A Public Affair

On today’s program, Allen Ruff speaks with friend of the show, Mouin Rabbani, about Yasser Abu Shabab, the continuing genocide in Gaza, the chaos created by US-backed aid organizations, and Israel’s military and political interventions in surrounding states like Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

Rabbani describes how the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint US-Israel project, is weaponizing aid in order to gain control over the distribution of supplies. The GHF’s former leader, Jake Wood, was an exorbitantly paid US mercenary and well known Christian Zionist, resigned last month saying the organization couldn’t meet humanitarian standards.

Meanwhile, this week Israel abducted European aid workers and activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Rabbani says that European leaders have been tepid in their response, and the media is too focused on criticizing the courageous activities instead of focusing on the issue of Israel’s actions. He adds that Israel’s international immunity is growing, and is a privilege granted by Israel’s international sponsors and allies who are providing Israel with diplomatic cover. 

Mouin Rabbani is an expert on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He’s currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. Rabbani is co-editor of the e-magazine Jadaliyya and a Contributing Editor to the Middle East Report. He’s written widely and provided expert analysis to a variety of international and US national press, including Al-Jazeera, The Nation, and Democracy Now!.

Featured image of humanitarian cargo being unloaded in Gaza via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

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On today’s show, host Matvei Mozhaev speaks with Maria Foscarinis, a principal architect of the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the first major piece of federal legislation to address homelessness. They discuss her recent book, And Housing for All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America, which details the impact of homelessness on people’s lives and argues that ending homelessness in the US requires the recognition of housing as a basic human right. 

Foscarinis discusses the last four decades of the homeless crisis in the US. She started her career when Regan came to office, slashed housing services, and triggered the crisis of homelessness. Since then, the crisis has only worsened and homelessness has become more normalized. However, Foscarinis says that people are getting better at connecting homelessness with the crisis of affordable housing in the country. 

In her book, Foscarinis interweaves the stories of people experiencing homelessness with policy analysis, attempting to balance the personal narratives with the structural story of policy failures. Mozhaev introduces listeners to Brian Deschane who was offered housing the day after he passed away this Spring. Brian was one of over a thousand Madisonians currently experiencing homelessness. Over 50% of unhoused people in Dane County are people of color, with every 1 out of 100 Black people in Dane County currently homeless. Dane County has struggled to mitigate homelessness, with only a 5% per capita decrease since 2015.

Since the 2024 decision by the Supreme Court that cities can criminalize homelessness, over 150 anti-homeless bills passed across the country. In response to a decade of efforts to criminalize homelessness, Foscarinis describes the initiative called “Housing not Handcuffs” that fights against criminalization and for housing. And as cities also sidestep housing solutions for “sanctioned encampments” and “safe parking lots,” Foscarinis reminds listeners that everyone wants “a safe, decent, affordable home for everyone.”

Maria Foscarinis is a lawyer and principal architect for the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the first major federal legislation to address homelessness. In 1989, she founded the National Homelessness Law Center to help ensure that federal legislation would be properly implemented. 

Featured image of And Housing for All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America, published by Prometheus Books. 

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On today’s show, host Greg Michaud interviews Joe Grande, the Water Resources Manager at Madison Water Utility. They discuss what’s in Madison’s drinking water, how consumers can have confidence in their tap water and stop buying bottled water, and what Madison Water Utility does to determine if water is meeting standards, as is disclosed in the recent Annual Drinking Water Quality Report. 

Grande describes how Madisonians get their tap water, which typically is sourced from 1-3 of Madison’s 20 wells. To produce their annual report, the Utility samples roughly 27,000 times over the course of a year. Online, you can type in your address and learn more about your water.

Two contaminants that Madison Water Utility is tracking are sodium and PFAS. Grande says they’re seeing high levels of sodium, some of over 60 milligrams per liter, which is over 10 times the amount that would normally be found in groundwater. These higher levels are coming from road salt applications. Grade adds that a new PFAS removal system will come on line for well 15, meaning it will again be operational by the end of summer. 

Joe Grande is the Water Resources Manager for Madison Water Utility. He is responsible for determining if the water complies with drinking water standards before it leaves the Utility and reaches the user. 

Featured image of a water droplet via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes unpacks the future of AI in the state of Wisconsin. He’s in conversation with Brett Korte who describes why big tech companies are looking to Wisconsin as the future home of their data centers. Wisconsin happens to be water rich, and these data centers require water. But Korte says that Great Lakes water is governed by compacts with lots of stakeholders, making water harder to access. Korte adds that data centers require rezoning, so there’s room for community action. Nevertheless, there’s been widespread support for these centers across the political spectrum. 

