Colombian President Gustavo Petro traveled to Washington to meet with President Trump on February 3rd to try to avert a war in the Caribbean. Host Ann Garrison spoke to American attorney Dan Kovalik, who was part of a team that helped President Petro prepare for the meeting, then traveled to the White House with him.
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Thousands of San Francisco teachers went on strike this past week and reached a tentative agreement that includes fully paid healthcare starting next year. Over 70 billionaires live in San Francisco, and yet salaried teachers have minimal health care coverage. Teachers spoke out about their fight and the connection between education and the massive US spending for genocide in Gaza and the trillion dollars military budget. Teachers rallied at San Francisco Mission High School and called out Superintendent Maria Su.
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The use of AI to commodify all public resources is most developed in public education, which for decades has been a testing ground for the technocracy.
Professor John Klyczek’s book School World Order, The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education is about this agenda. He spoke about it last week in Wilmington, Southern California, at a conference called “AI, Labor, and The Future Of LA and The World” in Wilmington, California, on February 7.
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Next, public health epidemiologist Nicholas Hulsher of Focal Points and the McCullough Foundation discusses the implications of the arrest on Feb 2nd by local police in Las Vegas in connection with the discovery of a suspected biolab housed in a private home.
Hulscher spoke to Brannon Howse of Worldview Tube on Feb 9th about this in the context of a recent global mapping study published in the Journal of Public Health on May 20, 2025 that identified more than 3600 Biosafety Level-3 and Level-4 laboratories worldwide. The vast majority of these labs don’t publicly disclose their locations nor list the pathogens they study or what they do to them. The mapping study shows that roughly half of these facilities are located in the US and that more than 300 lab leaks have occurred since 2001.
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We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates who contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from Ann Garrison, Thomas O’Rourke, and Steve Zeltzer.
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening!
Music:
Aberlado Carbono y su Conjunto, “Palenque”
Kraftwerk – The Robots (Official Video)
“Round up All the Billionaires” Written by David Rovics, performed by AI Tsuno
