(photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)
This week on CounterSpin: Paul Stair was a manager at a government land bank in Flint, Michigan, who resigned after he was caught on tape by a local activist saying the problem in Flint, site of the ongoing water contamination crisis, was: “Niggers don’t pay their bills.”
The point of the environmental justice movement is that you don’t need a Paul Stair. Flint could have protected its residents; the reasons they didn’t have everything to do with the race and class of the community, and their political voicelessness. For years, the existence of that sort of inequity, and the idea that it needs rectifying, had at least nominal government support; but now all bets are off. We’ll talk about Flint and the recent history of environmental justice policy with ProPublica reporter Talia Buford.
Transcript: You’re in Danger of Ignoring an Entire Section of the Population
(cc photo: David Holt)
Also on the show: Legislators might be backing off something called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which the ACLU said looked a lot like an unconstitutional assault on First Amendment rights. But there’s a lot of confusion about what the Act, introduced in both houses, would allow for, and why we should we be concerned—and US corporate media aren’t really the place to look for clarity. We’ll hear what’s going on from Josh Ruebner, policy director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Transcript: Boycotts to Achieve Political Change Are Forms of Political Speech
It is good to hear about the good done under President Obama in regards to environmental justice. Considering his main legacy at this point appears to be indirectly insuring the election of someone who intends to overturn all of his policies, we should recall what limited good he was able to do.
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BDS
A great many of the natives who are indigenous to Palestine, they have ancestors who occupied Palestine going back over 6,000 years. On the other hand, Jews originally came to the Promised Land in BC 1405, occupied it for only 832 years and then all Jews were exiled to Babylon. A minority of Jews later returned, but in AD 70 the Roman Empire leveled all of Jerusalem flat to the ground and not until 1910 did the Jewish population in Palestine exceed 6%.
So, the white European settlers who have invaded Palestine to commit a second genocide and steal land at gunpoint, they now want laws passed that declare both of their genocides and all of their land theft to be honorable acts of self-defense.