Working Life Podcast
Jonathan Tasini
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The weekly Working Life podcast hosts in-depth political, economic and labor conversations and analysis heard through the voices of workers, leaders and experts.
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Mar 31, 2021
Ep 220: Inside The Amazon Union Vote Count!; Yemen Is “Hell On Earth”
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I have discussed a number of times the union organizing campaign at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. So, as the ballot counting is now underway, I thought today we could add two aspects to the conversation, while we await the final results which could take a number of days.
First, people don’t really know how the hell the ballot count happens, what’s the process, what does it look like so I thought it would be worth checking that out a bit. And, then, second what happens if the union wins? That second one is a doozy—because the fight just begins even after a union victory: the road to getting a first contract is torturous because a company like Amazon will fight tooth and nail to obstruct, delay and undercut the union at every turn, all in an effort to frustrate workers who want to see tangible results from their vote.
We all need to know that, if the union wins, everyone supporting this campaign needs to keep the mobilization going after the final ballot is counted. So, to wrestle with these thoughts, our friend Dave Mertz is back. Dave is a vice president at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union and he joined me for a chat from Bessemer, Alabama which took place late at night after he finished meeting with the core organizing committee members.
So, why is Yemen a place that even a top United Nations official calls “hell on earth.” Consider: Yemen is a country of 30 million people, 81 percent of whom make less than $5.50 a day and are facing a historic deadly famine; a place where, in 2021, 2.3 million children will face malnutrition, and 40 percent of households have poor to borderline access to food; a nation in which 20.5 million people, two thirds of the entire country, are without safe water and almost as many are without adequate health care, leaving millions at the mercy of cholera and, of course, COVID-19. Add to that a vicious war—fueled by U.S. arms and aid to Saudi Arabia—that has displaced millions of people from their homes, making every aspect of what I just recounted even worse. Scott Paul, who is a lead humanitarian policy expert with Oxfam America, lays out the crisis in Yemen, and whether a small ray of hope beckons.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Mar 24, 2021
Ep 219: A Social Fund For The Planet’s Poor; Challenging A Corporate Mouthpiece
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I’ve spent a lot of time on the crisis facing workers around the world who before the pandemic even hit us faced some pretty dire economic realities. Tomorrow, a high-level group will convene, virtually naturally, to talk about creating an international social fund to assist lower income countries to come out of the year-long pandemic economic shutdown. Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department and deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 200 million unionized workers worldwide, gives us the scoop.
Rick Larsen has been a useless member of Congress. You can’t find a single initiative that he championed in the 20 years he’s represented the 2nd Congressional District in Washington. His best claim to fame might be that there isn’t a corporate dollar he hasn’t been willing to pocket, from defense contractors to health care companies to big tech companies like Amazon and Google to planet polluters like big oil companies. Jason Call, a longtime progressive activist, is taking on Larsen in the Democratic primary for the seat in 2022. He joins me to talk about the campaign to, as he says, “rein in the undue influence of giant corporations and directly challenge their power.”
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Mar 17, 2021
Ep 218: There Is No Debt Crisis; Taking Down A California Corporate Democrat
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It’s those zombie voices again. The ones who rise up from the dead, or from a hidden policy corner, to start the drumbeat of fear about “debt” and “deficits”, all in order to block progress for the people.
There is no debt or deficit crisis. We have plenty of money in the richest nation in human history—and we should be spending big right now, especially with interest rates at rock-bottom lows. So, today is your antidote of information to combat the claim of a debt crisis (by the way, I wrote a book about this topic a decade ago—you can download it for free).
Shervin Aazami, a progressive activist, is running for the Democratic nomination for the 30th Congressional District in California. He’s challenging a long-time corporate Democrat, Brad Sherman, who, among other horrendous positions, voted for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and opposed the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. Shervin joins me for a chat about his campaign.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Mar 10, 2021
Ep 217: It’s All North Carolina—The Fight for 15 and The Campaign For A Progressive U.S. Senator
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Episode 217:
It’s all about North Carolina today—the fight for better wages and the campaign to get a progressive person in the U.S. Senate, all of which is connected to my two guests today who represent the theme of the just-marked International Womens Day.
The sad outcome of the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour tells us two things. First, there is a big house cleaning needed to make way for politicians who actually care about workers. Second, no matter what happens in elections, we need to keep up the street heat to mobilize millions of people to stop the immorality of people working full-time but getting paid poverty wages while billionaires get even richer.
First up, then, is Precious Cole. Precious lives in Durham, North Carolina and works at Wendy’s. She has been working minimum wage jobs for half her life and, like millions of other workers, has, year after year, not been able to meet her monthly bills earning what is a poverty wage. Which is one reason Precious has become a key activist and leader in North Carolina Raise Up, the state branch of the national Fight for 15 and a Union network. She chats with me about her life and her activism.
Then, you may remember state Senator Erica Smith—she was a progressive who jumped into the 2020 North Carolina race for the U.S. Senate to challenge incumbent Republican Thom Tillis. But, the D.C. insiders shoved her aside, handpicking the most uninspired, dumb-as-a-brick candidate Cal Cunningham who, with piles of corporate and party-directed money, won the primary—and, then, proceeded to crash and burn, handing Tillis his re-election.
The 2022 election is a barometer for whether lessons have been learned. As the results of the Florida minimum wage ballot initiative showed—it passed overwhelmingly even as Joe Biden was losing the state—people are saying pretty clearly: give me a policy that puts money in my pocket and isn’t about supporting the rich over regular people, and I’ll vote for it whether you call it “progressive” or “a loaf of bread.” Erica is back for another Senate race, competing for the party primary nod for the seat that is opening up in 2022 with the retirement of Richard Burr. I talk with her about her campaign and the mood in North Carolina.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Mar 3, 2021
Ep 216: Wealth Tax On The Table; Two Trillion for The Global Poor; Joe Biden and Union Organizing
Episode 216:
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The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent. While over half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID in one year, while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, savings and homes, and many people have been forced to wait in long food lines to get enough to feed their families—while all that was happening, the billionaires—the top 0.05 percent in the country, the Waltons, the Jeff Bezos’ of the world—saw their collective wealth go up 40 percent. Which is one good reason to have a wealth tax.
This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal rolled out an “Ultra Millionaire’s Tax”. The tax would only be on the wealthiest 100,000 households in America, or the top 0.05%, who have a net worth of $50 million, and it would raise $3 trillion over a decade. Since, and I’m just spit balling here, I don’t think my audience falls into the over $50 million-net-worth category, I figured it would be safe to engage the always-brilliant Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, in a conversation about the great benefits of a wealth tax.
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Some good news! Last May, I talked about an effort to raise two trillion dollars for poorer countries to battle the pandemic and the economic collapse. The money, so-called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), can be created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but the Trump Administration blocked the move—even though it comes at no cost to taxpayers here. But, now, there’s movement: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appears to be in favor of some level of the SDRs, if not the full two trillion now in the newly resurrected bills in the Senate and House. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of CEPR and an expert in international affairs who has been leading the campaign since last year, joins us for an update.
I also have a few thoughts about the video Joe Biden made about the rights of workers to have a union. It’s a good thing—but it also shows how narrow the debate is about true union organizing rights. Check it out—and let me know your thoughts!
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Feb 24, 2021
Ep 215: Big Pharma Wants Poor People To Die; Unions Fighting Myanmar Coup—Redux
Episode 215:
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You aren’t going to be surprised by this news: Big Pharma is killing people. All over the world. And the real kicker here is: after you, the taxpayer, gave billions of dollars to Big Pharma companies to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, Big Pharma is keeping that vaccine from getting into the hands of millions of people in poorer countries—which will come back to hurt every American as well.
Under the World Trade Organization rules, Big PHARMA gets *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines, tests and the technologies used to produce them. Trump wouldn’t join virtually every other country to grant a waiver for poorer countries to get access to the vaccines so lives could be saved. Next week, Joe Biden has a chance to do the right thing. I discuss this urgent effort with two warriors for progressives: Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who has represented the 9th Congressional district in Illinois for two decades, and Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch.
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A couple of weeks ago, I did a segment on the military coup in Myanmar and the specific threat faced by union leaders. Opposition to the coup is being led by union leaders who are facing arrest and violence, forcing many to go into hiding. I have new insights on what is happening in Myanmar from Khaing Zar, Treasurer of the Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM) and the President of the Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar, the manufacturing and garment worker affiliate of the CTUM and the largest garment worker union in Myanmar.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Feb 17, 2021
Ep 214: YOUR Four Talking Points For $15/Hour Minimum Wage; Alabama Is Amazon Unionizing Ground Zero
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Right before our eyes, in these very days and at this time of crisis, you can see so clearly this bankrupt system, defended and promoted by greedy CEOs and spineless politicians, but a system people are trying to rebel against and take down. And that’s the picture of two really important fights—the fight to get millions of workers a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the organizing campaign at Amazon.
It’s infuriating to keep reading about these so-called Democrats, and, of course, every single Republican, who oppose raising the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour? How deeply out of touch are these people who oppose giving people a semi-livable wage to try to survive on? So, in service to my listeners, I’ve given you four—just four!—easy talking points to argue for hiking the immorally low minimum wage.
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Then, I return to the organizing campaign underway at Amazon’s huge warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. There is never enough conversation about organizing Amazon because of its power and how a victory in this campaign will inspire workers at other Amazon warehouses, not to mention labor as a whole. I am joined by Joshua Brewer, a main organizer of the campaign for the Retail Wholesale & Department Store Workers, for the latest on-the-ground intel.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Feb 10, 2021
Ep213: Bi-Partisanship Kills; Amazon Workers Organize!; Unions Confronting Myanmar Coup
Episode 213:
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“Bi-partisanship” is an idea that should make everyone sick to their stomach. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or, its related political spineless copout “compromise”, makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives. That’s what I start out with today—a topic I also wrote about in my new newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Quick, who said just a couple of days ago: “We believe that $15-an-hour is the minimum that anyone in the U.S. should earn for an hour of labor” and, then, demanded that Congress raise the minimum wage to $15-an-hour. If you said Bernie Sanders, wrong! Though of course he does believe this. It was…wait for this…Amazon.
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That’s a direct result of union and community pressure on Amazon. Thousands of workers are trying to get a union at Amazon’s huge warehouse in Bessemer Alabama. The ballots have just been mailed and we get an update on the organizing campaign from a good friend of the show Dave Mertz, vice president at the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union, which is seeking to represent the workers.
Since the coup in Myanmar on February 1st, the Myanmar trade union movement is taking a leading role in protest and strike actions against the military and is calling for international solidarity actions. There is a global solidarity day coming up Thursday, February 11th. So, to give everyone an update and what to do to support our sisters and brothers in Myanmar, I’m joined by Brian Finnegan, the Global Worker Rights Coordinator at the International Department of the AFL-CIO.
-- Jonathan Tasini
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Feb 3, 2021
Ep 212: Unemployment Money Chaos Redux?; Clawing Back Dough From The Rich
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How many of you dealt with that chaos when it came to wrestling with the unemployment insurance system last year? Some of the rhetoric we heard was, “well that chaos was just the pandemic crush overwhelming the system”. Yes, that’s true in a very narrow sense—the system collapsed in many places, meaning people who were desperate to get a check to pay rent or for food had to wait months and months for a first check…and lots of people just gave up.
But, here’s the truth, folks—that’s a feature not a bug. So, as enhanced unemployment benefits are about to expire at the end of March but seem likely to be extended in a new stimulus bill, is this chaos going to continue to be as bad as it was a year ago? Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project and a leading national expert on the unemployment insurance system, tells us the status and how we fix the broken system.
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Remember during the presidential campaign when Joe Biden promised not to raise taxes for anyone making less than $400,000? I thought, “well, that’s dumb”. Why should someone making say $250,000—which puts them in the one percent—not pay higher taxes? I figured right then that that line-in-the-sand $400K number was a purely stupid political calculation—let’s not piss off the people in the suburbs who voted for Trump who we want to get.
Really? Why not try a direct populist argument to reach a whole lot of people who are making under $100,000 and get angry about taxes because they have to pay a heavy load but see people making $250,000 paying a relatively small sum? I talk with Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, about taxing people above $400,000, why other well-off people shouldn’t pay higher taxes as well and, bonus, how Netflix is paying less than one percent taxes on a massive revenue boost (hint: legalized corruption!)
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Jan 27, 2021
Ep 211: What Corp. Interests Are Infiltrating The Biden World; Global Inequality At Record Levels
Episode 211:
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know that that’s a snippet of the speech by Michael Douglas’ character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street.
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Truth is, Jeff Bezos makes Gekko look like a penny ante small-time crook. And the crooks who control government on behalf of big corporations are in the same Bezos league when it comes to the massive shift in wealth that they engineer—and that’s the theme of this week’s show.
The one enduring fact of any government is the way in which the real powers—corporate and private wealth—push the levers behind the scenes. It’s the Revolving Door between government and Big Money, a door through which all sorts of manipulators and greedy people pass through from government to corporations to pro-corporate lobbying companies. And the story is mixed, as you will hear from Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, who is back on the show to update the picture of whether, and how deeply, corporate interests are dominating and controlling the Biden Administration.
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During this entire pandemic, which is now approaching a full year of horror and destitution for so many, I’ve pointed out in many of the segments we’ve done on frontline workers that the virus has just exposed the sickness we’ve lived with for decades—a sickness which lets a handful of people become filthy rich at the expense of everyone else. You can see that in the poverty-level minimum wage—which means people labor like slaves to make the likes of the Waltons of Walmart billions of dollars in profits. Or the lack of paid sick leave which is a main reason so many people have gotten sick on the job and, then, died because they could not afford to stay home from work when they got sick.
Paul O’Brien, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America, is back for our annual discussion about global inequality, tied to Oxfam’s new report, “The Inequality Virus”. And the picture is devasting: driven by the economic pandemic-driven collapse, we are witnessing a historic level of inequality across the globe.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Dec 16, 2020
Ep 210: Is Europe Taking Climate Change “Just Transition” More Seriously?
Episode 210:
I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there isn’t enough real thought by environmentalists and politicians, with numbers to go along with the thinking, how to take care of workers who will be hurt by the closing down of the fossil fuel industry.
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Grasping climate change is serious is not contrary to also being worried to death you won’t be able to pay the bills if your coal mine shuts down, or a refinery stops production or the truck you drive to deliver food to people has to be all electric. Joe Biden has plenty of language in his campaign positions…
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Dec 9, 2020
Ep. 209: It’s Not A Game—World Cup Workers’ Rights Fight; Europeans Leap To Protect Gig Workers
Episode 209:
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Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of soccer’s quadrennial World Cup, including the upcoming one in 2022 in Qatar. A worldwide outcry put a brake on some of the worst abuses in Qatar and set the stage for even more workers’ protections for the 2026 World Cup, which will be staged in North America and Mexico. Cathy Feingold, the international affairs director of the AFL-CIO and the deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to outline the campaign already underway to keep the heat on the host countries and the Federation Internationale de Football Association…
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Dec 2, 2020
Episode 208: Goldman Sachs/AFL-CIO On Same Page—Pigs Fly!; Taxing The Rich—The Fight Looms
Episode 208:
Back in the spring, I had a good chuckle when I found a topic of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, as well as agreement from lots of heads of states, many labor folks and business titans—creating trillions of dollars in grants, not debt, to give to poorer countries needing immediate financial aid right away to contend with the pandemic. I’m circling back to this idea I first explored on the podcast in May, this time in a chat with Isaac Evans-Frantz, director at Action Corps, and Don Wiviott, a farmer advocate based in Iowa.
Fasten your seat belts! The fight to raise taxes on the very wealthy and corporations is heating up, and, perhaps, the best options for victory will come at the state level. To look at the state of play, I chat with one of my favorite very smart people who knows everything about taxes, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.
In case my email slipped by yesterday—there is still time to p…
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Nov 19, 2020
Episode 207: Ending the Pandemic in 30 Days; Speeding Up Poultry Processing Lines—Insane!
Episode 207:
Ideology is in the way of a simple plan to end the pandemic in 30 days. Yes, 30 days: Lock down the country and pay everyone up to an annual wage of $90,000 to stay home. I’m resurrecting the argument I made months ago because the debate about a stimulus is on the agenda again—after Republicans have basically said fuck you to the entire country for months when it comes to aiding the people. My explanation of the plan leads off the episode.
Then, high up on the list of pandemic utter chaos has been the way in which political leaders at the local and state level have mishandled how to safely reopen schools so teachers and kids don’t get sick. To get a sense of the current state of play for teachers, I zero in on Arizona where voters just approved a new tax hike to fund education and, at the same time, the infections are on a steep rise. Joe Thomas, the president of the Arizona Education Association, joins me to talk about the union’s renewed public push to put in p…
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Nov 11, 2020
Ep 206: Perez Still Has A Job?; Georgia, Georgia, Georgia; Arizona Hikes Taxes To Fund Schools
Episode 206:
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Three questions post-election are on the menu this week. First, how does Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, still have a job? Perez has been incompetent for a very long time. He was the choice of the Democratic Party elites back in 2016—a guy who knows zippo about the mechanics of an election. And, voila—the party loses seats in the House, fumbles the chance to take the U.S. Senate, and even worse, fails to take back legislative chambers at the state level. Perez’s failures will echo for years to come.
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Second, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia…these two run-off races will mean the difference between millions of people being able to pay for food or keep their homes, not to mention whether people like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brow…
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Oct 28, 2020
Episode 205: Stiffing Corporate Lobbyists; Short-Time Work Salvation; Nurses On The Line
Episode 205:
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It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the strategy looks like to limit the influence of the corporate elites in a possible Biden Administration.
The pandemic has ripped through the world, killing and sickening millions. But, if you look at the economic hits people have taken, the pandemic has exposed the complete and utter failure of the system in the U.S. to make sure people can hang on. Both Europe and the U.S. had to shut down their economies and both took hits in output—but why has the unemployment rate been so much lower in Europe in the first half of the year than the…
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Oct 21, 2020
Ep 204: COVID and Inequality—A Love Story; Landslide Coming!
Episode 204:
The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights.
Now, this is a feature, not a bug, of the supply chain of global capitalism—keep people poor, enslaved and desperate as a way of making huge profits. To be sure, as I discussed in a recent episode, workers in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet, were barely hanging on before the pandemic—now, they’ve been shoved deeper into the hole of economic deprivation.
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But, the U.S. ranks last out of the wealthy G7 countries and trails 17 low-income countries like Liberia when it comes to laws that stop anti-unionis…
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Oct 14, 2020
Ep 203: Biden Tax Ideas Are Weak Sauce; Give More Power For The Post Office
Episode 203:
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When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling verbal sparring with Trump that he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making under $400,000, I yelled back, “why the hell not?”.
