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Radio Topics |
Animals, Activists, and War.
Guest: Mr. Rivas-Rivas, People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals. Why are animals being used
as soldiers in the U.S. war on Iraq? What is the
relevance of the animal rights movement to the peace
movement? Why have animal rights groups been labeled
"terrorists" by the FBI? Is the life of an animal
worth less than the life of a human?
Click here to listen!
Has the INS Become a Branch of
the Criminal Justice System?
Guest: Michael Welch, Ph.D., Author of
DETAINED: Immigration Laws & the Expanding INS Jail Complex.
With the recent
passage of legislation calling for the formation of
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has now
become part of the war on terrorism. Yet the role the
INS began to change long before the events of
September 11, 2001, as our nation's immigrants have
historically been the scapegoats of our nations
problems. The most recent trend in criminalizing
immigrants actually predates the war on terrorism by
some ten years. Tune in to learn about this troubling
trend and what you can do to halt the racist
scapegoating of the immigrant population.
Embedded, or In Bed? Media,
the Pentagon, and War.
In an attempt to place
the most positive spin on a pre-emptive war against Iraq
while simultaneously silencing allegations of government
censorship, in the months prior to the military assault
the Pentagon took extreme measures to work with the media
for the purpose of public relations. Providing
journalists with war-time media coverage training,
certified journalists became "embedded" with the military;
that is, journalists were assigned to a particular
military unit and promised the most comprehensive access
to news footage of the war. But is the practice of
becoming "embedded" a breach of journalistic objectivity
on the part of news organizations and reporters? Can
reporters really examine the issues of international law
and justice while embedded within a military unit? Or has
media coverage of a possible war against Iraq suffered
from a lack of objectivity even before the bombs began to
drop? Guest:
Steve Rendall of Fairness in Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR).
Reject Defeatism: Keeping the
Peace Movement Moving Forward! Now that
war has been waged (escalated?) against the people of
Iraq, many peace activists likely feel deflated, while
others question the appropriateness of demonstrating while
U.S. troops are abroad. Guest Michael
Albert discusses strategies for the peace movement in
a time of war. Topics for discussion include: stop
whining and start winning, being congenial, respecting
differences, and moving forward.
Pretty Lies / Dirty Truths
is a new art exhibit that offers unflinching views and
alternative perspectives of over four score artists who
believe that underneath the current patriotic rhetoric
lurk that same old motives driven by ignorance,
arrogance, and greed. These artists all embrace the
proposition that it is time to promote a better vision
for the world. We further challenge that if any of the
dirty truths presented in this exhibit are found to be
untrue that we will offer a public apology and withdraw
them from the show. The exhibit may be seen at BC
Space Gallery behind the steel door at 235 Forest
Avenue, Laguna Beach, CA 92651. For images of the
artwork,
click
here.
Progressive Music/Progressive
Messages. Entartete Kunst Recordings
is a San Francisco based record company that produces
and distributes "progressive" electronic music. That is,
not only is the sound forward thinking, experimental and
genre bending, but the artists that comprise their catalog
are committed to delivering not merely a groove, but a
powerful message. Through sound-bites, spoken word,
and biting poetry, artists such as the deletist, dj
slomo, raw knowledge and drowning dog take on
the male dominated, white-supremacist, homophobic,
ethno-centric, corporate structure. Whew! Check 'em
out at
www.entartekunst.info.
Yo No Quiero TACO BELL!
Farm workers who pick for Florida growers who sell
tomatoes to Taco Bell earn between 40-50 cents for every
32-lb bucket of tomatoes they pick.
That is the same piece rate
paid since 1978. Last year, the Immokalee
Workers who represent Taco Bell's tomato pickers began to
organize for improved wages, but to date,
Taco Bell has refused to take any responsibility for these
sweatshop conditions in the fields where their tomatoes
are picked.
Join Guest Max Perez
of the Immokalee Workers as they discuss their current
efforts to put pressure on Taco Bell, including their
staging of a 10-day hunger strike outside of Taco Bell
headquarters right here in Irvine.
