president trump and china's paying cooled off their ongoing trade war for his part mr trump announced he'll hold off on imposing more tariffs again against chinese goods while china one concession on reopening to american industry products from its leading tech giant which were recently banned out of national security concerns for the u.s. so how long is this truce going to last and which side is winning and which is losing the battle of the tariffs and trade for expert analysis we turn to chris lew the former deputy secretary of labor during the obama administration he also served as the former white house cabinet secretary for president obama he joins me from washington d.c. welcome to the program chris thank you so let's begin with china's trumps agreement to ease restriction on china's tech giant who way it's a shock to many now is it a shock to you. it is a shock because there has really been bipartisan concern on a national security basis and so this is not a partisan issue in any way and so congress has been very firm on the national

security risk that this entails and so this is a fairly significant concession from the president the question is is what he got in return he has touted agricultural purchases from china will have to wait and see what that exactly amounts to there's no specificity on that and you'll recall he made a similar promise to mexico purchasing products last month that didn't really materialize he also made a concession about whether any changes to chinese trade policies need to be codified legislation and he agreed that they did not so to the extent that there are changes made. how lasting they are is yet to be seen so let's talk about the national security concerns do you think they're legitimate and just what are they well it involves you know look with with all chinese companies they have a close nexus with the chinese government given the concerns about cyber security given the concerns about electronic surveillance its right to be concerned about

you know it's right to be concerned about foreign interference and potentially compromising of our technology infrastructure that being said there's a lot of u.s. companies that do business with this company hallway and a lot of their components are used as part of hallway products and what's interesting important understand here is that these concerns by the united states aren't necessarily shared by our european allies so there's a little bit of a disconnect on that front as well so you said yourself lawmakers on both sides of the aisle including mark rubio and general schumer democrat of new york have expressed alarm that troia is showing weakness is that the case is he's showing weakness well what's interesting here is i mean if in fact it was his own administration that imposes greater restrictions and now he's. hold back on then unilaterally you know if the concerns were legitimate 1st place then that he needs to explain frankly why those concerns don't exist anymore and it simply can't be

because our trading relationship with china is too important because it's not clear from this weekend i don't want to see agreement this weekend understanding that anything necessarily has changed on that front so let's talk about the trade war overall who has a stronger hand right now mr trump in playing and why well look if i weren't. paying i think i have the upper hand i've got an economy a controlled economy that frankly the chinese government has a greater ability to manipulate including with their currency to make adjustments for any economic downturns but i frankly think both are potential losers in this free and fair trade is a concept that helps both countries and it's important understand look we've had large trade imbalances with china for a long period of time there are certainly concerns about access to their markets intellectual property protection these are all legitimate concerns that have been

raised by previous presidents but how you address them and whether a bilateral trade war which is what's happening right now with escalating tariffs is really the best thing whether for the u.s. government or u.s. economy or u.s. consumers so trump has eliminated some of the tariffs right he's taken smartphones baby products and other items off the table for now which is a huge win for u.s. retailers do you think this is going to help in the news is the strategy to to eliminate those tariffs for his 2020 bid well you know what's important is that how he got here i mean he the tariffs that some of the tariffs easing off are ones that he put in place so we're basically back to where we started before this trade war heated up and he also agree. not to raise additional tariffs along the way so again it's like what we had with mexico several weeks back. we received kind of

a temporary truce for a couple weeks but we're certainly not out of the woods yet again another example of a self-inflicted crisis that the president created then comes in and purports to save in the end you know could we have gotten to this place with something less drastic probably yeah so it's been estimated that the average family is having to spend about $800.00 more per year because of trump's current tariffs. do you think that cost is going to go up or down based on what his behavior is currently well it's hard to say because you know we were still and having and again need to look at this in the broader context we're still having ongoing trade battles with canada with mexico their european allies before leaving for the g. 20 the president raised his concerns about trade imbalances with india japan it was another in terms of auto sales was another topic that came up and so it's a little bit like a game of whack a mole when he claims to solve one problem he's kind of started 10 others along the

way and ultimately all of this not only impacts u.s. consumers it hurts u.s. businesses as well you know we live in a global economy we're supply chains go across national boundaries companies which are both sourcing raw materials from overseas or selling overseas need to understand where their markets are and right now they don't have that certainty on top of that you've got a whole you know millions of farmers who are wondering hey where are we going to sell our soybeans were we going to sell or corn this year because it's probably not the china at what point do american american companies and corporations begin to move manufacturing to other countries outside of china maybe to latin america southeast asia and so forth will you start to see that a little bit right now some of this is already moving to southeast asia and. vietnam but you know that that is a process that will take you know years or decades to happen i mean ultimately companies make decisions about where to manufacture the products based on you know

