"Killing Gaza”
with
Max Blumenthal, director and writer of the new film “Killing Gaza”, senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and award-winning author of "Goliath, Republican Gomorrah,
and the 51 Day War"
and

Dan Cohen, journalist, cinematographer and editor of “Killing Gaza”  

On May 14th the Israeli military slaughtered at least 60 unarmed Palestinians and wounded 2,700, of whom 200 were children, as some 60,000 massed at Gaza's enclosure fence demanding their Right to Return to their homelands. But this isn’t the first time Israel has murdered unarmed Gazan civilians.  Independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen, in a film just released to coincide with the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, which commemorates the 1948 war that uprooted 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating a refugee crisis that is

still not resolved talk about documenting Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza beginning with the 2014 aerial bombings of what is oftentimes described as the largest open-air prison in the world.  

Blumenthal and Cohen talk about chronicling the “Killing of Gaza”, beginning in 2014 and give us the context for and sadly recount their expectation of this latest murderous attack on Palestinians by Israel supported by US tax dollars. They give us a chilling accounts of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, and recount

the experiences of the survivors just days after escaping indiscriminate shelling, bombings and summary executions.  They talk about walking through the rubble of Gaza’s devastated landscape and their discussions with the survivors of the slaughter who offer them their testimony of the war crimes they experienced, which they long for the world to recognize and prosecute their torturers.  

Our documentarians, talk about their recordation of the daily struggles of the people of Gaza, as they endure, freezing winters, where babies freeze and sweltering summers without shelter.  While Blumenthal and Cohen give voice to the pain of a people under constant siege, they also give voice to the Gazans’ acts of creative resistance and their reaffirmation of life by artistic expression

with the brush, and through literary works to youth’s break-dancing and rapping their resilience, their potential and resolve to break the occupation.  Blumenthal and Cohen explain that the people of Gaza collectively will continue to channel their pain, their anger and energy to the maintenance of their history, the preservation of their culture and the reclamation of their land and for a free, free

Palestinian. 

play stream or download

Read More...

The South African Revolution Continues: First dismantling the Racialist State and Now Dismantling the Capitalist State that Fostered Apartheid 

featuringin this first of a two-part exclusive an expanded conversation with Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of SAFTU, the South African Federation of Trade
Unions.

The South African Federation of Trade Unions (“SAFTU”) is the voice of the workers in the struggle for a socialist society. It was formed by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, the largest union in South Africa, with more than 350,000 workers and numerous other unions, as an alternative to the Coalition of

South African Trade Unions, which has capitulated to state capital, including defending the South African government's role in the Marikana massacre of 34 striking miners in August 2012.  Cyril Ramaphosa who is currently the President of South Africa was a member of the Board of Lonmin plc, formerly the mining division of Lonrho plc, a British producer of platinum group metals operating in the Bushveld Complex of South Africa, which owns the Marikana mine.

We asked SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi about the history of the South African freedom struggle which overthrew apartheid, but left in place the capitalist economic system, which has continued the exploitation of the working class and fostered mass economic inequality, and whose corruption has been rife under each of the successors to President Mandela.  Vavi talks about these issues and how the now Ramaphosa administration new developments are reaching a crisis: mass unemployment; heightened inequality; and new proposals restricting the rights of unions; and proposals that would gut minimum wages.  He also relates the upsurge amongst the masses, with youth in the

forefront of the protests was led to the general strike in April. 

play stream or download

Read More...

Teachers Take the Lessons of the Classrooms to the Streets
from West Virginia to Arizona and now Colorado
with
.  Joselyn Palomino, Denver High School Teacher of Mexican-

   American Literature
.   Cat Berrett, English teacher at Phoenix Union High School District

The victorious wildcat strike in W. Virginia ushered in a new wave of teacher and state worker activism and strikes organized by the rank and file with their unions racing to catch up.  Teachers without bargaining rights in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona and where striking is illegal and their unions weak summoned their courage and walked off the job.  The most recent addition to this calvalcade of militancy is the Colorado teachers who with their union the Colorado Education Association shut down the statewide school
system for two days last week. At the same time Arizona teachers went on strike after weeks of militant demonstrations. . The strikes and mass protests often been led by the workers themselves forming new organizations often based on face book sites which host full-throttle conversations of what to do next such as Arizona’s face book group that organized the #RedForEd campaign and Kentucky’s KY120 United. They are fighting years of budget
cuts which translate into low wages and benefits and as importantly for these workers reduced school budgets meaning overcrowded classrooms, lacking basic supplies, updated books and educational materials. They are fighting for themselves and their students and have rejected deals to separate the issues.

