Food and a permanent underclass

GUEST: Katia Chapman, recent Vassar graduate (Latin American/ Latino Studies) and Youth Empowerment Associate Coordinator for the Rural & Migrant Ministry, talks about community activism and the pursuit of social and economic justice for all.

The invisibility of farm workers protects us all. We can be enthusiastic about local produce and sustainable agriculture. We can use local farmers' markets that have opened in almost every community. But workers' rights never seem to enter into the discussion. We even pay a little more for organic produce to keep our family healthy. Would we ever pay a little more so that farm workers could live normal lives?

Without labor rights, farm workers are often much worse off then any other employees in America. Why aren't farm workers included in our labor legislation? Must there be a permanent underclass that plants and harvests the food you serve at your table? 

We rant a little

GUEST: Katia Chapman from Rural and Migrant Ministry was unable to call in as our guest (we are rescheduling). Listeners get a whole hour of just Fred and Gary railing against the war mongers and corporate elites.

From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama and from Madeleine Albright to Hillary Clinton, these Democratic sellouts have been pursuing American Empire at the cost of trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost. They do it for money, and for their place among the corporate elite. They internalize the logic of neoliberalism since it fits with their all consuming ambition to be rich and powerful. None of them come from the elite class, but have been willing to sell their intellect and persuasive skills to the highest bidder, which in the Twenty First Century has always been the captains of multinational corporations.

Hope has been an integral part of their message. The hope of the middle class to do better, to own more, and to become a member the ruling class. Their actions in office, however, betray the hope of the middle class by making it impossible for most other people to improve their lives or the lives of their children. By serving the elite so faithfully, they increase the already gross disparity of income in America, and restrict the social mobility for everyone else.

War is the most efficient way to increase the power and wealth of the nation's elite, and so these Democrats have become masters of creating deadly conflicts abroad. They use all their persuasive powers to demonize selected countries, creating "enemy lists" that can be used from administration to administration. The US media plays along and never raises questions. Welcome to the American Empire, hated and feared by most of the developing world.

Rant a little; it clears the head after all the imperial garbage we are fed daily.

With the right alliances and tactics

GUEST: Chino Hardin, lead know-your-rights trainer for the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives, will talk about NYPD's stop and frisk policy and the hope for reform.

Chino took us through a training that she does for at risk teenagers. At risk for arrest because they are black. How could our system have strayed so far and allowed so many people of color to fill our jails? 

Perhaps it is our racist perceptions about black youth committing more crimes. Perhaps it is our comfort with the police, who would never treat us with less than respect. We make easy assumptions about our criminal justice system, preferring not to understand its racist nature and its neoliberal profit motives. 

Chino, of course, is a pro. Rather than talk about black people and white people, she preferred to discuss human rights for everyone. It made me think about the concept of universal human rights and why they are so often taken from the less powerful. Palestinians are simply asking for the same rights as Israelis enjoy. African Americans are simply asking for equality from the police and from the courts. Perhaps that is a definition of racism, the denial of rights based on an imbalance of power between two identifiable ethnic, racial, or religious groups.

Racism can be overcome with the right alliances and tactics. We saw that in the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps we will see it today in the End the New Jim Crow movements to reform our criminal justice system. 

What the Palestinians want

GUEST: Dalit Baum, co-founder of Who Profits from the Occupation, a research initiative of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel, speaks to us about boycotting specific settlement products like SodaStream.

Our conversation with Dalit was full of information that I hadn't known. The law passed restricting Israeli citizens from advocating a boycott had other aspects to it. The law also threatened any Israeli company that purposely restricts commerce with the settlements in the West Bank. Could SodaStream have their corporate charter revoked by pulling their manufacturing out of the occupied settlements? Maybe boycotts should be geared towards all of Israel, rather than just the companies located in the illegally occupied areas. Israeli policy is the problem. The state supports and encourages the apartheid treatment of Palestinians. 

