all the world. and all the news companies merely players but what kind of partners are into america r.t. america. america. many ways the news landscape is just like the real news. good actors bad actors and in the end you could never. see the park in all the world all the world's a stage. play. below

until harben in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture cold war is over but the threat of nuclear annihilation is very very much alive joe cirincione will explain why in just a moment and are conservative values fundamentally out of step with our nation's founding principles i staved mccall and sam saxon tonight's big picture rome. was thirty years after the end of the cold war the planet is still armed to the hilt with nuclear weapons the u.s. and russia lead the way with a few thousand warheads each while france china and the u.k. all have a few hundred nukes at their disposal pakistan india and israel meanwhile have between fifty one hundred forty bombs each why when we know the three. they pose to

the continued existence of human civilization our nuclear weapon still such a significant part of the global arsenal and how can we prevent their spread and maybe even do away with want them once and for all joining me now is joe cirincione president of the ploughshares fund author of several books including most recently nuclear nightmares securing the world before it's too late joe welcome back to the program thank you tom pleasure to be here it's been too long so yeah i thought first of all just like a baseline is there such a thing as mutually assured destruction yeah it's a fact of life it's not a strategy or theory it's the fact that countries have enough nuclear weapons that no other country could attack them and hope to eliminate all those weapons so if a country a attacks country b. country b. is going to be able to retaliate both countries would be destroyed in the process of nuclear war is an act of suicide in effect so is that the is that the thinking

in your opinion that kim jong un is pursuing. here who want to be mutually be deterred but he believes that the united states is out to get him and there's good reason i mean we practice military drills every every year with the south koreans where we practice attacks on north korea we practice decapitation strikes we think they're defensive to deter him from attacking south korea but north korea sees it differently so he wants to have a weapon and ultimate weapon that he believes will prevent the united states from attacking it isn't good enough you reasons that a war would devastate south korea might devastate japan no he believes he has to have destruction that would hit directly at the american homeland and that is of course is grounded in years of cold war theory his calculation on this is actually very rational you know and that's that's it seems to me that the prevail belief belief is maybe the wrong word but just you know it's kind of this mean that has infiltrated the american media certainly. i don't know if this is how the

people the pentagon of the state department think about it but this idea that he's fundamentally irrational seems to me like one of the most dangerous things to be part of our you know our calculations right yes no question he's ruthless thirty's brutal that he keeps his own population on the edge of starvation no one rational would like to live in north korea but his calculations quite solid quite sound i mean just think about his dynasty this was the democratic people's republic of korea was founded in one thousand nine hundred five this public has outlasted monarchs presidents the soviet union his family dynasty has succeeded they must be pursuing a fairly effective you could say rational policy to ensure their survival he's just continuing that technique just maybe a policy seems. yes of how to construct a society but it works for him thirty years after the cold war we still have all these nukes russia has all these nukes there's nuclear proliferation around the

world. do we really need the this many nuclear weapons just speaking of the united states do we really need them and if not is the existence of them part of a giant welfare program for the nuclear weapons building industry the military industrial koppel i firmly believe that the main rationale for keeping this enormous overkill capacity that we have is not ideology or strategic doctrine although those both help it's the nuclear industrial complex people make a lot of money from nuclear weapons we spend about fifty five billion dollars a year on the nuclear weapons complex including missile defense systems that's contracts that's jobs that's billets so you have senators going arguing against arms control treaties why to protect the base in their state that provides perhaps a thousand or two thousand jobs yes this is a very real factor do you need that number no look there hasn't been a military mission that's justified the use of a nuclear weapon in seventy two. years since he was shimon nagasaki and we've been

in wars we've lost wars our allies have lost wars and yet no president has ever felt they needed to use even one nuclear weapon nor has the president of any other country so maybe you do need at some point to use one or ten or one hundred nuclear weapons which is inconceivable we have over four thousand in our active stockpile where he to fire so does russia and then as you pointed out in the show other countries have similar stockpiles working their way down way more than you would need for any conceivable military purpose so if there were a nuclear throw a nuclear war yeah and and let's say the united states russia or china you know a couple major players got involved maybe the middle east goes up israel's shoot in iran pakistan shoots back at israel you've got nuclear weapons going all over the place how many nukes would it take to render the planet basically uninhabitable what would the outcome of

