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

The Revolutionary King with Dr. Clayborne Carson -28:37  


The Revolutionary King: MLK’s The Three Evils of Society, "the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism" and his prophetic work then for the path forward today!
with

Dr. Clayborne Carson, African American professor of history at Stanford University, and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985 he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

For anyone that is preoccupied with the current local-global condition affecting the human family with the visible ravages of racism eating at our soul, poverty's death march and the ever expanding military industrial complex cancer devouring everything in sight our two-hour special The Revolutionary King will truly aid us on our journey to become more affective agents for social change.

On Aug. 31, 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King delivered The Three Evils of Society speech at the National Conference on New Politics, which is the most prophetic and revolutionary address to date on the questions of militarism, poverty, and racism. "We are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness" was how MLK framed the problem that "has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning." Identifying "the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism" and considering the three problems as the "plaque of western civilization."  Dr. King understood that the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement was from the outset a battle against the system itself.

At the time of the speech, MLK was facing increasing white opposition to black empowerment and equality, an expansion of crony capitalism and open ended commitment to military expenditures on the Vietnam war that all together led to deepening poverty and rising discontent in the African American community. The conditions in today's America and the world resemble what MLK described in "The Three Evils of Society" speech in 1967.

MLK spoke of America's "schizophrenic personality on the question of race" with two conflicting personalities. One professing "the great principles of democracy" and another that practices its antithesis. Every step forward in confronting racism in America has an equal step backward, which MLK perceptively identified as the white backlash -- the "old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation." Racism, for MLK, was that "corrosive evil that will bring down western civilization" and white backlash was nothing more than good old White Supremacy that is never content with equality.

Dr. King was a great leader in the Black Revolutionary Tradition whose work should help shape our understanding of capitalism and organizing today.  Now is precisely the time to recount and be instructed by Dr. King’s revolutionary legacy against the system’s efforts to white wash and degrade his frontal challenge to its crimes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the great revolutionaries in U.S. and world history. He was a leader of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement, a fierce internationalist, anti-imperialist, and Pan Africanist, a Black militant, a socialist, and part of The Movement that was far to the left of the Democratic Party.


Since 1980, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, the two party system, aka U.S. imperialism, has waged a counter-revolution against the great victories of the revolutionary sixties, where the revolutionary left won so many of the ideological battles against U.S. hegemony.  In the past 40 years, in particular, it has been profoundly painful to witness, and difficult to combat, the lies and slanders against the historical, and political achievements of the Black and Third World led movements.

In the case of Dr. King, the establishment has tried to distort King’s life by putting him forth as an accommodating, dreamer and use him as a counterforce against Malcolm X, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fidel Castro, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the great Third World revolutionaries throughout history. In truth, Dr. King was one of their colleagues and comrades and in turn, they all had great appreciation of his unique and courageous role in history.

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Which Of The 2020 Candidates Is A Friend Of The Workers? - 25:01  

Which Of The 2020 Candidates Is A Friend Of The Workers?
with
Shaun Richman, Program Dir. of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College.


.  Wage growth is weak for a tight labor market—and the pace of wage growth is uneven across race and gender. 
.  Wage growth is being held back by political decisions and the Trump administration is on the wrong side of key debates.
.  Working people have been thwarted in their efforts to bargain for better wages by attacks on unions.
.  Low-wage workers are suffering from a decline in the real value of the federal minimum wage.
.  Black workers endure persistent racial disparities in employment outcomes.
.  Employers increase their profits and put downward pressure on wages and labor standards by exploiting migrant workers

Together, these dilemmas underscore that we must understand and address many factors—including the dynamics of gender, race, and immigration—when crafting policies to give all workers a fair shot at achieving faster wage growth and greater opportunity. 

Moreover, U.S. employers are willing to use a wide range of legal and illegal tactics to frustrate the rights of workers to form unions and collectively bargaining. Employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5% of all union election campaigns. And one out of five union election campaigns involves a charge that a worker was illegally fired for union activity. While this outrage has persisted for years under Democratic and Republican Administrations, it has reached new depths under Trump.

Within this context we’ll talk about what the top Democratic Party contenders for the presidency are proposing to better the “state of the state” of working men and women, as they ready themselves for the Iowa caucuses.  We’ll also discuss who supports and the likelihood of the passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which is scheduled to be introduced in the House of Representative in early February. 


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