A Public Affair

On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by Van Jackson to talk about Trump’s tariffs and their impact both on global trade and domestic labor. Aimed at China, these tariffs are part of a larger strategic project that many worry could lead to an economic downturn worldwide. They talk about how tariffs will hurt the working class, the rise of crony capitalism, the increasingly flagrant spoils system, and Arundhati Roy’s vision of civil disobedience.

Jackson puts Trump’s tariff regime in the context of international politics. He says we’re past the age of neoliberalism and fully in the age when state power is mobilized for capitalism. In the US, a coalition of oligarchs and ethno-nationalists are working toward economic domination that Jackson calls “zombie economic nationalism.” What’s at stake is the livelihoods of the working majority and increased repression.

Van Jackson is an international relations specialist on US foreign policy and practice in East Asia. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and his research focuses on the class dimensions of geopolitics. He is the author of dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports. His most recent book is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

Featured image: photo of Van Jackson.

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On today’s show, we’re continuing our April theme of highlighting the role of the arts in times of political turmoil. As federal cuts to arts and culture programs are hitting local organizations hard, host Ali Muldrow speaks with Jessica Becker and Jen Rubin of Wisconsin Humanities. Last week the organization was notified from the National Endowment for the Humanities that all of their grant funding had been canceled. 

Becker says that their funding comes from a 53-year-old grant program that ended overnight when the Executive Director of Wisconsin Humanities received an unidentified email signed by the acting director of the NEH saying they’d been defunded.

They talk about how this presidential administration is going after programs that promote and teach critical thinking. Muldrow says that there seems to be a political appetite for defunding arts and humanities. But the guests have no confidence that the money will be diverted to do better things.

They also discuss how this devastating news will impact the organization as well as affect people across the state. Rubin says that the elimination of Wisconsin Humanities is going to impact rural communities across the state the hardest. But in a state that is ranked the worst in the nation for arts funding per capita, the loss of Wisconsin Humanities, is a loss for the state. 

Jessica Becker is the Director of Communications at Wisconsin Humanities where she manages their annual communication strategy and oversees mission-focused branding to build relationships and engagement across the state. 

Jen Rubin is the Executive Producer of Wisconsin Humanities’ statewide digital storytelling project, Love Wisconsin. Working with freelance producers from around the state, she is always looking for and helping to share new stories with our very active social media community. 

Featured image: logo of Wisconsin Humanities. 

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On today’s show, host Christina Lieffring speaks with scholar Mariel Barnes about misogyny online and in public life. They discuss the rise of what Barnes calls the “manosphere,” its rising influence on US politics, and how it leads to doxxing and violence. 

Barnes studies how this form of online misogyny took off around 2008 with the emergence of Web 2.0. She says that the manosphere is made up of “a group of loosely connected websites, blogs, and forums that share the belief that men are oppressed in modern day society because of women, feminism, and gender equality.” Even father’s rights groups have appropriated the strategies of women’s rights groups to make their positions more mainstream. 

Technology plays a major role in how the manosphere operates even though these groups have existed for some time, coming out of the women’s liberation movement. With the rise of the internet, people with extremist ideas were better able to find each other. Based on her research, Barnes says that the rise of the manosphere predates the rise of the alt-right. But now, algorithms are very good at feeding young boys and men extreme content. 

Barnes’ recent article, “The Manosphere and Politics,” coauthored with Sabrina M. Karim, was published in Comparative Political Studies earlier this year.

Mariel Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. Her work primarily focuses on the interaction between social and housing policies, and domestic violence.

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Last month the USDA eliminated two programs that help schools, child care centers, and food banks buy food from local farms. This cut erased more than $1 billion in support, and a USDA spokesperson said these programs “no longer effectuates the goals of the agency.” Now, school districts and local organizations are scrambling to save these programs. 

To talk about school nutrition and farm to school programs, host Douglas Haynes is joined by Erica Krug, the Farm to School Director at Rooted, Kaitlin Tauriainen, the President of the School Nutrition Association of Wisconsin, and Jennifer Gaddis, a scholar and advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network. 

They talk about potential changes to SNAP eligibility, the health benefits of eating local foods, potential cuts at AmeriCorps, and Governor Evers’ “Year of the Kid.” Gaddis says that cuts to the farm to school programs would not only be devastating to kids, but to the future of local, regional, and national food systems.

Farm to school programs do a number of things, from purchasing food from local farms to serve to students, engaging students in hands-on gardening, and teaching students in agriculture and health programs, says Krug. These kinds of programs are popular in Brown County, where Tauriainen works. She says that across the state 1-in-6 kids are food insecure and the number of families utilizing food banks is rising. 