a nuclear war be at what point would that with that curve of destruction cease to be linear and start to go along yeah good point well you know people talk about nuclear weapons destroying the planet in fact nuclear war the planet would be fine earth would recover it's been around for a long time it's the people that would be gone and so if you look at a full exchange just between two countries the u.s. and russia you'd be looking at about eight thousand nuclear detonations that is enough to weighty eight most to most human life and much animal life on earth but the really bad news is it doesn't have to be that big to end human civilization a different level scientists calculated just one hundred nuclear weapons going off in south asia so if india and pakistan go at it would put a start enough mega fires to put enough smoke in particular it's in the air that it would shroud the earth in clouds for two to three years lowering global temperatures to. we're three degrees the so-called winter so yes which we used to

think would take many more weapons but the new climatology models show that only one hundred would do it if you drop global temperatures two or three degrees you're killing off most food crops in the world we calculate that would cause a massive famine killing at least a billion people you kill a billion people you're talking about mass migration mass destruction mass disorder the collapse of human civilization from a war that might occur half a world away that we wouldn't feel the direct effects of but the planet would is a stone yes so in the meantime you know donald and tom ronald reagan came along with a brilliant idea the some actually i forget who wasn't as a ministration but somebody had made the comment back in the eighty's you know the that well i think you saw a science fiction movie when you're drunk that we could have this impenetrable shoot all over the united states laded a science fiction movie where they had this real death parade this this way that

was it was able to he was in a movie he was in the movie where you could a limb an ape airplanes rockets at at the speed of light and he got the idea then that wouldn't be great if we could have that and so edward teller who is then at livermore national laboratories says that he has such a device he called it the x. ray laser and he said this one satellite put in space could send out beams of laser energy that could demolish the entire first wave of soviet warheads and that convinced reagan to start the strategic defense initiative so where is there right now do we are are we safe when we do not have a workable system that can protect any country from long range ballistic missiles forty years and we've spent about three hundred twenty billion dollars on missile defense since the beginning of the missile age about two hundred fifty billion of that in the star wars program and we have a long list of failed projects particle beam weapons x. ray. lasers kinetic kill vehicles brilliant pebbles all these things were founded i

was on the staff of the house armed services committee in the government operations committee for ten years and i tracked every single one of these things now one of them works now one of them can effectively shoot down even a north korean attack a purely attack by comparison to the attack these systems were designed to defeat well so it really is mutually assured destruction i mean you can you can throw nuclear weapons but you're going to get them back no matter what no matter what and part of the reason is you can just overwhelm these defenses maybe you can shoot down one maybe two missiles on a good day but ten twenty forty doesn't it doesn't this mean if we can't rely on our nuclear arsenal as a significant or consequential deterrent because of this shouldn't we be investing in an enormous amount of resources in diplomacy yes you should but we're doing of course exactly the opposite this administration is cutting the budget for the state department you know the u.n. where we try to work these things out rex tillerson the head of the state

department who controls the budget has cut the staff by sixty percent at the united nations so exactly the time when you need to plan with seymour we're cutting it back we still haven't filled any any really of the top posted at the state department eight months after the president has taken office and this appears to be not incompetence but intent they are guarding the state department why or with the possible they believe that that is part of the deep state that the problem is that you have these entrenched bureaucracies that enact their own agendas independent of the president so they want to weaken these agencies but what about the deep state i mean this is the institutions of our country this is what george washington had three horses shot out from under him to create i mean the whole point is they have a state that is bigger than any one politician any one thomas jefferson first secretary of state absolutely this is been the thing that has distinguished america in the world from many other countries out global diplomacy backed up by economic.

