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Detroit radio host Tony Trupiano talks about his new show, and Motown’s new emergency manager; independent journalist and author Reese Erlich reports on Syria’s bloody war, Obama’s visit to Israel, and more. Trupiano is a longtime progressive radio host who was displaced last December when Clear Channel donated WDTW to a local nonprofit. He’s back on the air, on a Clear Channel sports station, WDFN 1130 AM.Visit his website here.
He updates us on the new emergency manager for Detroit, appointed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder, and offers important background: Michigan’s emergency manager law was repealed by voters last November, then re-enacted by the Republican-dominated legislature along with a nasty anti-union law. Trupiano is candid about the damage done by ex-mayor and felon Kwame Kilpatrick and city council members like Monica Conyers, wife of Rep. John Conyers, who also went to jail for corruption. We talk about the recent book by Charlie LeDuff, a former print reporter who left the NY Times to return to his hometown, and how LeDuff stiffed PBC on a planned interview after he got drunk and picked a fight at the recent St. Patrick’s Day parade.
At about 38 minutes in, we talk with Reese Erlich, an independent reporter who just returned from a reporting tour in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. His most recent book is Conversations With Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence, and Empire and you can read his dispatches here.
We start with the brutal war in Syria, and Erlich describes the array of fighters who are taking on the Assad “regime”. In an interesting aside, he talks about the use of the term “regime” to tag governments opposed by the US. He also talks about the battle lines defined by Shiite and Sunni Islam, and about the role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in fudning the Syrian opposition. We also discuss Obama’s trip to Israel, the apology to Turkey that Obama squeezed out of Netanyahu, and the hyper anti-Iranian rhetoric. And he talks about the heavy crackdown on protesters in the tiny kingdom of Bahrain.