Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Text Unveiled:
It’s Worse Than We Thought
with  
Melinda St. Louis | International Campaigns Director
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

The long-awaited release of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) revealed that the pact replicates many of the most controversial terms of past pacts that promote job offshoring and push down U.S wages while further expanding the scope of the controversial investor-state system and rolling back improvements on access to affordable medicines and environmental standards. Melinda St. Louis highlights the most onerous features of TPP and discusses the rigorous efforts to stop this quintessential capitalist juggernaut.  

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U.S. Supreme Court Heard Challenge to Bread and Butter Survival of Public Sector Unions
with
Caroline Fredrickson, President American Constitution Society for Law and Policy
and
Joe Burns, Labor Lawyer and Author, Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor's Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today

On Jan.11th, the U.S. Supreme Court considered a conservative legal challenge targeting public sector unions when the justices took up a case brought by non-union teachers who object to having to pay for collective bargaining rights. The dispute pits 10 public school teachers and the Christian Educators Association International against the California Teachers Association, a union with 325,000 members and a history of backing liberal political causes.  Unions that are certified to represent a group of employees are legally compelled to represent all employees in that unit, which means bargaining on behalf of all the workers for health care and other benefits, higher wages and representing them in grievances to adjudicate their rights against their employers.  The “dues” pay for unions to be able to  advocate for services to its members and to administratively function as an organization.  This court challenge seeks a decision that would economically starve the public workers organizations affecting their ability to advocate for their members individual economic benefits and their political rights as workers.   

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Inside Chicago's Legacy of Police Abuse:

Violence 'as routine as traffic lights'
with
Professor Craig Futterman, professor of law

On November 24, the Chicago Police Department released the long-awaited dashcam video from the shooting death of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Craig Futterman, Clinical Professor of Law and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, was instrumental in that release through his successful FOIA request. Professor Futterman and the Invisible Institute also recently released the Citizens Police Data Project, which provides a powerful tool to research several years of complaints against Chicago police officers. Now Building Bridges speaks with Prof. Futterman about The Alarming Numbers on Race and Police Misconduct in Chicago" and the context for the most recent police killings of 55-year-old, mother of 5, Bettie Jones and her young upstairs neighbor, 19 year old Quintonio LeGrier.  

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Immigrants Decry President Obama’s New Year Resolution to Begin Massive Roundups and Deportations of Central Americans
with
Oscar Charcon, Executive Director Alianza Americas

To stanch the flow of undocumented refugees to the U.S., President Obama, who some now refer to as the Deporter-In-Chief’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been preparing a national operation to deport Central American families, many of whom have been showing up at the southwest border, driven to leave El Salvador and Honduras which is gripped by terrifying violence, in a region that has also been plagued by a devastating drought.  Starting this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS unit, plans to start rounding up hundreds of families that entered the U.S. without documents and deport them. Building Bridges speaks with Oscar Chacon, Executive Director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant from El Salvador, Chacon is a frequent lecturer on Latino immigrant issues in the U.S. and the impacts of the Latino diaspora in Latin America and decries this betrayal of the U.S.’s touted principles of human rights 

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