We speak with journalist Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which examines myths about individualism and self-reliance that underpin the U.S. economy and the inequality it fosters.

We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021.

We speak with Jaysin Saxton, one of the witnesses who testified at the Senate hearing Wednesday on Starbucks’ union-busting record. Saxton was a former Starbucks shift manager, fired after leading the union drive at a store in Augusta, Georgia. He tells Democracy Now! he and fellow workers were motivated to organize their store to address the “insane” working conditions, including understaffing and inconsistent schedules.

Just weeks after the National Labor Relations Board accused Starbucks of engaging in “egregious and widespread misconduct” to prevent employees from unionizing, the company’s longtime CEO Howard Schultz appeared before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday to answer questions. Committee Chair Bernie Sanders of Vermont grilled Schultz on the company’s union-busting record and demanded an end to retaliation against workers.

We continue to remember the lawyer and human rights activist Randall Robinson, the founder of the racial justice group TransAfrica, who died last week at age 81. Robinson was a leader in the U.S. movement against South African apartheid and was a prominent critic of U.S. policy in Haiti, including the U.S.-backed coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.