• Listen to this segment with Maya Rockeymoore

• Listen to the entire program with Host Sonali Kolhatkar

Uprising’s guest expert Maya Rockeymoore, President of the Center for Global Policy Solutions, a social change non-profit dedicated to making policy work for people and their environment, analyzes today’s news headlines:

The CEOs of two major fast food chains announced this week that they support raising the federal minimum wage. Subway CEO Fred Deluca said on Wednesday in an interview on CNBC that he would support an increase in the minimum wage and that it wouldn’t affect business if all companies had to pay a new higher wage. And then, just yesterday Dairy Queen’s CEO John Gainor in a CNN interview echoed similar sentiments. Even former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has backed a wage hike. Yet a bill to raise the federal minimum wage recently failed to pass the GOP-dominated House. The current federal minimum wage is only $7.25. Click here for a Think Progress article and here for a Huffington Post article about the story.

Americans for Prosperity, the main political spending arm of the Koch Brothers, has budgeted more than $125 million to spend in this year’s midterm elections. Politico reports that the budget is “unprecedented for a private political group in a midterm, and would likely rival even the spending of the Republican and Democratic parties’ congressional campaign arms.” Meanwhile, spending a greater percentage of its political donations to the Republican Party than even the Koch brothers is Flowers Food – the makers of Wonder Bread. The New York Times reports today that the Georgia-based corporation has given more than 99% of its donations to the GOP over the last 30 years. Click here for a Politico article and here for an MSNBC article about the story.

There’s a new development in the case of Cecily McMillan, the Occupy Wall Street activist convicted this week of assaulting an NYPD officer after she was sexually assaulted and beaten. The Guardian newspaper has obtained a letter written by 9 of the 12 jurors asking the judge in McMillan’s case to not send her to prison as she awaits her sentencing hearing. McMillan is being detained at Rikers Island. Her conviction carries a possible 7 year sentence and has shocked activists around the country. < a href=”http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/cecily-mcmillan-jurors-judge-occupy-activist-jail “>Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.