Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Tea Party demonstration today on the west lawn of the capitol that was billed as the million patriot protest against Obama’s Iran deal featuring Duck Dynasty headliners plus Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, but instead fizzled into a few hundred Obama-haters holding up protest signs. Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund who previously directed nuclear non-proliferation and international policy programs at the Center for American Progress and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joins us to discuss the Tea Party non-event as well as Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy speech at the Brooking Institution and the latest on whether the senate vote on the resolution disapproving Obama’s Iran deal will happen at all.

Part 2

Then we examine reports of deepening Russian military involvement in Syria that claim Moscow has boots on the ground in support of the beleaguered Assad forces. Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma who write the daily newsletter and blog “Syria Comment” joins us to discuss how Putin is upping the ante to force the vacillating West and their Arab allies to join in the fight against ISIS before Damascus falls and there is an even greater exodus of refugees to Europe.   

Part 3

Then finally as Britain and the Commonwealth nations celebrate the milestone of Queen Elizabeth surpassing the reign of her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, we go to London to speak with Graham Smith, the Campaign Manager and Executive Officer of Republic, a membership-based pressure group representing Britain’s 10-12 million Republicans who want to see the monarchy replaced by an elected head of state. We discuss the antiquated House of Lords and how the queen is not just the head of state, but the head of the class system in the U.K. that still pervades its culture and dominates its society

Full Program

Part 1

On this Labor Day weekend we begin with an analysis of how American workers might be celebrating the end of summer on Labor Day with vacations, given that about 56% of American workers took weeklong vacations last year, an all-time low from the steady decline that began in the 1980’s when more than 80% took weeklong vacations. Harold Meyerson, an editor-at-large of The American Prospect and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post joins us to discuss his latest article at The American Prospect “A Happy Labor Day – Really” and examine how both left wing and rightwing populism are emerging in this election season as a result of stagnant wages and lack of economic opportunity.

Part 2

Then we speak with Dr. Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies labor, information technology, the organization of work, global economic integration and trade. We discuss the state of working America and the decline of wages and unions since the late 1970’s and whether manufacturing jobs could be returned as the service economy takes over from the manufacturing economy. We also examine the future of American capitalism as more and more wealth is extracted by the top 1% while less and less wealth trickles down to the bottom 99%.

Part 3

Then finally we get an historical perspective on labor, income disparity and race and gender in the workplace with Leon Fink, a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He edits the journal “Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas” and we discuss whether growing income equality today is worse than it was in the previous Gilded Age and how much globalization has lowered wages while almost all of the benefits of increased productivity go to the top.