Workers have been under brutal attack and unionization has been in decline for over 40 years. The employer offensive against unions has included all-out war against militant action and especially strikes. Yet it has only been in the periods of struggle and strikes for the private sector in the 1930’s and late 40’s and the public sector in the 1960’s that unions have grown and workers prospered. Now
the West Virginia workers have sparked workers across the land to embrace their rekindled militancy. 

play stream or download

Read More...

Morristown, Tennessee subjected to the largest workplace raid by immigration authorities in over a decade.
with
Camila Fyler, Integration Director, The Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition who has been stationed in Morristown since the raid to help coordinate financial Assistance to the families and secure legal representation for immigrant detainees.
and
Beatrice who has experienced the loss of many of her family member in the raids.in which hundreds of families have been impacted


Federal agents, with the assistance of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, stormed into Southeastern Provision, a meat-processing plant in Bean Station, TN. As helicopters circled above the factory and agents blocked doors, around 100 workers were rounded up and filed into buses without any opportunity to explain who they were, how long they had been there, or whether they were subject to federal immigration law at all. 54 community members living in East Tennessee for decades, some of whom had devoted over ten years of labor to that factory, were shipped out of the state without even a chance to say goodbye to their spouses and children. Their families were told nothing, and were left to wonder what had happened to loved ones who never came home.

This is a humanitarian crisis.  At least 160 children are missing a parent, nearly 600 students in a single school district have stayed home out of fear, and participation in the economy and community has been chilled.  Hundreds of
families whose lives have been torn apart.

It's hard to imagine another kind of crisis that would cause 5% of the district's children to stay home that wouldn't trigger some kind of intervention or at least public response.  We’ll talk with the people in Morristown and its surrounding
communities about the human costs of this unconscionable abuse of power on the children devastated by this assault on their families, and on the  thousands who are rightly afraid to go to work, take their kids to school, or even leave their
homes. The disaster stemming from the recent immigration raid continues to unfold. But, we know from similar raids in previous decades that the impact on children's health, on the school system, and on the local economy can last for
years to come.  This is no time for silence! 

Listen to stream or download

Read More...

A coalition for an “International Labor Offensive to Free
Mumia Abu-Jamal and All Political Prisoners” is gaining momentum.
with
Jacky Hortaut, union organizer, member of the CGT in France; an
American studies Professor in Tours and Clermont-Ferrand
Universities and author of a book about women in prison dedicated to
the “Move” sisters and chair of Collectif Libérons Mumia, and organizer
of a local chapter of Just Justice Tours Le Collectif, which represents
roughly 10 cities, unions, human rights associations, and political
parties in France.
and
Dr. Claude Gillaumaud Pujot, a professor in France who wrote the
2007 Abu-Jamal biography, “A Free Man on Death Row”, who says
“Mumia is an example to all of us because he remains an activist even
after spending 30-plus years in hell.”    

A call for freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners is picking
up steam, with solidarity actions on his status hearing on in Philadelphia,
plus a court hearing on April 30, which could eventually lead to his freedom.
After years of global community meetings, protests, petitions and legal
challenges, the people’s movement succeeded in taking Mumia off death
row in 2011 and elevating Mumia to internationally recognized stature. 

Mumia now has name recognition rivaling top-tier athletes and entertainers and
is considered a hero to all people seeking liberation - having inspired millions
around the world, from Berlin to Brazil, Georgia to Ghana, who rally regularly on
his behalf demanding he receive release or a new trial.  In France Mumia is
considered a freedom fighter because of his advocacy for the oppressed
everywhere.  Mumia is the “voice of the voiceless,” who chronicles the legacies
of people’s struggles worldwide and one of the greatest threats to U.S.
imperialism is the uprising of “young Mumias” from the streets of Philadelphia
to the streets of Paris. We’ll talk with French activists about their understanding
and concerns that our courts in rejecting all challenges to evidence of Mumia’s
guilt have fueled questions worldwide about the fundamental fairness about the
U.S. court system and demand that the freedom fighter Mumia, advocate for the
oppressed everywhere be released or receive a new trial.