Medical Marijuana and the Case of
Ed Rosenthal. California resident Ed
Rosenthal was convicted in a federal court of growing and
distributing an illegal narcotic; in this case, that
narcotic was marijuana. He now faces a potential
lengthy prison sentence. But did Ed Rosenthal
receive a fair trial? Why are jurors now crying
"foul" and stating that they'd rule otherwise if they had
been properly informed? Were jurors informed that
Mr. Rosenthal was growing marijuana for medical purposes,
and the citizens of the state of California approved the
use of marijuana for medicinal purposes? Should
state law trump federal law? Guest: Safe
Access Now.
Civil Disobedience: Practical
Advice for the Politically Disenchanted.
What rights do you have if you are arrested at a protest?
What can you expect upon your first day in court? If
you are planning a protest, must you obtain a permit?
What is the best way to raise public consciousness?
Guest James Tracy is an anti-poverty
activist and organizer living in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Currently, he coordinates Right to a Roof, part of
the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. In addition to the
"Civil Disobedience Handbook...," he has been published in
numerous publications most notably Race Poverty and the
Environment, NOSH, Maximum Rock and Roll, Shleterforce and many others. He is also a
member of hte Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe, a
seven member collective of political poets.
Veterans for Peace
Guest: Wilson Powell, National Administrator & World Community Coordinator.Veterans for Peace (VFP)
is a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization
dedicated to the abolishment of war. VFP was founded in
1985 by ex-service members committed to sharing the
horrors they experienced. "We know the consequences
of American foreign policy because once, at a time in our
lives, so many of us carried it out. We find it sad that
war seems so delightful, so often, to those that have no
knowledge of it. We will proudly, and patriotically,
continue to denounce war despite whatever misguided sense
of euphoria supports it. Wage Peace!"
Click here
to listen!
Why Civil Disobedience
Matters Guest: Howard Zinn.
Professor Zinn's appearance on KUCI 88.9FM's
Justice, or Just Us?
marks the 35 year anniversary of the publication of
his book: Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies
on Law and Order recently re-issued by South End
Press (www.southendpress.org).
The book was written in part as a response to a 7-1
Supreme Court decision that upheld the criminal
conviction of David O'Brien for burning his draft
card. When Justice Abe Fortas wrote a booklet on
civil disobedience justifying such prosecutions,
professor Zinn drafted a response, which contained 9
fallacies. Zinn's essay immediately sold over
70,000 copies, and remains as relevant during the
current push for war as it did during Vietnam. Click
here for MP3 audio file.
Writing as
Resistance: A
celebration of the 15th anniversary of
The Journal of Prisoners on
Prisons. Guest: Bob Gaucher, Journal
editor.
Over 2 million people are now
incarcerated in the United States - a four-fold
increase - and the numbers continue to grow despite a
decrease in the violent crime rate. The prison
industry is now the second largest employer in the
U.S. after General Motors. But as the state continues
to lock people up, and as the academic discipline of
criminology continues to gain in its policy influence,
rarely are the perspectives of actual inmates
acknowledged and/or heard. The Journal of Prisoners on
Prisons is the only academic journal containing
scholarly work authored exclusively by incarcerated
offenders. The newly published anthology "Writing As
Resistance" contains articles from the first twelve
years of the journal and includes work on a range of
topics, including facility accreditation, victims'
rights, crime trends, and political crimes. The
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons forces the reader to
look the issue of punishement and incarceration in the
eye, and it humanizes that which has previously been
conceptualized as the "other." "Writing as
Resistance" represents the best the Journal has to
offer.
Imprisoning Women:
Power, Gender & Unintended Consequences.
In the past two decades, the
number of women being held in the nation's prison
increased more than six fold, yet half of all female
inmates are serving time for drug offenses. What social
forces can account for the war on women as a byproduct
of the war on crime? Does the imprisonment of women
produce unintended social harms or "collateral
consequences," such as the break-up of the family, the
erosion of child-rearing, and the victimization of women
by male prison guards? Has female criminality really
increased, or is something else accounting for the mass
incarceration of women? Guest
Meda Chesney- Lind i is the author of the award
winning Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile
Justice and co-editor (with Marc Mauer) of
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral
Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. She
currently serves as professor of women's studies at the
University of Hawaii.