Really, you won’t ask people earning, say, $250,000 a year—a quarter of a million dollars—to pay higher taxes? I dig deep into Biden’s tax ideas with one of my favorite guests, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.
While millions of people wait, in desperation, for Congress to pass a new stimulus package, a whole lot of other important stuff is also tossed by the wa…
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Oct 7, 2020
Ep 202: Trump Is A Tax Cheat—But Lots Of Rich People Dodge And Cheat Thanks To Both Parties
Episode 202:
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For a sliver of time, the political world was talking about how Donald Trump cheats on his taxes. Virtually every rich person does what Trump does: they use the tax code to dodge paying their fair share, which costs the country tens of billions of dollars every year.
Rich people move their money around, hide cash in trusts, foundations, hard-to-understand complex partnerships, a web of limited liability companies, and, especially for those who run companies, in overseas operations. And they have an army of accountants and lawyers whose sole job is to hide as much income, use the tax laws as aggressively as possible to confuse the under-resourced IRS staff, and, then, to fight in court to keep every nickel the IRS somehow manages to find.
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Sep 30, 2020
Ep 201: Firefighters Face The Infernos—And The Devastating Long-Term Health Consequences
Episode 201:
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I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters these days, what with the jaw-dropping video we see virtually every day of these monstrous wild fires scorching millions of acres of forests in California and Oregon. For the record, these fires are absolutely driven by climate change—so what we see today will be a feature every single year, with all the widespread devastation of communities and the loss of human lives and wildlife.
Recently, I was sheltering in my home like tens of thousands of other people because the fires in Oregon created air that was off the charts hazardous. I mean that not as hyperbole—the measurements were too high for your average air quality reading to capture.
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But, damn, if we, regular people just…
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Sep 23, 2020
Episode 200: Racism at Tesla; China Is Rocking Green Technologies
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Episode 200:
CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today.
Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more than two years ago on this podcast in Episode 80. And it appears pretty evident he’s a sexist and a racist. He’s facing one federal lawsuit claiming that in 2015 and 2016, at Tesla’s factory in suburban Fremont, CA, black workers were subjected to repeated racial epithets, racist cartoons, and supervisors engaged in, or did little to stop, the racism.
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Sep 16, 2020
Ep 199: We Have A Price For A Worker’s Life: A Few Thousand $; COVID-19 Dangers For Building Workers
Episode 199:
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What’s a worker’s life worth? To you and me, it’s priceless. Capitalism, though, doesn’t see it that way—a worker’s life is a cost of doing business, a life easily disposable when it comes to making profits. And the corporate world has an accomplice in this immoral scam where workers are disposable: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processor making billions of dollars every year, did almost nothing to stop workers from getting the virus at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota plant. In just under three months, more than 1,300 were infected, 43 ended up in the hospital and four workers died. OSHA’s response? A fine of $13,494 as part of a single violation OSHA cited the company for—that’s $3,373.50 for each worker killed or a little over $10 bucks for those infected. Jessica…
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Sep 9, 2020
Ep 198: Pigs Fly—The Fed Says Jobs Are THE Priority; Hotel Workers in The Abyss
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Episode 198:
The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care about.
Which is why what the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced recently is pretty important—the Fed will keep its main attention on employment. Is this just a pandemic-linked shift that will eventually go away and send the Fed back to doing the bidding of the banks and the bond markets? I poke at this topic with my favorite Fed watcher, Dean Baker, senior economist wit…
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Sep 2, 2020
#197: Staunch Conservative Reveals She’s Voting For Biden; Workers Fear Speaking Up On COVID Safety
Episode 197:
The last name “Hoover” is, if I can use this term, a brand name in conservative circles. Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the U.S. who served during the Great Depression, taking office in 1929 the year the stock market crashed—an apt historical reference for today perhaps since the economic implosion we are living through is the worst in a century dating back at least to the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.
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His great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover has kept the Hoover flame alive—both in her attention to Herbert’s legacy and her own work as a conservative commentator. Margaret and I have known each other since the 2016 election cycle. We have vigorous, but respectful, disagreements about actual policy. In the wake of the two parties’ political conventions, Margaret joins me to talk about politics—and she reveals…
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Aug 26, 2020
Ep 196: Poultry Plant Killing Fields; Desperate People Jam The Bank Lines; Bidding To Win In Florida
Episode 196:
It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on the list—like the folks that are crammed together in poultry processing plants who are getting sick by the thousands and dying by the hundreds. Alexandre Galimberti, Senior Advocacy and Collaborations Advisor for the US Domestic Program at Oxfam America, talks with me about how the corrupt, greedy poultry industry is exposing workers to horrendous conditions.
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Last week I was driving about town, doing a few errands (while always wearing my mask) when I passed by a bank. There were hundreds of people lined up at the bank, piec…
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Aug 19, 2020
Ep 195: How To Steal An Election 101; Haitian Garment Workers Rise Up
Episode 195:
Voting in America, compared to many other countries, is not easy. That’s always been true. Donald Trump’s relentless effort to undermine the vote in November, in this case by crippling the postal service and trying to make it impossible for ballots to be counted on time, is surely corrupt. But, the undermining of the vote is made easier by a rickety election system that has existed for decades. Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut Secretary of State and, now, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard’s Ash Center, talks to me about the threat to voting this Fall, what we can do and his bigger project to implement a national mandate that everyone must vote as a civic requirement.
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If you wanted to pick a country that has been ravaged for decades by economic, political and physical blows a grimly appropriate choice would be…
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Aug 12, 2020
Ep 194: Hollywood Tales—A Union Win In Cali, A FL Progressive Aims To Fire Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
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Episode 194:
Today the show is all about Hollywood. Hollywood, California and Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, California is in a rumble. For most performers in the entertainment business, residuals are the foundation to making a living—either a solid middle class living or somewhat less than that. Over many decades, residuals have been tied to various things such as repeat showings of a movie in syndication or sales of DVDs. Now, it’s all about streaming.
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For performers this is a huge change and it’s really about a fight to make sure generations of performers, some not born today, will be able to earn a respectable living. How do performers get paid in a streaming world? The performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, just scored…
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Aug 5, 2020
Ep 193: The States Go Broke; The Democratic Convention Approaches…Yawn
Episode 193:
The pandemic has ripped a hole through every state budget in the country to the tune collectively of over $550 billion. That red ink is more than half a trillion dollars in money states won’t have—which translates into millions of people losing their jobs, services being decimated that we all rely on, attacks against people of color who are employed disproportionately in decent-paying government jobs and an economy that won’t recover if aid is not dispatched. Pronto.
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And it doesn’t have to be this way, if ideology wasn’t more important for Republicans, and some Democrats, who should be pouring money into states and closing these big deficits—deficits that, remember, were no fault of management by state leaders. The deficits were caused, essentially, by one person, Donald Trump, who dismissed the pandemic, called it a hoax, made f…
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Jul 29, 2020
Ep 192: NAFTA Horrors in Mexico; Shaking Up The Florida Democratic Party; Bezos Dissembles
Episode 192:
By the time you are tuning into the show, Jeff Bezos, one of the great scars on the economic landscape, will have finished his song-and-dance testimony before Congress, during a hearing that mostly focuses on the massive anti-competitive power of the big tech firms like Amazon and Google. But, long before today, Jeff Bezos has always been the poster child for the CEO who doesn’t give a shit about workers and only cares about a single thing: how to become even richer than he is. The man is a scar on humanity. My observations about Bezos leads off the show.
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Then, Congress passed NAFTA 2.0 earlier this year. I’ll just say right away—the first NAFTA was an abomination, the newer one was just horrendous—and we also have to be clear that, with or without these so-called free trade deals, capitalism marches on and abuses people, as we saw i…
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Jul 22, 2020
Ep 191: Uyghurs Are The Slave Labor For Global Companies; Tax Dodgers Love to Knee-Cap the IRS
Episode 191:
China’s leaders and wealthy elites are willing partners of global capitalism, opening up its doors, willingly, to Wal-Mart and huge multinational companies so those companies can produce trillions of dollars of stuff using cheap slave labor—in good capitalist style. Since 2017, China has been conducting a steady campaign of mass transfer of more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, which Uyghur activists call “east Turkestan”.
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Think of the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or apartheid in South Africa—the key difference, is that this is being driven a lot by the thirst of global capitalism for cheap, slave labor. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work in factories that are in the supply chains…
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Jul 15, 2020
Ep 190: EXPOSED—Big Pharma’s Greed, Lies and Poisoning of America: Wages For All!
Episode 190:
Here is something we can all agree on I think—drug companies are blood-sucking, greedy cheats who cannot be trusted with the health and welfare of tens of millions of people. Am I right? And that’s even more true as we watch the global scramble to be the first company to profit big-time from a vaccine for COVID19. So, I’m going to focus on the Big Pharma corruption today with a friend and investigative reporter, Gerald Posner who is the author of a mind-boggling expose “Pharma: Greed, Lies And the Poisoning of America”
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Looking for the single most important thing you can do between now and the end of July to slow the pandemic? As I mentioned last week in outlining my proposal for a $6.5 trillion stimulus bill, badger everyone you know, and of course your members of Congress, to get behind Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s bill, and a similar…
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Jul 8, 2020
Ep 189: A $6.5 Trillion Stimulus Plan Now! Hong Kong Labor Activists Under The Gun
Episode 189:
Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student debt; $200 billion for a rent and mortgage freeze…and a lot more. Fight me on the specifics—but let’s expand the debate and the way people think about what is possible, what is needed and what should be done.
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Just a few days ago, China imposed a new National Security Law which is aimed at shutting down the mass protests that have consumed Hong Kong for more than a year. In the crosshairs especially are union activists who have been signing up people to dozens of new unions which doesn’t thrill Ch…
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Jul 1, 2020
Episode 188: Corporations & the Pandemic Killing Fields; Taking A Cleaver To The Pentagon Budget
Episode 188:
Big companies don’t give a second thought to making big profits during the COVID-19 pandemic even if that means thousands of workers—and their families—will get sick and die from the virus. Actually, it’s a feature not a bug, no pun intended—in food processing, all those workers who make sure you get beef or chicken on your plate, are getting sick by the droves, and the only way that happens is because companies, big rich companies, keep dangerous plants operating unsafely because to make things slightly safer would cost them a few bucks. That’s criminal in a normal world. Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project, joins me to look at the threat to workers—a threat that is growing as the pandemic surges.
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A few days ago, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to cut the b…
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Jun 24, 2020
Episode 187: The Vultures Gather; The Coming State Budget Apocalypse
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Episode 187:
Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to put their grubby hands on everyone’s 401(k) plans. Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the nation’s leading expert on the carnage wrought by private equity pirates, exposes the looming attack on our savings in a riveting chat.
Then, while millions of people are trying to get a job or an unemployment check, not to mention just stay safe, states are facing what even The Economist magazine calls “The Calamity Ahead”—a brutal shortfall in revenue because of the econo…
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Jun 17, 2020
Ep 186: Global Workers Hear BLM; The Would-Be Governor Who Stopped A Man’s Execution
Episode 186:
I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, and how African workers are linking the BLM movement to their own economic oppression.
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How would you like to have a governor who saved a man five hours before his state-ordered execution? That’s a choice New Hampshire Democrats will have in the September primary to choose their nominee for governor—he is Andru Volinsky who joins me to talk about his long-time civil rights advocacy, not to mention his work on jobs, climate change and taxes.
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Jun 10, 2020
Ep 185: How Do I Get My Damn Unemployment Check—We Have The Lowdown; Corporate PR Slime
Episode 185:
The big news—it’s the first regularly scheduled Working Life TV Show!!! View the show now and sign up at:
www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini
But, all our audio podcast listeners will still be able to hear the show in the long-time format.
The unemployment system is in chaos—jammed phone lines, crashing websites. People can’t get the checks they desperately need to pay for simple things like food, utilities and rent. So, I decided to devote the lion’s share of the show to dig into why this happening—and give concrete tips on how to access the system. Do not give up—that’s the message Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment Law Project and I deliver in our conversation (you can see the slides Judy and I are talking about here: https://www.workinglife.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Working-Life-TV-slides.ppt)
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Jun 3, 2020
Episode 184: Racism and Economic Oppression; WORKING LIFE TV DEBUTS--LIVE STREAM TONIGHT!
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Episode 184:
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave a speech entitled, “The Other America”, in which he said, “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.” This was a theme he repeated time and time again throughout his life because he saw the unbreakable bonds between the twin evils of racism and economic oppression. He made those links right up to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 when he marched in support of striking sanitation workers.
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And if King were alive today, he would link the murder of George Floyd and mass uprisings taking place across the nation with the economic oppression, the scourge of capitalism, that has brutalized people of color for decades. That’s what I talk about today featuring segments with two guests, Janelle Jones and Valerie Wilson, who…
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May 27, 2020
Ep 183: The People Should Own The Vaccine; Joe’s Bad Tax Ideas; Union Spends To Save Members’ Lives
Episode 183:
If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could stop with a change in the law. It’s especially important to get this idea in our heads right now with the rush to create a vaccine for COVID-19, which makes drug companies salivate over the prospect of pocketing huge profits for something that should be ours to own—which is what I talk about with Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Here is a prediction that I’d go to Vegas and bet a huge pile of money on: when it comes to making up big state budget deficits looming in the coming months because of the pandemic-caused economic…
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May 20, 2020
Ep 182: Nationalize Payrolls Now; Gig Work Is Exploitation; Domestic Workers In The Pandemic
Episode 182:
Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call of a supply chain or a big tech company, at the lowest cost possible. And not a surprise—lots of gig workers are at great risk during the pandemic. I explore the lives of “gig” workers in a conversation with Bama Athreya, an economic policy fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a veteran social movement activist.
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The pandemic has put domestic workers at risk. Think of it logically: you can be locked down in a home with your client, essentially enslaved, with nowhere to go and no social distancing space. You could easily be trapped in a home, forced to stay inside because of a curfew, without pers…
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May 13, 2020
Ep181: Greed Drove Retail’s COVID-19 Collapse; IMF’s Trillion-Dollar Money Machine; Rich Foundations
Episode 181:
Here’s a no brainer observation: It would be hard to find any areas of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs. Well, I got one—it turns out that the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, along with scores of heads of states, labor folks and business titans, are on the same page about one idea which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention—creating $3 trillion in grants for worldwide distribution by the International Monetary Fund to countries needing immediate financial aid to contend with the pandemic. You’ll learn all about this fascinating global tale in my conversation with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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And speaking of money, Morris Pearl, the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, joins me to explain how we can free up $200 billion for financially-strapped charities by just a little jiggering of the rules for philanthropic foundations who sock away tax break-driven c…
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May 6, 2020
Ep 180: Fixing The Pandemic’s Financial Ruin; Trump Wants To Kill Beef & Poultry Workers
Episode 180:
It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge lines of hungry people form every day across the nation and states and cities are on the brink of financial ruin.
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States and cities not only employ collectively millions of people but, my god, their services—from education to just picking up the garbage—are damn essential. And you don’t need a computer to get that with the economy shut down and people sheltering at home, revenue to the states through incomes taxes and other taxes has nosedived. It’s just around the corner, folks: when there are gaps in local budgets, especially at the state level, they are coming af…
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Apr 29, 2020
Episode 179: Global Workers Face COVI-19 Rampage With Little Defense; The Corona “Dirty Dozen”
Episode 179:
There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when you look at the global threat to workers.
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Think about what tens of millions of workers in poorer countries, with far fewer resources, are facing. The images coming out of Africa, Asia and South America showing huge migrations of workers are mind-boggling—how do you even wrap your mind around how to achieve social distancing at bus depots in India, crammed with huge crowds of migrants, who are desperately trying to get home because they have nowhere to go as industries have shut down in the pandemic. Or, consider Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisph…
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Apr 22, 2020
Ep 178: Postal Workers Face The Pandemic As The Service Struggles; Amazon Workers Protest
Episode 178:
Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are.
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Putting it mildly, postal workers are frontline workers—and to pile the safety and health dangers on top of everything else, the service is facing a massive budget hole because of the collapse of the economy because, obviously, less commerce means a lot less stuff being sent via the postal service which relies on fees. I go in-depth on what’s happening to postal workers with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.
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And Jeff Bezos is up to his usual despicable behavior—the wealthiest human on the planet is piling…
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Apr 15, 2020
Episode 177: Is Your Chicken Worth A Worker’s Life?; Stimulus Done The Right Way
Episode 177:
The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country.
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To put it bluntly, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 just so millions of people can chow down some meat product at dinner. And those products may be harder to find because the virus is raging through food processing plants nationwide and fraying the supply chain from factory to plate. To get an on-the-ground report about the epidemic, I’m joined by Randy Hadley, the president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union’s Midsouth Council who has been working in the industry for over four decades.
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Apr 8, 2020
Episode 176: A Deadly Match—Bad Trade Deals And Corona; Jamie Runs For Secretary of State
Episode 176:
When we come out of the immediate pandemic crisis, then, maybe we can have some accounting of who and what is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people—and among the “who” would be, say, politicians who are making themselves look like heroes today—I’ll just say, randomly, New York politicians—even though they sat on their hands in January when the World Health Organization issued a worldwide pandemic warning, which you think might have made those same aggrandizing politicians—say, in New York—think, “gee, maybe I should make sure we are stocked up with the right equipment.”
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But, the bigger inquiry should be about how a part of the crisis comes right from the way we’ve allowed global corporations and elites to set up an economic system using trade deals that profits them a whole lot but leaves everyone else vulnerable to a pandemic, not to mention other quaint class warfar…
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Apr 1, 2020
Episode 175: Health Care Workers and Transit Workers Face The Pandemic
Episode 175:
The other night I was watching an episode of Season 3 of Ozark and there was a scene in which the mother, played by Laura Linney, walks out of a supermarket with her son, both of them pushing a shopping cart. My head went immediately to, without a thought: I hope they sanitized that bar on the cart where their hands were placed…and then a few seconds later I laughed. That is where our heads are at these days—but, for lots of frontline workers out there, it’s all very real, deadly real, terrifyingly real.
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So, again, this week you are going to hear about those workers—today it’s health care workers and transit workers as I talk with the leaders of two very important unions: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 180,000 health care workers, and John Samuelsen, the president of the Transport Workers Union, whose members work on the buses, rail and airlin…
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Mar 25, 2020
Episode 174: Retail Workers on Corona Frontlines; Amazon Maims; Cori Bush Runs
Episode 174:
When I have snuck out briefly in the past couple of weeks to safely get a few items at the supermarket, I made sure to thank the workers in the aisles and my cashier for being on the job, and I also tell them be safe and careful. They are supremely vulnerable to getting sick.