Twenty-five French cities have made Mumia Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen
including Paris and two streets have been named after him in Saint Denis and
Bobigny. And, one-hundred and twenty European representatives have
mobilized for medical care for the now ailing Mumia, as he approaches his
64th  birthday.  Mumia has wrongly spent more than half his life in prison, most
of which time was on death row and in solitary confinement, before the Supreme
Court held that application of the death penalty to Mumia was unconstitutional
and instead shackled him with a life-sentence for a crime, the killing of a police
officer that he did not commit.  

Download or listen to this  28:55 minute program

Read More...

Farm Workers fast and march in their "Boot the Braids" campaign against fast-food giant Wendy's to stop sexual violence in the fields
with
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and allies 

For years, farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and their allies have called on Wendy’s to join all of its major competitors in the Fair Food Program, a uniquely successful approach to eliminating human rights abuses in the agricultural industry. Instead of joining the Program, Wendy’s has taken its
tomato purchases to Mexico, where workers continue to confront wage theft, gender-based violence, child labor, and even slavery without access to protections.  Now tens of thousands strong, and endorsed by over a hundred organizations the CIW is asking you to join a boycott against Wendy's, until it does the right thing.

The struggle against poverty and for freedom must be led from the ground up, and the farmworkers of the CIW have been some of our bravest leaders these many years.Building Bridges brings you voices of the shero farm workers who have been Fasting for Freedom because they believe we need a fundamental shift in our nation’s moral narrative which places the lives of workers and the
dispossessed at the center.  The CIW’s Fair Food Program has given workers a real voice in the decisions that affect their lives.  And, with that voice they are transforming the agricultural industry where they work – eliminating slavery, violence, and sexual harassment in fields — where these abuses have persisted for generations. But, the fast food giant Wendy’s has refused to
support the Fair Food Program — and worse yet, it abandons growers who are doing the right thing to instead buy from an industry in Mexico — where they know sexual assault to slavery continue to thrive with impunity — is the very definition of amoral and unacceptable.”
**************************
Download or listen to this program

                          
  

Read More...

Oscar López Rivera on U.S. Colonialism After Hurricane Maria

Oscar López Rivera has been called the Nelson Mandela of Puerto Rico. Indeed, like the South African legend, Rivera was imprisoned for his anti-colonial activism and spent decades in prison. But in January 2017, after serving 35 years of his 70-year sentence, President Barack Obama, as one of his last acts in office,

commuted Rivera’s sentence. In May 2017 Oscar López Rivera was a free man.

Oscar López Rivera has become a symbol of resistance to people the world over and became one of the longest serving political prisoners in the world. Among those who spoke out for his release were Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pope Francis, Senator Bernie Sanders, playwright Lin Manuel Miranda and others. Organizers of the 2017 National Puerto Rican Day Parade designated him as

the National Freedom Hero.  Recently Lopez Rivera sat down with Building Bridges’ Mimi Rosenberg, to discuss his frustration and anger with the American government, detailing how Puerto Ricans have been treated since the Caribbean island became an unincorporated territory of the United States in 1898. He

lamented that Puerto Ricans “are still a colonized people 120 years later,” Lopez Rivera said, “Puerto Ricans didn’t ask for citizenship; we didn’t want it. Since being colonized, Puerto Ricans haven’t been treated as humans; we have been marginalized, exploited and used by the United States who wanted our sugar cane and to create military bases.”  Lopez Rivera said there are two things he knows how to do best- struggle and work. He stated multiple times that he has never advocated any form of violence and this “fight for independence” must be an act of love. “People who love freedom and justice should care about Puerto Rico,” Lopez Rivera emphasized. “We have the potential to be a free nation, but it’s up to us. We will struggle and do what needs to be done.”  Lopez Rivera also spoke at length about Hurricane Maria and the humanitarian crisis taking place. Although it struck September 20, 2017, there are still more than 400,000 people without power. More than 550 residents were killed, and others are still missing. Maria is considered the worst natural disaster to ever strike the area.

play stream or download

Read More...

