December 13 - Rick "Oops" Perry for Secretary of Energy; How Trump Used Facebook to Win the Election; Is the Russian-Turkish Ceasefire in Aleppo Real?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump’s reported nomination of Governor Rick Perry to be his Secretary of Energy and speak with Luke Metzger, the founding Director of Environment Texas, a statewide, citizen-funded advocate for clean air, clean water and open spaces. He joins us to discuss Rick “Ooops” Perry, whose 2011 run for president crashed and burned when Perry couldn’t remember the third of the three government departments he wanted to abolish, which ironically happened to be the Department of Energy. We look into the former Texas governor’s record in Texas of being pro-coal. pro oil, pro-fracking and pro-nuclear waste, and assess what qualifications compared to his two predecessors Perry has considering he has a bachelor’s degree in animal sciences from Texas A&M while one of Obama’s last two energy secretaries was a professor of physics at MIT and the other won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Part 2

Then we speak with Jonathan Taplin, the Founder and Director Emeritus of the Innovation Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and author of the forthcoming book “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy”. He joins us to discuss his article at The New York Times, “Forget AT&T: The Real Monopolies are Google and Facebook” and how Steven Bannon and the Trump campaign used Facebook to win the election by mining social media date which they used to target different groups with different personal messages, while Clinton spent heavily on polling and advertising the same message to the same people.

Part 3

Then finally we assess whether the Russian/Turkish planed ceasefire and evacuation of besieged civilians and fighters from Aleppo is real and workable since the U.N. has warned that the Assad regime is committing atrocities in Aleppo, murdering civilians in their homes and on the streets. The English-language spokeswoman for the Local Coordination Committees in Syria, Rafif Jouejati, the Founder and Director of the FREE-Syria Foundation, joins us to discuss the lack of protection the majority of Syrians will have from the murderous Assad regime if the Russian-Iranian-Assad forces recapture all of the regime’s lost territory and succeed in “winning” the war for the Assads.