8 O'Clock Buzz

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.

Focussing on low-income families and children with special healthcare needs, ABC for Health helps people navigate the healthcare coverage options that are available, according to COO Brynne McBride.

She also talks about Trump’s continued assault on the Affordable Care Act, recently heard by the Supreme Court, and the effect it could have on the 22 million who have insurance thanks to the ACA, plus the effect that revoking the ACA could have on individuals with job-based insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and more.

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

How’s your anti-racism going?

Tim Cordon, Social Justice Coordinator from First Unitarian Society and Building Unity joins to talk about Sustainable Saturday Night, Election Protection, the run-offs in Georgia and how to support their work.

What Happened with America’s Working Class?

Lane Windham, Associate Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide joins to talk about the history of labor organizing, modern labor struggles and the lecture series she’s giving at UW-Madison November 17th and 18th.

Photo by Ken Fager on Flickr

The last day of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s 2020 Black Arts Matter festival takes place November 19th.  Moved to an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival so far has featured a one-woman play by Ebony Stewart and a performance by saxophonist Braxton Cook.  Thursday’s event features an online poetry slam, with eight spoken-word artists competing for both cash and glory.  Now in its second year, the festival owes its existence to UW Madison alumna Shasparay Irvin. And one of the competitors in Thursday’s slam, RADI the Poet,  joins us as well.

Facebook event | Black Arts Matter: Poetry Slam

 

Even in a pandemic, Dane County housing pricewards continue to creep up.  Based on the federal “fair market rent” standard, the Madison metro area had rents higher than 95% of all other metro areas.  The cost of living in the Madison area has caught the attention of both the public and private sectors.  Last week, both the City of Madison and Dane County governments announced a total of over thirteen million dollars in capital funding for affordable housing projects in their respective 2021 budgets.  On top of that, the United Way of Dane County and the Madison Development Corporation announced investments totalling another eleven point eight million dollars in the Dane Workforce Housing Fund.  Is all that investment enough, though, to make a dent in the unmet demand for affordable housing in the area?  Joining us now is Martha Cranley, Vice-President of Community Impact at United Way of Dane County.

Oregon will become the first state in the country to legalize psilocybin with the passage of Measure 109 in the November election. Multiple cities have decriminalized the substance, but Oregon will become the first to permit supervised use statewide. Paul Hutson is a professor at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy and is an expert on experimental clinical studies on psychedelic medications. He’s here to tell us about the ongoing investigation into the benefits and unknowns of the naturally occurring hallucinogenic.

Photo by Micheal M via Pixabay

For nearly 9 years, the Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones has held monthly vigils at the gates of Volk Field in Camp Douglas, Wisconsin to protest the RQ-7 Shadow Drones housed there and the US program of drone warfare in general — a program the UN has called a war crime, because many of the people killed are innocent civilians.

Our guest, Bonnie Block, is one of seven antiwar activists who was arrested for trespassing at one of these protests in November 2019, and now is set to stand trial later this month. The activists, who are all senior citizens, filed motions to postpone the trial, citing concerns about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But Judge Stacey Smith of the Juneau County District Court in Mauston, Wisconsin, denied their motions — and Bonnie says due to her high-risk status and the current elevated risk of COVID, she won’t appear in court on Monday.