I asked Dalit, an Israeli citizen, what her goals were for the boycott of SodaStream. Would it be enough for the company to close their factory in the West Bank? She said that boycott decisions were made by Palestinians, not by Israelis. It's a point that we must remind ourselves of again and again. The boycott follows what the Palestinians want, the same as the boycott against South African apartheid in the 1980's.

Natural result of imperial occupations?

Guest: Joshua Phillips, reporter on the Middle East who has written for the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation, Salon, and other publications, talks about his book, None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture.

Our talk covered some familiar ground. We had both attended the Iraq and Afghan vets' Winter Soldier Testimony in DC. Why young military recruits end up torturing and killing civilians is the question future generations will be asking. Of course, now is the time to interview returning vets and gather the necessary testimony.

Joshua gave us many insights. Torture doesn't really provide any meaningful intelligence, so why do it? For US military personnel, the experience of willfully injuring, sexually humiliating, and finally murdering civilians creates such moral trauma that returning vets face a lifetime of depression and anger. Torture is an act that destroys both the victim and the perpetrator. 

There were questions about who was responsible. Those at the top, or naive soldiers brought up to admire military heros and violent games? Is it our leaders, our media, or our society that doesn't value cultures outside the empire? Who is to blame? We know that few if any will ever be held accountable. 

I think we should also consider Jean-Paul Sartre's Colonialism and Neocolonialism. In the book, Sartre states that all occupations (he writes about Algeria) tend towards the same outcome. As occupied people suffer and die, they realize that fighting is the only way to survive. The occupation creates the resistance. And the resistance creates the torture and mass killings that the imperial country must use on the indigenous populations to maintain control. Could the inhuman behavior that we see in young men and women we sent to fight in the Middle East be a natural result of imperial occupations? Perhaps it is a price the elites of the empire are willing to pay for the obscene profits they earn in war.

Good Germans

Guest: Larry Siems, Director of Freedom to Write and International Programs of the PEN Center, talks about his latest book, The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, as well as the "Reckoning With Torture" Film project.

Why do we as a nation torture? Perhaps its the same reason we as a nation killed two million Vietnamese, or a million Iraqis. We try not to pay much attention, like avoiding a wounded dog on the highway. Take notice and you have to stop and try to help. 

Our media helps us drive by, offering rationales for invasions, tortures, and mass murders. Our president helps too, by talking about justice and change while serving the nation's killing machine. 

And perhaps the efficacy of torture isn't the point, despite all the studies that have found that it to be useless for gathering intelligence information. Our guest, Larry Siems, reminded us that torture is illegal, both in the United States and the rest of the world. Our country thus becomes a lawless state, one that uses war crimes to dominate other nations. 

It is no wonder that US citizens don't want to think about torture. We are all "good Germans" until the empire falls.

The fate of life on earth

Guests: Maureen Kelly (Etaoqua Mahicanu) and Evan Pritchard, Native American activists, talk about the Two Row Wampum Campaign in the Hudson Valley and the Idle No More movement in Canada.

We had a wide ranging discussion about radical politics, nonviolent resistance, and the awakening of the First World nations.

I didn't know that Henry David Thoreau's tactics were from conversations he had with indigenous people he met during his canoe trip in Main. I would love to get confirmation of that. I will try to find my copy of The Maine Woods. Could it be in there? I read it so long ago. There is some confirmation on the Internet that he hired a local Penobscot as his guide.

Sort of fits with another discussion we had. Are European settlers too bogged down in the minutia of reshaping our world to realize that we are destroying it? Can one get there with logic, or must it be understood from the heart, like the rows of wampum beads in the Two Row Wampum belt?

If we followed the philosophy of First World Nations, would we have a better chance of avoiding the climate catastrophe awaiting us? There is an inexpressible sadness in our failure to comprehend; it will dictate the fate of our children and grandchildren, as well as that of all life on earth.