Politics
GREE-GREE #100 begins with the great ANDREA MILLER of Center for Common Ground telling us how grassroots organizing and Democracy Centers can make a real difference, and could decide the 2022 election.
She’s joined by STEVE ROSENFELD and RAY MCCLENDON who fill us in on the political realities in the Peach State, including the likelihood of a Trump indictment and what’s needed to save the races for Stacy Abrams and Raphael Warnock in the fall.
JAN GOODMAN then tells us of the hard battles to save democracy at the Pacifica Radio Network, which has been ravaged by a series of stolen elections and insider destruction.
KPFK’s DENNIS BERNSTEIN, host of the legendary Flashpoints Show, adds vital background to the fight over the progressive nation’s most valuable piece of media real estate.
We also hear from TATANKA BRICCA on the California showdown between the lethal madness of the Diablo Canyon nukes vs. the desperate need to protect rooftop solar and a real green revolution.
In the second hour we go to the insane overturn of ROE v. WADE with WENDI LEDERMAN, LYNN FEINERMAN, DANNETT ABBOTT-WICKER and many many more.
Ready, aim, fire:
“I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”
So declares Kandiss Taylor, GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, in a campaign ad.
Or how about: “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today, we’re going RINO-hunting.” This is not about killing rhinoceroses. “RINO” stands for Republican in Name Only – you know, anti-Trumpers. Greitens, former governor of Missouri, who resigned in the wake of a sexual abuse allegation, is now running for the Senate – running fully armed and dangerous as hell, at least according to his little TV ad, which features him and a bunch of guys dressed up in camouflage outfits, fully armed, kicking someone’s door open, tossing in a smoke bomb.
Part 1
https://youtu.be/1QB1iDqq8_w
Part 2
https://youtu.be/k8HKAyH0B5c
Our 98th GREE-GREE (Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition) Zoom starts with a critical new progressive alliance and culminates at the January 6 Hearings.
We begin with TATANKA BRICCA who introduces us to DREW GLOVER, the charismatic new Executive Director of the National Progressive Action Coalition.
Drew explains to us in riveting in-depth detail how the NPAC will at last draw the left out of its silos and into the kind of unified political campaigning our country so desperately needs.
We then hear from ROGER HALLAM in England about the Extinction Rebellion and the huge demonstrations they’ve led in Great Britain.
In our second hour we’re joined by the legendary TV / documentary producer DAVID SALTMAN who gives us the insider’s overview of the first night of the January 6 hearings.
David is joined by our legendary co-convenor JOEL SEGAL and by DENNIS BERNSTEIN, nationally syndicated host of KPFA’s FLASHPOINTS.
Three years ago, we helped write a report for RootsAction.org targeting 15 corporate Democrats in Congress who deserved to be “primaried.” We called the report “Bad Blues.” A common reaction back then was that those establishment pols were too strong and entrenched to be defeated.
On Tuesday, yet another “Bad Blue” apparently went down to defeat – with seven-term Congressman Kurt Schrader of Oregon running way behind community activist Jamie McLeod-Skinner in the slowly tallied Democratic primary.
Schrader is not the first “Bad Blue” on our list to face defeat by a progressive challenger. And he’s unlikely to be the last.
The incumbent heavily outspent McLeod-Skinner – thanks to lavish funding from big pharma and other corporate PACs – but Schrader was out-organized on the ground. McLeod-Skinner called him “the Joe Manchin of the House.”
Sometimes one decision speaks volumes. And so it was when the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- with 98 members in the House -- recently chose to have its PAC endorse a corporate “moderate” against the strong progressive candidate Nina Turner. In the process, the Progressive Caucus underscored its loyalty to establishment Democrats while damaging its credibility among progressives nationwide.
Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:
I've learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side
In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.
Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”
Holding the fate of Build Back Better (BBB) in their hands, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema should heed some lessons from 2010. When a small group of Democratic Senators so delayed and weakened Obamacare that they cratered Obama’s initially massive support, they also helped end all their own political careers.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of an assault by pro-Trump forces on the U.S. Capitol. Many questions linger about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, but perhaps the overriding question is this: How could a segment of the Republican Party, once known by words like "prudence" and "probity," become so radicalized that such a violent, deadly event could happen?
Michael Edison Hayden tackles that question in an essay, titled "One year after Jan. 6, the Hard Right digs in," for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Hayden places Alabama-connected extremist Ali Alexander near the center of the radicalization effort. Writes Hayden:
Those Americans who dare to challenge the strangle-hold that Israel and its friends have over US foreign policy will likely find themselves targeted even more aggressively in the upcoming year. Two weeks ago the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), widely reckoned to be the largest and most powerful component of the Jewish state’s lobby, declared that it will now begin directly funding political candidates who are perceived as pro-Israel. Up until now, AIPAC has preferred to operate somewhat in the shadows, representing itself as a organization that is in part “educational” to justify its 501(c)3 tax exempt status which it uses to send all new congressmen on propaganda trips to Israel.