Rooted also gets funding from the Leahy Farm to School Grant, which has been cancelled. Krug says that Rooted’s programs aren’t going away, but they are concerned about how long they can sustain their programming. They’re starting to look to the local community for support. 

You can learn more about the end to the Leahy grant here, and share your stories of farm to school programs with the National Farm to School Network.

Jennifer Gaddis is an associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at UW-Madison and an expert on school food policy. She is also an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network.

Erica Krug is Farm to School Director at Rooted, a nonprofit based in Madison. Erica supervises a gardener-in-residence program that provides garden-based education at Madison Metropolitan School District schools and works to connect local farmers to school districts in order to get more local food in school meals.

Kaitlin Tauriainen is Child Nutrition Coordinator in the Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin School District and President of the School Nutrition Association of Wisconsin. 

Featured image of lunch served at a DC public school via Wikimedia Commons. 

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On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is joined by Chairman Omali Yesitela, the leader of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, and Penny Hess, the Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee. Uhuru means “freedom” in Swahili and is used as a greeting and a demand because of its historical significance in the struggle against colonialism. 

In 2022, Chairman Omali and Hess, along with Jesse Nevel, were targeted by the FBI. Their homes were occupied, equipment confiscated, and financial records taken with military force. They were later charged, without evidence, with being Russian agents. The Uhuru 3 recently won a legal victory in federal court and were found not guilty of the politically motivated charges. Hess says that the FBI’s attack on the movement was meant to suppress dissent. 

The Uhuru Movement is also working toward Palestinian liberation. Chairman Omali and Hess discuss the movement’s call for reparations, white solidarity with Black Power, and what Chairman Omali calls the “colonial mode of production.” 

Chairman Omali Yeshitela is the 83-year-old leader of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, political theorist and strategist who developed the theory of African Internationalism. He has traveled to over 19 countries building the Black Power struggle throughout Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and establishing solidarity relations with other colonized peoples’ movements. He has driven the establishment of over 50 Black community economic institutions designed to free African people from the colonial mode of production and welfare slavery.

Penny Hess is the Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, the solidarity component of the African People’s Socialist Party, leading the movement for white solidarity with Black Power and reparations, under the leadership of Chairman Omali. She is author of “Overturning the culture of violence” that chronicles the creation of white wealth by means of slavery, genocide and land theft of African and Indigenous people.

Featured image of the logo of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.

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On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by scholar and activist Rachel Ida Buff to talk about the right to due process through the 14th Amendment and the Trump Administration’s goal to end birthright citizenship. She’s written a recent article on this topic for The Progressive, “As Trump Sets His Sights on Birthright Citizenship, Deported Mothers Fight for Their Children’s Rights.” 

During the first Trump presidency, the idea of removing birthright citizenship was just a “twinkle in the administration’s eye,” says Buff. But now immigrant mothers, particularly women who give birth while seeking asylum, are being targeted. Buff reminds listeners that whatever can be done to a targeted minority can be done to anyone.

Buff says that the Trump administration “is in a rush to get rid of a class of people.” And they’re using what Buff calls “zombie laws,” older and obscure legislation and policies that they resurrect to create loopholes they can exploit. Buff describes the history of Title 42, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the language of invasion that hearkens back to 1950s science fiction. 

Despite all the turmoil, Buff says she’s paying attention to the heroic actions of the foreign born, interracial organizing in Milwaukee, and the coalition work across the country. 

Rachel Ida Buff is a historian of migration and immigrant rights movement at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her most recent book, A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: Palabras para Persona en Movimiento, is a bilingual, historical glossary of terms. Her work has appeared in Academe, The Boston Review, Jacobin, Jewschool, Public Scholar, and Truthout.

Featured image: a remix of a photo of Rachel Ida Buff by Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On this show we regularly talk with poets and artists about their work. And today host Ali Muldrow is joined by three professionals who work behind the scenes to make local arts programming happen. And they happen to be artists themselves. 

At a time when arts funding is being slashed left and right, we wanted to make the time to highlight some important arts programming happening in our community. Karin Wolf is the Arts and Culture Administrator at the Madison Arts Commission. She says that the city’s youth poet laureate application will open this month.

Sophia Snow is the director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives at UW–Madison and an interdisciplinary performing artist. Snow says that artists play an important role in “documenting, pushing, and inspiring everyone trying to fight for a better world.” 

The Eric D. Newble Jr. is the Arts Education Program Specialist at the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives at UW–Madison. He’s organizing the annual Line Breaks Festival that runs through this weekend and says that it takes collaboration to make programs like this succeed and sing.

They talk about the immeasurable value of the arts, the history of the Line Breaks Festival, the First Wave program, art as a vehicle for social change, the examples they’ve learned from civil rights movements, and the upcoming Brave New Voices international youth festival.