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Those retail workers, who still have jobs despite many stores having closed down, are forced to show up at work, mainly because they have no choice—their boss hasn’t shut down and the workers need the paycheck because lots of them are like millions of Americans with very little in the way of an emergency cash cushion, and in lots of cases they have zero paid sick leave. Today, I speak with Dave Mertz, vice president and New York City director of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, about what’s happening in the lives of retail workers on the corona frontlines.
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Mar 18, 2020
Episode 173: Corona And Class Warfare Part II; Stopping A Multi-Billion-Dollar CEO Pension Tax Break
Episode 173:
Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough cash in reserve to pay bills, unlike the rich who have made their wealth by exploiting workers. Who are the people most vulnerable? It’s the people who either have to still go to work or can’t afford to stay at home because they don’t have mandated paid sick leave or family leave, even in a crisis.
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Today, as so many of you either hunker down or are living in fear, I talk with one of my favorite and regular guests Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about a menu of steps the country needs to take to mitigate the devastating health and e…
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Mar 11, 2020
Episode 172: Corona In The Age Of Class Warfare; McKayla’s Bid To Knock Out Hoyer
Episode 172:
Pandemics might be one of the single best mass events to shine a light on class warfare, especially in the U.S. Rich people don’t have to worry about getting sick—they can afford extensive care in a country in which millions of working-class people can’t even afford to see a doctor for a run-of-the-mill reason. If a rich person gets sick, well, he can just sit home in his pajamas for as long as needed and never worry about paying next week’s rent, while a fast food worker or other service worker on an hourly wage is forced to go to work, even when sick.
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What the coronavirus has shown, quite sharply and clearly, is that a country without paid sick leave is not only an immoral society but also, on a practical level, a country which denies the most basic benefits that could contain a health threat—which is what I talk about today with Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment L…
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Mar 4, 2020
Episode 171: Bloomberg Isn’t Alone Muzzling Workers; Ramos Runs in New York
Episode 171:
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You may remember me using this before because the idea comes up again and again in the struggle of workers to get some power at work. In his ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd”, Woody Guthrie sang these words:
“Yes, as through this world I've wandered,
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen”
Today that’s real life, and today, I chat with Hugh Baran of the National Employment Law Project about forced arbitration, a mumbo jumbo legal term that basically means millions of workers are giving up their rights to corporations who are stealing billions from workers by using the power of the corporate pen.
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Then, I chat with Tomas Ramos, a progressive running for the 15th Congressional district in New York, a heavily Democratic district where a progressive can win.
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Feb 26, 2020
Episode 170: Experts Give Thumbs Up For M4All; Two Progressives Run For Congress
Episode 170:
I try to mostly stay away from long monologue and ruminations, leaving the topics to be explored in conversations with my guests. Today, a little change because of the issue—I’m going to dig into a recent important study that shows what is pretty obvious to anyone looking at the numbers—Medicare for All saves money and lives. That’s the conclusion of experts who published their peer-reviewed findings in The Lancet. You will want to catch this one to grab some easy talking points for future debates.
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Which will be a good transition, then, into chats with two progressive candidates running for Congress who both support, among other progressive positions, Medicare for All—Robin Wilt in New York and Chris Armitage in Washington state.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workingli…
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Feb 19, 2020
Episode 169: Progressive Economics Shifts The Debate, And Chalks Up Wins; Harper Runs In Indiana
Episode 169:
It’s easy to get dragged into a negative head space if you do any kind of politics or movement building work—it’s hard out there and too often we have a tendency to focus on the really bad stuff, like “the planet is burning up and imploding” or a few people own more wealth in the world than hundreds of millions of people.
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But, truth is—we’ve had a lot of victories that have shifted the conversation. And it’s important to talk about those victories because it reminds us that, yes, change is possible and, yes, it takes a long time—sometimes. So, today, I chat with economist Dean Baker about how progressive ideas have shifted the conversation and won the debate on many economic issues.
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And, then, yet another progressive candidate joins the program—you just don’t hear about most of these great progressive candidates on any show bu…
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Feb 12, 2020
Episode 168: Pay Up For Family Leave; Ashcraft Aims For NYC Incumbent Take-Down
Episode 168:
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Hypocrisy is pretty much a given when you are in politics. I’ve pointed out the particular hypocrisy of all those flag-waving politicians who shout a full-throated “I support our men and women in uniform” but, then, cut benefits for vets and cut funds for the VA.
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Today, I hone in on another hypocrisy: politicians who wax eloquently about the importance of families but refuse to advance paid family leave, a benefit enjoyed by tens of millions of people in other advanced economies. Just days after the 27th anniversary of the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which introduced unpaid family leave, I explore the lack of movement to expand the crucial benefit of paid family leave with Jared Gaby-Biegel of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Then, I chat with Lauren As…
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Feb 5, 2020
Episode 167: They Died For Your Chicken Dinner; Populist Roars Across Montana
Episode 167:
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It’s pretty likely that when you cut into a nice juicy roast chicken at home or in a restaurant a worker in some poultry processing plant was injured cutting up that chicken into commercial pieces. And in some cases, it’s even worse: in January, two workers in poultry plants were killed in the space of a little over a week. I talk about their deaths and the brutal working conditions in poultry plants with national safety and health expert Debbie Berkowitz.
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Then, Tom Winter, a progressive populist, joins me to talk about his race to win the congressional seat in Montana—it’s a conversation about how to win in so-called “red” areas with progressive ideas.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebo…
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Jan 29, 2020
Episode 166: Ohio, Missouri, Oregon—Progressive Candidates Abound!
Episode 166:
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With the Iowa caucuses just a few days away, I thought this would be a good time to devote the entire episode to progressive candidates who I’ve been talking to over the course of a number of weeks, with many more to come throughout the year. Today, you’ll hear from three women candidates—two are running for Congress—Morgan Harper in Ohio and Kathy Ellis in Missouri—and one, Paige Kreisman, who is running for a state house seat in Oregon.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Jan 22, 2020
Episode 165: Care Workers Spotlight Global Inequality; NAFTA 2.0 Passes—Good or Bad?
Episode 165:
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“Economic inequality is out of control. In 2019, the world’s billionaires, only 2,153 people, had more wealth than 4.6 billion people.” Those two sentences lead off Oxfam’s annual look at inequality. This year, Oxfam looks at unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. I speak with Paul O’Brien, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America about the in-depth report that is startling and bracing, and reminds us of the vast chasm dividing the very rich from the rest of us.
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Then, almost three decades ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, which devastated working people and the planet because NAFTA meant poverty for millions and an open season for corporations to abuse workers and the planet. Last week, NAFTA 2.0 passed the Senate so it’s a time to ask: Is it any better? Well, that depends o…
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Jan 15, 2020
Ep. 164: Death At Work: The Numbers Skyrocket; Hoadley Looks To Dethrone Incumbent in Michigan.
Episode 164:
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Most people, when they walk out the door to go to work, don’t think, “damn, I’m going to get killed today or seriously ill with a chronic disease”. Yes, if you work in a mine or on a construction site, you are more aware of the dangers. But, most people just assume work is a safe place and they will come home. Well, it’s getting more dangerous at work—the death rate has spiked to the highest point in a decade. And that’s the cheery topic of my first segment today in my conversation with Peter Dooley, a pro-worker safety and health activist, analyst and consultant with the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH).
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I also talk with Jon Hoadley who is running for the Democratic nomination for the 6th Congressional District in Michigan and a chance to take out a long-time Republican incumbent.
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Jan 8, 2020
Ep 163: The Tax Robbery Was Worse Than You Imagined; A Progressive For The Texas U.S. Senate Seat
Episode 163:
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The GOP Tax Robbery Bill, the tax cuts that shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of the very rich and corporations, was built on a complex set of lies. And, now with the close of 2019 and the numbers in on a full year of corporate 2018 tax returns, we have the numbers to prove it. It’s worse than you imagine—not only did hundreds of corporations pay a piddling amount of money to no taxes at all, but the Treasury Department, run by banker-to-the-elites Steven Mnuchin, created regulations and rules entirely out of thin air that gave even more money to corporations. Hear all the dirt in my in-depth conversation with Matt Gardner of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.
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Then, I visit with Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, a strong progressive activist, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the race for the U.S. Senat…
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Dec 25, 2019
Episode 162: The Minimum Wage Divides The County In Half; Eastman Takes Another Shot in Nebraska
Episode 162:
As the New Year beckons, there’s good news and bad news on wages. The good news is something I’ve been able to talk about for the past few years at the end of each year—come January 1st, a whole lot of people are going to see their paychecks increase because of some state and local minimum wage hikes that go into effect. Which shows why movements matter—in this case, the Fight for 15. The bad news: we are quickly becoming a country divided in half when it comes to minimum wages standards. That’s on tap here in our first segment in a discussion with Yannet Lathrop, policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project.
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And two years after she first came on the program, progressive candidate Kara Eastman is back to talk about her second campaign to unseat a Republican incumbent in the 2nd Congressional district in Nebraska—and, even though she came so close in 2018, the party elites are not in her c…
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Dec 18, 2019
Ep 161: ICE-Company Cover Up Of Workplace Deaths in NOLA?; Two More Progressives For Congress
Episode 161:
Shut your damn mouth or be deported. That’s basically the upshot of what happened to Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma, who wanted to tell the truth about the collapse of the under-construction Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans but, two days after he was hurt in the disaster, Joel found himself dragged off by ICE into detention and, then, deported back to Honduras after living in New Orleans for 18 years. I’ll be talking in today’s episode to Mary Yanik, senior staff attorney with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, about this abuse of workers to set the stage for a rally later today in New Orleans to “Bring Joel Home”.
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Then, two more progressive candidates visit with me. Mike Siegel is running to unseat a Republican incumbent in Texas’ 10th Congressional district—and even though he came pretty close to winning the seat in 2018, the Washington Beltway consultant class and the DCCC are pushing…
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Dec 11, 2019
Episode 160: Bakery Workers Unite!; Two Progressives Eye Congressional Republican Seats
Episode 160:
I love the bosses who wring their hands when workers try to unionize, the ones who say, “don’t you love us? Aren’t we good to you”? That isn’t the point. Everyone needs a union so workers together don’t ever have to rely on just good feelings from employers. Which is what I talk about with Cameron Coleman, a bakery worker at Grand Central Bakery who is a key organizer in a unionizing campaign which comes to a head tomorrow with a vote.
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I also chat with two progressive candidates who are running in Democratic primaries with the ultimate goal of winning a general election in Republican-held seats—Jennifer Christie, who is a candidate in Indiana’s 5th Congressional district, and Jason Butler who is campaigning to win the nomination in North Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasin…
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Dec 4, 2019
Episode 159: Beating the WTO Beast Twenty Years After Seattle; A Progressive Runs in Illinois
Episode 159:
Twenty years ago, thousands of environmentalists, union leaders and members, and lots of other progressive forces swept through the streets of Seattle to confront the global corporate beast known as the World Trade Organization, the WTO. They were met by the Seattle police force, buttressed by all sorts of other police and security operations, who tear gassed, pepper sprayed, assaulted and arrested people who were simply trying to exercise their free speech rights. Today, I am going to revisit that mass uprising with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch. I also talk to a young progressive Democrat who is running against an entrenched Democrat in Illinois
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Nov 27, 2019
Ep 158: A Union For Politicians’ Staffers; A Progressive Looks To Retire A Corp Dem; Amazon Kills!
Episode 158:
Hypocrisy probably makes it into the top three characteristics, alas, of the vast majority of politicians. That isn’t a reason not to participate in the electoral process but it’s just one of those cautionary, red lights to keep an eye out for. To wit: all those politicians who eloquently talk about the importance of unions—mostly that talk comes when a politician wants a union endorsement or a check—but they get very weird when their own staffers try to unionize. So that’s what makes the unionizing effort among staffers at the New York City City Council something to watch—partly because it could set a standard for the whole country. Zara Nasir, a City Council staffer and a main organizer of the unionizing effort, joins me for a chat about the campaign.
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I also revisit the race for the Democratic nomination for New York’s 16th Congressional district, which has drawn another great progressive candi…
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Nov 20, 2019
Episode 157: Deval Patrick Destroyed Peoples’ Jobs; The $1.5 Trillion Haul From A Tax on Wall Street
Episode 157:
Deval Patrick has become very, very rich since leaving the post of Massachusetts governor. That’s what happens when you become a managing director of Bain Capital, one of the behemoths in the private equity industry. Patrick became rich working for a company—being a managing director of a company—that has screwed thousands of workers, especially 30,000 workers for Toys R Us who don’t have a job today because Bain Capital, with Patrick in the leadership, drove that company into liquidation. I talk about Bain Capital’s role in the demise of Toys R Us with Jim Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
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Over a decade ago, I started reading about something called a “Financial Transactions Tax”. It’s often also called a “Tobin Tax” after its creator, economist James Tobin, and it originally focused on taxing currency speculation. But a broader idea is popular: each time…
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Nov 13, 2019
Episode 156: The False Gods of Economic Growth; Brianna Wu Looks To Take Down A Corporate Democrat
Episode 156:
Anyone remember that TV advertisement that Merrill Lynch used to have, with the big bull trotting along a beach? I’m reincarnating that bull today for a pretty simple discussion: what is economic progress and how do we have economic growth without destroying the planet? Evelyn Astor, an economic and social policy advisor at the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to talk about better ideas to measure what a healthy economy looks like for regular people, not just investors and billionaires.
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Then, Brianna Wu stops by with an update on her primary campaign to unseat a corporate Democrat in the 8th Congressional District in Massachusetts.
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-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Nov 6, 2019
Episode 155: Euro Corporate Evil Trolls The U.S. South; Kim Williams Has Blue Dog Dem On The Run
IKEA, Volkswagen, Nestle and Airbus are pretty different companies but all of them have a two-faced corporate Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that explains a lot about the oppression workers face in the U.S. South. Across the pond, all those companies have a pretty reasonable posture towards unions and workers trying to unionize. But just let them come hunting over in the U.S. South to do business and, bingo, they turn into your garden variety, vicious, union busting, corporate pigs. Cathy Feingold, the AFL-CIO’s international director, talks with me about an amazing new report tracing the European corporate marauding down south.
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Then, Kim Williams joins the show to talk about her Democratic primary challenge against a long-time Blue Dog-Corporate Democrat in the 16th Congressional district in California.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign u…
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Oct 30, 2019
Episode 154: Two Tales of Wall Street Vultures; A Progressive Takes On Another Corporate Democrat.
Episode 154:
The Gordon Gekko boast in the fictional movie “Wall Street” that “Greed is Good” is really an organizing principle for the financial vultures who rob the country day after day. Today, you will hear two tales of greed and robbery by hedge fund and private equity vultures.
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First, it’s Paul Singer, the CEO of a hedge fund called Elliott Management, who has a net worth of $3.5 billion, is a political buddy of the Koch brothers and is a funder of climate change deniers. As Beth Allen, the communications director of the Communications Workers of America, explains in our chat Singer now has his sights set on screwing thousands of CWA members who work for AT&T by trying to extort money from AT&T.
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Then, I circle back with Eileen Appelbaum, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who was on the program just three weeks ago d…
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Oct 23, 2019
Episode 153: Two Progressive Women Running To Clean Out The Corporate Democratic Rot In Congress
Episode 153:
EI’m in a politics mood today, having nothing to do with impeachment or the bizarre spectacle of a previous Democratic presidential candidate going seriously off the rails and accusing with no evidence, in McCarthyite fashion, another Democrat of being some sort of asset of Russia…I mean, crazy shit fills up my news dump every day.
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So as an antidote, I figured I’d bring to you two more progressive women candidates running for Congress against two corporate male Democrats: Eva Putzova in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District and Rebecca Parson in Washington State’s 6th Congressional District.
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Oct 16, 2019
Episode 152: The Dark Side of Whole Foods; Bowman Looking To Unseat Corporate Democrat
Episode 152:
The running joke about Whole Foods is its nickname: Whole Paycheck. But there’s a far darker side to the touchy-feely, organic feel of Whole Foods than the higher prices—the exploitation of workers everywhere along its supply chains where workers labor in slave-like conditions, and are abused day after day, especially women workers. Oxfam is out with a devastating report on Whole Foods—and I talk with an Oxfam expert about what the report found.
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Then, among the politicians no one would miss, ever, on the political scene is Eliot Engel who voted for the Iraq War, has worked to deregulate Wall Street and is a staunch mouthpiece for the most right-wing, racist governments Israel has produced. Thankfully, he’s got a serious primary challenger, Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal and educator who grew up in public housing in New York City. Jamaal joins me to talk about his campaign.
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Oct 9, 2019
Ep 151: Private Equity Vultures Are Running A Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Billing Scam
Episode 151:
I would never have said it before today but it turns out health insurance companies aren’t the most evil players in the healthcare industry. Don’t freak out—health insurance companies are bad, and they are bankrupting millions of people, and the country. But it turns out even worse than the health insurers are some big mega private equity vultures who are gobbling up big pieces of medical services and socking millions of people with surprise medical bills—and I’m going to go in depth on this story, which is not being covered anywhere else, with Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and one of the great experts on private equity.
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Then, I’m kicking back into gear with regular segments with great progressives running for office. Today, I chat with Rachel Ventura who is running in the Democratic primary in Illinois’ 11th Congressional district against a corporat…
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Oct 2, 2019
Episode 150: Chicago Teachers Gearing Up For the Picket Line; What’s the Matter With Ohio?
Episode 150:
Teachers are on the ramparts again. This time in Chicago where the members of the Chicago Teachers Union are gearing up for a possible strike if they can’t get a decent contract to improve wages, win a hard cap on class size and increase staffing. To talk more about the struggle for a good contract, I’m joined by Andrea Parker, an English teacher and union vice president, and Robin Blake Boose, a first grade teacher.
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I, then, take a look at what’s up in Ohio: You would think that people there would be ready to revolt, to overthrow the oligarchs and the elites and the corporate raiders who have effectively strip-mined the economy, destroying factory jobs and making sure new jobs don’t have decent wages because those same raiders fight unions tooth and nail. Even though Ohio voted for Trump, the people re-elected incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, a progressive, clear populist, quite comfortably in 2018. P…
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Sep 25, 2019
Episode 149: Fred Meyer Boycott Is On!; California Clips The Wings Of The UBER-Corporate Mentality
Episode 149:
A few weeks ago, I talked about the vast pay discrimination against women who work for supermarket chain Fred Meyer: 2/3 of women are paid $3.70 less than men doing essentially the same job. The union representing the workers—UFCW Local 555—is in hard, brass knuckles bargaining with Fred Meyer to end this. But in the meantime, just this past Sunday, because of the company’s recalcitrance, the union has called for a boycott of all Fred Meyer stores. I talk about the gender pay discrimination and the boycott with Jeff Anderson, the secretary treasurer of Local 555.
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Then, there is no difference between the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies of the last century and their corporate cousins, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or those folks who run Uber: companies just do everything possible to exploit workers, rip them off, take more and more profits made by the hard work of millions of workers and use those…
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Sep 18, 2019
Episode 148: Bangladesh Garment Workers Horrors Redux; Closing The Capital Gains Highway Robbery
Episode 148:
Take your shirt off. Or your pants. Almost certainly those garments and others were made in a faraway country, by people making pennies who work in horrendous conditions. I think we all know that when we are told to think about it—but we don’t think about it on a daily basis. I talk with Sonia Mistry of the Solidarity Center about the squalid, dangerous conditions in Bangladesh faced by garment workers—and a fire that recently made thousands homeless.
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Then, I enter into the land of “anti-deferral accounting”—that just rolls off the lips, right? Well, it might not be the most user-friendly lingo but it could add up to a trillion and a half more dollars to shore up Social Security—coming from the pockets of the richest of the richest. Steve Wamhoff, the director of federal tax policy at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, explains it all.
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Sep 11, 2019
Episode 147: Temp Work Is All The Rage; Coal Miners & The Green New Deal
Episode 147: Once upon a time, if you got a job that lasted a long time, you’d be a permanent worker, maybe after a short probationary period. Not so much anymore with the plague forcing people to take “temp” jobs—the kind of job that is increasing in the past few years, outpacing full-time permanent work, and also spreading a lot more to so-called “blue collar” jobs. I explore this with Laura Padin, senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project and author of a new important report called “Lasting Solutions for America’s Temporary Workers”.
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My regular listeners may recall that whenever the topic of a Green New Deal comes up, I gripe about the way in which environmentalists and politicians so easily promise to take care of workers. Don’t worry, people say, there will be a “Just Transition” for workers in the fossil fuel industries, which would mean income support and job retraining.…
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Sep 4, 2019
Episode 146: Union Embraces Bernie & Green New Deal; Social Security Attacked—Again!
Episode 146:
Back in the first half of the 20th Century, there was a big vibrant union, the United Electrical Workers, the UE. It had 100,000s of members—until the McCarthy era anti-communist hysteria swept the country, triggering eviscerating attacks against the UE by the government, companies and other labor unions.
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Today, the union is still one of the most progressive unions in the nation. I talk with the union’s president, Peter Knowlton about its recent decision to endorse Bernie Sanders for president and declare strong support for a Green New Deal.
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And a new attack against Social Security has been unleashed—this one by the occupant of the Oval Office who wants to cut the contribution rate for Social Security. It’s a really bad idea, and yet another attempt by the right-wing to destroy one of the most successful domestic programs in the nation’s…
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Aug 28, 2019
Ep 145: Hell, No, You Won't Take My Pension; The Sleazy Corporate Attack On City and Town Budgets
Episode 145:
We are taught as kids to keep your word. If you promised not to do something bad or your promised to do something good, we learned you have to keep your promise otherwise people pretty quickly don’t trust you. Which explains why most people just don’t trust politicians—like politicians who are supposed to be your allies and who promised thousands of people they would get a decent pension and, then, vote to take it away.
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And, so, "see you in court" is the cry we begin with. Stacy Chamberlain, the executive director of AFSCME Council 75, gives the lowdown on a critical lawsuit to challenge a bill--passed by a Democratic super majority and signed by the Democratic governor—that would rob workers of a big slice of their hard-earned pensions.
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And, then, shocker—Wal-Mart is up to some sleazy stuff yet again. Wal-Mart and other big corporations,…
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Aug 21, 2019
Ep 144: Wal-Mart Guns In Teachers’ Sights; Boeing Breaks Labor Law; Nurses Fight Retaliation Firings
Episode 144:
Sometimes CEOs and the economic elites do stuff that is so transparently absurd that it sort of makes me laugh. Add to that list the letter, “A statement on the purpose of a corporation”, released this past week by the Business Roundtable, signed by a couple of hundred CEOs, promising to be, well, nice to us—better wages, better treatment, better community efforts, all done with the help of the glorious free market. I could go down that list and point to, one after the other, all the horrendous policies those CEOs make happen—not to mention the huge riches they pay themselves at the expense of shareholders and workers, none of which they offered in the letter to cut back on for the betterment of human kind.
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But, better yet, this week’s episode features two of those hypocritical companies. Wal-Mart arms many people with guns—and teachers are ramping up a campaign to empty Wal-Mart’s shelves of the…
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Aug 14, 2019
Episode 143: Kill More Hogs, Hurt More Workers; Your Server’s Higher Wage Won’t Hurt
Episode 143: Working on in a hog processing plant is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse, evoking “The Jungle” of the early 20th Century. In a classic profits-over-people move, a new regulation is about to hit which would eliminate any speed restrictions on how fast hog carcasses come hurtling down the assembly line. As it is about to become law—more than a year after I first talked about the topic in a May 2018 episode—I bring back Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker safety and health program at the National Employment Law Project, to dig into the attack against these workers.
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Then, you knew it along—hiking the minimum wage does not usher in an apocalypse for businesses, despite the whining and moaning of the CEO class. The opposite is true. With the latest state minimum wage hike at the end of 2018 to $15 an hour in New York State in the books, I…
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Aug 7, 2019
Ep 142: How Would Warren’s Wealth Tax Work?; Nepalese Women Fight For Equal Pay in Construction
Episode 142: Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax in the country is a potential game-changer. It would apply only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more—roughly the wealthiest 75,000 households, or the top 0.1%. those super rich would pay an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. I dig into the idea of a wealth tax with David Gamage, a professor of law at Indiana University and a tax law expert who has just written the first draft of an article called, “Five Key Research Findings On Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich”.
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Then, I look at a fight for equal pay by women in Nepal who work in the construction industry. For that chat, I welcome to the show Feyzi Ismail who, among her various posts, teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London where she also is a senior fellow in the D…
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Jul 31, 2019
Episode 141: Progressive Challenger Speaks!; Fred Meyer Rips Off Women; The Fed Redux
Episode 141: It’s just basically a good thing when good, new, progressive people run in primaries against incumbents. Even if that incumbent isn’t a horrible human being and has a decent voting record—compared of course to the rest of the politicians out there. Today we get to hear from a darn good candidate, Albert Lee, who’s taking on a long-time incumbent.
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And, guess what? Women are still paid a lot less than men—I take a look at how grocery chain Fred Meyer is ripping off women in a chat with Tom Chamberlain, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO.
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And, lastly, since the Federal Reserve Board is wrapping up its July meeting today and won’t be meeting again until September and is likely to be announcing a cut in interest rates—as I record this the official announcement has not come but the markets have already “priced in” an interest rate cut—I t…
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Jul 24, 2019
Ep 140: Stopping Wall Street Looting; Airline Workers Demand Fair Pay; The Minimum Wage Bill Passes
Episode 140: I like the ring of The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, don’t you? True, it’s part of the business model of the joint, especially the private equity pirates. The Act is, in fact, aimed squarely at the private equity industry, who have stripped and destroyed hundreds of companies. I’ll talk about the Act with the national expert on the industry, Eileen Appelbaum, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
When you are sitting on your airplane ready to take off, you’ve probably seen those LSG Sky Chefs catering trucks driving up to service your plane with the sumptuous menu of crackers and peanuts. Thousands of those catering workers are low paid, and have to pay for expensive ,mediocre health insurance—and they are preparing for a possible strike to get some justice on the job. I’ll be speaking with one of the workers on today’s program.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/…
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Jul 17, 2019
Episode 139: The Corporate Sneak Attack Against Workers In The States; Amazon’s Tax Dodging Culture.
Episode 139: I have to tip my cap to the conservative, anti-worker right-wing. That whole gang has been far more focused, in a laser-like way, on seizing power in places where it can matter a lot—the local and state political arenas. Progressives, until recently, just didn’t focus enough on state capitols and local races—letting the right wing dominate state legislatures and local city governments. And that’s meant really bad things for workers to the tune of billions of dollars in lost wages—as we will hear today from Laura Huizer, senior staff attorney of the National Employment Law Project, who talks about a report she has co-authored looking at a little wonky, very dangerous, legal thing called “pre-emption”.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
And with the strike by thousands of workers globally against Amazon this past Monday on Amazon Prime day, I remind us what a corporate terrorist the company really is by re-airing two great segments o…
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Jul 10, 2019
Ep 138: EPA Workers Attacked!; Why Do People Become Refugees?; Mexico’s Labor Laws: Getting Better?
Episode 138: Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, is launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown on the draconian rules imposed just days ago. I can’t add to the descriptions of the daily despicable conditions faced by migrants and refugees at the southern border. Instead, what I wanted to do today is go the root of what brought so many to flee their homes—what made people refugees? It’s economic oppression, corruption, the lack of the rule of law—all blessed, supported, encouraged and funded by the U.S. I look at this in two conversations. First, Vicki Gass, Senior Policy expert for Central America and Mexico for Oxfam, describes why people become refugees. And, then, Gladys Cisneros the Solidarity Center’s country prog…
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Jul 3, 2019
Episode 137: The Conspiracies to Rob Workers—at the VA and in Hollywood.
Episode 137: If you look hard enough, you can find conspiracies to defraud workers in every corner of the economy—and those conspiracies are usually dressed up as something entirely different. Take the people who work for the VA—there is a conspiracy to crush their union and cut wages, all dressed by in the cloak of “efficiency through privatization”. I talk with American Federation of Government Employees leaders Marilyn Park and Eric Gerken about the Orwellian-named “Mission Act”, which will cripple the VA, hurt the quality of care Vets receive and undermine the union. And in the glittering world of Hollywood, talent agencies are pocketing huge fees as essentially payoffs from studios, in a broad conspiracy that is taking away money from writers of movies, who are the people talent agencies are supposed to be representing. David Goodman, the president of the Writers Guild of America and a long-time, top-tier TV writer, chats with me about the fight that has already seen,…
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Jun 26, 2019
Episode 136: Dump Citibank For The Post Office; Stopping Violence & Harassment At Work
Episode 136: It seems so simple—post offices are everywhere, often literally on Main Streets in towns all across the country. Everyone knows where the post office is. So, why not turn post offices into hubs of financial transactions for people, from pay check cashing, which could be a first step, and then on to remittances of money to families around the globe and even installing Postal Service ATMs? You can boil down this down to a simple question: who would you rather give your business to, Citibank or the Post Office? I take up this idea with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur. Then, Catherine Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department, is back to dig into a new global treaty to combat violence and harassment at work.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
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Jun 19, 2019
Episode 135: Secrets of The Fed; NAFTA Intrigue; Minimum Wage Robbery
It’s an action-packed, let’s-catch-the-thieves-in-the-act episode. The Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee just wrapped up its two-day secret June meeting without triggering a new cut in interests rates—and what does that mean? I unravel the state of play at the Fed—and ask the question why shouldn’t we change the basic structure of the Fed—with Dean Baker, Fed-watcher extraordinaire and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Intrigue is also swirling around the renegotiation of NAFTA 2.0 so Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch who knows the entire inside story and state-of-play, is back with all the insight you can’t get from anyone else. I close by noting a sad moment in time—it’s been a whole decade since workers saw a rise in the federal minimum wage, which is stuck at a poverty-level, immoral $7.25. Leo Gertner, a staff attorney with the National Employment Law Center, joins me for a chat about a new report excoriatin…
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Jun 12, 2019
Episode 134: Presidential and California Progressive Politics—Bernie! & Tulsi + Cory…
Episode 134: As you may recall from last week’s episode, I was at the California Democratic State Party convention recently. I continue bringing you the speeches of the presidential candidates who spoke—this week it’s Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Cory Booker. To give those speeches some context, I chat with Karen Bernal, the outgoing chair of the California state party progressive caucus. We look back at the past few years—and try to be honest about progressive victories and defeats, and the long road ahead to shaking loose the elements of the establishment who stand in the way of progress and a more democratic (small “d”) party.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
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Jun 5, 2019
Ep 133: Elizabeth Warren Speaks!; Tefere Talks Union & AFL-CIO Politics; Tax Ideas For The People!
Episode 133:
I just returned from the great city of San Francisco which hosted the state Democratic Party Convention. And in my audio bag are most of the speeches of the Democratic presidential candidates who gave their pitches to the delegates—California, with a much earlier primary than usual, will potentially have a decisive say about who will be the eventual Democratic nominee. This week, Elizabeth Warren starts off a mini-series of the speeches, which I will bring to you in the coming weeks. Warren gave, in my opinion, the sharpest, most focused, clear policy and philosophical speech of them all.
Then, Tefere Gebre, the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, joins me for a deep discussion about worker uprisings, the racism of trade and tariffs and internal politics inside the Federation that have targeted him.
And I wrap up with my favorite topic, taxes. Jessica Schieder, a federal tax policy fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, walks us through some ne…
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May 29, 2019
Episode 132: Murder, Violence and Robbery—Gifts From the Free Market
Episode 132: Murder, violence and robbery—it sounds like a list for a plot of The Wire. But, no, it’s just another standard operating procedure for the free market system—in which people are murdered in Colombia thanks to so-called “free trade”, workers are beat up and sometimes killed at McDonald’s because the company doesn’t care about its workers beyond the bottom line so leaves workers exposed to threats to their lives and, lastly, public sector employees have the money they have saved for retirement, sometimes over many decades, taken from them mainly because some greedy Wall Street lowlifes crashed the economy to make a pile of money no matter the cost to millions of people.
The Violence: Debbie Berkowitz, the Worker Health and Safety Program Director for the National Employment Law Project, chats with me about NELP’s new report looking at the violence faced by McDonald’s workers.
The Robbery: Tom Chamberlain, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, explains how the…
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May 22, 2019
Ep 131: Are The War Hawks Ginning Up A War With Iran?; Flight Attendants and The Future Of Labor
Episode 131: Here we go again: a slow but steady laying of a groundwork for a war, this time against Iran, assisted by the media’s promotion of lies surrounding Iran, reprising the role it played almost two decades ago hyping up the threats posed by Iraq. I talk in-depth with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the Iran war threat. Then, Sara Nelson, the dynamic president of the Association of Flight Attendants, joins me for a discussion about what her members face and the future of labor.
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May 15, 2019
Episode 130: The Corporate Game: Stealing From Us Again; A Political Reporter Chat
Episode 130: Our friends at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, my go-to folks when it comes to tax policy, put out another fantastic report called “Corporate Tax Avoidance Remains Rampant Under New Tax Law”. I know—you’re shocked, just shocked that the 2017 GOP tax fraud bill is letting corporations steal from us day after day…steal because tax avoidance by corporations. To dig into this robbery, I turn to a frequent guest, the Oracle himself, ITEP’s Matt Gardner. Then, I decided to rope in for a conversation Alex Seitz-Wald, a main political reporter for NBC and MSNBC. Alex rings me up now and again to get chat about stories he’s working on, and, now and again, he makes the mistake of choosing to actually quote me—accurately I would quickly add, and with my permission. So, I thought I’d turn the tables on him a bit—though not for the purposes in engaging in bashing of traditional media, which I’ve engaged in a lot and for which there is plenty of fod…
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May 8, 2019
Episode 129: Oregon Teachers Uprising; The Shame of Kids’ Poverty; Savings Miners’ Pensions.
Episode 129: Just hours ago, 25,000 teachers and their supporters massed in Portland, Oregon to demand a fully-funded education system—it’s another moment in the incredible teacher organizing that has swept the country over the past year. With the energy of thousands of revved up teachers pulsing in the background, I chat at the rally with teacher/union leaders, as well as bring other voices from the mobilization. Then, in the richest nation in human history, 11.5 million children live in poverty. Children. I talk with Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, about the Child Tax Credit and the new move to get states to fill the hole in the federal CTC system, and maybe even bump up the miserly amount given to families who need it most to make sure kids can eat and be clothed. And here’s a pro tip for climate change activists: if you want to build bridges with coal miners who might not be on board with your agenda, you could start, in a small…
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Apr 17, 2019
Episode 128: Walking The Stop & Shop Picket Line; A Pilot’s View of The 737 Max
Episode 128: Another day, another profitable corporation trying to skim more dough from the pockets of workers. Thousands of workers are striking Stop & Shop in the Northeast—I’m joined by Julie Sabo, one of those workers and a 38-year veteran of the company. Then, a top official of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), First Officer James Belton, chats with me about the 737 Max and the crucial role the pilots and their union play in airline safety. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of the parent company of Stop & Shop.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Apr 10, 2019
Episode 127: Sacramento and Florida Teacher Uprisings!
Episode 127: Everyone measures the morality or immorality of society based on different criteria. For some, it’s the huge numbers of people who pay outrageous amounts for prescription drugs or just go bankrupt because of health care costs. For others, it’s racism permeating our economic and social fabric or the permanent war economy the country has had for generations, wasting trillions of dollars on behalf of the military-industrial complex. Today, I hone in on the immorality of how the country, mainly its right-wing politicians, treats teachers. And we’re going to dig into that with a look at two new teacher uprisings on the two coasts.
I talk with David Fisher, president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, about the strike starting tomorrow over the scandalous conduct of the education bigwigs who are engaging in widespread unfair labor practices, violating a contract agreed to last year by the union and management. Then, I take our listeners across the country to Flo…
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Apr 3, 2019
Episode 126: Equal Pay For Women…Long Way To Go; Government Workers Under Attack; J.D. Scholten
Episode 126: Yesterday was Equal Pay Day—not a celebratory day but a time, again, to raise a stink that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country: on average in 2018, women were paid 22.6 percent less than men. I talk more about gender pay discrimination with economist Elise Gould. I, then, speak with Jacque Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, about the relatively under-the-radar full-scale Trump attack on the rights of federal workers and their unions. To wrap up the show, I welcome back J.D. Scholten who came oh so close to defeating the racist Steve King in Iowa’s 4th Congressional district. J.D. has continued to travel the state, focusing on the issue of poverty.
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Mar 27, 2019
Episode 125: It’s A Trap Handcuffing You To A Job; NAFTA Is Still A Bad Deal
Episode 125: So, you want another job? That’s a pretty normal kind of desire for millions of people. Maybe there’s a better job out there that pays more money. Maybe the place you work just stinks, it’s abusive or you’re the target of sexual harassment. So, ok, off you go to polish up the old resume and start looking…well it isn’t that easy. You, and millions of people like you, may be trapped by a bad contract clause. I’ll talk about that wrinkle today with an expert leading a campaign to give a lot more freedom to millions of workers. Then, it’s a fresh in-depth look with AFL-CIO trade expert Celeste Drake at the state of play of negotiations over the new North American Free Trade Agreement. In short, it’s still a bad deal.
