Jon Nelson hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments:
New Forms of Democracy-Part Two: In part two of their discussion, Bill Resnick interviews Eleanor Finley, an anthropologist, who investigates historic and emerging forms of democracy.
Chiquita Bananas and Climate Justice: On June 12 Democracy Now aired a segment on a legal victory for Colombian agricultural workers against Chiquita. After years of legal wrangling, the banana giant was ordered to pay $38 million to families of banana workers who were harassed, tortured and assassinated by paramilitaries financed by the food corporation. Workers were targeted for their efforts to organize and resist low pay and dangerous working conditions. But many in the local climate justice movement were dismayed by the coverage for the failure to make the connections to the environmental devastation caused by banana monoculture. Today on the mole we have with us Lynn Spitaleri Handlin, a local climate justice activist, to talk about media coverage, or lack thereof, of critical issues of environmental and climate justice.
WRR: Rob Wallace on Bird Flu in Context: In this Well-Read Red, we hear excerpts from a post by Rob Wallace titled "Whether Bird Flu is on the March Misses the Point," shared by Frann Michel.
Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps and Pandemic Research for the People. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, Dead Epidemiologists, and most recently The Fault in Our SARS, all with Monthly Review Press. He is also co-author of the more technical monographs Neoliberal Ebola and Clear-Cutting Disease Control, both with Springer. Wallace has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the CDC, and the People’s CDC, and has been a guest on the Old Mole Variety Hour (in 2017 and 2009).
His post originally appeared on his Patreon, to which you can subscribe for as little as one dollar per month, and was republished at MR online, where you can find the full text as well as illustrations, diagrams, and other figures.
Asylum, Migration and US Border Policy: Biden's border policies have taken a dramatic shift to the right. Through an executive order he set a cap on daily migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border and allowed US authorities to deport migrants without processing their asylum claims if they entered the country illegally. Journalist Kevin Foster talks today with Natalie Lerner, a law student and volunteer with the Asylum Seeker Solidarity Collective. They discuss the difficult conditions of migrants in the Portland area and the implications of Biden's new border policies on future border crossings. They also dive into the issues with US asylum policies, why migrants cross the border without permission, and how being a political football could have an emotional effect on migrants.