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Pen Pal: Prison Letters From a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row

Tiyo Attalla Salah-El died in 2018 on “ Slow Death Row” while serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. He was a man with a dizzying array of talents and vocations: author, scholar, teacher, musician, and activist: he was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons. He was also an extraordinarily eloquent correspondent.

Today we are going to talk with his friend Paul Alan Smith about the letters that Smith exchanged with Tiyo which were written over a decade and a half. We will also speak with Paul’s friend the actor Carl Weathers who read the letters for the audiobook. The book is called Pen Pal: Prison Letters From a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row. It has a preface by Mike Africa, Jr.

Guest – Carl Weathers, multi-talented director, actor and former professional football athlete. Carl Weathers learned about the life and letters of Tiyo and read the letters for the audio book version of Pen Pal.

Guest – Paul Alan Smith, an agent and manager representing directors working in both film and TV. He’s most recently known as the founder of New Deal Mfg. Co., which seeks to shift representation to a more client-centric approach, rather than focusing on the needs of corporations.

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Chris Hedges Analysis Of Pre-Election Society In The United States

We are living in extraordinary times. At the same time we face both tremendous danger and extraordinary opportunity. The danger comes from a failed state, a failed racist capitalist state they cannot afford safety let alone opportunity to its citizens. Our opportunity comes from the massive social mobilizations that we have not seen in 75 years. A young generation has risen up. White people are involved with black people who are providing leadership. Perhaps 20 million have taken to the streets.

Trump is desperate and resorts to stoking fear of violence, race baiting, lying, explaining to his followers that all the unrest is due to agitators, antifa, Marxist and socialists.

The Democratic Party has chosen to oppose Trump with Joe Biden. The best you can say about him is that he’s not Trump. He has vowed to veto a medicare for all bill if it comes across his desk and has suggested that police violence could be curbed if they shot people in the legs, not the chest. He is for giving police departments more money. The worst you can say about Biden and the Democratic Party is that they are not a bulwark against fascism.

The big financial backers of the Democratic Party crushed the Sanders campaign indicating they would rather have Trump than a social democrat who would cost them money and raise expectations. Sanders for his part missed his historic moment, twice, when he refused to break from the Democratic Party in both 2016 and 2020.

Instead he performs the function of a sheepdog herding people back into a moribund capitalist party that has nothing to offer as a way out of the combined climate, economic, race, the health crisis, and nuclear annihilation and nuclear annihilation

Guest – Chris Hedges about where we are at, how we got here, and what to do next. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He was the foreign correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years and served as middle eastern bureau chief. He is the host of Emmy award nominated RT America show On Contact and the author of numerous books Including America: The Fairwell Tour, Empire of Illusion, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

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