the supply of labor raw materials the cost and china has become more expensive in part because as the chinese economy has improved or has has has. has gone up a workers are doing better standards of living have gone up so it becomes expensive but that's not going to change overnight in terms of moving everything out of china let's talk about the terms performance of the g. 20 in japan can you talk about it. it was a little unusual to say the least he seems to have had a greater affinity with some of our adversaries whether it's president xi president putin or his surprise visit to north korea to meet with chairman kim he you know as he always does creates a little bit of a of fury before he goes there mentioning india in terms of japan in terms of trade imbalances. look at the end of the day you know perfectly with regard to north

korea any time you talk to an adversary is a good thing the larger question though is what did the united states get return and so that with all trumps international visits there's a lot of turmoil there's a lot of show some interesting photo ops but what actually tangibly got out of that i still think is unclear he seems to really praise the the authoritarian adversary do you think he does that to stir up the left to anger people to just get press i mean what's is what's is objective in doing that or does he just genuinely admire these people do you think ito it is hard to understand. you know. maybe it's a realistic understanding that when you're trying to conduct diplomatic relations with other countries you take those countries as you see them so you know obviously the regimes in russia and north korea are not nice regimes but then the antagonism

to our traditional allies in europe is also baffling as well you know this is a president who doesn't seem to understand that we've had a world order that's come out of the 2nd world war that's built out a series of alliances not only in europe and shipped europe in asia that have kept us safe and he seems intent on constantly questioning whether those should even exist or not i think one of the most astonishing moments was his reaction to vladimir putin to when he sort of joked jokingly says to him you know don't meddle in the election what do you make of that i mean it's not surprising i mean let's go back to last summer when the when oil when the 2 of them met in helsinki the president gave that extraordinary news conference statement where he you know he said he had believed putin's denials about election interference and then a couple days later after there's an uproar about that then backtracked on that you have a president who has said in the oval office just last month that he would except

for an election interference and so it's and this is disturbing because the u.s. intelligence agencies have determined conclusively that there was foreign election interference in 2016 that there were attempts in 2018 and that it's going to happen again in 2020 and so when you've got the head of the u.s. government dismissing them we're joking about it that sends the exact wrong message to hardworking both federal and state officials that are trying to shore up our lection systems right now the argument over whether or not trump has colluded with russia and whether or not that's a crime it seems like we're into so much hair splitting about the whether or not. the thing is a criminal act not a criminal act what do we take from the mother report what do we not that what's been lost here is that russia tried to interfere and interfered conclusively all law enforcement that we have who are whose job it is to investigate these

things have said russia has interfered with our election and all the hairsplitting about the report and so forth has distracted from that is there any evidence that we can bring that's going to get republicans to begin to look at this seriously though you're 100 percent right let's just take the partisan politics out of this and i will i will stipulate that they exist on both sides but just read them all or report in terms of the that the effort that this information effort that the russian government. can then look at the u.s. intelligence assessments look about what we already know in terms of russia trying to access voter rolls in florida and other places along the way. and you can even see this over the past week and you see these internet trolls that are now spreading rumors about senator kabul harris harris harris his heritage right now and so the same playbook that they used in 2016 you're starting to see play out

again right now and it doesn't matter what party you belong in we ought to take this very seriously and unfortunately the parts of politics of this have really colored the ability to think of people to think about this in a rational way this is an attack on our democracy and we should treat it that way chris stay right there more politicking right after the break. aeroflot russian headlights. you know world of big partisan movies a lot and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that

made stream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now we're watching closely watching the hawks. aeroflot russian headlights. magic mushrooms seize down some contexts

used in the wrong way carry carry potential arms like any any psychoactive substances. but used in the right way they seem to have quite a. profound 30 to potential and quite a good safety profile as well. welcome back to politicking i'm matthew cook sitting in for larry king we're continuing the conversation with chris lu former deputy secretary of labor and former. white house cabinet secretary during the obama administration he joins me from washington d.c. so let's talk about the issue of. the upcoming presidential election it's one of the things that trump likes to talk about all the time is how well the economy is doing forget the fact that we're on a trend that's now lasted

