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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, February 9, 2025 10:00 am 1:00:12
Host:
Meleiza Figueroa
Guests:
David Cobb, Kali Akuno
Topics
Fighting Trump's Administrative Coup
We are just a few weeks into Trump's shock and awe horror show, with a whirlwind of attacks on immigrants, transgender people, tribal nations, people of color, and women. Government institutions are being dismantled, and the administrative coup is well underway. Meleiza Figueroa talks to Kali Akuno and David Keith Cobb about the nature of this current historical conjuncture, and what they have been doing to prepare the people for this very moment.
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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, February 2, 2025 10:00 am 1:00:11
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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:00 am 0:56:51
Guests:
Victor Narro, Nana Gyamfi, Aquilina Soriano-Versoza
Topics
building defense against Trump’s xenophobic policies
President Trump is back in power and immediately moved to carry out his xenophobic, cruel, hateful and racist policies with a slew of unconstitutional executive orders and plans for mass detention and deportation of the nation’s immigrants. We talk to three extraordinary activists whose organizations and coalitions are building effective solidarity and defense for the about to be detained and deported. Victor Narro, UCLA’s long time expert on immigrant rights and low wage workers, works in the sanctuary movement; Nana Gyamfi of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI); and Aquilina Soriano-Versoza of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California explain what their Black, Latino and Filipino led and focused coalitions are doing to counter the Trump offensive against immigrants. This is practical solidarity that builds power -- and it is moving and uplifting.
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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, January 19, 2025 10:00 am 1:00:07
Guest:
Mike Davis
Topic
California Burning
Catastrophic firestorms have wiped out the LA neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and much of Altadena. More than ever we miss the sagacity of Mike Davis, who died in October, 2022.
On today’s Beneath the Surface with Suzi Weissman we feature Mike’s October 2020 lecture to UMass Amherst’s Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, moderated by Vijay Prashad.
October, as Southern Californians know, is the month of the Santa Ana winds, and Mike began his lecture talking about the 4 million acres of forest burned in what he called the fire year from hell, an almost unimaginable ordeal, in his words, though the Santa Ana winds had not yet begun to blow like dry hurricanes.
Though Mike couldn’t imagine the burning of downtown Altadena, or the destruction of the Palisades, Mike knew the outline of the firestorms and disasters to come, and he begins his lecture quoting Ward Moore’s 1947 sci-fi novel "Greener Than You Think" that describes the nightmare devil grass, the monstrous new nature swallowing up everything in its path, replacing native land cover and creating the flammable understory of our fires.
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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, January 12, 2025 10:00 am 1:00:11
Guest:
Mike Davis
Topics
2018 & 2021 Apocalyptic Firestorms from CA to the Paciic NW
Our hearts go out to everyone affected by the multiple wildfires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area over the past several days, and which continue to threaten new areas as Santa Ana winds surge anew in a bone-dry landscape. We’ll share some important local resources for fire survivors below.
This week, we dig into the archives to bring you highlights from Suzi’s interviews with the clearest, most prescient and prophetic writer on wildfires in California: Mike Davis. It’s been nearly 30 years since Mike Davis published his infamous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” in 1996 – a starkly honest look at the fire-dependent geography of LA’s exurban communities and the tragedies that result from unchecked real estate development in high fire hazard areas. At the time of its publication, Mike Davis faced an enormous amount of backlash and criticism from the mainstream media and city boosters. But in the 3 decades since, especially with climate change driving more intense and more destructive fires in CA, reality seems to have not only confirmed his insights, but perhaps even gone beyond his predictions, with this unprecedented January urban firestorm that Mike – who passed away in 2022 – may not even have imagined.
We begin with Suzi’s interview with Mike Davis in 2018, during the last big Fireswildfire in Malibu, the Woolsey Fire. At the time, Paradise was also burning 500 miles north in the Camp Fire – which, until this week, was the most destructive wildfire in the state's history in terms of structural damage and loss of homes. Mike compares and contrasts this “tale of two fires” and two communities with very different class characteristics – much like Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Then, we go to an interview from 2021, during a wave of apocalyptic wildfires that consumed forests from CA to the Pacific Northwest, where Mike talks specifically about the implications of climate change for wildfires and their destructive power in the wildland-urban interface, and how the solution to this urgent problem and preventing further tragedy requires a radical decolonizing of the land, our cities, and ourselves.
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RESOURCES FOR LA FIRE SURVIVORS:
https://211LA.org for information on shelter and short term rentals
LA Recorder's Office (to replace property and vital documents):
800-201-8999 (select option 1, then 2)
Los Angeles Mutual Aid Network - https://MutualAidLA.org
Interactive Map of Fire Relief Resources - https://FireAid.info
In-Person FEMA Assistance at LA County Libraries: Jan 12 & 13 9am-5pm https://lacountylibrary.org/fema/
Octavia's Bookshelf (mutual aid pit stop for Historic Black Altadena): https://www.instagram.com/octavias_bookshelf/?hl=en
Monetary donations for Altadena: https://friendsindeedpas.org
Paul Stephens
I heard there were fires in Studio City. Was your house spared?
27
Beneath The Surface
Sunday, January 5, 2025 10:00 am 1:00:12
Guests:
Nancy Fraser, Trevor Ngwane, Patrick Bond
Topic
Critical questions for the global left
We have featured many presentations from the recent conference held in honor of Boris Kagarlitsky, author of "The Long Retreat," a sobering analysis of the international Left that was discussed in our previous episode, and currently a prisoner in Russia for speaking out against Putin’s war in Ukraine.