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Mar 20, 2019
Episode 124: Here’s How We Fund “Medicare For All” & The Rest; Work Is Not Safe
Episode 124: I offer a public service to progressives—and to those, like me, who are irritated by progressive leaders who don’t know how to talk about specifics when it comes to policy, and just spew out sloganeering, even when they get caught making mistakes. It’s embarrassing. So, today, Matt Gardner, a leading expert on tax policy, comes back to the show to talk with me about five specific things we can do to raise close to $5 trillion over the next decade. Jot these down—and send them to your favorite member of Congress or TV talking head. I, then, welcome back Debbie Berkowitz, a national expert on safety and health in the workplace, to for a chat about the grim reality that going to work has gotten more dangerous in the Trump era.
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Mar 13, 2019
Episode 123: Bangladesh Workers Under Attack; Wage Theft in Houston
Episode 123: If you are looking for a place to see the scourge of free market capitalism at work, you don’t have to look further than Bangladesh. I talk with Monika Hartsel of the Solidarity Center about the thousands of workers in Bangladesh who have been recently fired for protesting and demanding better wages. I, then, welcome back Marianela Acuña Arreaza of the Houston-based Faith and Justice Worker Center to discuss the widespread wage theft her organizations has uncovered. Our Robber Barons of the week are the CEOs of Big Pharma.
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Mar 6, 2019
Episode 122: A Union Fights Corporate Greed in Erie, PA; Kimberly Ellis Runs Again!
Episode 122: A classic workers versus corporate greed battle is underway right now in Erie, Pennsylvania. Just about 2,000 workers who make locomotives are walking the picket lines in freezing weather—and I talk with Scott Slawson, the president of the union, to get the details on their struggle against, Wabtec, a union-busting company. Kimberly Ellis is back on the show to give us an inside look at her new bid to become chair of the California Democratic Party—and she’s the front-runner! Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Wabtec.
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Feb 27, 2019
Episode 121: Amazon Turns Tail and Bolts; Strange Demands by The LATimes Owners
Episode 121: Here’s one thing we learned in recent days about Jeff Bezos—like all CEOs, he’s a bully and quite uninterested in engaging in a give-and-take with community leaders where Amazon does business. I talk to union leader Dave Mertz about the decision by Amazon to back out of the deal to build part of its new headquarters in New York City, mainly because Bezos was unwilling to yield an inch on union rights and other demands to alter the bad terms of the original agreement. Then, I check back in with the contract negotiations at the Los Angeles Times—a year after the union victory, which I covered, the organizing committee is still battling the company for a first contract, and, now, the newspaper has thrown a pretty bizarre demand into the mix. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of UBS.
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Feb 20, 2019
Episode 120: Bernie Talks
Episode 120: In case you hadn’t heard…Bernie Sanders has entered the race for the 2020 presidential Democratic nomination. I devote the entire podcast this week to a re-airing of my in-depth conversation with Bernie just before the 2016 general election—what he had to say then is still quite relevant today. Enjoy!
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Feb 13, 2019
Episode 119: The Corporate Grab For Your Mailbox; The Peoples’ Scientist Talks Climate Change
Episode 119: They are back—and trying to get their hands on your mailbox. Big money interests have tried for a very long time to make a ton of money by privatizing the postal service, and now the danger is ramped up with the ideologues in the White House. Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, is back on the show to explain the threat to universal, affordable mail service—and to the security of your information. I, then, chat with Katharine Hayhoe, a leading atmospheric scientist and a co-author of the last two National Climate Assessments, about the challenges inherit in educating people about climate change, especially in the face of the media’s willingness to consider the arguments of climate change deniers as legitimate. Our Robber Baron of the week is a building contractor who stole millions from hundreds of workers.
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Feb 6, 2019
Episode 118: Fast Food Workers Have A Union!; A Judge’s Inside View of the Immigration System
Episode 118: Thousands of workers, and supporters, have rallied and marched for several years under the banner “Fight for 15”—a demand that fast food workers, and all workers, be paid at least $15-an-hour, almost double the poverty-level federal minimum wage, and, as important, have the right to form a union. It’s been a hard slog but a bright spot shines: workers who toil for Burgerville in Oregon have won union representation rights at three of the chain’s locations. I talk with two of the workers, Emmett Schlenz and James Curry. Then, we see through a judge’s eyes the crisis facing the immigration system—a crisis exacerbated by the racism hurled at immigrants from the Oval Office. It’s my chat with Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of Burgerville.
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Jan 30, 2019
Episode 117: The Bezos-Style Greed Is On Fire!; Tunisian Workers Revolt
Episode 117: The rich are living the creed of the 1987 film “Wall Street”: Greed is good! Consider this: 26 billionaires now have a collective wealth of $1.4 trillion—equal to the wealth of the bottom 3.8 billion people on the planet. That’s just a smidgen of the immorality I discuss with Oxfam America’s Paul O’Brien, whose organization has a startling report out called “Public Good or Private Wealth?”. Then, I chat with Hind Cherrouk, regional director for North Africa and the Middle East for the Solidarity Center, about the mass uprisings by workers in Tunisia who are seeking a small raise so they can actually eat. Our Robber Barons of the week are those 26 billionaires spotlighted by Oxfam.
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Jan 23, 2019
Episode 116: Make The Climate Killer Pay; Teachers Win a Good Deal; Professionals Going Union
Episode 116: Just as we were wrapping up the podcast episode, the striking teachers in Los Angeles won a new contract. I review the highlights, and underscore the smart strategy the union used in the campaign that generated overwhelming support for the teachers. Then, I chat with climate warrior Daphne Wysham about “risk bonding”, a demand that the fossil fuel industry stop dumping the costs of environmental damage on us and start paying up, in advance, for the wreckage the industry causes. Finally, with Jennifer Dorning, the president of the AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees, I dig into the interesting trend of a slight uptick in professionals who are joining unions. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of ExxonMobil.
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Jan 16, 2019
Episode 115: Should Bernie Run?; Teachers Striking!; A National Severance Pay Now!
Episode 115: A lot of people are wondering: should Bernie Sanders run? Is Bernie going to run? In today’s episode, I consider the notion that Bernie would become the most powerful politician in the country, and it could be better for the progressive movement, if maybe he sidestepped running for president. Whoa! Then, I check in with the massive and important teachers’ strike in Los Angeles—you will hear from the president of the union, Alex Caputo-Pearl. I wrap up with a conversation with Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about a “radical” idea: a national severance pay law. After all, if CEOs never lose a dime when they screw up and get sacked, why should workers, who actually do their jobs and create the real value for a company, not be assured of pocketing a nice hunk of cash when a company goes belly up or just fires thousands of workers just to make the bottom line look better?
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Jan 9, 2019
Episode 114: How Amazon Dodges Taxes; 22 Million Workers Get A Raise!
Episode 114: I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently on the very bad deal made by New York and Virginia with Amazon to lure the company to build its new headquarters in those two states. Amazon is an important story because of the power it exercises over our economy—a power that grows every day. This week, I talk with Oren Teicher, the CEO of the American Booksellers Association, whose perspective goes beyond the damage Amazon has done to book stores; he and I talk specifically about the hundreds of millions of dollars states and cities lose because of Amazon’s on-going shenanigans around sales tax collections, and how the company hurts businesses and communities on just about every block in the country. In the second segment, I celebrate and discuss with Yannet Lathrop of the National Employment Law Project the extra money 22 million workers will see in their paychecks this year because of state and local hikes in the minimum wage (yes: the federal minimum wage still stands at…
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Dec 19, 2018
Episode 113: The Tax Bill Scam—An Anniversary Look Back; Fighting in States For Worker Power
Episode 113: The least surprising thing I might say is: the GOP Tax bill last year was an utter scam. We knew it. But, now we have a full year to look back at the lies and the realities of the tax cuts—where has all that money gone? I discuss all this with Richard Phillips, senior policy analyst at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. I, then, pick apart a great report on what can be done to win workers’ rights at the state level. That’s a discussion with Paul Sonn, state policy director of the National Employment Law Center, which co-produced the report. The Robber Baron of the week is the former CEO of Sears.
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
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Dec 12, 2018
Episode 112: A Con Job—Using Taxpayer Dough To Build A Stadium; A Progressive Economic Roadmap
Episode 112: I’ve loved baseball since I was a kid. But, at the same time, I don’t believe we, the people, the taxpayers, should spend a single dime to help build baseball stadiums, or any sports arena, for the rich people or corporations who own teams. Don’t believe the hype—these projects never pay back the subsidies doled out, and, in fact, the track record has been disastrous for many cities, saddling taxpayers with a pile of debt. Just a few weeks ago, the people of Portland got their first look at the design and plan for building a baseball stadium—and a con job that may be under way. I have a long chat on the topic with the national leading expert on sports stadium economics, Roger Noll, professor emeritus at Stanford University. I am, then, joined by Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, to talk about the organization’s roadmap for a progressive economic agenda. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of General Motors Mary B…
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Dec 5, 2018
Ep 111: Amazon Attacks Workers; Patents & Copyrights=Corp Big Bucks; The GOP Racist Tax Cuts
Episode 111: I circle back on the bad deal made by politicians in New York and Virginia with Amazon, honing in specifically on the vicious anti-unionism Amazon pursues—and, despite the hallucinating by the NYC mayor that somehow bringing Amazon to NYC will magically turn it into a fuzzy pro union company, I talk with Dave Mertz of the RWDSU about the global path littered with Amazon’s attacks against unions and against workers. Dean Baker, frequent guest and senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, talks with me about the real profit centers for corporations—control over patents and copyrights, all of which adds up to one trillion dollars more in corporate profits, and hits on the average person’s wallet. Lastly, racism is a little talked-about aspect of the GOP tax cut robbery last year—Meg Wiehe, the deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, talks with me about her recent excellent report called, “Race, Wealth and Taxes: Ho…
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Nov 28, 2018
Episode 110: NAFTA 2.0—What’s The Bottom Line?
Episode 110: Join me in choking on the following three words: Trump was right. When he criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a bad deal during the 2016 campaign, he was telling a truth that resonated for many working people—even though, of course, Trump, who defrauded thousands of people who worked for him and would pile lie after lie about workers and unions, was certainly not going to blow up NAFTA on behalf of working people.
But, there is now a draft of NAFTA 2.0. In this episode, I dig deep into what it says and means. Most of the episode is a great conversation between two trade experts who are peoples’ advocates: Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch, and Celeste Drake, the trade and globalization policy specialist at the AFL-CIO.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
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Nov 21, 2018
Episode 109: Amazon Robbery Redux—The Bad, Bad and The Really Bad
Episode 109: I’m a dog with a bone. I take on Amazon for the second straight week for its utter highway robbery, with the willing participation of politicians, of the people of New York and Virginia. Greg Leroy, executive director of Good Jobs First, kicks off our episode with a deep dive into the lies about what this deal will cost and, surprise, it’s a whole lot more than Amazon and its political allies are saying. I, then, talk to Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, who phones in from London where he is attending a meeting of a coalition of global unions strategizing solely over the viciously anti-union Amazon. I wrap up the episode with Maritza Silva-Farrell, executive director of the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN). Ok, you are all smart listeners—guess who the Robber Baron of the week is?
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://w…
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Nov 14, 2018
Episode 108: Amazon Bigfoots NY and VA—We Follow Up A Ground-Breaking February Story
Episode 108: This week, Amazon announced which two communities, thanks to willing political cowards, it will fleece in return for siting its new HQ. I expand on the ground-breaking Amazon episode Working Life did in February with three segments on the financial, tax and community implications of the marauding corporation’s breathtaking campaign to extort billions. The Robber Baron of the week is, of course, Jeff Bezos.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
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Nov 7, 2018
Episode 107: Election Day Musings—Hear Beto, Katie, Abdul and Celinda!
Episode 107: If you are shaking off the cobwebs from way too much surfing, watching and texting about every bit of Election Day trivia, then, you are an elections junkie. So, buckle up: I’ve got a great episode to keep that addiction fed. Listen again to Beto O’Rourke talk about the campaign as he rode in his car around Texas. Hear from Katie Hill, a progressive almost certainly about to become a new member of Congress from California. Abdul El-Sayed comes back on the show to give his perspective about lessons progressives can learn from his own race for governor in Michigan and the broader outcomes. National pollster and general wise soul Celinda Lake is back to wrap up the analysis. And, lastly, I have a list of 5 things to be happy about from Election Day!
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Oct 31, 2018
Ep 106: Mid-Term Election Results Will Be…; Grocers go Belly-Up: The Dark World of Private Equity
Episode 106: I know no more than the next person about what the mid-term election results will be. But, what I can do is bring you, exclusively, the thinking in this episode of Celinda Lake, one of the nation’s leading Democratic and issues pollsters, who tells us what is driving voters right now just days before the election. Then, I take a deep look with national economics guru Eileen Appelbaum into the bankruptcies of grocery chains across the nation, which are financial failures driven by the greed of private equity barons. Our Robber Baron of the week is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for his leading role in trying to defeat a ballot initiative that would tax businesses to raise a small amount of money to address the homeless crisis.
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Oct 24, 2018
Ep 105: Uber/Lyft Drivers Race-To-Bottom; Sales Taxes Rob The Poor; Wellstone Remembered
Episode 105: Thousands of drivers in the app-driven ride service business, principally those who work for Uber and Lyft, just can’t make ends meet—and the whole scramble has created a race-to-the-bottom in which companies impoverish the very people who bring in the cash (sound familiar?). To get an insight into the plight of such drivers, I speak with Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the National Taxi Workers Alliance, and economist James Parrott from The New School. Heard the conservative rhetoric about no-income tax states being the easy street place to live? It’s the big lie—because state and local sales, property and excise taxes, which try to fill the budget gaps, are a huge burden, mostly on the not-rich. I explore the issue with Carl Davis of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Lastly, as I do each year as October 25th looms (tomorrow), we remember, with his own words, the late Senator Paul Wellstone, a great progressive champion, who died in a plane cra…
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Oct 17, 2018
Episode 104: Traister Talks “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger”
Episode 104: I am devoting the entire podcast this week to Rebecca Traister’s new book, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger”. I rarely do books on this show because, once you start, where do you draw the line on what I *have* to read? But, this is an important topic—I had the chance to record Rebecca’s talk at one of the nation’s absolute best bookstores, Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. In keeping with the topic, our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of NBCUniversal for allowing a pervasive culture of sexual harassment at NBC News to thrive.
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Oct 10, 2018
Ep 103: Progressive Ideas In A Conservative District; Riggers Taking on Anti-Union Rhino Gone Wild
Episode 103: I’ve been featuring dozens of progressive candidates running at all levels. Many of them have not won their races, largely primaries. But, as I’ve said before, the conversation that such progressive bring to a race is so key—especially in more conservative areas. So, I talk to Mike Ellison, a working class union member, who is running for the relatively conservative Oregon’s 19th House District on a strong progressive platform. Then, I dig into a campaign by unionized riggers to bring to heel the Wal-Mart of the concert business, Rhino. Our Robber Baron of the week is—again!—Amazon’s CEO Jezz Bezos.
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Oct 3, 2018
Episode 102: NEW Data Show It: Women Will Power November Wave; The New Republican Treasury Robbery
Episode 102: It doesn’t matter where a woman sits on the political spectrum—solid majorities of Democratic, Independent and Republican women support policies you could term “progressive”. I talk with Celinda Lake, a long-time national pollster who conducted a just-released survey, which points to a powerful wave of women voters who will shape the coming election. And they are at it again: the Republicans are, under cover of other controversies, pushing through yet another robbery of the Treasury. We knew it would happen—and Matt Gardner, from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, is back to break down “Tax Cuts 2.0”. The Robber Baron of the week is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
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Sep 26, 2018
Episode 101: Shocker! Drug Companies Scam The People; D.C. Tipped Workers Shafted By Pols?
Episode 101: I know--you're shocked, shocked to hear that major drug companies are dodging taxes & stashing billions in tax havens around the world. Oxfam's Robbie Silverman joins me to talk about the organization's blockbuster report, and how Big Pharma's Gang of Four is hurting millions of people. Then, it's over to the nation's Capitol where the local politicians think they know better than voters--after the people voted to require higher minimum wages for tipped workers, the mayor and her cronies want to repeal the law because--get this--the voters didn't understand what they were supporting. I discuss the gory details of this perversion of democracy with David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute who has a dynamite report on the value of higher wages for tipped workers. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Pfizer.
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Sep 19, 2018
Episode 100: The Human Pain In Every Morsel You Eat; NY Progressives Chalk Up Big Wins
Episode 100: A quick "birthday" promo: you are listening to the 100th episode of the podcast. Make today the day you become one of our small financial supporters--go to workinglife.org, click on the Patreon link and sign up to be a monthly contributor.
Every bite of food you take has a lot of sweat and tears of agricultural workers around the world. I welcome back our good friend and global organizer Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center, to talk about the tens of millions of people who toil in the food global supply chain--and how to build a food justice movement.
Turning to the recent elections in New York, Katherine Brezler, grassroots activist extraordinaire, drops by to pick apart why progressives should feel pretty damn good about the results at the polls.
Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of a drug company that jacked up the price of a critical drug more than 500%.
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Sep 12, 2018
Episode 99: Anonymous Tells Unintended Truths; Cutting Off The Prison Industry; Bank Workers Woes
Episode 99: Anonymous did, in fact, do us a great favor—but probably not in the way he or she (most likely a “he”) thinks. I ruminate a bit on the point I have made for a long time—Anonymous simply showed us that Donald Trump and the Republican Party, as a whole, are one and the same.
I, then, turn to a discussion with American Federation of Teachers leader Jay Rehak about his union’s efforts to use its large pension fund holdings to undercut the private prison industry’s role in tearing children from their families under the immoral Trump immigration policies.
And, finally, I converse with Anastasia Christman from the National Employment Law Project about the hard conditions facing bank workers.
Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of General Dynamics.
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Sep 5, 2018
Episode 98: States With Best Work Life; Oklahoma Repubs Go Down In Flames; Labor's Future
Episode 98: Curious which states have a better work environment? We have the answer thanks to Oxfam which unveils a ranking based on wages, worker protections and the right to organize a union. I chat about the details with Oxfam's Minor Sinclair. I, then, welcome back Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, for a chat about how the teachers' uprising in her state led to a slew of primary defeats for Republicans who voted against a tax hike to fund education. Lastly, I engage in a "what does labor need to do to grow?" with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, who always has an interesting, informed progressive take on the way forward for unions. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of Primavera, an online charter school.
