Today on the show, Season Burnett and Moti Rieber will be in to discuss the proposed K-10 bypass as related to the Wakarusa wetlands and the Haskell burial ground. Tune in for this and more on EcoRadioKC, right here on 90.1 FM KKFI–Kansas City Community Radio!
Seeking Shelter: Building Housing and Community for LGBTQ Elders
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender seniors are much more likely than their straight counterparts to be alone and isolated as they age. Housing and support for these elders is a growing need–and the issue is not confined to the United States. On this edition of Making Contact, we’ll visit Jakarta, Indonesia, and Los Angeles, California, to hear stories of building housing and community for LGBTQ seniors.
Special thanks to FSRN-Free Speech Radio News.
Featured speakers/guests:
Michael Adams, Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders executive director; Alice Herman, Miss Rosie, Triangle Square residents; Eric Harrison, Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing executive director; Yulianus Rettoblaut, waria activist and community leader; Yoti Maya, Mbok Sri, waria elders.
Credits:
Host/Producer: Jen Chien
Producers: Andrew Stelzer, George Lavender
Executive Director: Lisa Rudman
Production Interns: Salima Hamirani, Lisa Bartfai
Web Editor: Irene Florez
Development Manager: Juanita Carroll Young
Organizational Volunteers: Dorian Roberts, Dan Turner, Larry Piltz and Barbara Barnett, Bansi Mehta, Federico Villalobos
Voices from the 2013 Left Forum: Speeches and Interviews from the Annual Event
On this week’s edition of Sprouts, we hear a summary from voices from the 2013 Left Forum, featuring Jill Stein, Tadzio Muller, Medea Benjamin, Oliver Stone, Dona Murch, Noam Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Thomas Drake, Esther Castillo, William Blum, Ninoctka Rosca, Alvaro Garcia Linera and more.
About the forum:
History: From the Socialist Scholars to the Left Forum
Left Forum developed out of the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC). The first SSC in 1981 was actually the re-founding by Bogdan Denitch, Stanley Aronowitz and others of the 1960s Socialist Scholars Conference. The earlier conference was a broad effort by new left academics to create a forum in which to present theoretical and historical work, for the most part in a scholarly format but with an audience reaching far beyond academic circles.
When the conference was re-founded in 1981 by leading personalities of Democratic Socialists of America – a 1983 fusion of DSOC, whose best known personality was Michael Harrington, and the New American Movement, a New Left movement organization – it moved to a venue within the City University of New York system where it enjoyed the active support of the socialist chancellor of the City University, Joseph A. Murphy, giving it nearly unlimited space and many advantages. In this period, precisely during the Reagan onslaught, the conference grew such that there were on average 1,500 – 2,000 attendees a year, some 300 – 400 speakers and about 50 exhibitors (book publishers, including some university presses, journals, organizations). By now, with a great number of panels (up to 200), the conference largely lost its scholarly character, taking on the function, as it has done ever since, of being the largest annual gathering of the left in North America. Indeed Paul Sweezy once pointed out that if it hadn’t been for the hegemonic control of the media, this large gathering of the left, with university support and taking place “in the shadow of Wall Street” would have been a fascinating mainstream newspaper story for the general public.
Practically every major socialist thinker appeared at one time or another at the SSC, and many international unionists and political officials. By 2000, after Chancellor Murphy’s death, and with the growing costs imposed by the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a reflection of the neoliberal impact on public university budgets as seen in the tendency to rent out university space at a commercially competitive level, the organizers explored the possibility of finding a more stable anchor outside the City University, and of making the conference economically self-sufficient.
With space no longer unlimited, the SSC (now moved to Cooper Union) cut down the number of panels to 60 – 70.
Right after the 2004 SSC, the organizers associated most closely with DSA split from the newer members of the Board. The latter continued to organize the conference, which for legal reasons was obliged to change its name. One difference was the fading away from then on of what some felt was the social-democratic character of the large plenary sessions. However, it should be said that zealous supporters of each side in the split exaggerated the political differences between each side and the level of felt enmity.
