Talk World Radio: Recent Episodes
David Swanson
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, which is meeting in Austin, Texas, August 12-15, and will be voting on some interesting resolutions, and refusing to vote on at least one other. Key resolutions were drafted by our guest, Michele Johnson, who is a project manager by trade. She is an elected member of her local parish Democratic party council as well as on the executive board of the Louisiana Democratic Party where she serves as the DNC Committeewoman. Outside of work she organizes around food access, clean air and environmental justice issues and consults on field strategy for political campaigns.
This week on Talk World Radio, my recent thoughts on Robert Kagan, Christopher Nolan, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Donald Trump.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing wars, migrations, and borders with Josephine Solanki who is a project coordinator at the Transnational Institute where she works on the militarisation of the European Union, EU migration and border policy, and related topics. She is also a member of the international Abolish Frontex network. She will also be a speaker at the online annual conference of World BEYOND War coming up in November which is on the topic of borders.LINKS:World BEYOND War's upcoming annual conferencehttps://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2026Recent articles by Josephine Solanki:https://www.tni.org/en/publication/military-and-related-spending-in-the-mff-2028-34-proposalhttps://www.tni.org/en/publication/eu-military-spending-until-2027https://www.tni.org/en/war-and-pacification/border-warshttps://abolishfrontex.org/https://www.tni.org/en/publication/natos-35-spending-goal
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about a new documentary called An Ordinary Insanity (which you can see at https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com ) which focuses on Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s calls to action about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons. Our guest, the maker of this and a number of other wornderful films is Judith Ehrich, film director, writer, and producer. Her 2009 film The Most Dangerous Man in America, also about Daniel Ellsberg, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a Peabody Award.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about nuclear insanity with Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (see https://wagingpeace.org ) and a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry at Columbia University. You can find her at https://nuclearinsanity.substack.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Venezuela after the earthquakes. Our guest Gabriel Aguirre is Latin America Organizer for World BEYOND War, is from Venezuela, and is currently based in Caracas. He has been an activist and advocate for peace, social justice, international solidarity and human rights, and has more than 13 years of experience in social and community work. He has participated in multiple international events and activities on five continents, always in defense of a stable and lasting peace. He has been a representative to the United Nations to defend the foundations of a more just world without wars or sanctions. His work experience includes participation in several international missions of solidarity to countries that have had military, economic, political, and social conflicts. He has also been an organizer of various campaigns for the closure of military bases, and the lifting of sanctions on countries that suffer their consequences. He holds a degree in Political Science, with a specialization in International Relations, and a master’s degree in Public Policy. He can be contacted through his email: gabriel @ worldbeyondwar.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about U.S. military spending. Greg Williams is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight. The Project on Government Oversight has worked with a number of friends of this program to put out a report called The True Total U.S. Military Budget. See:https://www.pogo.org/reports/the-true-total-u-s-military-budget
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about campus activism. Our guest, Francis Burns, is a student organizer at Cornell University and a native of Ithaca, New York. He grew up in a family of Catholic Workers who were deeply involved in the anti-war movement throughout the early 2000s. His father was one of the Saint Patrick’s Four. At Cornell, he is vice president of the Cornell progressives and students for justice in Palestine, which are focused on direct action and education surrounding Palestine and other leftist causes on campus. He is currently working on Graham Platner's campaign in Maine for the U.S. Senate.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Bolivia and people who refuse to put up with outrages that people in the United States sit back and accept. Our guest Kathryn Ledebur is director of the Andean Information Network which is online at https://ain-bolivia.org/about/
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Iran and how we got to this point. Our guest Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and program director for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about abolishing the police. Our guest, brian bean, is the author of Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, which I've just read and highly recommend. brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. They coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about ending the death penalty with Scott Langley, co-founder of Death Penalty Action. See:https://deathpenaltyaction.orghttps://abolition.orghttps://forwhomthebelltolls.org
This week on Talk World Radio we speak with John Reuwer, just freed after having been kidnapped at sea by the Israeli military. John Reuwer is Treasurer and a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is a retired emergency physician whose practice convinced him of a crying need for alternatives to violence for resolving tough conflicts. This led him to the informal study and teaching of nonviolence for the last 35 years, with peace team field experience in Haiti, Colombia, Central America, Palestine/Israel, and several US inner cities. He worked in South Sudan with the Nonviolent Peaceforce, one of the few organizations practicing professional unarmed civilian peacekeeping. He also serves on the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons with Physicians for Social Responsibility educating the public and politicians about the threat from nuclear weapons, which he sees as the ultimate expression of the insanity of modern warfare, so blatantly displayed in the current war in Ukraine. John has been a facilitator for World BEYOND War’s online courses “War Abolition 201” and “Leaving World War II Behind.”
This week on Talk World Radio, we have the great privilege of speaking with John Sayles. John Sayles is an independent filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and once for the National Book Award. He has written eight novels, including, most recently, Jamie MacGillivray and To Save the Man, and his latest which we will be discussing: Crucible.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about community and workplace organizing. Our guest Keith Kelleher was the founder of United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 880 (1983-5), then Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 880 (1985-2008) and then president (2008-2017) of SEIU Healthcare Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas (HCIIMK). Once the smallest local union, it is now the largest local union in Chicago, Cook County, the state of Illinois, and the Midwest, as well as the 7th largest local of the 2 million member Service Employees International Union. Keith has also served as an International Vice President of SEIU.How Black and Brown Women in Chicago Helped Build Jesse Jackson’s Campaignshttps://convergencemag.com/articles/how-black-and-brown-women-in-chicago-helped-build-jesse-jacksons-campaignsHow Mass-Based Community Unions Could Transform the Countryhttps://forgeorganizing.org/article/how-mass-based-community-unions-could-transform-the-countryThe Coming Storm In New Yorkhttps://forgeorganizing.org/article/the-coming-storm-in-new-york
This week on Talk World Radio, we're joined by Howard Yaruss, an economist, professor, attorney, businessman, and activist who teaches at New York University. He has published a new edition of a book called Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Iran, the world, and the problem of war. Our guest Matthew Hoh is a disabled Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and former Afghan War State Department Officer. In 2009, after being appointed to the Foreign Service, Hoh resigned his post in Afghanistan over the Obama administration’s escalation of the Afghan War. He is now an analyst and commentator on foreign and military policy issues as a senior fellow with the Eisenhower Media Network. He serves on the advisory boards of many peace organizations, including Veterans For Peace and World BEYOND War, and is an associate member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the U.S. National Guard. Our guest Isaac Evans-Frantz is director of Action Corps. See https://actioncorps.org
John Reuwer is Treasurer and a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is a retired emergency physician whose practice convinced him of a crying need for alternatives to violence for resolving tough conflicts. This led him to the informal study and teaching of nonviolence for the last 35 years, with peace team field experience in Haiti, Colombia, Central America, Palestine/Israel, and several US inner cities. He worked in South Sudan with the Nonviolent Peaceforce, one of the few organizations practicing professional unarmed civilian peacekeeping. He also serves on the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons with Physicians for Social Responsibility educating the public and politicians about the threat from nuclear weapons, which he sees as the ultimate expression of the insanity of modern warfare, so blatantly displayed in the current war in Ukraine. John has been a facilitator for World BEYOND War’s online courses “War Abolition 201” and “Leaving World War II Behind.”
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with the wonderful playwright Karen Malpede about her new book, Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about peace advocacy in Australia. Our guest, Melanie Morrison, is executive director of the Sydney Peace Foundation which can be found at sydneypeacefoundation.org.au. Melanie Morrison is a human rights, peace, and climate justice advocate with extensive leadership experience in partnerships, strategy, communications, and program development. She is an award-winning journalist, researcher, and producer.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about how the winter Olympics is melting the world's snow away. Our guest, Stuart Parkinson, joining us from England, is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility which has a new report out called Olympics Torched.Here's the report:https://www.sgr.org.uk/publications/olympics-torchedFeb 21-23 are Global Days of Action to #CloseBases:https://daytoclosebases.org
state links to organized crime, and the targeting of land and water defenders in Mexico and Honduras. His work has appeared in the Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, the Baffler, the Nation, Foreign Policy, and more.See:https://jaredoperiodista.substack.com/p/my-latest-investigation-translatedhttps://thebaffler.com/latest/spectacle-of-justice-olsonhttps://theintercept.com/staff/jared-olsonFeb 21-23 are Global Days of Action to #CloseBases:https://daytoclosebases.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking about Western Asia with Mouin Rabbani. He is a Middle East analyst specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian affairs. He is the co-editor of the book Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures. He has written for numerous publications and regularly posts writing and videos on Substack.See: https://mouinrabbani.substack.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. His most recent book, with Grieve Chelwa, is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (Johannesburg: Inkani Books, 2026).Upcoming General Strike:https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/2015651683477369098Upcoming Global Days of Action to #CloseBases:https://daytoclosebases.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Hartzell Gray from Kansas City, Missouri, who is running as a Democrat in Missouri's fourth Congressional district. His website is hartzellforcongress.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about media and violence. Our guest, Rose A. Dyson, is a media education consultant, scholar, writer, journal editor, public speaker, and activist living in Toronto. She is the author of Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy and will be doing an online book club in February about it at worldbeyondwar.org for those who want to read the book and ask her questions.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with Rose Penelope Yee who is a congressional candidate in California’s newly redrawn Second District. Rose is Chair of the Shasta County Democratic Central Committee and a longtime advocate for healthcare, housing, climate justice, and peace. She was also the endorsed candidate of the California Democratic Party in the 2024 congressional race in District 1. She supports Medicare for All, affordable housing, climate resilience, and an end to U.S. funding for endless war. Her website is RoseForCongress.com
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about U.S. threats and acts of war against Venezuela. Speaking with us from Venezuela is Gabriel Aguirre, Latin America Organizer for World BEYOND War, where I also work. Gabriel is from Venezuela, but is often in Colombia. He has long been an activist and advocate for peace, social justice, international solidarity, and human rights.World BEYOND War is working to pass local resolutions and host a webinar on January 7 and deliver this petition to the U.S. Congress on January 14 — as well as to hold a global day of actions against war on Venezuela on January 17. You can help share useful information on Bluesky, Instagram, and Twitter.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking with Norman Solomon about his brand new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. The book is free online at BlueRoad.info. It includes wonderful cartoons by Matt Wuerker. Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction, where I also work, and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of more than a dozen books, many of them previously discussed on this program, including War Made Invisible, and War Made Easy.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about a book from New Zealand called Hidden Stories of Heroism for a Peaceful Planet. Our guest is the book's author Linda Hansen, a New Zealand based author of books for both adults and children, whose website is lphansen.com.
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about Native Nations: A Millenium in North America with its author Kathleen DuVal who is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in early American and Native American history. DuVal is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her website is at kathleenduval.net.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about a jarring new book called The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today. The author Susanne Antonetta is our guest.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about the damage that's done when Donald Trump opens his mouth or uses social media, in this case to make confused and ignorant utterances about nuclear testing. Our guest, Greg Mello, is executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.
Former Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with Guy Feugap who is Africa Organizer for World BEYOND War. He is a secondary school teacher, writer, and peace activist, based in Cameroon. He has long worked to educate youths for peace and non-violence. His work has put young girls in particular at the heart of crisis resolution and awareness raising on several issues in their communities. He joined WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) in 2014 and founded the Cameroon Chapter of World BEYOND War in 2020.The upcoming Imagine Africa Beyond War conference is herehttps://worldbeyondwar.org/africa2025
See https://husseini.substack.com/p/they-have-torn-down-the-east-wingYou can find all kinds of projects Sam is working on at http://husseini.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about military bases and the law with Martha Schmidt who is a co-chair of the Human Rights Framework Project and member of the Anti-Militarism Working Group of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). Martha Schmidt holds law degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin. She wrote a thesis was on the illegality of nuclear weapons in the oceans. Before “retirement”, she practiced labor rights, equal employment and juvenile law in Washington and Illinois. She chaired the World Peace Through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association several times and led a successful effort for a Bar resolution supporting US ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She also co-chaired NLG subcommittees on Peace and Disarmament, the Hawaiian Kingdom (illegally occupied by the US), and the Task Force on the Americas. She is also part of the Task Force of the People’s Academy of International Law, which was created by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which is the NLG’s affiliate organization. They have been providing free courses on various topics of international peace and humanitarian and human rights law. She also serves as a board member of the Center for World Indigenous Studies.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about so-called authorizations to use force. Brett Heinz is a policy researcher and freelance writer based in Washington, DC, where his work focuses on economic justice, political inequality, corruption, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently the Global Policy Coordinator for Economic and Climate Justice at the American Friends Service Committee. You can find his writings at brettheinz.com.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about opening borders with John Washington, author of a terrific book called The Case for Open Borders. John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Intercept.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with Abby Martin about her new film, Earth's Greatest Enemy. Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the second feature film project by Abby Martin, is a groundbreaking anti-imperialist environmental documentary. Exempt from international climate agreements and rarely scrutinized in mainstream reporting, the Pentagon is the world’s single largest institutional polluter—spewing carbon, contaminating water, and scarring landscapes across the globe. Combining investigative journalism, striking visuals, and stories from impacted communities, this film challenges audiences to rethink the hidden costs of a global military empire and its planetary consequences. Provocative, urgent, and eye-opening, this is a documentary that will change how you see both the military and environmentalism.See: https://earthsgreatestenemy.com
This week on Talk World Radio, we are welcoming back Alfred de Zayas, who is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a United Nations Independent Expert on International Order from 2012 to 2018. He is the author of twelve books including “Building a Just World Order”, “Countering Mainstream Narratives”, and “The Human Rights Industry”. You can find his columns at CounterPunch.org.See also:https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/09/action-by-the-80th-session-of-the-un-general-assembly-to-stop-the-genocide-of-palestinianshttps://worldbeyondwar.org/one-year-after-icj-ruling-un-experts-urge-states-to-confront-inaction-over-israels-unlawful-occupationhttps://worldbeyondwar.org/14-badly-needed-and-1-catastrophically-dumb-things-your-country-can-do-for-gazahttps://worldbeyondwar.org/the-case-against-a-military-intervention-to-stop-the-gaza-genocide
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about war, peace, and politics with RootsAction's Political Director Sam Rosenthal. Sam is an organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He recently served three years on the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America's National Electoral Commission.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about abolition -- of all things in need of it. Our guest, Ray Acheson is an organizer, activist, and writer. They are Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament program of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They served from 2008–2024 on the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Ray Acheson is the author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy and of Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages. Ray Acheson will be speaking at the online annual conference of World BEYOND War on October 24-26 which will explore various abolition movements.See: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2025
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about a new film called Neelan: Unsilenced. Our guest, Pitasanna Shanmugathas, is the director, writer, and producer. Shanmugathas was previously a guest on this program regarding his co-directed six-part documentary series titled "Truth to the Powerless: An Investigation into Canada's Foreign Policy," which interviewed Canadian politicians, academics, and activists to examine Canada’s colonial history, its role in international conflicts, and the impact of its foreign policy on global communities.See: https://neelanunsilenced.com
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about working to stop weapons shipments, in particular to Israel, and in particular from Canada. Our guest, Rachel Small, is the Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, where I am the Executive Director.See also:https://armsembargonow.ca/reporthttps://worldbeyondwar.org/canada
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about what actually killed the dinosaurs. Our guest, Gerta Keller, is Professor of Paleontology and Geology Emeritus in the Geosciences Department of Princeton University. Her new book is called The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about a successful lawsuit and impactful campus activism against genocide. Daniela Colombi is with Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization at the University of Maryland that views itself as part of the international movement for a free Palestine, working for collective liberation, justice, and equality. Daniela was delegated by the board to work on outreach and to testify on behalf of the organization in court. On August 6, civil rights groups Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced a historic $100,000 settlement agreement for their clients, University of Maryland Students for Justice in Palestine (UMD SJP), paid by the University of Maryland.Further reading:https://www.instagram.com/p/DNBVeFpOinvhttps://palestinelegal.org/news/umd-settlementhttps://x.com/AnasAlSharif0/status/1954670507128914219
This week on Talk World Radio we welcome back RootsAction Co-Founder / National Director Norman Solomon, who founded the Institute for Public Accuracy in 1997 and is its executive director. Immersed in anti-war, social justice and environmental movements since the late 1960s, he is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Invisible," "War Made Easy" and "Made Love, Got War."
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with Kathy Kelly, President of World BEYOND War, about a new book and an upcoming online book club, and about the latest developments in Gaza and what to do about it. The book is called Our Journey from Afghanistan: A Story of Survival and Hope.See book club:https://worldbeyondwar.org/book-club-our-journey-from-afghanistan-a-story-of-survival-and-hope/?clear_id=trueSee information on Unarmed Civilian Defense:https://worldbeyondwar.org/UCD
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Paramount cancelling Stephen Colbert's show, and the corporate media cartel generally bowing to Trump. Our guest, media critic Jeff Cohen was founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he was an associate professor of journalism. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986, and cofounded the online activist group RootsAction.org in 2011. His recent column is called "Colbert’s Termination Is a Corporate Assault on Dissent and a Victory for Trump," and RootsAction has a petition to media owners telling them to stop paying Trump's bribes.Seehttps://rootsaction.org/news-a-views/3707-colberts-termination-is-a-corporate-assault-on-dissent-and-a-victory-for-trump-Andhttps://rootsaction.org/protest-colbert-cancellation-big-medias-complicity
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about NATO invading classrooms. Our guest Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored Judge. Higdon’s popular Substack includes the bi-weekly Gaslight Gazette, which chronicles important and well-researched examples of disinformation, character assassination, and censorship in the United States. He recently co-wrote an article called "The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy."
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about Zohran Mamdani and other topics with India Walton, a longtime community activist who emerged in 2021 as a powerful presence in the progressive movement after a stunning Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor of Buffalo, New York. Now a senior advisor at RootsAction, she has continued to advocate for increased civic participation and policies that prioritize the poor and working class.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about the climate destruction done by wars and militaries. Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, which you can find at sgr.org.uk. He is the author of numerous reports related to the connection between militarism and environmental destruction. He is also co-author of a book on the Kyoto Protocol, and an editor of the Responsible Science journal.See:https://www.sgr.org.uk/publications/responsible-science
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about peace activism and Gaza, and the recent global march to Gaza. Our Guest, Cymry Gomery, is a community organizer and activist who founded Montréal for a World BEYOND War in November 2021, after attending the inspiring WBW NoWar101 training. This fledgling Canadian chapter came into being just on the cusp of the Russia-Ukraine war, Canadian government decision to purchase bombers and so much more—our members have had no shortage of actions in which to participate! Cymry is passionate about nature and the rights of nature, the environment, anti-speciesism, anti-racism and social justice. She cares deeply about the cause of peace because our ability to live in peace is the barometer by which we can judge the success of all human endeavor, and without peace it is impossible for humans or other species to flourish. Email Cymry at montreal@worldbeyondwar.org
This week on Talk World Radio we are hearing and discussing poetry about Gaza. Our guest, Anita Barrows, is a poet, novelist, and translator from French, German and Italian. She has eighteen published books and a nineteenth on its way. She and Joanna Macy have translated four volumes of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, and many of their translated poems have been used in weddings and other ceremonies, and set to music. Anita is a clinical psychologist and teaches in a psychology doctoral program, The Wright Institute, Berkeley, where she is a tenured Institute Professor. She maintains a clinical practice where she sees children and adults with a history of trauma or neurodivergence. Anita Barrows worked for five summers at The Palestinian Counseling Center in Ramallah (in the Occupied West Bank) and she has had a longstanding commitment to the liberation of Palestine. See https://poemsforgaza.com
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the Gaza Flotilla with Ann Wright who has spent 22 years as a leader in the peace movement.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about people in the United States who are fasting in solidarity with the people of Gaza who are being starved by the government of Israel and its supporters in the U.S. and other governments. We're talking with one person who is fasting, Mike Ferner, longtime member of and former President of Veterans For Peace, a former City Council Member in Toledo, Ohio, author of Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq. See:https://veteransforpeace.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about the past and future and design of Europe. Our guest Ulrike Guérot is Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the European Center Ernst Robert Curtius at the University of Bonn. Prior to 2021, she was a professor and head of the Department of European Politics and Democracy Studies at Danube University in Krems, Austria. Prior to 2016, she worked for around 25 years in European think tanks and at various universities in Paris, Brussels, London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. She has been a recipient of the French L'Ordre pour le Mérite and of the Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor and of the Salzburg State Prize for Future Studies. Ulrike Guérot is the author of at least 18 books, including Why Europe Should Become a Republic, and including two new books in German, one called ZeitenWenden and one called Ulrike Guérot on Halford J. Mackinder's Heartland Theory.See also:https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/enemy-of-the-state-the-politicalhttps://europeanpeaceproject.euhttps://www.europeandemocracylab.orghttps://ulrike-guerot.de
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the single biggest and least mentioned place that U.S. tax dollars are going. Our guest Stephen Semler is a senior fellow at Center for International Policy and author of Polygraph, a newsletter on Substack, which you can find at stephensemler.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Palestine with Kathy Kelly who is board president of World BEYOND War. From 2022 to 2024, she co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, she has co-coordinated an international network to assist young Afghans forced to flee their country. She made over two dozen trips to Afghanistan from 2010 – 2019, living with young Afghan Peace Volunteers in a working-class neighborhood in Kabul. With Voices in the Wilderness companions, from 1996 – 2003, she traveled twenty-seven times to Iraq, defying the economic sanctions and remaining in Iraq throughout the Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. She joined subsequent delegations to the West Bank’s Jenin Camp in 2002 during and after Israeli attacks, to Lebanon during the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hezbollah and to Gaza, in 2009, during Operation Cast Lead and following the 2013 Operation Pillar of Defense. Kathy has been an educator for most of her life, but she believes children of war and those who are victims of violence have been her most important teachers.We Were So Close: Life After Conscience and the Abraham Accordshttps://worldbeyondwar.org/we-were-so-close-life-after-conscience-and-the-abraham-accords
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about a new book by Noam Chomsky and our guest Nathan J. Robinson titled The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about the Revolving Door Project with Assistant Director Andrea Beaty. The Revolving Door Project tracks corporate influence in politics with a focus on the executive branch. Its website is https://therevolvingdoorproject.org
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about Cop City with two organizers of the movement to prevent it and co-editors of the new book No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement. You can pre-order the book, and we'll have a link to it at TalkWorldRadio.org. Our guests are Micah Herskind and Mariah Parker.Pre-order the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-cop-city-no-cop-world-lessons-from-the-movement-kamau-franklin/21645107?ean=9798888903742&next=t
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing efforts to prevent the United States from putting military bases back into Ecuador. Our guest Bosco Vera Delgado, speaking to us from Ecuador, was representative to the Cantonal Council of Manta until 2023 and deputy director of Heritage and Culture Management of the same city government. He chairs the Tribu Azul Foundation and is Deputy Coordinator of Iskra, Multipolar Integration & Strategic Cooperation Latin America.
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Andy Shallal about his new book, A Seat at the Table: The Making of Busboys and Poets.See https://orbooks.com/catalog/A-seat-at-the-table
This week on Talk World Radio, we are speaking with one of the greatest chess players ever and the author of the new book Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster. Our guest, Susan Polgar, started winning chess tournaments at age 4 in Hungary, won the top female player in the world ranking at age 15, was the first woman to earn the men's Grandmaster title by norms and rating, is the only player ever to earn all six of the world's most prestigious chess crowns, holds a world record for playing 326 simultaneous games and winning 309 of them. I could go on. She is also the only woman to coach a men’s Division 1 collegiate team (Texas Tech 2007–2012 and Webster University 2012–2021). Her teams in the past 10 years have won more world championships, national championships, major titles, and Olympiad medals than all other collegiate chess programs in the United States combined. She is also founder of the Susan Polgar Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes chess.
This week on Talk Word Radio we are speaking with Dmitry Babich in Russia about U.S.-Russian relations. Dmitry Babich is a journalist who has focused on Russian politics. He has been a senior correspondent at the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, RIA Novosti, and Russia Profile magazine. Between 1999 and 2003 Babich was foreign editor at The Moscow News before returning to Russia Profile in 2009 as acting editor-in-chief. His core areas of focus include Russia’s modern political history, international relations.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about how popular culture fuels war. Our guest Mimi Healy is an Associate with the Costs of War project where she provides research assistance and editing. Most recently, she is one of the co-editors on Costs of War's latest research series "Consuming War." Costs of War’s Consuming War research series showcases how, every day, Americans are inundated with cultural products promoting militarism. The first report in the series is titled, "The Militarization of Movies and Television."See:https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2025/consumingwarhttps://www.instagram.com/costsofwar
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about the corporate media with Jeff Cohen who was an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986, and cofounded the online activist group RootsAction.org -- where I work -- in 2011. He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. He has been a TV commentator at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and was senior producer of MSNBC's Phil Donahue primetime show until it was terminated for political reasons three weeks before a U.S. invasion of Iraq. His website is jeffcohen.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Harley Lippman, an Executive Committee member on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC. He serves by Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation as a member of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. He is a board member of the Yale School of Management Board of Advisors and is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about U.S. foreign policy and starting with a little test the so-called Space Force recently did that you probably heard nothing about, preparing for a nuclear war. Our guest, returning to the program, is our friend the terrific peace activist Elizabeth Murray who was once the U.S. Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council. She specialized in Middle Eastern political and media analysis, and has lived and traveled extensively in the region. Elizabeth Murray is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In 2018 and 2024 she was an activist aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. She has been a Member-in-Residence at the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State.
This week on Talk World Radio we are speaking with Craig Unger. He is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin; and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
This week on Talk World Radio we are speaking with Natasha Hakimi Zapata, the author of the new book Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe. Natasha Hakimi Zapata, who is joining us from London, is an award-winning journalist, university lecturer, and literary translator. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, In These Times, and elsewhere. She is former foreign editor of Truthdig.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute who was previously a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. State Department, where she worked on human rights in the Middle East but resigned over the genocide in Gaza. Her most recent work for Quincy has focused on how Israel's ambition to annex the West Bank would not only render a future state of Palestine impossible, but would destabilize Jordan, a key U.S. ally:For Responsible Statecraft: "Jordan braces as Israeli annexation of West Bank looms Jordan braces as Israeli annexation of West Bank looms"Longer report on this for Quincy: "Jordan on the Edge"See also: "Joe Biden Gaza ceasefire Biden & Trump take credit for Gaza ceasefire"
This week on Talk World Radio we welcome back Scott Horton, whose new book is called PROVOKED: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. His books include Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, and Fool’s Errand:Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with John Paul Lederach, author of The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War: Surprising ideas from everyday people who shifted the cycles of violence.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about shutting down military air shows. We have two guests who are working together on this project. Taylor Smith-Hams is U.S. Senior Organizer with 350.org, a global climate justice organization, and Gary Butterfield is Treasurer with San Diego Veterans For Peace. He is a Vietnam-era draftee veteran, a lifetime member of Veterans for Peace, and a member of San Diego 350.org.https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/climatecrisis/no-mashttps://act.350.org/signup/no-mas/?source=get_involved_dynamichttps://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/climatecrisis
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Guantanamo with Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files. Worthington has worked with the United Nations and WikiLeaks, runs two websites, andyworthington.co.uk and closeguantanamo.org and also has a band, The Four Fathers, playing protest music: https://thefourfathers.bandcamp.comWhat's happening this week:https://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2025/01/06/guantanamo-at-23-global-vigils-on-january-11-and-an-ongoing-photo-campaign-marking-8400-days-on-january-9
This week on Talk World Radio, a new analysis finds that over the past decade the U.S. government has given to foreign nations' militaries 40 times the money it has paid into the Green Climate Fund. We have two guests from the Institute for Policy Studies. Aspen Coriz-Romero is the 2024-25 IPS New Mexico Fellow. And Hanna Homestead is a Research Analyst with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about peace activism in the United States with Al Mytty who has been involved in a variety of social justice and peace programs including Pax Christi, Just Faith, Veterans For Peace, and World BEYOND War. He has been an active supporter of World BEYOND War since 2015 and now serves as the Co-Coordinator for the Illinois chapter. Previously, when he resided in Florida, he served as Co-Coordinator for the WBW Florida chapter.Upcoming Zoom on starting a World BEYOND War chapter: https://actionnetwork.org/events/online-info-session-starting-a-world-beyond-war-chapter?clear_id=true
This week on Talk World Radio, we welcome back Jeremy Brecher whose latest book is called The Green New Deal From Below.
Kathy Kelly is board president of World BEYOND War. From 2022 to the present, she has co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, she has co-coordinated an international network to assist young Afghans forced to flee their country. She made over two dozen trips to Afghanistan from 2010 – 2019, living with young Afghan Peace Volunteers in a working-class neighborhood in Kabul.With Voices in the Wilderness companions, from 1996 – 2003, she traveled twenty-seven times to Iraq, defying the economic sanctions and remaining in Iraq throughout the Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. She joined subsequent delegations to the West Bank’s Jenin Camp in 2002 during and after Israeli attacks, to Lebanon during the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hezbollah and to Gaza, in 2009, during Operation Cast Lead and following the 2013 Operation Pillar of Defense.Kathy has been an educator for most of her life, but she believes children of war and those who are victims of violence have been her most important teachers.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about the 70,000 Korean victims of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Japan. Our guest Brad Wolf is a lawyer and former prosecutor, director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, PA, and co-coordinator of the Merchants Of Death War Crimes Tribunal. He is also co-coordinator of the International People's Tribunal on the 1945 Atomic Bombings for the Redress of Korean Victims. His new book on the writings of Philip Berrigan was published by Fordham University Press and is entitled “A Ministry Of Risk.”http://abombtribunal.orghttps://philipberrigan.com
This week on Talk World Radio we are speaking with Emiliana Vegas, author of the new book Let’s Change the World: How to Work within International Development Organizations to Make a Difference. Emiliana Vegas has been highly recognized for her career working to inform education policy in the so-called Global South. She has been a leading economist at the World Bank, division chief of education at the Inter-American Bank, and codirector of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is currently a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the crime of war in Palestine with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director for DAWN -- the organization founded by slain writer Jamal Khashoggi and found at dawnmena.org.
This week on Talk World Radio we are speaking with Tore Naerland who is the founder and since 1977 has been the president of Bike For Peace, a Norwegian-based peace organization that works to organize peace rides on bicycles all over the world. They collaborate with various peace organizations, schools, and universities to promote and focus on the work in the struggle against nuclear weapons. See https://bikeforpeace.no
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Kevin B. Smith who is the author of the brand new book The Jailer’s Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America. Smith is also the Leland and Dorothy H. Olson Chair of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The book shows that incarceration rates vary dramatically by state, within the United States, and that several factors correlate significantly with variations in those rates.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the illegality of the war in Gaza and the utility or lack thereof of international law. Our guest John Quigley is Professor emeritus of international law at Ohio State University, Quigley's books include The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict (Cambridge University Press).
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with portrait painter Robert Shetterly whose website is americanswhotellthetruth.org. Robert’s paintings and prints are in collections all over the U.S. and Europe. For more than 20 years he has been painting the series of portraits Americans Who Tell the Truth. These portraits have been traveling around the country since 2003. Venues have included everything from university museums and grade school libraries to sandwich shops, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, and the Superior Court in San Francisco. To date, the exhibits have visited 35 states. In 2005, Dutton published a book of the portraits by the same name. In 2006, the book won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non-fiction. New Village Press in New York City is currently publishing a series of themed books on the portraits. Each volume contains 50 portraits. The first two were Portraits of Racial Justice (2021) and Portraits of Earth Justice (2022). The new one is Portraits of Peacemakers: https://nyupress.org/9781613322567/portraits-of-peacemakers
This week on Talk World Radio: Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who volunteered for two weeks in March and April at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. He is one of 99 doctors who recently signed an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris that estimated Palestinian war deaths in Gaza at no less than 118,908. He is also the author of an October 9th article in the New York Times based on his surveying of 65 healthcare workers, documenting -- among much else -- that Israeli soldiers are regularly shooting children in the head and chest.The New York Times article discussed:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-doctor-interviews.htmlThe letter discussed:https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the November 3rd 1979 Greensboro Massacre in Greensboro, North Carolina, with Aran Shetterly, the author of a brand new book on the topic, titled MORNINGSIDE: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul.To join an online bookclub with Aran Shetterly, go to:https://worldbeyondwar.org/book-club-aran-shetterly-with-morningside-the-1979-greensboro-massacre-and-the-struggle-for-an-american-citys-soul/?clear_id=true
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about a new book called WE THE POISONED: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Coverup and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans. Our guest is the author Jordan Chariton. The book, with a foreword by Erin Brokovitch, is devastating and not just about one town in Michigan but about the United States and beyond, and not just about something in the past, as the outrage is ongoing.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about poverty with Karen Dolan who is Project Director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Karen has been on before but it's been a long time. We're happy to welcome her back.See https://ips-dc.org/project/criminalization-of-race-and-poverty
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with Norman Solomon about his book, newly out in paperback: WAR MADE INVISIBLE: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine -- with a new afterword on the Gaza War.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about war and the Civilian Agenda. Our guest, Ousman Noor, is Co-Director of The Civilian Agenda. The website ishttps://thecivilianagenda.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the war in Sudan. Our guest is Omia Mustafa who goes by Zeirra on social media. She is a 21-year-old with an international relations degree. You can find her at:Instagram: zzeirraTwitter : KushiteDictatorTiktok: zeirra7A petition to sign:https://worldbeyondwar.org/hand-off-sudan
Kathy Kelly has been President of the Board of World BEYOND War since March 2022, prior to which time she served as a member of the Advisory Board. She is based in the United States, but is often elsewhere. Kathy is WBW’s second Board President, taking over for Leah Bolger. Kathy’s efforts to end wars have led her to living in war zones and prisons over the past 35 years. In 2009 and 2010, Kathy was part of two Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegations which visited Pakistan to learn more about the consequences of U.S. drone attacks. From 2010 – 2019, the group organized dozens of delegations to visit Afghanistan, where they continued learning about casualties of U.S. drone attacks. Voices also helped organize protests at U.S. military bases operating weaponized drone attacks. She is now a co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones campaign.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the somehow ever-worsening livestreamed genocide in Gaza. Our guest, Jennifer Loewenstein, is former Associate Director of Middle Eastern Studies and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has lived and reported from Gaza and Beirut. She highlights a series of critical recent reports.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about working for peace in Africa. Our guest Brenda Wanjiru is based in Ghana where she works on peace education, peace activism, aiding children and refugees impacted by war, and rehabilitating child soldiers. We'll talk about all these topics. Find Brenda on Linked In athttps://www.linkedin.com/in/brenda-wanjiru-%F0%9F%A7%91%F0%9F%8F%BE%E2%80%8D%E2%9A%96%EF%B8%8F%E2%9A%96%EF%B8%8F-abb234153/
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about peace activism in Romania and worldwide with Maria Cernat who is the co-organizer and co-founder of World BEYOND War Romania, a chapter of World BEYOND War of which I'm the executive director. Maria Cernat is also the host of a new podcast called Pacifist Barricades. She is also an Associate Professor of Communication and Public Relations, and President of the Institute for Media Research and Human Rights, and lecturer at the Faculty of Communication Sciences and International Relations at Titu Maiorescu University. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Politics and Law published by the Canadian Center for Higher Education.World BEYOBND War: https://worldbeyondwar.orgWorld BEYOND War Romania: https://worldbeyondwar.org/romaniaPacifist Barricades Podcast: https://worldbeyondwar.org/category/podcasts/pacifist-barricade
Campaign Nonviolence Action Days are coming up September 21 to October 2. See https://campaignnonviolence.orgWorld BEYOND War's #NoWar2024 is September 20 to 22. See https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2024Rivera Sun is an author and activist whose novels include The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and the board of Backbone Campaign. Her website is riverasun.com
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about how incredibly hot it is outside and why that might be and what might be done about it. Our guest Dr. Alec Feinberg has a Ph.D. from Northeastern University in Physics. He currently does volunteer climate modeling to help out on the climate crisis. His climate work has focused on urbanization heat flux contributions to global warming, re-radiation modeling for the global mean Earth’s energy budget, and the development of solar geoengineering equations for solar radiation modification to reverse global warming trends. He has published in all of these areas focusing on physics based modeling methods. He has a website at BestGlobalWarmingSolution.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about a new book called How America Works and Why It Doesn't by our guest William Cooper. He is an attorney, national columnist, and award-winning author. His commentary has appeared in hundreds of publications around the world, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, Toronto Star, and Jerusalem Post. Publishers Weekly calls his writings about American politics “a compelling rallying cry for democratic institutions under threat in America.”
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about immigration. Our guest Ernesto Castañeda is director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, the Immigration Lab, and the Masters in Sociology, Research, and Practice at American University in Washington, D.C.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with former Congressman / current Congressional candidate Dennis Kucinich.Dennis Kucinich's campaign website: https://kucinich.comDennis Kucinich's substack blog: https://denniskucinich.substack.comThe 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush by Dennis Kucinich:https://www.amazon.com/Articles-Impeachment-Case-Prosecuting-George/dp/1932595422
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing a wonderful new novel called Anything Is Good, with the author, Fred Waitzkin. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1943. He went to Kenyon College and did graduate study at New York University. His other books are Searching for Bobby Fischer, Deep Water Blues, Strange Love, Mortal Games, The Last Marlin, and The Dream Merchant. His work has appeared in Esquire, New York magazine, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast, among others. He lives in Manhattan.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Palestine. Our guest, who has been on before, is Dan Kovalik, whose latest book is The Case for Palestine: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care, with a forward by George Galloway. His previous books include No More War, which I just included in a yet-to-be-published article for a website that asks authors to recommend five books on a theme. My theme was war abolition. Dan Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer who has taught International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the coming months of crazy. Whether or not Frank Zappa ever really said it, politics is indeed the entertainment division of the military industrial complex. It is the circenses of the panem et circenses, the circuses of the bread and circuses. As we normalize genocide, increase the risk of nuclear war, lock in climate collapse, and accelerate the bioweapons tinkering that probably caused the covid pandemic, we are yet again presented with another most important election of our lifetime. Which geriatric sociopathic servant of the MICIMATT — the military industrial congressional intelligence media academia think tank complex — do you choose to identify with, deny all evidence against, and cheer for as a savior worthy of imperial powers no person should ever hold? See:https://davidswanson.org/the-coming-months-of-crazy
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing a new book called End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate, with the author Jon Mills.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about countries around the world investing in U.S. investment in wars. We have three guests joining us from Mauritius. Nawsheen Uteene is a Certified Project Manager and Accountant. Zaynab Khodabocus is a Chemical and Renewable Energy Engineer. And Adil Aboobakar is a Chartered Financial Analyst and the Managing Founder of a consultancy firm focused on Financial Modeling and Business Valuation. Read more here:https://worldbeyondwar.org/debt-dollars-the-unused-leverage
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the U.S. educational system. Our guest Jennifer Berkshire writes about education and politics for the Nation, the New Republic, the Baffler, the New York Times, and other publications. The creator and co-host of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard,” she teaches in the Education Studies program at Yale University and the Prison Education Program at Boston College. She is the author or co-author of two previous books, and of the forthcoming The Education Wars: A Citizen's Guide and Defense Manual.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about campus protests, accusations of anti-Semitism, and media malpractice with Richard (RJ) Eskow, who has served as a chief writer and editor for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign; a Fortune 500 healthcare executive (those two things make an odd combination); a student activist; an economic consultant in more than 20 countries; a songwriter; and a musician. He is the host of The Zero Hour found at https://ThisIsTheZeroHour.com and his articles can be found at https://ZeroHourReport.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Nuclear energy with our guest Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman. He is a past guest and a life-long activist who speaks, writes, and organizes widely on energy, the environment, U.S. and global history, drug war, election protection, and grassroots politics. He has taught at Capital University, Columbus State Community College, and Hampshire College. He has authored or co-authored 20 books, countless articles and speeches, two films, and a Grammy-winnning song, and hosts two radio shows, California Solartopia and the Green Power & Wellness Show. Harvey helped coined the phrase “No Nukes” in 1973, and his recent article at Counterpunch is called Nuclear Power’s Lethal, Larcenous End Game.See also: https://solartopia.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Ontario Teachers and Retirees Demanding Divestment from the Israeli War Machine. Our guest Dave Szollosy has worked as Director of the Office of Social Justice in Victoria, B.C., high school teacher and president of the Toronto Secondary Unit of his union. He served three terms as Ward 3 Councillor in Georgina. Retired, he still is engaged with union work and acts as a professional parliamentarian for union locals and the Chamber of Commerce. Along with political involvement, Dave serves on the Executive of a Retired Teachers organization and Catholics for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land. Most recently, he has been host of a bi-weekly public affairs show on Rogers TV, Politically Speaking: Insights and Issues.See: https://worldbeyondwar.org/otpp
This week on Talk World Radio, we welcome back Coleen Rowley, a retired special agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel of the FBI who taught constitutional law and law enforcement ethics to FBI agents and other law enforcement, then became a whistleblower about the FBI’s pre 9-11 failures and the folly of the Iraq invasion. She was named, along with two other corporate whistleblowers, as TIME Magazine’s 2002 Persons of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and Huffington Post, along with other publications.See:https://freedomflotilla.orghttps://usboatstogaza.org
Ann Wright is a Member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War. She is based in Hawaii. Ann is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was also a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned from the Department of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience and appeared in the documentary “Uncovered”. See:https://freedomflotilla.org
Gabriel Aguirre is Latin America Organizer for World BEYOND War, is from Venezuela, and is currently based in Bógota, Colombia. He has been an activist and advocate for peace, social justice, international solidarity and human rights, and has more than 13 years of experience in social and community work. He is one of the planners of a Neutrality Congress planned for April 4-7 in Bogota and online in Spanish and English. People can sign up to attend in-person or online athttps://worldbeyondwar.org/congress-on-neutrality-a-strategy-for-global-stabilization
This week on Talk World Radio, we are speaking with Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, the author of the new award-winning book, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about investors in war profiteering. Our guest, Stavroula Pabst, is a writer, comedian, and media PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Athens, Greece. Her writing has appeared in publications including Responsible Statecraft, Reductress, Al Mayadeen, and The Grayzone. Keep up with her work by subscribing to her Substack at stavroulapabst.substack.comSee also these articles:https://responsiblestatecraft.org/venture-capital-defense-companies/https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/10/investigative-reports/how-peter-thiel-linked-tech-is-fueling-the-ukraine-war/
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about a book called DOMESTIC DARKNESS: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism by our guest, the former Director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police, Julie Farnam.
This week on Talk World Radio we are discussing the documentary Beyond Bars by Brave New Films. We have two guests.Robert Greenwald is the filmmaker. He is is an award-winning producer and director of more than 60 features, television movies and miniseries. His work has garnered awards from organizations including the ACLU and Physicians for Social Responsibility, in addition to an Office of the Americas Activist in the Trenches award, a Liberty Hill Upton Sinclair Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Award, and a Peacemaker Award from The Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.Chesa Boudin is the subject of the film. He was District Attorney of San Francisco from January 8, 2020 to July 8, 2022, and is now the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Boudin was born in 1980 to Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and Dvid Gilbert who were convicted of murder and went to prison when Chesa Boudin was 14-months old.Watch Beyond Bars here: https://form.123formbuilder.com/6591824/beyondbars
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about a new book called PRACTICAL RADICALS: SEVEN STRATEGIES TO CHANGE THE WORLD by Deepak Bhargava and our guest Stephanie Luce.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about illegal weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. We're joined by two guests.Josh Paul resigned from the U.S. State Department in October, 2023, due to his disagreement with the Biden Administration's decision to rush weapons to Israel. He had previously spent over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. He is a Non-Resident Fellow at the organization Democracy Now for the Arab World (DAWN) and a recipient of the 2023 Callaway Award for Civic Courage.Mike Ferner is current Director and a previous President of Veterans For Peace, a former City Council Member in Toledo, Ohio, and the author of Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq.
This week on Talk World Radio we are talking about what I think can be called a U.S. coup in Pakistan. We'll see if my guest agrees. Professor Junaid Ahmad teaches Religion, Law, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality in Islamabad, Pakistan. See also:https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240202-bidens-generals-in-pakistanhttps://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240213-khan-v-the-generals
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about solving the climate crisis with John Berger, author of Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about locking up innocent people. Our guest Victoria Valenzuela is assistant publisher and investigative reporter at ScheerPost, and a graduate student at the University of Southern California focusing on investigative and social justice journalism. She has worked with The Marshall Project, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, BuzzFeed News, ProPublica, and LA Taco. She is the social media manager for Renewing American Democracy and a fellow with the Law and Justice Journalism Project.The Innocence Project is athttps://innocenceproject.org
This week on Talk world Radio we're talking about U.S. public opinion on Gaza with two guests in the first half. Stephen Miles is President of Win Without War. And Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum is Chief Operating Officer and former Director of Research & Analysis at ReThink Media, a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports movements through media and communications.See the polling we discuss:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hVYMXTLrnthiza1hWAHi2FTxcoM5TBXD/viewIn the second half, we turn to Trita Parsi who is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on US-Iranian relation.To take action online and learn more on this topic visit https://worldbeyondwar.org/gaza-genocide
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Namibia's denunciation of Germany's support for Israel's defense against South Africa's case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Our guest, Henning Melber is Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. He has served as Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Kassel University, was Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit in Windhoek, and Research Director of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. Henning is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein and a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Commonwealth Studies/University of London. He directed the Foundation from 2006 to 2012. He holds a PhD in Political Sciences and a Habilitation in Development Studies. In 2017 he was elected President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI). See also:https://www.daghammarskjold.sehttps://nai.uu.sehttps://www.namibian.com.na/namibia-germany-and-israel-the-pitfalls-of-selective-remorse-and-trauma
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the prosecution of Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Our guest is the independent journalist Sam Husseini.You can find his writing at https://husseini.substack.comTo take action online and learn more on this topic visit https://worldbeyondwar.org/gaza-genocide
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Timmon Wallis, author of the new book Warheads to Windmills: Preventing Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear War. See: https://warheadstowindmills.org/bookTimmon Wallis is national coordinator of the Warheads to Windmills coalition. See: https://warheadstowindmills.org
This Week on Talk World Radio we're talking about a new book called Abolishing the Military: Arguments and Alternatives, with two of the three authors, joining us from New Zealand, it being the New Zealand military in particular that they'd like to abolish. With us is Joseph Llewellyn who completed his PhD at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago. He completed a Master of Arts and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Peace and Conflict Studies at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. Also with us is Richard Jackson who holds the Leading Thinkers Chair in Peace Studies at the University of Otago. He lectures on critical terrorism studies and critical peace studies at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and more than a hundred articles and book chapters on pacifism and nonviolence, conflict resolution, war and terrorism. He is the editor of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism and commentates regularly in the media on international security issues. See:https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/abolishing-the-military
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the media, what's wrong with it and what to do about it with Jeff Cohen. Jeff Cohen is Co-Founder / Policy Director at RootsAction.org. He is a media critic, columnist, documentary filmmaker, and retired journalism professor who founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. For years, he was a regular pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC discussing issues of media and politics; he is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." See also:Has Corporate Media Found Its Inner Peacenik? (March, 2022)https://progressivehub.net/has-the-corporate-media-found-its-inner-peacenik/When CNN Introduces Bernie-Bashers Only as “Former,” CNN Is Lying To You (Feb, 2020)https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/13/when-cnn-introduces-bernie-bashers-only-former-cnn-lying-youMilitary Propaganda Pushed Me Off TV (May, 2008)https://www.huffpost.com/entry/military-propaganda-pushe_b_98925In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphone for Official Views (March 2003)https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/in-iraq-crisis-networks-are-megaphones-for-official-views/The Panama Deception (full movie, released 1992)https://www.c-span.org/video/?467566-1/the-panama-deception
This week on Talk World Radio we listen to an event recorded on December 2nd at the Univeristy of Virginia in the former house of James Monroe who came back to life for the occasion of burying his 200-year-old doctrine.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing whistleblowers and Julian Assange and Iran and Palestine with RootsAction Whistleblower Advocate Jeffrey Sterling.Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA case officer who was at the agency, including the Iran Task Force, for nearly a decade. He filed an employment discrimination suit against the CIA, but the case was dismissed as a threat to national security. He served two and a half years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act. No incriminating evidence was produced at trial and Jeffrey continues to profess his innocence. His memoir, “Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower,” was published in late 2019.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about war, peace, and nukes with Norman Solomon. Norman is Co-Founder / National Director at RootsAction.org. He founded the Institute for Public Accuracy in 1997 and is its executive director. Immersed in anti-war, social justice and environmental movements since the late 1960s, he is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Invisible," "War Made Easy" and "Made Love, Got War." His recent articles discussed in this program include:Time for a Transnational Uprising Against a Reckless Escalation of the Arms Race?Backing Biden for 2024, Conformist Democrats Have Been in Denial. Now They’re in a Panic.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about ICBMs, Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, possibly the very most likely thing to destroy all life on Earth, including everyone who doesn't know or care what they are or why they're so dangerous. Our guest, Peter Manos, is a retired consultation-liaison psychiatrist, a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the author of a number of books. On learning of the U.S. government's plans for new land-based ICBM, he decided to write a novel. The result is the fantastic book called Shadows.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about making peace in place of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Mairead (Corrigan) Maguire is a Member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War. She is based in Northern Ireland. Mairead is a Nobel Peace Laureate and Co-founder of Peace People – Northern Ireland 1976. Mairead was born in 1944, into a family of eight children in West Belfast. At 14 she became a volunteer with a grass-roots lay organization and began in her free time to work in her local community. Mairead’s volunteerism, gave her the opportunity to work with families, helping to set up the first centre for disabled children, day care and youth centres for training local youth in peaceful community service. When Internment was introduced by the British Government in 1971, Mairead and her companions visited Long Kesh Internment camp to visit prisoners and their families, who were suffering deeply from many forms of violence. Mairead, was the aunt of the three Maguire children who died, in August, 1976, as a result of being hit by an IRA getaway car after its driver was shot by a British soldier. Mairead (a pacifist) responded to the violence facing her family and community by organizing, together with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, massive peace demonstrations appealing for an end to the bloodshed, and a nonviolent solution to the conflict. Together, the three co-founded the Peace People, a movement committed to building a just and nonviolent society in Northern Ireland. The Peace People organized each week, for six months, peace rallies throughout Ireland and the UK. These were attended by many thousands of people, and during this time there was a 70% decrease in the rate of violence. In 1976 Mairead, together with Betty Williams, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their actions to help bring about peace and put an end to the violence arising out of the ethnic/political conflict in their native Northern Ireland. Since receiving the Nobel Peace prize Mairead has continued to work to promote dialogue, peace and disarmament both in Northern Ireland and around the world. Mairead has visited many countries, including, USA, Russia, Palestine, North/South Korea, Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Syria, Congo, Iraq.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about structural racism, non-structural racism, healthcare, gun violence, and politics with Dr. Brian Williams. He is the author of The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal. He is running for Congress in Dallas, Texas, where he became known in the media following the ordeal of trying to save the lives of multiple police officers shot in a mass shooting in 2016.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about genocide. Our guest, Ed Horgan, is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is based in Ireland. Ed retired from the Irish so-called Defence Forces with the rank of Commandant after 22 years service that included peacekeeping missions with the United Nations in Cyprus and the Middle East. He has worked on over 20 election monitoring missions in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia, and Africa. He is international secretary with the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, Chairperson and founder of Veterans For Peace Ireland, and a peace activist with Shannonwatch. His many peace activities include the case of Horgan v Ireland, in which he took the Irish Government to the High Court over breaches of Irish Neutrality and U.S. military use of Shannon airport, and a high profile court case resulting from his attempt to arrest U.S. President George W. Bush in Ireland in 2004. He teaches politics and international relations part-time at the University of Limerick. He completed a PhD thesis on reform of the United Nations in 2008 and has a master’s degree in peace studies and a B.A. degree in History, Politics, and Social Studies. He is actively involved in a campaign to commemorate and name as many as possible of the up to one million children who have died as a result of wars in the Middle East since the first Gulf War in 1991.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the Anti-Defamation League with Emmaia Gelman who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is writing a book about the Anti-Defamation League. She recently published an article in the Boston Review called "The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems."See:https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/emmaia-gelman-anti-defamation-leaguehttps://rootsaction.org/tell-adl-stop-engaging-in-defamation
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about what the U.S. military is doing to drinking water in Hawaii. Our guest, Wayne Tanaka, is Director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii.Latest article by Ann Wright:https://worldbeyondwar.org/none-of-the-14-navy-officers-named-in-red-hill-toxic-fuel-spill-disaster-were-fired-suspended-had-pay-docked-or-reduced-in-rankPetition to Shut Down Red Hill fuel storage, now shut down:https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/protect-oahu-s-drinking-water-shut-down-20-massive-75-yr-old-jet-fuel-tanks-at-red-hill
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing a recent legal settlement that will compensate family members of people killed by the Bolivian military. Our guest, Beth Stephens, is a Center for Constitutional Rights cooperating attorney and a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers Law School. The Center for Constitutional Rights is at https://ccrjustice.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about peace activism in a country that has more of it than perhaps any other: Italy. Our guest Sergio Bassoli is senior officer at CGIL's International Department. CGIL is the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro -- the confederation of labor unions. He is also the Board's coordinator of the Rete Italiana Pace Disarmo or Italian Network for Peace and Disarmament. And he is a member of the national coordination of Europe for Peace. A major rally is planned in Rome on October 7th: https://retepacedisarmo.org/evento/la-via-maestra-insieme-per-la-costituzione
This week on Talk World Radio we are speaking with Nick Mottern, long-time stand-out peace activist, reporter, researcher, speaker, and prop-creator. Nick is co-coordinator of Ban Killer Drones and organizer of Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, as well as a member of the national board of Veterans For Peace. See:https://bankillerdrones.orghttps://merchantsofdeath.orghttps://veteransforpeace.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the latest developments in the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange. Our guest Greg Barns SC is an Australian barrister speaking to us from Australia. He is a member of the Assange Committee and former President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. He was appointed Senior Counsel in Tasmania in 2020. He is Chair of the Prisoners Legal Service in Tasmania and is a Patron of the Justice Reform Initiative.See: https://republicchambers.com.au/barrister/greg-barns-sc
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about peace, and not in your heart, and not as "more than just the absence of war," but in fact as the absence of war, in Ukraine in particular.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about pharmaceuticals with Dana Brown, the director of health and economy at the Democracy Collaborative, where her research focuses on health and care systems, the pharmaceutical sector, and economic transformation for health and well-being. See:https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/09/drug-shortages-public-pharma-option/https://democracypolicy.network/agenda/strong-people/strong-bodies/public-pharmaceuticals
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about a U.S. supported coup in Pakistan. Our guest Abdul Jabbar is an emeritus professor at City College of San Francisco and a former visiting professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. He came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship and has received two National Endowment for the Humanities awards. His books are: Reading and Writing with Multicultural Literature: In Search of Reconciliation and Peace; and Not of an Age, But for All Time: Revolutionary Humanism in Iqbal, Manto, and Faiz; and The Promise, Reality, and Potential of America’s Cultural Diversity.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about how many people in the United States have been dying for no good reason. Our guest Jacob Bor is one of the authors of a new study that assesses how many U.S. deaths would be avoided every year if the U.S.'s mortality rates were equal to other wealthy peer nations. Jacob Bor is an assistant professor in the departments of global health and epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health.
PNAS Nexus Paper (2023) https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/6/pgad173/7185600
Coverage in The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/us-life-span-mortality-rates/670591/
Coverage in The NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/opinion/mortality-rate-pandemic.html
Lancet Commission on Health and Policy in the Trump Era (2021) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext#seccestitle50
National Academies of Science (2021 Report) https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/rising-midlife-mortality-rates-and-socioeconomic-disparities
National Academies of Science (2013 Report) https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/13497/us-health-in-international-perspective-shorter-lives-poorer-health
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about counter-recruitment, or discouraging people from joining a military. We have two guests. Debra Sweet is Director of World Can't Wait, and has been working to stop U.S. war on the world for almost 60 years. Hip-Hop Artivist and Educator Miles Megaciph is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and an advocate for peace. They have both been working on a project called We Are Not Your Soldiers: https://www.wearenotyoursoldiers.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Yemen with Arwa Mokdad, a peace advocate at Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation.
https://YemenFoundation.org
and a MPhil candidate at the University of Oxford researching conflict mediation within Yemen.
Recent articles by Arwa Mokdad:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/yemen-blockade-medical-care/
https://dawnmena.org/what-many-western-experts-keep-getting-wrong-about-yemen/
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/war-childhood-yemen
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/28/when-will-the-war-in-yemen-end/
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/06/14/what-the-uae-takeover-of-yemens-islands-really-means/
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/03/12/what-about-the-saudi-blockade-strangling-yemen/
Article by David Swanson that he quotes from:
https://davidswanson.org/every-single-member-of-congress-is-willing-to-let-yemeni-children-die/
This week on Talk World Radio will be unusual. We're going to listen to a piece of music, and it's an unusual piece of music. It's a speech set to music. President John F. Kennedy's June 10, 1963 commencement address at American University is certainly the best speech ever made by a U.S. president and one that it would be hard to imagine a U.S. president giving today.
"Peace for All Time" was created by Irthlingz.
Video and full credits are here.
Excerpts are here.
Excerpts with discussion: See Part 5 of 24 Hour Peace Wave 2023.
Lyrics.
Kennedy's speech.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing global broiling -- "warming" doesn't seem to cover it -- and what's being done and by whom to increase or lessen it. Our guest Helena Cobban is a writer on, and analyst of, international affairs. For two decades she contributed regular columns on global affairs to, respectively, the Christian Science Monitor and Al-Hayat (London). Of her seven books, four deal with Middle Eastern issues and the remainder with other international issues. In 2010, she founded Just World Books LLC, which has published 40 titles on Middle Eastern and global issues. Since 2015, she has been Executive Director of the Just World Educational Foundation. Ms. Cobban blogs at Globalities.org.
This week on Talk World Radio we speak with Sean Conner. He was appointed Executive Director of the International Peace Bureau (see IPB.org) in October 2022. He holds a Bachelors in Intercultural and Critical Communication Studies from the State University of New York at Geneseo and a Masters in Intercultural Conflict Management from the Alice Salomon Hochschule. Prior to joining the IPB team in Berlin he worked for the Centre for Cross-Cultural Study in the U.S. and in community development with the non-profit Enlace Project in Nicaragua. He has been with IPB since 2020, first as Assistant Coordinator, then Coordinator for the 2021 World Peace Congress in Barcelona, and as Deputy Executive Director, and now Executive Director.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking nuclear danger and antinuclear action with Ivana Nikolić Hughes, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University. See https://wagingpeace.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with Matthew Hoh, who has been a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy since 2010. In 2009, Matthew resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the American escalation of the war. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew took part in the American occupation of Iraq; first in 2004-5 in Salah ad Din Province with a State Department reconstruction and governance team and then in 2006-7 in Anbar Province as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, Matthew worked on Afghanistan and Iraq war policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department from 2002-8. Matthew’s writings have appeared in online and print periodicals such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution, CounterPunch, CNN, Defense News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Raleigh News & Observer, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He has been a guest on hundreds of news programs on radio and television networks including the BBC, CBS, CNN, CSPAN, Fox, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, Pacifica and PBS. The Council on Foreign Relations has cited Matthew’s resignation letter from his post in Afghanistan as an Essential Document. In 2010, Matthew was named the Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling and, in 2021, he was awarded as a Defender of Liberty by the Committee for the Republic. Matthew is a member of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Public Accuracy, an Advisory Board Member for the Committee to Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties, Expose Facts, North Carolina Committee to Investigate Torture, The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, and World Beyond War, and he is an Associate Member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a 100% disabled veteran and was certified by North Carolina as a Peer Support Specialist for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder. See: https://matthewhoh.substack.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Venezuela, sanctions, and immigration with Adrienne Pine, visiting professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies Department of Anthropology and Social Change, and co-editor of Asylum For Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with Norman Solomon about his brand new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. Norman is cofounder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This week on Talk World Radio we're remembering and learning new information about the IWW, the International Workers of the World or Wobblies, with Ahmed White, author of the new book Under The Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers.
Kathy Kelly has been President of the Board of World BEYOND War since March 2022, prior to which time she served as a member of the Advisory Board. She is based in the United States, but is often elsewhere. Kathy’s efforts to end wars have led her to living in war zones and prisons over the past 35 years.The peace wave is at https://24hourpeacewave.orgWorld BEYOND War is at https://worldbeyondwar.orgInternational Peace Bureau is at https://ipb.orgMerchants of Death is at https://merchantsofdeath.orgBan Killer Drones is at https://bankillerdrones.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about prosecutorial misconduct, and a new report from a coalition called It Can Happen to You. Our guests are Kat Dean, Communications Director for It Can Happen to You, who was the chief researcher on the report, and Peter B. Collins, a retired radio host and podcaster who worked on wrongful convictions for 30+ years as past president of the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit founded by a San Quentin prisoner to support innocent inmates. See: https://itcouldhappen2you.org
This Week on Talk World Radio: Cop City: What is it and how can we stop it? Our guest is Reverend Keyanna Jones. She is a Political and Social Justice Activist and Community Organizer, and a staunch advocate for quality, affordable childcare and equity in education. She currently works with Community Movement Builders to educate, engage and empower the Black Community in Atlanta, Georgia (focusing on self-sustainability). Before moving back to Georgia in 2020, Keyanna was a Community Organizer in Roselle, NJ. It was there that she began her life of advocacy and resistance to white supremacy and oppressive systems. She was ordained as a Prophetess in the Lord's Church on July 14, 2020 by Pastor Shonda Obi, of Obione Global Ministries International. She is the proprietor of E Equals MC Squared Educational Services, LLC, where she works as a Homeschool Curriculum Consultant, IEP Advocate and German Translator. She is a proud daughter of East Atlanta; old-school hip-hop lover and the biggest fan of her Granny, Mary Kate Thomas. Keyanna is the wife of Jerrod R. Moore and mother to their 5 unique and extraordinary children. See: https:// stopcopcitysolidarity.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Israelgate and Nordstream. Our guest, journalist James Bamford, has a new book called Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, and recent articles in The Nation, one called "The Candidate and the Spy," another "The Nord Stream Explosions: New Revelations About Motive, Means, and Opportunity." See https://www.thenation.com/authors/james-bamford
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing nonviolent journalism, and a new book called Nonviolent Journalism: A Humanist Approach to Communication. Our guests are two of the authors.A free public event will be held to debut the book in Washington DC on May 9:https://worldbeyondwar.org/upcoming-event-in-dc-nonviolent-journalism-a-book-debut-and-dinnerPía Figueroa Edwards is from Chile, a former Undersecretary of State of Chile, and former environmental advisor to the Minister of Agriculture. She is Vice President of the Pangea Foundation and director of TempoConsultores. Since 2008, she has been co-director of Pressenza, international press agency.Tony Robinson is from the UK and has been an activist for peace and nonviolence. He has been a writer, an editor and finally a co-director for Pressenza, International Press Agency, specialising in matters of peace and disarmament. In 2019, he produced the award-winning documentary film, The Beginning of the End of Nuclear Weapons.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, nuclear waste weapons, and other genius ideas thought up by our mentally challenged species. Our guest, Linda Pentz Gunter is founder and international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. See https://beyondnuclear.org and https://beyondnuclearinternational.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about a Zone of Peace in the Americas, and events in Uganda, and presidential indictments, and everything we find time for with Margaret Kimberley, Executive Editor and Senior Columnist at Black Agenda Report, member of the coordinating committee of Black Alliance for Peace, and author of a wonderful book previously discussed on this show called Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents.
This week on Talk World Radio: Why doesn't the global south support war in Ukraine? Our guest, Krishen Mehta is a former partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and worked in their New York, London, and Tokyo offices. Krishen is currently a Senior Global Justice Fellow at Yale University co-teaching a course on Global Trade, Tax, and Social Justice. Along with his wife, Krishen is co-founder of Asia Initiatives, an organization devoted to women's empowerment in Asia and Africa. Krishen also serves on the Board of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism in New York, the Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI), the American Committee for US Russia Accord (ACURA), the Human Rights Watch Foundation in Japan, and SaveLife Foundation in India.See: "5 Reasons Why Much Of Global South Isn’t Automatically Supporting The West In Ukraine"
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the new book War Is Hell: Studies in the Right of Legitimate Violence. Our guest is the author, Charles Douglas Lummis. He has written extensively on the topic of U.S. foreign relations, and is a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. Susan Sontag has called Lummis "one of the most thoughtful, honorable, and relevant intellectuals writing about democratic practice anywhere in the world." Karel van Wolferen has referred to him as an "eminent observer of the American-Japanese vassalage relationship."
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the October Surprise and independent journalism with Nat Parry, who is an author, independent journalist and the editor of the recently published book, American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader, as well as the article at Consortium News: "NYT Catches Up to Parry But Still Falls Short on October Surprise."
This week on Talk World Radio we're looking back at the peace movement against the war on Iraq, or the phase of it that began 20 years ago. Our guest, David Cortright, is Professor Emeritus and special adviser for policy studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He was an organizer for peace as an active duty soldier during the Vietnam War, and Executive Director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (1977-1988). He is Co-founder and board member of Win Without War, and author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 22 books, including a terrific new book, A Peaceful Superpower: Lessons from the World’s Largest Antiwar Movement.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're planning for a big peace rally in Washington, D.C., on March 18th. We have two guests. Jodie Evans is Cofounder of CODE PINK. See https://codepink.org And Jodie is Founder of China Is Not Our Enemy. Joe Lombardo is Coordinator of UNAC, United National Antiwar Coalition. See https://unacpeace.org For more on the upcoming event in DC and sister events elsewhere, see any of these websites:https://www.codepink.org/march18https://www.answercoalition.org/protest_march_18_19_peace_in_ukraine_say_no_to_endless_u_s_warshttps://peoplesforum.org/events/peace-in-ukraine-say-no-to-endless-u-s-wars
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the war in Yemen with Isaac Evans-Frantz, the executive director of Action Corps, a grassroots humanitarian advocacy organization that co-leads a nationwide coalition to end U.S. complicity in the Saudi war on Yemen. Action Corps provided support to activists in over 12 U.S. cities who organized Yemen war protests the first week of March. See https://actioncorps.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing train wrecks and the idea of nationalizing freight trains. Our guest Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist, author and assistant professor at Northwestern University, where she leads the investigative specialization at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Her books include Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%, and she's just published an article at In These Times called "The Case for Nationalizing the Railroads."
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the United States and China with Ambassador Chas Freeman, who chairs Projects International, Inc., and was a Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993-94, earning the highest public service awards of the Department of Defense for his roles in designing a NATO-centered post-Cold War European security system and in reestablishing defense and military relations with China. He served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). He was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the historic U.S. mediation of Namibian independence from South Africa and Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola. Ambassador Freeman worked as Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires in the American embassies at both Bangkok (1984-1986) and Beijing (1981-1984). He was Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s path-breaking visit to China in 1972. See: https://chasfreeman.net
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing Oromia and the Oromo people. Seenaa Jimjimo is Executive Director for the Oromo Legacy Leadership & Advocacy Association. The website is http://ollaa.orgSeenaa is an Oromo-American born and raised in Ethiopia. She was a key player in the adoption of U.S. House Resolution 128 – an important factor in enabling change in Ethiopia in 2018.Take action at https://worldbeyondwar.org/oromia
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with the great journalist and author Dave Lindorff, whom you can find at thiscantbehappening.net. Lindorff was awarded the 2019 “Izzy” Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media. His new book is called Spy for No Country: Ted Hall: The Teenage Atomic Spy Who Saved the World. It's also a film now in festivals.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Ukraine and an amazing book called "The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution." Its author is our guest Nicolai N. Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. Petro is a graduate of the University of Virginia. He is the recipient of two Fulbright awards (one to Russia and one to Ukraine).
A rally and march against war are being planned for February 19 in Washington DC called Rage Against the War Machine. See: https://rageagainstwar.com. This week we speak with two of the key planners, Nick Brana, Chair of the People's Party of the United States (Previously he was the National Political Outreach Coordinator on Bernie Sanders' 2016 run for president and the Electoral Manager at Our Revolution), and Angela McArdle, Chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about the new (or is it the same?) Cold War. Our guest Vijay Prashad is the author of dozens of books and countless articles, his books including The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. He is executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research where he has just published an article or newsletter called "The Winds of the New Cold War Are Howling in the Arctic Circle."
Pitasanna Shanmugathas has produced a series of videos exposing the little-known horrors of Canadian foreign policy. See https://www.truthtothepowerless.comPitasanna Shanmugathas holds a master’s degree in global affairs from the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs—he has worked in multiple organizations advocating for peace and disarmament such as Save the Children, Science for Peace, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, and STAND Canada. While completing his post-graduate education at the University of Toronto, Pitasanna decided to embark on a three year documentary journey starting in 2019 to explore the role of Canada's foreign policy in the international arena.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Historians on Call with Margaret Power, who is co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy. See historiansforpeace.org She is a professor of history emeritus from the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author or co-editor of seven books including Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973 and Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Antiimperialism. See: https://www.historiansforpeace.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing how the weapons business is making dramatic use of the war in Ukraine. Our guest, Niamh Ni Bhriain, is the War and Pacification Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Transnational Institute and Stop Wapenhandel have a new report out called "Smoke Screen: How States Are Using the War in Ukraine to Drive a New Arms Race."The report is available here: https://www.tni.org/en/publication/smoke-screen
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing how the weapons business is making dramatic use of the war in Ukraine. Our guest, Niamh Ni Bhriain, is the War and Pacification Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Transnational Institute and Stop Wapenhandel have a new report out called "Smoke Screen: How States Are Using the War in Ukraine to Drive a New Arms Race."The report is available here: https://www.tni.org/en/publication/smoke-screen
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Professor Ilan Pappe is the Director of the European Center for Palestine Studies and a senior fellow of the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Pappe is the author of 20 books his two most recent ones are Our Vision for Liberation, with Ramzy Baroud and The Historical Dictionary of Palestine with Johnny Mansour. His most known work is the 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and he also co-authored two books with Noam Chomsky.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing U.S. resisters to World War II with Daniel Akst, author of the brand new book War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Honduras. Our guest Allison Lira is the Director of the Honduras Program for the Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective. Allison Lira holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.Phil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation from Trinity College Dublin.See https://solidaritycollective.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing Ukraine with Medea Benjamin. Her latest book is "War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict," co-authored with Nicolas J.S. Davies. See: https://peaceinukraine.org and https://codepink.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Dr. Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair (Emeritus) in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely in the fields of Middle East politics, comparative politics, social science methodology, U.S. foreign and national security policy, and social science-based computer simulation.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about how nuclear war is nothing to worry about and if you just go indoors you'll be fine -- NO, we're not! We're talking sensibly about nukes with someone who knows what she's talking about. Our guest, Jackie Cabasso, has been involved in nuclear disarmament, peace, environmental, and social justice advocacy at the local, national, and international levels for more than 40 years. She has served as Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation since 1984. In 1995 she was a “founding mother” of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, where she continues to serve on its Coordinating Committee. She also serves as North American coordinator of Mayors for Peace and as a National Co-Convener of United for Peace and Justice. Jackie was the 2008 recipient of the International Peace Bureau's Sean MacBride Peace Award.
This week on Talk World Radio, our guest is Christopher Coyne, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. He is the author of the new book In Search of Monsters to Destroy. His website is https://ccoyne.com
This week, we speak with former Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich about the turn toward warmongering in U.S. politics.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about murdering people with flying robots, er excuse me, doing noble targeted drone strikes, except when Russia does them because then they're evil. We welcome back two guests. Nick Mottern and Kathy Kelly are co-coordinators of BanKillerDrones.org. Nick is on the board of Veterans For Peace. Kathy is President of the Board of World BEYOND War. They are also planners of Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.
https://bankillerdrones.org https://merchantsofdeath.org https://veteransforpeace.org https://worldbeyondwar.org
This week we're speaking with Rashid Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author, among other books of the fantastic book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Palestine, Israel, and what one is and is not allowed to say out loud. Our guest is Rev. Graylan S. Hagler, former chief pastor at the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C. and director of Faith Strategies.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the upcoming COP27 UN climate meeting in Egypt, with Nancy Mancias and Cindy Piester.
Resources discussed are posted here: https://worldbeyondwar.org/cop27
Nancy Mancias is a doctoral student in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She holds a MBA from Dominican University of California and BA in Drama from San Francisco State University. She has worked over 15 years in the non-profit sector, focusing on social services, social justice, and theater. She has volunteered and visited the refugee camps in Greece and Kurdistan, Iraq, and provided migrant support on the US-Mexico border. As an anti-war advocate, Mancias has been actively trying to bring the troops home from their overseas misadventures. She has also been part of the movement against torture and a proponent of closing the prison in Guantanamo.
Cindy is a lifetime activist and organizer focusing on peace, justice, human rights, and the military impacts on the climate crisis. A former cable access television alternative media producer and host, and a US war crimes documentarian, She is the surviving spouse of Vietnam veteran, John Piester, and a founding member of Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism Project. She is a Board Member with a national Unitarian organization, a member of WILPF US’ Climate Justice + Women + Peace Project and WILPF’s International Environmental Working Group. Cindy has been calling for cutting the DoD budget and ending perpetual wars that enrich the war industry while depriving all of us the means necessary to urgently mitigate the climate crisis.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking with two members of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. Founded in July 2020 by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, Women for Weapons Trade Transparency is a nonprofit promoting transparency of the weapons and arms trade. Their website is https://w2t2.org
Rosie Khan is a Founding Board Member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, with a quintuple-major. She hopes to eventually be a novelist and turn her solarpunk vision of the world into reality.
Lillian Mauldin is a Founding Board Member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Thematic Specialist with Amnesty International USA's Military, Security, and Police Transfers Coordination Group. Lillian hopes to continue building a career in policy advocacy.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing nuclear weapons and efforts to abolish them with two activists from the Seattle, Washington, area, Tara Villalba, who organizes with neighbor tenants and workers, and Thomas Rogers who is a former Navy submarine captain now active with the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. I'll be joining them for a rally in Seattle on September 24 which can be found at https://abolishnuclearweapons.org
I hope we can inspire others to do the same in their towns.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing peacebuilding and women's rights with Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE, Founder/CEO of International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) and director of the London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security who was awarded an MBE in 2020 in honor of her contributions to international peacebuilding.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about cancer clusters in heavily polluted neighborhoods in the United States, and an upcoming protest on September 29th at the EPA in Washington D.C.
September 20, 2022: https://www.safeprotestepa.org
Our guest, Susan Wind, became an environmental advocate after her daughter Taylor was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2017. Through her investigative skill set, she exposed a thyroid cancer cluster in her town along with a dirty secret - builders, contractors and landscapers used Duke Energy's coal ash (instead of soil) as structural fill in communities throughout Lake Norman, NC. This coal ash came from its neighboring coal burning plant (the Marshall Steam Station). While the health department, the state, and the politicians tried to dismiss the issues, Susan Wind continued to build alliances and connections with advocates from all over the country to address the broken system that fails people's health.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing dramatic political developments in Pakistan with Professor Junaid S. Ahmad who is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality and teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics in Islamabad, Pakistan. He does a wide array of consultancy on issues related to international law and international affairs. Junaid is also the founder and Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) - Pakistan.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing Afghanistan with Dr. Zaher Wahab, Professor Emeritus, Lewis and Clark College and the American University of Afghanistan; born, raised, and schooled in a village in Afghanistan; Attended the American University of Beirut, Columbia University, and Stanford University. Zaher Wahab was senior adviser to the Minister of Higher Education of Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006; taught at Kabul University and Kabul Education University 2006 to 2013; and directed MA programs and taught full time at the American University of Afghanistan from 2013 to 2019.
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Carmen Wilson, a community development expert and the Community Manager at Demilitarise Education, a world renowned organisation that envisions a world where universities champion peace. She is a world citizen, having grown up in Asia for 14 years, including in Taipei, Taiwan, Beijing, China, Tokyo, Japan, and Manila, Philippines. She has a B.S. in Media Management and an M.A. in Globalization & International Development Studies, having completed her dissertation on the importance of freedom of press and information for democratic accountability. Since finishing her M.A. 2019, she has gained professional certifications in maximizing community impact and non-profit management. She is a passionate advocate for peace, youth work, critical discourse and education. A former English (ESL) teacher, she is also passionate about using communications technologies (ICT's) to promote access to quality education, with specific experience teaching and working with refugees in the U.S. and internationally, and community development projects in places like Makati City, Philippines and San Salvador, El Salvador.
See also:
https://ded1.co
@ded_ucation (across all platforms)
Myth 1: Higher defence spending does NOT equal higher security https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj1pEofz8uQ
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with Matt Hoh. In 2009, Matthew Hoh resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the U.S. escalation of the war. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matt had taken part in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Since his resignation, he has been a peace activist and truth teller. In 2010, Matt was named the Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling and, in 2021, he was awarded as a Defender of Liberty by the Committee for the Republic. Matthew is a member of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Public Accuracy, an Advisory Board Member for the Committee to Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties, Expose Facts, North Carolina Committee to Investigate Torture, The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, and World BEYOND War. He is a candidate for U.S. Senate from North Carolina.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and its financial power over U.S. elections. Richard Silverstein is an independent journalist who writes the blog, Tikun Olam, which exposes the secrets of the Israeli national security state. He also publishes at Jacobin Magazine, Middle East Eye, and The New Arab. Check out https://www.richardsilverstein.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Iran. Our guest, Negar Mortazavi, is an Iranian-American journalist and political analyst and host of the Iran Podcast based in Washington DC, who has been covering Iranian affairs and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East for over a decade. She is a regular media commentator and has appeared on CNN, NBC, NPR, BBC, France24, Aljazeera, and i24News. Her writing has been published in Foreign Policy magazine, The Intercept, Politico, and The Independent. She has been named by Middle East Policy Council among 40 under 40 leaders shaping the present and future of U.S.-Middle East relations. And she and I will be speaking in Washington DC on August 5 at an event you can find at worldbeyondwar.org
See: https://www.negarmortazavi.com/iran-podcast https://mepc.org/resources/40-under-40 https://actionnetwork.org/events/77-years-later-eliminate-nukes-not-life-on-earth?clear_id=true
This week on Talk World Radio, I'm discussing what to do about Ukraine. See also https://worldbeyondwar.org/ukraine and https://defusenuclearwar.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're speaking with Myrna V. Pagan a longtime activist from Vieques, Puerto Rico, the Colony of the Colony. She is the founder of the Vidas Viequenses Valen movement (Vieques Lives Matter) established by the people of Vieques to continue their struggle for justice when they, after decades of protests and a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience forced the U.S. Navy to close its bombing range and base on May 1, 2003. The struggle continues now in the cleanup stage of this Super Fund site where for more than 60 years a trillion pounds of explosives and toxic substances were dropped by the Navy and its NATO allies on Vieques creating an environmental nightmare and health crisis.
This week on Talk World Radio we're speaking with two people who will be leading a training session on Nonviolent Communication Skills at the July 8-10 online NoWar2022 conference. That can be found at https://WorldBEYONDWar.org -- We're speaking with Saadia Qureshi and Nick Rea, both of whom work at the Preemptive Love Coalition, which can be found at https://preemptivelove.org -- Preemptive Love Coalition’s mission is to end war and stop the spread of violence. Saadia Qureshi works as a Gathering Coordinator and Nick Rea works as a Workshops Coordinator at Prememptive Love. They are both from Florida.
"Militarism + Machismo = Gun Violence in America" https://preemptivelove.org/blog/militarism-machismo-gun-violence-in-america
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the COVID pandemic. Our guest, James G Kahn, is an emeritus professor of health policy at the University of California San Francisco. He is an expert in evidence-based medicine and medical decision-making, and a leading researcher in U.S. and global health economics, with more than 200 academic publications. He is also the editor and primary blogger for Health Justice Monitor (http://healthjusticemonitor.org ), and a coauthor of a recent study finding that universal health coverage in the U.S. could have saved 338,000 lives just from COVID-19.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about ending violent crime. Our guest Irvin Waller is emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, and author of, among other works, the incredibly useful book, Science and the Secrets of Ending Violent Crime. His website is IrvinWaller.org
Aisha Jumaan is the Founder and President of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. Jumaan has over 30 years of experience in public health, including in viral vaccine preventable diseases, cancer research, maternal & child health and nutrition, and women in development. She worked with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for over a decade. Jumaan also worked in her native home, Yemen, with the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Development Program. She also participated in health-related program development, evaluation, and training activities for the Peace Corps. She has served on the faculty of Emory University, as well as Sana’a University. Jumaan is currently working as an Independent Consultant coordinating health- projects in Yemen.
Do something about it: https://bit.ly/leaveyemen
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Ukraine and nuclear weapons with Norman Solomon who is Co-Founder and National Director of RootsAction.org. Norman also founded the Institute for Public Accuracy in 1997 and is its executive director. Immersed in anti-war, social justice, and environmental movements since the late 1960s, he is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy" and "Made Love, Got War."
Defuse Nuclear War: https://defusenuclearwar.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Davos. Our guest Jenny Ricks, speaking to us from Johannesburg South Africa is the global convenor of Fight Inequality Alliance. See http://fightinequality.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about psychiatry. Our guest Bruce Levine's new book is A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment.
This week on Talk World Radio, we are talking about the unending Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara with Tim Pluta who is speaking to us from the town of Boujdour, in the home of human rights activist Sultana Khaya. Tim is an organizer in Spain with World BEYOND War, a U.S. military veteran, a conscientious objector, and an unarmed civilian protector. See: https://karamasahara.org/register
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about #NoWar2022, an online event planned for July 8th to 10th. Our guest Greta Zarro is Organizing Director of World BEYOND War, where I'm Executive Director, so we are colleagues. Greta is based in Upstate New York, where she and her partner run Unadilla Community Farm, a non-profit organic farm and permaculture education center. See: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2022
Angelo Cardona is a multi-award-winning human rights defender, and peace and disarmament activist. He is representative of Latin America in the Council of the Nobel-peace prize-winning International Peace Bureau (IPB), Co-founder and President of the Ibero-American Alliance for Peace, member of the International Steering Committee of the Global Campaign on Military Spending, Youth for TPNW, peace ambassador of the Global Peace Chain, and Member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the state of international law and the war in Ukraine. Our guest Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the advisory boards of the American Association of Jurists and of Veterans for Peace. Marjorie is a legal and political analyst who writes a regular column for Truthout ( https://truthout.org/series/human-rights-and-global-wrongs ). She has published several books about U.S. foreign policy, torture, and drones. Marjorie is co-host of Law and Disorder radio, and she lectures, writes, and provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media outlets.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about world citizenship. Our guest, Arthur Kanegis, is President of Future WAVE, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to shifting our culture of violence to a culture of peace. He is the Director/Producer of "The World Is My Country" about the amazing adventures of World Citizen # 1 Garry Davis. Kanegis produced "War Without Winners" narrated by Paul Newman and filmed by Haskell Wexler -- a compelling TV documentary on the nuclear war issue. He also worked on the 1983 most watched ever made-for-television production called "The Day After" which Ronald Reagan credited with moving him to negotiate and sign weapons reduction agreements.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about whether it's good or bad for a country to have a permanent military. Our guest, Ned Dobos is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: the True Cost of the Military.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the use of nonviolent activism in Western Sahara. Our guest, Ruth McDonough is a 35-year-old former secondary school teacher who was born and raised in the northern mountains of Wabanaki/New Hampshire. Ruth is an educator, facilitator, and activist in service of understanding across diversity of experiences and perspectives. Right now she is one of a team of people serving as nonviolent unarmed protectors in Western Sahara.
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing efforts by local residents to save a mountain in Montenegro from being turned into a military training ground. Milan Sekulović is a journalist and environmental activist. He started to deal with environmental activism after the government of Montenegro declared the mountain Sinjajevina a military training ground. Milan is the son of a farmer and was born and raised on Sinjajevina. Together with other members of the local community, he formed the Save Sinjajevina movement, of which he is currently the president. They have been working for the preservation of the mountain for four years, and so far they have prevented attempts to use heavy weapons on the pastures of Sinjajevina.
Sign the petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/save-sinjajevinas-nature-and-local-ccommunities?clear_id=true
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the war on Yemen with Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Prior to joining FCNL in August 2019, Hassan El-Tayyab was co-director of the national advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, where he led their lobbying work to advance a more progressive foreign policy in the Middle East and Latin America. He played a major role in the successful passage of the War Powers Resolution to end U.S. military participation in the Saudi-led coalition’s war and blockade on Yemen.
This week on Talk World Radio, Lee Camp. He was the host, head writer, & creator of "Redacted Tonight" for 8 years, until it was canceled due to U.S. sanctions. It was the only anti-war anti-corporate comedy show on U.S. TV. In the same week, Lee's podcast "Moment of Clarity" was removed from Spotify, and his youtube channel was banned across Europe & the UK. Now he's at: https://www.patreon.com/LeeCamp
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about burn pits. Our guest Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, researching the environmental health impacts of war. She did research among farmers from Anbar, Iraq, in 2014 and 2015, documenting the environmental effects of the 2003 U.S. occupation. She is currently in Fallujah conducting research on the epidemic of birth defects in the region. https://www.facebook.com/fallujahhospital2012 https://reparations.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking with Alfred de Zayas, author of Building a Just World Order. He is former UN Independent Expert on international order (2012-18), senior lawyer with the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee and Chief of the Petitions Department.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about Western Sahara and a book -- now out in an updated second edition -- called Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution by Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy. Our guest, Stephen Zunes is professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. His books include Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Smedley Butler with the author of a terrific new biography called Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire. The author, Jonathan Katz, based here in Charlottesville, Virginia, as most of the coolest people are, received the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for reporting from Haiti. His first book, widely praised, was The Big Truck That Went By. You can find him at https://jonathanmkatz.com
For more on the topic of World War II try Leaving World War II Behind.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about debt, including student debt. Our guest Braxton Brewington is a spokesperson and organizer for The Debt Collective. See https://debtcollective.org The Debt Collective is the nation's first debtors union fighting for debt abolition and a transformation to our economy. Braxton is a North Carolina native and graduate from North Carolina A&T State University.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the saga of Julian Assange with Richard Hillgrove who was hired by Assange in 2018 to lobby British MPs for his release, and worked for him until September 2020. You can find Richard Hillgrove at https://6hillgrovepr.com
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing nuclear weapons and war with Ken Mayers from Veterans For Peace, which has -- in anticipation of the Biden administration's nuclear posture review -- released its own nuclear posture review. See https://veteransforpeace.org
About Ken Mayers: The Marine Corps paid Ken’s way through Princeton as an NROTC scholarship holder. He graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1958 and accepted a commission as a regular Marine Corps Officer, intending to make the service his career. However, his experience as an instrument of US foreign policy drove him out of the Corps at the end of 1966 when he returned to graduate studies at UC Berkeley, earning a Ph.D. in so-called Political Science. In 1986 Ken was recruited into Veterans for Peace by then President John Barr, another former career Marine Corps Officer. In July 2002, Ken co-founded the Santa Fe Chapter of VFP. Ken was a member of the national VFP Board of Directors from 2004 through 2009 and national treasurer from 2005 through 2009. He was again elected to the Board in 2020.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., media, activism, and related topics with Jared A. Ball, who is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!”, co-founder of Black Power Media which can be found at BlackPowerMedia.org, and his decades of journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found at http://imixwhatilike.org
This week on Talk World Radio, we're talking about the difficulty the U.S. government has in ceasing to threaten war on Iran or even committing to uphold future commitments. Our guest, Robert Fantina, is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is based in Canada. Bob is an activist and journalist, working for peace and social justice. He writes extensively about the oppression of the Palestinians by apartheid Israel. He is the author of several books, including Empire, Racism and Genocide: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy. His writing appears regularly on Counterpunch, MintPressNews, and several other sites. Originally from the U.S., Bob Fantina moved to Canada following the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and now resides in Kitchener, Ontario.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about refusing military "service." Our guest Charles Lenchner is a veteran peace activist, organizer, and political campaigner. Born in the United States, he grew up in Israel where he became an anti-occupation activist at a young age. In 1987, he was drafted into the Israeli Army and subsequently refused orders and spent time in military prison. More recently he was a co-founder of People for Bernie Sanders and today is part of the RootsAction team that publishes ProgressiveHub. I also work for RootsAction.
Read articles by Charles Lenchner at https://progressivehub.net/?s=charles+lenchner
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about peace activism in 2021 and looking ahead to 2022. Our guest Greta Zarro is Organizing Director for World BEYOND War, where I'm Executive Director. Greta previously worked as New York Organizer for Food & Water Watch. There, she campaigned on issues related to fracking, genetically engineered foods, climate change, and the corporate control of our common resources. Greta and her partner run Unadilla Community Farm, a non-profit organic farm and permaculture education center in Upstate New York.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the state of war and peace in the world with peace activist Kathy Kelly. Kathy's efforts to end wars have led her to living in war zones and prisons over the past 35 years. In 2009 and 2010, Kathy was part of two Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegations which visited Pakistan to learn more about the consequences of U.S. drone attacks. From 2010 - 2019, the group organized dozens of delegations to visit Afghanistan, where they continued learning about casualties of U.S. drone attacks. Voices also helped organize protests at U.S. military bases operating weaponized drone attacks. She is now a co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones campaign and serves on the Advisory Board for World BEYOND War.
This week on Talk World Radio: We're all going to die. Our guest, Helen Caldicott, is founder and president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, founder of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, Co-Leader of the 1980 Nuclear Freeze Voter Initiative Campaign, founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (now called Beyond Nuclear), founder of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, and initiator of the movement against French atmospheric tests in Australia and New Zealand. Her website is at http://HelenCaldicott.com She is also a member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and will be hosting an online book club with her book Sleepwalking to Armageddon that you can sign up for at http://worldbeyondwar.org/bookclubs
This week on Talk World Radio, the sneaky and sleazy bipartisan privatizing of Medicare. Our guest, Kay Tillow, is chair of Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care and Coordinator of Unions for Single Payer Health Care. She is a retired union organizer who has worked for decades with nurses and other hospital workers.
Alfred W. McCoy is the author of a tremendous new book called To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. He also holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After earning his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale in 1977, his writing has focused on Philippine political history, the history of modern empires, and the covert netherworld of illicit drugs, syndicate crime, and state security. His first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), sparked controversy over the CIA’s attempt to block its publication. His book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006) provided the historical dimension for the Oscar-winning documentary feature, Taxi to the Darkside.
This week on Talk World Radio, the U.S. colony of Guam. Our guest, Chris Gelardi is a New York City-based journalist. His work appears in The Nation, The Intercept, and The Appeal, among other publications. His recent article in The Nation is called "Guam: Resisting Empire at the 'Tip of the Spear'."
This week on Talk World Radio, Is Wall Street Taking Over Ownership of Nature? Our guest Randall Wray is a professor of economics at Bard College. His current research focuses on providing a critique of orthodox monetary theory and policy, and the development of an alternative approach. He also publishes extensively in the areas of full employment policy and, more generally, fiscal policy. Wray’s most recent book is A Great Leap Forward: Heterodox Economic Policy for the 21st Century.
This week on Talk World Radio, we're going to hold a bit of a respectful and civil debate. I'm going to take the position that we should be focused on preventing wars and defunding militaries even at the expense of working to reform wars. My guest, Leonard Rubenstein's position includes support for reforming war to protect healthcare workers and patients. Rubenstein is the author of Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War. He is professor and director of the Program on Human Rights and Health in Conflict at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2011, he founded and now chairs the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a group of 40 humanitarian, human rights, health provider organizations working at the national and global levels that seeks to reduce attacks on and interference with health workers, patients, facilities and transports. Leonard Rubenstein was previously president of Physicians for Human Rights and is a recognized global expert on violence against health care.
Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility. He has been an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and provided advice to UK negotiators to the UN climate change convention. He then spent a year working for Friends of The Earth, co-ordinating research and policy work highlighting the link between environmental problems and social injustice. His reports include The environmental impacts of the UK military sector; and Under the radar: the carbon footprint of Europe's military sectors. He is also co-author of a book on the Kyoto Protocol, and an editor of the Responsible Science journal. Stuart Parkinson will be speaking at an event in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 4, presenting a petition to the COP26 conference demanding that militaries be included in climate agreements. You can sign that petition at http://cop26.info
Daniel Ellsberg is a former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events, and as an author of critically important books, and as a guest on this program and many others. Dan Ellsberg has recently published with Norman Solomon an article in The Nation magazine titled "To Avoid Armageddon, Don't Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them." See: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/eliminate-nuclear-missiles
Margaret Kimberley is a co-founder and Executive Editor and Senior Columnist for Black Agenda Report, a recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism, a board member of Consortium News, and a recipient of a 2021 Women and Media Award from the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. Ms. Kimberley is author of the book “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents,” which we discussed with her last year. She is also a contributor to the anthologies “In Defense of Julian Assange,” “Capitalism on a Ventilator: the Impact of COVID-19 on China and the U.S.,” and “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.” Her activism includes leadership positions in the United National Antiwar Coalition, the Black Alliance for Peace, and the Board of Directors of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation.
This week on Talk World Radio: Stand on Guard for Whom? — A People’s History of the Canadian Military. That's the title of the new book, his twelfth, from our guest Yves Engler. His website is YvesEngler.com
This week on Talk World Radio: a new book called Punishment Without Trial: Why Pleabargaining Is a Bad Deal. The author, Carissa Byrne Hessick, is the Ransdell Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also serves as the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. Before joining the faculty at UNC, she taught at the law schools of Arizona State, Harvard, and the University of Utah. Her work on the criminal justice system has been published by the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, and numerous academic journals. She also has one of the most informative and useful Twitter accounts for anyone interested in criminal justice. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This week on Talk World Radio, The Kaepernick Effect is a new book by our guest Dave Zirin who is sports editor for The Nation and the author of 10 books on the politics of sports, including Jim Brown: Last Man Standing. His website is at EdgeofSports.com.
This week on Talk World Radio: Rahm Emanuel has been nominated for worst politician ever -- just kidding, he's been nominated for Ambassador to Japan. Will the U.S. Senate go along with that? Our guest, Delmarie Cobb is a journalist from Chicago. She owns and operates The Publicity Works and is president of Deleco Communications, which produced the award-winning, nationally televised newsmagazine program, STREET LIFE on PBS affiliates. In 1988 she was national traveling press secretary to presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. She writes a column called Chicago Colors.
Email Your Senators and the President: No to Rahm! at https://bit.ly/no-rahm
This week on Talk World Radio: U.S. military bases all over the world and what the heck are they doing there? Our guest David Vine is Professor of Anthropology at American University. His books include Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World and his latest, just out in paperback, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State. Find him at https://davidvine.net Find an online book club he's about to do at https://worldbeyondwar.org/bookclubs
This week on Talk World Radio, the failures of September 11th and the failures of the global war launched on September 12th. Our guest Coleen Rowley is a retired special agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel of the FBI who taught constitutional law and law enforcement ethics to FBI agents and other law enforcement, then became a whistleblower about the FBI’s pre 9-11 failures and the folly of the Iraq invasion. She was named, along with two other corporate whistleblowers, as TIME Magazine’s 2002 Persons of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and Huffington Post, along with other publications. Ms. Rowley is also a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of independent veteran military and national security experts.
This week on Talk World Radio: Better late and diastrously than never. It's never too soon to end a war, even if you don't really end it, tell lots of lies about it, and increase military spending to prepare for more wars.
This week on Talk World Radio, one of the ways in which the killing machine of war just keeps on killing. Our guest Kiji Noh and co-author Claudia Chaufan have published an article in Social Medicine called "The Neglected Role of the Military as a Disease Vector: Implications for Covid-19 and for Global Health Policy." Claudia Chaufan is Associate Professor of Health Policy & Global Health, past Program Director of the Graduate Program in Health at York University. K.J. Noh is an independent scholar, journalist, and educator, specializing in the geopolitics of Asia and in issues of global security and health. See: https://www.socialmedicine.info/index.php/socialmedicine/article/view/1301
This week on Talk World Radio: Living through the dying of the Earth. Our guest Daniel Sherrell is the author of a powerful new book called Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction. He currently serves as Campaign Director for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center.
This week on Talk World Radio: Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), and contributing editor at Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, NY Times, The Nation, HuffPost, The Hill, Salon, BuzzFeed News, Tom Dispatch and Truthdig.com, among other publications. He hosts the Fortress on a Hill podcast and has a website at https://skepticalvet.com
This week on Talk World Radio: Peace in the Streets. Our guest Robert Gray is Co-Founder of Uhuru, an organization based where I am, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Gray is a visionary, businessman, brand strategist, and social entrepreneur with a passion for education reform and economic empowerment. He's done a wide range of organizing work, and in 2019 received a Proclamation from Charlottesville City Council for his work in the community. He has over 10 years of experience working with high-risk youth and two years of experience applying the nationally recognized, evidence-based Check and Connect program within a targeted community of youth and their families in the City of Charlottesville, ensuring students were attending, engaging with, and investing in their education. Uhuru's Peace in the Streets program has recently received support from the City of Charlottesville.
This week on Talk World Radio: Remembering the Alamo, or -- better yet -- forgetting it. Our guest Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of seven books, including the New York Times #1 best-selling Barbarians at the Gate (with John Helyar) and Public Enemies. He is co-author of a terrific new book called Forget the Alamo.
This week on Talk World Radio: Why won't disproven Russiagate ever go away? Our guest Ray McGovern was an infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties, and became a CIA analyst. His duties eventually included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing The President’s Daily Brief. He conducted the one-on-one morning briefings of President Reagan’s five most senior national security officials, including VP Bush, from 1981 to 1985. In retirement Ray co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — an attempt by intelligence veterans to hold former colleagues to account for “fixing” intelligence to “justify” wars like Iraq. His website is https://RayMcGovern.com
Ray's recent article for Antiwar.com: "The Guardian: Regurgitating the Russia-Gate Canard" is at https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/07/15/the-guardian-regurgitating-the-russia-gate-canard/
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing Haiti with human rights lawyer and activist Brian Concannon. He is Executive Director of Project Blueprint, which promotes a progressive, human rights-based U.S. foreign policy by bringing the perspectives of people impacted by U.S. actions abroad into policy discussions. Brian founded the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), and was its Executive Director from 2004-2019. He lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, where he served as a Human Rights Officer with the United Nations and Co-Managing Attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a public interest law firm.
See: https://blueprint389096451.wpcomstaging.com/ http://www.ijdh.org/
This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing Ukraine, war, and peace. Our guest Yurii Sheliazhenko is executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection. He obtained a Master of Mediation and Conflict Management degree in 2021 and a Master of Laws degree in 2016 at KROK University. In addition to his participation in the peace movement, he is a journalist, blogger, human rights defender, and legal scholar, an author of academic publications and a lecturer on legal theory and history.
This week on Talk World Radio, U.S. military veterans. Our guest, Michael Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, and has in recent years focused his research on U.S. military veterans who become lifelong advocates for peace and social justice. The first book based on this research, Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace, which I highly recommend, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. The new book, Unconventional Combat: Intersectional Action in the Veterans’ Peace Movement is hot off the press from Oxford University Press. The website is https://unconventionalcombat.com Messner is an associate (non-veteran) member of Veterans For Peace, on whose advisory board I serve.
This week on Talk World Radio, the non-ending of the war on Afghanistan, the ramping up of the cold war on China, and the Black Alliance for Peace. Our guest Julie Varughese has served in an advisory role for the Black Alliance for Peace since it was founded in 2017. She also is the coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace's Solidarity Network.
See https://blackallianceforpeace.com
This week on Talk World Radio, we’re discussing that barbaric vestige of uncontrollable ignorance and sadism, capital punishment. Our guest is Alexandra Klein. Professor Alexandra Klein researches and teaches in the area of criminal law, criminal procedure constitutional law, and the death penalty. Her scholarship has been published in, or is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal, the Florida Law Review, and the Washington and Lee Law Review. Her recent article in The Nation magazine is called “A Few Words for the Firing Squad.” In the Washington and Lee LAw Review in March she published “The Beginning of the End: Abolishing Capital Punishment in Virginia.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/south-carolina-firing-squad
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1140&context=wlulr-online
This week on Talk World Radio: draft registration. Is it unfair to young women not to force them to kill and die for weapons profits? Our guest Rivera Sun is the Editor of Nonviolence News, a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent movements, and the author of many books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and The Way Between. She serves on the Advisory Boards of World BEYOND War and the Backbone Campaign. Her essays on nonviolence are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals.
See: https://riverasun.com
Join Rivera's online book club: https://worldbeyondwar.org/bookclubs
This Week on Talk World Radio, it's time to end the terrorism-generating war on terrorism. Our guest is Scott Horton. Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and of the new book we'll be mostly discussing Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.
This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about activism on behalf of the basic human rights of Palestinians. Our guest is Nora Barrows-Friedman. Nora Barrows-Friedman is an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada and the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine. She is also the co-host of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, and co-host of The Brief Podcast. Learn more: https://electronicintifada.net
Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editorial Director and Publisher of The Nation magazine. See https://thenation.com
She is also vice-president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, a group interested in an informed dialogue about improving U.S.-Russia relations. See https://usrussiaaccord.com
This week on Talk World Radio, our guest is Richard Falk. Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, and currently Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London. Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine (2008-2014). He has written several books. (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. Among his earlier writings are Legal Order in a Violent World and This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival. His most recent publications are Power Shift (2017); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization, and Disarmament (2019). Since 2009 Falk has been annually nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His political memoir, Public Intellectual: Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published by Clarity Press in February 2021. His website is https://richardfalk.org
This week on Talk World Radio we're discussing the earth's climate and militarism, and what Veterans For Peace is working on. Our guest is Vince Dijanich, a veteran of what the Vietnamese call "The American War," and a founder of the Climate Crisis and Militarism Project at Veterans for Peace. Vince also works with the Climate Reality Project and Sustaining All Life.
Related link: https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/climatecrisis
Dr. Sam Perlo-Freeman is a Research Coordinator at Campaign Against Arms Trade in the UK, where he has focused on UK military spending and procurement, UK arms sales to Saudi and the war in Yemen, and global arms trade to countries in conflict. Previously, Sam worked at the World Peace Foundation on corruption in the international arms trade, and before that at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, researching global military spending, arms trade, and arms production. He has been involved as both a researcher and an activist on arms trade and other peace issues for about 25 years. He will be facilitating a session at #NoWar2021 https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2021
Related report: https://caat.org.uk/resources/business-as-usual-how-major-weapons-exporters-arm-the-worlds-conflicts/
Matthew Hoh is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), as well as a member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War. He is a 100% disabled Marine combat veteran and, in 2009, he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the war.
This week on Talk World Radio, what's going on in Cameroon. Our guest is Guy Feugap. He is coordinator in Cameroon for World BEYOND War. More information: https://worldbeyondwar.org/?s=feugap
This Week on Talk World Radio in the first half of the show our guest is Vanessa Lanteigne. Vanessa is the National Coordinator at the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace which is Canada’s longest-running national women’s peace organization. Vanessa has worked in a variety of roles in non-profits around the world. In Tanzania, she worked at an organization to end child marriage and promote the rights of children. In Ghana as a facilitator for youth livelihood skills, she facilitated training for over 1,000 youth and was a part of a team that rolled out the Innovation Fund for green entrepreneurs that was replicated in five other countries. Vanessa will be speaking at NoWar2021, the annual conference of World BEYOND War, which is virtual this year and can be signed up for at https://worldbeyondwar.org
On the second half of the show we'll be talking about militaries at universities. Our guest Lia Holla is a third-year Bachelor's student at McGill University studying Physics and Political Science, and minoring in Behavioural Science. She works part-time as the Executive Director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and part-time with her Student Union as a Political Campaigns Coordinator. After moving to Montreal, she co-founded the Student for Peace and Disarmament Group which aims to be a community for peace and justice and to end military research on campus.
This week on Talk World Radio, Iran, the United States, war, and peace. Our guest, Yasmine Taeb, is a human rights lawyer, progressive strategist, and former DNC Committeewoman for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Previously, she served as a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and a Senior Policy Counsel at Demand Progress. She's a seasoned human rights lobbyist and her efforts focus on ending militarism at home and abroad and advocating for refugees and asylum seekers. In 2021, she was named by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the "Most Influential People in Washington." In 2016, Yasmine became the first Muslim woman elected to the Democratic National Committee. She has advised and worked on several national and state political campaigns, including on President Obama's reelection campaign.
Petitions you can sign regarding Iran:
https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-the-petition-to-president-biden-restore-the-iran-deal
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-biden-to-lift-sanctions-for-covid-relief
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/end-sanctions-on-iran/
This week on Talk World Radio: santions, the harm they do, and how to end them. Our guest is Hanieh Jodat Barnes, a Bernie Sanders 2020 Delegate, President-co-founder of Muslim Delegates and Allies, National Director of PDA Middle East Alliance, and Founding member of Women's March Los Angeles.
See: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-biden-to-lift-sanctions-for-covid-relief and http://liftthesanctions.org
This week on Talk World Radio: guess who's being taxed less than they used to be? Our guest, Bob Lord, is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he focuses on the relationship of tax law to inequality. He was co-author of a recent briefing paper that found that taxes on the rich are one-sixth of what they used to be.
See https://ips-dc.org/ips-authors/bob-lord
Todd Miller is the author of the books Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (2019), Storming the Wall (2017), and Border Patrol Nation (2014). He is co-author of the recent report for the Transnational Institute "Biden's Border: The Border Industry, The Democrats, and the 2020 Elections."
This week on Talk World Radio: Who funds so-called foreign relations experts and why? Our guest is Eli Clifton. He is senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and investigative-journalist-at-large at Responsible Statecraft. He recently published an article called "Weapons Biz Bankrolls Experts Pushing to Extend Afghan War."
See: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/author/eclifton
Talk Nation Radio is becoming Talk World Radio and can now be found at https://talkworldradio.org
This week on Talk World Radio: Why hasn't Trump been prosecuted in court yet? Our guest Paul Jay is a journalist and filmmaker. He’s the founder and publisher of theAnalysis.news. He is past chair of the Documentary Organization of Canada, and was the founding Chair of the Hot Docs! Canadian International Documentary Festival. Jay was the co-executive producer of Face Off and counterSpin, nightly prime time debate programs that ran for ten years on CBC Newsworld. Jay was the founder of The Real News Network. Jay is currently working on a documentary series with Daniel Ellsberg, based on his book Doomsday Machine.
See: https://theAnalysis.news
This week on Talk Nation Radio, a successful recent campaign to prevent the construction of a new military base in the mountains in Europe. Our guest Pablo Domínguez is an eco-anthropologist of the commons, especially centered on pastoral commons of the Mediterranean mountains. He mostly focuses on the ecological and socio-cultural holistic understanding of their functioning, at the same time doing research ‘about’ and ‘for’ action in favor of the natural and cultural values of such systems.
Brian Ferguson is a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the anthropology of war, including ethnic conflicts, tribal warfare, the impact of expanding states on indigenous war patterns and the collapse of states. His 1995 book, Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, challenges popular assumptions about the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon, and has sparked debate within his field. Ferguson is director of the MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies as Rutgers University Newark. Additional reading:
A general statement about human nature and war: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/
A general overview of research findings on war: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233652423_Ten_Points_on_War
On the "Fierce" Yanomami: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285635568_History_explanation_and_war_among_the_Yanomami_A_response_to_Chagnons_Noble_Savages
A broad statement about archaelogy and the antiquity of war: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273367168_Archaeology_Cultural_Anthropology_and_the_Origins_and_Intensifications_of_War
Newest paper on masculinity and war, with reference to human nature debates: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/711622
This week on Talk Nation Radio, putting your body in front of weapons shipments and organizing for peace. Our guest is Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, an organization of which I'm the executive director. Rachel Small is a community organizer based in Toronto, Canada, on Dish with One Spoon and Treaty 13 Indigenous territory. She has organized within local and international social/environmental justice movements for over a decade, with a special focus on working in solidarity with communities harmed by Canadian extractive industry projects in Latin America. She has a background in art-based activism and has facilitated projects in community mural-making, independent publishing and media, spoken word, guerilla theatre, and communal cooking with people of all ages across Canada.
On the January 25th global day of action to end the war on Yemen one of the most dramatic actions that moved the demand for peace into the most media stories was taken by members of World BEYOND War and our allies, including Labour Against the Arms Trade in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. READ MORE: https://worldbeyondwar.org/how-we-blocked-weapons-trucks-in-canada-how-you-can-do-the-same
Steve Ellner is a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela and currently an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author and editor of over a dozen books on Latin American politics and history, his most recent being his edited Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective (2021). He has published on the op-ed page of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and in the Nation and is a regular contributor to NACLA: Report on the Americas. He has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University (2004), Duke University (2005), University of Buenos Aires (2010), Tulane University (2015) and elsewhere.
This week on Talk Nation Radio, the National Popular Vote and the Electoral College. Our guest is Pat Rosenstiel with NationalPopularVote.com, which advocates for "The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact."
Salam Sarhan is Founder & Secretary-General of BPUR international ( https://bpur.org ). BPUR stands for Ban the Political Use of Religion. Salam Sarhan is a well published writer and journalist with three books and over one thousand articles on a wide range of subjects in Arabic and English. He has worked as a TV presenter, producer, business editor, and TV commentator for numerous leading media establishments, including BBC, Alarabiya TV, Sky News Arabia TV, Alarab daily, and The Arab Weekly.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: U.S.-China relations. Our guest is Jodie Evans. She is co-founder of CODEPINK, which works to stop U.S. Military interventions overseas, and promotes diplomatic solutions and divestiture from war. She served in the administration of Governor Jerry Brown and ran his presidential campaigns. She has published two books, Stop the Next War Now and Twilight of Empire, and produced several documentary films, including the Oscar and Emmy-nominated "The Most Dangerous Man in America," and "The Square," and Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything.”
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Where did Coronavirus come from? What do we know? What do we not know? What is it crazy to ask? What is it crazy not to ask? And why aren't more people interested? Our guest is Sam Husseini.
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist (and artist) living in Maryland, his website is husseini.org.
Michael T. Klare, The Nation’s defense correspondent, is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, DC. Most recently, he is the author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, and his latest article for The Nation is "A Very Trumpian Christmas Surprise? Signs Point to a Possible US Attack on Iran.”
Nicolas "Sandy" Davies is a freelance writer, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. We discuss the article he wrote with Medea Benjamin, "Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists?"
Alison Cole is a former researcher and activist living in Portland, Oregon. She is working with a coalition of community organizations to demilitarize their local law enforcement agencies.
See: https://worldbeyondwar.org/policing
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Michèle Flournoy and other disastrous cabinet prospects. Our guests are Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. She has been described as "one of America's most committed -- and most effective -- fighters for human rights" by New York Newsday, and "one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement" by the Los Angeles Times.
Marcy Winograd served as a 2020 DNC delegate for Bernie Sanders, organizing a team of delegates to submit a foreign policy platform plank calling for reduced military spending, an end to the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and defunding of US military support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. Prior to that, Marcy co-founded the California Democratic Party Progressive Caucus and ran for office as a congressional peace candidate.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Michèle Flournoy and other disastrous cabinet prospects. Our guests are Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. She has been described as "one of America's most committed -- and most effective -- fighters for human rights" by New York Newsday, and "one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement" by the Los Angeles Times.
Marcy Winograd served as a 2020 DNC delegate for Bernie Sanders, organizing a team of delegates to submit a foreign policy platform plank calling for reduced military spending, an end to the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and defunding of US military support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. Prior to that, Marcy co-founded the California Democratic Party Progressive Caucus and ran for office as a congressional peace candidate.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Martial Mining, or Militarism and Extraction. Our guest is Daniel Selwyn, a researcher and educator with the London Mining Network, an alliance of 21 organisations working to expose human rights abuses and environmental crimes committed by mining companies based in London, and campaigning for social justice and the ecological integrity of the planet. Daniel Selwyn recently authored a report called Martial Mining: Resisting Extractivism and War Together.
See:
https://londonminingnetwork.org
https://londonminingnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Martial-Mining.pdf
On Twitter: @redrosaroo
Daniel Selwyn spoke on this show in his capacity as a researcher and educator with London Mining Network but that not all of his views represent those held collectively by the Network.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: the decision to rule the world. Stephen Wertheim is a historian of U.S. foreign policy. He is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His terrific new book is called Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: the poisoning of the Pacific and who the worst culprit is. Joining us from Tokyo is Jon Mitchell, a British journalist and author based in Japan. In 2015, he was awarded the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan's Freedom of the Press Lifetime Achievement Award for his investigations into human rights issues on Okinawa. His latest book, Poisoning the Pacific, reveals the environmental damage caused by decades of U.S. military operations.
This week on Talk Nation Radio, we’re discussing peace journalism. Our guest Steven Youngblood is the founding director of the Center for Global Peace Journalism at Park University in Parkville, Missouri, where he is a communications and peace studies professor. He has organized and taught peace journalism seminars and workshops in 27 countries and territories. Youngblood is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Moldova 2001, Azerbaijan 2007). He also served as a U.S. State Department Senior Subject Specialist in Ethiopia in 2018. Youngblood is the author of “Peace Journalism Principles and Practices” and “Professor Komagum.” He edits “The Peace Journalist” magazine, and writes and produces the “Peace Journalism Insights” blog. He has been recognized for his contributions to world peace by the U.S. State Department, Rotary International, and the World Forum for Peace, which has named him a Luxembourg Peace Prize laureate for 2020. See: http://park.edu/peacecenter http://stevenyoungblood.blogspot.com
This week on Talk Nation Radio, as we begin year number 20 of the U.S. war on Afghanistan that Obama pretended to end, Trump promised to end, and it seems every U.S. presidential candidate from here on out (including Trump again) will promise to end, we look at how exactly destroying Afghanistan got started over 40 years ago. Our guests are Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, whose article at World Beyond War dot org is called “President Carter, Do You Swear to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?” Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are a husband and wife team, who in 1981 acquired the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to a U.S. TV crew. Following their news story for CBS News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline. Their 2009 book is called Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, and their 2011 book is Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire.
David Vine is Professor of Anthropology at American University whose books include Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. David Vine’s latest book is called The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State. Find him at https://www.davidvine.net
This week on Talk Nation Radio: war and children. Our guest, Charles Busch, is the founder of Peace Village Global, and Fields of Peace. He is the author of Soft as Water - 50 Meditations on Peace, and of A Promise to Our Children: Your Child, My Child, The Enemy’s Child: A Field Guide to Peace. His background includes employment in the U.S. Marine Corps, being a business owner in New York City, and 20 years as a church pastor in the United Church of Christ. He is presently Director of Fields of Peace, a peace education/activist nonprofit headquartered on the Oregon coast. See https://www.fieldsofpeace.org
This week on Talk Nation Radio: What sort of illness does U.S. politics have, and how can we heal it? Our guest is Abdulrachman El-Sayed, who is a physician, epidemiologist, public health expert, progressive activist, and author of HEALING POLITICS: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic. He was appointed health director of Detroit at 30 years old. He’s a former professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He holds a doctorate in public health from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a medical degree from Columbia University. He is the host of the “America Dissected: Coronavirus” podcast and a CNN commentator. Senator Bernie Sanders has referred to him as “one of the brightest young stars in the future of the progressive movement.” He is a former candidate for Governor of Michigan, and was one of eight appointees to the Biden-Sanders "Unity Task Force" on healthcare. His book Healing Politics can be found at healingpoliticsbook.com
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Monopolies and what’s wrong with them and how to get rid of them. Our guest is Thom Hartmann, radio host and author extraordinaire, whose latest book is called The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream -- which has a foreword by Ralph Nader calling it the most important book in a generation on this topic.
Lisa Savage is a longtime educator from Solon, Maine, currently running for U.S. Senate. In a life dedicated to public service, Savage has worked to make Maine and the United states more equitable, more peaceful, and more aware of the looming climate crisis.
Tunde Osazua is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network, which is the organizational arm of the Black Alliance for Peace's campaign to shut down AFRICOM and end the U.S. invasion and occupation of Africa. See: https://blackallianceforpeace.com
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Undoing Gerrymandering. Our guest is Brian Cannon, executive director of FairMapsVA -- that’s VA for Virginia -- the website is http://fairmapsva.org
The organization is working on the Vote Yes campaign for a redistricting reform amendment. Before leaving to run the vote yes campaign, Brian was Executive Director of OneVirginia2021, which raised the issue of ending gerrymandering in Virginia. While in law school, Brian studied election law and was on one of the winning teams in the 2011 state-wide redistricting competition. We discuss the state of undoing gerrymandering in Virginia and around the United States.
To learn more, join David Swanson and Brian Cannon for a webinar and get your questions answered on September 17, 2020, at 12 p.m. ET. Register here: http://bit.ly/Amendment1info
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Billionaires and their ever-expanding billions. Our guest is Omar Ocampo, who is a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is coauthor of the study, Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers, and of the recent article, “Twelve U.S. Billionaires Have a Combined $1 Trillion,” which you can find at Inequality.org. https://inequality.org/great-divide/twelve-us-billionaires-combined-1-trillion
This week on Talk Nation Radio we welcome back Coleen Rowley. She is a retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel who testified about the FBI's pre 9-11 lapses as a whistle-blower in 2002 to staffers of the Joint Intelligence Committees' Inquiry; the Senate Judiciary Committee; and to investigators of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. Along with two other whistle-blowers, she was selected that year as Time Magazine's "Persons of the Year." Coleen Rowley has been a terrific activist and advocate for peace and justice ever since.
Ray McGovern was an infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties, and became a CIA analyst. His duties eventually included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing The President’s Daily Brief. He conducted the one-on-one morning briefings of President Reagan’s five most senior national security officials, including VP Bush, from 1981 to 1985. In retirement Ray co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) -- an attempt by intelligence veterans to hold former colleagues to account for “fixing” intelligence to “justify” wars like Iraq. His website is https://RayMcGovern.com
This week on Talk Nation Radio we’re talking antiwar activism with Ann Wright who was in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a Colonel but who, by my count, has been a fulltime model antiwar activist for over 17 years, so less than a dozen to go to match the Army career. Ann Wright resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a member of the National Advisory Board of Veterans for Peace. She writes frequent columns about human rights, U.S. foreign policy, and the contradiction between the two. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Her website is https://marjoriecohn.com
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Where's our money? Why so many wars? A bill to put the Pentagon on the flag? Is everything we've been told a lie? Are there some things that are not Putin's fault? And how do you talk to people who won't wear masks?
This week on Talk Nation Radio: massive, shameless, and endlessly expanding war profiteering by weapons dealers. Our guest is Heidi Peltier, author of a new report called “The Growth of the ‘Camo Economy’ and the Commercialization of the Post 9/11 Wars.” Heidi Peltier is the Director of the “20 Years of War” project at Boston University and part of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. She has written reports and articles on various costs of war, including the hidden costs of financing war through debt, as well as the opportunity costs of spending federal dollars on the war economy instead of on other domestic priorities such as healthcare, education, or clean energy.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Why is much of what many people believe about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not true? And how did Hollywood help get various myths started? Our guest is Greg Mitchell, author of numerous books, whose latest is called The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood -- and America -- Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Nina Turner is the former national co-chair of the Bernie 2020 campaign. She is a former Ohio state senator, and a former professor of African American history. Nina Turner is currently a Strategic Delegate Advisor for RootsAction.org. And she hosts a podcast called “We the People.”
Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a daily, primetime television and radio program syndicated on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates. She is also a weekly columnist with Independent Media Institute and lead author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. Sonali Kolhatkar recently wrote an article titled "If We’re Going to Defund Militarized Police Departments, Why Not Add the Pentagon?"
Jake Johnston is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. His research has focused predominantly on economic policy in Latin America, the International Monetary Fund, and U.S. foreign policy. Jake Johnston co-authored a report in March on the role of the Organization of American States in the coup in Bolivia in November of last year. The New York Times has recently admitted that OAS claims of fraud in last year’s Bolivian election were baseless, but at the time that paper promoted those claims, while Jake Johnston and his colleagues refuted them.
Peadar King is director of KMF Productions and presenter / producer of the RTÉ documentary series What in the World? We discuss his latest book, War, Suffering, and the Struggle for Human Rights.