Click here for MP3 audio
file.
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Is Punishment Simply Another
Form of Violence? Is punishment necessary for
justice? Is punishment a form of counter-violence? Why
must we inflict pain to bring about justice? Are there
any alternatives to traditional means of punishment?
Guest: Dennis Sullivan is the
author of Restorative Justice: Healing the
Foundations of Our Everyday Lives. He has been
an advocate for alternatives to punishment and retributive
justice for years. In 1981 he co-authored The Struggle
to be Human which presents an anarchist alternative to
contemporary justice practices. He is the founder of the
Institute for Economic & Restorative Justice and the
editor of Contemporary Justice Review.
Social Justice Through
Participatory Economics Does the current
economic model that underlies western democracies promote
injustice and inequality? What is the relationship
between the economy and social practice? Is it possible
to create a more just economy without compromising
productivity or quality? Guest:
Michael Albert, long time activist, speaker, and
writer, is editor of Z-net and co-editor and
founder of Z Magazine. He is also co-founder of
the highly influential South End Press which has
brought such figures as bell hooks, Noam Chomsky, Howard
Zinn, and Ward Churchill to national prominence. Albert
is the author of some fifteen books on social justice,
including Liberating Theory, What is to be Undone,
and Stop the Killing Train. Through his writing
and activism, Albert provides a cooperative and liberating
economic model for a just society. |
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Why Racial Profiling Cannot
Work Racial profiling is a model of policing
based upon faulty assumptions and false logic. Now,
statistics show that stopping more blacks and Hispanics
(predictably) does not turn up more drugs or criminals.
Author and law professor David A. Harris discusses
his new book Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial
Profiling Cannot Work, a rather timely topic as
our government expands profiling to other racial groups.
Reparations for Slavery
Native Americans, Jews, Japanese Americans,
Alaskans. All received reparations from the United States
government. So why not reparations for African-Americans
in response to the slave trade? Why won't congress even
allow for a committee to study the feasibility of
reparations? Are reparations cash payments, or
scholarship funds? Are they handouts, or funds to provide
for African-American national monuments? Guest: Kalonji
Olushegun of the National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America (www.ncobra.org). Click
here for transcript.
Art and Politics: Hip Hop
Activism Hip Hop artist and social activist
Mr. Lif of the influential recording label definitive
jux was one of the first artists to use his talent to
speak out against the U.S. government's military assault
against Afghanistan, not to mention the domestic assault
on civil liberties. Songs like "missing persons' file"
and "home of the brave" tackle the so-called PATRIOT ACT
head on, while his newest release I-PHANTOM provides a
critical examination of American values and mores.
Guest: Mr. Lif, live and direct from his tour bus as
he travels into the heart of the jungle known as D.C. [click
here for mp3 audio of show] (Requires mp3 audio
software player) |
Left Out! Mass Media & the
Exclusion of Dissent. The myth of the liberal
media; the lack of minority voices on National Public Radio
(NPR); why corporate media threaten democracy. Guest:
Steve Rendall of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR), the media watchdog group.
The GREEN PARTY and Third Party
Politics Who's stealing votes from whom? Or why
the Democrats want less democracy! California gubernatorial
candidate Peter Miguel Camejo discusses the politics
surrounding third party politics, instant runoff voting, the
"spoiler" issue, and why the Greens are the only party worth
your vote.
African-Americans and Civil
Disenfranchisement Laws Following the ratification
of the 13th - 15th amendments at the end of the Civil War,
many jurisdictions were quick to incorporate civil
disenfranchisement laws into their legal structure as a means
to maintain the "purity" of an all-white vote. Civil
disenfranchisement laws remove the right to vote to any
individual convicted of a criminal offense, yet the laws are
rooted in Jim Crowism and worked to deny blacks the vote for
committing crimes that applied disproportionately to blacks.
Today, as a result of drug laws like the crack vs. powder
discrepancy, 13% of African-American men are
disenfranchised. In two states, one in three (33%) of
African-American males are disenfranchised. Interestingly, an
offender who receives probation for a single sale of drugs can
face a lifetime of disenfranchisement. That is, he can lose
his right to be involved in the community even though he isn't
deemed dangerous to the community. Guest: Marc Mauer
of the Sentencing Project discusses the history and
political/social impact of civil disenfranchisement laws as
they apply to African-Americans.
