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Activism, politics, and beer from PA-based Raging Chicken Press
Episodes
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
On this week’s show...we attempt to get our feet firmly planted in this timestream with a themed show: “This playing nice shit ain’t cutting it.” That little ditty comes by the way of a striking miner in Alabama and it’s a phrase we could all do well to get used to integrating in our political organizing. Today we talk about Texas Dems leaving their state en masse to prevent new voter suppression legislation; Biden’s Philadelphia speech on voting rights; PASSHE Board of Governors voting to move forward with meeting 6 universities into 2; the coal miners’ strike in Alabama; and, we get to hear a little bit about Cyril’s new column (now released) on critical race theory. It’s a show not to be missed!
- Cyril’s latest column: “Anti-Critical Race Theory hysteria revives McCarthyism, Klan politics.”
- Subscribe to Cyril’s newsletter on substack: https://cyrilmychalejko.substack.com/
- Support striking mine workers. Contribute to their strike fund HERE.
Monday Jul 12, 2021
Monday Jul 12, 2021
We're back from vacation and so much is going on. The vote on PASSHE consolidation is looming. Haiti's president just got whacked. Teachers are getting fired for teaching diversity. Sir Richard Branson launches into space with civilian passengers. Summer reading. So, much. We're opening up our phones through Riverside.fm (details below). We'd love to hear what's going on on your end of things!
During the live show, I'll announce when we'll be taking calls. If you want to call into the show, you should join the show on Riverside.fm and turn the volume off on YouTube, otherwise you'll get a delay and feedback.
You can join the show, Monday 7/12/21 @ 7pm using this link: https://riverside.fm/studio/out-dcoup-live
Here's info for how it works from Riverside.fm: https://support.riverside.fm/en/articles/4666206-live-call-in
Friday Jul 09, 2021
Friday Jul 09, 2021
This is a special rebroadcast of our interview with whistleblower Colleen Bradley - former Vice President of Administration & Finance at West Chester University - and her lawyer, Dan Kearney. This is a follow up from last week's show from Raging Chicken's documentary about her case. Here's the description from the original podcast on March 29, 2018:
***
On today’s Out d’Coup Xtra, Kevin Mahoney interviews Colleen Bradley and her lawyer, Dan Kearney, about her whistleblower case that is knocking on the door of the U.S. Supreme Court. Colleen Bradley was the former Director of Budget and Financial Planning at West Chester University who blew the whistle in 2014 about fraudulent budget practices at WCU and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. When she outed the fraud to the university community, she was fired. Bradley’s suit initially appeared to be a textbook case of an employer retaliating against an employee for blowing the whistle on corruption and financial malpractice. However, the U.S. Third Circuit Court denied Bradley First Amendment whistleblower protection in a manner that threatens to dramatically narrow whistleblower protections for every public employee in the nation. Bradley is in the process of filing a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court’s decision.
If the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to review the lower court’s decision, the rights of public employees - and all potential whistleblowers - will be gutted.
Raging Chicken Press reported on Colleen Bradley’s case when she filed her 62-page complaint against West Chester University and PASSHE in 2015. The documents Bradley filed confirmed Raging Chicken’s ongoing reporting on PASSHE’s dishonest and deceptive budgeting schemes (e.g. “Wall Street on the Susquehanna”; “PASSHE’s Austerity Magic”; and, “The Persistence of Crisis at KU”). Her case also provided concrete evidence in support of an independent audit commissioned by the faculty union APSCUF in late 2014, which raised concerned about PASSHE’s creative accounting practices. And yet, despite reams of evidence, the people responsible for the fraud at West Chester and other PASSHE universities have not been held accountable and, as the recently released “Bunsis Report” showed, the same deceptive practices continue.
And now, PASSHE’s decision to retaliate against Colleen Bradley for blowing the whistle on their deceptions has the additional consequence of putting all future whistleblowers at risk. Today’s Out d’Coup Xtra focuses on the legal issues at stake in her First Amendment whistleblower case.
Wednesday Jul 07, 2021
Wednesday Jul 07, 2021
This week Cyril is flying solo! Today, Cyril talks to locally grown Progressive from Bucks County Rotimi Adeoye. He worked in Congress as a Staff Assistant to Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), and Press Secretary to Congressman Dan Kildee (MI-05). He is currently working on a campaign to defend and expand voting rights and democracy.
