July 9 - The Ghosts of the Confederacy Still Haunt Our Politics and Economy; The Clamor to Arm Ukraine; Jeb Bush is Way Out of Touch with Working Americans

Full Program

Part 1

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

Part 2

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

Part 3

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