Due to building construction at Cooper Union, LF had to move again before the 2008 Forum, and the new venue, Pace University, has put at LF’s disposal a space nearly as unlimited as that of the pre-2001 venue. The organizers of the Forum have been able to make the Forum grow to its maximum size to date – with over 3,000 attending and over 200 panels.
The keynote speaker for the 2010 conference was Rev. Jesse Jackson. The final plenary featured Noam Chomsky, and included a tribute to Howard Zinn from Arundhati Roy and Frances Fox Piven, along with a performance of Zinn’s play “Marx in Soho.” The Zinn tribute and Chomsky’s appearance drew the expected enormous crowds, with people lining up around the block.
Credits:
Ernesto Aguilar, Jon Almeleh
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy with William Blum and Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield – A New Documentary
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy
The United States war machine has been on auto pilot for the past 65 years says our guest William Blum he’s author of the recently published America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else. This provocative book exposes the true motives of America’s foreign policy and outlines steps to take action.
William Blum:
All this while I was looking to find reasons for it, to explain this weird record.
What I was left with to believe that it’s world domination that the U.S. wants for various reasons.
Once you understand that, many things become clearer, much less confusing.
We’re dealing with a lifetime of indoctrination. It starts in kindergarten. People like you and I have a long battle on our hands to overcome this.
We’re subjected to the indoctrination means well and its the most honorable and liberal government in the world.
It’s reinforced in high school and college, on television, in the print media, it’s a major task for the likes of you and I to overcome this upbringing.
It’s amazing the number of Americans that have seen through this upbringing despite this upbringing.
I think the main to understand with this man called Barack Obama, is that there’s nothing that he strongly believes in except being President of the United States.
The man doesn’t have any core beliefs. He’s not anti-empire, he’s not pro-empire, he likes being President.
He’ll do and say whatever it takes to remain in that office. In my opinion, in Europe he’d be regarded as center-right.
Look at the atrocities we carry out.
Samantha Power is the author of a book on humanitarian intervention. Obama appointing these two women with that philosophy shows that he supports that philosophy. We have to assume they’re believers in humanitarian intervention.
Guest – William Blum, has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government’s “socialist experiment” and its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world. In the mid-1970’s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds. His book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated since, has received international acclaim.
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
The new documentary “Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield” is an unique look into the covert wars brought by the United States. The film follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill into Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen and analyzes expanded US drone warfare and the foreign policy that has allowed this destruction to take place. The film’s director Rick Rowley and Scahill went into these covert war zones to speak with families about the what they’ve seen and bring those stories back. As we’ve reported on Law and Disorder, the Obama Administration has continued to normalize the Bush Administration policies by empowering the Joint Special Operations Command and the use of drones.
Rick Rowley:
The film is about the global covert war on terror.
Jeremy and I have war reporters for over a decade. I became a war reporter because I thought the global war on terror was the most important story of our generation – killed hundreds of thousands of people cost untold billions yet most of it was unfolding in the shadows.
Around the world today there are dozens of wars being fought in our name but without our knowledge and meaningful oversight.
When we started shooting this film we thought it was a film just about Afghanistan. What we were seeing is the covert war in Afghanistan was eclipsing the covert war.
More Afghans are killed and captured by covert units than by the entire 100 thousand strong NATO force that’s there.
So we began to film to see what was up behind that.
This is a unit that initially amounted to a few hundred guys who’s supposed to the most high level strategic missions, hostage rescue missions. If a nuclear weapon is stolen from the Ukraine they’d go and recapture it. That’s what they’re supposed to do.
They’re doing 15-20 raids a night across Afghanistan, thousands of raids a year, going after mid level Taliban field commanders.
The entire war is being fought by this clandestine group that wasn’t really built for this operation.
