On the Fringe

• We sat down in studio with Brian Rodgers, a South Austin-based real estate developer and founding member of Stop Domain Subsidies - the group behind this election’s Proposition 2.  Prop. 2 would revoke the $38 million subsidy the City Council gave to the developers of the Domain, a north Austin luxury shopping mall, in 2003.  He says it’s the right thing to do both legally and ethically, particularly for Austin’s local businesses.  No recording of today’s show, so we’ll link to Rodgers’ mini-documentary on the subject above instead.
• In the show’s last third we spoke with Gavin Dahl, community media activist and Programming Director at Boise Community Radio.  He shared interviews with Texans evacuated from Galveston for Hurricane Ike who were housed in the Austin Convention Center alongside the National Association of Broadcasters Conference.  Gavin pointed out the pitfalls of the NAB’s stance against localism standards in light of an evacuee population under-served by the media.

• Slightly truncated show this week, so we aired the day’s Free Speech Radio News program.  I spoke a little bit about Preston, a homeless black man in Austin who after twenty-some-odd years on the street is about to be paid the money he’s owed by the Veterans Affairs Dep. for the nerve damage inflicted by Agent Orange in Vietnam.  And I wrapped the show with some tips on how to help out the still-hundreds of evacuees from Hurricane Ike in our midst in Austin.

• This week we aired a recorded interview with James, a Austin resident who traveled to the Twin Cities last week to protest the two-party duopoly and exploitation of capitalism at the Republican National Convention.  He shared his assessment of the protests’ efficacy and his account of police brutality against demonstrators.

• I sat down with Irwin Tang, a UT graduate and Austin-based author of Asian Texans, to talk about his new book “Gook: John McCain’s Racism and Why It Matters.”  Full interview to be posted soon.

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nepal elections, Maoists in India, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• Juan Gonzalez, longtime columnist for the New York Daily News and co-host of Democracy Now!, was in Austin two weeks ago to talk about independent media. We aired excerpts of my interview with him on the show. Posted here is the full audio of the 45-minute discussion of his upbringing, the Young Lords, Democracy Now!, and the future of grassroots media. [mp3]
• The Vice-President of Burger King has been using his daughter’s computer to bad-mouth the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which is calling on the fast-food chain to support human rights and higher wages, in the tomato fields of Florida, in online forums. That’s the stunning news that broke earlier this week. We spoke with Kate Kelly, an Austin-based activist and member of the Student/Farmworker Alliance, about what this means for the CIW’s fair food campaign. Unfortunately, we don’t have a recording for this segment of the show. Support KVRX so we can upgrade our equipment.

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nepal elections, Maoists in India, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• Burger King is suspected of spying on and attempting to infiltrate the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its ally, the Student Farmworker Alliance, the Ft. Myers Press revealed yesterday. We have followed BK’s stubborn refusal to pay mostly immigrant farmworkers in the fields of Immokalee one penny more per pound of tomatoes picked or negotiate with the CIW to improve farmworkers’ rights on the On the Fringe, but this story shows just how far BK is willing to go to enforce the farmworkers’ ongoing poverty for the sake of profit.
• Music: Soul Position - Hand Me Downs
• We played the first half of Noam Chomsky’s seminal 1970 talk at the New York Poetry Center entitled “Governments in the Future.” Chomsky argues that capitalism and socialism are systems of human organization which are fundamentally at odds with the growth of human liberty. He outlines why an anarchist or libertarian socialist approach to human society has the best chance of creating a just and equitable society. [mp3]
• Announcement: Robert King Wilkerson, former Black Panther and member of the Angola 3, is speaking this Wednesday at GEO 2.324 at 7pm on racism. King and his comrades spent decades in solitary confinement as political prisoners at Angola after being framed for a crime. King lives in Austin now after fleeing Hurricane Katrina and will speak about his life and activism.
  

It’s spring break at UT, and that means there’s no On the Fringe today.  We’ll be back next week.

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on violence in Pakistan, Canadian renditions, Miami students demonstrating, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• We aired almost all of UT graduate and award-winning journalist Will Potter’s presentation on “The Green Scare: How Corporations Created the ‘Eco-Terrorist Menace,’” which he gave on Feb. 27 on campus at the invitation of United Student Activists. Posted here online is the full audio from the event, including the question-and-answer session following Potter’s talk. [mp3]

From the USA event release:

With pressure from corporate lobbyists, politicians and law enforcement nation-wide have been advancing a coordinated campaign to label animal rights and environmental activists as “eco-terrorists.” They’ve taken a few pages from the Red Scare playbook and a few pages from the “with us or against us” script of the War on Terror in their attempt to build a “Green Scare” upon a foundation of fear. This multimedia presentation will examine the roots of this government crackdown, the details of “Operation Backfire,” the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and the SHAC 7, as well as a discussion of what the “terrorism” label means for activists in all social movements.

The Green Scare has important local relevance, in light of the recent arrest of a local animal rights activist for his alleged actions against the animal cruelty industry. There has also been a long standing effort to label local peace and justice activists and organizations as terrorist, as when FBI Agent G. Charles Rasner identified Austin Indymedia and Food Not Bombs as being on the “terrorist watch” list while speaking at the UT School of Law in March, 2006. All Austin residents concerned with the erosion of civil liberties and attack on political dissent in the name of fighting terrorism are encouraged to attend.

For more information and the latest updates on the Green Scare check Will’s blog: GreenIsTheNewRed.com.

Looks like we lost the recording of this show. Update: You can read my live-blog of the summit, view raw video at the event’s website, or listen to an audio report about the summit here. []

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Turkey’s invasion of northern Iraq, violence in Pakistan, anti-dictatorship demonstrations in the Philippines, hazards at a Houston oil refinery, and more… [mp3]
• We spent the bulk of the hour speaking by phone with Stefan Wray, a producer at Channel Austin and organizer behind the first-ever Texas Community Media Summit. The summit intends to bring together grassroots radio, print, TV, and Internet media-makers from around the state to build a coordinated strategy for advancing the cause of non-commercial community-based media.
• Music: Supastition - Soul Searching

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Iraq, police raids in France, prewar intelligence, resistance to the School of the Americas and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• Our in-studio guests were Casey and Ron, active-duty Iraq Veterans Against the War based out of Fort Hood participating in IVAW’s Winter Soldier campaign. They spoke out about the brutality of war, the disconnect between politicians and reality, and biased media coverage of the conflict. [mp3]
• We also spoke with Nick Hudson, a philisophy major and director of Texas Students for Obama about whether Obama’s call for progressive change should be believed, given his ties to corporate money, neo-conservative advisors, and failure to stake out strong anti-empire and anti-war positions. [mp3]