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Aug 29, 2018
Episode 97: CEOs Pocket YOUR Money; It’s A Fact: More Unions, Less Inequality
Episode 97: As Labor Day looms on the horizon, I ring up Larry Mishel, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, to talk about his new study looking at CEO greed. Not a shock, but if you are wondering where that pay increase went, it’s probably in the CEO’s bank account. A logical conversation after digging into CEO greed is this: how do you fight inequality? The answer is, and has always been, more unions, as I’ve emphasized during many episodes. That’s great rhetoric—but Suresh Naidu has the actual data proving that this has been true going back many decades, before government statistics began tracking the connection between union strength and an equal society. He joins me to talk about his path-breaking work. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Prime Healthcare.
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Aug 22, 2018
Episode 96: Toys R Us Workers Aren’t Playing Around; The Secret To Organizing A Union
Episode 96: When Toys R Us went belly up, 33,000 workers were cast into the streets with no severance because the bankruptcy laws favor corporate thieves and raiders. But, those workers are fighting back. I talk to two key leaders in the campaign to change the laws and get a bit of justice, not just for Toys R Us workers but all people. I, then, welcome back a good friend, Richard Bensinger, to talk about a new initiative he’s launched to teach workers inside companies how to launch effective union organizing campaigns. The Robber Baron of the Week is the CEO of Toys R Us
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Aug 15, 2018
Episode 95: The Torching of Education; The “Opportunity Zone” Tax Scam.
Episode 95: The destruction of our education system hasn’t just been a natural phenomena like the sun rising in the east. It’s been a determined assault on our schools and teachers by right-wing ideological zealots. To get the facts about this campaign of destruction, I talk to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, about the union’s important new study, “A Decade of Neglect: Public Education Funding in the Aftermath of the Great Recession.” I, then, explore with tax expert Richard Phillips the below-the-radar tax scam slipped into the Republican tax plan robbery called “opportunity zones.” Our Robber Barons of the week are the CEO and Chairman of Dish Network.
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Aug 8, 2018
Episode 94: The Economy of Racism
Episode 94: Yesterday was Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, the day that signifies how long it would take for an African American woman to work in 2018 to equal the *2017* pay of a white male counterpart. I noted this day a year ago in Episode 41—and come back to it today in conversation with Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. And it isn’t just black workers facing racism: Hispanic workers face similar bias, which is what I discuss with Marie Mora, who is with the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley and co-author of a new EPI report. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Kimberly Clark.
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Aug 1, 2018
Episode 93: Nepalese Women Empowered; The Stock Buy-Back Robbery
Episode 93: In the sea of millions of migrant workers who end up slaves or in forced labor, a pilot project has empowered Nepalese women working in Jordan’s garment industry to make a better deal. I spoke to the International Labor Organization’s Phillip Fishman about how the project works—and whether it can be scaled up. I, then, talk to the co-authors of a study looking at how companies are using the majority of profits to buy back shares, a gambit that goes back to the time before the Republican tax cuts which are going, as well, largely to buy back shares--which is great news for CEOs who get rich but not so much for workers. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of Lowe’s, a company buying back shares with money that could, if used for workers’ wages, give a pay hike of almost $20,000 to each worker.
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Jul 25, 2018
Ep 92: UnBought & UnBossed Debut; Progressive Works To Dump One Of The Worst Republicans in Congress
Ep. 92: Republican Steve King is a racist, a despicable politician who fans the flames of hatred and division aiming mainly at immigrants. So, I welcomed to the show J.D. Scholten, the progressive Democrat who is aiming to take this guy down in November in the race for Iowa’s 4th Congressional district. Kimberly Ellis comes back to the show to talk about her new effort looking to be, as she says, an “incubator for the next generation of political disrupters”. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Tronc who sacked scores of New York Daily News journalists.
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Jul 18, 2018
Ep 91: Can A Conservative & Dem Socialist Converse? Yup! Plus: Digging Into Our $15.7 Trillion Debt
Episode 91: Anyone remember the talk show “Firing Line” with arch-conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., which ended its run in 1999? Well, it’s baaaaack…with a new host, my conservative friend Margaret Hoover, who visits with me to talk about reviving the iconic show, as well as the state of conservatism and the Republican Party. I, then, welcome back our all-things taxes guru Matt Gardner to tell you’all the truth about why we have a $15.7 trillion debt—and, psst, it’s all about tax cuts for the rich and war, not social spending. Our Robber Baron of the week, for the third time, is Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and now the richest man in human history.
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Jul 11, 2018
Episode 90: Blowing Up The Big Lie; Black Lives Matter; Washington State Progressive Runs
Episode 90: I recently posted a column, which I talk a bit about in the opening of the episode, predicting that the recent teachers’ uprisings (which have been featured a lot on the podcast) will have far more lasting impact on the country’s economic policies than any one electoral race—and those uprisings may blow up the Big Lie conservatives have shopped around for several decades. You, then, will hear a recording from a recent inspiring Black Lives Matter rally I attended in Los Angeles, and that’s especially relevant as we watch the Supreme Court signal increased hostility towards people of color, and, generally, progressive ideas (sorry, friends, that guy is going to get confirmed). Last up is my conversation with Dorothy Gasque, a progressive running for the Democratic nomination in Washington State’s 3rd Congressional district. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Coca Cola who seems to be just fine with the company’s role in global human rights violations.
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Jul 4, 2018
Episode 89: For Real Patriotism, Let’s Hear From #MeToo Activists And Union Leaders
Episode 89: Patriotism isn’t embodied in flag-waving. It’s seen every day in the hard work done by community and union activists. So, with the fluke of our regularly scheduled podcast falling on July 4th, I start by talking with Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health about a new initiative called “Our Turn” that is turning the spotlight on the sexual abuse and harassment rampant in the world of low-wage workers like janitors, farmworkers, hotel workers and other people who labor in factories. I also chat with Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, about not only the union’s contract negotiations underway right now but ways in which we can re-imagine the post office to do a whole lot of things for the betterment of the people. Our Robber Baron of the Week is the recently-departed CEO of Mattel, Margaret Georgiadis.
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Jun 27, 2018
Episode 88: Janus Comes Down—The Bad, the Really Bad and The Fight Back
Episode 88: Today, the inevitable happened. The Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME, with the now-familiar right-wing conservative majority siding with the anti-union billionaire forces against public sector unions, and, really, the entire middle-class. I welcome back Celine McNicholas from the Economic Policy Institute to look at who is hurt by the decision. I, then, give us another listen at an in-depth conversation with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten about how the AFT has been preparing to fight back in the wake of the decision. Our Robber Barons are the network of billionaires who funded Janus and similar cases.
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Jun 20, 2018
Episode 87: Teachers Corral Charter Schools; No Nerds, No Birds
Episode 87: I start off on the West Coast with a conversation with Sylvia Cabrera, a “this is the future” union activist who helped lead winning organizing drives at three schools in Los Angeles owned by the biggest charter school chain in the area. So, yeah, charter schools undermine the public school system but, if they exist, they best be unionized. I, then, go to the final frontier, where no person has gone before…I couldn’t help channel a little Star Trek there to forecast a chat with Paul Shearon, the incoming president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), which represents, among a whole slew of varied workers, NASA rocket scientists. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Time Warner Jeff Bewkes.
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Jun 13, 2018
Episode 86: L.A. Ports Ripping Off Their Peeps; Kara Wins, DNC Shrugs
Episode 86: No matter that the Los Angeles Ports moves 40 percent of the containerized goods entering the country, generating billions of dollars in commerce—it’s rip-off time when it comes to treating the truck drivers and warehouse workers fairly. I know, you’re shocked! I recently checked out a big rally, featuring Bernie Sanders, by workers trying to form a union at a number of companies at the L.A. ports. In the big picture, the workers are getting screwed like a lot of workers: companies misclassify workers, treating them as independent contractors, not employees. After you hear segments from the energetic rally, I chat with truck driver Daniel “Seko” Uaina. I, then, talk with progressive candidate Kara Eastman who won the Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District in Nebraska—and, then, got the blow-off from the national party, at least partly because she defeated the favored centrist “Blue Dog.” Because the national party has been so-skilled at winnin…
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Jun 6, 2018
Episode 85: Workers Storm The Magic Kingdom—With A Guy Named Bernie Sanders
Episode 85: Fantasy is the Magic Kingdom’s product. Yet, life is all too real for the thousands of people who work at Disneyland and Disneyworld, the people who make billions for the huge wealthy corporation but are faced with bad pay, homelessness, debt and hunger. So a few days ago, I went to the mass rally for Disneyland workers where the featured political ally was, of course, Bernie Sanders, who gave a tutorial on the struggle of all workers. The rally also featured a panel of workers in conversation with Bernie, and I’ll bring that to you, as well. Finally, I talked to two Disney workers whose stories you will hear right after the rally segments. Our Robber Baron of the week is, of course, Disney CEO Bob Iger who makes tens of millions of dollars while most of his workers can’t pay the bills.
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May 30, 2018
Ep 84: The Racism in the Tax Cuts; What’s Up In the NAFTA Negotiations; Predicting Blue Wave 2018
Episode 84: The economic system has been built on racism for generations. The recent tax cuts just made things a lot worse—and I talk about that with Michael Linden, co-author of a path-breaking paper about the hidden racism in the system. I, then, ring up Lori Wallach, the peoples’ trade warrior extraordinaire, for an insider look at the recent earth-shaking developments and fights over the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then, I review the political predictions for 2018 from the global business magazine, The Economist, which predicts a Democratic win…at least in the House. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of BT, a global telecom company.
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May 23, 2018
Ep 83: Right-Wing Assault on the VA; Supreme Court Attacks #MeToo; Meatpacker Talks Ugly Hog Speedup
All those flag-waving politicians love their military folks—until it’s time to screw them every which way once they take off the uniform, especially when it comes to funding the Veterans Administration. I look into the attack on the VA by the free-market fanatics in a conversation with union policy expert Jacque Simon. I also chat with legal expert Najah Farley about how the horrendous Supreme Court decision this past week, which puts workers out on their own when it comes to taking on unlawful and unethical corporate behavior, will especially hurt the #MeToo movement. In a follow-up from last week’s episode, I also discuss with Darryl Blackwell, a worker on the hog processing line at Farmer Johns Smithfield, the brutal conditions he faces and how things will get worse if the Department of Agriculture allows big corporations to speed up the hog assembly line. Our Robber Barons of the week are the heads of the Wall Street buyout firms Bain, KKR and Vornado.
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May 16, 2018
Ep 82: Hell Might Be Safer Than A Hog Processing Plant; Teacher Uprising in NC; Mayor Heidi Runs!
Episode 82: Another day, another chapter in the new ways to screw workers. This time, the target is workers inside hog processing plants--who are already doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. I talk with expert Debbie Berkowitz about the Department of Agriculture's new proposal to speed up the processing line--so that Big Ag can pile up bigger profits even if workers get hurt and sick at an even higher rate.
Today, the next teacher uprising is underway in North Carolina. I caught up with NC teacher union president Mark Jewell before the mass rally to hear about not just the short-term goals but the long term political strategy.
Heidi Harmon, mayor of San Luis Obispo, California is a better example of "America's Mayor". She's a solid progressive who was elected in 2016 as part of a campaign run by a big progressive team. As she prepares to run for re-election I chat with her to hear her thoughts about lessons all progressives can learn about running a city and building…
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May 9, 2018
Ep 81: A Shift In The Air on Tax Cuts? Arizona Uprising Update; Inequality is Worse Than You Think
Episode 81: The teachers’ uprisings around the nation have challenged the bankrupt ideology of supply-side tax cutting—and maybe marks a shift in the public’s view of taxes and public spending. I talk about that with Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. I welcome back Arizona teacher activist Amber Gould for an eyewitness account of the Arizona mass rally, and what it means for politics in the state. I also chat with David Rosnick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about how much worse inequality really is despite some statistics floating around. Our Robber Baron of the week is, again, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who is trying to scuttle a tax to fund affordable housing in Seattle.
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May 2, 2018
Ep. 80: Elon Musk’s Tesla Is Bad For Workers Health; The Corporate Scam Greasing Human Trafficking
Episode 80: The high-tech world is too often made out to be a shiny new toy, all upside. But, it ain’t so—especially at Tesla where workers are getting sick at astronomical rates. I talk to a Tesla worker about the dangers in the plant—and the unionizing drive underway to protect workers lives. I also talk with a leading expert about the scam human traffickers use to enslave women who are forced to perform commercial sex under the cover of massage parlors—the traffickers mask the ownership of thousands of parlors spread all across the nation by creating anonymous shell companies. Our Robber Baron of the week is Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
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Apr 25, 2018
Episode 79: Arizona Teachers Are Lit!; Privatization Is A Bust; Lowe’s Poisons People
Episode 79: The uprising is hitting Arizona. Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will flood the state capitol to demand—like their brethren in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Colorado—fair wages. I talk with the both the head of the union and a rank-and-file union leader. I also take up the silly idea of privatization, inspired by a recent dumb-as-can-be article in The New York Times, with the dude who actually sort of wrote the book showing why privatization is bunk. And as Workers Memorial Day looms, our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Lowe’s, a company that is selling really bad stuff that poisons, sickens and kills people.
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Apr 18, 2018
Ep78: Workers Crush It So Jet Blue Goes Union; Murder in Honduras and Guatemala; The Fed; Tax Truths
Episode 78: You may remember that last month I did a curtain-raiser on the Jet Blue flight attendants’ union organizing campaign (Episode 74). Yesterday, the vote came in—and the workers crushed it, winning by a 2-1 margin. You get to hear first-hand from three front-line flight attendant activists how it all came down. I also talk with a global union organizing expert about the trail of murder and violence in Honduras and Guatemala that befalls union activists. I go a bit deeper in a chat with an expert researcher on why the Federal Reserve needs to act to repair the damage to regular people that still lingers from the financial crisis. I also give some key tax truths to remember—truths you won’t hear talked about much.
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Apr 11, 2018
Episode 77: The Man Who Will Beat Ted Cruz; A Teacher Can't Pay For Food; GOP Tax Fraud
Episode 77: Beto. He’s the guy who will send Ted Cruz into retirement. I talk with Beto O’Rourke while he’s out driving on the campaign trail in Texas. Have you tried to live on a teacher's salary? In Oklahoma, it means counting on visiting a food pantry to survive, as I learn in my in-depth talk with veteran teacher Jennifer Thorton. And as Tax Day looms, I bring in tax expert Carl Davis to talk about the widening GOP Tax Fraud and Trump’s own personal business tax dodging. Our Robber Barons of the week, in recognition of Equal Pay Day, are all the employers who pay women less than men.
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Apr 4, 2018
Episode 76: Oklahoma Uprising, Secrets of the NY Fed, Colorado Progressive On the March
Episode 76: Now it's the turn of teachers in Oklahoma to rise up. Jonathan chats with Alicia Priest, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, and Jennifer Thornton, a third grade teacher in Tulsa, after the state's teachers walked off the job to push for higher pay so they don't have to go to a food pantry to feed their families. Jonathan, then, discusses with EPI's John Bivens how unemployment is tied to a too-secret search for the new head of the Federal Reserve Board of New York, one of the most powerful jobs in the system. Lastly, Jonathan visits with Levi Tilleman, a progressive candidate running for the Democratic nomination in Colorado's 6th Congressional District. Our Robber Barons of the week are Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and her mindlessly, ideologically-dumb, Republican-ruled Legislature.
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Mar 28, 2018
Episode 75: Stealing Tips, Not! Big Airport Wage Hike, Yes!
Episode 75: The gall of greedy employers never seems to end, right? This time it shows up in the restaurant biz where the other NRA--the National Restaurant Association--was trying to get its hands on waiters' tips. Jonathan talks to Judy Conti, a key leader in the successful battle to slap down that money grab. Jonathan then chats with Angie Person, an airport worker, and Rob Hill, a union organizer, to hear how 40,000 workers won a raise more than doubling pay to--are you sitting down?--$19-per-hour. Lastly, Jonathan continues the series of progressive candidate interviews with a conversation with Lillian Salerno who is running in Texas' 32nd Congressional District. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Toys-R-Us.
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Mar 21, 2018
Episode 74: Is Betsy Devos Really This Dumb? Jet Blue Gonna Go Union
Episode 74: Betsy Devos has already shown herself to be entirely unqualified to be running the Department of Education. Jonathan adds on to what we already know with a look at how she is breaking the law by trying to impose rules on workers in the department without bothering to reach agreement with the union representing the workers. Hey, we get ideology stokes a fire but ignoring the law—a habit with the wing nuts in power—isn't going to happen unchallenged. Jonathan talks with a top union official about the fight. Jet Blue flight attendants look set to have a union—Jonathan digs into that vote underway right now with the president of the Transport Workers Union. Our Robber Baron of the week is Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
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Mar 14, 2018
Ep.73: WV Teachers Walk The Line; Climate Change Gets Real in Washington; Hawaii Progressive Runs
Episode 73: Nine days striking isn't the longest walk-out you will see. But, when you do that in defiance of the law, whoa, now that's showing some spine. Jonathan kicks off the podcast with a chat with the president of the West Virginia Education Association, Dale Lee, to get a read on what we can learn from the teachers' victory. Jonathan, then, takes up the topic of climate change "just transition" with the president of the Washington State Labor Council, Jeff Johnson, who is among the leaders of a broad coalition to push a ballot initiative to fund serious action on climate change but does so in a way that protects and strengthens workers and their communities. And, last up, Jonathan visits with progressive candidate State Representative Kaniela Saito Ing who is running for Hawaii's 1st Congressional District.
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Mar 7, 2018
Episode 72: Political Roadtrip Through Kansas, Illinois & California
Episode 72: Jonathan continues his deep-dive series interviewing scores of progressives candidates running all across the country with three new segments with three Congressional candidates: James Thompson in Kansas, David Gill in Illinois and Rico Franco in California…all regular people jumping into the electoral world. Our Robber Barons of the week are the U.S. Senate fools—including 12 Democrats—who are supporting a rollback in banking regulations put in place to prevent another financial crisis.
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Feb 28, 2018
Ep 71: The Cockroaches In The Axis of Bigots-Supreme Court Justices-Greedy Billionaires
Episode 71: The attacks against public sector unions—an attack on all working people—reached their legal pinnacle Monday when the Supreme Court heard the case, Janus v. AFSCME. But, something else is exposed in the case: the links between the conservative right-wing ideologues on the Supreme Court, greedy billionaires and piles of money that have funded bigots, racists and a general assault on a progressive society. Jonathan looks at the whole terrain in talks with three national leaders and experts who share a collection of knowledge and insight you won't find anywhere else. Our Robber Barons of the week are, in fact, a whole raft of secretive funders who are pouring money into efforts to undermine economic security for millions of workers.
