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#88 Election Protection Mar. 27, 2022

This week’s show is rooted in our monumental March 27 Summit in Santa Monica.

On a warm, sunny southern California Day, dozens of local activists gathered to meet and hear brilliant movers and shakers from throughout the nation.  

The program was zoomed to the Progressive Democrats of America and the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition.  Speakers included: 

ANNA IN THE TROPICS: Theater Review

From Russia, With Lust: Tolstoy Meets “Florida Man”

By Ed Rampell

It’s ironic that A Noise Within’s absorbing production of Anna in the Tropics opens, as fate would have it, while Russia is making frontpage news. This is because the titular “Anna” is a reference to the eponymous Anna Karenina in Count Leo Tolstoy’s famed 1878 Russian novel. But in this Pulitzer Prize winning play, playwright Nilo Cruz has transmogrified Tolstoy’s saga of infidelity, moving it from Moscow and St. Petersburg (in Russia – not Florida!) to – of all places! – Tampa in the Sunshine State in 1929.

There, Cuban transplants (like the Mantanzas-born Cruz, whose family emigrated to Miami’s Little Havana in 1970) have established an old school-style cigar factory. To break the sheer monotony of long days, often in stifling heat, spent rolling the handmade cigars, “lectors” were hired to read books aloud to the hardworking proletarians. As Tropics opens, a new lector, Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal) arrives at Tampa and the first novel he has chosen to regale the cigar rollers with is none other than Anna Karenina.

“We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This sentence was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military. 

Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to “walk back” his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

 They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

I figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom.

There’s a piece of legislation sitting in the

figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom.

How the tables have turned. A high-level US delegation visited Venezuela on March 5, hoping to repair economic ties with Caracas. Venezuela, one of the world’s poorest countries partly due to US-Western sanctions is, for once, in the driving seat, capable of alleviating an impending US energy crisis if dialogue with Washington continues to move forward. 

Our GREEP zoom #87 leaps into the issue of Civic Duty Voting with the great MILES RAPOPORT, former Secretary of State of Connecticut.

Miles has served as president of Common Cause and Demos.  He is most recently the co-author, with E.J. DIONNE, of 100% Democracy being published this week by New Press.

Miles’s discussion of universal mandatory voting is groundbreaking and fascinating.  He’s a great presenter and his hour with us is utterly riveting.  

We then hear from MYLA RESON and election protection activists SUSAN YOUNG and TERRI BURKE about the major challenges facing voters in Texas.  Leading that agenda is a brutal race for Attorney-General, where a grassroots victory could be a game-changer nationwide.

We follow with an astounding dive into the unreal rabbit hole that is Ohio.  As we hear from RACHEL COYLE,  DAVID DEWITT and STEVE CARUSO, GOP fanatics have trashed public mandates to draw fair and balanced districts for upcoming elections for the state legislature and US Congress.  

Minute by minute, Putin’s “Peaceful Atom” pushes us to the brink of an atomic Apocalypse…maybe as you read this….likely within hours or days.

Some 440 atomic power reactors now heat this planet, 93 in the US. For a half-century opponents have warned that a madman like Putin could make them spew out enough radiation to burn our species off this planet. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant.html )

We are headed precisely in that direction. The clock ticks down in real time.

Start at Chernobyl. Despite decades of industry denials that any commercial reactor could explode—-Soviet or otherwise—-Unit Four blew up on April 26, 1986. (For a gut sense of what happened, watch HBO’s five-part mini-series “Chernobyl.”)

The last of Chernobyl’s other three reactors ran through 2000. Unit Four’s blown core is still so hot the world community spent some $2 billion to cover it with a giant shield, aptly called a sarcophagus.

At this 86th zoom session of the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition we are joined by activist Nicole Dvorak who has pioneered powerful new means of tracking the purchase of politicians by giant corporations.  Nicole’s work offers a roadmap for building the critical data base needed to expose exactly how our democracy is being destroyed by big money.

We also proudly host Nancy MacLean of Duke University, whose landmark Democracy In Chains digs deep into the destruction of our essential government structured by a greedy Uber-rich class of fascists and autocrats who threaten us all.  Nancy is interviewed by the great Tatanka Bricca, whose detailed knowledge of what plagues our electoral system sets a critical framework from a truly unique discussion.

A new global geopolitical game is in formation, and the Middle East, as is often the case, will be directly impacted by it in terms of possible new alliances and resulting power paradigms. While it is too early to fully appreciate the impact of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war on the region, it is obvious that some countries are placed in relatively comfortable positions in terms of leveraging their strong economies, strategic location and political influence. Others, especially non-state actors, like the Palestinians, are in an unenviable position.