Lorena Jaume-Palasí adds a European perspective on the issue, saying that these projects require large-scale logistical support, usually taken up by governments. Jaume-Palasí notes that data centers can’t use wastewater or sea water. They need potable water for cooling and that the water ultimately is highly treated with chemicals and therefore difficult to recycle. She adds that tech companies haven’t been planning for global warming and that AI companies are not considering power and water as limited resources as they build out their next generation of software. 

They also discuss nuclear energy projects, natural gas plants, and Renewable Energy Credits; but even in a world of new and unique energy demands, utilities need to rethink their approaches to serving all the load that comes to them.

Brett Korte is a Staff Attorney at Clean Wisconsin. His work focuses on air, climate, and energy issues impacting Wisconsin’s communities and environment. He works closely with the organization’s policy, science, and communications experts to advocate for healthy air, climate mitigation, and a just transition to renewable energy.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí is the Founder and Executive Director of The Ethical Tech Society, a fact- and theory-based non-profit organisation focused on the social relevance of automation and digitisation processes. Her work centres on ethics and legal philosophy, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence.

Featured image of a data center from 2013 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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On today’s show, economist Richard D. Wolff joins host Esty Dinur to talk about the state of the American empire and the state of independent media. We’re also joined in the studio by Norman Stockwell who reiterates that funding independent media is as important as ever in light of potential cuts to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. Wolff says that we’re living through the decline of the American Empire and that decline is gathering speed. He says that we can’t accept that what has happened to every other empire won’t happen here.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the New School University, New York City. Wolff is the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show “Economic Update.” His most recent book is Understanding Capitalism.

Featured image: photo of Richard D. Wolff from 2025 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

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Today we turn the tables; Allen Ruff sits in the guest seat to talk about his life and times. Ruff has been hosting the show for over 20 years and logged over 1000 hours of tape over that time, many of which you can find on the WORT website. Guest host, Bert Zipperer, interviews Ruff about what brought him to Madison, how he developed his subversive analysis, and the early days of WORT. 

In this rare interview, Ruff opens up about how his youth amidst working class radicals in New Haven and later education at American University and UW-Madison developed his critical thinking. Ruff says he learned the intellectual tools to interrogate cold war liberalism from his PhD studies. He says that traveling the world, including to Israel, “stripped away” the myth of Israel as a nation by seeing the ethnic and class differences there. 

Ruff hitchhiked to Madison in January of 1974 and it was the coldest place he’d ever been. He immediately noticed a movement culture here, influenced by the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. He found WORT and other local institutions to be paragons of how to build a new society.

We also hear from listeners who share their anecdotes about the station, memorable moments with Ruff, the history of Rainbow Bookstore, and more. Ruff says that he finds hope in friendship and comradeship, that “true community is a subversive thing” because under capitalism people are atomized into individual consumer parts. 

Featured image of Allen Ruff and Bert Zipperer in the WORT studio. Photo courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On today’s show, guest host Yuri Rashkin is joined by independent journalist, Jonathan Fink. These two popular YouTubers of the Rashkin Report and the Silicon Curtain (respectively) break down the recent development in the war in Ukraine and champion the work of independent media on the increasingly politicized topic of Ukraine.

They discuss Ukraine’s recent drone strike on Russian aircraft and how the world is starting to see that Ukraine has more cards in its hands. Fink calls this an “inflection” moment because Ukraine is acting from a position of strength and innovation in destroying Russia’s tools of aggression.

Rashkin and Fink also discuss the environmental impacts of war on the land of Ukraine. From heavy metals, toxins, mines, and fiber optic cables, cleaning up the land will be an immense task. Rashkin describes that during a recent trip to Ukraine, he saw multiple signs warning people not to leave the road because there could be mines in the surrounding fields.

War is fought with artillery and with information. Rashkin and Fink elaborate on their efforts to “peddle truth,” as Fink says, in the face of the very profitable world of misinformation and lies common to corporate media. This leads them to unpack the narrative that Ukraine can’t make it without the US’s aid. Fink says we’d be better off aligning with the idea that Ukraine can and will win, and that he believes this is true after he observed everyday acts of resistance on a recent trip to the front lines, where he says “life is lived on the edge of freedom.”

Jonathan Fink is an independent journalist and the host of the Silicon Curtain podcast, a channel about propaganda, digital disinformation, politics, corruption, hybrid warfare, weaponized conspiracy theories, echo chambers, and digital dystopias.

Featured image of a wheat field in Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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On today’s show, host Sara Gabler speaks with sociologist Dr. Ruth Braunstein about money and morality. They discuss her new book, My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, which was published on April 15, or Tax Day–an auspicious day that Braunstein calls an American “ritual.” 

