In Episode 35 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Emily

Ramos, Pilar DeJesus and Kara Bhatti, members of the worker-owned marijuana

consumer cooperative High Mi Madre, on their lobbying and activist efforts in

support of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, still pending in the

final countdown to the close of the current New York State legislative

session. They especially emphasize the demand for "Day One Equity" with

cannabis legalization in the Empire State -- measures for reparative justice and reinvestment in the communities that had for generations been criminalized and oppressed by cannabis prohibition. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Another Banger" by Werdz Music produced by Beat Hogan

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

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In Episode 34 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Rose Tang, veteran journalist, activist, artist, musician, and survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In an in-depth oral history, Tang recounts her experiences as a student leader in Beijing in the spring of 1989, her witness to the June 4 repression, and her work as a public voice for Tiananmen Square survivors. Books and works discussed include: Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (Simon & Schuster 2009); The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim (Oxford 2014); "Tiananmen Massacre," Tang's contribution to The Princeton Reader: Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University (2010); and Jack London's "Credo." Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Locust Flowers Blooming, Sichuanese folk song performed by Rose Tang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWP2P-VVmQI

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

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New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

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In Episode 33 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg compares coverage of the Idlib offensive from CNN and its Turkish counterpart TRT World, illustrating how the US corporate media uncritically echo the propaganda of the Assad regime. While TRT emphasizes civilian casualties, the CNN headline says "terrorists" are being killed—the propaganda technique of dehumanization and objectification of victims. Shamefully, "progressives" in the West are far more complicit with Assad's genocide. The deplorable Amy Goodman has now repeatedly allowed voices such as Phyllis Bennis and the inevitable Noam Chomsky to spew genocide-abetting propaganda on Democracy Now. Weinberg also discusses the contradictions facing the Rojava Kurds in the areas of Syria they control. He closes with a call for Syria Solidarity NYC and Rojava Solidarity NYC to hold a joint workshop at the NYC Anarchist Book Fair, to try to arrive at a unified pro-revolutionary position on Syria. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Free Syria New Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyPkwu4COyI

Production by Chris Rywalt

Follow Syria Solidarity NYC on Twitter

https://twitter.com/nyc4freesyria

Follow Rojava Solidarity NYC on Twitter

https://twitter.com/rojavanyc?lang=en

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

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In Episode 32 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg reads from George

Orwell's 1945 essay "Notes on Nationalism," and explains why despite his

anarchist politics he is willing to march under the Mexican flag but not "Old

Glory," under the Palestinian flag but not the Israeli, under the Tibetan flag

but not that of the People's Republic of China -- and under the Free Syrian flag but not that of the Assad dictatorship. The Free Syrian flag flown by the rebels and opposition is the original flag of an independent Syria, and now represents the struggle to free the country from a one-family dynastic dictatorship massively propped up by foreign powers. Weinberg especially calls out the depraved Max Blumenthal for purveying a version of events in Syria starkly at odds with reality. Weinberg invites listeners to join the Syria Solidarity NYC contingent at New York's May Day march, gathering 5 PM at the Sixth Ave. entrance to Central Park. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

"The Foggy Dew" by Charles O'Neill, performed live by our very own Bill Weinberg

Production by Chris Rywalt

Follow Syria Solidarity NYC on Twitter

https://twitter.com/nyc4freesyria

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

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In Episode 31 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg documents the ugly

far-right politics of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and how the 2010 document

dump risked the lives dissidents under authoritarian regimes in places like

Zimbabwe -- and may have constituted outright collaboration with the

repressive dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. An objective

reading of the circumstances around the 2016 Wikileaks dump of Democratic

Party e-mails reveals Assange as a Kremlin asset and Trump collaborator, an

active agent in a Russian-lubricated effort to throw the US elections -- part

of Putin's grander design to impose a fascist world order. Weinberg also notes

that the ACLU and Committee to Protect Journalists have issued statements

warning that the charges against Assange may pose a threat to press freedom.

But he argues that even if we must protest his prosecution, we should do so

while refraining from glorifying Assange -- and, indeed, while forthrightly repudiating him as a dangerous political enemy of all progressive values. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

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In Episode 30 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg decries the unseemly gloating from the (totally predictable) Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and their ilk over the Mueller Report's supposed (not actual) exoneration of Donald Trump. The report actually backs up the 2016 findings of the intelligence community that there was Russian meddling in the election. There have been over 100 indictments issued by Mueller's team, including for lying to Congress about meetings between Trump representatives and Russians. Meanwhile, the results of several other investigations and legal cases against Trump and his team remain pending. Yet paradoxical pro-Trump "leftists" ignore all this and echo the interpretation of the Mueller Report put forth by Attorney General William Barr—who was appointed by Trump precisely to protect his ass. Repudiating this Red-Brown pseudo-left jive that abets Trump's lies, Weinberg joins with the ACLU and Robert Reich in calling for the complete and unredacted release of the Mueller Report. And hopefully using its contents to build a mass militant movement such as was seen in South Korea in 2016, to demand the impeachment of the president—or even nullification of the tainted election that brought him to power. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

$30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are

currently up to $20.

