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

Dr. King and Public Workers: Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike - 26:24  

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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Lincoln Cantata -28'  

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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NYC Schools Closings - Another Bloomberg Snow Job - 28:24  

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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An Israeli Campaigner For Justice For Palestinians with Jeff Halper - 27:38  

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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