Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

Today's program is going to look at the interaction between dying empires, particularly

the British and the American, on the one hand, and the climate crisis on the other.

We're also going to look at a new report from the Secret Service of the United States

about mass shootings. We're going to delve into an effort by fast food restaurants in California

to buy their way out of paying higher wages, and we're going to then talk about the so-called

debt-sealing crisis playing out in Washington.

After that, we'll have an interview within a very important independent news journalist and

host, Aaron Mate.

So let's jump right in. The British Empire started to decline at the beginning

of the 20th century and spent the entire century declining. So it's far beyond the United States

whose decline is much more recent in terms of its beginning to go down as an offset,

you might say, to its rise in the previous century.

But one of the things that we can see already is how the declines of empires play out

in terms of how they deal with the crises of their time.

We clearly have a crisis of our climate, of our planet, of what we have done to that planet,

and what it is doing as a result. And so it's instructive to see what has happened with an empire whose decline

is further along than ours, Great Britain, the United Kingdom. So, for example, last month,

Minister Graham Stewart, he's the Minister for the Environment in Britain, got exposed,

taking campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies and supporting, renewing, coal

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