The Brian Lehrer Show

(Fred Froehlich)

Construction Boomdoggles

Thursday, May 31, 2007

A Daily News investigation discovered a deadly lack of City oversight during the current building boom. We’ll explore the relationship between the “honor system” for developers in New York City and the deaths of dozens of construction workers. Also, what do we mean by the term “American hegemony”?; America’s origins at Jamestown; and more questions for Time magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, Bobby Ghosh.

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Construction Boom-Doggles

Brian Kates, reporter for the New York Daily News, reports on the City's deadly lack of oversight of building construction, and Oona Adams, chief researcher of the Greater New York Laborers-Employers Cooperation and education Trust who represents union workers and employers in construction, looks at the use of undocumented employees in the industry.

The Daily News series: Building Boom-Doggle

Part I: Danger & ripoffs are on the rise

Part II: So many ways to beat the system

Part III: At the mercy of contractors

Part IV: Dream denied

View of the News in Baghdad

Bobby Ghosh, Baghdad bureau chief for Time magazine, fills us in on the latest from Iraq as part of a month-long series.

"Empirical" Evidence

We continue our conversation about the U.S. and “empire” with Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order (2003) and Colossus: the Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), his most recent book is The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press HC, 2006).

Jamestown: 400 Years and Counting

Tim Hashaw, journalist and the author of The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (Carroll & Graf, 2007) and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, professor of history at New York University and the author of The Jamestown Project (Belknap Press, 2007), discuss new views of the Jamestown colony as we observe the 400th anniversary of its founding.

The Jamestown Project and The Birth of Black America are available for purchase at Amazon.com.

“The First Black Americans” in U.S. News & World Report
Prof. Kupperman’s NYU webpage