energy

"This is what's interesting in Wisconsin: I think that the Right may have picked a fight they can't win rhetorically," says Harper's columnist Thomas Frank, who visited Wisconsin during the heat of the union battles this winter. He notes that Wisconsin was historically one of the most liberal states in the country, and the labor-liberal base there is fired up and ready to fight back. Thomas joins Laura in studio to talk Wisconsin and the bigger picture for progressives in the country--is the time of the Tea Party fading? "Because of the separation of women, we have created societies where we are cut in the middle. And when women have gone into public life they are forced to go into public life like men," says Gioconda Belli, Nicaraguan poet and author and former Sandinista revolutionary and later government member. Gioconda and her female comrades formed "The Party of the Lusty Left" in response to continued sexism by the revolutionary party. Gioconda is in New York for the PEN World Voices festival, and joins Laura in studio for a conversation about what modern revolutionary movements need, how women are leaders in the fight for equality, and why media matters. Finally, as gas prices are going up, Obama's approval ratings waver--and Republicans, who never met an oil and gas subsidy they didn't like, are preparing to exploit that. Laura has some thoughts. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Global climate change isn't an if anymore, it's a when, according to journalist Mark Hertsgaard. The planet is going to get warmer, and Hertsgaard says that only the "climate crooks and climate cranks" are still in the denial business. But legislation is stalled in Congress because those very same crooks control the purse strings of the politicians who make the decisions. How do the members of Generation Hot, like Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, make it? Mark joined Laura in studio to discuss that and more in the second part of a two-part interview, this one focusing on the big picture, covered in his new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

"What they're not looking at is ultimately the extraordinary cost--both the human cost and the actual cost.." says Jeff Biggers, author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. After the Massey mine explosion and BP oil spill last year, we now face a nuclear disaster in Japan. The question, then, is whether we take the opportunity to push for truly clean energy or hunker down and retreat to the old faithful sources that are slowly killing us. Jeff joins us via Skype to discuss the possibility for better energy policy post-Japan, the new coal mines opening up in Wyoming, and much more. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was 100 years ago this week, and while labor groups and historians commemorate the deaths of 146 workers from unsafe working conditions, around the country conservatives are trying to erase all those years of labor history. The latest, in Maine, is that a Republican governor wants to have a mural at the state labor department painted over; its depiction of Maine's labor history, including the first woman labor secretary Frances Perkins, has been deemed too "one-sided." What do we lose when we forget workers' history? Sarita Gupta of Jobs With Justice and Maine state representative Diane Russell join Laura to discuss the stories we need to remember. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"Quite frankly, with what's happening in Japan, I think not only us, but a lot of other people are going to have to review our sense of comfort about that," says Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers union. Gerard himself was once a union representative at a facility that mined and refined uranium, and he represents many workers in such dangerous conditions across the country today. The USW has long been part of the Blue-Green Alliance, creating a labor-environmentalist coalition, but stopped short of calling for an end to nuclear power--but will that change after Japan? Leo joins Laura via Skype to discuss the crisis in Japan, the situation of the workers there, and why this crisis is linked to workers' protests around the US.