May 19 - The U.S. Charges Five Chinese Army Officers for Cyber Espionage; The Budget-Busting House Defense Budget for 2015; Fed Up with Big Food? How to Fight Back

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with criminal charges filed by the Justice Department against five Chinese army officers for hacking corporate secrets from Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, Solarworld, Allegheny Technologies, Alcoa and the United Steel Workers Union. June Dreyer, a professor of Political Science at the University of Miami and author of “China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition”, joins us to discuss today’s charges which are the first time the U.S. has charged a state actor in a criminal cyber espionage case, in this case the People’s Liberation Army unit 61398 for acting on behalf of Chinese state industries in competition with U.S. corporations.

Part 2

Then, with the House about to vote on the 2015 defense budget that has rejected the Pentagon’s efforts to cut spending, we speak with William Hartung, the Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex”. We will explore why a war-weary country that recently made it clear it did not want to go to war in Syria, that is spending more on defense than the next 12 countries in the world combined, including four times what China is spending and eight times what Russia is spending, is allowing its representatives in Congress to bust the agreed upon budget caps to throw more pork at military contractors for expensive weapons systems that don’t work.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dr. Robert Lustig, the author of “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease”. He is a pediatric endocrinologist who has spent the last 20 years treating childhood obesity and studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, metabolism and disease, and we look into efforts underway to impose soda taxes to curb the intake of sugar amongst children as well as the similarities of resistance coming from the food industries to prior resistance from the tobacco industry about the danger to health from their products that now contain health warnings.