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Occupy Wall Street made a stunning showing over the weekend – we’ll talk about the different manifestations around Southern California with ALAN MINSKY, KPFK program director. My personal favorite: Occupy Irvine – more than 500 people marched on Saturday. Who would have thought?
Also: It’s time to abolish the death penalty in California – with an initiative on the November ballot. JAMES CLARK, southern California coordinator for the SAFE California Campaign, will explain the strategy—and the need for volunteers to help gather signatures.
Plus: RY COODER has a book out: Los Angeles Stories is a collection of noir-ish tales of L.A. in the late forties, and the outsiders and oddballs in the old downtown neighborhood Bunker Hill and out in Venice Beach. Los Angeles Stories is our featured thank-you premium, along with Ry’s new CD, “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down.” Today’s NYTimes suggests Ry Cooder’s Song “No Banker Left Behind” as an anthem for the “Occupy” movement: watch “No Banker” HERE.
Please call and pledge during the hour: 818-985-5735 — or at kpfk.org.
After decades in which “hard hats” were described as enemies of the left, and four decades after construction workers in lower Manhattan attacked anti-war demonstrators on Wall Street, the AFL-CIO on Thursday called on its members to defend Occupy Wall Street from the NYPD as the city moved to arrest and evict protestors in Zuccotti Park. Hard hats and hippies, together at last!….
Big Bill Broonzy – he left the Mississippi Delta to become a leading Chicago bluesman of the 1930s, singing about racial injustice alongside Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel; then traveling to Europe to ignite the British blues-rock revival of the 1960s with Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend. 
Also: Whatever happened to the American left? 
When Sarah Palin announced last week that she was not running for president, many wondered, what had she been trying to do during the last three years, when she seemed to be almost a candidate? Now we know: she was trying to make money.
From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Review of An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman; Dissent, Fall 2011) . . . . continued 
In a move that dramatizes the political differences between Los Angeles and New York, several members of the LA City Council today declared their support for Occupy LA and introduced a resolution that will put the city officially on record as endorsing the demonstrators camped at City Hall. City Council president Eric Garcetti, who is running for mayor, visited the encampment yesterday and said, “Stay as long as you need, we’re here to support you.” . . .
Also: 
Plus: The rise of a new American security state: Pulitzer-Prize winner 
They called it “rebuilding Iraq,” and Peter van Buren knows a lot about what went wrong — he’s a career State Department foreign service officer who spent a year there on a Provincial Reconstruction Team. I spoke with him recently on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.
Plus: L.A.’s jails are the worst in the nation – that’s what the ACLU says in a 
In a trial that never should have taken place, ten Muslim students at UC Irvine were convicted Friday of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador on campus last spring.. . . .