The ‘two-state solution - did it ever mean more than an expanding colonial state, Israel ruling over a Palestinian Bantustan?
with
Jeff Halper Coordinator of the Israeli Committee against House
Demolitions and author of War Against the People: Israel, the
Palestinians and Global Pacification 


Jeff Halper provides a powerful indictment of the Israeli state’s “securocratic” war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, drawing on firsthand research to show the pernicious effects of the sub-liminal form of unending warfare that was conducted by Israel, an approach that relies on sustaining fear among the populace, fear that is stoked by suggestions that the enemy is inside the city limits, leaving no place truly safe & justifying intensification of military action and militarization in everyday life. Halper shows, the integration of militarized systems—including databases tracking civilian activity, automated targeting systems, unmanned drones, and more—becomes seamless with everyday life. The Occupied Territories, Halper argues, is a veritable laboratory for that approach.  Halper goes on to show how this method of war is rapidly globalizing, as the major capitalist powers and corporations transform militaries, security agencies, and police forces into an effective instrument of global pacification.  


Halper is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment and Sanction Movement and the academic boycott of Israel, and considers Israel to be guilty of “apartheid” and of a deliberate campaign to “judaize” the occupied Palestinian territories.  He critiques the political and territorial viability of a ‘two-state solution’ and raises the mainly nonviolent strategies to solve the Israeli-Palestinian within one state.

play stream or download

Read More...

While ICE Raided Nearly 100 7-Eleven Stores in Pre-Dawn Nationwide Sweeps, California Unions Resists Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Actions
with
Rusty Hicks, President of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

California unions are moving to protect undocumented workers and immigrants against attacks from the Trump regime.  They are vigorously supporting AB450, a bill introduced by state Rep. David Chiu, D-San Francisco, which gives undocumented immigrants “affirmative protections” against indiscriminate raids by agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). 
And then they darned their armor, after learning agents from the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be visiting a 7-Eleven store in Koreatown to conduct interviews and an audit, and decided to stage a protest outside of the store, holding signs that read, “Immigrants are welcome here.”  ICE raided close to one hundred 7-Eleven stores nation-wide, including five in Los Angeles.  While people were arrested in other states, none were arrested in Southern California, however ICE issued a statement
saying there were would be more raids to come. 

play stream or download

Read More...

Teacher and Utility Unions on the State of the Puerto Rican Labor Movement After Maria and Governor Rossello's Plans to Privatize the Public Power Company and Schools
with 
Fredyson Martinez Estevez, Vice- President of the Irrigation & Electrical Workers Union, Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego,
and
Mercedes Martínez Padilla, President of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico/Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico

In Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of people are still reeling from the destruction caused by Hurricane Maria. In a time of such dire need, the Trump administration has failed to provide the support needed to restore water to 7% of Puerto Rican residents and power to the nearly one in three residents, paving the way for a catastrophic announcement. The decision to privatize Puerto Rico’s state-owned power company which follows the same dangerous path mapped out in the Trump administration’s draft infrastructure
plan.

Whether it’s water or energy, privatization helps Wall Street at the expense of the well being and health of communities, particularly low-income families and people of color. Trump's leaked infrastructure plan similarly provides a blueprint for handing over public land and public water to Wall Street. It seeks to privatize local water systems and other critical public services, prioritizing
limited federal dollars to Wall Street and corporate investors. This scheme would also sell off federal assets and create a new infrastructure fund by opening up federal lands and waters to mineral and energy development benefiting the oil and gas industry.

We’ll speak with representatives of public sector unions in Puerto Rico representing teachers and utility workers about Governor Rossello's plans to privatize their services, and about challenges faced by the labor movement and workers following hurricane Maria and they’ll discuss labor issues affecting those unions under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA)

stream or download

Read More...

Say No to Trump’s Sneaky Tip Theft
with 
Saru Jayaraman, President, Restaurant Opportunities Centers
(ROC) United

The Trump Department of Labor, backed by the National Restaurant Association, is moving quickly to push a new rule that will make tips the property of restaurant owners rather than workers. It recently proposed rolling back a rule that protects workers in tipped industries, including restaurant servers and bartenders, from having their tips taken away by their employers. Under the proposal, federal law would allow restaurant owners who pay their wait staff and bartenders as little as $7.25/hour to pofcket
and confiscate all of the tips left by customers, without having to disclose to patrons what happens to the tips. Tips account for over half of these workers’ income which even together still adds up to poverty wages. More than $5.8 billion dollars will be transferred from workers to bosses under this proposal. Nearly 80 percent of the tips that would be stolen by employers would come from female tipped workers. Many women who work for tips already face harassment and discrimination at work, and this rule adds insult to injury

to download or play stream

Read More...

