FEATURING CHUCK FLORES – After 7 days of being on strike in the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles’ 32,000 educators went back to work on Wednesday. More than two years of contract negotiations finally ended on Tuesday when the Los Angeles Unified School District and the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced an agreement in a joint press conference alongside LA Mayor Eric Garcetti. Later on Tuesday afternoon a vote was held among union members who passed the agreement, officially ending the strike.

Did the teachers actually get what they demanded? And can the LA strike be a model for teacher-led struggles in other parts of the country?

Prof. Chuck Flores, Assistant Professor of Educational Administration in the Division of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education at California State University, Los Angeles.

FEATURING D.D. GUTTENPLAN – In our ongoing attempt to make sense of the US under Donald Trump, we turn today to the author of a new book that promises hope that a concerted group of dedicated Americans can salvage the nation out of the President’s vice-grip. D. D. Guttenplan was the lead reporter during the 2016 election for The Nation magazine and his new book, The Next Republic, chronicles how nine activists have worked to change the course of the US and how their work offers a path for survival.

D. D. Guttenplan, leader reporter during the 2016 election for The Nation. His earlier books include The Holocaust on Trial and American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone. His latest book is called ‘The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority’.

The US Senate is due to vote on two competing bills to end the record breaking partial government shutdown. Republican Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell plans a vote on his party’s bill that includes $5.7 billion for President Donald Trump’s border wall and also puts in place new restrictions on asylum seekers. He also plans a vote on a House version of a bill that Democrats passed allowing the federal government to reopen temporarily while negotiations continue. Neither of the bills is expected to pass. In the House, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will introduce more bills on Wednesday to reopen the government. Public opinion polls show that more Americans blame Trump for the on-going shutdown than Pelosi. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also stuck firm to the Democrats’ position.

Meanwhile, a new caravan of immigrants has arrived on the Mexico border from Central America. A type of “humanitarian visa” being made available under Mexico’s new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has apparently spurred more than 5,000 Central American refugees to wait by the Guatemala-Mexico border. The new visas would protect them from Mexican deportation and help them toward their journey northward to the US. There are still about 3,000 refugees mostly from Honduras in Tijuana on the US-Mexico border, awaiting the ability to apply for asylum into the US. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Lawyers and migration experts say the migrants’ chances of getting asylum in the U.S. are lower than ever.”

The weeklong Los Angeles teachers strike has ended. After intense discussions that went overnight, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced an agreement on Tuesday. LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner and UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl gave a joint press conference on Tuesday afternoon announcing an agreement after 7 days of teachers striking. Later in the afternoon a vote was held among union members who passed the agreement, officially ending the strike. 

Democrats are under fire for muddying the waters on an effort to pass Medicare-for-all legislation. Lawmakers in the House where the Democrats hold a decisive majority, have introduced at least 8 bills on healthcare that critics are casting as “Medicare-for-some.” Among them are Senator Sherrod Brown who is considering a run for President and has introduced a bill allowing only retiring police and firefighters access to the Medicare system before they hit retirement age. Brown said, “It’s easy to say ‘Medicare for All’ and make a good speech, but see no action.” According to Politico, the bills, “range from modest Medicare reforms to more ambitious restructurings that would extend government-run care to millions of new patients — an array of options that fall short of campaign trail promises for full Medicare for All.”

Representative Pramila Jayapal has introduced the only truly Medicare-for-all bill – a version that Independent Senator Bernie Sanders has backed in the Senate. Senator Ed Merkley explained, “If we could make the leap straight to Medicare for All, I would love for us to do that…But it’s important to lay out a route about how we get to that vision. If you tell people the only choice they have is Medicare, that could produce a lot of folks being concerned about, ‘Wait a minute, I like my health care and you’re telling me I have to leave it.

FEATURING PAUL O’BRIEN – The World Economic Forum has begun in Davos, Switzerland, bringing together business and state representatives in what AFP calls, ‘the world’s most exclusive business bash.’ This year the US will not be represented at Davos as President Donald Trump cancelled travel plans for his cabinet representatives citing the on-going federal government shutdown.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has released its annual report on global inequality to coincide with the start of the World Economic Forum as it does every year. This year’s report is entitled Public Good or Private Wealth? and addresses the deep impact that low tax rates for the fabulously wealthy have on the public services ordinary people rely on.

Read Oxfam’s report ‘Public Good or Private Wealth’ HERE.

Paul O’Brien, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America. 

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence visited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s memorial in Washington DC on the day that marks his birthday. It was Trump’s second MLK Day as President and last year he came under criticism for failing to follow in other Presidents’ footsteps and mark the occasion appropriately. This year Trump and Pence both laid wreaths at the memorial staying for just about 1-2 minutes. 

