June 4 - The Senate Moves to Undo the Supreme Court's Permission to Buy Elections; The Real Costs of the Snowden NSA Leaks; States and Cities Move Ahead Raising the Mininum Wage

Full Program
 

Part 1

We begin with the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on a constitutional amendment to nullify recent Supreme Court decisions and restore Congress’ power to regulate campaign finance. Jamie Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law, who testified in favor of the constitutional amendment, joins us to discuss his Senate testimony and the political polarization surrounding the issue of money in politics where in the last four years the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to unlimited and unattributed money in politics that has mostly benefited Republicans.

Part 2

Then with the German parliament announcing it will investigate the NSA’s tapping of Chancellor Merkel’s phone, and a recent BBC World Service poll on public opinions in 24 countries that found views of the U.S. have deteriorated sharply among citizens in Spain, Germany and Brazil where extensive U.S. surveillance activity has been exposed, we examine the rising global cost to the United States and to U.S. businesses from the Snowden leaks with Danielle Kehl, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. We discuss her article at CNN “A Year After Snowden, the Real Costs on NSA Surveillance” and how much U.S. economic interests have been the real casualty while most of the focus has been on the tradeoff between individual privacy and national security.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Bill Lester, a Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he researches the impact of minimum wage and living wage policies on urban economic development. We discuss the passage of a new $15 minimum wage law in Seattle, Washington and assess its national impact as more and more cities and states push for a higher minimum wage and demonstrations by fast-food workers intensify while the Federal Government remains paralyzed with its minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour.