Counterpoint with Scott Harris
1) Tiffany Muller, President & Executive Director of the group End Citizens United discusses the debate/negotiations over the two proposed infrastructure bills, with a focus on the role played by the deregulation of political campaign contributions, and her group’s work to reverse the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
2) Bob Lord, an attorney and Tax Counsel with Americans For Tax Fairness discusses “The Pandora Papers,” a global investigation that exposed billionaires around the world involved in aggressively concealing their assets and tax avoidance.
3) Ted Lewis, Human Rights Program Director at Global Exchange discusses the recent testimony of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen before Congress describing the social media platform’s destructive internal policies, the debate over new regulations covering social media — and the Facebook Users Union’s #FireZuck campaign.
4) Luis Luna, an organizer with the Connecticut Working Families Party talks about WFP’s recent Teach In: Advocating for Housing at the Local Level as well as some of the other projects the group is working on.
Monday, October 11, 8 pm and archived.
Tidings from Hazel Kahan
Accounts of the Partition that created India and Pakistan on August 15, 1947, have usually been framed by academics in partisan terms — either a crime against Hindus by Muslims or a crime against Muslims by Hindus — that left behind three million dead and 14 million refugees who lost their homes, their land and a coherent identity. Official accounts of Partition inevitably include iconic images of trains, their every surface obscured by frantic fleeing people and iconic stories of trainloads of dead, decapitated Muslim bodies dispatched across the border from Amritsar to Lahore while equivalently gruesome trainloads arrived in Amritsar from Lahore. Headline credit in the Partition story goes to the British whose hasty departure and inadequate handover preparations led to much of the unfolding brutality. Yet, palpably missing from the story until now, are the voices of those who experienced Partition, people now in their 70s, 80s, and older who experienced the catastrophe as children and survived to bear witness today. Until, that is, my guest, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, began the urgent task of recording these oral histories that now number almost 10,000 in the monumental and ongoing project that became the 1947 Partition Archive.
Wednesday, October 13, 7:30 pm and archived.