In 2000, the U.S. Presidential election was decided by one vote among only nine voters.  In a notorious 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a Florida recount, effectively handing Republican George W. Bush the Presidency over Democrat Al Gore. Twenty years later, President Trump’s campaign has filed multiple lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election vs. Democratic challenger, and apparent President-elect, Joe Biden.  With a newly minted 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court — a majority that includes 3 of the lawyers that successfully argued Bush v. Gore — could history repeat itself?  Franciska A. Coleman is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and she joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on November 30, 2020.

[Photo of US Supreme Court building by Mr. Kjetil Ree. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1906516]

Moderate Democrats in Congress, like Virginia representative Abigail Spanberger and Oregon representative Kurt Schrader, have publicly blamed the Black Lives Matter movement and calls to “defund the police” for recent Democratic losses in the House of Representatives.  But, looking a bit further down the ballot, in the elections most relevant to criminal justice, progressive reformers won and won big.  Reform-minded District Attorney candidates in Orlando, Colorado, Detroit, Austin, Los Angeles and Chicago won on campaigns to hold police accountable, end cash bail and reduce incarceration.  Caren Myers Morrison is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University and she argues these election results are a sign that the American public is moving away from traditional ideas of “law and order.”

In this special ExPO hour (Ex-incarcerated Prisoners Organizing), host Jerome Dillard interviews 3 recently released inmates of several Wisconsin prisons to get the facts about the COVID infection risks to inmates. They relate their experiences of a lack of PPE, lack of proper quarantine of infected inmates and staff, their struggle over COVID-related health concerns. A common theme is that a prison sentence should NOT be a death sentence.

Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Damita Brown and Sikowis (in exile)…

Damita and Sikowis talk about speaking truth about Thanksgiving by celebrating Truthsgiving and the upcoming December Challenge from Dane County Timebank, healing and honing our anti-racist practices every day of December.

Ronnie James from Des Moines Mutual Aid and Great Plains Action Society joins to talk with Sikowis about their efforts in Des Moines to support the needs of the houseless and those facing food insecurity, as well as their bail fund established to support those arrested protesting for our freedom.

Trisha Etringer from Vote Mob and Great Plains Action Society joins to talk with Sikowis about fighting COVID-19 in Native communities in Sioux City, and supporting the needs of the houseless in their community.

In November of 1918, President Woodrow Wilson issued his annual Thanksgiving proclamation.  He spoke about the end of the first World War, saying that peace “has not came as a mere cessation of arms, a mere relief from the strain and tragedy of war. It has come as a great triumph of right.”  Nowhere, however, did he mention the real killer of that year, a devastation that would end up killing six times as many Americans as those who perished in combat.  The influenza pandemic was at its peak in November of 1918, and despite warnings from a variety of public health officials at the time, the country was in no mood to ignore the holidays.  This year, we once again find ourselves facing the risk of infectious disease just at the time when we want most to spend time with our family and friends.  Melissa Hawkins is an epidemiologist and a professor of public health at American University, and she joins us now with some tips for a safe and celebratory Thanksgiving.

In November of 1621, so the story goes, the Wapanoags shared a harvest feast with the English colonists of the Plymouth Plantation in what is now the state of Massachusetts.  That event, now etched in our collective minds as the first Thanksgiving, has come under increased scrutiny in recent years.  Was that a peaceful sharing of bounty and gratitude, or the prelude to displacement, territorial landgrabs, and the destruction of an indigenous culture?  As a result of the expansion of European settlement, many indigenous traditions, including the very agriculture that produced much of the food eaten at that first Thanksgiving, have vanished.  Christina Gish Hill is an anthropologist at Iowa State University, and she is part of a team of researchers that are trying to restore traditional Native American agriculture to the people who once practiced it.

Since 1999, the Wisconsin Budget Project, an initiative of Kids Forward, has advocated public spending on projects that benefit low to moderate income families.  Recently, the project turned its lens on how the state property tax system favors the wealthy, and perpetuates longstanding racial segregation.  Tamarine Cornelius is a policy analyst with Kids Forward, and she joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on November 23, 2020.

Ellen Samuels is a UW-Madison professor in the English and Gender & Women Studies departments and is a founding member of the UW Disability Studies Initiative(@UWDisStudies). She lives with a disability that makes her days unpredictable and often keeps her housebound, sometimes bed-bound. When the pandemic hit, she saw that we were all facing challenges new to us, but familiar to her–about how to survive staying in, and social distancing. Early in the pandemic she wrote a piece called Ten Tips from a Chronically Ill Person for Surviving Social Distancing, and posted it on Medium, where it was shared widely. Now that we’re entering another stage of lock down, the piece is seeing a revival, so I thought I’d check in with Ellen about her tips for getting through these strange and difficult days.

 

 

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Last week the Wisconsin Environment Research & Policy Center, along with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, BRINGiT, and Student PIRG chapters, are pressing Whole Foods to rein in their expanded use of single-use plastic packaging and have sent a letter to John Mackey, Whole Foods’ CEO urging him to take action on tackling plastic waste. Megan Severson talks with Jan Miyasaki about their efforts.

In a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Senior Analyst Julie Hollar writes about the centrist-bias of the media, and their fears of covering progressive issues out of concerns of displeasing their major corporation advertisers. Her article “Drawing All the Wrong Lessons From Media’s Election 2020 Failures” shows how right-wing Trump supporters and Trumps far-right supporting tweets were covered disproportionately by the mainstream media.