Dr. Bob Fitrakis and Dan-o Dougan talk about women-led and all-women music groups from the rock era and some other genres including Heart, the Runaways, Sweet Honey and the Rock, TLC and more!
Listen live at 11pm Friday, March 7 and 14 streaming at wgrn.org or on the radio at 91.9FM
and
Monday at 2pm streaming March 10 and 17 at wcrsfm.org or on the radio at 92.7 or 98.3FM
Archived on Mixcloud here
It’s with a very heavy heart that I watch Europe imitate the militarism of the United States, moving massive resources from human and environmental needs to weapons, celebrating proposals from good liberal civic groups to steal money from Russia and dump it into more weapons, cutting deals to have the ingredients for more weapons dug out of your soil by a distant empire that routinely spits on your head, moving nuclear weapons around and across borders like toys, discarding the rule of law and a vision of a survivable future.
President Donald Trump’s address to Congress and the nation on Tuesday night was remarkably devoid of any mention of why the United States continues to both enable and be complicit in the Ukrainian conflict with Russia as well as with the war crimes that are being committed by the state of Israel against nearly all its neighbors on a daily basis. The most recent abomination committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of thugs is the cutting off of food, medicine and temporary housing to the Gazans who were bold enough to return to their ruined homes due to a ceasefire negotiated successfully by US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff in January. Now that Netanyahu has decided to come up with some false assertions to break the agreement, allowing him to continue his extermination of the Palestinian people, Trump as peace maker seems to have disappeared without a trace even though the US was in a sense a guarantor of the phased disengagement.
International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.
In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the global south for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonization of the South.
We start with a wonderful offering (as always) from our Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN.
For an excursion into the wonders of grassroots organizing we are led by the great ANDREA MILLER through the wilds of Wisconsin and Virginia.
“Despair is not a strategy,” she says, & shows us how to use elections as an instrument of freedom.
We’re joined with critical input by long-timer activists MARION EDEY and MYLA RESON.
Santa Monica solar homeowner PAUL NEWMAN chimes in with his usual brilliance, as does NICOLE UNG.
The burning issue of DC HOME RULE comes to us with co-convenor MIKE HERSH & DC's former SENATOR MICHAEL BROWN.
Georgia voting rights activist RAY MCCLENDON tells us of an upcoming march in Selma, in Atlanta & beyond.
Long-time organizer FATIMA ARGUN gives us the word from Arlington, across the water from DC.
Our expectations are challenged by MELISSA HALL, RONALD HALL, and LYNN FEINERMAN.
We then take a deep dive into the life-&-death issue of Electronic Magnetic Frequency from CAMILLA REES.
Pearl River President Trump engaged the country in 90-minutes of “me-time” in a rant before Congress, but that’s hardly news. While the Republican side of the House rose in applause, the rest of the room, and world, continues to recoil in horror. In the wide, wild world,
some of the reaction is more personal than the handwringing of politicians and businesses over the damage that is being wrought.
I saw a Facebook post of a friend, a labor lawyer in DC, who is housing federal employees suddenly thrown out of work. A book reviewing organizer for Social Policy missed the issue deadline, because he was dealing with so many federal workers in chaos over the loss
of livelihood.
Returning to type, “As a measles outbreak expands in West Texas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, …cheered several unconventional treatments, including cod liver oil, but again did not urge Americans to get vaccinated.” What children
dying, me worry?
Hundreds of OSU students sit on the Oval in front of Thompson Library in protest of Senate Bill 1 and the university’s recent DEI rollbacks. When asked about her perspective on the speak-out, Brielle Shorter said “Last week when OSU sunsetted ODI, there were lots of tears, there was lots of pain, there were lots of hugs. Less than a week later, today, we are here in joy and celebration, because you cannot legislate us as human beings.”
As much of the American public reflexively freaks out over Trump's sudden capitulation in it's proxy war against Russia, one must consider the options, as I have written before. The three choices are to capitulate, to drag the war on for an indefinite period of time, or to escalate.
The idea of escalating this war, with the intention of militarily driving the Russian army back to it's border, is terrifying. American's have been programed to believe that Vladimir Putin is an unhinged lunatic who intends to attacking the NATO military alliance as soon as he defeats Ukraine, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Although we are supposed to believe Putin is an evil madman, when the subject of nuclear war arises, most American's discount that possibility, despite all the close calls over the past 80 years. Nuclear war is dismissed as something no rational person would initiate. Yet we are led to believe that Putin is not rational. Which is it? Since the Empire is comfortable provoking Putin, it would seem that the managers of Empire do believe he is a rational actor.
The “old days” are more alive than ever – by which I mean my old days, when I was a kid. My life pushed forward on its own, more or less. This is called growing up. I wasn’t paying much attention until, at a certain point, a.k.a., adolescence, I started noticing the world I was a part of in ways beyond what I was taught. The world itself was changing and nobody, including my teachers, really understood it.
Existence wasn’t a bunch of bricks-and-mortar certainties. It was a vast unknown. Knowing this was alarming; it was also the meaning of freedom.
Today, as I move through the dark, stumbling uncertainty known as old age (I’m 78), I find myself looking backwards a lot, mulling over how I got here, often in amazement. For some reason it seems to matter. Can I learn from myself?