a couple of the administrations what's your forecast for the economy and the effect that that may have on the upcoming election well the economy is clearly slowing and it doesn't matter which indicator you look at i mean the rate of job growth has clearly slowed down over the last couple of months we expect to see with 2nd quarter economic growth to be significantly down it was sort of artificially inflated in the 1st quarter of this year manufacturing a sort of slowdown as well so across the board. again i don't think we're heading into a recession anytime soon but it's clearly slowing now the irony of all this is that if you look at the stock market you would have a different impression in a part that's kind of based on expectations of the federal reserve lowering interest rates and so from a political perspective this president really hasn't gotten a huge political advantage out of a good economy. but i think you know if it starts to fade inevitably that may come

back to haunt him a little bit one of the causes of the economic slowing. well look we are about 9 years into this economic recovery that really started at the tail end of the great recession economic cycle recoveries go in cycles and this is an extremely long recovery at this point and i think so it's about time that it would start to fade a little bit i think what you're also starting to see is some tension because of the uncertainty around trade wars that's creating a little bit of a headwind for this economy and what about what about wages where are we with with with with wages in the kinds of jobs that are being created under the trump and ministration well this is a this is you know one of the paradoxes of this economy you're going to have unemployment below 4 percent which is historically really good and yet you can have 40 percent of americans who can't come up with $400.00 for an emergency expense and

so what you have is people have jobs but their wages haven't really markedly risen over the last couple of decades meanwhile the cost of food and gasoline and housing and everything has gone up along the way so people aren't feeling particularly economically secure at the moment and that creates kind of attention even while the top line economic numbers seem pretty good and of course this is a topic of much discussion amongst the democrats you served with former vice president and current democratic primary front runner joe biden in the obama administration what do you think about his performance in last week's debate well wasn't the sharpest performance i've seen i will qualify that by saying barack obama wasn't particularly good in his 1st debate performances in 2007 this is not the best format for certain people i would say this which is. vice president biden has had a distinguished record as a u.s. senator but what the american voters really want is his message for how we take the

country forward and yes it's. appropriate to talk about his record on passing the assault weapon ban or passing the violence against women act but people want to understand what he's going to do as president in the next 4 years looking forward instead of looking backwards do you expect him to lay out those kind of plans and that kind of vision one of the things that i was surprised to see was that and this is not something i would would have normally commented on but he did seem a bit he seemed older you know just to be frank he didn't seem as quick and sharp and the usual charisma that we expect from from joe biden yeah you know i mean it is these are not great formats and i will tell you particularly when you're up against a formidable former prosecutor and senator mcconnell harris who i thought was brilliant on thursday night even the best of debaters would be challenged in that setting up but you're right and i think candidates get better as the debates go along i also think frankly having that many people on stage is frankly

a little distracting i think going to your head out once you get down to 3 or 4 candidates i think it will it'll be it'll be a better conversation i think more enjoyable frankly for those those watching at home i think one of the criticisms that everyone can agree with about the debates was that it's hard to sum up your your entire presidency and if we had 500 or less actually chris thank you so much for your time today always fun thank you. this weekend donald trump became the 1st sitting u.s. president to enter the democratic people's republic of north korea there he enthusiastically greeted the north korean leader kim jong il and then the 2 met for talks their 3rd since trump became president what does this mean for the efforts to denuclearize north korea and which leader scored a bigger win by trump's visit to the hermit nation for insight on this we turn to gordon chang expert on asia and north korea columnist for the daily beast he's also the author of nuclear showdown north korea takes on the world he joins me from new

york city gordon welcome to the program thank you so much matthew so the significance of a u.s. president stepping into north korea what are your thoughts completely inconceivable if you go back 10 years ago or 70 years ago because north korea has been a country that has seen the u.s. as its enemy and to have president trump step across the military demarcation line as he did on sunday is ultimately and issue of reconciliation between the u.s. and north korea so there are a lot of implications of all this but that was a stunning and a very good moment do you think that it was an appropriate time to make that step. probably not that step should have been reserved for a time when north korea and finally given up all busy its missiles and nukes president trump does this differently what he's trying to do is create such a favorable atmosphere that kim will feel secure enough to give up his most

destructive weapons this isn't trying to entice the north koreans now no nation has been successful in doing that i don't think the us will be the 1st but you know trump is giving it a fairy very vigorous try and what how do you think his strategy will play out do you think kim jong un is going to keep his promise and denuclearize. kim won't keep his promise until trump forces him to do that and i think trump has to go back to what made him successful he was extremely successful through the middle of may of last year when he was making no concessions and kim was making all of them and then that flipped especially after the june singapore summit last year and then we've been making the concessions in the north koreans have not taken steps to give up their nukes and missiles trump's got to go back to that old policy of forcing the north koreans to do what they don't want to do and he's got to do that by cutting off their money flows and do you think he's going to do that. i think trump will

