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I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement\xa0of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as part of a larger movement to end the war in Vietnam. Barbara's time spent working at such a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington was one part of a long career of writing and activism. Her controversial play MacBird!, a\xa0satire of the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Kennedy family, was an off-Broadway hit in 1967. Over the following decades, she has published a series of books focusing on American labor (All the Livelong Day: \xa0The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work), the economic landscape (The Electronic Sweatshop: \xa0How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future), and most recently, the social consequences of capitalism (Down the Up Escalator: \xa0How the 99 Percent Live). She joins me here to discuss her personal political development and the ideas driving her work.