President Donald Trump and Congressional leaders will meet on Friday to once more discuss the on-going government shutdown that has impacted the jobs of 800,000 federal workers. Fourteen days into the shutdown, neither Trump nor Democratic leaders are willing to budge on their differences regarding a border wall in the spending bill. On Thursday the President posted to his Twitter account a video compilation of migrants at the border claiming they are “dangerous” and “criminal” – a repeat of many of his past claims. But Democrats, formally taking on the mantle of majority party in the House, also staked their claim to not fund his border wall, leading many to wonder what progress could be made at the Friday meeting.

On Thursday the President made his very first appearance at a White House Press briefing – something he has never done in his two years in office. He began by congratulating his rivals. Trump also repeated his desire for a border wall. 

As California Representative Nancy Pelosi was elected House Speaker – the second time in her career she has achieved that goal – she made opening remarks setting her vision for the Democrats’ agenda in the new year — her first address as House Speaker of the 2019 House of Representatives.

Hours after Pelosi spoke, some of her colleagues in the House went against her stated wishes and re-introduced articles of impeachment against Trump. Rep. Brad Sherman of California, and Reps. Al Green of Texas and Steve Cohen of Tennessee, together introduced the bill. Sherman told CNN that he intended to have a bill ready for when Special Counsel Robert Mueller released the findings of his investigation into election wrongdoing.

Democrats also passed their own temporary spending bills in the House. A continuing resolution to fund the Department of Homeland Security through February 8th passed by 239-192, and a separate bill to fund six other agencies for the entire year passed 241-190. By separating the bills Democrats challenged Republicans to help fulfill government spending in all other non-immigration related areas. But neither of the bills are likely to make any headway in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Pelosi made a strong statement on her first day as House Speaker on the issue of climate change. Bringing it up during her opening address, she referred to climate change as an “existential threat.” But critics denounced the rules for the “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis,” that was expected to contain much needed language on a “Green New Deal.” The rules indicate that the committee would, “investigate, study, make findings, and develop recommendations on policies, strategies, and innovations to achieve substantial and permanent reductions in pollution and other activities that contribute to the climate crisis which will honor our responsibility to be good stewards of the planet for future generations.” But ultimately the committee will lack the power to issues subpoenas or depositions, or even vote on bills that it could send to the floor of the House for a vote.

FEATURING DOUG HENWOOD – With the launch of her exploratory presidential committee on New Year’s Eve, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has been among the first to jump into what is sure to be a crowded field of Democrats vying for their party’s 2020 nomination. In a 4 and a half -minute video, Warren laid out in clear terms her bold, progressive agenda for a people-centered economy. It was a big improvement on the video she published last fall as part of her widely criticized response to President Donald Trump’s false accusations about her Native American ancestry.

On Wednesday Warren hired several staffers in the key electoral state of Iowa, including the person who managed the 2016 Iowa caucus campaign for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Emily Parcell, who helped Barack Obama win Iowa in 2008. Warren this week also announced her backing for a Green New Deal.

Doug Henwood, political economist, editor of Left Business Observer, author of After the New Economy, and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency. He is also the host of a weekly radio show on Pacifica called Behind the News.

FEATURING CRAIG AARON – Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced gleefully on Wednesday that Congress had failed to use the Congressional Review Act to restore Net Neutrality after he led the FCC’s vote against it. Mr. Pai released a statement saying, “I’m pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation. They did the right thing—especially considering the positive results for American consumers since the adoption of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order.”

But the Washington Post asserted that the battle for Net Neutrality is far from over and that several major lawsuits against the FCC’s decision are wending their way through courts.

Craig Aaron, President and CEO of Free Press, and a leading advocate in the fight to preserve net neutrality (www.battleforthenet.com). He is the editor of two books, Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In These Times and Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age.

Thursday marks the first official day of the new Congress with Democrats taking majority control of the House of Representatives. New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a photo to her Instagram account of herself posing with 5 other newly seated female members of Congress, all of whom are women of color, and all of whom broke election records. Ocasio-Cortez herself is the youngest woman to be elected to Congress. Ayanna Pressley became Massachusetts’ first black representative, while Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia are Texas’ first Latina representatives. Ilhan Omar becomes the nation’s first Hijab-wearing member of Congress, as well as the first Somali American, and one of the two first Muslim American women. And Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids become the nation’s first two indigenous women in Congress. Davids also becomes Kansas’ first openly LGBTQ representative. The five women are all Democrats.

Meanwhile Thursday also marks California Representative Nancy Pelosi’s first day as House Speaker for the 2019 Congress. In an interview on NBC’s Today Show Pelosi was asked whether she thought a sitting President could be indicted in spite of some legal opinions at the Justice Department saying otherwise. 

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday at the White House to discuss the on-going partial government shutdown which is now entering its 13th day. After the meeting both Trump and the Democrats stuck to their positions on a federal spending bill. Trump wants Democrats to pass a bill with $5 billion set aside for a border wall with Mexico while Pelosi and Schumer have held firm against such an appropriation. After the meeting Trump spoke with reporters at the White House.  Schumer and Pelosi also spoke with reporters outside the White House on Wednesday after meeting with President Trump.

Despite Pelosi’s vow to stop Congress from being a “rubber stamp“ for the President, she and other establishment leaders have backed a set of rules for funding new programs call Pay-as-you-go, or Pay-go. Those rules, championed by Republicans, require that any new spending be accompanied by matching cuts or revenue increases. But progressive Democrats like Ro Khanna and the newly seated Ocasio-Cortez have vowed to vote against Pay-go and its austerity approach. Ocasio-Cortez explained in a tweet, “PAYGO isn’t only bad economics, … it’s also a dark political maneuver designed to hamstring progress on healthcare+other leg[islation].”

