Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

You may already know that 15 US governors recently  rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item. We’re joined in conversation with Mark Nowak, an innovative and influential political poet, author of Social Poetics and Coal Mountain Elementary.  His latest book, Again, takes its title from the last word in MAGA, and works its way through the four seasons, naming this political moment and urgently asking us to consider what the known demands of us now.

Prison and police abolitionists, rebels and radicals, peace activists and environmental warriors, freedom fighters and dissidents, political prisoners of every type—the voices of dissent and defiance—are gathered together in a dazzling collection from AK Press called Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. Join us as we discuss the meaning of “political prisoners” with Eric King and Josh Davidson, and explore the challenges ahead for those of us fighting for a world without prisons.

As the savagery in Gaza continues unabated, we’re deeply honored to be joined from Jerusalem by the brilliant writer Nathan Thrall for a conversation about his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Here in one family facing one heartbreaking moment, we experience Israeli apartheid up-close and personal—its everyday humiliations and its banal cruelty, its dehumanizing impact on victims and perpetrators alike.

For voters in Chicago it’s been a strenuous non-stop election cycle for the last couple of years. We're all tired and burned out – but as always, we must carry on! So as we head into the last weekend before the election, we offer up this incentive to get those among us motivated and informed about why this election, while not changing the world - does still matter.In conversation with us are our old friends Stephanie Skora of the "Girl, I Guess" progressive voter guide and Charles Preston of Injustice Watch. We discuss the drive to write-in Gaza at the top of the ballot, the Bring Chicago Home initiative and we're reminded of the outsized power of the judiciary on our daily lives and why we need to be an informed voter when filling out the ballot in those races. If you’ve already voted, be sure to share this episode with those in your lives who still need a little push to the polls! And we remember voting is just one tool at our disposal, after we leave the voting booth, we still head out to the protests, to our mutual aid programs, our reading groups, or whatever it is that helps us to continue building power in our communities.

Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in the U.S., with over 18,000 living in Cook County alone. The Palestinian community has led powerful protests that have led to Chicago becoming the largest city in the country to endorse a ceasefire resolution. It is in the midst of this atmosphere that we gathered for an urgent exchange with Rashid Khalidi, the preeminent historian of the Palestinian national struggle, and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in conversation with activists Ricardo Gamboa of the Hoodoisie and Latinxs for Palestine, and Bill Ayers from Under the Tree. The event served to not only raise awareness but to also raise funds for Palestine Legal. The energy was fierce, the mood determined, the spirit razor-sharp. We left that gathering a little wiser, more resolute, and fixed on turning our anger into action and our dreams of a world at peace into reality.

Julian Assange who founded WikiLeaks in 2006 went on to win multiple awards for his investigative journalism covering, among other stories, political killings in Kenya and social unrest in Tibet. Assange came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, including footage of US airstrikes in Baghdad, and US military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. The US government—charging Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and later for violating the Espionage Act of 1917—has pursued Assange relentlessly. Since April 2019, Assange has been confined in HM Prison, Belmarsh as the US extradition effort grinds forward and is contested in the British courts. We’re joined by Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, for an urgent conversation about the imminent fate of someone who dared to tell the truth.

The brutality of capitalism is apparent in every direction: war, invasion, and occupation throughout the world; militarized police forces at home; super-exploitation at the point of production; the looming catastrophic climate collapse; the banality of evil in the increasingly pervasive carceral state. Capitalism willfully and skillfully nurtures our vilest qualities—selfishness, greed, murderous competition, corruption—and deliberately degrades other qualities: mutual care, human kindness, the beloved community. The rage to accumulate is the beating heart of capitalism; injustice and predation follow as surely as day follows night. We’re joined today in conversation with Premilla Nadasen, professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University and author most recently of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Professor Nadasen interrogates the plundering, profit-driven care system in the US, and illuminates the transformative power of collective resistance.

As Israel’s crimes against humanity multiply and mass death and indiscriminate destruction escalates, as the world unites around a near-universal call to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people and militant resistance to US complicity deepens here at home, we are fortunate to be joined by Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir has authored several major investigative reports, including a 2021 account that  comprehensively documents Israel’s apartheid apparatus and its systematic persecution of millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. 

As Israel continues to execute its pre-announced genocide of the Palestinian people, ethnically cleanses Gaza, and attempts to liquidate an enclosure that they themselves created, everyone of goodwill around the world is calling for a ceasefire. As of now 22,000 Palestinians have been murdered, close to 2,000,000 displaced in Gaza, countless hospitals, school, and clinics destroyed, and vital supplies of food and water stopped at checkpoints. The US media says that Gaza is starving, and it’s true that famine is imminent, but the passive voice is an obscenity. The truth is that Israel is starving Palestinians deliberately. The US stands alone in blocking a ceasefire. This Special Episode is curated from Episodes 23, 41, 77, and 81—episodes recorded over the past two years. We hope these conversations are enlightening and illuminating, and that they deepen your sense of the urgency to act against war in these terrible times.

In this episode we’ll be heading over to the dazzling Pilsen Community Books, a regular stop on our freedom tour, for a conversation with Janie Paul, Professor Emerita at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and curator and co-founder with her late husband, Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons, a project of the legendary Prison Creative Arts Project. Her beautiful new book, Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance, is filled with extraordinary images of the dazzling creations of people caged inside Michigan prisons—it’s a stunning achievement. But before we go to the bookstore, we pause for a moment for an update, because the genocide in Gaza is on-going, and Palestine is still front-of-mind for us, and we hope for you too.