January 30 -A Cold War Flashback Over Russian Cheating; A Beijing-Based Journalist Who Recently Had His Visa Pulled; How Free Trade Agreements Drive Inequality

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an apparent return to the Cold War in the form of an arms control treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 that the U.S. suspects the Russians have cheated on. Daryl Kimball, the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association joins us to look into concerns that the U.S. briefed NATO allies on over Russian test flights of the R-500 ground-launched cruise missile that have been going on since 2008, complicating U.S. diplomatic engagements with Russia on cooperating to end the war in Syria and bring Iran’s nuclear program under international control.

Part 2

Then, with China’s Foreign Ministry refusing to grant visas for New York Times and Bloomberg News reporters in China, we will speak with journalist Paul Mooney, who has been based in Beijing since 1994, but in November his visa application was rejected by the Chinese government with no reason given. We discuss why the current leadership in China is trying to intimidate foreign journalists into towing the party line and the extent to which revelations about massive corruption among top Communist Party officials and their families by the New York Times and Bloomberg have reached the Chinese people and led to efforts to restrict the ability of foreign reporters to do their jobs.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Clyde Prestowitz, the former counselor to the Secretary of Commerce who has an article at the Los Angeles Times “The all-too-real costs of free trade to average Americans. The Country is not better off when trade deal gains go only to the very rich”. We discuss the apparent contradiction in President Obama’s State of the Union address where he decried the growing income and wealth disparity in America, while calling for a free-trade agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership that is likely to ship more jobs overseas in exchange for cheap imports that the unemployed will not have the means to purchase at Wal-Mart.