Episodes
Saturday Apr 26, 2014
Alternative Visions - The Resurging Immigrants Rights Movement in the US - 04/26/14
Saturday Apr 26, 2014
Saturday Apr 26, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus welcomes grass roots immigrants’ rights leaders, Nativo Lopez and David Bacon, to discuss the new resurgence in the immigrants rights movement in the U.S. With deportations under the Obama administration now exceeding 2.5 million since 2008—including half a million of legal US citizens (youth & children or deported parents)—Jack and guests discuss the key demands of the immigrants rights groups today and the resurging activity at the grass roots. Jack asks guests why the Obama administration has not introduced executive orders to defend immigrants, while continuing to hide behind the failure to pass any legislation by Congress. David Bacon explains that while millions are being deported, the administration has increased the numbers of ‘guest workers’ coming into the US to work in agriculture and elsewhere under sub-wage and sub-working conditions and bringing hundreds of thousands of skilled tech workers to the US while deporting record level millions back to Mexico, central America and elsewhere. Jack’s guests explain how free trade agreements, like NAFTA and CAFTA (and soon the TPP) play a key role in driving emigration to the US. Nativo Lopez discusses the key demands of the movement today, and in conclusion raises the question why 22,000 US agents are needed on the border today, developing new procedures for mass roundup and mass incarceration and detention in camps and rapidly expanding the use of drones and other technology. Is the border control strategy in development today perhaps a ‘dress rehearsal’ for something yet to come throughout the US down the road?’
David Bacon is a California writer and photojournalist, documenting the impact of the global economy, migration, and human rights..He was a founder of the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network, and board chair of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and a union organizer for two decades with the UFW and the ILGWU.His books include Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008), The Children of NAFTA (University of California Press, 2004) and Communities Without Borders (Cornell University Press, 2006). His new book is The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013), and is about the social movements seeking alternatives to displacing communities and criminalizing the migrants produced by displacement.
Nativo Lopez is a leader of the immigrants rights organization, Hermandad Mexicana, and has been active in Mexican and Latin American undocumented workers’ rights groups and movements in the southern California area for decades.
Saturday Apr 19, 2014
Saturday Apr 19, 2014
‘Dr. Rasmus interviews Staughton Lynd, long time oral histories labor historian, as part of the Alternative Vision show’s continuing focus on the subject: ‘Are US Unions At a Strategic Impasse’? Lynd recounts his oral history interviews with union activists and local leaders in the 1930s-40s and their warnings on the limits of Labor’s then developing strategies that have since become the norm for the past 75 years—i.e. industrial, bargaining, organizing, and political strategies that now appear in recent years to have exhausted their potential for advancing workers’ wages, benefits, and standard of living in the 21st century. Both Jack and Lynd discuss the broad ‘legal web’ that has developed the past half century that today have effectively neutralized and defeated past union strategic approaches, as well as prevent internal union renewal ‘from below’. Current promising movements by low wage workers, immigrant workers, and union reform movements in recent years (i.e. Chicago teachers, Boeing workers, etc.) are considered for their great potential for union renewal. But both Jack and Lynd agree these spontaneous movements will likely atrophy, as in the recent past, unless some form of new union-community permanent organization at the grass roots emerges to break through the ‘legal web’ and internal union organizational roadblocks that prevent union renewal from below today. The ‘Great Task’ is to develop some kind of permanent labor-community organizational network that, according to Lynd, “doesn’t give away workers freedom of action in order to become a permanent organizational structure that prevents that freedom of action”--as is the case today. Lynd agrees to return to the May 3 Alternative Visions show to discuss this view further in his forthcoming new book, ‘Solidarity Unionism’, and Rasmus agrees to update his similar views on the necessity of new ‘labor-community alliance’ organizational forms for the 21st century.”
Saturday Apr 12, 2014
Alternative Visions – The USA Economy Today, What’s Next – 04/12/14
Saturday Apr 12, 2014
Saturday Apr 12, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus offers his latest view of the US economy as it enters the 2nd quarter 2014. What’s happening with US GDP, business investment, consumer spending, housing, and jobs in the US today, as the rest of the world’s economies currently drift toward slower growth, deflation, and economic and political volatility? Dr. Rasmus discusses the 2014 US economic picture as the addendum to previous Alternative Visions shows in recent weeks that reviewed China’s slowing economy and growing financial instability, the Eurozone’s drift toward deflation and stagnation, the UK’s artificial construction bubble-driven recovery, Japan’s now stalling ‘Abenomics’ recovery, and growing currency volatility, capital flight, and economic slowing in Emerging Markets like Brazil, India, So. Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, etc. Having previously identified the US and global economy in early 2014 as the initial stage of a ‘3rd Phase of the Global Economic Crisis’, Rasmus explains where the US economy presently fits in the broader global economic trends and picture today.”
Monday Apr 07, 2014
Alternative Visions - Venezuela Coup In Preparation by US? - 04/05/14
Monday Apr 07, 2014
Monday Apr 07, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest discuss the buildup toward a coup being prepared by US and its business-right wing friends in Venezuela today. Jack’s guest is longtime union activist, Alan Benjamin, who works in the International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland, and has access to information globally on the Venezuela situation. Benjamin provides an eye-witness view of contemporary events in Venezuela based on his frequent direct contact with unionists on the ground in Venezuela in recent months. Jack and Alan discuss the current relationship of political forces today in Venezuela, including the various alignments of classes there, political parties, union organizations, students, US sponsored and funded NGOs, small business v. large businesses, small farmers and peasants, and splits within the military. Benjamin explains the history of US coup attempts in Venezuela and Latin America in recent decades and parallels with recent events in the Ukraine coup. Who is behind the recent killings in the streets, splits within the anti(Maduro) government right wing forces and within the government itself, and USA’s current various current plans (‘A, B, and C’) to destabilize Venezuela along multiple fronts are addressed—in this ‘fact-based’ exploration of what’s happening in Venezuela.
Alan Benjamin is a long time member of the Office & Professional Employees Union in the U.S. and its delegate for a number of years to the San Francisco Central Labor Council, AFLCIO. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the ‘Labor Fightback Network’ in the USA, and has been involved in numerous undocumented US workers’ grass roots organizations defending US immigrant workers rights, as well as active in organizations defending US students from government education spending cutbacks.