Controlling the Dangerous Classes:
The Prison Industrial Complex Has crime control
become big business for U.S. corporations or has the criminal
justice system always been designed to deal with the surplus
population created as a result of the "contradictions" of
capitalism? Author and professor Randall Shelden
discusses his book Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A
Critical History of Criminal Justice.
The Silencing of Political Dissent
What rights do citizens have under the newly enacted
PATRIOT Act? Do protestors run the risk of being labeled
domestic terrorists? How do the police violate the first
amendment rights of political protestors? Guest: Carol
Sobel of the National Lawyers' Guild discusses the
silencing of political dissent with commentary on the Patriot
Act, police behavior outside of the Democratic National
Convention in Los Angeles, and outside of the World Economic
Forum in New York City.
Understanding Anarchism
When Sherman Austin was apprehended and detained by the
Federal Government for 13 days under the so-called PATRIOT ACT
without any charges ever having been brought against him, it
was solely because of his political views. After all, Austin
is the webmaster of
www.raisethefist.com, a website devoted to anarchist
thought and action. While anarchists like Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman preach pacifism, feminism, and communal
living, most people assume anarchism = chaos. Guest
Sherman Austin provides insight into the anarchist
philosophy, as well as a chilling description of his personal
ordeal under the U.S. PATRIOT Act.
The Plight of Palestine
Is it anti-Semitic to support the Palestinian cause? Is
Zionism racist? If Palestine was truly "a land without people
for a people with no land," as contemporary Zionists contend,
then why the discussion of relocating indigenous people? Why
does the U.S. call for peace while continuing to supply the
Israeli army to the tune of $5 billion each year? What is
meant by "the occupation?" Guest: Beverly Anderson
traveled to the West Bank with Global Exchange, returning with
some 400 photographs of the plight of Palestine, some of which
are posted to this website. Click
here for MP3 audio file.
Citizen Empowerment and
Whistleblower Protection Voting is perhaps the
most passive of political acts. Occurring only periodically,
it simply asks that citizens select individuals to make
decisions for them. In that sense, it is completely dis-empowering.
Guest: Margaret Strubbel of the California Oaks
Project discusses citizen empowerment and the "tools of
democracy," or the ways citizens can take back the political
process and work for self determination. Special attention
given to CA legislation providing whistleblower protection of
corporate workers.
Corporate Crime Enron,
Worldcom, Waste Management. Is this merely a corporate crime
wave, or is this really business as usual? Why are corporate
crimes not afforded the same means of aggressive law
enforcement as so-called international terrorists? Or of drug
dealers? Or bank robbers? Why the reluctance to label
corporate malfeasance as "criminal," rather than
"scandalous?" Guest: David Friedrichs, professor and
author of the critically acclaimed book Trusted
Criminals: White-Collar Crime in Contemporary Society
which is widely considered one of the best introductions to
white-collar crime in the field.
Peace and Freedom Party
Another third party? YES! An alternative to the mainstream?
YES! A unique social and political vision? YES! The Peace
and Freedom Party may have disappeared from the ballot, but
they are not gone, and certainly not forgotten. Now, there is
a growing movement to place a socialist alternative onto the
California (and national) ballot. Guest: Cindy Henderson
of the California Peace and Freedom Party discusses
the platform of this socialist alternative.
Voices of Dissent
The Coalition Against Unnecessary War started as a group
of about 5 pacifists and leftists who took to the streets
immediately after 9/11 to demand justice, not vengeance. Now,
more than a year later, the Coalition has amassed nearly 90
citizens to protest each and every Friday evening, rain or
shine! Included in the coalition are representatives from the
Green Party, the Peace & Freedom Party, Veterans for Peace,
Not in Our Name, International ANSWER, ATLACHINOLLI FRONT, and
local anarchist collectives. Guests: Al Appel -
Veterans for Peace, Naui Huixilapotchli - Atlachinolli Front,
Mike Mang and Chuck Anderson of the Coalition Against
Unnecessary War.
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JUSTICE,