Full Program

Part 1

We begin Hillary Clinton’s much-anticipated speech on the economy and get an analysis from Heidi Hartmann, the President of the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research and author of “Equal Pay for Working Families” and “Survival at the Bottom”. We discuss whether the Democratic front-runner for president’s attacks on Wall Street will resonate and how much Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are pulling Clinton to the left, or if the country itself has moved to the left on issues of inequality, the lack of wage growth and the need to change an economy that is rigged against the middle class.

Part 2

Then we speak with Thomas Ferguson, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He joins us to discuss the European bailout deal that the Greek Prime Minister must now try to sell to his parliament and whether the $100 billion deal is, as the out-going Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varafoukis described it, “the new Treaty of Versailles”.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the latest, in fact the 17^th candidate to enter the Republican presidential primaries, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Brendan Fischer, General Counsel with the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy joins us to discuss the career of a politician who has attracted a lot of support from wealthy donors by breaking unions in a largely blue state, but in doing so has made himself a polarizing figure who is unlikely to be able to be the president of all Americans. 

Full Program

Part 1

On a day when the South Carolina legislature voted to take down the Confederate flag, we will begin with shouting and jeering in the House of Representatives as Republicans tried to add an amendment to protect Confederate flags in national cemeteries. Michael Lind, a co-founder of the New America Foundation and author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States”, joins us to discuss how the ghosts of the confederacy haunts our politics today while the feudal Southern economic model that the civil war was fought to expunge, is alive and well today in the right-to-work states of the South.

Part 2

Then we analyze the testimony of the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs before the Senate where Marine General Joseph Dunford called Russia’s recent actions “nothing short of alarming” and went on to say that Russia posed an existential threat to the United States. Kimberly Marten, a professor of political science at Barnard College and a member of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute joins us to discuss the dangerous consequences of the U.S. providing Ukraine with lethal weapons which General Dunford said was a “reasonable” thing to do.

Part 3

Then finally we examine Jeb Bush’s remarks in New Hampshire that “people need to work longer hours” to make America more productive. Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley joins us to discuss how out of touch Jeb Bush is with the realities facing working Americans. Particularly when his super PAC just released its latest fundraising numbers between January and June totally more than $103 million and according to the Bush campaign, Jeb made $28.5 million between 2007 when he left the Florida governorship, and 2013.