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Welcome to ClassWars, the home of Activist Radio, a weekly program for all Americans who are not in the wealthiest one percent of the US population.

Class wars have been going on since the beginning of recorded history. As societies become more powerful and wealthy, they often become more corrupt. At the end of each cycle, a few rich families own practically everything and rule with an iron fist. Military overexpansion with its endless wars, another trademark of a debased and undemocratic society, often brings about great poverty and suffering.

Class wars is a dirty term in our media, which always implies that America is above such crudeness. But the very rich are not above that at all. They have been waging an especially intense attack on working people since the 1970's, and have accumulated immense wealth and power at the expense of the rest of us.

Of course, class wars are not fought with tanks and bombs, but with crooked politicians, right wing think tanks and corporate owned media. For the very rich to maintain and increase their share of the national wealth, they have to fool you. How else could one percent of our population call the shots for ninety-nine percent?

Activist Radio will attempt to show you how the few richest of our citizens lie to the rest of us to expand their power and wealth. They are sick with greed, of course. But so far, the rest of us are what might be worse, and that is stupid. None of the information presented is particularly new or really very hard to find, although you won't read it in the mainstream press or see it on TV. If that is what you are relying on for news, you are being suckered, my friend. I don't know how to put it any nicer.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Activist Radio every Thursday from 5:00 to 6:00 PM on WVKR in Poughkeepsie (91.3 FM). And if the word spreads that the emperor has no clothes and you want to be entertained from another part of the globe, point your browser to:

WVKR streamed on the web

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Tunein Radio app for smartphones

Recent stories on Activist Radio may have you thinking about some important issues. Put another way, you could be wondering if most of what we say is totally made up, since you probably haven't heard it on TV. But here are some links on stories we have done. Get the full stories on:

Fantasyland Media

News fashioned by the people in charge,
the corporations and your government.
Each week, we cover the stories that are
just left out of the US propaganda machine.

Thousands gather to
protect the OWS encampment.


Dahr Jamail and Gary


Fred and Gary with Pete Seeger


Kathy Kelly and Gary


Thanks to Martha for this time
on the set of Democracy Now.


Fred and Gary on the air

Listen to recent shows
by clicking on the date.

Works with your smartphone too. You can listen to just part of the show by right-clicking the date and downloading or saving the linked file.

GUEST: Brendan Fischer, law fellow and reporter for The Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch, talks about how corporations shape public policy through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

PR Watch, Center for Media and Democracy
Buying lawmakers in Wisconsin

SONG: Nina Simone, Silk & Soul...I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
SONG: John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band...Working Class Hero

GUEST: Jo Salas, Cofounder of Playback Theatre and Artistic Director at Hudson River Playback Theatre, talks about her recent trip to the West Bank to work with The Freedom Theatre in Jenin.

Playback Theatre
Hudson River Playback Theatre
Hudson to West Bank Blog
The Freedom Theater in Jenin
Let's Get The Freedom Bus On The Road!

SONG: Eliza Gilkyson, Roses At the End of Time...Roses At the End of Time
SONG: Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman, One Man Revolution...Battle Hymns

GUEST: Laurie Arbeiter, member of The Critical Voice, an affinity group of Artists Against the War who organized the We Will Not Be Silent T-shirt campaign, talks about a local twenty two mile walk for human rights and social/economic justice.

Wall Street to Main Street Exhibition
Wall Street to Main Street -We Will Not Be Silent
We Will Not Be Silent T-shirts

GUEST: Max Fraad Wolff, nationally known economist who has appeared on BBC, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Democracy Now!, talks about the hidden destruction of the middle class. (recorded at Occupy Northern Dutchess)

2012: A Political Economy Year
Why So Unstable?

SONG: Bruce Springsteen, Tracks...Roulette
SONG: Chumbawamba, A Singsong and a Scrap...Bella Ciao

GUEST: Harold Miller, community organizer and Upstate Director of New York Communities for Change, talks about his divestment campaign aimed at JP Morgan Chase.

