Just a dream some of us had

August 27

GUEST: Thom Hartmann, top rated progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host and New York Times bestselling author of twenty-six books, talks about his recently published work, The Hidden History of Monopolies - How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream.

The Thom Hartmann Hidden History Series

We were honored to have Thom Hartmann on Activist Radio. His latest book, The Hidden History of Monopolies is a fascinating exploration of how big corporations become even bigger, and in the process came to dominate our public discourse. It has all happened before, during the Gilded Age and  the Roaring Twenties. In each case the apex of corporate power was followed by a catastrophic economic collapse, and then the public demand for regulation and reform. Like always it was the working people who experienced the most devastation.

One question got Thom talking about socialism. According to him, socialism has never worked, although he did make some exception for the socialist oriented democracies of Scandinavia. According to Thom, the lending of capital is always necessary if businesses are to flourish. He gave an example of a travel business he had started at one time. By borrowing capital, he had turned it into a very successful business, and one that he sold for several million dollars.

No, capitalism is something to be reformed, not done away with. His Hidden History series is blueprint for reform aimed at the common man (and woman too). Read them and you will simply know more about the evils that have plagued our democracy for the last hundred years. And we are well past the time when the giant corporation and trusts should have been busted up.

The future of reform doesn't look too promising either. We pay exorbitant prices for everything, making the billionaires at the top richer than even they can imagine. Meanwhile wages have stagnated for so long that the American Dream has taken its place next to the Holy Ghost. Was it "just a dream some of us had," like Joan Mitchell's lament for peace?

I want a dyke for president

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.
Zoe Leonard
-Thanks to Colin for this poem.

Subjugated peoples have always had the courage and persistence to demand equality

August 20

GUEST: Sijal Nasralla, Campaign Director of the MPower Change, an organization that promotes human rights for Muslims both in the US and around the world, talks about growing up in Palestine and trying to change the racist narrative about Muslim immigrants living in our country.

You Can't Reform Haram

Muslims in the US face racism because it comes from the top. Trump, like most destructive tyrants, uses racial hatreds to gain power. Republicans have been dong that for decades to win elections. Democrats have a more subtile racism, as practiced by the grifter Clintons. Bill and Hillary used phrases like "super predator" when they wanted to play the race card.

But subjugated peoples have always had the courage and persistence to demand equality. Sometimes this courage ends in genocide, as with America's indigenous peoples. Muslims are torn between these two extremes: stay safe and internalize the hatred around them, or speak out and demand to be a full citizen of this supposed democracy.

MPower Change is all about having the courage to be a Muslim in a toxic society. Toxic because the US has killed millions in the Middle East, occupied land through illegal invasions, and stolen the oil and natural resources that belong to the peoples who live there. We are a predatory state, a privateer enterprise and only the American people don't know. Muslims living the US, however, do know. Like Blacks, they realize the viscousness of a state run by neoliberal madmen, intent on enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else in the world.

Like Black people, Muslims are figuring out how to preserve their identity and resist.

Neoliberalism is coming after your standard of living next

August 13

GUEST: Van, local antifa activist and member of the Hudson Valley Antifascist Network, talks about white supremacy violence and the collective efforts to expose and publicly shame racists, homophobes, and right wing fascists.
Hudson Valley Antifascist Network - Facebook

Van and I hit it off. I understand why it is so important to oppose racists and white nationalists in the streets. Without a battle in the streets, these white fascists take over communities, especially in these times of unbridled corruption in high places. Had the Blackshirts or the Brownshirts been beaten in Italy or Germany, there would have been no Second World War.

The US media, almost completely owned by the corporate elite, does not want this basic truth to get out. The media wants you to think that voting is the most important thing a mistreated and frustrated citizen can do. But as Howard Zinn taught us, movements come first, before election victories. If there is no movement, the corrupt bastards who we elect just serve the Billionaires, like Obama did for eight years.

Without movements against racism, fascism, and corruption of the very rich, nothing will change. In fact, things have gotten worse for the average worker over the last 40 years. Get off your ass you white liberals, and take to the streets. Neoliberalism is coming after your standard of living next. 

The corporations want us to focus on racist police

August 6

GUEST: Christian Perenti, author of "Radical Hamilton," and Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College CUNY, talks about his latest article, "The Surprising Geography of Police Killings" and how race and region determine who gets murdered by the men in blue.

The Surprising Geography of Police Killings

Christian has done the research. Police in the North kill more Black people than police in the South. When one looks at the ratio of Blacks in each state, the most dramatic killing rates are not in Alabama but in Massachusetts.

How could that be? It is just possible that police kill a higher percentage of poor people. Large numbers of whites are poor in the South, making them more apt to be murdered by the cops. Whites in the North are better off, so the killings of Black people make up a higher percentage if the population.

