Ep 217: It’s All North Carolina—The Fight for 15 and The Campaign For A Progressive U.S. Senator

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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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Ep 218: There Is No Debt Crisis; Taking Down A California Corporate Democrat

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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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Ep 219: A Social Fund For The Planet’s Poor; Challenging A Corporate Mouthpiece

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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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Ep 220: Inside The Amazon Union Vote Count!; Yemen Is “Hell On Earth”

Bernie Sanders rocked the nation and triggered a political revolution. He talks exclusively to Jonathan Tasini about his journey, Trump, the Democratic Party, fighting the corrupt system, and the next wave of the revolution.

Episode 1: Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

Nina Turner had a lot to say to the throngs of people who she spoke to over the past year as a main surrogate for Bernie Sanders. And when she said it, she said it with passion and inspiration. In her chat with the podcast, she brought that same energy to a wide range of topics, from Bernie's campaign, the Democratic Party, the political revolution and what the future holds for her as a leader of the progressive movement. We also hear from a leading anti-Trump conservative, Tara Setmayer. And we end with our regular segment, the Robber Barons, featuring the Waltons of Wal-Mart.

Episode 2: Nina! Nina! Nina!

Bedwetters, this is for you. A day before the election, Jonathan speaks to Celinda Lake, long-time national Democratic pollster, and together they sift through the polling data and the real trends. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield—yup, Ben & Jerry, with Ben having ice cream in hand—talk about their experience supporting Bernie Sanders. We wrap up with our Robber Barons segment with a look at the corruption at Wells Fargo.

Episode 3: Bedwetters and Ice Cream Lovers Unite!

Because we need to celebrate in these dark political days, give a listen to how YOU, and thousands of people like you, helped kill (hopefully, forever), the dastardly Trans Pacific Partnership. After a short primer on so-called "free trade", Jonathan speaks with two key people who organized the opposition, Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch, and Larry Cohen, the new board chair of Our Revolution, the organization carrying forward the Bernie Sanders movement. To wrap up the podcast, this week's Robber Baron segment focuses on Apple.

Episode 4: The TPP is Dead!

Jonathan goes digging into the world of the global sweatshop, talking with global workers rights advocate Shawna Bader-Blau on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Bangladesh factory fire that killed 110 garment workers and injured thousands more. We also talk Just Transition--how workers and communities will be looked after as we transition from a carbon based energy system--with Jonathan's good mate from Australia, union leader Tony Maher, a global advocate for climate change action who represents miners and energy workers. And our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of a greedy drug company that hiked prices by hundreds of dollars on a life-saving device.

Episode 5: Burning People, Burning Planet: Capitalism Ain't Pretty

Episode 11: That's the sum total of the guy who will soon occupy the Oval Office, and have his finger on the nuclear button. To honor this, Jonathan spends the entire podcast chatting with David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-prize winning, investigative *real* journalist (as opposed to the incompetent transcribers of press releases who can't do their own homework) who knows the real Trump and wrote "The Making of Donald Trump." Join a serious discussion laying out the truth about Trump. Hot tip: the consensus between Jonathan and David--Trump only cares about two things, money and whether he can unbutton a woman's blouse. And, of course, we have our Robber Barons segment.

Episode 11: Trump: Liar, Fraud, Ignoramus, Sex Predator…An Expert Tells All

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

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Ep 211: What Corp. Interests Are Infiltrating The Biden World; Global Inequality At Record Levels

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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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Ep 212: Unemployment Money Chaos Redux?; Clawing Back Dough From The Rich

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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Ep213: Bi-Partisanship Kills; Amazon Workers Organize!; Unions Confronting Myanmar Coup

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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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Ep 214: YOUR Four Talking Points For $15/Hour Minimum Wage; Alabama Is Amazon Unionizing Ground Zero

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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Ep 215: Big Pharma Wants Poor People To Die; Unions Fighting Myanmar Coup—Redux

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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Ep 216: Wealth Tax On The Table; Two Trillion for The Global Poor; Joe Biden and Union Organizing

The weekly Working Life podcast hosts in-depth political, economic and labor conversations and analysis heard through the voices of workers, leaders and experts.

Episode 11: Trump: Liar, Fraud, Ignoramus, Sex Predator…An Expert Tells All

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