NY Communities for Change
Race and pre-foreclosure notices
Avoid Foreclosure: New York

SONG: Weavers, Let Freedom Sing - This Land Is Your Land II...Which Side Are You On?
SONG: Allison Moorer, The People Speak...Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
SONG: Anne Feeney, Have You Been to Jail for Justice?...The Rich Man's House

Fred and Gary take on local Dutchess County issues like segregated schools and major companies that fire workers while paying their CEOs tens of millions in salary.

Pete Seeger Hosts Voices of Hope Concert
The New Jim Crow

SONG: Nanci Griffith, The Loving Kind...The Loving Kind
SONG: Andrew Bean and David Holmes...Great American Foreclosure Song

Click below to bring up Activist Radio in iTunes:

Some Favorite Lies
of the Very Rich

  1. Class wars don't exist in America, the land of the free. (The very rich have taken the rest of us to the cleaners, especially since the mid 1970's. Democracy in America has become little more than a useful fiction.)
  2. The two party system promotes the will of the people. (Both parties are paid for by the major corporations, leaving the people with very little power to change domestic or foreign policy.)
  3. Multinational Corporations encourage free enterprise. (They spend most of their time getting handouts from governments while trying to eliminate workers' rights and environmental regulations through "free" trade.)
  4. The billions spent on defense contracts make Americans safer. (Most defense contracts are no-bid, billion dollar scams. Of the first world countries, only America spends so much on weaponry that there is nothing left over for the poor and middle class: no education, no health care, and no housing.)
  5. High drug costs are necessary to pay for research. (Most drug profits go towards advertising and CEO stock options. Other first world countries, like Canada, control drug prices.)
  6. Charter schools increase the quality of the nation's education. (Charter schools allow corporations to control what students learn, while draining dollars from public schools.)
  7. Environmental destruction is necessary for growth. (It is only necessary for huge profits, earned mostly by putting the health of the poor and middle class at risk.)
  8. US Foreign policy is used to spread democracy and to make the world a safer place. (Most US policy is military action aimed at countries that threaten corporate profits. In America, the poor fight the wars, the middle class pays for them, and the very rich make out like the bandits they are.)
  9. Health care can't include everyone in our country. (Every other developed country in the world has universal health care. And it cost them a lot less to do a much better job.)
  10. Social Security needs reform to save it. (Social Security is good for another 40 years, and with a little more paid by top earners, good forever. That is if we can keep Wall Street thieves from getting their hands on it.)
  11. Obama represents change we can believe in. (By altering the face of corporate domination, the elites hope to keep things just about the same. It is change they can believe in: no change at all.)


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We have been added to the British site
www.WorthBroadcasting.org

Crony capitalists have always been with us.
Here is Boss Tweed of New York's Tammany
Hall sometime in the 1860's.


The profits of war have always influenced
American foreign policy. A decade of conflict
has robbed workers of a trillion dollars.

Milton Friedman, guru of deregulation and self interest, made millionaires into billionaires by robbing everyone else.

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
This land was made for you and me.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people --
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me.

WOODY G. (Feb. 23, 1940)
I see in the future a crisis approaching that fills me with anxiety. As a result of the war, corporations have become enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its rule by preying upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is concentrated in a few hands and the Republic destroyed.

Abraham Lincoln
And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society.

Benito Mussolini
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
A revolution is a class struggle. It was one class - the oppressed, and that other class - the oppressor.

Fred Hampton
Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that--not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor--is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

Howard Zinn
The clinical definition of “fascism” is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

Ralph Nader
There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.

Warren Buffet
This ($700 billion bailout) was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country.

Dennis Kucinich
I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.

Naomi Klein
The effect of the (European Central Bank) policies is to weaken the welfare state measures and to reduce the power of labor. That’s class war. It’s fine for the banks, for financial institutions, but terrible for the population.

Noam Chomsky


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