Listen / Download

The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa: successor to the oh-so promising “Rio Earth Summit” a decade ago. Back then, world leaders and NGOs alike gathered hopefully to chart water resources, to curb climate change, and to promote environmental responsibility.

This year, the same crowd considered similar issues, but somehow, there’s a sour taste here at the close, a sense not much progress is being made, environmentalists railing against U.S. resistance, developed nations prickling at the notion they’re not doing enough for the poor.

Summits either hoist or suppress lofty goals, act as either networking heaven or a wasteful junket. Question is, do they work? Johannesburg et al, requisite or ridiculous?

Guests:

Vijay Vaitheeswaran – Energy and Environmental Correspondent for The Economist

Christopher Flavin, President of World Watch Institute

and Jerry Taylor, Director of Natural Resource Studies at the Cato Institute.

Listen / Download

Lenny Bruce never got his due. Yes, he was a celebrated, if hugely controversial comic. Yes he appeared on TV, and toured the country and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, even in life he gained cult status and after his ignominious death was celebrated in song and film and on stage, but he never got the star billing he so deserved in American legal history.

That’s the case presented by two First Amendment lawyers, whose new book, “The Trials of Lenny Bruce,” shines the spotlight on Bruce and his eight obscenity arrests during the early 1960s, calling Lenny an unsung hero of free speech, a man crucified by “contemporary community standards,” and a man resurrected by a nation yearning to live and listen free of moralities’ muzzle.

Guests:

Ronald K.L. Collins, co-author of “The Trials of Lenny Bruce”

David M. Skover, co-author of “The Trials of Lenny Bruce”

Nat Hentoff, columnist for The Village Voice.

Listen / Download

The swinging ’90s are over. The bosses are in handcuffs. Employees hold the pink slips. That’s today’s image of the American workplace.

But there’s another economic “crisis” looming, according to a new study, harder to perceive, harder to fix too: the authors say over the next 20 years, America won’t have the right workers, and workers won’t have the right skills. It could bring “a new burst of inequality” and a deeper economic slide.

The study is a call for change, from the high halls of Congress down to the mindset of the individual worker. The query of Ebenezer Scrooge seems apt, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they the shadows of things that may be, only?” Peering into the past, the present, and the future of the workforce.

Guests:

David Ellwood, Harvard University labor economist and director of the Aspen Institute report

Beth Shulman, report contributor and former Vice President of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union

Jim Oesterreicher, report contributor and former CEO of JC Penney.