June 30 - SCOTUS Rules that Employer's Religious Beliefs Trump Employee's Rights; SCOTUS Goes After Labor Unions; Hong Kong Votes for Democracy While China Eschews Hegemony

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with today’s rulings from the Supreme Court that will have a profound impact on the survival of labor unions and on undermining the separation of church and state by extending protections limited to churches to private for-profit corporations, making an employer’s religious beliefs more important than an employee’s rights. Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center joins us to discuss the latter and the implications of this radical ruling by the court’s conservative corporatist majority that expands the powers of “closely-held” corporations like Cargill, Mars and Koch industries, who already account for 52% of private employment and 51% of private-sector output, over their employees.  

Part 2

Then we examine the other Supreme Court ruling against public sector unions that exempts Medicaid-funded home care workers and other workers who are not seen by the conservative corporatist justices as “full-fledged public employees” from joining unions and paying dues. William Gould, a Stanford Law Professor specializing in labor and discrimination law who previously served as Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board joins us to discuss this “nose of the camel” ruling that opens the way for corporations and their representatives on the Supreme Court, to go after the foundation of the court’s “Abood” ruling that allows unions to collect due and thus be viable.

Part 3

Then finally China expert Perry Link, who in banned from China because he was the recipient of the politburo’s leaked “Tiananmen Papers”, joins us from Taiwan to discuss the referendum in Hong Kong that was a protest vote against China’s encroachment on democracy in the former British colony that has a tenuous “one country, two systems” democratic autonomy from the mainland. We also discuss the Chinese president’s recent pledge to India and Myanmar that “China does not subscribe to the notion that a country is bound to seek hegemony when it grows in strength.“