A major confrontation is taking place in Los Angeles this week where more than 70,000 education workers are set to strike. This includes SEIU 99, UTLA, Teamsters, and other unions. This strike comes in the midst of a strike wave taking place in schools in San Francisco, Richmond, and Sacramento.
Gilbert Feliciano and Janae Tyler are on the bargaining committee of SEIU 99, which represents 30,000 service workers. They spoke to Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer about school privatization via charters, the conditions that the students and staff face, as well as ICE terror attacks on the community and in the schools.
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Next, we play an excerpt from an interview that Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal gave to Professor Glenn Diesen on his April 11 podcast. Blumenthal traces the deep links that Trump and his family as well as his “A Team” tier of advisors have to various Israeli, American, and even Russian Zionists. The American ruling class formed a bi-partisan, strategic partnership, he says, before and after Israel’s founding in 1948. It is now strained by growing domestic opposition to the ongoing war against Iran’s Islamic Republic.
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In our next segment, we hear from investigative journalist Abby Martin, creator of The Empire Files, who reflects on the visceral reality of Israeli society and the collapse of its state propaganda.
Since her 2016 trip to the region, Martin has warned that the “writing was on the wall” for the current humanitarian catastrophe. She describes a society in the grip of “full-throated fascism,” where genocidal rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream.
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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 Steve Zeltzer, Polina Vasiliev, and Thomas O’Rourke.
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:
Aretha Franklin and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, “Think”
David Rovics, Performed by AI Tsuno, “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age”