Braunstein says that tax paying is the most significant way that everyday people interact with the federal government. And people invest a lot of symbolic value (in addition to material value) in the act of tax paying. Groups like war tax resisters and anti-abortion activists resist paying taxes because they understand the use of their tax dollars to be profane and out of line with their moral values. But the federal government has largely accommodated the concerns of the antiabortion activists.

They also talk about the idea of a “moral” budget and the long line of social justice advocates that have tried to push for the federal government to address inequality through its budgeting process. As DOGE under the leadership of Elon Musk has been slashing federal agencies and the Republican’s reconciliation bill is poised to deliver tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, they also discuss where our tax dollars are being put to use these days. Meanwhile a new wave of war tax resisters like Taxpayers Against Genocide is growing in opposition to the US’s funding of genocide in Gaza.

Braunstein asks listeners to consider what services they’re proud that their tax dollars make possible, like public media, public schools, the National Weather Service, National Institutes of Health, libraries, and so much more. 

Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she leads the Meanings of Democracy Lab. Her new book, My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, delves into how paying taxes became a moral battleground in public life. She’s also the host of When The Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, a new documentary podcast spotlighting evangelical leaders who are resisting political extremism in their church and the country.

Featured image of the cover of My Tax Dollars, published by Princeton University Press.

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In Wisconsin we don’t have a shortage of beavers, despite over hunting and over trapping in the nineteenth century. But their resurgence isn’t without friction, especially as development encroaches on their environments. On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes is joined by journalist Bennet Goldstein whose recent reporting covers the ways that people are living with beavers and learning how to mitigate floods and drought from them.

Goldstein describes how human-built dams were constructed around Wisconsin in the early twentieth century to mitigate floods in the very hilly Driftless region. An increasing number of these earthen dams are failing. In lieu of federal funding support, local municipalities are stepping in and coming up with creative solutions to severe storm events, using beaver-inspired methods. 

Goldstein’s reporting brings to light the “symbiotic relationships” that are being developed, including mock beaver dams. This nature-based solution can keep water in the watershed, refill aquifers, and purify waterways, all of which is crucial for restoring watersheds. 

They also talk about urban beaver sightings and how “beaver believers” and wildlife management staff approach the relationship between humans and beavers. And they end the show talking about the importance of solutions journalism and the challenges of photographing beavers.

Bennet Goldstein reports on water and agriculture at Wisconsin Watch and serves on the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a collaborative reporting network across the Basin. Before this, Goldstein was on the breaking news team at the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska. He has spent most of his career at daily papers in Iowa, including the Dubuque Telegraph Herald.

Featured image of a beaver in the Wisconsin Mammals exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Milwaukee via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is joined by two representatives from Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) to talk about the Point Beach Nuclear Reactor in Two Rivers, Wisconsin on Lake Michigan. Amy Schulz and Alfred Meyer discuss the potential relicensing of this power plant despite the reactor being past its lifespan and how to oppose this relicensing. 

Meyer is concerned that the regulatory studies done on nuclear plants don’t account for the effects of climate change on these reactors. Meanwhile the Trump administration last week issued four executive orders that would remove regulatory measures. Meyer says that the goal of the US’s current push for more nuclear energy is to compete with Russia and China, and nuclear power is being called an “essential enabler” of national security.

Schulz describes the effects of the Point Beach Plant on the surrounding environment, saying that the reactor takes in 950 million gallons of water a day from the lake and returns that water at a warmer temperature. Schulz worries that the rising lake temperatures from climate change in combination with the higher temperatures from the discharge will increase the growth of blue-green algae and other microorganisms. Meyer says that people around the site are also affected by radiation, and this hasn’t been sufficiently studied by the NRC. 

Amy Schulz is a retired Registered Nurse and has served as president of Physicians , Health Professionals and Concerned Citizens for Social Responsibility Wisconsin (PSR WI) for over 20 years.  In addition to her work with PSR WI., Amy volunteers with Journey Mental Health and with Luke House Community Meals program.

Alfred Meyer is a social activist who serves on the boards of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility – Wisconsin (PSR-WI) and Physicians for Social Responsibility – New York (PSR-NY).  Mr. Meyer’s current focus is on how civilian nuclear power is an essential enabler of nuclear weapons and the nuclear navy with which to deliver them.  He has previously worked with non-governmental organizations to assist communities recovering from the Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear catastrophes. He co-authored a 2012 PSR/IPPNW critique of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report on the health effects of the radioactive releases from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. He also worked as Program Director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in Washington, DC.

Featured image of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant from 1973 via Wikimedia Commons.

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