Unhinged Trump Sends Troops To Iran
President Trump continues to make unhinged remarks saying that he wants to "take the oil" in Iran and could seize Kharg Island easily as thousands of US ground troops make their way to the war torn region.
The Guardian reports Iran is accusing the United States of plotting a ground assault of Iran while publicly seeking talks, a strategy Trump has used before.
Al Jazeera is reporting that a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant have been hit as the joint US and Israeli war of choice continues to widen with the Iranian civilian death exceeding 2,000 as residential areas are increasingly being targeted.
Al Jazeera reported this weekend that Prime Minister Netanyhu has ordered the expansion of the IDF's ground invasion of southern Lebanon in an offensive to drive Hezbollah back from where it has previously launched rocket attacks on northern Israel.
In Lebanon, over 1,200 people have been killed including 124 children.
Throughout the Mideast millions have been displaced as the war enters its second month.
This morning we spoke with Pastor Jonathan Wilson Hargrove, who works with Bishop William Barber, about a peace protest today with clergy, veterans, and moral leaders in front of the White House in Washington, D.C and at Senate offices across 14 states to protest Trump's undeclared war on Iran.
Hargrove is the Assistant Director for Partnerships and Fellowships at Yale University's Center for Public Theology and Public Policy and co-author with Bishop William Barber of White Poverty How Exposing the Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.
According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project, the estimated $1 billion per day cost of the war doesn't include the latest request from the Trump administration for an additional $200 billion to fund the widening war.
"It should be clear: funding this unjust, unpopular, and illegal war comes directly at the expense of ordinary Americans," according to the IPS analysis. "Less than a year after the passage of Trump’s signature 'Big Beautiful Bill,' which made deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — and right in the middle of an affordability crisis — this is the last thing the country needs. That same bill added $150 billion for the Pentagon, pushing the Pentagon budget over $1 trillion for the first time since World War II — and directly enabling the war on Iran."
Gender Pay Gap Endures
On the last Monday of Women's History month, WBAI interviewed Seher Khawaja, attorney and Co-Chair NY Equal Pay Campaign, about the nation's massive gender pay gap that has women making on average close to 20 percent less than their male counterparts doing the same job.
Khawaja explains how this systemic inequality also persists in the taxpayer funded public sector where FDNY EMS workers, who are mostly female and people of color, make tens of thousands of dollars less than their male colleagues who are firefighters.
Khawaja asserts that the Trump administration's dismantling and co-opting of DEI programs and agencies like the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission make advocacy at the local and state level even more essential.
Dr. Joe Wilson, labor consultant, historian and the biographer of the iconic civil rights and labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, weighs in on how the US labor movement needs to respond to President Trump's war of choice with Iran and how a new militancy is required as the oligarchs seek to consolidate their power.
Maduro Update
In the B Block, investigative journalist Gloria Guillo, who produces Uncontrolled Opposition and writes regularly for Covert Action, takes us inside the courtroom of Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, 92, where Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were present for a pre-trial conference. Both Maduro and Flores were abducted during a U.S. military incursion into Venezuela on January 3rd.
During the proceeding, Guillo reports the DOJ prosecutors tried to persuade the court that the defendants, who have both pleaded not guilty, should not be able to fund their defense with money from Venezuela. Prosecutors also sought a motion to withhold information from the defendants about their case.
Judge Hellerstein expressed concern that by preventing the two defendants from paying for their defense with the money from their country, an undue burden would thrust on the already overburdened public defender as well as on US taxpayers.
Maduro and Flores are both being held in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn in solitary confinement.
Big Oil Greases Albany?
We finish up with an update on Gov. Hochul's strategy to use the state's budget deliberations to dilute New York State's landmark climate crisis legislation that aims to reduce the state's reliance on fossil fuel. Environmental activists argue that by making the rollback part of the non-transparent budget reconciliation process fossil fuel lobbyists will have an oversized role.
Eunice Ko, deputy director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and
Monique Fitzgerald, the Climate Justice & Campaign Director at the Long Island Progressive Coalition, both argue the widening war in Iran, and the oil price shock it's producing, supports their case for New York State to press on with reducing its reliance on fossil fuel.
