Unemployment, Poverty and the “Great” Recession
with
Avis Jones-DeWeever, Exec. Dir., National Council of Negro Women,
Marc Morial President & CEO of the National Urban League, and
former Mayor of New Orleans,
Dean Baker, Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Signs of economic recovery, well, maybe for Wall Street, and the banksters,
but what about our street? Where’s the beef, where’s the jobs? The United
States is still experiencing its worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression.
Officially in of May 2011 the unemployment rate increased to 9.1%. In 2009
there were 43.6 million people living in poverty, the largest figure in the 51
years for which poverty estimates are available, and the numbers have been
climbing. This national crisis demands a bold plan to put people back to work
and to prevent those wielding the ax from chopping more jobs and cutting
further holes in the safety net and jeopardizing entitlement programs.

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What Is To Be Done?

In this period of intensified class warfare against the working class and the
poor, what will it take to mobilize the people for the mass movement it will
surely take to win? Many have been heartened by the fightback in Wisconsin
and many of the frontline states. But is the predominately electoral strategy
that is currently being followed sufficient to win? What is the role direct action,
strikes, including general strikes, and cross union and community solidarity?
We talk with:

General Baker has been called the most important 21st century American
revolutionary. He was a leader of the Detroit wildcat strikes in the 1960s, a
founder of the legendary League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), & the first American to refuse
induction to fight in Vietnam. The book, "Detroit: I Do Mind Dying" (about the
worker revolts of that era) calls Baker the "soul of the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement (DRUM)." An autoworker for 30 years, he remains a
champion of the unemployed and unorganized workers.

Stanley Aronowitz is a Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, where he studies labor, social movements,
science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies. He is
author or editor of 25 books including: Left Turn: Forging a New Political
Future; How Class Works; The Jobless Future (with William DiFazio); and
False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness.

Staughton Lynd has dedicated his life to activism & social change as a
historian, lawyer, and labor activist. He helped direct the Mississippi
Freedom Schools. In April 1965 he spoke at the first march on Washington
against the Vietnam War and became an early leader of the anti-war
movement. Subsequent to becoming an attorney he spent years focusing
on labor and prison issues. He wrote the definitive history of the 1993 Ohio
prison uprising at Lucasville as well as the ever popular “Labor Law for the
Rank and Filer” and “Rank and File” oral histories of the 1930’s .

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The Freedom Riders and Lessons for Today
With
The Rev. Dr. James Lawson , helped coordinate the Sitdown
strike in 1960, Freedom Rides in 1961, the Meredith March in
1966. While working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist
Church in Memphis, he invited Dr. King to Memphis & played
a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. Dr. King
called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of
nonviolence in the world.”

and
Diane Nash, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) who participated in the sitdown strikes in
Nashville & rode the freedom buses into Alabama and Miss.
where she endured mob violence & imprisonment. Later, she
was hired by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) & was a major organizer for the 1963 Birmingham
campaign.

The movement by African-Americans, in the 60’s to desegregate interstate
travel facilities throughout the South was pivotal in challenging & ultimately eradicating the most onerous Jim Crow laws and breaking the back of what
were the police states of the South. The Freedom Rides, along with efforts
to integrate public accommodations, & educational institutions and the voter registration campaigns coalesced as a mass movement that triggered the
conscience of a nation and spurred it to action. Risking life and limb to
confront white supremacy, the civil rights activists forced major changes
in the power relationships of the nation.

Fifty years after the freedom rides, on this anniversary Building Bridges
looks back at & learns anew how the freedom riders organized and
mobilized to dramatically alter the very functioning of the state and what
e can emulate today in the face of increasing repression, by undemocratic
forces who seek to unravel fifty years of gains, ushered in by the freedom
riders.

