September 22 – A Requiem for Scott Walker; Japan’s New Military Posture; Why Did VW Rig Tests?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the exit of Governor Scott Walker from the Republican presidential primary race with an announcement exhorting his rivals still in the crowded field to drop out so that a limited number of candidates can offer an alternative to the front-runner who he did not name. John Nichols, the Nation magazine’s Washington correspondent and the associate editor of the Capitol Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, joins us to discuss what happened to Walker’s early lead and whether any other candidate will take Walker’s advice now that the latest polls have him at less than one half of one percent that would exclude him from even being at the kids table in the next debate.

Part 2

Then we look into an historic shift in Japan’s military posture that was a huge issue in Japan and provoked alarmed responses from China and South Korea but has elicited little interest and scant coverage here in the U.S. Ellis Krauss, professor emeritus of Japanese politics and policy-making at the University of California San Diego and author of “Beyond Bilateralism: U.S. – Japan Relations in the New Asia Pacific” joins us. We discuss what the abandonment of Japan’s post war pacifist posture will mean for a region where tensions often erupt over disputed islands.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Paul Eisenstein, the editor and publisher of the Detroit Bureau, who has over 30 years of experience covering the auto industry. We try to understand why Volkswagen rigged test results on 11 million VW diesel cars that were sold worldwide, with vehicles sold in the U.S. receiving a green energy rebate that cost the taxpayer $51 million for cars that were emitting 40 times the pollutants they were supposed to be trapping.