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Feb 21, 2018
Episode 70: Forget ISIS. Amazon Is The (Economic) Terrorist To Fear
Ep. 70: ISIS poses virtually no threat to you in your home. The same can’t be said for Amazon. Amazon really is an economic terrorist. That's what Jonathan spends most of the podcast this week digging into—after laying out the picture of the sorry spectacle of cities and states begging Amazon to locate its new headquarters in one of their communities, Jonathan turns to economic and tax experts who explain the fraudulent claims Amazon repeatedly makes about what a great job creator the company is and, then, how Amazon engages in relentless tax dodging. Jonathan also checks in with Tom Guild, a progressive Democrat running for Congress in conservative Oklahoma's 5th District. Our Robber Baron of the week, appropriately, is Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos.
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Feb 14, 2018
Ep 69: A 28 Hour Work Week? Plus: Progressive Candidates Running in California and North Carolina
Episode 69: In Germany, the most powerful union in the country just secured the rights of workers to opt for a—get this!--28-hour workweek. Jonathan gives us the details. And, then, Jonathan talks with two progressive candidates—Michael Bracamontes who is running for governor in California and Jenny Marshall who is looking to capture a House seat in North Carolina. Our Robber Baron is the CEO of PG&E.
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Feb 7, 2018
Episode 68: Exposing The Political Termites At Work; Mental Clinicians Beat Back Kaiser
Episode 68: We love this description of the people burrowing deep inside government agencies to screw the people: political termites. And it comes courtesy of investigative journalist David Cay Johnston who returns to the podcast to discuss with Jonathan his new book, "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What The Trump Administration Is Doing To America". Jonathan also chats with two union organizers—Sal Rosselli and Clem Papazian--who have helped tame hospital giant Kaiser Permanente in an organizing campaign that has lessons for labor. Lastly, Jonathan gives a preview of the upcoming release of CEO-to-worker pay ratios, which will shine a light on the greed in the executives suites.
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Jan 31, 2018
Episode 67: The Global Super-Wealthy Motto--Get Rich While Millions Die.
Episode 67: The super-wealthy keep getting richer and, while they are human beings, they just don't seem to care how many people die or go hungry while billionaires party on. That's the only conclusion you can come to after reading a new stunning report about global wealth and inequality out from Oxfam--and Jonathan delves into the report with Oxfam's Paul O'Brien. Jonathan also chats with Katie Hill, a progressive candidate running for the House seat in California's 25th District. Our Robber Baron of the week is Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus.
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Jan 24, 2018
Episode 66: Uber & Lyft Are Bad, Bad Companies; Big Union Win At The LATimes!
Episode 66: Yeah, we get it: you like Uber and Lyft because it's the "new thing" in the app-centered corporate world. But, know this: Uber and Lyft are very bad corporate actors, stomping around the country, using right-wing, anti-consumer, anti-union tactics, to trash fundamental rights in every state—as Jonathan learns from Rebecca Smith, co-author of an incredible study about the nefarious tactics the two companies use. Jonathan also circles back to hear the voice of joy of Carolina Miranda, in the wake of a smashing victory in the union organizing effort she helped lead at the Los Angeles Times. In our last segment, Jonathan chats up Derrick Crowe, a progressive candidate running for Congress in Texas's 21st District. Our Robber Baron is Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan who wants to make poor people even poorer.
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Jan 17, 2018
Ep 65: 50 Years Later, Racism Is Deeply Embedded In The System; Michigan/California Progressives
Episode 65: Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, just after he had marched on behalf of striking sanitation workers. Today, racism is still a defining characteristic of the economic system, which is what Jonathan and Janelle Jones of the Economic Policy Institute discuss in our lead segment. Jonathan then visits with two progressive Congressional candidates, one in California and the other in Michigan. Our Robber Baron is—once again—Wal-Mart and the Walton family.
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Jan 10, 2018
Episode 64: Progressives Reach For the Governor's Mansion, And a Heartland Seat in Congress
Episode 64: Jonathan continues his on-going chats with solid progressive candidates all across the country. He chats with Abdul El-Sayed, who is vying in Michigan to be the first Muslim-American elected as governor in the history of the country. And from south-eastern Indiana, Dan Canon tells Jonathan why he jumped into a congressional race despite being, in his words, the most non-politician you could find. Our Robber Baron of the week is Big Pharma CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo.
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Jan 3, 2018
Ep. 63: Putting A Hole In GOP Tax Scam; A Union Rising At The L.A. Times; A Progressive Runs in Iowa
Episode 63: Republicans tried all sorts of tricks in their tax scam bill to target taxpayers in Democratic states, including messing with the deduction for local and state income and property taxes…except we're smarter than they are—at least Dean Baker is. Because he's found a way to keep the deductions in a round-about way—and he explains the idea that is catching fire around the nation. For decades, the Los Angeles Times has been viciously anti-union when it came to journalists who might want a union at the newspaper—but that may all change within two weeks thanks to a union election that starts tomorrow. Jonathan gets all the latest from Times reporter and union supporter Carolina Miranda. We also visit with Austin Frerick who is running for Iowa's 3rd Congressional District. Our Robber Baron is Home Depot CEO Craig Menear.
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Dec 27, 2017
Episode 62: West-to-East, Arizona to New Hampshire, Progressives Put On Candidate Hats
Episode 62: We're not resting in the low-key week between Xmas and the New Year. Jonathan chats up Marcus Ferrell, who was Bernie Sanders' main man organizing African American voters, who is now in the fray himself, running for a state house seat in Arizona. And across the country from sunny Arizona, over in the much chillier temps of New Hampshire, Jonathan hears from progressive union leader and Bernie delegate Mark MacKenzie who is vying in a Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District. Our Robber Baron is UK CEO Jeff Fairburn.
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Dec 20, 2017
Episode 61: IronStache! The Man Who Will Take Down Paul Ryan; The Billions Stolen From Workers Pay
Episode 61: Even Paul Ryan, the odious Speaker of the House, is in the electoral crosshairs and has a good shot at losing in the 2018 midterm elections. The man who is up to the task is Randy Bryce, better known in the Twitterverse as @ironstache. Randy joins Jonathan for a talk about politics, his campaign and the people he is seeking to give a voice in Wisconsin's First Congressional District. Looked at your paycheck recently? There is a decent chance the boss has stolen some money from you because billions are stolen from workers every year—as Jonathan explains with the help of Marni Von Wilpert of the Economic Policy Institute. Our Robber Baron is Bob Iger of Disney.
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Dec 13, 2017
Episode 60: BP Killed Katherine's Dad, A Colonel Runs For Office on Progressive Ideas
Episode 60: It's been 13 years since Ray Gonzalez was killed in an explosion at a British Petroleum facility in Texas. Jonathan has a searing conversation with his daughter, Katherine, who keeps his memory alive by campaigning for safety and health in the workplace. Out in California, Colonel Doug Applegate is taking another shot at unseating the odious Darrell Issa in the 49th Congressional District—Jonathan has a chat with Doug as he campaigns in a key 2018 race, and promotes a progressive platform that includes raising the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour, opposition to the TPP and support for single-payer health care. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Aetna.
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Dec 6, 2017
Episode 59: If A Pedophile, Why Not A Killer of Miners? And Other Tales of Workers Lives At Risk
Episode 59: Don Blankenship, the coal CEO robber baron, served a year in prison for his central role in a conspiracy that killed 29 miners in a massive 2010 mine explosion. Because workers' lives don't matter in our legal system, Blankenship could only be convicted of a misdemeanor violation, not manslaughter or murder. But, hey, when a party is willing to crown a pedophile, what's a few miners' deaths to stand in the way: Blankenship is running for the Republican nomination for US Senate in West Virginia. Jonathan has the low-down on how the miners died. Jonathan is, then, joined by Marianela Acuna Arreaza, executive director of Fe y Justicia Worker Center, to dig into the threat to the health of day laborers cleaning up after Hurricane Harvey. Jonathan wraps up with Mara Ortenburger of Worksafe who gives us insight into worker injuries at Tesla. Our Robber Baron is, yup, Don Blankenship.
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Nov 29, 2017
Episode 58: Women Taking Power, Tax Cut Truths & Fighting For Control of the CFPB
Episode 58: Women are leading the way in the political revolution. Jonathan talks with three fantastic women candidates: two who are running for seats in the state Senates in Oregon and New York, and one who is vying to become the chair of the Florida Democratic state party. Jonathan rolls out five tidbits on truths about the Republican tax plan robbery—truths you can use to debate just about anyone to expose the tax bill fraud. Jonathan also chats with Karl Frisch of Allied Progress about the brazen move by a recent shill for a pay-day lending scammer to help Trump seize control over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—and, then, effectively destroy it.
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Nov 22, 2017
Episode 57: Jumping Into A Big Race; Rethinking The Post Office
Episode 57: Leading off, Jonathan has a thought about how we should think about the estate tax—billionaires owe us that dough! Keeping up the podcast's regular reporting on real people running for office, longtime union organizer and first-time candidate Tanya Boone stops by to talk with Jonathan about her race for a Congressional seat in New York. And if you want to re-imagine what the Post Office can do for people, you will love Jonathan's chat with Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union. Our Robber Baron of the week is Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who is about to engage in a big-time scamming of the people.
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Nov 15, 2017
Episode 56: Sexual Harassment Inside Unions Is Real; The Hidden $2.6 Trillion Corporate Cash Stash
Episode 56: No one would suggest unions have outsized predators like Harvey Weinstein. But, sexual harassment, driven by an entrenched male culture and power structure, has been a long-time problem inside labor. And, now, in dribs and drabs, people are speaking up. Jonathan talks about it with labor activist and former AFL-CIO official Ana Avendano. And you want to talk about real robbery? How about the $2.6 trillion corporations hide overseas to avoid paying taxes? That money is part of the debate over tax changes—so Jonathan welcomes back tax guru Matt Gardner. Our Robber Baron of the week is Alex Gorsky, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson which has $66 billion stashed overseas.
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Nov 8, 2017
Episode 55: Election Rigging 101—It's More Complicated; South Korea Is A Hard Place For Unions
Episode 55: Sure, there were shenanigans in the 2016 Democratic primary. But, we need to understand what is tough politics versus what is rotten in the system. Jonathan unwinds this a bit in an Election Rigging 101 (and, hey, nice election results last night). Jonathan also digs into the battle for labor rights in South Korea with two women leaders, Kristyne Peter and Mi-Kyung Ryu. Our Robber Baron of the week is Nike CEO Mark Parker.
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Nov 1, 2017
Episode 54: Stopping Murderers From Putting A Shirt On Your Back; Bernie In The House!
Episode 54: Just about every piece of clothing you put on is made with blood, sweat and tears of exploited labor. Jonathan revisits the April 2013 murder of 1,138 garment workers in Bangladesh with his two guests, two women global labor leaders: Christy Hoffman, the deputy secretary of the 20-million member UNI and Nazma Akter, who began working in a garment factory when she was 11 years old. We hear from Bernie Sanders who continues to bring the message of the political revolution to every corner of the country. Our Robber Barons of the week are a pair of Johns from greedy Big Pharma.
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Oct 25, 2017
Episode 53: Black Lives Matter—In St. Louis & Zimbabwe; Paul Wellstone Remembered
Episode 53: We start this week's podcast by remembering Paul Wellstone, the progressive firebrand who died exactly 15 years ago in a small plane crash while campaigning for re-election. Jonathan, then, brings us the voice of Bruce Franks, a powerful leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in St. Louis and across the nation. Jonathan also sits down with Peter Mutasa, the president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, who tells us the story of the struggle in Zimbabwe of workers fighting a brutal dictator. Our Robber Baron of the week is Wall Street financier Steven Rattner who, on behalf of the ruling elites in the Democratic Party, has launched an attack on single-payer, Medicare for All.
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Oct 18, 2017
Episode 52: Taxes, Trade, DNC Silliness & A Progressive Winner…Happy Anniversary!
Episode 52: We've got great stuff on tap for our one-year anniversary episode. Jonathan starts off by asking members of the Democratic National Committee "What are you thinking?" with a bizarre loyalty resolution aimed at Bernie Sanders. Then, he focuses our attention on the right answer to economic growth—raising wages, not cutting taxes. From there, Jonathan checks in with trade warrior Lori Wallach for a look at the inside fight—the wild lies and the truth—over a possible new framework for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Newly elected progressive New York Assemblyperson Christine Pellegrino talks about her amazing win in a Republican Trump-supporting district and what it's like to be in public office—and she gives tips for progressives looking to run. And we close, as usual, with our Robber Baron of the week: Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang.
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Oct 11, 2017
Episode 51: No, We Are Not The Most Taxed Nation In The World
Episode 51: That guy in the Oval Office can't stop making up fibs. Yesterday, he repeated a lie: "We're the highest taxed nation in the world". Not even close. Which inspired Jonathan to look at lies about the economy. Thea Lee, the incoming president of the Economic Policy Institute, stops by to talk the truth about trade, taxes and health care. Jonathan, then, chats with Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about the truth about which country accounted for 75 percent of the people who rose out of deep poverty over the last 25 years…you might be surprised by the answer. Back to capture the crown of Robber Baron of the week once again is the CEO of Wells Fargo, Tim Sloan, who rakes in millions while he oversees the shipping of call center jobs overseas to low-wage countries.
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Oct 4, 2017
Episode 50: A Canadian Doctor Walks Into A Bar…And Schools Us on Single-Payer
Episode 50: If Danielle Martin tells you that single-payer is more popular in Canada than ice hockey and the Royal Mounted Police, trust us, it's worth believing this doctor from the North—Bernie Sanders does, inviting her to stand with him when he recently unveiled his single-payer, "Medicare for All" plan. Martin is a clear, smart advocate for single-payer health care and she joins Jonathan for an in-depth conversation that answers everything you ever will be asked, and wanted to know, about how the Canadian system works—including how it needs to be made better even as it is undeniably better, by far, than the bankruptcy-causing, sickness-encouraging system in the U.S. Our Robber Baron of the week is Tom Rutledge, the CEO of Charter/Spectrum.
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Sep 27, 2017
Episode 49: Chains of Work—The Scourge of Global Child Labor and Slavery
Episode 49: Today, 152 million children—children—are in forced labor around the world, along with 40 million people who are simply slaves. Don’t turn your head away! Because we need to know about this—and understand the movement afoot to end this moral stain on the planet. After participating in a United Nations summit, Jonathan speaks to two leading global advocates who are combating modern slavery. What you will hear is stunning, sad and, also, spirit-moving. We can make a difference.
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Sep 20, 2017
Episode 48: Shaking Up The Labor World In North Carolina and Beyond
Episode 48: It's just a smidgen but every time you get a chance to hear about the shake-ups needed in our beloved labor movement, it's worth saying "yeah, baby". And, sisters and brothers, we have a double-barreled shot for you today. Jonathan chats first with MaryBe McMillan, the new president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, about organizing in the south. And, then, a special guest who gives almost no interviews to media, friendly or not, comes by: Richard Bensinger, the founder of the Organizing Institute and long-time labor organizer, chats about what works and doesn't in union organizing, the brutality of companies in organizing campaigns and how to make sure companies pay a price when they break the law. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Equifax.
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Sep 13, 2017
Episode 47: Real Health Care Takes A Big Step Forward
Episode 47: It's not going to happen tomorrow or even next year. But, the day when insurance companies are no longer bankrupting people every single day because of outrageous premiums is drawing closer. Today, Bernie Sanders will unveil a "Medicare For All" bill that rockets the conversation about universal health care to a new level. And he won't be standing alone: more than a dozen Democratic Senators have endorsed the bill, with the pressure building on others to do the same. Jonathan talks with a policy expert who has been on the front lines of the single-payer, "Medicare for All" battle going back to the 1990s when Rep. John Conyers laid down a comprehensive proposal that now has 117 cosponsors in the House. We also talk to a minister who is pushing single-payer at the grassroots in North Carolina. Our Robber Baron of the week is the price-gouging airline industry.
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Sep 6, 2017
Episode 46: The Secret War Against Unions—And It's About To Get Worse
Episode 46: No surprise. The traditional media will never tell people about the multi-billion dollar anti-union industry which corporations use to intimidate any workers who try to organize a union. So, Jonathan explores the anti-union industry in several segments of this week's podcast. We look at the steps Donald Trump is about to take to let these assassins of worker rights go deeper into the shadows. The Robber Baron of the week, appropriately is Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta. Bonus: check out Jonathan's CNN.com op-ed on the topic!
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Aug 30, 2017
Episode 45: The Bad Seeds Taking Root In Iowa and California
Remember the election for the Democratic California state party chair? It has stayed sleazy. Jonathan circles back with progressive chair candidate Kimberly Ellis to hear the latest—sexism, racism and just plain bully tactics are still the order of the day. Then, just two weeks after Jonathan talked about a big-time corporate fleecing of taxpayers in Wisconsin, it's happening again—in Iowa. The culprit: Apple. Yup, Jonathan shows the seamy side of lovable Apple, which, despite its billions of dollars stashed overseas, is holding up the people of Iowa for corporate ransom. And, in that vein, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple gets a second crown of Robber Baron of the week.
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Aug 23, 2017
Episode 44: Mansions of Fear, Mansions of Pain
Episode 44: Having chicken tonight? Go right ahead, but pause for a few minutes to listen to Jonathan's look at the brutal working conditions faced by poultry plant workers—and the entirely insane idea being pushed by industry lobbyists to make those birds whizz by even faster on the factory assembly line. Jonathan, then, takes us half way around the world to chat with youth union organizer Jane Njoki about the monumental challenge of finding decent work for the hundreds of millions of unemployed and underemployed young people. Appropriately, our Robber Baron of the week comes from the poultry processor world: Pilgrim CEO William W. Lovette who runs a company that has sky-high injury rates for workers.
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Aug 16, 2017
Episode 43: The FoxConn Scam—This Is How Taxpayers Get Ripped Off Every Day
Episode 43: Here's how the elites reach deep into your pocket to rob you. By now, we know how fraud is a business model for Wall Street and other elites. But, it's legalized fraud that hurts us most—rip-offs that are perfectly legal in today's system. Jonathan devotes the entire podcast this week to the big-time scam that is at the heart of the multi-billion FoxConn deal unveiled recently. And, for the first time in the podcast's history (woohoo!), our Robber Baron of the week is a repeat from last week: Terry Gou, FoxConn's billionaire owner.
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Aug 9, 2017
Episode 42: Democratic Litmus Test Misfire: How About Tax Cuts For Rich, Not Womens' Rights?
Episode 42: Sometimes, you have to wonder: are Democratic Party leaders dumb or just ideologically bankrupt? Jonathan talks to a leading abortion rights advocate, Vicki Saporta, about the foolish suggestion floated by some Democratic leaders that the party would not have a litmus test--and, thus, support with money and resources--candidates who are not pro-choice. How stupid is that since womens' reproductive rights are central to the party's platform, not to mention a human right that animates many voters? And speaking of litmus tests, maybe the next step under consideration is to give a pass to Democrats willing to support the massive Republican tax cuts for the rich about to be unveiled any day—and Jonathan digs into key aspects of that future robbery with tax expert Matt Gardner. Our Robber Baron of the week is Terry Gou, the billionaire owner of Foxconn.