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The People versus the Corporations in America’s Rust Belt
The Coup in Benton Harbor, Michigan
with
Rev. Edward Pinkney, Community Activist & Leader in the Fight
Against The Takeover of Benton Harbor

For the residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan the question is will America
have prosperity and democracy, or live in poverty under the heel of open
corporate power. There’s been a coup in Benton Harbor, First, Whirlpool
controlled Benton Harbor and now the City of Benton Harbor has become
the battleground for Michigan’s new emergency financial management law.
The law gives an accountant, Joseph Harris, dubbed an emergency manager
the right to tear up labor contracts. And, in Detroit district wide layoff
notices hit every one of its Public Schools. The 5,466 unionized employees
called the move the largest “one fell swoop” firing of teachers in union
memory. Additionally, the Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb’s
concurrent announcement that he plans to unilaterally modify the Detroit
Federation of Teachers’ collective bargaining agreement is the first test
of a sweeping new state law.
*************
Fighting Back
with
Frances Fox Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished professor, legendary activist, and writer
for more than a year has been accused by Fox news host Glenn Beck, who
employees a graphic of a tree to do so of being an advocate of violence
and plotting since 1966 to overthrow the system. Well Piven now closes
our programming, with our support, respect and affection as she addresses
a national youth audience Teach-In. You’ll hear Piven reference the tree
and rather use the metaphor to advocate organizing movements for peace
and justice.

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In Brief- Produced by Mimi Rosenberg
presents
Protecting Reproductive Freedom

with
Jennifer Dalven, Director of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project

Since the start of this year, 916 measures seeking to regulate reproductive
health had been introduced in 49 states. And by the end of March, 15 laws
had been enacted in seven states. Is this death by a thousand cuts, has state
law and new federal legislation affectively aborted, literally the right of choice ensconced in Roe v. Wade.

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Inspiration From Egypt: A May Day Message
with
Hossam el-Hamalawy,
Historian, Activist Reporter,Blogger, from Cairo

The events in Egypt, were a catalyst throughout the Middle East
for the yearnings for democracy and working class empowerment.
And, as well the aspirations & activism of the Egyptians has given
inspiration to us here, in the face of a full court press against the
working class. The current renaissance of unionism in Egypt should
likewise give us inspiration. Hossam el-Hamalawy provides an
insightful report on the May Day celebrations in Cairo detailing
the continuing conflict between the newly formed independent
unions and the state unions which were still being supported by
the military on May Day celebrations. He provides a fascinating
history of unions in Egypt culminating in their present emergence
of a free trade union movement independent of the state with
demands for dissolution of the state unions, higher wages and renationization of substantial parts of previously privatized
industries.

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Port Workers In Bay Area Turn Out To Say An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
with
Clarence Thomas, Former Secretary Treasurer of Local 10, and rank
& file activist Local 10

The Bay Area’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10is under attack by the Pacific Maritime Association, after the rank and file dock workers’ voluntary action in solidarity with the national “We Are One” action, for the Wisconsin public workers. The PMA is suing the ILWU Local 10 because the members shutdown the ports in support of other workers. This is a serious attack on the right of workers to withhold their labor to support other workers, and alongwith support from the 87,000 member San Francisco Labor Council Local 10 workers continue to demonstrate their solidarity with workers fighting the attacks on collective bargaining rights.

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Shredding The Child Labor Safety Net
with
Susan F. Feiner, Prof. of Economics & Prof. of Women
& Gender Studies, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

Republicans in Utah, Ohio, Minnesota, Maine and Missouri are
proposing sweeping changes to child labor legislation including
expanding the use of sub-minimum wages for workers up to
the age of 20 & permitting teens to work till 11pm on school
nights. Missouri is taking the lead in the race back to the 19th
century, by drastically cutting back on enforcement & inspection
of child labor protections, including those protecting child
workers' health and safety on the job.

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Holding Women’s Health Hostage
with
LisaLyn Jacobs, Vice President of Government Relations, Legal Momentum (formerly NOW LDF)

House Republicans threaten to shut down the government over federal funding for Planned Parenthood. After weeks of federal budget negotiations, the focus shifted from economic issues to a particular rider that would eliminate all gov't funding to Planned Parenthood through the Title X family planning program. Conservatives are targeting PlannedParenthood because some of its clinics provide abortions, even though those abortions make up less than 3% of Planned Parenthood's services and federal money is not used to pay for abortion services. What was proposed by the House of Representatives is to say that women can no longer go to Planned Parenthood to get their cancer screenings, to gettheir birth control, to get any kind of services through federal programs.
*********************
Highlights From The Money for Jobs, Not for War Rally

Thousands of protesters attended the largest national antiwar protest inyears. The rally juxtaposed the Democrats and Republicans haggling over budget proposals that in any event slashed billions in life-sustaining programs. As the rally organizers stated Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid are being threatened -- but there is always money for another war – but, if we brought the troops home now, the deficit could be wiped out in a heartbeat. Saturday’s demonstration represented a renewal ofthe antiwar movement and we will bring its highlights.

