It's too soon to die

December 22

 

Holiday Special. We include some songs we never got to play during the year, as well as some parts of interviews that were just left out. Stay tuned for a Pandora's Box full of wishes and the unexpected gifts. And of course, we don't leave out that most important of treasures, which is our hope for a new world based on peace and love, rather than greed and militarism.   

This was a fun show to do, and I hope you enjoyed it. I just picked music and interviews that I had saved during the year. It was stuff I couldn't throw away.

Activist Radio is usually more formulaic, especially since I now record it in my home studio. I write almost all of the program out before I start recording. That's different than what happened in the Vassar College Radio's studio, where I would often go off subject. Back then I also had a number of so-hosts, which really changed the dynamics of what went out over the air.

The new year gets me thinking about other possibilities for the show. I still enjoy doing it a lot, especially since the program seems to be gaining an audience. KCEI carries Activist Radio now, broadcast from Red River and Taos New Mexico. So does KEPJ of San Antonio, Texas.

KKWE from White Earth Indian Reservation broadcasts Activist Radio in Minnesota, as does WBDY in Binghamton, New York. Wesleyan University airs my program to Middletown, Connecticut from its station, WESU. And WGRN (The Green Renaissance) broadcasts us from Columbus, Ohio. WRFA airs us to Jameston, New York. 

Each week brings a new list of stations. Some carry Activist Radio for a week or two and then drop us. Some have been with us for several years. One of our longest relationships is with WIOF in Woodstock, NY. It is a great little station, with a relatively wide broadcast area in the Mid Hudson Valley. Finally, the show is carried by the Progressive Radio Network which goes out from https://prn.live.

Having listeners always makes things seem more important. I want my country to put a greater emphasis on peace and social justice. I want to talk about racism, neoliberalism, and militarism. I want to expose the filthy rich for what they are doing to the US and to the rest of the world. And I want to convince humankind that it is "too soon to die," as Pete Seeger implored us. 

Here is all of Pete's song for a better new year:

One blue sky above us
One ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round
Who could ask for more
And because I love you
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon to die.
 
Some folks want to be like an ostrich,
Bury their heads in the sand.
Some hope that plastic dreams
Can unclench all those greedy hands.
Some hope to take the easy way:
Poisons, bombs. They think we need 'em.
Don't you know you can't kill all the unbelievers?
There's no shortcut to freedom.
 
One blue sky above us
One ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round
Who could ask for more
And because I love you
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon to die.
 
Go tell, go tell all the little children.
Tell all the mothers and fathers too.
Now's our last chance to learn to share
What's been given to me and you.
 
One blue sky above us
One ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round
Who could ask for more
And because I love you
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon to die.
 
One blue sky above us
One ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round
Who could ask for more

My rainbow race

 

December 15

 

GUEST: Dr. Helen Caldicott, long time peace and environmental activist, former faculty member at Harvard Medial School, and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, talks about the environmental and medical dangers of the nuclear age.

Russia’s war could spell worldwide nuclear disaster

I wonder what it is like being right about nuclear power all these years. The concept never seems to die either. There must be a lot of money to be made poisoning the earth. But where do these energy entrepreneurs figure they will go after the last plant is wilted? Perhaps one turns to space fantasies once our planet is done for. We should start a GoFundMe campaign to shoot these aspiring energy speculators far into outer space, where they can't hurt us anymore.

But the idea of nuclear energy seems to be as eternal as its half life. A recent issue of the Jacobin Magazine started out with the familiar truths about poisoning our planet, only to change halfway through the article to an attack on liberals for closing the Indian Point power plant. Maybe the editors of that self branded "socialist" magazine thought that any attack on liberals was worth a try. But take a look at the tortured logic the writer uses. The article is a time capsule of discredited science from the 1960s. Is this the brave new world of socialist thought?

"How Liberals Created, Then Destroyed, Publicly Owned Nuclear Power" By Fred Stafford 

I include this article to show how many lives the nuclear energy industry has. Not only are some supposedly progressive writers (The Intercept describes Fred Stafford as a "STEM professional and independent researcher on the left") pushing nuclear again, but the whole concept of a nuclear exchange with Russia has long since disappeared from our mainstream media. Even the use of the word "exchange" is misleading. A nuclear war would be the catastrophic end of human life on earth. Nothing left to exchange really.

