The OWS Demands group meets
Last night, I went to the meeting of the OWS Demands Working Group, held in historic Tompkins Square Park, scene of many a riot and other kind of uprising in its 161-year history. There were about 75 people there, to discuss what to do with the draft set of demands that the group had passed past week. On Friday, I wrongly reported that the OWS General Assembly had rejected the draft and disavowed the working group. In fact, the GA hasn’t even discussed the issue. According to people at last night’s meeting, whoever controls the… Read More
Another purge at WBAI
WBAI’s program director Tony Bates has ousted another critic of his fondness for quackery and conspiracy theories: Bill Weinberg’s Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade has been “terminated.” Read about it here. It’s highly likely that these purges—coming along with those at KPFA (recap here)—are being directed by Pacifica management. It all makes me wonder how much longer I’ll be on at KPFA. So a radio network with strong signals in five major metropolitan areas, with the capacity to reach about 20% of the U.S. population on terrestrial radio, is being turned over to advocates of… Read More
Wisconsin erupts
By some strange but excellent coincidence, our visit to Madison coincided with a tremendous series of demonstrations against Gov. Scott Walker’s plans to destroy public employee unions in the state, and no doubt inspire other governors to do the same. Wisconsin, it should be noted, was the first state to recognize the right of public employees to bargain collectively; Walker wants to make it a leader in reversing that history. Liza & I dropped by today’s protest at the state Capitol—one that we’re told was far larger than yesterday’s, which is said to… Read More
September employment
[I didn’t do a new radio show this week because WBAI is fundraising. More on this very soon. In the meanwhile, here’s a quick analysis of the September employment report that I did as a special intro to the KPFA version of the show, which was almost all a rerun.] And now a special update on the September employment report, released Friday morning. The headline number was a loss of 95,000 jobs—though more than all of that was accounted for by the continuing attrition of temporary workers who were hired to help… Read More
The war on William Robinson
For daring to draw similarities between Israeli behavior in Gaza and the Nazis, the ADL and the rest of the gang of intellectual policemen are at war with William Robinson, a sociology prof at UCSB. I met Robinson at a conference in Amsterdam in 2002 and interviewed him for my radio show; the archived version is here. While I have some differences with him on the issue of “globalization,” he’s a serious scholar and a likable guy, and he deserves support. Here’s an article from Inside Higher Ed on the case. And site organized… Read More
Timmy meets the Establishment
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared this morning at the Council on Foreign Relations. The main meeting room, named after private equity kingpin and entitlement scourge Pete Peterson, was jam-packed with members, so we media hacks had to watch the proceedings on a video screen set up in the David Rockefeller Room. Geithner’s remarks (as prepared, here; as delivered, here) mostly achieved the anodyne level customary to the genre. He’s glib in a way, but doesn’t give the impression of having a powerful or capacious mind. Though he’s 47, he still gives the… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 