On August 26, 2010, The Train interviewed renowned aboriginal rights activist Rev. Kevin Annett by phone in Vancouver.
We reviewed Kevin's activism but mostly we described a recent and ongoing conflict between Kevin and Vancouver Co-op Radio in which the radio executives have use a harsh legalistic approach to trespass Kevin off the premises while publicly stating that his radio show is not being canceled.
The situation has been summarized by Kevin Annett HERE.
On August 19, 2010, The Train interviewed train driver (in North America read "train engineer") Peter Laux by phone from Melbourne, Australia. It was 7am the next day for Peter and there were still no measurable effects of anthropogenic CO2-driven global warming.
The dynamic and wide ranging conversation covered Australian working class skepticism of global warming, green psychology, Richard Nixon's "war on cancer", environmental protection as government ploy, Australian regional climate changes, trade unionism, energy technology, energy politics, DDT criminalization as racism, and much more...
On August 12, 2010, The Train phone interviewed two Kingston-based organizers of the resistance against the Harper government's closures of all six Canadian prison farms. These farms have been providing food and meaningful work to prisoners for 100 years.
Both our guests, biochemistry technologist Patrick Thompson and RMC university professor Michael Hurley, were arrested on Monday along with dozens of others practicing a weekend blockade to stop the sale of the Kingston (Ontario) prison farm dairy cows. Also arrested were a grandmother in her eighties and a youth in her early teens.
After his arrest, Professor Hurley (aged 60) refused to sign an undertaking that would have removed his constitutional right to protest and was therefore forced to spend a sleepless night in holding conditions that can only be described as inhuman.
Both activists were upbeat and felt empowered by their recent discovery of solidarity via direct action dissent, following a long road of all the usual government subversions of democracy.
On August 5, 2010, we interviewed two members of the Ottawa-based OCTranspo Transit Riders' Union: New member and University of Ottawa student Nate (in-studio) and founding member and Carleton University student Ashton (by phone from Winnipeg).
It's all about access. The bus riders' union wants to work with both transit clients and the drivers' union to eliminate all exclusion based on class, income, neighbourhood, disability, race, gender... The union is based on the principle that transportation is an essential service to which all users must have no barriers to access.
Posts
