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

Dreams Deferred - 28:59  

Dreams Deferred
with

Oscar A. Chacón 
co-founder and executive director of Alianza Americas
an umbrella of immigrant led and immigrant serving 
organizations based in the United States of America,
dedicated to improving the quality of life of Latino  
immigrant communities in the US, as well as of peoples throughout the Americas. Oscar served in leadership positions at the Chicago based Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Boston based Centro Presente, and several other community based and international development organizations. Oscar is a frequent national and international spokesperson on transnationalism,
economic justice, the link between migration and development, migrant’s integration processes, human mobility, migration policies, racism and xenophobia; and U.S. Latino community issues
and
Chia Chia Wang, the organizing and advocacy director for the American Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights Program, whose goal is to achieve policies that respect the rights and dignity of all immigrants,
including a fair and humane national immigration policy.
and

Our ‘Dreamer’ Issac, born in Ghana and a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) beneficiary he tells his story and puts a human face on those who seek equal rights and justice as immigrants as refugees as
migrants, as Dreamers! 

President Trump ordered an end to the Obama-era program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling it an “amnesty-first approach” and urging Congress to pass a replacement before he begins phasing out its protections in six months.  As early as March, officials said, some of the 800,000 young adults brought to the United States illegally as children who qualify for the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, will become eligible for deportation. The five-year-old policy allows them to remain without fear of immediate removal from the country and gives them the right to work legally.

Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who announced the change at 
the Justice Department, both used the aggrieved language of nativists of virulently anti-immigrant activists, arguing wrongly, but aggressively that those in the country illegally are lawbreakers who hurt native-born Americans by usurping their jobs and pushing down wages.  Mr. Trump said in a statement that he was driven by a concern for “the millions of Americans victimized by this unfair system.” Mr. Sessions said the program had “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”  But Oscar Chacón , Chia Chia Wang and Issac came out
swinging and explode these falsehoods, calculated to whip up hysteria in in support of the demagogic Trump regime. 

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Will NAFTA Renegotiation Continue to Shaft Workers? - 28:48  

NAFTA Renegotiation:
Will Working People Continue to Get Shafted?
with
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
and
Gisela Perez, lawyer and journalist who works at NGO Derechos
Digitales and is a spokesperson of the coalition "Mexico Against
NAFTA", composed of more than 30 civil society organizations
and trade unions.



The trade policies that replace NAFTA cannot be allowed to put the
interests of multinational corporations first, as the renegotiation of
NAFTA under a Trump administration teeming with corporate interests is positioned to do. We need an internationalist approach to trade that lifts up labor rights, environmental standards, and human rights for people in all of the nations involved in the agreement, and provides good jobs for workers in the U.S. Trump wants to allow corporations to pit U.S. workers against other working communities in a global race to the bottom.

To coincide with the first day of NAFTA renegotiations, Mexican civil society organizations, including the largest independent trade unions, small farmer and other civic and human rights organizations, mobilized nearly 9,000 people to march through the streets of Mexico City to their Foreign Ministry with hundreds of banners and signs that read “NAFTA Injures You – Mexico is better without FTAs (Free Trade Agreements)”. Contrary to President Trump’s claims that Mexico has been the big winner under NAFTA, the dozens of Mexican civil society organizations
that organized the march assert that the current NAFTA model has been a failure for the majority of Mexicans and that they reject any deepening of that model through NAFTA renegotiations.  They blasted the secrecy of the negotiating process and delivered a list of demands to the Mexican government.

Lori Wallach says:  “A new NAFTA deal that we can support is a deal that not only stops NAFTA’s ongoing damage, but that creates American jobs and raises wages.  Unless NAFTA’s investor privileges that promote job offshoring are eliminated and strong, enforceable labor and environmental standards and tighter rules of origin are added, a new deal will not be better for working people, much less deliver on Trump’s promises to bring down the NAFTA trade deficit or create more American manufacturing jobs. NAFTA must be renegotiated to stop its ongoing damage. But depending on how the administration conducts these talks, NAFTA could get worse for working people in all three NAFTA countries. “

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Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse with John Nichols - 28:01  

Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse:
A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America
with

John Nichols, is the national affairs writer for The Nation magazine and a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. He is also the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, and a co-founder of the media-reform group Free Press. A frequent commentator on American politics and media, he has appeared often on MSNBC, NPR, BBC and regularly lectures at major universities on presidential administrations and executive
power. The author of ten books and has earned numerous awards for his investigative reports, including groundbreaking examinations (in collaboration with the Center for Media and Democracy) of the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council.


A line-up of the dirty dealers and defenders of the indefensible who are definitely not "making America great again"

Donald Trump has assembled a rogue's gallery of alt-right hatemongers, crony capitalists, immigrant bashers, and climate-change deniers to run the American government. To survive the next four years, we the people need to know whose hands are on the levers of power. And we need to know how to challenge their abuses. John Nichols, veteran political correspondent at the Nation, has been covering many of these deplorables for decades. Sticking to the hard facts and unafraid to dig deep into the histories and ideologies of the people who make up Trump's inner circle,
Nichols delivers a clear-eyed and complete guide to this wrecking crew.

administration. 
download or stream

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