For analysis on the Wisconsin recall vote, we go to Madison to speak with John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Although Republicans hold on to a slim 17-to-16 majority after the election, Nichols says the Democrats’ pick-up of two seats, coupled with the moderate stance of Republican State Sen. Bill Schulz, amounts to a new “pro-labor majority” in the Wisconsin State Senate. “Gov. Scott Walker took a hit last night,” Nichols says. “Even though Democrats didn’t win, progressive politics made a real advance.” Some $30 million was spent by outside groups on the Wisconsin recall. Looking forward to the 2012 national election Nichols says the “biggest message from Wisconsin” is that “we are going to see absolutely unprecedented amounts of money coming into our politics and have to ask ourselves the question, do we have a democracy or a dollar-ocracy?
July 1, 2011
Haiti: Leaked Cables Expose U.S. Suppression of Min. Wage, Election Doubts and Elite’s Private Army
Drawing on almost 2,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables on Haiti released by WikiLeaks, a partnership between The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly, Haïti Liberté, exposes new details on how Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked with the United States to block an increase in the minimum wage in the hemisphere’s poorest nation, how business owners and members of the country’s elite used Haiti’s police force as their own private army after the 2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and how the United States, the European Union and the United Nations supported Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections, despite concerns over the exclusion of Haiti’s largest opposition party, Lavalas, the party of Aristide. We speak with the reports’ authors, longtime Haiti correspondent Dan Coughlin and Haïti Liberté editor, Kim Ives.