August 31 - Putin's Perpetual Destabilization of Ukraine; What You Need to Know About the TPP; The Great Stagnation of Wages Over the Last 44 Years

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the call by Russia’s President Putin to discuss “statehood” for Eastern Ukraine, and go to Moscow to speak with Dr. Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst who writes for Novaya Gazeta, practically the only newspaper left in Russia not controlled by the Kremlin. We discuss Putin’s strategy of permanent destabilization of Ukraine until it submits to Moscow’s demands, and the much less likely scenario of a Russian military invasion to cave out a land corridor to Crimea.

Part 2

Then finally we speak with Lori Wallach, the Founder and Director of Global Trade Watch at Public Citizen who is an expert on NAFTA, the WTO, KAFTA and the latest trade agreement now in the works, the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership. We discuss why it is that President Obama, who can’t get anything done with the current Congress, has been given fast-track authority by Congress to negotiate the TPP in secret, in spite of a continuing trickle of leaks coming out of the negotiations between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia and Japan.

Part 3

Then, on this Labor Day weekend we examine the state of working America with Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley and the co-author of several editions of The State of Working America, a bi-annual report that is considered the authoritative source on the American workforce. We discuss how the median salary for a male worker in 1969 was $35,567 in 2012 dollars, and today it is $33,904, indicating that for 44 years most Americans have been caught in a great stagnation, while the wages of the top 10% have continued to climb.