8 O'Clock Buzz

Kelly Percival, Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, talks with Jan Miyasaki about her recent article: “Documents Reveal Trump Administration’s ‘Unprecedented’ Attempts to Influence 2020 Census“. At every level of the process, Percival says, Trump attempted to remove undocumented individuals from being counted, including adding “citizenship” to the Census questionnaire, using calculations to estimate and remove undocumented people, but was fortunately thwarted by career officials in the Census Department.

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When COVID struck and states moved to establish lockdowns, work-from-home, and mask mandates, the demand for oil dropped precipitously — which threatened groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. Alex Kotch, Senior Investigative Reporter for the Center for Media and Democracy, recently co-authored an article “How the Koch Brothers Hijacked the War on COVID“, a deep-dive investigation of the Koch network’s efforts to supplant government COVID experts, promote/recruit for lockdown protests, support the “Great Barrington Declaration” advocating for “herd immunity”, and more.

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The Maya Angelou quarter has been released, and monthly columnist for The Nation and The Daily Beast, Kali Holloway, has written that the irony of a 10-fold wealth gap between Black and White families and her image on a coin would not be lost on Angelou in her article “Maya Angelou, the quarter, and real change“. She discusses the tide of Critical Race Theory laws, voter suppression, anti-protest laws, and the “white grievance agenda“.

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Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, Part one of a two part interview with Gabes Torres talking about her world, her work studying intergenerational trauma, the impact of capitalism on the global South, our interconnectedness and what is “normal,” anyway?

More on Gabes: https://gabestorres.com/

To read The Pursuit of Rest Under Capitalism in Yes Magazine: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2021/10/21/rest-under-capitalism 

Listen in Madison at 89.9FM or online anywhere at wortfm.org.  Support your community radio with a donation online at wortfm.org!

Provided Photo

Gabes (she/they/siya) was raised in the countryside of the Philippines. She comes from an ancestral lineage of educators, revolutionaries, artists, and healers. She lives their legacy onward as a therapist, organizer, singer-songwriter, and teacher today.

At present, Gabes has been in different parts of the global South where she organizes with other unionizers and activists to advance international human rights. Even with some geographical movement, Gabes virtually teaches at a variety of universities and academic events in the West on the topics of intergenerational trauma and healing, as well as anti-colonial methods to providing therapy. Her teaching also focuses on building community safety and accountability infrastructures from a transformative justice lens.

Gabes founded and co-facilitates the Heritage Workshop, a virtual workshop for people of color around the world where they explore and process ancestral lineage, stories, and medicine as a community.

Gabes is an avid reader and a lover of the ocean, of poetry and good conversation. She believes that her friendships are her greatest romance (including the friendship she has with herself), and that it is necessary for the revolution to be infused with laughter, feasting, and singing and dancing.

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Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, Susan Jennik from League of Women Voters, and Erica K. López, UW-Madison Clinical Instructor and head of the Eviction Defense Clinic, join us to talk about tenant rights and working to fight evictions in Dane County and across the country.

More on..

League of Women Voters Dan County: https://www.lwvdanecounty.org/

Eviction Defense Clinic: https://law.wisc.edu/eji/evictiondefense/

Tenant Resource Center https://www.tenantresourcecenter.org/ 

Listen in Madison at 89.9FM or online anywhere at wortfm.org.  Support your community radio with a donation online at wortfm.org!

Photo by Matt Moloney on Unsplash

Susan Jennik is a Board member of LWVDC and serves on the Social Equity subcommittee of the Program and Advocacy Committee. She also serves on the LWVWI Legislative Committee, focusing on labor and employment. Ms. Jennik is a retired attorney who represented labor unions, employee benefit funds, and workers in the New York City area for 38 years. 

Erica K. López is the Clinical Instructor who leads the Eviction Defense Clinic (EDC) at University of Wisconsin, a part of the Economic Justice Institute. The EDC started in August 2021 in response to the ongoing need for representation in rental housing cases. The EDC is part of a collaborative community partnership involving the Tenant Resource Center and local nonprofit legal aid providers Legal Action of Wisconsin and Community Justice Inc. The goal of this partnership is to provide and expand legal representation and other support (such as rental assistance, housing navigation, and community resource navigation) to low-income Dane County renters facing eviction.  

More on Erica: https://secure.law.wisc.edu/profiles/[email protected]

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · Death Rituals in the Era of COVID with Professor Natasha Mikles

Virtual funerals can now be added to the list of formerly unimaginable things brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With infection rates making in-person gatherings too risky, families, friends, religious and community institutions have all had to adapt, finding new ways to honor their recently departed.