Resources:
- Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/politics/supreme-court-arizona-voting-restrictions.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage - The Supreme Court Vs. Democracy
https://steady.substack.com/p/the-supreme-court-vs-democracy - Freedom Riders Ride Again for Voting Rights: A caravan led by UNITE HERE is part re-creation, part addressing a new wave of voter suppression.
https://progressive.org/latest/freedom-riders-voting-rights-feliz-leon-210706/ - Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoes GOP-backed election overhaul bill
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/pennsylvania-tom-wolf-vetoes-gop-election-overhaul-bill/index.html - The Brennan Center
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote - ACLU: Voting Rights
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights
Monday Jul 05, 2021
Monday Jul 05, 2021
The very first interview we ever did at Raging Chicken was with Noam Chomsky. Yup. Chomsky was the featured speaker for World Philosophy Day at Kutztown University in the fall of 2011. Kevin Mahoney reached out to Chomsky to see if there would be a chance that he'd be willing to be interviewed by a brand new left/progressive media site based out of Kutztown at the time. As you can see, he said yes.
The fall of 2011 was dominated by the Occupy movement and growing radicalism about gaping economic inequalities in the U.S. We talked quite a bit about Occupy, organizing, and social movements.
Be warned, the sound is really not good. We had very little idea what we were doing, but in classic punk rock DIY spirit, we did it anyway.
Friday Jul 02, 2021
Friday Jul 02, 2021
On this week's Out d'Coup podcast, we've got something timely and special. We are on vacation this week, so we look through the archives for something that will be useful today. Given PASSHE's plans to consolidate 6 universities into 2 and the on-going deception by PASSHE administrators, we wanted to take you back to a documentary we did in 2018 with an amazing woman who blew the whistle on PASSHE's deceptive, if not fraudulent, budgeting practices: Colleen Bradley, former Vice President of Administration and Finance at West Chester University. Kevin gives some context in the intro. Here's the description from the original release in 2018:
***
Colleen Bradley tells Raging Chicken Press editor, Kevin Mahoney, about the budget fraud she uncovered at West Chester University and other Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education universities. Bradley was hired as WCU's Director of Budget and Financial Planning in 2011. In less than a year, she uncovered deceitful budgeting practices that hid huge surpluses all the while promoting a "budget crisis" narrative to the public, to faculty, and to students. For exposing this deception, she was fired. Part 2 will focus on Bradley's decision to file a whistleblower case after she was fired in 2014. Bradley's lawyers, Dan Kearney and Ed Mazurek, thought her case was a "slam dunk." However, strange things began to happen as the case made its way into the Federal Court system. Despite solid, documented evidence of fraudulent practices and sworn depositions from her boss, a U.S. District Court is denying her whistleblower protection. Now Bradley and her legal team are making a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the U.S. Supreme Court allows the lower court's decision to stand, we will see a historic narrowing of whistleblower protections for all public employees at the very time that corruption is running rampant at the highest levels of power.
For a preview of the legal case, you can listen to Raging Chicken's podcast with Colleen Bradley and Dan Kearney from March 29, 2018 here:
http://bit.ly/ColleenBradleyPodcast1 Part 2 of the video will be released in the coming days.
Monday Jun 28, 2021
Monday Jun 28, 2021
On tonight’s show, I welcome Dana Morrison and Eleni Schirmer to the show to talk about that Other debt crisis in American colleges and universities. You’ve probably heard about the crisis in student debt that is crushing a whole generation of graduates from American colleges and universities. However, the crushing debt held by colleges and universities threatens to crush American higher education - especially American public higher education - across the county. As we’ll get into, that debt crisis stems from state legislature walking away from funding state universities on the one hand, and university presidents going on spending sprees to erect shiny luxury dorms, state-of-the-art gyms, and fancy amenities in a full-on, neoliberal approach to attracting students.
Dr. Dana Morrison, is an Assistant Professor at West Chester University’s Department of Educational Foundations & Policy Studies, and an active member of APSCUF (PASSHE faculty union) and the Public Higher Education Workers (PHEW) Network.
Eleni Schirmer is a faculty associate at UW-Madison in Educational Policy Studies, where she researches and teaches about labor movements, social movements and the political economy of education. She is writing a political biography of Wisconsin's largest teachers' union, and its unsteady path towards social justice unionism. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review and elsewhere.
Friday Jun 25, 2021
Friday Jun 25, 2021
India Walton, the socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, NY won the Democratic Party primary on Tuesday, all but securing her election in the fall, given that Buffalo is a deeply blue city. Walton will become Buffalo’s first female mayor and will with the first socialist to lead a major American city since sewer socialists ran Milwaukee, Wisconsin in early 20th century. She beat Mayor Byron Brown, a four-term incumbent and close ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and ran a campaign focused on returning power to working people in New York State's second largest city.
Biden signals he’ll back the new bi-partisan infrastructure bill as long as Congress sends him a second bill at the same time that includes investments in our social infrastructure cut from the bipartisan agreement. That second bill will most likely need to run through the reconciliation process. Already, Sen. Lindsay Graham is bolting.