Meanwhile as the government shutdown stretches on into a month with no end in sight, Republican Senators are hoping to make progress with new legislation on Tuesday. The behemoth bill, running 1,300 pages long, was released to the public on Monday night and apparently makes some significant changes to the ways in which asylum seekers are treated. It also apparently includes a 3-year extension for DACA registrants and billions of dollars in disaster relief, as well as of course the $5.7 billion for Trump’s border wall. Democrats rejected the bill outright with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling it a, “non-starter,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accusing the President of “hostage taking.” But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans on introducing the bill anyway and taking a vote count as early as Thursday. The Republican Party’s goal appears to be to re-cast Democrats as taking the blame for the on-going shutdown.

An estimated ten percent of TSA workers did not show up to work over the holiday weekend. Employees of the Transportation Security Administration are among the hardest hit federal workers in the shutdown. Many are struggling to make ends meet and are no-shows to work as they attempt to find other ways to remain financially afloat.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued several decisions. On the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the court decided not act on the Trump Administration’s request for a review. The inaction means that the program remains in place for now. The court dealt a blow for transgender rights in a ruling that lifted legal injunctions against Trump’s ban on transgender military personnel. This means that the policy can now go into effect while a legal battle plays out. The ruling was strictly along partisan lines. And the Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it would take up a gun control issue for the first time in ten years. The case in question is a challenge to a New York City law banning handgun owners from taking their weapons outside the city.

Several major marches took place in Washington DC over the weekend. On Saturday the third annual

FEATURING PAUL SEAMUS RYAN –  The online news outlet BuzzFeed on Thursday published a damning exposé on President Donald Trump saying that he instructed his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow, and that “Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations.” All of this was apparently happening while Trump was telling the public that he had no business deals in Russia.

After Cohen was in the cross hairs of the Special Counsel’s Investigation, BuzzFeed reports that, “the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.” The Washington Post said, “BuzzFeed’s Michael Cohen story, if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump.” CNN asserted that, “This may be the smoking gun in the Russia investigation.”

The BuzzFeed report came on the same day that the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen hired a technology firm during the Trump Presidential campaign to try to rig online polls in favor of Trump. Cohen confirmed the report on Twitter.

Paul Seamus Ryan, Vice President of Policy & Litigation at Common Cause.

FEATURING KEITH M. PARSONS – The state of American politics has devolved to such an extent under President Donald Trump that there seems to be no end to the depravity, antagonism, deception, and ugliness we appear to be willing to tolerate. Perhaps we are simply too fatigued to keep up with the barrage of propaganda, name-calling, and intransigence from various political factions.

Now, a new book hopes to remind us that it is indeed possible to have civil discourse, engage in actual political and philosophical debate, and still be part of a community.

Keith M. Parsons, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. His earlier books include It Started with Copernicus, Rational Episodes, and God and the Burden of Proof. His new book, co-authored with Paris M. Donehoo is called ‘Polarized: The Collapse of Truth, Civility, and Community in Divided Times and How We Can Find Common Ground’.

FEATURING NOLIWE ROOKS – Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is finding it hard to attend public events without being the target of protests. The virulently strong supporter of school privatization and charter schools has become a lynchpin for mass dismay of the state of our public school system. But privatization did not begin with Devos. It has a long history embedded within the early days of racial desegregation and the Brown Vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

In a new book, Noliwe Rooks writes about how private investment in public education has sky-rocketed – and the result is worse achievement outcomes, more segregation, more privatization.

Noliwe Rooks, Director of American Studies at Cornell University, former associate director of African American studies at Princeton University. She has written four books including White Money/Black Power and Hair Raising. Her newest book is Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.

**This segment was originally broadcast on October 19, 2017.

FEATURING LESLIE R. HINKSON – You’ve heard of the ‘subprime mortgage’ crisis where homebuyers of color were targeted by banks for high-interest loans. But what about expanding that framing to healthcare and medicine? A new book takes on racial disparities in the delivery and costs of healthcare to examine how medical debt disproportionately impacts people of color.

The book is called Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine. In it contributors trace how pharmaceutical companies market in specific ways to certain racial groups, as well as how the repayment of medical debt can be viewed within the historical framework of past medical abuses.

While there is an on-going crisis in healthcare in the US, how healthcare, debt, and race intersect ought to be a crucial component of the national dialogue.

Leslie R. Hinkson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and co-editor with Nadine Ehlers of the book Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine.

**This segment was originally broadcast on October 24, 2017.

FEATURING MUMIA ABU JAMAL –  He recently filed this commentary on the current state of the world called ‘Cracks in the Walls of Empire’.

Visit prisonradio.org for more commentaries.

Mumia Abu Jamal is a political prisoner and award winning journalist. You can listen to this and all his other commentaries at prisonradio.org.