January 26 – Trump Humiliates His Lackey Peña Nieto; The Hollowing Out of the State Department; Moving Closer to Midnight and the Apocalypse

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the president of Mexico’s cancellation of a scheduled visit to Washington to meet with his friend Donald Trump who effectively gave him no choice after humiliating Pena Nieto by insisting that Mexico will pay for Trump’s wall with a 20% tax on import from Mexico. We will go to Mexico City and speak with Dr. John Mill Ackerman, an author and a professor at the Institute of Legal Research of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and discuss his article at The Atlantic “How Mexico’s President Laid the Foundation for a Wall” and look into Pena Nieto’s fealty towards Donald Trump whose presidential campaign was helped immensely by Mexico’s president who staged a photo op for Trump back in August to make him look presidential and shore up his foreign policy credentials in an apparently vain hope that Trump would reciprocate. We  also examine the consequences of tearing up NAFTA which has been a disaster for Mexicans while benefiting U.S. farmers and corporate America.

Part 2

Then we assess the damage to U.S. foreign policy from the hollowing out of the State Department with abrupt departures of many of its top officials. Wayne White, who served as the Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and was an advisor/expert to the Iraq Study Group joins us to discuss Trump’s appointment of two callow political neophytes from a right wing website and a Koch brothers front group who are now running the Voice of America which will soon lose its global credibility and become a Fox News-like propaganda arm of the new administration.

Part 3

Then finally we look into today’s turning of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ doomsday clock closer to midnight in a symbolic recognition of a drift towards Armageddon that we have not seen since 1953 when the Soviet Union exploded its first Hydrogen bomb. Lawrence Krauss, the director of the Origins Project and Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department at Arizona State University, joins us to discuss growing concerns that Donald Trump’s reckless talk about nuclear weapons and denial of scientific facts is moving us closer to midnight, midnight being the apocalypse.