August 6 – The DOJ is “Reviewing” Press Subpoenas to Stop Leaks; Why Does West Virginia Love Trump?; The Fight to Unionize the Right-to-Work South

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the warning from Attorney General Sessions to would-be leakers “Don’t do it!” and his threat to reporters that he is “reviewing” press subpoenas that would force journalists to reveal their sources or face jail time. Cora Currier, a journalist who, as a reporting fellow at ProPublica covered national security, and now covers national security and press freedom for The Intercept, joins us to discuss Sessions’ response to humiliating public criticism from Trump that he was “VERY weak on Intel leakers” and the release of embarrassing transcripts of the president’s private conversations with world leaders. We examine the DOJ’s pursuit of three times as many leak investigations that occurred under the Obama Administration and the FBI’s creation of a new unit to handle the investigations.

Part 2

Then we look into why Donald Trump holds so many campaign-style rallies in West Virginia and why the state’s governor and only billionaire made an appearance at last Thursday’s rally to announce that he had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Bob Kincaid the co-founder of the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Campaign and the President of the Coal River Mountain Watch joins us to explain Trump’s popularity in a state with the nation’s worst opioid addiction crisis and the highest death rate from opioids yet is the most dependent on Medicaid funds to address the crisis as Trump plans to cut Medicaid and proposed a 95% cut in funding for the agency leading the charge against the country’s opioid epidemic.

Part 3

Then finally we assess why the United Auto Workers failed in their bid to unionize the Nissan plant in Mississippi at which the majority of workers voted with the company against the UAW in a bitterly contested campaign. An expert on labor issues, Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies labor, information technology and the organization of work, joins us to discuss the latest defeat for labor in the “right to work” South.