yes military power but we've always tried to lead with diplomacy that's not what we're doing now it's tragic what are the parts of the world that you see as the most potentially problematic flashpoints around nuclear weapons you mentioned india . we've talked about north korea i can you rank these yes yeah you can up until this year most experts would have said south asia is the area we were most likely to see a nuclear weapons used because of the trenched differences and tensions there and the fact that you've got these two states arming but now it's got to be korea i mean this is a nuclear free train that's just going down the tracks and u.s. policy going north korea is completely incoherent you can pick up the paper almost every day and see conflicting statements from u.s. officials we do we have no plan for how to negotiate with north korea to stop this which most experts believe is the only feasible solution yes sanctions yes backed up by threats of military attack if we were attacked but in the end you've got

a negotiated solution here and we have no plan for how to do that we don't even have the diplomats in place no one bastard of south korea for example it's a remarkable and fragile time joe cirincione your your your brilliance is much appreciated a pleasure thanks for having me on coming up real tax reform in soaking the rich i'll explain why in tonight's rumble with a mcallen same sex whatever it was. not . by the. if you go after the corporations it's just more your life

profit over people at every turn. redact it's not for me it's like medicine it's like a cancer deal from all the stress that the news puts you under redacted tonight is a show where you can go to cry from laughing about the stuff that's going on in the world as opposed to just regular crying we're going to find out what the corporate mainstream media is not telling you about how we're going to filter it through some satirical comedic lenses to make it more digestible that's what we do every week hard hitting radical comedy news like redacted tonight is where it's at. what you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put those through the face if

your wife or. donkey like you neal and what's your biggest fear you are going to build on a hay ride when so let's talk a little bit bored you say if you have a man who's the best quarterback. exploring the topic doesn't belong in the piece now i've interviewed you to question more. to come. to cut. play.

it's time to take the fossil fuel industry paid to dispose of its own trash let's rumble. with me first that i had trouble or dave mccall a national g.o.p. strategist and sam sex writer co-founder of the district's sentinel news co-op thank you both for being with us tonight but it's done great to have you both with us as super storms like hurricane harvey and hurricane irma become what the new normal we are seeing firsthand what happens when an industry in this case the fossil fuel industry does not pay to dispose of its own waste so that that waste fossil fuel waste carbon products going in the air the air is warmed up the oceans are warmed up there's more water there's more air there's more violence in our storms all this death and destruction that's happening you know a number of scientists have said at least thirty percent of the severity this is

directly attributable to global warming why not have a carbon tax so that the fossil fuel companies are paying for their own externalities they're paying for their own waste was like a great idea to me i mean there's some cruel irony in the fact that we have three named hurricanes out there right now one of them the biggest ever that's been recorded in the atlantic and trump was speaking and oil refineries this week whether he understands the connection or not you know i don't know whether he will fully decide to believe it or just doesn't know the connection it's very much there and it's time to make oil companies whether it's through a cap and trade system which would be a republican idea a conservative idea where they have a certain top and if they go over the top if the buy more credits from georgia is going to push did with sulfur dioxide or just a hard cap and say from now on you can pollute this much and you're to start paying any time you. more than this and that money can go into solving it whether it's asthma high asthma cases from people living around pollution whether it's the costs

of the massive floods we're going to see or these super storms that we're going to see that should follow the brunt of the oil companies and dave sam didn't even mention what i said which is an absolute carbon tax that is a tax on every pound of carbon that's consumed or produced it's working in other countries and in my but china rather than rather than tax carbons that one while we develop new technologies not only new technologies that reduce both ok why not both but ultimately the idea of more taxes is that necessarily going to change the way some of these companies behave and it's certainly not going to solve our hurricane problems or night and i'm not even convinced yes i think that global warming is a thing i do believe that this may have had a role in these three hurricanes are going right now but certainly it's not going to solve the problem overnight or even in ten years but it's going to prevent it from getting a lot worse well it isn't and i mean there's two reasons why we have texas and this i mean you can literally read aristotle on this and the principal reason is not to

raise money the principal reason is to alter behavior it's to do to organize aristotle talked about organizing society in a rational manner by taxing things that you don't like and by lowering taxes on things that you do like and so you know if we don't want more carbon to be used and we do want more alternative energies to be used why not tax the carbon well suddenly than then. gas is a is a sin tax or yes yeah exactly because it's a sense you're killing the paul the planet i don't know who created only your fellow men i mean if there's fifty people dead in texas right now at least a few of the a lot of those people some of the blood of those people is on the hands of the oil industry exactly that might be a little bit extreme but at the same time there are certainly hurricanes out there are scary and and you know our taxes that we do collect right now do go to to programs like noah which which thank goodness that we haven't in twenty fourteen there. a study by the climate citizens' lobby they found that even a ten dollar a tonne national carbon tax which is less than china is charging right now would

reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the united states. by twenty eight percent take us back to two thousand and five levels there though the issue is the oil companies are going to do this on their own they're not to do this by their own good will we already know that because exxon mobil has known about this problem for decades and they haven't said anything about that they've tried to suppress the evidence in regard to this so as long as there's trillions of dollars to be made pumping this stuff out of the ground burning it and in shipping it off and putting on boats and shipping all over the world they're going to keep doing that it's when the price point changes that it's no longer profitable for them to do that because they're going to be paying taxes on refining in and all the carbon releases that they come out they might consider ok this business business models no longer sustainable we have to move on to some sort of alternative energy tax is a whole lot less you know big government to show than simply saying no no no we're going to get you in jail if you do me a whole like it's a government taxes that you lay only you may only refine a million gallons of this month you may not refine two million gallons sorry but

we're also seeing more and more people shifting to electric cars and alternative things a solar i.e. these are all amazing things that we're seeing an average people being able to buy because more people to do it we've seen that they're going to scale economies of scale rather helping out with that with solar more people or by tesla is suddenly a tesla electric car is that it is within reach when we start to see those those market based ideas it may not be as fast as implementing a tax and suddenly just everything shifting but we're starting to see that naturally that is going to set it up this this is i think it's inevitable it's just the question is how much damage is done before it happens and we really needed to start doing these things a decade ago or sort of decades ago yeah so we do need the speed we need this to happen much faster than it's happening all over the us by the government there you go ok the basic republican argument for so-called tax reform is that lower taxes on the rich will help not just businesses. but also help the bank accounts of people like you you know you and me everyday americans this sounds nice in theory but the

cold hard truth is that the economy has been better for all americans when taxes for the rich have been higher than they are now when taxes are higher american society has historically had a strong middle class as is true of countries all over the world the higher the tax the top tax rate on the very very rich the stronger and larger is the middle class you can literally see this in virtually every country on earth the economy also grew faster when the highest marginal tax rate was between ninety one and seventy four percent than it did after reagan's giant tax cuts that dropped that top tax rate on millionaires and billionaires from seventy four to twenty five percent so if we really want to tax reform would at least repeal the reagan tax cuts right and why not go back to that ninety one percent marginal rate that we had during the wilson roosevelt truman eisenhower kennedy and johnson years when the economy in the middle class were booming i mean why you know we know worked it worked for forty years in the united states stuck with a ninety one percent tax rate i wouldn't go to business at all i don't use it

simple it wasn't wide margin a lot of extra well it's it doesn't kick in until you've made three million dollars a year into days dollars i mean the old the old ninety one percent tax rate kicked in at three million dollars a year and that's why the average c.e.o. made thirty times what the average worker makes when ronald reagan came into office now it's what five hundred times a thousand times on wall street thirty thousand times this is obscene yeah i don't think people are fully aware fully understand the transfer transformation that took place in our economy in our country with the reagan tax cuts in which they were dropped literally from the ninety up to upwards in the ninety's of percents down to twenty five percent now we've since gained back to about thirty nine percent the top the highest tax rate but it's still such a massive change in how our economy is organized when you do something like that and ever since you've seen massive as your church show massive gains to the one percent while everybody else has been barely seeing there were. it is growing there in their wealth grow so it's about determine what services type of society you want to want to merican to be the end of billionaires the place where people can go and

become billionaires but everybody else is going to starve and die or do we want an america that we had ensured somewhat idealized it was an america that was accessible to a lot of people at the time but one that at least tries to be more accessible this time with the new new deal that guarantees better wages better benefits a stronger social safety net for people by taxing the rich taxation the top tax rate as a percent or ten total taxation as a percentage of g.d.p. for all of the o.e.c.d. countries at thirty four o.e.c.d. countries the average is thirty four percent were at twenty three percent or one of the lowest where the next to next to the bottom mexico is just below us and. all of the northern european countries are between forty five and fifty percent of their g.d.p. is represented by taxes so there's a heavy government sector in this country those countries all all have the strongest middle classes the stronger you know the the stronger societies and they also have a lot of socialist type programs and i mean you're with my point well and for some

