What media could be

March 5

GUEST: Abby Martin, well known journalist, former commentator on RT, and founder of the Empire Files, talks about her documentary Gaza Fights For Freedom and how the Israel lobby threatens freedom of speech in the US.

The Empire Files with Abby Martin

We were very appreciative of Abby's guest interview on Activist Radio. She represents what non-corporate media would look like. Her opinions probe the open wounds of the US Empire: racism at home, war crimes overseas, and the gradual disintegration of our democratic process.

So is she a Russian agent? A vector of "fake news" meant to make America less great again? I think she is a very capable journalist who knows that she wouldn't last for a week on mainstream media. Not because her writing and interviews are substandard, but because she has taken her propaganda blinders off. Where local NPR has its "Round Table" of conventional wisdom, Abby's reporting can show how narrow that Public Radio view really is. She reports the facts about Palestine, Venezuela, and US wars abroad, while the Round Table swoons over Biden's latest victory in the primaries.

Abby is good at being provocative. Some of it is just anger at the injustice she sees around her. Part of it is her niche. She is not on the corporate payroll, so she has to scramble to survive. Here latest movie, Gaza Fights for Freedom pushes the envelope in a similar way. It is a brutal and heartrending view of the Empire's ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land. Not something that mainstream media would dare touch.

Abby Martin shows us what media could be in America. Turn off NPR and find out a little more about the world we live in. 

The fight isn't over yet

On their yachts in foreign ports, the billionaires are raising their champagne glasses to toast Biden's victories, as they triumph once again over the vast majority of America's working class. 

Voters will once more be faced with the lesser of two evils, both firmly affixed to the teat of corporate influence. Maybe voters will go with Sleepy Joe, that doddering champion of elite financial interests. That pro-war, pro incarceration, pro financial deregulation member of the good old boys on Wall Street. 

Or maybe voters will prefer a more primitive version of a corporate sellout, the reptilian current occupant of the White House. Is there a greater of two evils that even comes close to our misogynist, racist, and mendacious president? 

It doesn't matter to the billionaires. The country can go to hell for everyone else, while they and their immense fortunes float freely out of reach. Biden and Trump are both long time members of that putrid swamp in Washington; they will do what they are told. 

Perhaps the ultra rich will also toast their newspapers and TV news outlets for never giving Bernie a break. Did The New York Times ever have a positive word to say about him? When he was down, there was no coverage at all. When he won, its headlines called him a "threat." The billionaires know that the establishment media is their most important asset.

The oppression of the wealthy elite will only get worse. But the fight isn't over yet.  

Fred Nagel

Perhaps we will come to that conclusion ourselves

February 27

GUEST: Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Fulbright Scholar and Associate Professor of geography at SUNY New Paltz, talks about the writings of Joel Kovel and how capitalism is the enemy of the emerging eco-socialist movement to save our planet.

The Enemy of Nature

As global warming continues unabated and the planet becomes more unlivable, people are giving socialism another look.

Perhaps large majorities are now realizing that capitalism makes billionaires, but does nothing for the rest of us. And as our neoliberal system gets more and more extractive, there is less and less for the vast majority to live on. As the richest country in the world, there has always been some excess left over for the middle class. But greed has no logical boundaries, and much of the US population is now living paycheck to paycheck.

Revolutions are born of desperation. There was the desperation of the electorate that put the demagogue, Donald Trump, into the White House. Perhaps voters in 2020 will put Bernie Sanders into office too. Polls of Democratic voters all across the country show that they now view socialism more favorably than capitalism, the latest one being from Texas and California.

Will a revolution in values save our planet? Certainly not the phony revolutions of Clinton, Obama or Trump, all puppets of the rich elite. But just maybe Bernie will create something different, some evolution of our democracy before we give up on it entirely.

Joel Kovel wrote that capitalism is incapable of saving itself or the planet. Devastation is in capitalism's DNA. Perhaps we will come to that conclusion ourselves as our world collapses around us and we desperately look for another way. 

Generations following behind us

February 20

GUEST: Steve Hoffman, labor activist in the Washington Federation of State Employees, and former Freedom Socialist Party candidate for US Senate from Washington state, talks to us about the return of the strike, and how labor is "getting its mojo back."

Freedom Socialist Party candidate

Yes, there are the billionaires, who dominate our political discourse as well as elections. It is a natural consequence of a society that puts no limits on the greed and plunder at the top. A fascist society as it turns out. To "drain the swamp," we elected a demagogue who just might put an end to the entire democratic charade.

But there is a resource in our country that is pushing for something different. We saw it in Occupy, when the labor unions marched in to protect the Wall Street encampment. It was early morning just before the first sunlight came through the trees. There were thousands of us standing in a huge circle around Zuccotti Park as thousands more union members came down the street to join us. I remember thinking that this is what the end of neoliberalism will look like. Here was joy that we all had worked so hard to achieve.

