June 3 - Obama's Billion Dollar Boost to NATO; Republican Operatives Organize Attacks on American POW; A Reporter Who Covered the Tiananmen Massacre on the 25th Anniversary

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the president’s pledge in Poland to bolster NATO with a billion dollar boost to military deployments in Europe. A leading specialist on the politics and economics of post-Communist Russia, Daniel Treisman, who is just back from Russia, joins us to discuss Russia’s threat to pull out of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act if there are major NATO deployments in eastern and central Europe and whether or not there is an appetite on both sides for an increase in defense spending or a new arms race in Europe as former Warsaw Pact countries grow increasingly nervous of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

Part 2

Then we look into how Republican operatives have organized soldiers from Sergeant Berghahl’s former unit and offered them up to the Press to criticize the American POW who was swapped by the Obama Administration for Taliban prisoners. Robert Creamer, a long-time political organizer and strategist and author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win” joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post, “The Despicable Republican Attack on an American Prisoner of War” and why the mainstream media have enabled the attacks on Bergdahl, who if he is as it appears, a deserter, will be judged by the military, but in the meantime the POW is being smeared in the right-wing press as a way to attack Obama

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Scott Savitt, a former Beijing-based foreign correspondent who covered the Tiananmen Square massacre 25 years ago for The Los Angeles Times and United Press International. He joins us to discuss the media blackout in China on this June 4^th anniversary and whether the Communist Party leaders have erased the pro-Democracy movement entirely by encouraging nationalism and generating economic growth, improving the standard of living to the point where the average Chinese citizen today has twenty times the income they had twenty five years ago.