New York Immigrant Rights Activists, Ravi Ragbir & Jean Montrevil Targeted by ICE for Deportation

with
immigration attorney, Amy Gottlieb, the Associate Regional Director for the Northeast Region of the American Friends Service Committee, who is responsible for supporting programs in the Northeast Region that focus on immigrant rights and the spouse of activist Ravi Ragbir.

An escalating legal battle is playing out in the case of Ravi Ragbir, Executive Director of the New Sanctuary Coalition, a prominent immigrant rights activist whose detention by federal immigration authorities sparked protests that led to the arrest of 18 people, including elected officials of The New York City Council. Ravi Ragbir, showed up for his regularly scheduled “check-in” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan and was then detained, as had been the co-founder, Jean Montrevil of the New Sanctuary Coalition weeks earlier.  Both were immediately transported to the notorious Krome Detention Center in Florida.  Clearly the two immigrants’ rights champions were targeted by ICE and Jean Montrevil

has already been deported to Haiti while Ravi Ragbir remains in detention. We’ll examine the cases of these two immigrant rights activists, to put a human face of the growing numbers of immigrants facing, repression, detention and deportations under the racist/xenophobic immigration policies of Trump/Kelley, one two punch Republican juggernaut!  

play stream or download

Read More...

Farmworker women launch their "Harvest Without Violence"
campaign to end sexual violence in Wendy’s fast food supply chain
featuringThe Coalition of Immokalee Workers


Now, amidst the stories that are surfacing about sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape against woman, too often low-wage woman workers have been subjected to sexual violence against their person in their work place, but their voices have oftentimes been eclipsed.  And, we barely think about the workers who are responsible for the bounty of food on our tables.  So, Building Bridges is off to join the formidable farmworker women leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (“CIW”) for a major "Harvest without
Violence" march.  The CIW Women’s Group traveled to the Big Apple to demand a meeting with Wendy's Board Chairman and major shareholder Nelson Peltz to share their powerful stories and demand Wendy’s do its part to end sexual violence in the fields. Join the farmworkers in their Boycott Wendy’s march through Midtown Manhattan to Trian Partners, the multi-billion dollar asset management firm founded by Nelson Peltz, the chairman of The Wendy’s Company, based in New York. Declare that farmworker women should not have to surrender their dignity for the right to put food on their families’ tables!
**************************
Download or listen to this 29  minute program

Read More...

Billionaires Feast on $1.5 Trillion Trump Tax Cut Leaves 99% with Scraps from their Table and Threatens Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
featuring
Dean Baker,  formerly was an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He is currently a co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C.
and
Alex Lawson, Executive Director, Social Security Works

Only the Billionaires will win bigly with this tax cut for the rich which offers a sugar coated poisoned pill of benefits for the working class with threats to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid down the road to pay for their party. The massive cut to Corporate Taxes will be permanent while decreases in the individual rates will be eroded by inflation and then end in 8 years. The final bill also limits deductions of state and local taxes only to $10,000/yr while exempting more millionaires from paying the Estate Tax. According to all credible estimates, Republican claims that the $1.5 Trillion deficit over 10 years will covered by increased economic growth are overblown. It will leave a $1 Trillion deficit which will give the Republicans an excuse to attack Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

play stream or download

Read More...

Chief economist of the AFL-CIO declares Trump tax plan a con game against working people 

with
Dr. William Spriggs,  Chief economist of the AFL-CIO 
and professor of Economics at Howard University

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka responded to the Trump tax plan saying “it is nothing but a con game, and working people are the ones they’re trying to con. Here we go again. First comes the promise that tax giveaways for the wealthy and big corporations will trickle down to the rest of us. Then comes the promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. Then comes the promise that they want to stop offshoring. And finally, we find out none of these things are true, and the people responsible for wasting trillions of dollars on tax giveaways to the rich tell us we have no choice but to cut Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, education and infrastructure”.  Dr. Williams Spriggs tells us why the tax plan is little more than an across-the-board tax cut for America’s

millionaires and billionaires and wealthiest corporations at a time of massive wealth and income inequality – and that’s morally repugnant and bad economic policy to boot! 

play stream or download

Read More...

