Building Bridges Radio: Your Community & Labor Report

Produced and Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash over WBAI,99.5FM in the NYC Metro Area

WHO WE ARE

WORKERS OF THE WORLD TUNE IN! Introducing "Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report"

Our beat is the labor front, broadly defined, both geographically and conceptually. We examine the world of work and workers on the job as well as where they live. We examine the issues that affect their everyday lives, with a particular sensitivity towards human rights abuses, environmental concerns and the U.S. drive for global domination. We record their global struggles and provide analysis of their efforts to empower themselves and transform society to provide greater democratic, human, social, political and economic rights. Each program consists of feature stories, generally interviews, within a historical context, often accompanied by sound from demonstrations, rallies or conferences, and complemented and enhanced by poetry and instrumental or vocal -- people's culture.

Over the years Building Bridges has produced a weekly one hour program, Mondays from 7-8 PM EST, covering local, national and international labor and community issues over radio WBAI-Pacifica 99.5 FM in New York. We also produce half hour version, Building Bridges National, which is distribtued to over 40 broadcast and internet radio stations.


For more information you can contact us at knash@igc.org
In Struggle Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash

Obama's Jobs Plan - So Where's the Beef? 27:50  

Speaker Boehner’s Adds His Jobs Pitch To Obama’s, So Where’s The Beef?with
Timothy Canova, professor of international economic law and author of The Federal Reserve We Need and the Legacy of the Clinton Bubble

House Speaker John Boehner added his two cents to the pot of job creation
plans when he called for a total reform of the tax code, fewer federal
regulations and an expansion of infrastructure projects and domestic energy production. Boehner’s plan targets the employer side by lowering the
corporate tax rate and rolling back environmental and labor regulations.
Meanwhile, Obama’s plan focuses partially on the employee side of the
equation, with payroll tax breaks and extended unemployment insurance, infrastructure projects and aid to the States for Education Jobs. We’ll
dissect the respective proposals, see the prospects of either plan to put
America back to work and comment on Obama’s deficit reduction proposals. ************
Plus
The Socialist Bank of North Dakota
with
Dr. Rozanne Everson Junker, political scientist

North Dakota has long had a state bank which unlike private banks has
faithfully served the people and the state in good times and bad. We've
talked about a public option for health care, but why not for banks?
Thanks to Michael Moore for this case study.

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40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion and Massacre and the Struggle Today Against the New Jim Crow - 27:56  

40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion and Massacre & the Struggle TodayAgainst the New Jim Crow
with
. Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Consultant , Inst, for Development of Pan African
Policy (Ghana), a 43 year veteran of the Black Liberation and Pan-African Movements
. Joseph "Jazz" Hayden, Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
. Dr. Cornel West, Prof. Princeton Univ., public intellectual, author & activist

Forty years ago, September 9, 1971, inmates in New York's Attica Prison
began a protest against jail conditions that ended on September 13, as
one of the bloodiest days in the 20th century in the U.S. Troopers shot indiscriminately over 2000 rounds of ammunition, and 29 prisoners and
10 state personnel would die. After the shooting stopped, police beat
and tortured scores of prisoners, 90 of the surviving prisoners were
seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. The state
would originally claim that all of the guards had died at the hands of the
inmates. The New York Times reported on its front page that the throats
of all of the guards were slashed. But it was lies, the guards as well as
the prisoners who were deemed expandable had been shot dead during
the raid.

The Attica uprising is an under-commemorated historic event. Millions,
watched the drama, from interviews with the inmate leadership all the
way to the climactic helicopter gunship assault, which was as ruthless
and one-sided as anything that was coming out of Vietnam. While the
legacy of the Attica uprising, includes the establishment of Prisoners
Legal Services, and the Prisoners Rights Project, it also includes the
Rockefeller Drug Laws. The lasting lesson of Attica is that little will
change until current and former inmates, many times more numerous
than in 1971, again take their destinies into their own hands, as many
are doing, and continue to organize themselves and we in our
communities follow suit in a political fight to roll back the prison state
in our lifetimes, inspired by the sacrifice of the heroic Attica Brothers.

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Joe Hill's Legacy: A New Biography with Author Bill Adler 27:59  

"The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill -
American Labor Icon"
with
author William Adler

Labor Day, marked the day for the release of "The Man Who Never
Died". This book presents new evidence of Joe Hill's innocence of
the murder for which Utah executed him in 1915. It also names the
likely perpetrator of that murder: a career criminal who went on to
work for Al Capone. The Man Who Never Died, Joe Hill is a narrative
history of Joe Hill's life and the rise of the Industrial Workers of the
World, the IWW, the Wobblies. It seeks to put Joe Hill’s martyrdom,
his organizing, his music in the radical context of his times. What
better cultural icon to inspire and move us than Joe Hill, the man
who never died. We speak with author Bill Adler who keeps Joe Hill
alive.

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Newark Jobs Protest; AFL-CIO's Trumka Challenges Obama on Jobs Crisis 28:38  

Newark Activists In Fifty-Fourth Day Of Protest Calling on U.S. Government To Institute Jobs Program
with Larry Hamm, Chairman, People's Organization for Progress, Newark, N.J.

The U.S. economy is struggling, but in many black communities Americans
are in the throes of a depression. With unemployment exacting an outsize
toll on African-American men and women, a coalition of community groups
sees it as a crucial civil rights issue emerging from the country’s economic
woe. "We are more than a half-century away from the Montgomery bus
boycott, but we are dealing with issues just as pressing," said Larry Hamm,
chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress. Flanking a statue of
Abraham Lincoln outside the Essex County Courthouse, Hamm and like-
minded activists started a 381-day protest modeled after one of the most
famous battles of the Civil Rights era — the Montgomery bus boycott in
1955-56. They are calling on President Obama and Congress to institute
a jobs program akin to the Works Progress Administration of the Great
Depression, that employed millions of unskilled Americans in public works
jobs. Unemployment is 16 percent among black Americans, a rate rivaling
those of the 1930s. New Jersey’s jobless rate is 9.5 percent, while the
national rate is 9.1 percent.
******************************
AFL-CIO Pres. Trumka:
History Will Judge Pres. Obama If He 'Nibbles' at the Jobs Crisis


At a recent forum sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, AFL-CIO's.
Richard Trumka urged President Obama to “propose bold solutions on the
jobs crisis,” and not nibble around the edge of the issue and that, “history
will judge him and I think working people will judge him. on what he
proposes on the jobs crisis. Trumka said that, in a conversation with
Pres. Obama “I urged him to propose what was necessary to solve the
problem” as opposed to what the president thought was politically possible
given Republican control of the House of Representatives. Mr. Trumka
added, “I said to him,'Do not look at what is possible, look at what is
necessary. The American public wants solutions and just because [of] the Republicans, you think this is the only thing that is politically possible, that
doesn’t mean you should propose that. That means they control the agenda.' ”

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