Building Bridges Radio: Your Community & Labor Report

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

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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

Fighting the Debt Crisis in Puerto Rico - 26:08  

Fighting the Debt Crisis in Puerto Rico
with

Antonio Carmona Reis, social science professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and a militant with the Association of University Professors and a pro-independence activist.

Puerto Rico has a poverty rate approaching 50 percent, and a public debt that amounts to over $20,000 dollars per inhabitant.  With its poverty rate, more than double that of the United States’ poorest state Mississippi Puerto Rico had serious long-term economic problems that, like its current massive public debt, have been historically papered over.  Most of the media attention on Puerto Rico’s debt has focused on technical issues relating to the solvency of municipal bonds and austerity measures. Ignored is the history of how U.S. policies have resulted in more than three and a half million Puerto Ricans being affected by its colonial status.
The bottom line is that Puerto Rico is the United States’ colony, that it decided to take by force 117 years ago, and has since treated like a resented orphan it has consistently undernourished politically and economically.  Puerto Rico’s current fiscal crisis is, in this sense, really a crisis of American colonial policies.    

Meanwhile amidst the poverty and debt, the hedge fund vultures and 
Wall Street banks and lawyers are circling Puerto Rico.  They, are, sensing a fiscal death spiral they can feed off and care little about the consequences for millions of residents as they manipulate a financial system devoid of any social conscience.  The board appointed to oversee Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring is turning the island’s recession into a depression, of a magnitude seldom seen around the world.  Unemployment, already at 12.4 percent, is soaring. The plan, which puts the creditors’ interests above those of the island’s economy and people, has created a debt/death spiral and growing resistance to it by Puerto Ricans who are suffering under its yoke. 

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