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) 

yanks Temporary Protective Status (“TPS”) from Haitians –
more than 50,000 face deportation!
featuring 
Steve Forester, Immigration Policy Coordinator,

with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti
and
Kim Ives, journalist and co-founder of the international weekly

newspaper Haiti Liberté

We condemn the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for Haitians, and deport the more than 50,000 Haitians who currently live in the United States with that status. These vulnerable people will be forcibly returned to a country not yet recovered from the devastating 2010 earthquake, and the massive hurricanes and cholera epidemics that followed and where the country’s political turmoil further places these refugees lives at risk.  Haiti is in no condition right now to accept deportees.  Attorney Steve Forester,

Immigration Policy Coordinator, with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti and Kim Ives, journalist and co-founder of the international weekly newspaper Haiti Liberté discuss DHS’s saying get back and how we can fight back.

play stream or download

Read More...

As the saying goes, “some thing's rotten in Denmark” & we’ve figured out what it is, why it’s the Trumpian tax plan!
featuring
Dean Baker,  formerly was an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He is currently a co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C.

When Trump said that “the biggest winners” under his new tax plan “will be the everyday American workers as jobs start pouring into our country, as companies start competing for American labor and as wages start going up at levels that you haven’t seen in many years,” you might’ve suspected he was lying, because, well, his lips were moving. But some corporate media give credence to the idea that this GOP tax plan is one for the little guy. We’ll talk taxes with economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

play stream or download

Read More...

“The Storms have ripped the clothes off colonialism's devastation of Puerto Rico” says Luis Rosa Perez!
featuring
Luis Rosa Perez, is a former U..S. held Puerto Rican political prisoner of war. He served almost 20 years in U.S. prisons for fighting to free Puerto Rico from the colonial relationship it’s had with the U.S. since 1898. In 1999 he and a group of Puerto Rican prisoners of war were given clemency by President Clinton. Luis Rosa Perez's commitment to his people is described as "Sacrifice without hesitation".
and
Rafael Bernabe is a researcher and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. He is the author, with César Ayala, of Puerto Rico in the American Century:A History Since 1898 (2007).

Hurricane Irma and Maria's passing and aftermath have once again brought to light Puerto Rico’s primordial conundrum: colonialism.  Together they have left The Island in shambles.  Luis Rosa Perez and Rafael Bernabe, two of the Island’s most prominent social change agents survey the damage on the ground wrought by the storms, whose devastating path through the Island was paved by Puerto Rico’s status as a US colony.  Luis and Rafael take
stock of The Island’s needs and urge us to build support for the Puerto Rican communities Unity March for Puerto Rico, Sunday, November 19, in D.C., – One People – One Voice – against unjust laws that have been systematically oppressive and exploited the people and resources of Puerto Rico and prevented its socio-economic growth and the sustainability of The Island. 

Luis and Rafael discuss the peoples reconstruction efforts on the ground and their organizing for self-determination, while they encourage us to create forceful, sustained political pressure on our leaders until they act for Puerto Rico – for a commitment to sustain rebuilding efforts; for transparency and accountability in the delivery of aid; and for the elimination of the Jones Act and the cancellation of Puerto Rico’s debt which is crippling The Island’s
recovery.  

listen to stream or download

Read More...

Rev Barber on Creating a Fusion Movement

to Defeat Trump and Move Forward Together
with
The Rev. Dr. William Barber is Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina and architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement that gained national acclaim with its Moral Monday protests which drew tens of thousands of North Carolinians and other moral witnesses to the state legislature.  He has served as president of the North Carolina NAACP, the largest state conference in the South.  His two most recent books include Forward Together (Chalice Press) and The Third

Reconstruction (Beacon Press).

And, Dr. William Barber is the founder and president of Repairers of the Breach, an organization that seeks to build a progressive agenda rooted in a moral framework to counter the ultra-conservative constructs that try to dominate the public square. Rev. Barber one of the most influential, progressive religious figures in the country.

Tens of thousands of men and women rose up in Chicago and cities from coast to coast to demanding that everyone in America have the right to organize and join a union and the Rev. William Barber said “I’m proud to stand with them, because their fight is central to the battle against poverty, racism, and inequality”. 

Earlier this year Rev. Barber announced an effort by faith and moral leaders to carry forward Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a Poor People’s Campaign, working across twenty-five states to alleviate the triad forces of poverty, militarism, and racism that Dr. King knew were poisoning our country then and still threaten us today.

play stream or download

Read More...

