SPECIAL PROGRAMMING–POETS’ ROUNDTABLE, IN CONVERSATION ABOUT LISTENING TO POEMS
Featuring San Diego poets SERETTA MARTIN, DELORES FISHER, KARY VAIL and JOSEPH MILOSCH along with host and poet SUSAN TAYLOR
In a departure from Susan’s regular show, she and her guests are in conversation with suggestions on ways listeners can get the most enjoyment from listening to and reading poetry-spoken word. Have you wondered what a poet is trying to tell you, or wondered why some poems mean more to you than others? Listen in and see what might be meaningful to you.
Also, if you are ready to try your hand at poetry-spoken word and you are shy, you are going to hear tips on writing and ways to connect with your followers. Tonight, Susan’s show is full of thoughtful conversation, ideas, poets bouncing ideas off of one another, so that you can get the most from what poets are trying to say.
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO ASK SUSAN OR HER GUESTS ABOUT POETRY-SPOKEN WORD, CONTACT INFO@KNSJ.ORG OR CALL 619-283-1100.
The Executive Director UNRWA USA describes how important UNWRA has been in Gaza for decades, and how Israel’s targeted destruction of UNWRA infrastructure is an attack on all civilian life in Gaza.
For millions of Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is more than just a humanitarian organization — it is a lifeline. For 75 years, it has provided crucial infrastructure support and sustained a population facing heavy repression at the behest of Israel. For the past 22 months, the organization has proved as important as ever in the midst of genocide.
UNRWA and its facilities have provided schools, hospitals, cafeterias and more for Palestinians when no other help existed. Precisely because it is sometimes the sole entity continuing to keep Palestinians alive, Israel targets them and has killed 310 staff members in Gaza.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges is joined by Mara Kronenfeld, Executive Director of UNRWA USA. Kronenfeld details the assaults on UNRWA by the Zionist entity, from the brutal bombings of schools and shelters in Gaza to the farcical legal battles waged against it in the United States.
“When there are attempts to eradicate UNRWA in Gaza, it’s not just eradicating the helpers, the key humanitarians… they’re destroying the educators… [and] doing further damage to any commercial activity, the ability for people to pay for those goods and services that are desperately needed by starving people today,” Kronenfeld tells Hedges.
DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION OR COMMENT? Call In 619-790-KNSJ (5675)
GUEST: SAN DIEGO’S DONNA FRYE
PRIVATIZING PUBLIC LAND
Donna Frye: Mission Bay Park Is Not “Surplus” Land
A successful business owner with a bachelor’s degree in business, Donna Frye served the public and City of San Diego as a Councilmember from 2001 to 2010. During her tenure, Frye distinguished herself as an independent thinker who fought relentlessly for an open and honest government that was accountable to the public.
Frye believes the role of government is to serve the public and improve the quality of life for all members of the community and used her leadership skills to help open the doors of government.
Her 2004 boycott of closed session meetings served as the catalyst to reform the rules to allow for greater public access and more transparency of those meetings. She also worked with Californians Aware to rally public consensus around a tough open-government City Charter ballot measure that passed with 82 percent of the vote.
Frye’s advocacy on behalf of the public and its right to know what its government is doing began more than 30 years ago. Prior to her election, she was best known for her environmental activism and her commitment to clean water. She founded Surfers Tired of Pollution, which helped initiate efforts to establish uniform statewide water monitoring standards and require the posting of warning signs in front of discharging storm drains to warn the public about the pollution. Frye received the 2011 Sunshine Award from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists.
Isn’t it wiping out our jobs, stealing our creativity, blurring fact and fiction with deep fakes, and pushing us into a dystopian future that will suck the humanity out of us all? Are we doomed?
For historian Yuval Harari and would-be politician Andrew Yang, AI will create self-driving trucks that will decimate the working-class. Peter Truchin, the mathematical historian, seriously imagines a future in which AI robots are used to colonize asteroids with new weapons that will allow a few powerful men, or maybe just one, to rule the universe.
Getta grip!
While inflammatory prognosticators predict that hundreds of millions of jobs will be gobbled up by AI, only 10,000 jobs were cut due to AI in the first seven months of 2025. That sure-to-be-slaughtered trucking industry is expected to experience an 11 percent total increase, not decrease, in truck drivers through 2030. It’s not at all clear that more jobs will be destroyed than created as AI spreads. Predictions of the unemployed roaming the streets due to automation haven’t yet occurred even during rapid periods of technological change. Why should this time be different?
Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible that a wide range of jobs will be dramatically impacted by AI. This wouldn’t be the first time. World War II also ushered in an amazing array of new technologies and production techniques to compensate for and cope with the vast needs of a war economy that was missing 17 million workers in the armed forces.
But then, as opposed to now, Wall Street didn’t run the country, and we had a powerful labor movement that understood that vast productivity increases could lead to increased wages and shorter workweeks, not just job destruction.
Today, things are more than a little different. We seem in total awe of AI, falling on our knees before its vast power, while experiencing no power of our own to change the course of events. As a result, we aren’t even discussing how AI could and should be used to create a four-day work week without reduced pay.
Imagine for a moment that AI does have the potential to eliminate one fifth of all jobs without new jobs filling the breach. Going to a four-day work week would make certain that unemployment would remain low, while tens of millions gain more time away from work without loss of pay. Mind-numbing work could be replaced. Work and home life could be enriched.
That kind of dream was alive and well when labor unions represented more than one out of every three private sector workers, instead of about one in 20 today. During and after WWII, labor unions were a force to be reckoned with. Government and corporate leaders understood that the fruits of productivity needed to be shared with working people or there would be big trouble in the form of mass strikes.
In October 1955, a congressional committee held hearings on “Automation and Technological Change,” to deal with the unease the country felt about technological change. The report said what was obvious then but is totally absent from today’s AI hysteria.
“The prevailing workweek in manufacturing today, as is well known, is about 40 hours per week compared to about 45 in the mid-1920s and about 60 at the turn of the century. The hope is frequently expressed that the fruits of automation may permit us to reduce this still further to 30, 32, or 35 hours per week in the not-so-distant future.”
Not so distant future? That was written 70 years ago.
We no longer think these thoughts. We no longer have these discussions. We no longer imagine having enough power to make such substantive changes to our collective work lives. We expect the fruits of productivity to go entirely to the corporations and Wall Street – their reward for their great insights and ingenuity. (With the exception of Professor Juliet Schor, who is conducting research on the value of a four-day work week and helping corporations try it.)
And why? Because we have lost our collective will to power as expressed by labor unions. And our political representatives have allowed Wall Street to run wild all over us.
At this very moment, Wall Street and large corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are killing tens of thousands of jobs to finance stock buybacks, the tool of choice to enrich the largest shareholders and richest executives. (For the data to prove that point see Chapter 11 of Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
Leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks have been killing tens of millions of jobs, not AI. And they will continue to do so until we have a political movement with the guts to take on high finance and protect the needs and interests of the rest of us.
As I will show in more detail in upcoming Substacks, the Democratic Party is not it. Working people want something new….and soon.
Les Leopold
After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, Les Leopold co-founded the Labor Institute in 1976, a nonprofit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics for unions, worker centers, and community organizations. He continues to serve as executive director of the Labor Institute and is currently working to build a national economic educational train-the-trainer program with unions and community groups.
Tune in to Friendly Fire to hear retired USA Colonel and A&M professor Greg Daddis discuss his latest book, Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945.
WHEN RELIGIOUS MAFIA AND RIGHT WING EXTREMISTS TAKE OVER with ROLLO ROMIG
The 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, is indicative of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide that is now infecting the United States.
One of the most stark examples of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide was the 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, allegedly assassinated by a far-right religious group in India for her fearless journalism.
Romig chronicles the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism in India, linking it to India’s current authoritarian policies under Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The group accused of Lankesh’s assassination, Sanatan Sanstha, operates on the vision “of making India an officially Hindu country and, equally importantly, relegating all non-Hindus to second-class citizenship and ostracizing, particularly, Muslims from Hindu society,” according to Romig.
Much like in the United States, Romig and Hedges argue that such fringe groups serve a strategic purpose of mainstreaming extremist ideologies that ultimately benefit the ruling class. Gauri’s work represented a threat to far-right political movements in India and she was often subjected to fierce intimidation campaigns, including, as the title of Romig’s book suggests, being placed on murder hit lists.
CALL IN WITH QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS: 619-790-KNSJ (5675)
Mike’s Guest is KIM MOORE, Education and Training Director with the United Domestic Workers Labor Union in San Diego
United Domestic Workers is a statewide union representing over 200,000 home care and child care providers in California.
Kim Moore has been a community organizer for 20 years in San Diego working on various campaigns related to policing, mass incarceration and immigration. In 2018, she co-founded the San Diego bail fund with several other local organizers.
Kim has spent the last 11 organizing workers through her job at UDW, where she is the Education & Training Director.
Labor Day is only a few weeks away. Mike and Kim will be in conversation about the history of labor, the strength in organizing, having a seat at the table, the responsibilities of domestic workers, and more.