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Just A Cutting & A Slicing:
Bloomberg Seeks To Eliminate Subsidized Day Care
with
G.L. Tyler, Political Action Director, DC 1707

Mayor Bloomberg, is attempting to eliminate nearly 17,000 infants and toddlers from safe, quality and affordable day care. The “Education Mayor” is prepared to devastate subsidized daycare. Once again, Bloomberg has exposed himself to be not the protector of working families but ready to turn his back on working families needing public day care. The Mayor has a $2 billion “Rainy Day” fund that he does not wish to share with New Yorkers in need. He cannot take this money, our money, and give it to the millionaires and billionaires while cutting the jobs of day care providers and forcing working parents out of the work force if they don’t have child care.

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Martin Luther King’s Economic Justice Agenda From Memphis To Wisconsin Forty three years ago, a struggle by 1,300 sanitation workers for economic justice brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis. On the eve of his death, hours after marching with the AFSCME sanitation workers, being denied the right of collective bargaining & facing down the armed forces of a city & state, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared: “work that serves humanity…It has dignity and it has worth.” WE ARE ONE Today in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida and more than a dozen other states, well-funded, corporatist politicians are trying to take away the union rights Dr. King gave his life for. This year, to commemorate his sacrifice, the AFL-CIO called for nationwide events and actions to link the struggle of 1968 to the challenges we face today, We Are One. ***** Carrying On The Legacy Of Dr. Martin Luther King with Dr. Vincent Harding, an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, has written numerous books, including "Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero". On this 43rd year since the death of Dr. King, speechwriter, confidante Dr. Harding discusses Dr. King’s economic justice activism and its relevance for us today as workers battle for the survival of their labor organizations, against give backs, stagnating wages and unemployment **** From Ground Zero Of the War on the Workers: Reports from Wisconsin and Ohio with Peter Rickman, Teaching Asst., LaFollette Law School , Univ. of Wisconsin, & member of Teaching Assistants’ Assn., AFT Local 3220 and Joseph Rugola, Exec. Dir., Ohio Assn. of Public School Employees, AFSCME The Ohio legislature just passed Gov. Kasich’s union busting bill which nullifies public employee rights. Meanwhile, Gov. Scott Walkers’ rush to cut public sector worker benefits, and bust their unions in Wisconsin has been stymied by court action. But the workers in both states aren’t taking the assaults lying down, we found out how they’re carrying on the legacy of Dr. King by going live to the We are One demonstration in Madison Wisconsin. stream or download

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From Egypt to Wisconsin, Is NY Next?: Breaking the Silence, NYC’s Protests Against Budget Cuts Buoyed by the new spirit of rebellion flowing from Egypt to Wisconsin, thousands of students, workers & community members from a wide coalition of organizations rallied at City Hall Park, followed by a march on Wall Street to demand higher taxes on the rich, to prevent budget cutbacks. This was the first major NYC demonstration, in an otherwise muted budget debate despite the grim consequences of the State & City proposed cuts. **** Arrests Up The Ante On Albany Budget Negotiations with Barbara Bowen, President, Professional Staff Congress, CUNY and James Parrott, Deputy Director & Chief Economist, Fiscal Policy Inst. While Albany budget negotiators are reaching agreement, the real question for the public is how much pain and suffering are legislators prepared to hit us with. We’ll analyze the budget and especially, it’s likely impact on NYC, where Mayor Bloomberg,while sitting on a $3 billion budget surplus is threatening major cutbacks, & thousands of layoffs. Bloomberg, like the Governor refuses to consider a millionaires or a securities transfer tax to prevent a slash and burn policy. In otherwise subdued budget protests this year, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY led an Albany protest in which 33 people were arrested. They sat down and blocked access to the New York State Capitol's Executive Chamber demanding that Albany not pass an austerity budget that pays for a hefty tax breaks for the wealthy. stream or download

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The New Class War on Unions Spreads to Ohio
with
Joseph Rugola, Exec. Dir., Ohio Assn. of Public School Employees, AFSCME

Following Gov. Walker’s union busting lead, Ohio Gov. Kasich proposes to nullify public employee unionization rights by taking away impartial arbitration of disputes, the right to strike of “non-emergency public employees” and protections against privatization of government jobs. Despite the demonstration by over 20,000, it was politics at its worst, Republican leaders rammed this bill through by kicking opposing members of their own party off key committees.
************************
NYC Union Rally Blasts Bloomberg and Cuomo Attacks

District Council 37 Locals 375,154, 768 & 1549 demonstrated at City Hall Park in support of the resistance of workers & their unions under attack in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states. On the NYC front, they railed against proposed layoffs by Mayor Bloomberg, despite projections of a multibillion dollar budget surplus and a plethora of costly and often corrupt outside contracts. Both the Bloomberg and Cuomo Administrations oppose continuing the millionaires’ tax to enhance revenue rather than cutting public services and layoffs.