On Strike, Six Months & Counting: Spectrum Cable workers headed from the picket line crossing the Brooklyn Bridges to a massive Rally in Foley Square drawing thousands of supporters from the labor and community movements for social change. They built support  amongst the public for their fight for a fair contract and to save their union, amidst a media whiteout of their historic labor struggle!  
with
IBEW Local 3 strikers and supporters

Some 1,800 members of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 have been on strike at Spectrum/Time Warner Cable in New York and New Jersey since March 28, more than six months ago. Since then, only a fraction of the workforce has crossed picket lines, but the company is trying hard to keep up normal operations by using scabs and subcontractors to break the strike and the workers' union..

Spectrum is part of Charter Communications, the second largest cable provider in the U.S. and a telecommunications giant, providing services to roughly 25 million customers in 41 states, two and a half million of which reside in New York. The CEO, Tom Rutledge, who made $98.5 million last year met with Donald Trump in the White House earlier this year, and the company is touted by Trump as a job creator investing in its U.S. workforce. Meanwhile Rutledge’s Charter Communications has hung its workers out to dry:
 
  Download or listen
 
               

Read More...

Knocking on Labor’s Door
Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide
with
Lane Windham, author, Knocking on Labor’s Door; Associate
Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for
Labor and the Working Poor and co-director of WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor Leadership)

The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor
law--with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects.


Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.  Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future.

play stream or download

Read More...

Puerto Rico: Trapped Amidst the Perilous Winds of Colonialism and Hurricanes

with
Nelson Denis, a former New York State assemblyman, is the author of “War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony” and joins us now as we examine Puerto Rico between a rock and a hard place: between
colonialism and hurricanes.
and 

David Galarza, Puerto Rican Independence and labor activist

Puerto Rico is no stranger to crisis. Before Maria’s rampage through the archipelago, Puerto Rico was already in the midst of one of the most devastating financial and socio-political crises in its recent history, with an unaudited $74 billion debt under its belt, $49 billion in pension obligations, and several decades’ worth of illegal bond issuances and trading related to its status as an overly-advertised tax haven. Neoliberal policies such as draconian budget cuts and extreme austerity measures had already been rendered life in Puerto Rico quite precarious. And the whole thing was being overseen and managed simultaneously by Governor Rosselló, an

unelected and antidemocratic Fiscal Control Board, and judge Laura Taylor Swain, all of whom were going back and forth on the country’s fiscal management and debt restructuring processes.  Now, first Irma’s and then Maria’s passing and aftermath have once again brought to light Puerto Rico’s primordial conundrum: colonialism.  Nelson Denis and David Galarza discuss the humanitarian crisis that is exploding in Puerto Rico, the consequences of the Jones Act and “the junta” and how nullification of the Jones Act, cancellation of the multi-billion dollar debt and the implementation of environmentally conscious sustainability planning are imperative for Puerto Rico to rebuild for its native inhabitants. 

play stream or download

Read More...

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. 

Download or listen to this 28:59 minute program

Read More...

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. “

play stream or download

Read More...

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

Read More...

Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination
with
Herb Boyd, journalist, educator, author, and activist. His articles appear regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. He teaches Black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New Rochelle.

Herb Boyd excites and stimulates us with his inspiring, illuminating book that will interest students of urban history and the Black experience. 

Detroit was surely the capital of 20th-century African-America, as native son Herb Boyd recounts, this centrality dates back to the American Revolution but became pronounced at the time of the Civil War, when Detroit went from being an important station along the Underground Railroad to become an important source of abolitionism, industrialism, and sheer manpower for the war effort—including Black soldiers bound for the Union ranks.

As the author notes, however, the ascendancy of Black Detroit did not mean an end to racial tension; though he grew up on a block with Italian, Irish, and Jewish families, “our blackness was for our neighbors an object of derision and insult.” Boyd celebrates the rising-above that accompanied this ethnic contest, the grit and determination that put Berry Gordy’s Motown on the map, lifted the members of the Supremes and the Miracles from the projects, and ushered in a second black literary renaissance through the pens of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. As he reminds his readers, immigrants and exiles rom other regions and countries did their parts to shape Black Detroit: Malcolm X lived there before moving to New York and taking a leading part in the radical wing of the civil rights movement, while Rosa Parks moved there from the South in 1957. “Parks’s commitment to fight Jim Crow—North or
South —was unrelenting,” writes the author. Though the city has fallen victim since to outmigration, its population having fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 670,000 today, Boyd writes confidently that the city’s African-American population will be central to its revival, concluding, “I’m proud to be a Detroiter.”
**************************
play stream or download

Read More...