Our dying planet

 

March 9

GUEST: Eric Epstein, environmental activist and former Chairman of the Three Mile Island Alert Inc., talks about how communities can document and protect themselves from nuclear waste.

Eric Epstein on the Three Mile Island 40th Anniversary

It doesn't take a scientist to expose the fraudulent nuclear power industry. It just takes guts and persistence. Eric Epstein has that in spades, and his story about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is a lesson in what we all could do.

Eric reminds us that he is part of the community threatened by the plant, as well as its dangerous decommission. He has lived in the community for much of his life, and was a trusted spokesperson for a newly awakened population. 

But the question remains. How could the nuclear power industry risk so many people's lives? There was obviously money to be made, and Wall Street was all over this supposedly revolutionary way to make electricity. In fact, The New York Times was one of the industry's champions, rarely printing a story that questioned the industry's hype and exaggerations. The newspaper even removed a reporter covering Long Island, simply because she was pointing out some of the inconsistencies in what was being promised to the public. 

Far from learning from its mistakes, The New York Times is off again, promoting the nuclear fusion "breakthrough" that will supposedly free our world from its carbon catastrophe. Maybe all this false publicity is actually disinformation from Big Oil, which wants to burn carbon fuel until our dying planet breaths its last breath.     

Fracturing our society for their bottom line

 

March 2

GUEST: Arielle Reid, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at The Legal Aid Society, the largest and most influential social justice law firm in New York City, talks about fighting to keep what is left of bail reform.

Albany must keep bail reform

Arielle Reid pointed out the absolute fairness of bail reform. Originally a process that gave all the benefits to wealthy, white defendants, bail was refocused to allow even poor Blacks to get a fair shake in our criminal justice system. The assault on these simple reforms says more about our society than about protecting our neighborhoods from crime.

Racism is deeply ingrained in our society, making its manifestations almost invisible, at least to white people. Racism still exists because it is useful in suppressing worker rights, selling newspapers and winning elections. Why else would our media put out news articles about Walmart stores closing down in Black sections of our cities? 

Check out this Fox News story to get a sense how easy it is to create fear and hatred. I love how a gun products advertisement comes before the red meat of Blacks carrying stolen TVs from stores.   

https://youtu.be/gM1TU_pP-pM

So this is how African Americans are kept in the lowest caste in our supposedly free society. We allow merchants of hate like Fox News to openly cultivate racial discord in our body politic. We could start challenging news like this with some basic questions. Is theft really why some stores are closing down in Black areas? Or is that a convenient lie for whites looking to stoke up their rage? Could you go to a white area of town and  make a video of all white thieves stealing items? Of course you could. But Fox News thrives on stirring the pot of racial mistrust. It's viewers come for their daily dose of ignorance and hate. 

Let's fight back against the enemies of criminal justice reform. And let's call them by what they are, hatemongers willing to fracture our society for their bottom line. 

Surviving their next assault

February 23

GUEST: Craig Johnson, writer for the Jacobin and podcaster (Fifteen Minutes of Fascism), talks about the global rise of the radical right and its base in religion.

Lula Is Giving a Lesson in How to Respond

Craig Johnson issued a wake up call to the United States. He talked about Lula's response to the far right in Brazil. Those who tried to overthrow the government there were dealt with harshly, with most sent to jail after the first day. In the US, things moved much more slowly, with analysis and judgements still coming out two years later. Our country's response to the January 6 uprising has been a slow motion dance. 

In fact, Brazil and the US ended up in very different places after their far right rebellions. Brazil has been very effective in going after the people high up in their political system: the very rich and some of their corporations. Both coups had large networks of supporters, but the US criminal justice system left those elites alone.  

As a result, the American people may never find out why the National Guard wasn't sent in immediately. We may never discover why the Capital Police were so woefully under prepared. There are glimpses, course. Why didn't the FBI's warnings ever reach those in charge? It is no wonder that our country is awash in conspiracy theories. We never get a straight answer on who funded, planned and implemented the most dangerous right wing coup in our nation's history. 

These failures may lead us to our next right wing uprising. Countries that do nothing when their governments are invaded by armed and violent insurgents, are often doomed to repeat the experience. Both Mussolini and Hitler led armed rebellions before they finally destroyed their democracies. Mussolini was arrested for collecting arms to overthrow his government, and released the next day. Hitler was convicted of treason after his first coup, only to be released after nine months. 

The higher ups who planned our January 6th uprising are still walking the halls of power. Will our democracy survive their next assault?  

