It takes the average Latina, 12 extra months to earn what the average White, non-Hispanic man earns. That is because Latinas are only paid .55 cents to the dollar of […]

The post Yo Quiero Dinero! Storytelling with Midwest Mujeres appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is joined by scholar Marc Becker to talk about the Trump Administration’s rapidly escalating attacks on Venezuela. He puts the strikes on boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the context of Venezuela’s oil economy and Latin American politics.

Venezuela is considered to have the world’s largest oil reserves which leads many mainstream news sources to call the country the wealthiest in Latin America. But Becker says that wealth is poorly distributed. Under the presidency of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela was successful at redistributing that oil wealth. However, the US has worked to remove Chavez and more recently Nicolás Maduro from power. Even the media circulates narratives that these left-wing leaders have “illegitimate” power.

They also talk about how the US embargo has had a catastrophic effect on the Venezuelan economy, how the US might be gearing up for attacks on Cuba, Chinese policy in Latin and South America, and the Ineligibility of María Corina Machado in the recent Venezuelan elections.

Marc Becker is professor of history at Truman State University. He studies the Latin American left with a particular interest in race, class, and gender within popular movements in the South American Andes. Among other works, he is the author of Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022); The CIA in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020); The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (Duke University Press, 2017); and Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (Duke University Press, 2008. He has served on the executive committees and has been web editor of the Peace History Society (PHS) and Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-Pad). Becker is currently working on a project on Philip Agee and the CIA in Ecuador in the early 1960s.

Featured image of a mural outside a Venezuelan state-owned oil and gas company from 2009 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The post Oil Motivates US Attacks on Venezuela appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Earlier this week, the Atlanta City Council approved an addition $31 million dollars for the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. This was after more than 16 hours […]

The post Cop City Explained with George Chidi appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

More than 3,800 Starbucks baristas have joined a nationwide strike since mid-November. They’re demanding increased staffing, more predictable hours, and better wages. To talk about the exploitation of service workers like baristas, host Allen Ruff is joined by Annie McClanahan who says that the struggle of Starbucks workers to get a fair contract is very common across low-wage service work.

More than 80% of the nation’s workforce is in the service sector. It’s made up of doctors, lawyers, and restaurant workers, all united in the ways that their labor can’t be scaled up, automated, or outsourced. McClanahan describes how this sector also includes 75% of the folks earning minimum wage or sub-minimum wage, folks who are more likely to live below the poverty line and less likely to be protected from maximum hour or minimum wage protections. Because service work doesn’t produce a “product” in a classical sense and because this labor is often racialized and feminized, service work is excluded from labor reforms and regulations.

McClanahan outlines a few ways that service workers become prey to “super-exploitation” – through intensifying and surveilling technologies and through the informalization of policies and contracts. The result is that service workers get stuck in what McClanahan calls “reproductive rifts” where people who deliver groceries can’t afford groceries, or people who provide childcare can’t afford their own childcare.

McClanahan says that conceptualizations of capitalism that are tied to industrial manufacturing are complicated by the rise of the service sector, which requires a different relationship between wages and technology. They also talk about the outsized influence of the National Restaurant Association and the difference between gig work and the service industry, namely that gig workers aren’t paid hourly but through wage algorithms that are black boxed. Gig work draws on traditions of tipped work but adds to it forms of technological exploitation from wage algorithms and GPS systems, management by app, and the targeting of migrant workers for this kind of labor.

Meanwhile, rank and file Starbucks workers are making demands. And McClanahan says that service workers are drawing on tactics of domestic worker unions that aren’t just about wages, but about rent control, mutual aid, and more.

Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. She writes about U.S. popular culture, political economy, and contemporary capitalism and is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture. Her second book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work, is forthcoming in 2026.

Featured image of Starbucks workers rally and march in 2022 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The post From Tips to Gigs to the Picket Line appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

“The Philippines is under a new administration, but still the government’s case against de Lima hobbles along, a symbol of the country’s degradation from the Duterte years of violent populism […]

The post Timothy McLaughlin on Leila de Lima and the cost of criticism in The P... appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

This week marks the 1-year anniversary of the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. Meanwhile the search for the Brown University shooter is ongoing. To talk about these events and the ongoing crisis of school shootings across the US, host Ali Muldrow is joined by Dr. David Riedman who tracks these shootings and the online communities that foster gun violence.