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A Women's History Month Special

Out of the Flames, From The Ashes: TheTriangle Shirtwaist Fire & Its Legacy

Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Fire - March 25, 1911

Tune into our tapestry of archival sound, re-enactments – a docudrama of the “flowering girls” who lost their lives in the Triangle Fire, on this hundredth anniversary, of one of the most important events in the history of the labor movement. Threaded through the sound tapestry are the haunting voices from the fire intermingled with the poetry and songs that arose in the wake of the tragedy. Another thread of the tapestry are the voices of scholar/activists who deliberate on the legacy of Triangle for today - to organize and unionize, to regulate the workplace and create a safe, decent life for working people, to attend to the problems today sadly echoing the conditions at the time of the Triangle Fire. This is a drama of the dilemmas faced by working women, their pathos, & the importance of the fire, in the annals of workers’ history - “not to mourn, but to organize.”

A fire broke out on the top three stories of a relatively new building just east of
Washington Square Park, which housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a
large manufacturer of women’s clothes (a building which today houses New York University classrooms). Though the building was modern and advertised as fire-proof, the cramped layout of the factory space, large piles of flammable materials, locked doors by the employers, an inadequate fire escape, and the inability of New York City fire truck ladders to reach high enough to rescue the people trapped by the flames led to a staggering loss of life. All told, 146 workers died that day, mostly women workers, many still in their teens, some as young as fourteen, killed by the fire or their desperate leaps to the ground to escape the suffocating smoke, the heat and flames. It is the largest industrial tragedy in the history of New York City.

After the fire, & the outraged voices of community residents, workers, labor activists, New York State passed a series of new laws regulating factory safety which, along with unionization,gradually eliminated the worst conditions workers faced. These efforts would reach fruition in the New Deal, in many respects the creation of the coalition of forces that came togetherin the aftermath of the TriangleFire.

If Triangle is an old story, one about a century ago, it is also a very current story. While the U.S. was successful, at least for a while, in eliminating the worst abuses of the sweatshop era and improving the lives of its working people, there are millions of workers today who face conditions not unlike those faced by the Triangle workers. What people sometimes refer to as the global sweatshop is a vast archipelago of workplaces, in many of which young female workers toil long hours in dangerous conditions, very often without union representation or any rights.

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The New Class War in Wisconsin
with
Frank Emspak, Dir.Emeritus, School For Workers, University Of Wisconsin and Exec. Dir. Workers Independent News

In the face of massive protests, Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker’s “budget repair bill” proposes limiting collective
bargaining powers of public employees only to base pay
tearing the guts out of the union.The bill also mandates
increases in workers' pension & health care contributions.
And next come the layoffs. We’ll explore Walker’s capital
supported initiative to break the back of organized labor.
What are the politics behind it and forces pushing this
Republican juggernaut? Is this a blueprint for union
busting in other states? And, oh yes, we’ll discuss what is
to be done?
************
See You On the Picket Line
With
Harry Belafonte, the Great Actor, Singer and Social Justice Activist

In his recent speech at City College in NYC, Belafonte
decries what has been the passivity in the U.S. in face of
massive attacks on civil rights and workers rights but
welcomes the recent protests against tyranny in Tunisia
and Egypt and extending to Madison Wisconsin to protect
workers rights.

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Woodlawn Cemetery Alive with Union Protests
With
Chris Silvera, Secretary Treasurer Local 808, Teamsters
And
Local 808 Woodlawn Members - the Band of Brothers
. Todd Brown
. Alex Coss
. Enrique Coss

Landscapers at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where
six Mayors & jazz legends like Celia Cruz, Miles Davis & Duke
Ellington are buried, protested at the cemetery with union and
community allies from throughout NYC . Management plans to
contract their jobs out to a private landscaping firm unless they
take a 35% pay cut. Local 808 Secretary-Treasurer Chris Silvera
called the proposed outsourcing “an act of vengeance against
the workers for choosing a fighting union to represent them.
” It's the latest battle for the workers, "The Band of Brothers",
who for several years have lodged complaints about racism by
supervisors. Then in October, the workers voted over-
whelmingly to switch their union affiliation to Local 808.