Eric D. Newble Jr. is the Arts Education Program Specialist at the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives at UW–Madison. He is a member of the 7th Cohort of First Wave and has been a Madison resident for over a decade by way of Central Illinois. He is also a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and creative director.

Sophia Snow is the director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) at UW–Madison, which administers the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Scholarship Program. An alumna of the inaugural cohort to graduate from the First Wave program, Snow is an interdisciplinary performing artist who is passionate about developing talented artists in higher education. Before returning to UW, she served as executive director of Urban Word NYC, one of the oldest and most comprehensive youth literary arts organizations in the U.S. 

Karin Wolf is the Arts and Culture Administrator at the Madison Arts Commission. She manages art projects, educational programs, galleries, collections and more for the City of Madison. Before she joined the Madison Arts Commission she worked for the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design where she created award-winning programs and before that was an educational assistant at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Featured image: remix of the logo of the Madison Arts Commission and promo for the Line Breaks Festival by Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On today’s A Public Affair we’re honoring the life and legacy of Bob McChesney who passed away on March 25. In addition to being a renowned academic and activist who fiercely advocated for independent media, McChesney was also a host on this show.

In an obituary written for the Nation, John Nichols says that McChesney “inspired generations of people to challenge corporate power and support a media reform movement that lives on.”

To pay tribute to McChesney and his legacy, today we’re re-airing an episode of A Public Affair from December of 1995. You’ll get to hear McChesney in conversation with John Nichols who was then an editorial writer for the Cap Times and a national political writer for The Progressive. They talk about national and international politics and take listener calls. Though the conversation is from nearly thirty years ago, it feels surprisingly prescient. 

Featured image: photo of Bob McChesney.

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In June the UW–Oshkosh, Fox City Campus will close for good. It will join 5 other associate-degree granting UW campuses that have closed since 2023. These closures are mandated by Universities of Wisconsin President, Jay Rothman. And these closures have locked out non-traditional students from higher education and the cost of this will stretch across generations. 

To talk about the impact of these closures, host Douglas Haynes is joined by Ken Brosky, who directed the documentary, Closure: The Dismantling of Wisconsin’s Colleges. They talk about the mission of the University of Wisconsin colleges including the Wisconsin Idea which is the notion that everyone in the state is entitled to the fruits of higher education. Two year schools are delivering on this mission, but those that haven’t closed are in danger of closing. 

Brosky’s documentary tells a story about budget cuts, the neglect of small campuses, and what communities are losing when these campuses close. It’s also a story of frustration with high-level decision makers who prioritize short term gains but who are really deciding who gets to have access to college. We also hear clips from the documentary that demonstrate just how significant these campuses are to the students who attend them.  

Ken Brosky is the director of Closure: The Dismantling of Wisconsin’s Colleges. He is an Assistant Professor in the College of Integrated Studies at UW-Whitewater at Rock County in Janesville. 

Featured image: a still from the documentary, Closure. 

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On today’s show, host Esty Dinur previews the Wisconsin Film Festival with four directors and the Festival’s senior programmer Mike King.

She speaks with filmmaker Tim Hunter, an American television and film director. His 1986 film River’s Edge won that year’s award for Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. His film, Tex will air at the Wisconsin Film Festival on Saturday at 4pm at the UW Cinematheque. His narrative film, Returning to Earth will also play at that time, and his documentary, By Kevin Thomas will play on Sunday at 3:30pm.

Greg Glienna is an American director and screenwriter from Chicago. He’s best known as the creator of the original 1992 film, Meet the Parents. That film is screening at the Wisconsin Film Festival on Saturday, April 5 at 1pm at the Barrymore Theatre. 

Catherine Léger writes for film, TV, and theater. Her screenplay for “Charlotte a du fun” won her the Best Original Screenplay award at the 2019 Canadian Screens. She joins us by phone from Montreal today. Her film Two Women is showing on Sunday, April 6 at 7pm at Union South and Thursday, April 10 at 5:45pm at Flix Brewhouse. 

Amman Abbasi is a Pakistani-American writer, director, editor, producer, and composer from Little Rock. His short form documentary about the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti won the DuPont award. His film, Yasmeen’s Element is screening on Sunday, April 6 at 4:15pm at The Marquee at Union South.

Mike King is the Senior Programmer for the Wisconsin Film Festival. He also curates UW Cinematheque’s seasonal series and heads up the Spotlight Cinema at the Madison Museum of Community Art. 

The Wisconsin Film Festival kicked off yesterday and runs through next Thursday, April 10. You can find the full schedule in the March edition of Isthmus newspaper or online.

Featured image: remix of the logo of the Wisconsin Film Festival.

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