Occupy was crushed by the plutocrats, led by the biggest sellout of them all, our President Obama.   How could the Democratic Party show its face after such a betrayal?

The left, however, remained standing. People like Steve Hoffman who will always be there to fight another day. If we can't change the Democratic Party by nominating Bernie, we will go on to break the two party system for good. We will all be there another day, and this time there are generations following behind us.

Destroyed by the very racism it was created to overcome

February 13

GUEST: Zahra Billoo, civil rights attorney, board member of the National Lawyers Guild, and executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), talks about Muslim rights and why she was removed from the Women's March board.

An Interview with Ousted Women's March Board Member

We have all talked about a united front against all forms of racism and discrimination. The Women's March seemed to be that combination, at least for a while. From three to five million people marched in the US against war and for universal human rights. The NYC march was so big that parts of the city were completely shut down. At the supposed end of the march, we ran into tens of thousands who had not yet begun. The Woman's March in NYC was simply too big to organize.

What followed was much less inspiring. The new board of the Women's March decided that it didn't want one of the original members because she had criticized Israel. Zahra Billoo, a Palestinian American, was ousted.

PEP stands for "progressive except for Palestine," and is a fitting acronym for how the Women's March lost its way. The human rights of Palestinian women in the US and in the Holy Land cannot be left out to satisfy a few influential Zionists. There are no ethnicities that are undeserving. We don't have an "untouchable" class for Muslims. In fact, to suggest that the rights of Palestinian women don't count is the essence of the racism and discrimination that the march was supposed to oppose.

Zionism is the embodiment of racism, the demand that only Jews in the Holy Land deserve our respect and support. Half the people living in the region are not Jewish. Are their rights somehow nonexistent?

In the end, the Women's March was destroyed by the very racism it was created to overcome.

Tyranny abroad and tyranny at home

February 6

GUEST: Margaret Flowers, retired pediatrician, co-director of Popular Resistance and co-host of Clearing the FOG on WBAI (Tuesday mornings at 9:00), talks about the four Embassy Protectors facing federal charges for trying to prevent the Venezuela Embassy from being turned over to leaders of a failed US-led coup.

Embassy Protectors Defense Committee

Margaret Flowers writes for Popular Resistance, a source of news and analysis that I use more and more to do Activist Radio. So few US media outlets are free from the influence of our all pervasive but perpetually invisible empire.

The blockade of Venezuela is one example. Few people in the rest of the world see US intervention in Venezuela as an attempt to free its people from tyranny. Yet that is the Pentagon narrative that defines the boarders of acceptable thought in our country. Any journalist who wants to keep getting paid must follow the prescribed script. There are no alternate story lines in the mainstream media.

Yet the egregious war crimes being committed by the US in Venezuela are plain to see. Maduro is a fairly elected president and Guido is the figurehead of a CIA backed coup, like the dozens of other such US backed coups in Latin America. Our blockade is an act of war based on nothing, a clear violation of all international law. Venezuela is not an imminent threat to the US, an assertion so preposterous that even our President hasn't made it yet.

True tyranny is not only controlling the media, but also attacking anyone with a differing point of view. That is why I picked this provocative depiction of Uncle Sam above. We have such a homogenous view of the world in part because truth tellers and whistle blowers face vicious retaliation when they engage in non-violent civil disobedience. US tyranny abroad eventually produces the same tyranny here at home.

It takes a history of being oppressed

January 30

GUEST: Colin Jenkins, researcher, political writer, and founder of the Hampton Institute, a working-class think tank named after Fred Hampton, talks about neoliberalism, the war economy, and his own political awakening as a US veteran.

Colin Jenkins' articles

How is it that African American writers and theorists can expose the empire much more effectively than white academics can. The Fred Hampton Institute connects all the dots to describe what motivates  neoliberal America in the twenty-first century: greed, militarism, and media complicity.

It is interesting to note that the two most influential thinkers of the 1960s were both African Americans assassinated in the prime of their lives at age 39. Martin Luther King, Jr. had come to realize the full malevolence of the empire of his day, and called attention to US imperialism in his later speeches. Malcolm X had an epiphany after traveling to Mecca, and saw his people's struggle in a similar way, as a fight against capitalism and imperialism.

Fred Hampton, murdered by the Chicago Police and the FBI when he was only 21, had come to believe that racism was dependent on militarism and colonial exploitation. Three visionary leaders telling it like it is. We as whites just can't seem to bring ourselves to look at our "democracy" in that way. Maybe it takes a history of being oppressed to recognize the empire.