people here that might be attractive for me not so much want some attractive about it because you look at these societies and you look where you also have lesser wealth inequality like you do in these societies compared to ours you see less social ills you see less drug addiction less issues of violence and crime less issues of teen pregnancy the places of depression and mental illness all these things correspond with wealth inequality which we've seen explode as tax rates for the top wealthy one percent two percent have dropped considerably and it's really working people have to make up a large share of that tax base when rich people aren't paying taxes the variables and i was an operations during the eisenhower administration. pay for thirty four as i recall thirty five percent of the total tax bill and says now it's eleven percent so there's there's some serious freeloading going on here and how is the democratic push for single payer health care kicks into gear. get ready for right wingers to start fear mongering about creeping stalin ism this is what they did with obamacare and it's what they did with frankly they did this with medicaid they

did it with medicare back in the sixty's one of the most popular and successful government programs in history here for example is good ole st ronnie talking about medicare. behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as norman thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism and if you don't do this and if i don't do it one of these days you and i are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in america when men were free the constitution says our government was elected to our erected to serve the general welfare of the people is cut it's conservative or conservatism fundamentally at odds with basic american principles no i don't think so i think that america was founded on the idea that we are individual people we we. to sustain ourselves and build our selves up and ultimately that more government is

not as good oh yeah yeah that's why that's why george washington three horses shot out from underneath him trying to try to create this government it was government long long term long term and we take a look at conservative principles versus liberal principles and liberals more government to conservatives or less already but by all means was it was a conservative who believed in it less government why did triple the size of the triple our debt he had that the largest expansion of government non-war time expansion of government in the history of states happened during the reagan presidency that too a lot of them claim they were different sized government they never do which is kind reagan made it. start i think looking out for the general welfare or our collective well being is an important founding principle of this country one of the greatest challenges our country's going to face aside from climate change for the next ten years is dealing with the economic changes of automation just this week the house passed legislation that's going to allow driverless car manufacturers to begin putting hundreds of thousands of cars on the roads within just the next five years that's going to mean hundreds of thousands of taxicab drivers drivers lift

drivers are going to find themselves out of a job years later it's going to be a long haul truckers three million of those could find themselves out of a job this is ramping up fast and i think the only way to solve this. sort of stuff is to strengthen our entitlement programs are social safety net creating a universal basic income a living wage for people not to replace things like. unemployment insurance and health care to go on top of that as well and a single payer health care system the money's there automations going to create a ton of wealth for a ton of people it needs to be ensure that it's redistributed back to working people are going to be ok where we're at a time and i'm sorry. i would like to give in the last great to have. and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get out can take your. pick.

our culture is awash in lives dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that. fiction until they are indistinguishable we have become the most elusive society on politics as a species of endless and needless political theater politicians and just celebrity are two ruling parties are in reality one part of corporate. those who attempt this . breathless universe of fake just signed to push through the cruelty and exploitation the little force so far to the margins of society including by a public broadcasting system that has sold its soul for corporate money that we might as well be mice squeaking against an apple and. we must.

change to something to do. they put themselves on the line they did accept it or reject it. so when you want to be president. some want to be preached. to the right person it's like the full story of the people. i'm interested always in the why. question. for decades the american middle class has been railroaded by washington politics. big money corporate interests that's drowned out a lot of voice that's how it is in the news pulse or in this country now that's

where i come in. i mean it's still on our t.v. america i'll make sure you don't get railroad you'll get the straight talk in the straight news. but to make. sure you do not this past weekend you probably saw the film of the wall to wall hurricane erma reporting it was mostly a name vapid coverage like this you know when you can alter it and you can surround yourself with couch cushions you know if you can spot and brick structure well learned from the story of the big bad wolf the people who live in the struggle their houses are usually stories of people who live in stone structures like this little. who literally jumping the american populace down the nursery rhyme.

they say they were there was very little mention of climate change or ecological collapse. you know people often say that we're the frauds right in the slowly boiling pot of water but we're worse we're frogs in the slowly boiling pot of water with program porters standing there going that's good got a warm hand here i can be a little sweat on my brow no no basis have said stay in you're almost in jail it's not so boiling out here ok. so i decided to off fix the corporate media hurricane coverage if you look all right and here we're here is the way to really make it go i've heard so a lot now but if you look you'll see this is actually a dog's life we're irmo.