WZBC 90.3 FM Newton

Humanitarian Crisis Continues in Syria's Eastern Ghouta Region;Devastating New Spike of Black Lung Disease Plagues Younger Coal Miners; Public Sector Labor Unions Face Further Damage in Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court Case.

West Virginia teachers and school staffers, among the lowest paid in the country, won a 5 percent pay raise for all of the state’s public sector workers, after a nine-day walkout over pay and surging healthcare costs. Much coverage, of what there was, was sympathetic; though some reports stuck to corporate media’s old anti-union recipe.

Chuck Collins, Director of the Program On Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, traces the history of the wealth gap in his work. Is Universal Basic Income, or UBI, an answer to the wealth gap, and to poverty? Or is it the tech community’s neoliberal dream? For this answer we hear from the producers from Upstream. Special thanks to Upstream Podcast: Upstreampodcast.org. (Warning: the music is VERY annoying.)

Currently the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest are in a struggle with worldwide multinational corporations that want to take over their lands for oil extraction, commercial palm oil, commercial agriculture, mining, and other massively destructive enterprises. Women leaders have taken center stage in the indigenous activism to guard the Amazon rainforest from those who would use it for profit. These women have faced down criticism, violence, and other tactics from powerful corporate and government adversaries, and they have achieved some remarkable victories. We get to know two of these women, and learn of an indigenous women’s uprising to protect Mother Earth.

It's been a very bad week for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was caught lying. A child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob of soldiers and left to die. ...

LOTS of substance, for example: "I describe AIPAC's desire over its entire history to appeal equally to both parties has given way to a move to the right, but the Democrats, whores for pro-Israel money, attend the conference anyway and that the top officials of both parties had speaking roles in order to pledge allegiance to a foreign country. I single out Charles Schumer, the Senate's top Democrat for my own censure. ..."

Nasim Chatha's writing has appeared in Mask Magazine, Truthout, The Abolitionist, and Upside Down Magazine. Here’s where to learn more about the issues she researches: https://afgj.org/prison-imperialism

What about all of the school shootings that have been averted? With new investigative research, and an emphasis on prevention and collaboration, we are now in a better position to understand school violence from the perspective of school personnel who have actually headed off deadly shootings. So says Dr. Jeff Daniels, a professor at the University of West Virginia, who has been working to identify pre-attack behavior. His team has studied 37 school shootings, involving 41 attackers.