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Aug 2, 2017
Episode 41: Class Warfare and Racism--Workers Take On The Economic Machine
Episode 41: Start by being inspired by Billy Bragg's "There Is Power In The Union". Then, listen to Jonathan talk to a Nissan worker who is at the center of a critical campaign to win a union at Nissan's plant in Canton, Mississippi—a two-day vote that will start tomorrow (and we will update the result for our listeners in next week's podcast!). Jonathan, then, marks this week's Black Women’s Equal Pay Day by talking with economist Janelle Jones about the blatant racism black women face in wages. Our Robber Baron of the week is Olivier Brandicourt, the CEO of French drug giant Sanofi, who is happy to pocket U.S. taxpayer-funded research money but won't commit to a fair drug price for a Zika virus vaccine—but, as you will learn, Bernie Sanders isn't sitting by quietly and accepting that scam.
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Jul 26, 2017
Episode 40: Firing The Status Quo, California Dreaming
Episode 40: Political revolution ain't beanbag. It's hard work and requires taking on tough assignments. Jonathan talks about two of the efforts with his guests: Pat Harris joins us for a chat about his California primary bid to unseat incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein. And Lane Windham stops by to chat about maybe even a bigger, important task: building up the ranks and political power of women leaders within unions, and generally in the workers' advocates movement. Our Robber Baron of the week is Peter Barbey, owner of the Village Voice, who is acting like any big corporate abuser in contract negotiations underway right now.
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Jul 19, 2017
Episode 39: Killing Big, Killing Small
Episode 39: The economic and political system kills people, in big numbers and, sometimes, one at a time. This week, Jonathan looks at the killing, big and small, with his guests. In Colombia, a union leader is murdered, and we discuss with Gimena Sanchez how his death is a microcosm of bad trade deals. We also look at the massive Pentagon budget increase Trump is proposing but, optimistically, a small city mayor, Ithaca's Svante Myrick, has rallied mayors nationally to oppose feeding the big killing machine. Our Robber Baron of the week is Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens who, incredibly, wants to impoverish thousands of people by cutting the St. Louis newly-enacted minimum wage from $10-an-hour to $7.70
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Jul 12, 2017
Episode 38: Ivanka Reaps A Fortune From Slave Labor. Welcome To The New KleptoGriftocracy
Episode 38: KleptoGriftocracy: it's Jonathan's new word to describe the unusual Trump "brand", which, when you boil it down, really is just a family of grifters trying to build a kleptocracy in government. In this podcast, Jonathan digs deep into the dark side of the Trump KleptoGriftocracy, focusing on Ivanka Trump's use of slave labor in China to make a fortune. And she doesn't seem to care. We're shocked, shocked, right? And our Robber Baron of the week, then, is obvious: Ivanka.
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Jul 5, 2017
Episode 37: This Is Your Brain On Politics—Or Why Progressives Lose
Episode 37: Our brains are hard-wired when it comes to political ideology. Until people understand how the brain processes political ideas—based on circuitry we aren't even aware of—progressives, not to mention the Democratic Party, will continue to lose elections. That's the view of political linguistics guru George Lakoff, who comes back to the podcast for another in-depth conversation with Jonathan. In the midst of the health care battle and more losses for Democrats in special election, Lakoff chats about why conservatives think the way they do, why Jon Ossoff was a dumb candidate and if there is any hope for political change. And we wrap up with our Robber Baron of the week: British Airways CEO Alex Cruz who is engaging in ugly strike-breaking tactics.
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Jun 28, 2017
Episode 36: The Grim Reaper Fails—For Now
Episode 36: Massive people activism dealt the Grim Reaper of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, a giant middle finger…from his own caucus. But, it ain't over. Jonathan uses this moment to talk to health care expert Dean Baker about a couple of critical work-related Obamacare benefits that not many people talk about. Jonathan also takes a harrowing look at the 65 million refugees displaced around the world. We wrap up with our Robber Baron of the week: California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat who took it upon himself to kill a statewide single-payer bill.
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Jun 21, 2017
Episode 35: From The Bench and On-Line, Amazon and The Supreme Court Gear Up To Screw The People
Episode 35: In this week's podcast, Jonathan's guests help us understand how Amazon and the Supreme Court have a common mission: to undercut the standard of living of millions of people. Amazon's move to buy Whole Foods means a further big-time cutting of wages for thousands of workers, and a new blow to workers in retailing beyond the two companies. Over at the Supreme Court, the conservative wing—with its majority restored after the confirmation of Justice Gorsuch--is drooling over the prospect of a new case that will cripple public sector unions, and hurt workers everywhere. Our Robber Baron of the week is, appropriately, Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
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Jun 14, 2017
Episode 34: Your iPhone Was Made By A Child Slave…And Wal-Mart Breaks The Law Again
Episode 34: We can't look away: 168 million children are laboring all around the world, usually in brutal conditions, partly to churn out the piles of consumer goods we lap up. Jonathan speaks with a leading global organizer trying to stop child labor. And, surprise, surprise, Wal-Mart is in the thick of that scandal…as well as breaking the law here, as we hear in our other amazing segment. We wrap up by crowning, not for the first time, Wal-Mart as our Robber Baron of the week.
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Jun 7, 2017
Episode 33: Did Democratic Party Insiders in California Steal An Election…Again?
"Politically speaking, you will be murdered and we will personally take part in murdering you"…that was the message Kimberly Ellis heard from her "sisters" in the California Democratic Party when she began running for the chairmanship of the party. And the "murder" took place—possibly through voter fraud. In her first extensive interview since the election on May 20th, Ellis tells Jonathan the whole story—why she decided to run, how the campaign built a massive, sophisticated operation, and came to the convention with hard numbers showing a comfortable victory in hand and, instead, watched as the election, she believes, was stolen by the establishment candidate Eric Bauman in a razor-thin contest. You have to wonder: if the election was fair and honest, why is Bauman, who has claimed victory, refusing to have an independent audit of an election in which almost 3,000 ballots were cast with just 62 votes separating the two candidates? The national party, Jonathan points out, better…
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May 31, 2017
Episode 32: Upbeat Stuff…Wage Theft, Election Theft, CEO Theft, War Crimes
It's an action-packed podcast. Jonathan looks at the daily stealing of workers' wages, to the tune of billions of dollars—right in time for an annual deep-dive to look at a big hike in CEO pay in 2016. There is also breaking news on what could be another chapter in Democratic Party insider shenanigans—was there fraud in the recent California Democratic state party elections? Jonathan also pauses to comment on Memorial Day—a day when the nation forgets that leaders like Henry Kissinger ignited the wars that killed so many people, committing war crimes along the way.
Jonathan Tasini
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May 24, 2017
Episode 31: Get Good or Get Gone
Episode 31: We kind of love the bottom line message delivered to Democrats by Jonathan's guest, California progressive leader Karen Bernal: Get Good or Get Gone. In the discussion on this week's podcast, Bernal was speaking directly about the insider Democrats in California who are trying to hold back the rising wave of progressive activists who came close—and still might do so—to winning the chairperson spot of the state party at a tumultuous convention that Jonathan attended this past weekend. But, it's a message that could apply across the country. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Citigroup who copped a plea on money-laundering charges—but actually didn't have to say the company was guilty…ain't America great?
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May 17, 2017
Episode 30: You Can Own A Bank. Really.
Episode 30: Why do we let Wall Street run wild with our money? We don't have to. With his guest Mark Armstrong, Jonathan digs into the idea of a public bank--a bank whose shareholders are we, the people. It's an idea gaining momentum throughout the country. Our Robber Baron of the week is hedge fund kingpin William Ackman.
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May 10, 2017
Episode 29: ACA Repeal Waves Goodbye to 3 Million Jobs & $1.5 Trillion
Episode 29: Here is something almost no one is talking about but Jonathan takes it up in this podcast: the repeal of Obamacare, along with its immoral tossing millions of people off health coverage, will cost the country 3 million jobs and $1.5 trillion in economic activity. Jonathan breaks this down for all of us in simple terms with his guest Leighton Ku. You also will hear from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. And wrapping it all up is our Robber Baron for the week, Paul Ryan, who takes the crown home for an unprecedented second time.
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May 3, 2017
Episode 28: Die or Organize!
Episode 28: People die at work, and people revolt and organize. All in sharp focus the last few days, Jonathan talks about the toll at work of sick, injured and killed workers—and why we mark Workers Memorial Day every April 29th—as well as the May Day mobilization that makes us consider how to change the system. Jonathan talks with Tefere Gebre, the Executive Vice President of the AFL-CIO, the first immigrant, political refugee, black man and local labor council leader elected as a national officer of the Federation. And we go back to Mylan Corporation to find our Robber Baron of the week, the outgoing chairman Robert Coury who pockets tens of millions of dollars.
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Apr 26, 2017
Episode 27: 100 days of Craziness, Bigotry and Bad Stuff
Episode 27: Jonathan digs into the top 10 really bad things that have happened so far in Donald Trump's reign, focusing on workers, and the issues we care about in the political revolution. It's all an easy-to-understand conversation with Jonathan's expert guest, Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute. Jonathan also talks about American Exceptionalism—a big part of a recently much-talked about piece he wrote. We wrap up with our Robber Baron of the week, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer who was just showered with another $186 million that she will pocket—after failing miserably.
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Apr 19, 2017
Episode 26: Forget ISIS—Uber Is A Greater Threat To Your Security
Episode 26: Uber or Isis: Which is really a greater threat to the security of millions of people in this country, and around the world? In conversation with national taxi workers advocate Bhairavi Desai and foreign policy expert Phyllis Bennis, Jonathan makes the point that, by far, the answer is Uber. ISIS is a brutal extremist gang—whose rise, people conveniently forget, was a direct result of U.S. foreign policy—but its capability to hurt millions of people comes nowhere near the reach of Uber's model of "corporate terrorism", which is a threat to the standard of living of most Americans. Our Robber Baron of the week is Rupert Murdoch.
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Apr 12, 2017
Episode 25: The Tax Robbery: You Get Fleeced, The Elite Get Rich
Episode 25: Every day, it happens: the tax system puts unfair burden on the 99.9 percent while the very wealthy and big corporations pocket huge bucks…and a lot of those bucks come right out of our pockets thanks to corporate tax subsidies. Just in time for Tax Day, Jonathan talks to three of the leading experts in the country about the tax robbery underway, which is mostly entirely legal courtesy of politicians of both parties. You'll learn how to talk taxes to your neighbor, including how to blow up the myth that corporations pay too much and getting key tips on the ways in which the very wealthy use the tax code to get even richer. Our Robber Barons of the week are the top 25 corporations that dodge taxes the most.
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Apr 5, 2017
Episode 24: The Fed's Power, The Myths of Politics
Episode 24: Poof! Before you noticed it, the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates and, then, no one much talked about it, even though the Fed probably has more power over your job prospects than any politician. So, we talk about The Fed at length with long-time Fed watcher Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Also, Jonathan was the keynote speaker a few days ago at the Larimer (Colorado) Democratic County Committee annual dinner—you can hear him take on the Democratic Party's promotion of myths and "American Exceptionalism", as he asks whether the party is really able or interested in leading the rebellion against a corrupt system. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Peabody Coal.
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Mar 29, 2017
Episode 23: Where Did All The Money and Jobs Go? CEOs and Domestic Outsourcing
Episode 23: This isn't a surprise—CEOs are robbing the great wealth created by workers. But, Jonathan adds a new wrinkle to the robbery of the people—domestic outsourcing. Yup, you got it. Not jobs running to slave-wage countries but jobs vanishing within the borders of the country. And our Robber Baron of the week, for a second time, is Wells Fargo.
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Mar 22, 2017
Episode 22: A $54 Billion StrangelovianKiss. Cuz The Pentagon Needs More Toys.
Episode 22: Who cares if old people go hungry if the military-industrial complex can celebrate, right? That's basically the upshot of Trump throwing a $54 billion increase the Pentagon's way—even if there is no clear idea what to do with the money, it's champagne time for the war machine.
I go in-depth with two experts on this insanity. And, keeping with the theme of the podcast, our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of Lockheed who is happy to make millions off the war machine while regular people go without food and water is polluted.
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Mar 15, 2017
Episode 21: "Make America Sick Again"--Or How Republicans Feel Just Fine If You Get Sick And Die
Episode 21: 24 million. Big number. The number of people who will be added to the ranks of those who have no health care coverage. More people will be sicker. More people will go bankrupt. More people will die. Jonathan goes deep into the "Make America Sick Again" bill, also known as the repeal of Obamacare, and gives answers to the key questions about what all this means, with some help from a top national expert from the AARP. Our Robber Baron for this week is the CEO of Uber.
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Mar 8, 2017
Episode 20: Undocumented Immigrants: Our Neighbors, Our Community & Our Wealth
Episode 20: The numbers and the passion show it: undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom have lived in the country for over a decade, are part of the fabric of communities everywhere. Jonathan speaks with one expert, Lisa Christensen Gee of the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, who tallied up the billions of dollars undocumented immigrants contribute to every local economy. Jonathan also chats with a friend from the Bernie Sanders campaign trail, Cesar Vargas, a national leader for immigrant rights who is not only a bar-admitted lawyer but lives his activist and professional life with undocumented status himself. And we wrap up crowning Paul Ryan and his gang Robber Barons of the week for their putrid proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which will make millions of people sicker and cause people to die because they can't afford health care coverage.
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Mar 1, 2017
Episode 19: The DNC Motto: To Hell With the Iceberg, It's The Russians.
Episode 19: Forget the election for chair of the Democratic National Committee. The most astonishing part of the debate at the recent DNC big meeting in Atlanta was…there was no real debate. Or, when there was, it wasn't to be honest about the crisis in the party. Nope—it was to defeat a move to ban corporate money from the party. Woohoo! So, to hell with that: Jonathan speaks with three people—the founder of the #DemEnter movement; a Bernicrat who is now a Democratic state party chair after running a campaign against the insiders; and, we welcome back Nina Turner to give her take on the DNC meeting and the future. Our Robber Barons of the week hail from the media industry.
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Feb 22, 2017
Episode 18: Looking For A Leader and A Message, Democrats Head For Showdown In Atlanta
Episode 18: Democrats will know this Saturday who is tapped as head of the party. But, will the party figure out what's wrong with its pitch to voters? Jonathan talks with linguistics guru George Lakoff, who a decade ago began pushing the party to understand how voters' brains really work. Jonathan also talks to Christine Quinn, yet another high-profile former supporter of Hillary Clinton who has just endorsed Keith Ellison. And after a crushing loss by unions trying to organize Boeing's plant in South Carolina, we anoint the company's CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, our Robber Baron of the week.
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Feb 15, 2017
Episode 17: Get Sick and Die…Or Hug "Medicare For All"
Episode 17: Here's what the political class offers the people as health care options: the Republican "who cares if you die as long as the free market lives" versus saving the Affordable Care Act which delivers huge new profits to the corrupt insurance industry. Seriously? So, it's a good time for us to go in-depth on the only real, moral and economically sane solution: single-payer, "Medicare for All". Jonathan devotes the whole podcast to a conversation with one of the nation's long-time leading experts on single-payer. And sticking to the theme, our Robber Barons segment shines a light on the enormous pay of the CEOs of the medical industrial complex.
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Feb 8, 2017
Episode 16: 150 Million People Slip And Slide Across The Globe
Episode 16: Consider this crazy number: 150 million people around the globe are migrants, moving here and there, either looking for work or avoiding political violence or both. Jonathan explores this astounding fact with an expert in Africa and an advocate in the U.S. Our Robber Barons segment pegs Chevron, tax avoider and poisoner of the Amazon.
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Feb 1, 2017
Episode 15: Trump Can Be Impeached. Today. Here's How.
Episode 15: Because of his greed and a never-ending thirst to grab for even more money, Donald Trump has been violating the Constitution—breaking the law—every moment since he got the keys to the Oval Office. Jonathan speaks with two lawyers who are part of two significant efforts with the potential—admittedly, with many political and legal obstacles to overcome--to force Trump from office. But, on the merits, this is a bi-partisan no-brainer. Seriously. We close with Goldman Sachs' alum Gary Cohn taking home this week's Robber Barons crown.
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Jan 25, 2017
Episode 14: Democratic Party Fight Heating Up, But The Action Is Local, Too
Episode 14: In about one month, a new chair of the Democratic National Committee will be chosen. Jonathan speaks with yet another candidate, New Hampshire state chair Raymond Buckley who has had some pretty tough things to say about the DNC. But, just as a recent podcast reported on progressive sweeps in California party politics, Jonathan is even more interested in local organizing so he wanders down to Florida to chat with Stacey Patel, a Bernicrat who rode her new-found political activism all the way to winning the post of Democratic party chair of Brevard County. We wrap up by tagging some banking CEOs as the Robber Barons of the week.
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Jan 18, 2017
Episode 13: Trump Redux: Liar, Fraud, Ignoramus, Sex Predator—One More Real Expert Tells All
Episode 13: Just two days before an ignorant person gets the keys to the Oval Office, and wraps his tiny fingers around the nuclear button, Jonathan goes in-depth with an expert on Trump: Michael D'Antonio, author of "The Truth About Trump" gets into the real story, the one the incompetent transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) don't seem to get. Michael explicitly tells us, from his deep research, that Trump is a very cruel person who is "happy to do the worst to the little guy," enjoys menacing people, and tended to fail at any business that required paying attention to details over a long period of time. Join Jonathan and Michael for a serious discussion. Our Robber Barons segment highlights a damning Oxfam report that tells us a startling fact: Eight men now have wealth equal to the wealth of 3.6 billion people on the planet.
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Jan 11, 2017
Episode 12: Boom! The Revolution is Alive and Well: Berniecrats Storm California Democratic Party
Episode 12: Yes, taking over the Democratic Party is far from a mirage. Over the course of two days, the political revolution showed it has bite and balls: Berniecrats, and other progressives, won more than 600 seats—over 50 percent of the seats in play--in elections to fill slots for the California Democratic Party state committee. Jonathan was on the ground in the state, and he brings eye-witness reporting from the elections and conversations with Berniecrats who helped sweep all the seats in San Luis Obispo—and you will hear the secrets to organizing that make these victories doable in other states. Wrapping it up: the regular Robber Barons segment sticks it to the corrupt health sickness industry (we don't call it "health care" around here).
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Jan 4, 2017
Episode 11: Trump: Liar, Fraud, Ignoramus, Sex Predator…An Expert Tells All