Still we hope that Helen Caldicott is not the Cassandra of our modern age. We must work to end nuclear's threat to humankind. As Pete Seeger sang it:

Then because I promise
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon, too soon to die

Free Julian Assange

An end to all wars

Twenty years of war has cost the United States trillions of dollars, thousands of its young men and women, and the almost universal condemnation from the rest of the world. Afghanistan and Iraq are in ruins, joining Vietnam and Korea as victims of our military prowess and quest for world domination since World War II.

Perhaps these calamities visited on Third World countries will help us dig deeper into our own national psyche, starting with the myth of good intentions. For each invasion of foreign lands, the American people were offered noble reasons for the carnage. For Korea and Vietnam we were told that our country was fighting for freedom from Communism. For Afghanistan, it was freedom for women. For Iraq it was to punish a dictator who was "killing his own people." Of course, we also understood that the latter two invasions were in retribution for 9/11, a moral judgment that most American citizens accepted. Paying back these Islamist countries also became part of the honorable intentions that most citizens believed in.

To preserve this mythology, other aspects of our system need to be obscured. Like the staggering profits of our weapons makers. No matter who ultimately wins these wars or how many innocents get obliterated, the military industrial complex always comes out on top. We are told that wars break out, and that we must spend our national treasure defending ourselves and doing good in the world. We never conceive that it goes the other way around. That the weapons makers sit in the Pentagon strategizing how they can make billions starting new wars, and then our media comes up with the lies to make it all palatable.

Perhaps the war in Ukraine will be an end to all wars. A nuclear exchange with Russia would terminate most life on earth. But our media never dwells on the negatives of our war making. Perhaps we will go marching off to that nuclear winter with all our patriotic righteousness still intact.

Stop taking money from apartheid

December 8

 

GUEST: Jamie Jackson, human rights activist with Citizens for Justice in the Middle East and radio host for Understanding Israel Palestine on KKFI FM in Kansan City, talks about her transition from Zionism to Palestinian rights.

We Are Not Numbers in Gaza

I always enjoy talking with other radio hosts, especially when they have a leftist political prospective. Jamie has been doing her program for several years, so I cut out some of our tech talk about how one starts a radio show. I was more interested in how a person changes their mind about emotionally based beliefs. Jamie is Jewish, and grew up with a strong belief in the righteousness of Israel. It was when these beliefs just didn't match up with what Israel was doing to the Palestinians that Jamie saw a different picture. Maybe growing up in a Jim Crow nation makes us recognize what racist oppression really is. When Jamie took a closer look at the apartheid state of Israel, she started her radio program on KKFI in Kansas City.

I think that the opinion of Jewish people in the US is critical to freeing Palestine's five million people. One of the human rights groups I belong to is Jewish Voice For Peace, an organization built around changing American minds. We talk to candidates for office, reminding them how important it is not be be bought off by the Israel Lobby. We look closely at how much money each of them took from the Lobby, and what was promised in return. Check out your own members of Congress, and ask them to stop taking money from apartheid.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=q05&recipdetail=M&sortorder=U&mem=Y&cycle=2022

How can they still smile at us?

December 1

 

GUEST: Dr. Diya Abdo, author, English professor at Guilford College, and second generation Palestinian refugee, talks about Arab feminism and the program she founded, Every Campus A Refuge.

American Refuge, True Stories of the Refugee Experience

Dr. Abdo has great plans. Why can't the nation's colleges help provide housing for refugees looking to start a new life in the United States? If every college opened itself to this program, thousands of refugees would be given a chance to make it in our supposedly "land of the free."

The idea brings up a lot of issues, of course. Why is the US a destination for those who have left their homelands, looking for a new life? For Central Americans, we know the answer. For two hundred years this country has been threatening, invading and occupying countries south of our boarders. How many times has the US overthrown a democratically elected president to benefit major corporations? Are there any countries untouched by the CIA since World War II?

Thirty years of US wars in the Middle East has created its own wave of immigrants, desperate for a new life away from bombs and drones. What country in the region has not been blown apart in the interests of Big Oil? Our government's "Project for a New American Century," drawn up during the Clinton administration, argued for the complete destruction of the Middle East. This imperialist wet dream has resulted in millions of desperate people on the move. Where else but to Europe and the US, the only place left that is safe and functioning. 

So one might conclude that imperialism creates these waves of immigrants. But there are other reasons as well. How about trade policies that destroy food production in the Third World? How about the massive debt that Third World countries have to pay off? And how about the global catastrophe that is climate change? First World countries created the problem, while less developed nations have ended up paying the price.

Refuges are the products of racism, war, corporate greed, and financial thievery. How can they still smile at us after what they have gone through?