We started to trace where JSOC was operating, that brought us to Yemen, and Somalia. Under the AQNX order, JSOC was authorized to operate in 26 countries clandestinely. Now under Obama 78 countries.
I was staggered by the massive scale of this, the wholesale assassination machine.
Current kill lists: It’s a permanent cycle of violence that’s being managed around the world.
We interview Ron Weiden from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s a guy who’s trying to push for more disclosure and transparency in the Senate, but the entire time there’s a lawyer an aide inside the office who has to keep stopping him.
There are secret interpretations of laws that exist on the books but would be shocking to the American people if they knew about them.
We knocked on so many doors of night raids in Afghanistan, families shared stories with us of the most painful time in their life.
They think that if the American people could only hear their story and their story were proven to be true, that somehow it would matter and make a difference.
When we started this film 3 years ago, WBAI was talking about drones and kill lists, but it took until 6 months ago for that to work its way to editorial page of the Times and the Post.
I’ve been a war reporter for more than a decade.
Jeremy got on camera a number of whistle-blowers who are former operators or parts of JSOC, CIA people who are saying these kinds of discussion about blow back are happening inside their institutions.
A lot of them talk about this as “mowing the lawn” the jihadists, insurgency will rise up and you go and chop it off but the grass will rise again.
That’s permanently managing a level of acceptable chaos and violence. This war remains secret for a reason, that if everyone knew about it there would be a popular outrage.
Guest – Rick Rowley, is a director and cinematographer. Over the course of fifteen years, Richard Rowley, co-founder of Big Noise Films, has made multiple award-winning documentary features including Fourth World War and This Is What Democracy Looks Like. His shorts and news reports are also regularly featured on and commissioned by leading outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, CNN International, Democracy Now!, and PBS. Rowley is a co-founder of the Independent Media Center. Rowley has been a Pulitzer Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, a Jerome Foundation Fellow, and a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow.
Wednesday MidDay Medley presents Marion Merritt + John McCrite + Amy Farrand
Wednesday MidDay Medley
Produced and Hosted by Mark Manning
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Marion Merritt’s Musical Discoveries
+ John McCrite & “One Third The Terror”
+ Amy Farrand & Weirdo Wednesday Supper Club
Mark welcomes Marion Merritt who joins us to share information from her musically-encyclopedic-brain. Marion plays tracks from: !!!, Daft Punk, CocoRosie, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood, Eleanor Friedberger, Laura Marling, David Byrne and St. Vincent, Orb ft. Lee “Scratch” Perry, Tricky, Boards of Canada, Camera Obscura, Savages, Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Wooden Shjips, Var, and Washed Out.
At 11:15 Mark talks with director John McCrite about his new short film, “ONE THIRD THE TERROR” that will make its premiere at the KC LGBT Film Festival – Out Here Now, June 21, at 5:30, at The Tivoli. John wrote and directed this film and will be at the premiere with the star, Scott Presley. Following John’s film will be the KC premiere of “I AM DIVINE” a new documentary about Divine. The KC LGBT Film Festival – Out Here Now runs June 20 – 27. More info at: OutHereNow.com
At 11:30 Mark and Marion talk with singer, songwriter, bassist, drummer, mistress of ceremonies, producer, organizer, trail blazer, Amy Farrand, who is back with the Weirdo Wednesday Supper Club – Summer Solstice Edition, June 19, 7:30 – 10:30 pm, at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club. The variety show will feature: Annie Thrax, Diamond Dan, Doug Marshall, Terrence Moore, and Quirk & Ruckus!
Marion Merritt is the co-creator of the blog: a2-m3.com providing information about: Music, Film, Art, Books, Television, Technology, with links, downloads, and articles keeping us current with the latest musical and film news.
