The Final Straw Radio

This week on Error451, William Budington and Bursts chat about eavesdropping by digital devices.  This conversation happened before the Cambridge Analytica & Facebook scandal, but covers some of the same material.  Do Facebook, Amazon, Google and other big data companies listen through your device to your conversations and target marketing at you based on your choices?  What tools do platforms lik...

This week we share as our main feature an interview with longtime anarchist, musician, anti-racist & organizer from Texas, scott crow. scott is the author of numerous books, including " Black Flags & Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective " & " Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams: A scott crow Reader ". At the end of 2017, PM Press published " Setting Sights: Histories and Reflect...

25 Years After Lucasville: Two Perspectives on the Uprising This week is the 25th anniversary of the longest prison uprising in US history in which lives were lost.  The rebellion, which lasted 11 days, took place at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, more commonly know as "Lucasville," in April 1993.  The disturbance broke out on L Block, which housed over 400 people.  Over the course of th...

Bursts spoke with a comrade y'all might recognize, a Camille who lives on the ZAD, or Zone To Defend in Notre Dame De Landes, Britanny, France. Camille and Bursts spoke in January upon the announcement of the French government's decision to cancel the building of an airport to replace the one in Nantes. After literally decades of struggle, and nearly a decade of squatting and on and off fighting o...

This week, we have a few goodies for y'all! First, we'll feature some words that friends in central NC recorded of Elijah . Elijah was born and raised in Durham, NC, who was imprisoned in Alabama. Elijah was among many who showed up to resist a threatened march in Durham by the KKK after people began rising up and taking down white supremacist statues last falls. Elijah talks about incarceration,...

In this week's episode of The Final Straw Radio, we have three segments on two subjects. This week there'll be no Sean Swain segment due to technical difficulties, but we hope to be hearing his clarion call towards dancing around the ashes of swivelization next week. In part one, I spoke with Friday, a former J20 defendant and a supporter of the remaining 59 facing charges. We talk about the arres...

Hebron Documentary This week we got the chance to speak with Yousef Natsha, who is a Palestinian filmmaker and activist about his new documentary called Hebron . In this interview we talk about how he got into making this documentary, some historical and present day context for this series of struggles in Hebron City, and some suggestions for action. You can learn more about Yousef, see more of hi...

For this week's episode, Bursts spoke with Ray Luc Levasseur,  longtime activist, Vietnam War vet, revolutionary and former political prisoner in the U.S. Ray was a reputed founder of the Sam Melville / Jonathan Jackson Unit, later known as the United Freedom Front which conducted sabotage, expropriations and attacks against profiteers and symbols of American Imperialism and oppression abroad. Aft...

In this podcast special, I spoke with Antti , Antti is a member of Moscow Anarchist Black Cross, which does anti-repression work for anarchists and anti-authoritarian antifascists. Many members of Moscow ABC are now living abroad and doing their work from there due to intense repression by the government of Russia and it's client states. For March 11-18 there has been a call out for international...

Interview with Michael about the recent WV Teacher's Strike In this interview, Bursts spoke with an anarchist teacher and IWW labor organizer in West Virginia , Michael Mochaidean, about the work that went into the recent teacher strikes that went slightly Wild Cat and ended in a partial victory for the teachers after 12 days of walk outs by public school teachers across the state and has inspired...

The Final Straw is excited to share with our listeners an episode of the podcast, Shades of Green , which describes itself as "a podcast exploring environmental justice from unceded Mi'kmaq territory." (correction to our intro, we say "liquified natural gas", when in fact the facility would just store "natural gas."  Apologies for the confusion.) This episode features voices of the Mi'kmaq resista...

Main Interview: Stop The MVP and All Pipelines! (at ~ 16min, 38sec) This week, Bursts spoke with Birch and Judy, two folks involved in the Tree Sits on Peter Mountain along the Appalachian Trail on the border of Virginia and West Virginia.  The tree sits are operating in order to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline or MVP.  Before all of the permits have been ok'd, contractors with the help of loca...

