Tillerson,  who previously made a deal with Putin for Exxon to extract Russian Arctic oil because the melting of the icecaps due to global warming was making it more economical to do so, and assess the extent to which handing over the environment to big oil will reinforce the cycle of burning fossil fuels which contributes to global warming and in effect enables dying industries to profit from the planet’s destruction they are accelerating.

Part 2

Then we examine whether Trump’s “America first” approach to threatening tariffs and the tearing up of T.P.P. and NAFTA will bring back jobs when other factors beyond globalism such as robotics and the rise of the dollar are at play. Jared Bernstein a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the former Chief Economist and Economic Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, joins us. We discuss his article at The New York Times “Ditching the T.P.P. Won’t Solve the Trade Deficit” and whether Trump, who has argued that American workers are paid too much and that unions are responsible for jobs being outsourced abroad, will lose more American jobs than create new ones.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with a former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley and discuss Donald Trump’s warm embrace of James Comey over the weekend and his decision to keep Comey on as the head of the FBI even though Trump had criticized him earlier for finding there was no basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server. We look into whether keeping Comey inside the tent will ensure that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia will go nowhere.