So is the problem of Black killings related to their rates of poverty? Blacks make up a larger number of poor people in the North. Being poor and Black in Massachusetts is a risk to your life.

Are racism and class competing narratives? Not necessarily. But to avoid talking about poverty and police killings is maybe to miss the larger point. MLK was working on the Poor People's March when he was murdered. Had he come to realize that poverty was the real enemy of poor people, whether they are Black or white?

And do the corporations want us to focus on racist police, rather than risk a true, multicolored movement for fair pay and economic justice?

Throwing the neoliberal money makers out from the start

July 30

GUEST: Ed Haffmans, local peace and environmental activist who has spent decades living well without fossil fuels, talks about the growing consensus for renewable energy, and Michael Moore's new documentary, Planet of the Humans.

SUNY New Paltz did not make the cut for greenest campuses

The only thing ‘green’ about nuclear power

Ed has been around the Hudson Valley for a long time. I remember him from the 1980s selling buttons about US imperialism in Central America. The buttons were right on; our government was lying through its teeth.

I had not really known about the local wars for environmental justice, so Ed was a source of some good stories. The turnaround of SUNY New Paltz was sort of a shocker. The college had gone from environmental innovation to a board of trustees filled with oil and banking executives. The college had even torn down its environmental center.

The story about Indian Point nuclear power plant is even more troubling. How did a few investors prevail over the safety of millions of people up and down the Hudson River? The NY Times was certainly part of it, with never a discouraging word about nuclear power.

Indian Point is still with us, of course. As is global warming. Profit making from the environment creates an ever larger dead zone. Indian Point can never really be deactivated because there is no place to send the spent fuel. It will sit there forever like a huge undetonated bomb, waiting for a time when the cooling tanks plug up or shut down.

I put the picture of a wind farm up because there were better answers all along, if we could have thrown the neoliberal money makers out of the equation from the start. 

Were our government made up of Laurette Giardinos

July 23

GUEST: Laurette Giardino, human rights activist and 2020 Democratic candidate running for New York State Assembly of the 105th district, talks about why she supports the NY Healthcare Act, green jobs, alternative energy, criminal justice reform, and getting the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

Laurette Giardino for NY State Assembly 105th District

Harckham Honors Two District LGBTQ Leaders for Pride Month

Laurette was a joy to interview. She has strong beliefs in justice, equality, and personal freedom. She is even willing to run on that platform for the NYS Assembly. She wants universal healthcare, and hasn't been bought off by the big insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. She is for the Green New Deal, and hasn't taken any money from Big Oil. She is for racial justice and not afraid to talk about what changes need to be made.

In short, she is putting forth a people's agenda, free from the dominance of the nation's billionaires. How is this even possible in a society so inundated with the filthy money of the privileged few?

I think it comes down to Barnie and the progressive movement in this country that just never stopped saying what should be said. That the very rich incite racial hatreds as a way to maintain their power and money. That working people can stand together and make the rich pay their fair share if they expect to enjoy the benefits and protections of our society.

Were our government made up of Laurette Giardinos. 

Recovering some of our lost humanity by being honest

July 16

GUEST: Kwame Holmes, PhD, Scholar in Residence, Human Rights Program, Bard College, and author of numerous articles about race and LGBTQ rights, talks about Black Lives Matter and how local actions can create lasting change.

Why Abolish the Police? - Chronogram

Scholar in Residence, Human Rights

Kwame is a delightful guest. He is able to keep his sense of humor as he talks about the prevailing racism that has plagued our society since way before the US Constitution. Ours is a nation built on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples as well as the importation of millions of Black slaves. As a white person, what does one do? What reparations will ever make those wrongs less of a curse on our national pride? Why do whites have national pride?

Discussing all this with a Black person willing to talk about race can be anxiety producing. Am I saying racist things because my society has been awash in racist sentiments for my whole life? Or am I simply a racist because my standard of living and virtual freedom from police killings has always made my life easier. Ok, much easier. I have been a member of the chosen people in a country perpetually stained by its continued assault on people of color.

So humor makes things easier. It allows me to express my support for human rights without thinking of what I should have been doing all along. Humor makes me laugh about racist assumptions too. Assumptions that are simply stupid and small minded, like our president. But is it enough to condemn Trump? What is enough for a white man in our society?

It is a question that the Germans have asked since the Holocaust. Did they know what was going on as Jews were disappearing? Were they in the German Army, defending a state that was committing genocide? And when can Germans expect to rejoin the human race?

I don't know about white people being "fragile," the conclusion of "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism." The book is well worth reading, of course. But why not say that like the Germans who lived through World War II, white people in America are simply guilty in some degree, and that we can recover some of our lost humanity by simply being honest?

PANOPTICON August 4, 2020 - Raphaelle

PANOPTICON August 4, 2020

Ever since the first day of the lock down, people around the world have had one burning question: how do we get out of lockdown and back to our former lives?  