because it will be too embarrassing not to do that and especially you know trump talks about no deadlines but he does have an effect one deadline and that of course is no election day in 2020 so november of next year is i think something that's going to weigh on his mind now you've said that there are multiple crises happening in asia that are all affecting one another can you talk about what they are you know 1st of all you've got the crisis in hong kong which terrible clashes today of around the legislative council building you have in beijing at the economic crisis their economy is not growing at the 6 percent range as they talk about it may not even be growing at all then you have many people in beijing concerned that china has lost the united states and of course we've got the trade war and we interact with china cross a range of these activities and i think the chinese are trying to use north korea

as a way of a getting cooperation from the us for instance on trade. president trump didn't take the bait on saturday we didn't see any chinese on sunday at that historic event so i think president show up at least is playing it correctly and not score you know what country other countries outside of the u.s. and north korea should be most worried were most affected maybe they're the most happiest about trump and kim's relationship i'm trying to understand better the impact globally. south korea i think would be the country most affected. south korea has a president in who actually brought trump and kim jong un together moon is deeply anti american though and he's very pro north korean and that for presents a number of dilemmas to us and you notice that moon was not in the meeting between trump and kim right after that historic handshake and that's probably a good thing for us so trump also invited kim to visit us in the united states when

the time is right what are your thoughts on the likelihood of this or that is this now creating another carrot for for kim to go after you know this is another carrot that we should not be giving to the north koreans until they have completely disarmed you know kim is one of the most horrific dictators on earth the last thing we should be doing is having him wandering around the white house especially if he's getting a 21 gun salute at a state dinner in the east room that would not be appropriate i think we are going to have to think rethink a number of our outreaches to kim because kim has not been in the since that singapore summit kivas just not been giving up his weapons he's better fact going the other way and that's not a good story for president from is he continuing so he's continuing the nuclear build up as some intel experts would agree yes he's been increasing the production of fissile material uranium and plutonium and he's been upgrading his facilities

for ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and you know recently he has tested 3 short range ballistic missiles and that's a violation of u.n. security council rules. so this is not a good story because it shows that he's not reciprocating the goodwill of president trump and eventually trump's going to have to pivot because this becomes just too embarrassing for the united states and for trump personally so your thought the most effective strategy right now on addressing where we are with north korea. demanding that the north koreans give us 2 things at the next meeting which would be a complete declaration of all of their missile and nukes sites plus a firm timetable for giving them up and if he doesn't do that what we need to do is cut off the flow of money to north korea and that involves moving against chinese banks about a dozen of them that have been laundering money for north korea plus cutting off the flows from other countries including including iran this is going to be difficult for us because there are so many people paying money to kim jong un but

we've got to stop those money flows we do that we can disarm north korea without the use of force and we probably can do it in an acceptable time frame let's pivot to terms performance at the g 20 summit in japan what are your thoughts. the most important thing is why wait technologies president from gave a reprieve to walk away which is a threat to the united states this echoes a reprieve he gave dizzy another chinese telecom equipment manufacture that was last year in the last year trump said he did that as a personal favor to see jinping the chinese ruler but this year see jumping actually issued a public demand that the united states give that reprieve to walk away and unfortunately president trump complied with that demand which shows you who's driving this bus it should be the other way around because we've got all the leverage but nonetheless we made

a stream lee important concession that we should never ever can have considered thank you gordon thanks very much for your time today. thank you both you and thank you for joining me on this edition of politicking also say thank you so much to larry king for letting me sit in this chair today remember we love hearing from you join the conversation on larry's facebook page and as always you can share your thoughts on twitter by tweeting at kings things and using the politicking hash tag i also invite you to join me on facebook at matthew cook official and that's all for this of this edition of politicking.

aeroflot russian headlights. you know world of big partisan movies lot and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that made stream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the bath shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks.

aeroflot russian airlines. magic mushrooms seize down some contexts used in the wrong way carry carry potential arms like any any psychoactive substances. but used in the right way they seem to have quite a. profound therapy to potential and quite a good safety if i fall is wild. when i almost choked something seemed wrong when old rules just don't all. meet you if you get to shape out disdain you can't get educated and in gains from an equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

that. it. was. a trove of classified documents found in a rubbish bin in london and a deeply embarrassing blow to the u.k.'s top secret chemical facility porton down an investigation has been launched. outgoing e.u. commission president john killed young coast slams the lack of transparency when his likely successor was agreed on by block leaders tough questions were guarding us live on the lines job competition from. the wrong phase it's an oil supertanker was illegally seized by the u.k. on demand for its release person insists the vessel was bound for syria in violation of e.u. sanctions.