The Pacific Northwest is expected to be hit by an extreme heatwave this weekend. The National Weather Service is forecasting temperatures as high as 109 degrees. The heatwave comes as the region is already experiencing a significant drought and high fire risk. One more argument for why climate changes needs to be front and center of the infrastructure bill - those very measures that were cut from the bipartisan agreement.
Joseph McCarthy...check that...I mean, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis has signed a bill into law that will cut university funds if it finds that critical race theory or any other intellectual pursuit that does not hum to the tune of a whitewashed version of American history. The bill encouraged students to record classes to rat on professors who deviate from GOP sanctioned speech.
Huge supreme court decision protecting free-speech in the cast of PA high school cheerleader Brandi Levy.
PA GOP continues its assault on voting rights.
One week left in public comment about PASSHE consolidation plans.
The International Space Station got some new solar panels this week.
Hope some of you caught last night’s Strawberry Super Moon.
DuckDuckGo, a Chester County-based search engine the claims not to share or collect any of your private information is making moves to launch a full-scale desktop browser.
Twitter was all a-buzz this week as Sam Seder - host of the Majority Report - surprised the horrible right-wing YouTuber, Steven Crowder on the H3 podcast with Ethan Klein. Crowder had been avoiding a debate with Seder for years. His public meltdown, I admit, was a joy to watch.
Wednesday Jun 23, 2021
Wednesday Jun 23, 2021
On today's show, we talk about Cyril's latest column, “Conversion therapy is a barbaric abuse of LGBTQ youth and it's legal in PA” and how important it is to support state legislators like Jessica Benham (D-Allegheny County) & Brian Sims (D-Philadelphia) who are working to ban conversion therapy. Their co-sponsored bill, House Bill 729 would, as Cyril puts is, "ban this medical quackery based on the disproven premise that being LGBTQ is some kind of disease or disorder."
Then we dig into Cyril's newsletter on Substack a bit. We take a look at his news round up, "White Supremacy Gains Popularity in Oregon, Conservatives Give Millions to White Nationalist Hate Group, Climate Defenders in the Crosshairs, and More!” Then we check in with his latest "Meet a Progressive" feature, "Activism You Can Dance to with Bonnie Chang, "founder of Bucks Voices, a voter engagement group based in Bucks County, PA, that “informs, engages and mobilizes” our community to realize the ideals of our democracy."
Cyril will be moving over into the driver's seat for the next two shows as Kevin takes a couple of weeks of vacation with his family. Some great shows heading your way!
You can support this podcast and all of the podcasts Raging Chicken's media network by becoming a patron for as little as $5/month: https://www.patreon.com/rcpress
Monday Jun 21, 2021
Monday Jun 21, 2021
On this episode of Out d'Coup LIVE, I am thrilled to welcome Erin Wallace to the program. We'll be talking about craft brewing's reckoning in the wake of the flood of stories about misogyny, racism, sexual harassment and assault in the craft brewing industry. The catalyst for the latest round of stories follows an Instagram post by Brienne Allen, a production manager and brewer at Notch Brewing in Salem, MA. Hundreds of women in the industry responded by telling their experiences of sexism and harassment. The attention has led to the resignation managers/owners at several well-known breweries, Tired Hands being perhaps the most noteworthy locally.
Erin Wallace is one of the Philadelphia region’s premier beer experts. The founder and longtime owner of the renowned beer-centric bar and restaurant, Devil’s Den, just south of Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, Wallace is a fixture on Philadelphia’s ever-growing beer scene. Wallace is a self-taught beer connoisseur and has an extensive knowledge of local and imported craft beers. Former long time board member of Philly Loves Beer and Philly Beer Week, Wallace is also the regional founder & co-leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pink Boots Society — a non-profit organization with international membership which supports women working in the brewing profession, especially in creating craft beer.
Erin attended Baltimore School for the Arts, and Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Her love for beer developed from her time as a server and bartender in various bars and restaurants in Philadelphia. She opened the Devil’s Den in 2008. ‘The Den’ is known for its excellent and diverse array of craft beer, curated by Wallace, as well as a dynamic events schedule. She is noted as one of Philadelphia’s top craft beer bar owners. Devil’s Den has won accolades from multiple publications and has appeared in Philadelphia magazine and on Foobooz’s Top 50 Bars list multiple times.
Looking for resources?
- Pink Boots Society: https://www.pinkbootssociety.org/
- Philly Chapter of Pink Boots Society: https://my.pinkbootssociety.org/Chapter_Leader?Code=PA_PHILA
- Philly Pink Boots on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pinkbootsphilly
- Follow Philly Pink Boots on Twitter: @pinkbootsphilly
- Follow Pittsburgh Pink Boots on Twitter: @pinkbootspgh
Visit the Devil's Den in South Philly: https://www.facebook.com/Devilsdenphiladelphia