Using hatred for political power

April 23

GUEST: Shannon Wong, activist and director of the Lower Hudson Valley Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, talks about the role of racism in the attempts to sabotage recent bail reform legislation.

Is Bail Reform a Bust?

Shannon is a tenacious fighter. She takes little steps, but is always moving forward. We quickly got into the specifics of bail reform, what was being repealed, and why the issue is so important to all of us.

It comes down to a racist system, with prosecutors and the police often tipping the scales when it comes to a fair trial. The bail reform movement doesn't really get into why a racist system is allowed to function in a free society. Just like the early Civil Rights champions wanted the courts to back up Black students' rights to attend schools and colleges. Jim Crow was attacked piecemeal, one decision at a time.

It was left to visionaries like Malcom X and MLK to present the whole. Black people are second class citizens in a country that they had a good part in building. Their ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved for the wealth of white owners. After the Civil War supposedly "emancipated" African Americans, they were faced with another century or more of vicious Jim Crow persecution.

Can we stick to bail reform? Or are we misleading our fellow citizens about what the true issue is? Shannon is working on bail reform because changes there will affect many Black prisoners right now. But she doesn't pretend that the battle will be won on one issue. A society based on racism and militarism must come to terms with how to change. We must understand what in our history created this racist relationship, and we must come together to overthrow those in government who use hatred for political power.

Confronting the Mammon we have let slip into power

April 16

GUEST: Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus at University of California at Riverside, a MacArthur Fellow, author of numerous books, and an editor of the New Left Review, talks about Coronavirus and capitalism.

Mike Davis on Coronavirus: “In a Plague Year”

In a "just in time" manufacturing, companies make a little more money because inventory is kept very low. But in times of stress, the system falls apart much faster.

In America, our healthcare is mostly privatized. Even our public hospitals try to save money by following the practices of the private sector. So when the pandemic hit, instead of having reserves of masks, testing kits, and hospital beds, we had nothing. Very soon our supposedly richest country in the world had the highest death rate from Covid 19.

Pandemics don't generate a lot of corporate wealth, so few major drug makers were interested in researching vaccines or medications. In a pharmaceutical industry where profit is the only motivation, the US drifted into Covid 19, with an ignoramus as President, a Congress firmly controlled by corporate interests, and a public health system that has been starved for decades. We are proudly "number one" when it comes to ignoring the needs of our citizenry.

Mike Davis talks about these links that our neoliberal media chooses to ignore. Most of us have already guessed that this round of Congressional bailouts will go mostly to the very billionaires who have created this inhuman system. What we didn't quite realize is that our kleptocracy would produce these many bodies. Where to put them all when our refrigerated trucks are jammed to overflowing?

Has there been a time in our recent history when our form of government has seemed so obviously flawed? Like all criminal organizations, it is firmly entrenched. But we know what we must do, and that is to confront the Mammon we have let slip into power, where it has destroyed our American dream.

Comfortable in the Third Reich

April 9

GUEST: Sam Lewis, writer, union organizer, and member of Democratic Socialists of America, talks about the breakdown of American society under neoliberalism and COVID-19, and what might come from the collapse of public trust.

If the Left Wants to Win Elections

Sam understands the peril to our existing system of a long lasting pandemic. There is also the peril to labor organizations, from US Postal Service employees to organized workers in the private sector. This unique time could see the ultimate assault on working people in a war based on disaster capitalism.

Real war, another pillar of our military industrial age, is just over the horizon. Now may be the time that the empire commits the ultimate war crimes of invading Iran or Venezuela. Trump has put together a pack of warmongering advisors who would have been comfortable in the Third Reich.

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COVID-19 has left many of us uncertain about our future. Sure, Trump was doing exactly the wrong things while being warned of a killer pandemic by a chorus of scientists and doctors. But the failings of American medicine can't be blamed on just one person. Both parties are owned by Big Pharma and the insurance lobby. Our profit driven medical system will excel at only one outcome in this crisis, the piling up of more bodies than any other country in the world.

There are other existential uncertainties lying just below the surface. Our leaders seem obsessed with militarism, with battles being waged in seven different countries. Iran and Venezuela are the next designated targets of the empire's war machine.

If that wasn't dangerous enough, the US has been shredding peace treaties like the Iran nuclear deal, the nuclear arms control treaties with Russia, and most recently the Open Skies Treaty. All of these agreements were put into place to avoid the type of nuclear conflagration that would end life as we know it on earth.

But here we sit in our houses because there is a raging pandemic outside our front door. Our foolhardy leaders have left us to face this killer alone. What makes us think that these same leaders won't let us stumble into a nuclear winter too?

The American system is run to make huge corporations billions of dollars. Nothing matters beyond this crude profit motive. Not we the people, nor our sweet land of liberty.

Acquiescing to some of their well heeled alums

April 2

GUEST: Nora Barrows-Friedman, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014), talks about Bard College's disciplinary proceedings against students who spoke out against a racist speaker on campus.

Bard students cleared of false charges

We have written a lot on this blog about Students for Justice in Palestine. We have had a number of students on Activist Radio, all with about the same point of view. Their college administrations were hostile to the idea of Palestinian rights.

There were several ways that colleges have tried to muzzle freedom of speech on campuses. First, SJP students were called rude and lacking in academic civility when they talked about Israel as an apartheid state. Next came the coverup, programs that the college supports that prove its benevolent view towards Muslims. Finally, individual students were threatened with disciplinary action and suspension. Vassar expelled a Black student for posting a cartoon on the internet that the college deemed to be antisemitic. In fact the entire SJP group was banished from campus for a year, despite the fact that no one else had ever seen the cartoon. The cartoon itself was problematical since it attacked all forms of racism in America, starting with a KKK member dressed in white holding black slaves in a cage. The charge of antisemitism was questionable at best.

Bard has taken a different route. The college has educational exchanges in the West Bank: how could the administration be biased against Palestinians? Two students who spoke out against Islamophobic comments at a public forum were under disciplinary review, yet all Bard could talk about was its praiseworthy links to Palestinian educational institutions. Eventually, all charges were dropped, in part because local community groups were supporting the students and their right to speak out.

Like our Congress, college administrators seem to be bought and sold by the Israel Lobby. Rather than protecting their students from outside assaults by rightwing Zionist organizations, the colleges have chosen to acquiesce to some of their well heeled alums in threatening students advocating human rights on campus.

Only whites in the US claim ignorance

March 26

GUEST: Phillip Martin, Senior Investigative Reporter for WGBH News, talks about his new series, Caste In America, that delves into the prejudice and discrimination that continues to the present day in India as well as the United States and Canada.

Phillip Martin

Phillip is interested in caste, and he decided to do a report on caste prejudice in India and two Western countries, the United States and Canada. In the process, he catalogued how society's racist views often dictate how badly an underclass is treated. To make matters worse, some politicians see prejudice as a way to achieve power, essentially by inciting hate and false narratives of racial superiority.

Our conversation brought us to a discussion of other caste systems that operate in much the same way. Blacks in America are a caste, and the discrimination and violence directed towards them has gone on for centuries. Palestinians are the underclass in the Holy Land. And where caste in India is a recognized phenomenon, caste in the US and Palestine is always explained away or even hidden from view. Perhaps the empire does not want its citizens to understand the racism that is always at the root level of coups, invasions and occupations.

Phillip Martin is an African American reporter. I suspect that he understood the caste system very well, even before his first trip to India. Only whites in the US claim ignorance.