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Just what’s wrong with the police? In recent years, on both sides of the border, we’ve seen the “boys in blue” come to resemble more a menacing occupier than your grandfather’s friendly beat-walker. Maybe it’s television, or the age we live in, but there’s definitely been an attitudinal sea change.
My first guest can attest, and has attested in his LA Times political cartoon column, to the blue-to-black approach to “community” policing. It’s a strange coincidence perhaps, that a personal account he wrote of abuse at the hands of the LAPD nearly fifteen years ago has escalated into a career threatening smear campaign against the vociferous critic of the “zero-tolerance” age we live in.
Ted Rall is the Pulitzer Prize-finalist; a journalist who having done his job at the LA Times calling out hypocrisy on both sides of American politics so well, now finds himself kicked off that venerable broadsheet with few allies.
Rall is more though than just a cartoonist in the LA Times’ syndication stable, he’s also a political cartoonist at ANewDomain.net, editor-in-chief of SkewedNews.net, and a prolific graphic artist and author, whose books include: ‘After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,’ ‘To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue,’ ‘The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,’ and many more. His latest, just released title, ‘Snowden,’ is an illustrated biography of America’s most wanted man, whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Ted Rall in the first half.
And; last month, Haiti made, according to the Organization of American States, a great “step forward” in holding long-delayed parliamentary elections. But was it the forward step the OAS would like the World to believe? Amid calls for investigations for massive vote suppression, ballot stealing and ballot-box stuffing, intimidation, violence and even murder it seems, if Haiti is moving it is in a direction leading down its well-worn path to despotism dressed as democracy in the service of trans-national capital as overseen by a ruthless local elite.
Kevin Pina is an American filmmaker, journalist, educator, and broadcaster with Pacifica Radio’s public affairs program, Flashpoints. Pina’s film credits include: ‘El Salvador: In the Name of Democracy,’ ‘Berkeley in the Sixties,’ ‘Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest,’ ‘Haiti: Harvest of Hope,’ ‘Haiti: The UNtold Story,’ and ‘HAITI: We Must Kill the Bandits.’ Kevin has lived in and reported from Haiti, and was jailed by the infamous Baby Doc Duvalier for reporting on the abuses of that nefarious regime.
Kevin Pina and a faux democracy deja vu in Haiti in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what’s good going on on our streets and beyond there too. But first, Ted Rall and the life and death of an LA Times column.
