Working Life Podcast

Episode 20: The numbers and the passion show it: undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom have lived in the country for over a decade, are part of the fabric of communities everywhere. Jonathan speaks with one expert, Lisa Christensen Gee of the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, who tallied up the billions of dollars undocumented immigrants contribute to every local economy. Jonathan also chats with a friend from the Bernie Sanders campaign trail, Cesar Vargas, a national leader for immigrant rights who is not only a bar-admitted lawyer but lives his activist and professional life with undocumented status himself. And we wrap up crowning Paul Ryan and his gang Robber Barons of the week for their putrid proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which will make millions of people sicker and cause people to die because they can't afford health care coverage.

Episode 19: Forget the election for chair of the Democratic National Committee. The most astonishing part of the debate at the recent DNC big meeting in Atlanta was…there was no real debate. Or, when there was, it wasn't to be honest about the crisis in the party. Nope—it was to defeat a move to ban corporate money from the party. Woohoo! So, to hell with that: Jonathan speaks with three people—the founder of the #DemEnter movement; a Bernicrat who is now a Democratic state party chair after running a campaign against the insiders; and, we welcome back Nina Turner to give her take on the DNC meeting and the future. Our Robber Barons of the week hail from the media industry.

Episode 18: Democrats will know this Saturday who is tapped as head of the party. But, will the party figure out what's wrong with its pitch to voters? Jonathan talks with linguistics guru George Lakoff, who a decade ago began pushing the party to understand how voters' brains really work. Jonathan also talks to Christine Quinn, yet another high-profile former supporter of Hillary Clinton who has just endorsed Keith Ellison. And after a crushing loss by unions trying to organize Boeing's plant in South Carolina, we anoint the company's CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, our Robber Baron of the week.

Episode 17: Here's what the political class offers the people as health care options: the Republican "who cares if you die as long as the free market lives" versus saving the Affordable Care Act which delivers huge new profits to the corrupt insurance industry. Seriously? So, it's a good time for us to go in-depth on the only real, moral and economically sane solution: single-payer, "Medicare for All". Jonathan devotes the whole podcast to a conversation with one of the nation's long-time leading experts on single-payer. And sticking to the theme, our Robber Barons segment shines a light on the enormous pay of the CEOs of the medical industrial complex.

Episode 16: Consider this crazy number: 150 million people around the globe are migrants, moving here and there, either looking for work or avoiding political violence or both. Jonathan explores this astounding fact with an expert in Africa and an advocate in the U.S. Our Robber Barons segment pegs Chevron, tax avoider and poisoner of the Amazon.

Episode 15: Because of his greed and a never-ending thirst to grab for even more money, Donald Trump has been violating the Constitution—breaking the law—every moment since he got the keys to the Oval Office. Jonathan speaks with two lawyers who are part of two significant efforts with the potential—admittedly, with many political and legal obstacles to overcome--to force Trump from office. But, on the merits, this is a bi-partisan no-brainer. Seriously. We close with Goldman Sachs' alum Gary Cohn taking home this week's Robber Barons crown.

Episode 14: In about one month, a new chair of the Democratic National Committee will be chosen. Jonathan speaks with yet another candidate, New Hampshire state chair Raymond Buckley who has had some pretty tough things to say about the DNC. But, just as a recent podcast reported on progressive sweeps in California party politics, Jonathan is even more interested in local organizing so he wanders down to Florida to chat with Stacey Patel, a Bernicrat who rode her new-found political activism all the way to winning the post of Democratic party chair of Brevard County. We wrap up by tagging some banking CEOs as the Robber Barons of the week.

Episode 13: Just two days before an ignorant person gets the keys to the Oval Office, and wraps his tiny fingers around the nuclear button, Jonathan goes in-depth with an expert on Trump: Michael D'Antonio, author of "The Truth About Trump" gets into the real story, the one the incompetent transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) don't seem to get. Michael explicitly tells us, from his deep research, that Trump is a very cruel person who is "happy to do the worst to the little guy," enjoys menacing people, and tended to fail at any business that required paying attention to details over a long period of time. Join Jonathan and Michael for a serious discussion. Our Robber Barons segment highlights a damning Oxfam report that tells us a startling fact: Eight men now have wealth equal to the wealth of 3.6 billion people on the planet.

Episode 12: Yes, taking over the Democratic Party is far from a mirage. Over the course of two days, the political revolution showed it has bite and balls: Berniecrats, and other progressives, won more than 600 seats—over 50 percent of the seats in play--in elections to fill slots for the California Democratic Party state committee. Jonathan was on the ground in the state, and he brings eye-witness reporting from the elections and conversations with Berniecrats who helped sweep all the seats in San Luis Obispo—and you will hear the secrets to organizing that make these victories doable in other states. Wrapping it up: the regular Robber Barons segment sticks it to the corrupt health sickness industry (we don't call it "health care" around here).

Episode 11: That's the sum total of the guy who will soon occupy the Oval Office, and have his finger on the nuclear button. To honor this, Jonathan spends the entire podcast chatting with David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-prize winning, investigative *real* journalist (as opposed to the incompetent transcribers of press releases who can't do their own homework) who knows the real Trump and wrote "The Making of Donald Trump." Join a serious discussion laying out the truth about Trump. Hot tip: the consensus between Jonathan and David--Trump only cares about two things, money and whether he can unbutton a woman's blouse. And, of course, we have our Robber Barons segment.