John Perkins is an author and activist whose 10 books on global intrigue, shamanism, and transformation including Touching the Jaguar, Shapeshifting, and the classic Confessions of an Economic Hit Man have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 70 weeks, sold over 2 million copies, and are published in 35 languages. As chief economist at a major consulting firm, he advised the World Bank, United Nations, Fortune 500 corporations, and the U.S. and other governments. He regularly speaks at universities, economic forums, and shamanic gatherings around the world and is a founder and board member of the nonprofit organizations, the Pachamama Alliance and Dream Change. See: http://touchingthejaguarbook.com
Helena Cobban is a veteran analyst of international affairs and an anti-imperialist activist who campaigns for human equality at all levels. She's a Quaker who lives in Washington DC, which she describes as "the belly of the beast." Helena has authored seven books on international issues, four of which have been about the Middle East; and for 20 years she contributed a regular column about global affairs to The Christian Science Monitor. She has also been a publisher. Her company, Just World Books, has helped midwife the work of writers like Miko Peled, Laila El-Haddad, Leila Abdelrazaq, and David Swanson. She's the head of the non-profit Just World Educational, which has some great web-based programing, most recently on Syria. She has also resumed blogging on her blog Just World News, where her major current preoccupation is the ways the coronavirus crisis affects the hegemonic role the United States has played in world affairs since 1945. See: https://justworldnews.org
This week on Talk Nation Radio, we discuss the past and possible future of the U.S. Postal Service. Our guest, Richard John, is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia University’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. Richard John is author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse and recently wrote the Washington Post article “The Founders never intended the U.S. Postal Service to be managed like a business.”
This week on Talk Nation Radio we discuss efforts to save the site of a Native American capital.
Greg Werkheiser is a founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners. He’s an attorney and educator and is working on a campaign to save Rassawek, the site of the historic capital of the Monacan Indian Nation in what is now Virginia.
http://CulturalHeritagePartners.com
Rufus Elliot is a Monacan tribal member, and he was the Tribal Administrator until late last year. He's been coordinating the Section 106 consultation for the tribe on the Rassawek/James River Water Authority project.
You can sign a petition in support at http://DIY.RootsAction.org
This week on Talk Nation Radio, our guest is Grant Smith whose latest and ninth book about the Israel Lobby is called The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise Of The Virginia Israel Advisory Board. You can find it at https://virginia.israellobby.org. Smith is director of the nonprofit Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy.
In 2014, Smith sued the Department of Defense in federal court and won release of a detailed report, contracted in 1987, about the advanced state of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The Nation wrote about it in the article “It’s Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too.”
In 2015, Smith sued the Central Intelligence Agency and won release of 131 pages of formerly classified information revealing its overseas agents obtained compelling evidence that Israel stole U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium in the 1960s to build its first atom bombs.
This week on Talk Nation Radio we talk with Richard Tucker, who is one of the editors of the new book, Nature at War: American Environments and World War II. Richard Tucker is an environmental historian at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is the founder and manager of a research network on the environmental consequences of military operations through history. See environmentandmilitary.com.
Tim Schwartz is the author of a new book called A Public Service: Whistleblowing, Disclosure, and Anonymity. Tim Schwartz’s career focuses on data privacy and digital information as an artist, activist, and technologist. He specializes in teaching techniques for challenging power while protecting one’s identity. Schwartz co-organizes the digital training organization Los Angeles Cryptoparty, a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. He currently works as a digital strategist at Alley, a digital agency that builds websites and digital systems for the media, nonprofits, and others. After developing technology to reunite missing people affected by the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, he began organizing the Missing Persons Community of Interest, which develops technology for reunifying families after disasters. He lives in Los Angeles.
This week on Talk Nation Radio, we’ll talk about how the coronavirus crisis is impacting or failing to impact militarism and sanctions. Sarah Lazare is web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Nation, Tom Dispatch, YES! Magazine, and Al Jazeera America. A former staff writer for AlterNet and Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book "About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War." Sarah got her start in journalism reporting for the Independent Media Center movement and has organized against U.S. militarism at home and abroad.
David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect magazine. He is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. His next book, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, will be released in June. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The Intercept, The New Republic, Vice, HuffPost, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. He has been a guest on MSNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, NPR, and Pacifica Radio. He lives in Los Angeles.
Charlotte Dennett is a former Middle East reporter, investigative journalist, and attorney. She is the co-author of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. And she is the author of the new book we will be discussing: The Crash of Flight 3804: A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.
About the book:
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-crash-of-flight-3804/
This week on Talk Nation Radio, we’re talking about Joe Biden, whether he can be found, and why anyone would want to find him anyway. Our guest is Branko Marcetic, author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, and of numerous articles for Jacobin at JacobinMag.com.
This Week on Talk Nation Radio, we discuss Coronavirus, corporate greed, and other topics with Dean Baker. Dean Baker is Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which he co-founded in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare, and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His blog, “Beat the Press,” provides commentary on economic reporting.
Norman Solomon is cofounder and coordinator of RootsAction.org as well as founder and director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy and Made Love, Got War. He has written op-ed pieces for almost every large daily U.S. newspaper and appears often on a wide range of radio and TV outlets. We discuss the U.S. presidential election.
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace, and World BEYOND War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy.
Mary-Wynne Ashford is a retired Family Physician, with a specialty in Palliative Care. She was Co-President of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War for four years, and President of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) for four years. IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She has received many awards for her work and her book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror, and War. She has been teaching thousands of high school students about nuclear weapons and the Ban Treaty.
Simon Black is a professor of labour studies at Brock University and founder of Labour Against the Arms Trade (LAAT), a coalition of peace and labour activists working to end Canada’s participation in the international arms trade. LAAT organizes for arms conversion and a just transition for arms industry workers. @_SimonBlack @LAATCanada
Simon Black and Mary-Wynne Ashford will both be speaking in May at the NoWar2020 conference in Ottawa. See https://nowar2020.worldbeyondwar.org
Richard Sanders is a researcher/writer/activist who has engaged full-time in the peace movement since 1984 when he escaped academia with an MA in cultural anthropology. His efforts to debunk Canada’s peace mythology began when coordinating Ottawa’s Peace Resource Centre, producing a community anti-war radio program for almost 20 years, and being a local organizer with the Alliance for Nonviolent Action. In late 1988, he founded the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT.ncf.ca). Its initial disARMX campaign, which included a conference, public inquiry, and march/rally of several thousand, precipitated Ottawa’s 20-year ban on arms bazaars. Richard Sanders will be speaking at No War 2020, World BEYOND War's conference in Ottawa in May which will be part of an effort to shut down CANSEC, the latest giant weapons show in Ottawa.
See https://nowar2020.worldbeyondwar.org
Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and investigative reporter. Over the last 35 years he has served as Washington correspondent for The Nation and Salon and as editor and reporter at the Washington Post and Washingtonpost.com for 15 years. He is the author of three books of non-fiction history: The Ghost, a biography of legendary CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton; Snow-Storm in August, the untold tale of a white riot that swept Washington in 1835; and Our Man in Mexico, a biography of Win Scott, the CIA’s top spy in Mexico in the 1960s. Morley is founder and editor of The Deep State, a news blog about secret intelligence agencies which averages 8,500 readers a month. See http://deepstateblog.org
Annette Brownlie is a mother and a life-long peace organiser and activist, arising out of the experiences of her father in WW2 and her own experiences as a teenager opposing the Vietnam war. Annette has had leadership roles in anti-nuclear, environmental, and peace organisations in Brisbane. She is a recipient of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and the United Nations Association of Australia Community Peace Award. When the announcement was made in 2012 to host U.S. Marines in Australia, she, along with colleagues and friends, initiated the formation of the national network IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, now representing organisations from every state of Australia. She is the current national chairperson. See http://ipan.org.au
Margaret Kimberley has been Editor and Senior Columnist for Black Agenda Report since its inception in 2006. Her first book, Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, will be published by Steerforth Press on February 4, 2020. She is a contributor to the OR Books anthology, In Defense of Julian Assange. She has also produced original work for Consortium News, Counterpunch, the Dallas Morning News, and the American Herald Tribune. Ms. Kimberley was a contributor to the 2014 book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence. She is a regular guest on radio and internet talk shows and has appeared on Al Jazeera English, RT, WBAI, WPFW, KPFK, KPFA, Sputnik News, Presstv Iran, The Real News Network, and Govorit Moskva (Moscow Voice Radio).
Phill Gittins is World BEYOND War’s Education Director. Phill has lived, worked, and travelled in over 50 countries across 6 continents; taught in schools, colleges, and universities in eight countries; and led experiential training and training-of-trainers for hundreds of individuals on peace and conflict processes. Other experience includes work in youth offending prisons; oversight management for youth and community projects; and consultation for public and non-profit organisations on peace, education, and youth issues. Phill has received multiple awards for his contributions to peace and conflict work, including the Rotary Peace Fellowship and the Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace.
Roger Hallam is a PhD researcher on civil disobedience at King's College London and an organic vegetable farmer. He has been a vegan for 34 years. In 2018 he co founded Extinction Rebellion. He has also just authored a terrific short book called Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse. His website is rogerhallam.com
Lisa McCrea is an environmental and human rights activist, and the mother of five. She lived on the former George Air Force Base in California from 1987 to 1991. She found out 30 years after first stepping foot on the base that it was and is extremely contaminated with numerous toxic substances, including nuclear waste. She became partially disabled in 1990 and completely disabled in 2003, at the age of 35, as a direct result of her contamination exposure. In 2017, she switched her focus from corporate contamination to military contamination. Already a veterans' advocate, she found out about the George AFB contamination through a veteran from Camp Lejeune, NC. Since 2017, she has been fighting for governmental and Department of Defense accountability and justice for all affected by military contamination.
Learn more:
Video: My Miscarriage and Radioactive Soft Drinks
Military Times: Why women were told ‘Don’t get pregnant at George Air Force Base’
Facebook: Lisa McCrea
Lisa McCrea will be speaking in California on March 21 at Berkeley's Unitarian Fellowship Hall and Sunday, March 22nd (World Water Day), at the Women’s Building, in the Mission District in San Francisco.
I had a great conversation this morning on KPFK with Harvey Wasserman and Alan Minsky on Connect the Dots, Lila Garrett's show. -- David Swanson
Alice Slater serves on the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War and is the UN NGO Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She is on the Board of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the Global Council of Abolition 2000, and the Advisory Board of Nuclear Ban-US, supporting the mission of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
This Week on Talk Nation Radio, we discuss the Christmas Truces of 1914. Learn more at https://worldbeyondwar.org/christmastruce
This Week on Talk Nation Radio, we speak with two of the key people behind Beyond Nuclear International, which you can find at beyondnuclearinternational.org
Linda Pentz Gunter founded Beyond Nuclear in 2007 and serves as its international specialist as well as its media and development director. Prior to her work in anti-nuclear advocacy, she was a journalist for 20 years in print and broadcast, working for USA Network, Reuters, The Times (UK), and other US and international outlets. Beyond Nuclear works to support grassroots, national and international efforts to phase out nuclear power in favor of safer renewable energy choices. It also draws attention to the perpetual link between nuclear power and the pathway to nuclear weapons and advocates for a global nuclear weapons ban.
Cindy Folkers studies radiation impacts on health, with particular focus on women, children, and pregnancy. She monitors and encourages community engagement with Congress and national scientific panels on radiation issues, and advocates for community-based action that informs individuals on contamination levels and risk. Cindy also handles the administrative operations of Beyond Nuclear.
Preetha Gopalan is Reprieve's Deputy Head of UK Litigation. She works on strategic litigation efforts in the UK which seek to hold the British Government to account for complicity in the death penalty, torture, secret detention and extrajudicial killings abroad. Reprieve has just appealed the decision by the International Criminal Court not to pursue prosecution of war crimes in Afghanistan.
David Gibbs is a Professor of History at the University of Arizona and has published widely on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and NATO. His publications have appeared in both academic and popular venues, such as the London Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He also recently debated the topic of humanitarian intervention at the Oxford Union Society in the UK. Professor Gibbs is currently finishing his third book, on the rise of American conservatism during the 1970s, to be entitled "How America Became a Right Wing Nation."
This week on Talk Nation Radio: a rant on impeachment, in favor of doing it right or not doing it at all.
Misagh Parsa is a Professor of Sociology who has taught at Dartmouth since 1989. A specialist on revolutions, he is the author of States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, as well as Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution. His most recent book which we discuss here, is called Democracy in Iran: Why it Failed and how it Might Succeed.
Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council (NIC), before retiring in 2010 after a 27-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. She was a political analyst focusing on various Middle Eastern countries and also served as an editor and media analyst for the U.S. Government’s Open Source Center, OSC, now known as the Open Source Enterprise. She is conversant in German, Arabic, and Spanish. A member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, Elizabeth currently serves as Member-in-Residence at the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action located near Seattle.
Lindsay Koshgarian is the Program Director of the National Priorities Project, where she oversees NationalPriorities.org. Lindsay’s work on the federal budget includes analysis of the federal budget process and politics, military spending, and specifically how federal budget choices for different spending priorities and taxation interact.
Mark Isaacs is the author, among other books, of the new book, The Kabul Peace House, which we discuss, and which describes a community of peace activists in Afghanistan. Mark is president of Sydney PEN, an affiliate of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers which defends freedom of expression and campaigns on behalf of writers who have been silenced by persecution or imprisonment. He speaks with us from Australia. His website is markjisaacs.com
The Kingsbay Ploughshares 7 are facing 25 years in prison for their action at a nuclear submarine base. We speak with six of them: Elizabeth McAlister, Martha Hennessy, Mark Colville, Clare Grady, Patrick O'Neill, and Carmen Trotta. https://kingsbayplowshares7.org/
Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA case officer who was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and was in federal prison in Colorado. I don't think that prior to this program Sterling has been asked whether he believes the official purpose of the progam he worked on giving nuclear bomb plans to Iran. Does he really think the purpose of giving obviously flawed bomb-part plans to Iran was to slow down a nuclear weapons program that may not even have existed? Or does he believe the purpose was to plant evidence on the government of Iran? Listen to his answer.
Before his trial and conviction, Sterling worked at the CIA, including for the Iran task force, for nearly a decade. He studied political science at Millikin University and holds a law degree from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. He was released from prison in January 2018. While Jeffrey was in prison, his wife Holly was on this program.
Jeffrey Sterling has a new book out called Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower. We discuss it.
Here's a review.
E. Ahmet Tonak is the author and editor of several books including Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (with Anwar Shaikh), Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (edited with Irvin Schick) and Marxism and Classes (edited with Sungur Savran and Kurtar Tanyılmaz). Trained as a mechanical engineer at Istanbul Technical University, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. Tonak taught for many years at Istanbul Bilgi University, Middle East Technical University, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and is currently a visiting professor at UMASS Amherst and works as an economist at Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, Interregional Office, Northampton, Massachusetts. He wrote for several Turkish dailies and contributes to sendika.org, an alternative news portal in Turkey. We discuss his new report: "The Rate of Exploitation: The Case of the iPhone."
Lisa Fithian has just published a terrific guide to direct action and strategic civil disobedience as the most radical and rapid means to social change, called Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce Loving Resistance. Fithian has been described by Mother Jones magazine as “the nation’s best-known protest consultant.” She has supported countless movements including the Battle of Seattle in 1999, rebuilding and defending communities following Hurricane Katrina, Occupy Wall Street, and the uprisings at Standing Rock and Ferguson. The website for Lisa's new book, which I strongly advise getting is http://shutitdownnow.org
Photo by Leon Alesi.
Kathy Kelly has traveled to war zones and lived alongside ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe the U.S. should end all U.S. military and economic warfare and pay reparations for suffering already caused by U.S. wars. Recently, Voices has helped organize vigils, forums, fasts, and nonviolent direct action calling for an immediate end to hostilities driving near famine conditions in Yemen. Kathy Kelly is a member of World BEYOND War’s Advisory Board. See:
http://vcnv.org
https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019
Russell Gray grew up in Kansas City, graduated from college in 2017 and took a banking regulation job with the U.S. government. He left that job in November 2018 to help start the climate group Extinction Rebellion ( https://extinctionrebellion.us/ ) in the United States. He's now working to shut down DC on September 23rd ( see http://strikedc.org ) as a follow up to the September 20th global climate strike and a lead up to further climate strike actions around the globe. Join World BEYOND War's affinity group for Strike DC at http://bit.ly/wbwaffinity
See also: This Is Really Not a Drill http://davidswanson.org/this-is-really-not-a-drill/
and: Nonviolence Denial Is As Dangerous As Climate Denial http://davidswanson.org/nonviolence-denial-is-as-dangerous-as-climate-denial/
Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff are out on bail and forbidden to leave Ireland. They attempted to inspect a U.S. plane for weapons in supposedly neutral Ireland. They will be taking part in #NoWar2019 (https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019).
Ken Mayers was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island prior to attending Princeton University. Upon graduation in 1958 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corp, eventually rising to the rank of major. He resigned his commission in disgust with American foreign policy at the end of 1966 and returned to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned a Ph.D. in political science. He has been a peace and justice activist ever since. He has served six years on the Veterans For Peace Board of Directors, five of them as national treasurer.
Tarak Kauff was a U..S. Army paratrooper from 1959 – 1962. He is a member of Veterans For Peace, the managing editor of Peace in Our Times, VFP’s quarterly newspaper, and was a member of the VFP National Board of Directors for six years. He has organized and led delegations of veterans to Okinawa; Jeju Island, South Korea; Palestine; Ferguson, Missouri; Standing Rock; and Ireland.
Clare Daly is an Irish politician who has been a Member of the European Parliament from Ireland since July. She is a member of Independents 4 Change, part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left. She served as a Teachta Dála or member of Ireland's parliament from 2011 to 2019. Clare Daly will be speaking at the NoWar2019 conference and rally being planned by World BEYOND War for Limerick, Ireland, on October 5th and 6th. https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019
Recorded by Dale Lehman / WZRD and posted at Radio4All (listen here). Or listen below.
This is a keynote talk by David Swanson for the West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition at their Peace Essay Contest Awards Presentation on August 27, 2019, the 91st Anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
It was Swanson's 2011 book, "When the World Outlawed War", an inspiring but forgotten story from the 1920s of how people created a treaty to ban all war — a treaty still on the books but ignored, given to Frank Goetz, the Coalition's just past President and Peace Essay Contest coordinator, by peace activist Kathy Kelly, that inspired him to establish the Peace Essay Contest, now in its 7th year.
Recorded by Dale Lehman / WZRD and posted at Radio4All (listen here). Or listen below.
This is a keynote talk by David Swanson for the West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition at their Peace Essay Contest Awards Presentation on August 27, 2019, the 91st Anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
It was Swanson's 2011 book, "When the World Outlawed War", an inspiring but forgotten story from the 1920s of how people created a treaty to ban all war — a treaty still on the books but ignored, given to Frank Goetz, the Coalition's just past President and Peace Essay Contest coordinator, by peace activist Kathy Kelly, that inspired him to establish the Peace Essay Contest, now in its 7th year.
Barry Sweeney is a member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. Barry is based in Ireland, but is often in Vietnam and Italy. His background is in education and environmentalism. He taught as a primary school teacher in Ireland for a number of years, before moving to Italy in 2009 to teach English. His love for environmental understanding led him to many progressive projects in Ireland, Italy, and Sweden. He became more and more involved in environmentalism in Ireland, and has now been teaching on a Permaculture Design Certificate course for 5 years. More recent work has seen him teaching on World BEYOND War’s War Abolition course for the last two years. Also, in 2017 and 2018 he organized peace symposia in Ireland, bringing together many of the peace/anti-war groups in Ireland. Barry is helping to plan NoWar2019: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019 He discussed this petition to the Irish and U.S. governments: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/the-world-must-support-ireland-against-us-wars
Timmon Wallis is the author of Disarming the Nuclear Argument and The Truth About Trident. He has a PhD in Peace Studies from Bradford University in England, and has been working on nuclear disarmament and other peace issues since the 1970s. Most recently, he was Program Manager for Peace and Disarmament for Quakers in Britain, before moving back to Northampton, Massachusetts. He has also been Executive Director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. As a member of the ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) team at the UN in 2017, Timmon took part in the negotiations which led to the adoption by 122 countries of the Nuclear Ban Treaty and won ICAN the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. With his new partner, Vicki Elson, he is now running NuclearBan.US, the campaign to get cities and states in the United States to comply with the Nuclear Ban Treaty. Wallis recently authored a report called Warheads to Windmills: How to Pay for a Green New Deal.