Kristian Williams on George Orwell This week on The Final Straw, Bursts presents a conversation with Kristian Williams about his recently published book, Between The Lie & The Bullet: Essays on Orwell , published by AK Press . Kristian is maybe best known for authoring Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America . For the hour we speak about Kristian's reading of Orwell, the importance of int...

This episode contains three segments: Move 9 Parole "Stare Into The Lights My Pretties" Anarcho-Syndicalist Organizing in Kosovo MOVE9 Parole First, there's the interview that Bursts held with Michael Davis Africa Jr., a member of the MOVE organization.  MOVE is a Philadelphia-based black liberation group founded by John Africa in 1972. The group lives communally. During the conversation, Michael...

This week William got the chance to speak to Bruno Renero-Hannan , who is an anarchist historical anthropologist from Mexico City, about their solidarity work around two of the original 250 Loxicha Prisoners in the state of Oaxaca. This rebellion and imprisonment occurred almost simultaneously to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in the mid-late 90s with very different results. We talk about the...

Interview with a member of the Youth Movement of Rojava This week, Bursts spoke with Şoreş Ronahi of the Youth Movement of Rojava (Yekîtiya Ciwanên Rojava), an autonomous movement within Tev-Dem, the movement for Democratic Confederalism in Rojava (located within Northern Syria).    Mr Ronahi speaks about the Turkish assaults, aided by ISIS/DAESH forces now flying the so-called Free Syrian Army fl...

This Week's Content First, we air a portion of Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech from the 2014 National Book Awards, where she received the Lifetime Acheivement award.  Ursula K. Le Guin, wrote fantasy and sci-fi for 77 years of her life, contributing many books such as The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest & The Earthsea Series.  She died on Monday, January...

This week on the Final Straw, we air two interviews. In the first segment, we hear from two organizers with the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo or Mutual Aid Center in Caguas, Puerto Rico. Emilu and Kique talk about Caguas, about the colonial relationship between the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico, the post-hurricane disaster relief they've been doing as a continuation of social organizing in the wake of tha...

Enough is Enough spoke with many refugees during their visit to Lesvos, and The Final Straw is happy to release this interview. Here we will hear from Amin (his name was changed for safety), a Pakistani man detained for 9 months for absolutely nothing. He went to the registration office of the Moria camp to renew his papers, something refugees have to do regularly. Instead of new papers he was sud...

This week, Bursts had a change to speak with two participants in the L'eu Est La Vie camp (Water is Life in French) organizing against the Bayou Bridge pipeline that Energy Transfer Partners is trying to push through the swamps of Louisiana at the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  For the hour, they speak about the pipeline, the lifeways of people living in the bayou, potential impacts on t...

Operation Push This week, Disembodied Voice spoke with Karen, a member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in Gainesville, Florida.  People imprisoned across the state of Florida are gearing up for a work strike and boycott of prison profit centers such as commissary beginning on January 15, and the Gainesville IWOC chapter has been a crucial node of support on the outside.   DV spoke...

This week on error451 , the occasionally-weekly tech podcast from an anarchist perspective brought to you by The Final Straw Radio, Bursts and William Budington chat about devices crossing the U.S. border.  Now, neither of us are lawyers and situations change according to laws, precedence and actual practice with border security, so consider these better practice suggestions. We talk about full di...

This week William and Disembodied Voice had the chance to interview Walidah Imarisha, who is an Oregon based writer, educator, public scholar and spoken word artist about her book Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption , her 2016 book out from AK Press and IAS, which highlights three distinct experiences that are all in different degrees tangential to the realities...

  This week, the show features two interviews. Anti-Fascist Organizing in Charlotte Against AntiCom The first is with an antifascist in Charlotte, NC, about the "March Against Communism" event that MIGHT be taking place in that city on Thursday, December 28 th . Anticommunist Action , the nazi group that originally announced the event had hoped to hold it in Marshall Park but never applied for a p...

Today William talked with two anarchist healthcare workers in Asheville, NC about the Trump administration's censorship of language regarding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2018 budget proposal documents. In this short episode we talk about what this means, some recent context for similar censorship, how CDC budget documents affect people's everyday lives, and recommendations for...