Episode 1367
Producing Amazon workers / Panos Theodoropoulos
Jul 21 2021
Many of us don't realize that access to death records is not something protected by our constitution. It depends on what state you live in. If you look across the 50 states of the US, there are states that don't allow people to get access to death records unless you are the next of kin. Even if you get those records, it's not always the case that those records are going to reveal the truth of what happened. I think perhaps more nefarious and difficult is we in this nation hold terrible ideas about people on the wrong side of the law. We often don't want to admit it, but we often believe that when people get arrested or go to jail and they lose their lives or they become sick or ill, we feel they deserved it somehow.
Terence Keel returns to discuss his new book from Beacon Press, The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Jul 8 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Up here in Antrim County, MI, there’s a rumor afoot that the founder of the Friske family orchards was a real live runaway Nazi. Well, not really a rumor at this point. He was a pilot for Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
But for a long time, it’s said, he used to refer to himself merely as a WWII veteran. Maybe to avoid the bad association some folks have with those who fought on behalf of the Third Reich. And I don’t blame the guy for concealing it. US citizens – those who call themselves “Americans”—are a bigoted bunch. There was a time when resentment of Germans was so strong here, people changed the word “sauerkraut” to “liberty cabbage” in casual conversation. And what could be more casual than talking about fermented shredded cabbage?
So, somehow, Richard Friske, who arrived in the US with his wife, Olga, in 1952, figured that in order to better disguise his German Nazi fliegendermann background, he could do worse than to don the mantle of US neo-Nazi, so he joined the John Birch Society, supported George Wallace for president in ’68, and got his entire family to be rabid nativists. The Friskes donate to David Duke, Rick Santorum and a number of other brainless spewers of hate against immigrants, homosexuals, and uppity city slickers like yours truly.
People up here still tell about the Friske’s no-mask policy during the pandemic lockdown. One letter to the editor of The Petoskey News-Review vowed never to return after seeing the workers in the kitchen handling food unmasked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was part of Friske’s policy “of allowing staff and customers to make personal choices regarding their health.” It sounds like they want us to be able to pick our own doctors, or maybe get an abortion should we choose one, but really they just want to give everyone the freedom to spread whatever infections they might be harboring.
The letter-writer concludes by mourning that they will never again enjoy the taste of Friske’s cherry doughnuts. The ones in the brown paper bag with grease stains indicating freshness.
Friske’s wasn’t just a passive spreader of the virus. They’ve held a couple super-spreader events in their parking lot, to bawl and whinge about the tyranny of the face mask mandate and how Democrats were out... read more