Natasha Mikles teaches philosophy and religious studies at Texas State University. The peculiar circumstances of the pandemic got Natasha wondering how different traditions found new ways to honor the dead while keeping everyone safe.

 

Image Courtesy: Texas State University

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · Wisconsin’s Cash Bail System with Wisconsin Watch’s Clare Amari

Wisconsin’s cash bail system is a widely debated issue – with differing ideas on how to best fix the system. Some want to increase the price of getting out of jail while others want to abandon cash bail altogether.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s Clare Amari brings us the story.

 

Image courtesy: Brian Standing / WORT News

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In this January 2022 episode, we delve into the world of human trafficking–sex trafficking to be precise and how this affects Indigenous communities. Based on statements from the National Congress of American Indians, rates for Indigenous Peoples being sold into sex trafficking here in the US are high, however, there is little to no hard data for this horrific industry and Indigenous involvement in it. Guests on this episode shed some light on why this is happening, how to recognize it, and what Indigenous folks are doing to take this issue on themselves as the government is doing next to nothing in our communities. 

Stephanie Olson, Dr. Colette Yellow Robe, and Sunrose Ironshell are all leaders and educators in this realm in different ways and they are taking big steps to stop sex trafficking in the midwest. Stephanie Olson is the CEO of the Set Me Free Project, which brings prevention education to youth​ and families to stop trafficking before it starts. Dr. Colette Yellow Robe is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is helping to lead the implementation of a grant for Indigenous-led Research on Sex Trafficking among Native Americans in the Northern Great Plains. Sunrose Ironshell is a grassroots leader and teacher who has spoken and organized a lot on the MMIR crisis and is currently promoting a documentary she is featured in called, Women of the White Buffalo.

Guest Bios

Stephanie Olson is a speaker, an author, and the CEO of The Set Me Free Project and holds a degree in Psychology. Her experience includes seven years of curriculum writing and development for women experiencing domestic violence, homelessness, and alcohol and drug addictions; Ten years of educating women in the area of empowerment and intrinsic value; Nine years of educating youth ages 11-18 in healthy relationships, the dangers of human trafficking, and social media safety. Stephanie has had extensive training, research, and study of human trafficking prevention education and social media safety. She is a sought-after speaker on women, youth, human trafficking, and social media safety while leading The Set Me Free Project to help prevent youth and young adults from personally experiencing trafficking. 

More in the Set Me Free Project: https://www.setmefreeproject.net/

Colette M. Yellow Robe, Ph.D. is an enrolled citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana who grew up on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska. She advocates and implements concrete changes, often in collaborative projects as a co-creator on research, teaching, and community projects. Her scholarly activism is often devoted to, and not limited to Native American education, epistemologies, Anti-racism Pedagogies, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) global movement. Her life’s journey is to actively engage the long-standing, systemic structures that do not support diversity, inclusivity, and equity. Dr. Yellow Robe is honored to serve in various leadership roles and policy advising that uplift past, present and future Indigenous voices. The continuous imagining of possibilities and a commitment to center cultural practices for Indigenous peoples keeps her going and it is her great honor and privilege to serve as a proud mother to two amazing sons, Chase and Mason.

More information on Dr. Yellow Robe’s new research: https://cyfs.unl.edu/research-network/research-projects/project?id=8d521f13afecf99f3b88eb12e8d3693b 

Sunrose Ironshell, is an artist, activist, poet, and teacher who fights every day to help her community on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, and all over the US, remember the Lakota ways in a world that wants them to forget. She is featured along with 8 other Lakota women in the documentary, Women of the Whtie Buffalo,

WORT 89.9FM Madison · Law Forward’s Mel Barnes on Redistricting Oral Arguments

Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that will likely decide how Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative districts will be drawn.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers, the GOP-controlled legislature, and many other parties all have different ideas about how the maps should be drawn. Law Forward is one of the parties in the case and has submitted its own maps to the Court for consideration.

Staff counsel Mel Barnes joins us to talk about the ongoing saga of redistricting in Wisconsin – and to tell us about the maps Law Forward is proposing.

Photo courtesy Law Forward.

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · How do teachers unions want to address the pandemic?

Teachers’ unions across the world have been pushing back against school boards to rapidly reopen public schools.

Last week in France, public school teachers voted to strike over confusing and inconsistent back-to-school pandemic orders. In the United States, the threat of strikes in Chicago and elsewhere have forced school boards to rethink their plans.

For more on these demands, the costs of remote learning, and what an appropriate balance between teacher and family demands might look like, Buzz host Brian Standing speaks with Melissa Arnold Lyon, a senior research scientist at Consortium for Policy Research in Education and a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Originally aired 1/24/22. Photo courtesy Tobi Law on Unsplash.

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