Two widely touted ways we are told we will regain our freedom are either a vaccine and failing that - or incorporating that - some kind of “papers-please” pass containing our personal health data as it relates to COVID19.

And of course given how much money is swirling around all things COVID related, oligarchs are jumping on both of these challenges.  I’ll leave the vaccine conversation for another program, (here’s where Fred breathes a sigh of relief!!) and focus in today’s episode of Panopticon on some of the tracking apps which we are being told will be a big part of our future new normal.

And just on a personal note, as a child of apartheid in South Africa, growing up watching people being pulled off the streets into police vans because their papers weren’t in order, it is particularly painful for me to talk about this.  

So first up is a Swedish company called Sidehide that say they are testing their biometric ID product in Miami hotels this summer.   Sidehide uses a QR code embedded with a selfie and your government issued ID to provide faster authentication during hotel check ins and could in the future include your covid19 test results and your vaccine status.

Delta and Heathrow Airport have both expressed interest in this product – which leads me to another early entrant in this space, Onfido, which raised a hundred million dollars in venture capital in April, including from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund.  Like Sidehide, Onfido uses a QR code embedded with your government ID, a selfie and AI to authenticate you.

Onfido recently submitted a proposal to Britain’s parliamentary Science and Technology committee, so I suspect we will be hearing more from Onfido in the future.

And finally I want to talk about COVI-Pass which uses a VCode—similar to a QR code—that flashes green if a person has tested negative for the virus, red if tests show that they have the virus or don’t have antibodies, or if their test result has expired and yellow when it’s time to be retested. The app can “geo-fence” an entrance, prohibiting visitors with a red light from entering a building, stadium or school. 

The COO of COVI-Pass, Adam Palmer, believes all governments will move toward a global health passport, and they will be as common as carrying a driver’s license or a passport.  The company says they are shipping passes to both the private sector and governments in over fifteen countries, including Italy, France, India, and the United States.

So how close are we to having these products rolled out?

Well the sticking point at the moment is not getting governments and corporations to jump all over this, but the inconvenient fact that science simply can’t match the ambitions of the people who want to control us.

Let’s start with the basics.  What constitutes a positive COVID19 test?  I’m not going to delve into the controversy about the accuracy of swab tests, but even a positive COVID19 antibody test is potentially meaningless.  According to the CDC, antibody tests don’t test specifically for COVID19 so a positive antibody test could just mean you’ve been exposed to a similar corona virus in the past.  (And we will provide a CDC link in the show notes)

A second sticking point is that scientists are coming to understand the limitations of antibody testing, because immunity to corona virus infections is coded on what are called T-cells.  Testing for T-cell immunity to COVID19 is possible – but it’s hard to scale.  The other problem with testing for COVID19 immunity on T-cells is scientists are finding that large percentages of the US population already have T-cell immunity to COVID19, based on prior exposure to corona viruses (and again, we will be posting those research papers in the show notes).

But using these immunity passes to track test results could become moot once governments start rolling out warp speed vaccines.  These immunity passes could then be used to record our vaccination history - and Mastercard will likely have a jump start on their competitors in this space.  In a joint venture with the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance and the AI-powered “identity authentication” company Trust Stamp, Mastercard is rolling out the “Wellness Pass” in “low-income, remote communities” in West Africa.  The Wellness Pass is a digital vaccination record and identity platform linked to Mastercard’s payment system.

Trust Stamp uses biometric identity data and the company says their system can operate in areas of the world without internet or cellular connectivity. And because it uses biometric data, it doesn’t need a person’s legal name or identity to function.

So is the Wellness Pass a super awesome, cool little app that enables you to roll up to the check in desk, show your face, be greeted by name, and then step onto a plane safe in the knowledge that everyone onboard is as up to date with their vaccines as you are?

How comfortable are we with a payment system that’s linked to our personal health information?

What happens if we fall behind with our vaccines?  Or find out we react badly to them.  Will we find ourselves being locked out of our payment system?  Or other systems?  Will our pass prevent us from boarding planes and trains - or even entering supermarkets - because it’s flashing red instead of green?

Are these apps the beginning of a western style social credit system?

Is this a Brave New World?  And if it is, are you brave enough to stand up to it?  

Or are you going to roll up your sleeve and roll over? 

CDC Guidance on Positive Tests:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing/serology-overview.html

Research Papers on Widespread T-cell Immunity

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1?fbclid=IwAR16SL_8tMopFfQGvA-cRttcah-Q9wd8exWZfENiYILrUzwrO_8m1nJDJYA

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30610-3.pdf

Articles and Blogs on T-cell Immunity

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/new-data-on-t-cells-and-the-coronavirus

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-immunity-test-t-cell-antibody-community-a9625811.html