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The current struggles of public sector workers rights in Wisconsin and
around the country has galvanized public and worker sentiment and
support to an extent not seen since the battle to organize the Memphis
City sanitation workers in 1968. This was part of the upsurge of the civil
rights movement of the 1960’s and also of the mass unionization of
public workers in that decade.

“Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign”
with
Michael K. Honey, Prof. of Ethnic, Gender, and Labor studies, University of Washington, Tacoma

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to add his voice to protests in support of striking sanitation workers – the civil rights movement paralleled with the struggles of organized labor. Professor Honey details the daily evolution of the strike and what it meant to Memphis and the larger civil-rights movement. He chronicles the events that led up to that fateful day at the Lorraine Motel, and to larger social change. Honey’s analysis of King’s role is particularly telling. “King,” he writes, “had qualities that allowed him to lead a mass movement that joined working-class people to the middle class through the black church” until his “Crucifixion.”

Plus Taylor Rogers, a past Pres. of the Memphis Sanitation Workers
Union talks about the 1968 Strike which was Dr. King's last struggle and a selection from King's speech at a strike rally.

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Earl Robinson’s Cantata, Lonesome Train

The Riverside Church in NYC presented the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, The NYC Labor Chorus and The Riverside Inspirational Choir in Earl Robinson’s cantata The Lonesome Train in honor of the birthday of the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln. The work had not been heard in its entirety for more than 50 years.

The performance featured theatrical direction by LorcaPeress,a narrator played by acclaimed actress Ruby Dee (American Gangster, Steam), a chorus led by a balladeer, Michael Mark (I Love My Wife, Cotton Patch Gospel), barn-dance caller David Amram (composer/Author/Jazz musician), banjo soloist Eric Weissberg (Dueling Banjos, Deliverance) and Sam Waterston (Law and Order) as President Lincoln. The four join gospel preacher Tyrone Aiken and his choir, a barn dance caller and fiddler to honor Lincoln’s message of “a new nation conceived in liberty.”

The Riverside production was introduced by Pete Seeger.

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Bloomberg Stop The Snow Job On Public Schools Closings!
with
. Stefanie Siegel, teacher, Paul Robeson High School
. Lowena Howard, teacher, Paul Robeson High School
. Letitia Ingram-Brown, teacher, Paul Robeson High School
. Lizabeth Cooper, student, Paul Robeson High School
plus
Highlights from the Stop Schools Closing Rally

Bloomberg's Department of Education (DOE) plans to close 26 more schools this year. Despite the DOE's claim that these school closings are aimed at reforming schools, they have instead opened the door to privately-run charter schools and have limited school options for those affected. According to the accounts by parents, students and teachers, DOE policies have had the effect of undermining the schools that are slated to be closed, not "fixing" them. Bloomberg has played a shell game with our most vulnerable children, shuffling them around from closing school to closing school. This process has disproportionately affected students of color, only serving to further perpetuate a separate and unequal school system in New York City. A discussion about and sounds from a rally for quality resources and support for our public schools, not closings and privatization!

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Jeff Halper, An Israeli Campaigner For Justice For Palestinians
with
Jeff Halper, famed author, and Coordinator, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)

Since 1967, more than 24,000 Palestinian homes have been demolishedin the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Gaza by the Israeli forces, bringing untold misery to countless Palestinians. Jeff Halper has led a campaign against this abuse through the organization ICAHD. As ICAHD witnessed the brutalities of the Occupation, it expanded its resistance activities to other areas – land expropriation, settlement expansion, by-pass road construction, policies of “closure” and “separation,” the wholesale uprooting of fruit and olive trees, the Separation Barrier/Wall, the siege of Gaza and more. Building Bridges hosts, in studio ICAHD’s Jeff Halper, an Israeli Jew who fearlessly criticizes the state of Israel and has, as a result, been arrested many times, including recently after he sailed into Gaza on a relief boat, for a discussion of ideas & international advocacy to end the Occupation altogether & for a “Free, Free Palestine.”

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