On the Fringe

• 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]

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Guantanamo detainees, East Timor, Eritrea, travel surveillance, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• We were joined on the phone by Cristina Tzintzun of the Workers Defense Project to discuss Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton’s recent unilateral decision to provide the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with a permanent office inside the Travis County Jail, which serves as Austin’s main jail. Cristina explained that cooperating with ICE’s beefed-up presence in the jail will discourage undocumented immigrants and their allies from reporting crimes while exposing residents of Austin, known as a sanctuary city for immigrants, to further racial profiling by authorities. Media have documented ICE’s disregard for human rights and coercive separations and victimizations of families as deportation raids around the country have increased in the last two years. ICE has already added agents at the jail and the number of their detainments and deportations of Travis County residents have increased in the past month approximately twenty-fold to over 100. [mp3]
  • Update: Above is a picture from the community meeting with Greg Hamilton held the night following our show. At the back of the room is Hart Viges, On the Fringe co-host and Iraq Veteran Against the War. We’ll air audio from this event on next week’s show.
• In the second part of the show we aired almost all of the Story of Stuff, an animation which explains in plain terms how corporate capitalism dumps the enormous amount of waste generated by consumerism on the environment and “Third World.” Watch the animation or listen here. [mp3]
• Community announcements [mp3]
  

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Argentina, Peru, the death penalty, Basra, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• Here’s our not-quite-complete 2007-in-review show. Of course, you can browse through the archive here on our website to listen to almost every show since last June. These are just some of the highlights. [mp3]

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Argentina, Peru, the death penalty, Basra, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• Former On the Fringe host Jordan Buckley, now an organizer with Interfaith Action, called in from Immokalee, Florida to talk about another case of slavery in the tomato fields just discovered after several workers escaped from horrific conditions in which they were held against their will and beaten. Just two weeks after the Coalition of Immokalee Workers marched (see our interview with Kate Kelly) on Burger King’s headquarters, this case renews scrutiny on Burger King after it led a press tour through Immokalee and claimed that tomato pickers are not paid poverty wages, much less enslaved. [mp3]
• We ended the show with an insightful (as-always) commentary from political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal on the possibility of there being a black president in the United States, even after Mexico had its own progressive black president almost two hundred years ago. [mp3]

Once again we have no full show recording for you this week. Just as we were about to capture the mp3, the KVRX computer rebooted itself. Seriously.

• Free Speech Radio News headlines on Argentina, Peru, the death penalty, Basra, and more… Listen to the full FSRN newscast here. [mp3]
• We spent the bulk of the show critiquing FCC Chariman Kevin Martin’s bid to further gut media ownership rules in this country, allowing for greater media consolidation by the corporate media - with help from the Seattle community, which turned out in the hundreds on November 9 at a public hearing on the issue to give Martin a piece of their minds. I listened to the six-hour hearing and picked out these testimonies for their passion and insights.
  • FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is one of just two on the commission opposed to deregulation. [mp3]
  • The President of the University of Washington spoke eloquently on the impact of homogenized and non-local news on higher education. Can you imagine UT Pres. Powers doing the same? I can’t. He’s supporting a tuition increase against the wishes of students and seems to avoid the public as much as possible. [mp3]
  • Regulating the media against further corporate consolidation is a bi-partisan issue. Here’s a Republican speaking to the Commission. [mp3]
  • Gavin Dahl, who joined us on On the Fringe this past summer to talk about media policy and net neutrality, shared his views on the future of the Internet. Shout-out to Gavin, who wrote up his account of the hearing here. [mp3]
  • Shanay, a Novah HS student who was also interviewed on On the Fringe last summer about her counter-recruitment work, spoke out against media consolidation. [mp3]
  • More comments from a journalist whose local paper has been hurt by the corporatization of news. [mp3]
  • And a hip-hop DJ. [mp3]
• Hart and I took Statesman reporter Ralph Haurwitz to task for his shallow and biased report on the support from UT’s “student leaders” for a massive 15% tuition increase over the next two years. Speaking of the corporate media, maybe if the Statesman wasn’t as intent on making money they could pay a thorough education reporter to actually come to the campus and interview some ordinary students, the overwhelming majority of which are opposed to tuition hikes at UT. See our past two shows for more coverage of this issue.
• Community announcements:
  • Vigil against the Hutto immigrant family prison this Sunday
  • This Saturday at the Rhizome, a $5 donation for a bike caravan and community workshop in Mexico gets you in for a night of live music, featuring Amanada Kitchens, Wino Vino, Son Armondo, Kruds Cubensi, Buscando El Monte, and Antithesis! Show starts at 8pm.