We continue with Trevor Ngwane, a South African scholar-activist at the University of Johannesburg, and Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research, who bring to the table some difficult truths and critical questions for the global Left.

After brief introductory comments from Patrick Bond, Trevor Ngwane outlines the brutal history of South Africa’s turn to neoliberalism and its consequences — widespread suffering and deepening despair among ordinary people as well as a political crisis in the African National Congress. He asks what it will take to revitalize the vibrant, militant, working-class movements that once overthrew apartheid.

Nancy Fraser then reflects on Kagarlitsky’s analysis of the chaotic political reality we face today, and raises three central strategic questions for the Left and mass politics: How can we engage with actually existing social forces towards positive social change? How do we navigate the geopolitics of war and migration in mass movement organizing? And what could a transformative working-class movement even look like in the 21st century?

Guest host Meleiza Figueroa and Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, follow with a discussion of the critical insights and questions brought up by Trevor Ngwane and Nancy Fraser, and consider what this means for American politics at this particular moment in history, as we face a new year filled with uncertainty, political confusion, and deepening crisis.
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Beneath The Surface
Sunday, December 29, 2024 10:00 am 1:00:12
13
Beneath The Surface
Sunday, December 22, 2024 10:00 am 1:00:11
Guests:
Bill Fletcher Jr, Alex Callinicos, Jayati Ghosh
Topics
Kagarlitsky's critique of today's left in "The Long Retreat"
Preesntations from the conference in honor of Boris Kagarlitsky -- who is languishing in Putin’s prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. Today we bring you the panel from the conference discussing Boris’s latest book, The Long Retreat, published while he was in prison. Three distinguished leftist activist-scholars, Bill Fletcher Jr , Alex Callinicos, and Jayati Ghosh present their appreciation and their critiques of Kagarlitsky’s analysis and account of the rise of the right and the decline of the left over the last 40+ years. Our speakers address Kagarlitsky’s clear sighted, brutally honest and internationalist account of the global left parties and formations today that cannot come to terms with new realities, but rather simply try to re-enact the past. They also address Kagarlitsky’s lucid critique of an identitarian politics of difference which makes forming broad mass political projects very difficult. We get their analyses, informed by their own substantive experience and writing.
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