Between the pyrotechnics at the UN General Assembly, Chinese Xi Jinping’s state visit and the ongoing war with Iran, global affairs were front and center this week.
Joining me were Washington Sun senior editor and Washington correspondent David Levinthal, Egberto Willies, host of Politics Done Right on KPFT, and political scientist and Out-FM co-host here on WBAI, Pauline Park, sitting in for Laura Jadeed who is out on assignment.
Then in the B Block, we looked at artificial intelligence. The technology isn't just writing emails or generating pictures anymore. It's increasingly being incorporated into warfare and policing.
We Decide media editor Jesse Lent speaks with journalist Mila Halgren and sociologist Dr. Christopher Schneider about AI-assisted military technology, surveillance, facial recognition and even AI-generated police reports, and what happens when those systems get something wrong.
Then in our second hour, the Wallace Global Fund is taking an unusual approach to philanthropy: rather than preserve its endowment indefinitely, the foundation plans to spend it down and direct the money toward organizations working on democracy, human rights, sustainability and corporate accountability.
“Democracy is under siege by authoritarian forces, the upper tier of the economy is swelling with riches at the expense of the people, and the accelerating climate crisis is making our planet a less healthy and more dangerous place,” according to WGF.
We spoke with the fund's co-chair Scott Wallace, Henry Wallace’s grandson, his grandfather Henry Wallace, one of FDR’s vice presidents and a leading progressive voice of the era. Wallace warned in a New York Times in 1944 in a op-ed entitled "The Danger of American Fascism" that "a fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends."
Prescient words written over 80 years ago.
And in the D Block, we covered a major settlement for New York City's delivery workers. More than 260,000 DoorDash workers are set to receive a share of more than $115 million after a city investigation found violations of New York's delivery-worker laws. We'll hear from Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su.
In our Moral Monday segment, Bob Hennelly asks Bishop William Barber about the potential power of the nation’s tens of millions of low wage and low wealth voters if they voted.
Barber notes that the present Republican majority in the House only prevailed by 7,000 votes in the aggregate.
We finish up with Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents over 100,000 technical workers in the US and Canada, including 30,000 federal workers.
Last week, the Trump administration settled ongoing litigation by agreeing to no longer use government shutdowns over the budget as a pretext for massive layoffs, something that did happened to 4,200 workers at agencies like the EPA, Commerce and Education as well as several others.
“Only an administration that wanted to hurt workers and help billionaires would use a government shutdown as a cynical pretext to fire tens of thousands of federal employees,” AFT president Randi Weingarten told Common Dreams.