Show #478
New Music Tuesday on The Tasty Brew
OMG Diana Linn is undated with new Americana/Bluegrass/Country/Roots Music! Tune in this Tuesday for new tunes from Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, Big Kettle Drum, Lee Koch, Rian Greene, Jerry Castle, Lilly Hiatt, Betse Ellis and Missy Raines. Stellar selections from The Black Lillies, Richard Thompson and The Trishas abound as well. Never heard of any of these people? Shame, shame, shame…you can remedy that by tuning in to The Tasty Brew this Tuesday! Enjoy the links!
How Can A Parent Connect With A Troubled Child? Learn Some Helpful Hints With Annette Lantz-Simmons of The Community Mediation Center
Host Melvin Merritt is joined by Annette Lantz-Simmons Executive Director of the Community Mediation Center to talk about Parents dealing with troubled children. There are any number of reasons children become disconnected or withdrawn. We will discuss ways to connect with children that are alienated and rebellious. Tune in to find out how and where to find the help you need.
Founded in 2000, the Community Mediation Center (CMC) is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization providing mediation services, facilitation and training to individuals and organizations, at a reasonable cost. Our goal is to empower people to solve conflict in their lives, giving them lifelong tools they need to find peaceful solutions.
Some of the training available through CMC are Interpersonal Conflict Resolution and Mediation, Mediation Skills Training and Domestic Relations Mediation Training. To find out more about times and dates for training sessions you can contact CMC at Phone: 816.461.8255 Email: info@communitymediationkc.org and check out Annette Lantz-Simmons blog at www.peaceparty.wordpress.com
CALENDAR 6.17.2013
Bill Lucero, a longtime friend and volunteer of Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty is setting out to ride 100 miles on his bike, in a single day, in order to raise awareness about the death penalty repeal efforts in Kansas. Lucero will start from his home near Auburn, KS, Tuesday, June 18th, and will be accompanied by several friends from the Kaw Valley Bike Club’s Ol’ Phogeys. Bill will finish at the KCADP office located at 3rd & Kansas Ave in KCK.
In explaining his ride Bill said, “Forty years following my father’s murder I am still working for repeal of the death penalty in Kansas. I know first-hand that capital punishment will not bring solace or closure to murder victim family members. Rather, I believe this method of retribution only hardens affected families and perpetuates an endless cycle of suffering.” For more information check out www.ksabolition.org
The Urban League of Greater KC is hosting the ASSET EMPOWERMENT SUMMIT FOR EX-OFFENDERS, Friday, June 21, 2013, 8:30 AM – 11:30 AM at the Urban League offices, 1710 Paseo Blvd, KCMO.
There will be an overview of the Empowerment Team curriculum which includes, Life Skills/Life Coaching, Career Development, Technology and Financial Education. There will also be individual empowerment assessments to help you determine your strengths and weaknesses and plot a future course.
Morals and the Self-Righteous Mind, The Handwritten Bible, and More
Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion June 13, 2013
If you’ve ever gotten into a moral argument with someone and thought your sparring partner just didn’t get it–well, you’re probably right. The problem is, you probably didn’t get it, either. A professor of moral psychology explains why it’s so easy to dismiss people who think differently from us.
Find out what values matter to you – take Jonathan’s morality quiz
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
The Copts: Nurturing Jesus in the Deserts of Egypt
For Coptic Christians, the story of Christianity is rooted in Egypt–where the young Jesus was nurtured and protected from the tyrant ruler King Herod. They’ve lived there since biblical times, often dwelling in the dusty caverns of the desert.
James Cowan, author of Fleeing Herod: A Journey Through Coptic Egypt with the Holy Family
The Handwritten Bible
Seven years after he first got the idea, Phillip Patterson finally completed a seemingly impossible task: to hand-copy the entire Christian Bible. He wrote in cursive for four years, sometimes for 14 hours a day, enduring the death of his partner and an ongoing struggle with AIDS. On May 11th, he finished, copying the last two verses of the Book of Revelation. His favorite passage in the entire Bible? “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Phillip Patterson, creator of the Handwritten Bible