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New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

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In Episode 28 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advances a progressive and anti-Zionist critique of Rep Ilhan Omar's controversial comments, which have posed the problem of US support for Israel in terms of "allegiance to a foreign country" -- the nationalist and xenophobic language of our enemies. As a Somali-American woman in a hijab, Omar is ultimately legitimizing reactionary forces that threaten her with the use of such nationalist rhetoric. As the massacres of Christchurch and Pittsburgh all too clearly demonstrate, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fundamentally unified concerns -- and the way Jews and Muslims have been pitted against each other by the propaganda system is part of the pathology. Contrary to the canard of "dual loyalty," Weinberg declares himself a "zero-loyalist," repudiating both Zionism and America-first nationalism, calling for an anti-Zionism based on solidarity with the Palestinians, not "allegiance" to the imperial state. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

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currently up to $20.

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In Episode 28 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes with trepidation Google’s plans to develop a censored search engine for China, and thereby be allowed back through the Great Firewall to access the world's largest market. But the next and more sinister step is imposing China's draconian standards for control of information on all Internet users, worldwide. Harbingers of this are already seen in Facebook's censorship of the Tibetan struggle, and of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, as well as initiatives to suppress footage of Israeli war crimes. While protesting these moves is imperative, the potential for such abuses in inherent to the technology—and this, ultimately, is a deeper and more complex problem that also urgently demands a critique. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Tonkha" by Tenzin Choegyal

https://tenzinchoegyal.bandcamp.com/album/heart-strings

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of

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In Episode 27 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Eben Egbe and Amy Dalton of the Global Initiative to end the Cameroons Colonial Conflict (Gi3C), who discuss the independence struggle in Ambazonia—a territory that was illegally annexed by Cameroon following the end of colonial rule in 1960. The past year has seen a terrible increase in state terror in Ambazonia from the French-backed neo-colonial Cameroon authorities, with protesters fired upon by helicopter gunships, and finally villages burned by military forces, sending the residents fleeing into the bush. Some 246,000 people have been internally displaced, with a further 20,000 having crossed the border into Nigeria as refugees. Cameroon also receives military aid from the US, ostensibly for the fight against Boko Haram in the north of the country—but this same military is now being unleashed against the civilian populace in the unrelated conflict in Ambazonia in the south. The Gi3C has issued an urgent call for the UN Human Rights Council, which convenes for its 40th annual meeting this week in Geneva, to send a fact-finding delegation to the region. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Ekongha Ya", traditional wedding song in Bayang language, by Etando Moh Manyu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICV9Cv9h5HM

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $19.

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In Episode 26 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes contradictions and complexities in two world crises depicted in polarized terms by left, right and center alike. The indigenous Tatar people of Crimea, their autonomy and rights abrogated by the illegal Russian occupation, have been drawn into an alliance with Ukraine's ultra-nationalist Right Sector based on their mutual opposition to Putin's annexation of the peninsula. Ukrainian anarchists are meanwhile facing repression for their opposition to Right Sector. Putin, who is cracking down on Russian anarchists who oppose his own ultra-nationalist imperial agenda, has just sent a detachment of Cossack mercenaries to Venezuela to serve as a Praetorian Guard for the embattled Nicolás Maduro. In addition to being opposed by the right-wing pretender Juan Guaidó, Maduro also faces a challenge from an independent left that rejects his undemocratic rule as well as US imperial designs on Venezuela. Indigenous peoples such as the Pemón of the Orinoco Basin are also mounting resistance to extractive designs on their territory—regardless of who holds power in Caracas. Can anarchists and the independent left in Ukraine, Russia and Venezuela unite with indigenous peoples such as the Tatars and Pemón to defend freedom and autonomy, and repudiate reactionaries and imperialists on all sides? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Erratum: Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1999, not "about 12 years ago."

Music: "Bitter Life/Banish Misfortune (Lirnyk Medley)" by Julian Kytasty

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/julian-kytasty-mn0000257615

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $13.

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New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

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