Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments:
Assault on the Environment: One of the first executive orders issued by Trump in January was a Whitehouse paper titled "Unleashing American Energy." It promises to restore American prosperity by removing legal barriers, including laws in many states, to the extraction of natural resources. In their Left & the Law segment, Jan Haaken and Mike Snedeker look at how this new wave of far-right assaults on environmental regulation compares to the Trump regime's assaults on immigrants, higher education, government workers, and the role of the judiciary in these various sites of resistance. Mike and Jan also reflect on how organizing for this Earth Day on April 22nd may need to include the resurrection of mass protests.
Why I Hate Earth Day: We have only one day out of 365 to celebrate the planet that we are slowly killing. But that’s not all. Earth Day has become a handy opportunity for corporations to greenwash and for businesses to profit from “Earth Day” product sales. Environmental writer, Tim Smedley, argues that we ought to be paying more attention to Earth Overshoot Day, the day of the year on which humanity's annual demand for natural resources and ecological services exceeds what the earth can regenerate in that same year. Ideally, Earth Overshoot Day would be Dec 31. Last year it was August 1. Our Well Read Red, Patricia Kullberg, reads excerpts from an article by Tim Smedley entitled Why I Hate Earth Day: by an Environmental Writer. It was published online in The New Climate on April 19, 2023, where the complete article can be accessed.
Deportation Nation, Part One: Luisa Martinez pursues a wide-ranging discussion with immigration lawyer Daniel Kanstroom about the ideology, history and political economy of immigration in the United States. In part one, they take up the political economy of labor migration, the historical antecedents of current US immigration policy and the racialization of immigration enforcement. In part two, which will air on April 28, they take up immigration policy through the lenses of gender, poverty and ideology. They discuss as well the debate on the left over border abolition. Daniel Kanstroom is professor of law at Boston University and has decades of experience with immigration law. He is the author of Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History and Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora. Luisa Martinez is a member of Portland DSA and the National Political Committee of DSA.
- KBOO