 

AOC and Shrestha are the vanguards

February 16

GUEST: Sarahana Shrestha, climate organizer, DSA candidate, and now member of the NY State Assembly as well as the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus, talks about taxing the wealthy for the public good.

Shrestha bill to raise $9 billion with tax on wealthy corporations

Assemblywoman Shrestha has what it takes to be a progressive force for change. Or maybe she doesn't have the monetary backing that would make her work impossible. She doesn't take corporate contributions. 

Wouldn't that be a different world? Our government is so corporatized that the last thing most government representatives care about is us. More than that, every governmental agency is packed with corporate stooges. Any breaks will be given to companies over workers, polluters over victims, and weapons makers over the general public that pleads for an end to our endless wars. Corporations are the ultimate in unfeeling power. The only thing they care about is making a profit. They would make hamburgers out of our grandparents if it was profitable. 

Are we worried about AI taking over the human race? Could computers eventually be taking orders from other machines, and might those machines eventually get sick of our pesky, aggressive little selves? Well, think again about Capitalism. The system is run by machines that continually balance which course of action creates the most profit. Then policy decisions are made by those same machines. Finally, humans are hired to put in place their often barbaric policies. That is why our society poisons you with chemicals, sends you up in poorly designed planes, or runs bomb trains through your towns. The artificial Intelligence of Capitalism is already here. 

Let's do our best to elect representatives who don't take orders from corporations. There is a brave new world coming that hearkens back to human intelligence. AOC and Shrestha are the vanguards.

Poking about in our history of slavery

February 9

GUEST: Penny Hess, long time activist, organizer and chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, talks about how whites can support the struggles for national liberation being waged by African and other oppressed peoples.

Burning Spear - African People's Socialist Party

Did you ever wonder why abolitionists always get a bad name? In the racist movie "Birth of a Nation," the KKK are the heroes and abolitionists the villains. And in the much more recent movie "Amistad" by Steven Spielberg, the abolitionists are almost as evil. 

In high school we learned that some abolitionists were just crazy (John Brown), and some were in it for the money. I remember a picture from one of my textbooks: the cartoon of a sneaky looking white man carrying a large "carpet" bag. We learned that abolitionists became carpetbaggers, who went to the South after the war and robbed white people.

Some of this racism has always been with us. As a young man, I remember digging ditches on my father's farm, along with a Black man whose name was "Silent Bill." He simply didn't talk and I never knew why. That afternoon after the sun went down, my father took us both to a local bar. I ordered a drink for Bill, and he acknowledged the beer with a smile and a one fingered salute. 

Beside me was a very old white women, nursing her drink. She smiled at me and then leaned over to tell me something. Pulling herself close to my ear, she whispered "N... lover."

Has the disease of enslavement always been part of our national psyche? We don't think about abolitionists as the heroes they really were. We don't revere the Freedom Riders who risks there lives to end segregation in the Deep South. We are suspicious of Blacks who talk about US imperialism in Africa and in other parts of the world. Can America be an empire without the racism that justifies exploitation and oppression? 

So Ron DeSantis doesn't want us poking about in our history of ethnic cleansing and slavery. But if we want a country that we all can be proud of, that's exactly what we should be doing. We shall overcome...

Collapse of our corrupted two party system

Political parties in the United States change over time. Sometimes the issues are so monumental that old parties die and new ones are born. The abolition of slavery is one example. The Whig Party disappeared before the Civil War and the Republican Party emerged.

We have overarching issues of the day in 2023. There is the enormous gap between the very rich and the rest of us that has plagued our nation for the last 40 years. Rich people buy politicians of both parties to make sure that our laws favor only the obscenely wealthy. Working people haven't had a break since Jimmy Carter.

Another issue is war. Both parties are enthusiastic supporters of our endless wars abroad. Both parties mouth the same platitudes about fighting for democracy, freedom and human rights, all the while shoveling enormous profits to the nation's major weapons makers. We have over 800 military bases around the world, and our soldiers and advisors are involved in wars in Africa, the Middle East, and now Eastern Europe. Both parties are fine with that, despite the fact that we are risking a nuclear annihilation.

A third issue is our unending support for tyrants and genocidal states. From Saudi Arabia to apartheid Israel, we reward the worst of human rights abuser, and both parties seem to like it that way, as long as the bribes keep coming. Most of our Congress is paid off by the Israel Lobby.

May the New Year bring the collapse of our corrupted two party system.

Fred Nagel

Paul Dunbar

During the Harlem Renaissance, literary critic James Johnson wrote that Paul Dunbar "was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form."

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!