jeff biggers

Federal prosecutors have charged Jared Lee Loughner with the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). We speak with Giffords’ fellow Arizona House Representative, Raúl Grijalva, about the shooting. The court documents filed Sunday suggest the the attempted assassination of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was premeditated. We speak with Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. "[Arizona] is a gun state," says Tucson-based journalist Jeff Biggers. "I think we see a huge difference between the right to own a weapon to go hunting or to defend yourself and the right for mentally disturbed people to purchase semiautomatic firearms without any sort of registration or regulation." We speak to Biggers about Arizona's gun laws. We speak with Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. In his latest article about the Arizona shooting, Berlet writes: "From a moral viewpoint Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of demagogues such as Glenn Beck and his allies at Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement. This is not about legal liability, but about moral culpability. This is about a nation that has lost its moral compass." Democracy Now!, a daily independent newshour.

This past week saw protests against mountaintop removal and strip mining around the U.S.--GRITtv coal correspondent Jeff Biggers attended one in Illinois, while around 100 people were arrested in front of the White House, including climate scientist James Hansen. There's no enthusiasm gap, Biggers notes, when it comes to the anti-coal protesters, many of whom have been fighting the destruction of their communities for decades. Biggers checks in with us via Skype from southern Illinois, where he's been covering the protests, and discusses the next move for anti-coal activists and the Obama administration.

Yet another coal miner was killed on the job this week, and journalist and author Jeff Biggers says that the situation has reached crisis level--that it's a war on miners. He also notes that abuse of the land and abuse of the people who work on it has always gone hand in hand, so as pressure for mountaintop removal and new coal mines mounts, so do safety violations--the latest being a story broken by NPR, that a methane gas monitor at the Little Big Branch mine, where 29 workers died in an explosion in April, had been deliberately shut down. Biggers joins us to fill us in on the latest news from coal country--and from D.C., where Lisa Jackson and the E.P.A. faced a unique protest.Every day, the story changes. Sarah Palin's the leader of the Republican party--except that she can't raise money. Eliot Spitzer is a disgrace (but has a TV show), and David Vitter can run for reelection on a "family values" platform. The NAACP wants the Tea Party movement to declare itself not racist, and suddenly the NAACP is racist. And we can't even get started on the BP disaster--mostly because BP won't let reporters near the scene of the crime. Who can make any sense out of all this? Thankfully, we have expert political observers Rebecca Traister of Salon.com and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join us in studio to try.

Even though twenty-nine coal miners were recently lost in the West Virginia Upper Big Branch mine explosion and the environmental and economic devastation from the BP oil spill continues to trump the clean up efforts, environmental legislation is strangled by this "deadly addiction." Author and journalist Jeff Biggers joins us via Skype from West Virginia to discuss how public hearings are not always the most effective response to pressing issues. For instance, miners are currently battling to have legal or union representation at the May 24th hearing surrounding this tragedy. While there is a cry for transparency and change in West Virginia, Biggers broadens this to Congress' Climate Bill claiming that now is not the time for a watered down compromise, but a comprehensive commitment to clean, safe energy. We have all seen the job market changing radically in a variety of ways. Not only is there more freelance, more contract, and more part time jobs, but some industries are dissolving all together while new ones rise to take their places. What does this mean for the future of labor movements, unemployment, and the work place? Barack Obama is promoting the economically, politically, and environmentally catastrophic oil spill as an anomaly in order to maintain support for offshore drilling. Go to www.SpillHereSpillNow.org to tell President Obama that this is unacceptable! Liz Shuler, secretary and treasurer of the AFL-CIO, joins us in the studio to discuss how both recent changes and America's labor culture have resulted in well over one third of young people being unable to make it in a variety of ways: living at home, unable to pay bills, and living without health insurance. Shuler discusses how in this unstable economy we not only need unions to ensure functionality and justice, but we also need to make sure that growing industries are open and available to everyone (especially women) to avoid the economic and social effects of discrimination and gendering the workplace. Finally, as Britain experiences a vast political change with the recent elections, Laura observes that Britain was faced with a vote between fairness and austerity.