Republicans are worried about President Trump’s chances of reelection in 2020 – this despite Trump’s assurances that he is, “the most popular president in the history of the Republican Party.” The recent op-ed by former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney issuing a scathing critique of Trump has opened the possibility that T...

FEATURING JEFF COHEN – The hundreds of Americans who were elected as delegates of Presidential Candidate Senator Bernie Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, were disappointed in the outcome of the primaries. Now, some of them have decided to revive the “Bernie Delegates Network,” through a vote conducted by the Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction.org.

That, in addition to the strong and independent stances taken by some newly elected and very progressive Democrats – such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib – may indicate that progressives have an edge within the Democratic Party.

Jeff Cohen, media critic, writer and journalism professor who founded the media watch group FAIR, co-founder of Rootsaction.org, Founding Director of Park Center for Independent Media.

**This interview was originally broadcast on December 13, 2018.

FEATURING L.A. KAUFFMAN – The midterm elections this past November were a strong rebuke to the Trump Presidency. The wave of young, first time progressives winning office was part of a strategy of resistance two years in the making. There have been more mass protests in the US in the years since Trump became President than at any other time in the nation’s history.

Now a new book put this new wave of resistance and organizing into historical context and attempts to understand how protest works and how it can be maximized as a tool for change rather than just an outlet for collective frustration.

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than thirty-five years immersed in grassroots movements, as a journalist, historian, organizer, and strategist. Her writings on organizing and social movement history have been published in The Guardian, The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, the Village Voice and more. Her earlier book was called Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. Her newest book is How To Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance.

**This interview was originally broadcast on December 13, 2018.

FEATURING RICHARD WOLFF – The year 2018 marked the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, a Western philosopher who changed global perspectives on the economy and the value of labor and goods. Sensing an increasing attraction to the ideas of socialism among the American public, Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors released a bizarre document entitled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.”

The report attempted to make an empirical case for why socialism does not work. In doing so, the authors inadvertently make the case for a single payer system that conservatives have derided as “socialist.” Vox’s Sarah Cliff pointed out that a chart intended to show longer wait times for seniors seeking healthcare in various countries includes the US having the shortest wait times. But of course seniors in the US enjoy the benefits of Medicare – a single payer system just for those over the age of 65.

Many point out that the report is intended to counteract the growing popularity of a Medicare-for-all system among the public and politicians, especially Democrats, as well as the popularity of socialism as an economic system.

For more information about Richard Wolff’s ‘Economic Update’ program visit www.democracyatwork.info/tags/economic_update.

Richard Wolff, visiting professor at the New School University, New York and professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author of a number of books including ‘Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism’, ‘Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism’, ‘Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA’, and ‘Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown.’

** This segment was originally broadcast on October 24, 2018.

FEATURING DAVID DAYEN – It has been ten years since the start of the Great Recession, marked by the earth-shattering downfall of Lehman Brothers, a global financial services firm, and the fourth largest such company in the US. Lehman’s fall, which happened after the subprime mortgage crash had begun, triggered a chain reaction that led to a massive stock market crash, the loss of pensions, jobs, and companies.

Ten years later we have a president who claims he has restored the economy to its full potential saying we have the “best economic numbers in decades,” and that Americans have “new-found wealth,” and “all-time high” of middle class incomes.

Have we indeed seen a turnaround of the economy, especially as measured by the financial well-being of the majority of Americans?

Read David Dayen’s articles about the 2008 crash in The New Republic and In These Times.

 

David Dayen, contributor to The Intercept, The Nation, and a weekly columnist for the New Republic. He is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud.

** This segment was originally broadcast on September 17, 2018.

FEATURING JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS – The Trump administration is moving ahead with a proposal to curb legal residency for those immigrants who would be eligible to obtain it but who have used public assistance in the past including Section 8 housing and food stamps. The Department of Homeland Security announced the new regulation recently on its website claiming it is merely about enforcing an existing law that, “Promotes Self-Sufficiency and Protect American Taxpayers.”

A spokesperson of the National Immigration Law Center said, “This is an attack on immigrant families and an attempt to make our immigration system a pay-to-play system where only the wealthy need apply.”

But this is only the latest in a breathtaking array of attacks on undocumented and documented immigrants that have escalated under the Trump administration.

The details of the precarious lives that immigrants lead are rarely acknowledged or understood by non-immigrants. Now, a new book explores the personal pain of navigating life as an undocumented immigrant.

LA Speaking Event: Jose will be speaking on Tuesday September 25th at an event in Los Angeles, at the Bovard Auditorium on the campus of University of Southern California. The event starts at 7:30 and is hosted by Skylight Books and sponsored by KPFK.

For more information about his book tour visit www.JoseAntonioVargas.com.

Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer prize winning journalist. He is the founder and CEO of the non-profit group Define American. He has written for Time magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and Washington Post. He is the winning of the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA. He is also a filmmaker and his films include Documented, as well as White People which was nominated for an Emmy. His new book is called Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.

**This segment was originally broadcast on September 24, 2018.

FEATURING ISRAEL CONCHA – Deportations of undocumented people living in the US have risen under Donald Trump. But they were high enough under his predecessor Obama. What happens to the thousands of people who spent decades, or even the majority of their lives in the US and are deported?

Now, one organization in Mexico is attempting to make something positive out of the deportation crisis by offering support for those newly deported people who were forced out of the country they consider home and into a country that may seem foreign.

New Comienzos, which translates into “New Beginnings,” was founded by my guest Israel Concha, and is located in a part of Mexico City called Little LA.

For more information visit www.newcomienzos.org or via Watzzapp at 55-77-33-1436. To donate visit https://gogetfunding.com/newcomienzos/.

Israel Concha, Founder and President of New Comienzos.

**This segment was originally broadcast on August 28, 2018.