Dr. Riedman takes an evidence-driven approach to the study of school shootings. He’s tracked 3,400 shootings back to the 1960s, including 226 of which were deliberately planned. He says there are some common denominators when it comes to shootings: the vast majority are committed by a current or recently former student who has likely experienced abuse in their home, has easy access to a gun, and has shown signs of distress, like leaving weapons out, leaving out maps of their schools, and making shrines to previous school shooters. These realities may run counter to the desire to view school shooters as deranged, lone-wolf outsiders. Instead, Dr. Riedman calls the majority of school shootings “violent public suicides.”

They also talk about the stereotype that public and urban schools are more dangerous than private, rural, or suburban schools, even though the majority of school shootings occur in small suburban communities and rural schools. Dr. Riedman advises that parents be educated about past school shootings in order to spot signs that kids are becoming radicalized by online communities like the True Crime Community (TCC) and Groyper movement, led by white nationalist influencer, Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile young people in Wisconsin have been calling for better mental health resources and better gun storage laws.

Dr. David Riedman is the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database and hosts the podcast Back to School Shootings.

Featured image of students from Des Moines Public Schools participating in the National School Walkout to end gun violence in 2018 by Phil Roeder on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

The post The Tragic Repetition of School Shootings appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Sold in headshops and on the grey market, “spice” or K2 is a way to get high while avoiding showing up on a drug test. Whether or not they’re legal […]

The post Synthetic Cannabinoids, the Analogue Act, and an Unprecedented Prosecu... appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Currently, Wisconsin and Arkansas are the only two states that have not expanded healthcare coverage for new moms. On today’s show, host Dana Pellebon speaks with ProPublica reporter, Megan O’Matz, about her investigation into Robin Vos’s rejection of postpartum Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin.

Even though there is bipartisan support in the Wisconsin legislature to expand Medicaid coverage for up to a year for low-income new moms, Robin Vos has blocked a bill that would do just that. O’Matz reports that Vos broke with other anti-abortion members of his party and that this decision is timed with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She calls it hypocritical not to give new moms healthcare past two months and claim you’re “pro-life” because the early months after birth are a vulnerable period when parents often need ongoing medication and treatment. O’Matz also tracks the influence of business interests on Vos’s decision, including the Uihlein family’s financial contributions to the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee.

They also talk about O’Matz’s most recent article on Sen. Ron Johnson’s support of a discredited Wisconsin doctor whose new book on chlorine dioxide–a bleaching agent used as a disinfectant and deodorizer–spreads misinformation. Sen. Johnson has written a blurb on the book’s dust jacket and has joined the doctor on panels on vaccine skepticism even though chlorine dioxide is not a drug or a medicine approved for therapeutic use. O’Matz says that we’re in a place where people don’t trust the CDC and that studies cited in Dr. Kory’s book are not scientifically rigorous.

O’Matz says that she got her start in Florida, where open records laws support journalists’ work of keeping elected officials accountable. However the newspaper industry has been contracting over the years due to influence from media conglomerates. She’s now with ProPublica, a nonprofit, independent newsroom that seeks to deliver a level of accountability to readers by reporting on how people with power use it. They rely on open records, data, and fact checking to foster reader trust.

Megan O’Matz is a ProPublica reporter covering issues in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. She has been with ProPublica since 2021 and writes about voting processes in Wisconsin, a swing state, as well as stories about family court, prosecutorial blunders and predatory lending. She has also worked at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. She and her colleagues were finalists for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for stories about widespread fraud in federal disaster aid programs after a series of devastating hurricanes. She also shared in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the failures of school administrators and police officers in connection with the Parkland school shooting.

Featured image of a pregnant person holding their belly via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

The post One Man Stalled Healthcare Expansion For New Moms appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.