Pat Elder is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. He is the author of Military Recruiting in the United States, and the Director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy. The coalition works to counter the alarming militarization of the United States’ high schools. Pat also writes for World BEYOND War and Civilian Exposure, an organization that tracks how the U.S. military poisons people around the world. Pat’s focus is on documenting contamination caused by the U.S. military’s use in routine fire-fighting drills of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also known as PFAS). Pat Elder will be speaking at the NoWar2019 conference and rally in Limerick, Ireland, this October 5th and 6th: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019
Edward Horgan retired from the Irish Defence Forces with the rank of Commandant after 22 years service that included peacekeeping missions with the United Nations in Cyprus and the Middle East. He has worked on over 20 election monitoring missions in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia, and Africa. He is international secretary with the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, Chairperson and founder of Veterans For Peace Ireland, and a peace activist with Shannonwatch. His many peace activities include the case of Horgan v Ireland, in which he took the Irish Government to the High Court over breaches of Irish Neutrality and U.S. military use of Shannon airport, and a high profile court case resulting from his attempt to arrest U.S. President George W. Bush in Ireland in 2004. He teaches politics and international relations part-time at the University of Limerick. He completed a PhD thesis on reform of the United Nations in 2008 and has a master’s degree in peace studies and a B.A. degree in History, Politics, and Social Studies. He is actively involved in a campaign to commemorate and name as many as possible of the up to one million children who have died as a result of wars in the Middle East since the first Gulf War in 1991. And Ed Horgan will be speaking at the NoWar2019 conference planned for Limerick Ireland in October: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019
Jeremy Kuzmarov has taught at numerous colleges across the United States and is author of four books on U.S. foreign policy including The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, with John Marciano and the new book that we will be discussing and which I highly recommend: Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State.
Jeff Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. He teaches courses on U.S. history and American Indian history. And he is the author of an important new book called Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.
Rob Kall is an award-winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector, and visionary. He's the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity. He has pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science, and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom-Up Radio Show. And Rob founded and publishes the progressive news and opinion site, OpEdNews.com, which has seen over 23 million visitors.
Donald E. McInnis is the author of She's So Cold: Murder, Accusations, and the System that Devastated a Family. He is a California criminal defense attorney, and he represented one of the three accused boys, Aaron Houser, in the Stephanie Crowe murder case. Over the span of his 40-year legal career, Mr. McInnis has worked alternately for the prosecution and for the defense, having served as a deputy district attorney for two California counties and as a deputy public defender for one California county during his early professional years. His website is https://donaldmcinnis.com
Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington, D.C. that promotes criminal justice reform. His books include The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, coauthored with Ashley Nellis. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has just released a report that draws on testimony by Marc Mauer on the impact of felony disenfranchisement.
Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment. Talkers magazine named him America's most important progressive host and has named his show one of the top ten talk radio shows in the country every year for over a decade. A four-time recipient of the Project Censored Award, Hartmann is also a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, translated into multiple languages.
Martin E. Hellman is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His work spans cyber security, reducing the risk of a nuclear disaster, and peace. His invention of public key cryptography is at the heart of the secure portion of the Internet and has won him many honors, including the million dollar ACM Turing Award, the top prize in computer science. In 2016, he and his wife of fifty years published A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home & Peace on the Planet. He has applied risk analysis to nuclear deterrence and, in his most recent project, he has raised troubling questions about the assumptions that form the foundation for common current thinking about national security. Hellman also wrote "The Man in the TNT Vest."
Stephen Roblin is a scholar of U.S. public opinion towards U.S. war and conflict. He is committed to using his research to support activists, NGOs and policymakers working to mitigate and prevent the human costs of war. His research examines the effect of civilian harm by the U.S. military and anti-war messaging on U.S. public opinion. He is currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at Cornell University. Prior to attending Cornell, he earned his masters at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy in 2009 and his BA at Morgan State University in 2006. In 2019-2020, he will be a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS) at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. See https://www.stephenroblin.com
Joe Emersberger is a Canada-based writer who writes primarily these days for FAIR.org, the Canary, and Counterpunch, and previously for Telesur English. You can find him on Twitter at rosendo_joe We discuss the media, Julian Assange, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Ross Caputi is a PhD student in History at UMass and a coauthor of the critically important new book The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History. Ross Caputi’s experience as a U.S. Marine in Fallujah in 2004 compelled him to speak out against the war and to organize solidarity efforts with Fallujah. He is also a co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project.
Danny Haiphong is an activist, journalist, and scholar. For the last five years, Haiphong has been a weekly contributor to Black Agenda Report. His articles have also appeared in The American Herald Tribune, MintPressNews, and CounterPunch. His work was featured in former Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s latest book How the U.S. Creates Sh*thole Countries (2018). Haiphong recently co-authored the book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News-from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
Marc Eliot Stein is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. I'm the Executive Director of World BEYOND War. Marc has been a web developer since the 1990s, and over the years has built sites for Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam, the international literary site Words Without Borders, the Allen Ginsberg estate, Time Warner, A&E Network/History Channel, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Center for Disease Control, and Meredith Digital Publishing. He is also a writer, and for years he maintained a popular literary blog called Literary Kicks using the pen name Levi Asher (he still runs the blog, but has ditched the pen name). Marc has begun creating a new podcast for World BEYOND War ( https://worldbeyondwar.org/podcast ), as well as helping World BEYOND War with social media, website issues, and the antiwar movement within the Information Technology world.
Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and his latest, which we will be discussing, The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions. Visit TheGrayZone.com.
Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History, and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. Grandin is a professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We discuss his new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
Foad Izadi is a member of World BEYOND War's Coordinating Committee based in Iran. His research and teaching interests are inter-disciplinary and focus on United States-Iran relations and U.S. public diplomacy. His book, United States Public Diplomacy Towards Iran, discusses the U.S. communication efforts in Iran during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Izadi has published numerous studies in national and international academic journals and major handbooks, including: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy and Edward Elgar Handbook of Cultural Security. Dr. Foad Izadi is a faculty member at the Department ofAmerican Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, where he teaches M.A. and Ph.D. courses in American studies. He'll be speaking at #NoWar2019 https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019
Vijay Mehta is an author and peace activist. He is Chair of Uniting for Peace and founding Trustee of Fortune Forum Charity. His notable books include ‘The Economics of Killing’ (Pluto Press, 2012) and ‘Peace Beyond Borders’ (New Internationalist, 2016). His current book is ‘How Not To Go To War’ (New Internationalist, 2019). The Sunday Times described him as a “longstanding activist for peace, development, human rights and the environment, who along with his daughter Renu Mehta has set a precedent for striving to change the world” (The Sunday Times, February 01, 2009). In 2014, Vijay Mehta’s bio “The Audacity of Dreams” appeared in the book form “Karma Kurry” published by Jaico Publishing House, India with a foreword to the book by Nelson Mandela. “Thank you for all you do Vijay – both the organisation Uniting for Peace and yourself are inspiration and give us all hope that both yourself and the organisation can bring a world without a war. Indeed it is possible, even in our own time.” – Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate 1976. “Vijay Mehta proposes in his book How Not To Go To War that in countries and communities, in governments, private institutions and media, Peace Departments and Peace Centres be established to report on and promote peace.”– Jose Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate 1996 and Former President of Timor-Liste
Maria Zakharova is an activist and public lecturer based in Odessa, Ukraine. She has been a strong supporter of the Council of Mothers of May 2, which represents relatives of the scores of progressives murdered at Odessa’s House of Trade Unions by a right-wing mob on May 2, 2014, just a few months after the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Ever since the massacre, Zakharova has been promoting the demand by the Council of Mothers for an international investigation into who was responsible for the murders, addressing this issue at meetings, conferences, and rallies across Europe and in the United States. Zakharova is a graduate of Odessa National Technic University with a degree in computer engineering. She holds a doctorate in Social Psychology and currently is pursuing studies in the field of Scientific Community. She is speaking this week in Washington, D.C., as part of http://notoNATO.org.
Marcela Mulholland is a 21-year-old organizer with Sunrise Movement. Her personal experiences with the impacts of sea level rise in her hometown, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. motivate her to fight for coastal communities everywhere that will be devastated by climate change. She is currently a senior studying Political Science and Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to being a student, Marcela is an organizer with Divest UF a group dedicated to financially disentangling the University of Florida from toxic industries including fossil fuels and private prisons.
Darcia Narvaez is Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame and focuses on moral development and flourishing from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating anthropology, neuroscience, clinical, developmental and educational sciences. Dr. Narvaez’s current research explores how early life experience influences societal culture and moral character. One of her recent books, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom won the 2015 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. She writes a popular blog for Psychology Today (“Moral Landscapes”).
Omali Yeshitela is Chairman of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace, and Reparations. The website is at blackisbackcoalition.orgHe has agreed to speak on April 4th in Washington DC at the No to NATO — Yes to Peace events. The website for that is NotoNATO.org.Chairman Omali is also Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party USA and the African Socialist International, and is the founder of The Burning Spear newspaper. See theburningspear.com
Roy Eidelson, PhD, is the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. His work focuses on applying psychological knowledge to issues of social justice and political change. His writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly peer-reviewed journals and other outlets including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible. Follow him online at royeidelson.com and @royeidelson.
Liz Remmerswaal Hughes is a member of the Coordinating Committee of World BEYOND War. She is the Country Coordinator for World BEYOND War in New Zealand / Aotearoa where she works with a number of peace organizations. In 2017 she was awarded the Sonia Davies Peace Award which enabled her to study Peace Literacy with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, attend the WILPF triennial Congress in Chicago, and a workshop on Peace and Conscience in Ann Arbor. We discuss opposition in New Zealand to the purchase of U.S. war planes.See: https://worldbeyondwar.org/newzealand
John Lannon is a member of the Executive Committee of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) in Ireland, a founding member of Shannon Watch, and a lecturer and researcher at the University of Limerick. We discuss Ireland’s neutrality and lack thereof.
https://worldbeyondwar.org/ireland
Ana Maria Gower is a Serbian-British mixed media artist focusing on the themes of memories, life path, and experiences of war. The origin of her artistic interests goes back to her own experience of surviving the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia and its capital – Belgrade. Being a 10-year-old in a war zone, she witnessed the destruction caused by NATO involvement both during the conflict and for years after. A graduate of Central Saint-Martins (London, UK), she has participated in numerous exhibitions in the UK, Serbia, and the United States. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. And she will be exhibiting her art and speaking at the No to NATO - Yes to Peace Festival in April in Washington DC (See NotoNATO.org).
Lee Camp is the head writer and host of the TV show "Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp" on RT America, which is watched by millions around the world. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for the Huffington Post, and had a hit web series called “Moment of Clarity." He’s toured the country and the world with his fierce brand of standup comedy, and George Carlin’s daughter Kelly said he’s one of the few comics keeping her father’s torch lit. Among his top accolades, he's also had smear pieces done about him by the New York Times and NPR's Weekend Edition.
Hoor Arifi is an Afghan activist who has been involved with humanitarian works in Afghanistan since he was a young boy. He has worked as a Coordinator with the "Afghan Peace Volunteers" while living in Afghanistan. Currently, he is majoring in Politics and Business at a U.S. University. He also works as a facilitator with the "Afghan Diaspora Communities" trying to solve problems faced by Afghans at home and abroad.
Dana Frank is the author of The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. She is professor of history emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since the 2009 military coup, her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in outlets including the New York Times, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs, and she has testified before the U.S. Congress and the Canadian Parliament.
Rob Kajiwara is an Okinawan-Hawaian singer-songwriter and visual artist. In 2017, he was made a cultural ambassador for his ancestral village of Nakagusuku, Okinawa. In 2018 he was also made a cultural ambassador / special envoy for Ke Aupuni o Hawaii (the Hawaiian Kingdom) in order to share Hawaiian history, culture, and issues in Ryukyu. Rob Kijiwara recently organized a petition to the White House about Okinawa that many of us joined him in delivering there on January 7th.
Stand With Okinawa. http://standwithokinawa.net/
The Tyranny of Contamination: The US Military is poisoning Okinawa. https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-tyranny-of-contamination-the-us-military-is-poisoning-okinawa/
U.S. Bases in Okinawa Are a Threat to Freedom https://worldbeyondwar.org/u-s-bases-in-okinawa-are-a-threat-to-freedom/
The petition https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-landfill-henoko-oura-bay-until-referendum-can-be-held-okinawa
Dr. Wes Bellamy is a City Councilman in Charlottesville, Va., and a political science professor at Virginia State University. He has helped lead the ongoing effort to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. His new book is called Monumental: It Was Never About a Statue.
Peter Phillips has been a Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994. He was Director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010 and President of the Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017. He has been editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of Censored, co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney 2006, editor of two editions of Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism 1999 & 2004. His most recent book is Giants: The Global Power Elite.
Leonard Higgins is a member of the Extinction Rebellion U.S. National Coordination Team and was a valve turner two years ago, one of a number of activists who took nonviolent action to shut off pipelines. Now new nonviolent actions are underway.
Stephanie Welch is a documentarian and executive director of Paragon Media, a nonprofit media organization that is the co-producer of the new film, A DANGEROUS IDEA. Welch is also Senior Producer at the nonprofit Bioneers and produces the award-winning syndicated program Bioneers Radio: Revolution from the Heart of Nature. She co-produced the radio documentary Biowars: First Do No Harm, which won a NFCB Silver Reel Award. Welch is also audio engineer for Women Rising Radio. We discuss A DANGEROUS IDEA. See http://adangerousideafilm.com
Mark Colville is one of the seven Kings Bay Plowshares activists. We recorded this interview on December 11th 2018, and Mark planned to turn himself in hours later at the Glynn County Jail in Brunswick, Georgia. Learn more:
http://kingsbayplowshares7.org
https://www.facebook.com/Kingsbayplowshares
http://www.nukeresister.org
Dave Lindorff is an investigative reporter who writes for the Nation, London Review of Books, Salon and Tarbell.org. He is founder of the collectively run journalists' news site thiscantbehappening.net.
Lindorff has just published an articled called "Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed." See: https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud
James Crossland is Senior Lecturer in International History at Liverpool John Moores University, and a founder member of the Humanitarian Working Histories Group. He is the author of Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939-1945, and most recently, War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914.
Barry Sweeney is a member of the coordinating committee of World BEYOND War, of which I'm the director. Barry is based in Ireland, but is often in Vietnam and Italy. His background is in education and environmentalism. He taught as a primary school teacher in Ireland for a number of years, before moving to Italy in 2009 to teach English. His love for environmental understanding led him to many progressive projects in Ireland, Italy, and Sweden. He became more and more involved in environmentalism in Ireland, and has now been teaching on a Permaculture Design Certificate course for 5 years. More recent work has seen him teaching on World BEYOND War’s War Abolition course for the last two years. Also, in 2017 and 2018 he organized peace symposia in Ireland, bringing together many of the peace/anti-war groups in Ireland. Barry is currently living in Vietnam, although he still continues his role of Country Coordinator for World BEYOND War in Ireland.
Sign this petition: https://worldbeyondwar.org/ireland
Steve McKeown was a radio operator in the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1966 to 1967. He was a founding member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 27 in Minneapolis / St. Paul, and is the coordinator for their newsletter. Steve has spoken to hundreds of classes in elementary and high schools, colleges, churches, and community groups on matters of war and peace. And he has been part of organizing all kinds of peace activism including related to Armistice Day, the 100th anniversary of which was this past Sunday.
Greta Zarro is Organizing Director at World BEYOND War. She has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as valedictorian from St. Michael’s College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology. She then pursued a master’s in Food Studies at New York University before accepting a full-time community organizing job with leading non-profit Food & Water Watch. There, she worked on issues related to fracking, genetically engineered foods, climate change, and the corporate control of our common resources. Greta describes herself as a vegetarian sociologist-environmentalist. She is interested in the interconnections of social-ecological systems and sees the profligacy of the military-industrial complex, as part of the larger corporatocracy, as the root of many cultural and environmental ills. She and her partner currently live in an off-grid tiny home on their organic fruit and vegetable farm in Upstate New York. Greta can be reached at greta@worldbeyondwar.org.
Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an Associate Professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. She recently published an article in Counter Punch called An Illegitimate, US-Backed Regime is Fueling the Honduran Refugee Crisis.
Nicolas J. S. Davies writes about U.S. foreign policy, war and militarism for Consortium News and other outlets. He has been working as a researcher with CODEPINK, and co-authored its report on "War Profiteers: the U.S. War Machine and the Arming of Repressive Regimes." He is also the author of the excellent book, Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
January 20. On this day in 1987, humanitarian and peace activist Terry Waite, special envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, was taken hostage in Lebanon.
January 19. On this day in 1920, in the face of egregious civil liberties abuses, a small group took a stand, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was born.
January 18. On this day in 2001, two members of the direct action group, Trident Ploughshares, were acquitted after being charged with harming the British HMS Vengeance which carried a quarter of Britain's nuclear arsenal.
January 17. On this day in 1893, U.S. profiteers, businessmen, and Marines overthrew the kingdom of Hawaii in Oahu, beginning a long string of violent and disastrous government overthrows around the world.
January 16. On this day in 1968, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin founded the Youth International Party (the Yippies), just one day before President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave his State of the Union Address asserting that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.
January 13. On this day in 1991, Soviet Special Forces attacked a Lithuanian television and radio tower, killing 14 and wounding over 500 as tanks drove through crowds of unarmed civilians guarding the tower in defense of Lithuanian broadcasting independence.
January 7. On this day in 1932, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson delivered the Stimson Doctrine.
January 5. On this day in 1968, Antonin Novotny, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, was succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, who believed socialism could be achieved.
January 4. On this day in 1948, the nation of Burma (also known as Myanmar) freed itself of British colonialism and became an independent republic.
Mark Dworkin is, together with Melissa Young, an award-winning documentary film director, and the director of an important new film called Plane Truths. You can find Mark and Melissa at movingimages.org and this movie at planetruths.org. Plane Truths looks at the increased activity at the U.S. Navy base on Whidbey Island in Washington state -- activity that is making life unbearable for locals and wildlife — collateral damage in the ever increasing militarization of society.
Peter Kuznick is Professor of History at American University, and author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists As Political Activists in 1930s America, co-author with Akira Kimura of Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives, co-author with Yuki Tanaka of Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power, and co-editor with James Gilbert of Rethinking Cold War Culture. In 1995, he founded American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute, which he directs. In 2003, Kuznick organized a group of scholars, writers, artists, clergy, and activists to protest the Smithsonian’s celebratory display of the Enola Gay. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States.
Aida Touma – Sliman is a Member of Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, and Chairwoman of the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality. She joins us from Israel but recently toured the United States. Her lengthy resume includes three years as editor in chief of Al-Ittihad, the only Arabic daily newspaper in Israel, and for the past 9 years she has served as secretary of the World Peace Council. Touma - Sliman will be speaking at the No U.S. / NATO Bases conference in Dublin in November.
Hawes Spencer is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, NPR, the Hook, and other publications. He has taught journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University and James Madison University. For over two decades, Hawes Spencer edited two weekly newspapers in Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which he co-founded: C-ville Weekly and The Hook. As the editor of the Hook, his staff delivered 149 awards from the Virginia Press Association during its nine-year run. His new book is called Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, Virginia. Hawes Spencer lives, as I do, here in Charlottesville, Virginia. We discuss his new book.
George Monbiot is an author, columnist for the Guardian newspaper and environmental campaigner. Among his books and projects are Feral: rewilding the land, sea, and human life; The Age of Consent; Heat: how to stop the planet burning and the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness. George’s latest book is Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis. We discuss this excellent book, and I ask George my usual question: How do you discuss U.S. budgets and public policies without ever mentioning military spending?
Ed Mead is former director of the Prison Art Project, former co-editor of Prison Focus and a former prisoner. He is the author of Lumpen: The Autobiography of Ed Mead. We discuss the prison strike in the United States and Canada.
Rajni Lallah is a leading member of LALIT (which means struggle), a political organization in Mauritius in the forefront for the past 42 years of the struggle to decolonize and demilitarize the Chagos Islands. Rajni Lallah was 12 years old when she joined the women's movement in Mauritius and remains active in Muvman Liberasyon Fam, a national women's organization in Mauritius. When she was 14, she went to the first solidarity all-night vigil in support of Chagossian women on hunger strike after they had been deported by the UK-USA military to Mauritius island and has been active on the Chagos front ever since. She is a musician, composer and music teacher by profession. At the time of Mauritian independence around 1968, the UK “depopulated” the Chagos archipelago, and then excised it from the rest of Mauritius to make way for a U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, one of the islands forming part of the Chagos archipelago. We discuss the case being heard in the International Court of Justice this week.
Shireen Al-Adeimi is originally from Yemen, and is an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. She co-authored a recent article at In These Times titled "Trump Quietly Overrides What Little Civilian Protections Remain in Yemen War." She comes back on Talk Nation Radio to discuss current efforts to end U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen.
Alan MacLeod (@alanRmacleod) is a writer for the media watch group FAIR. He completed his PhD at the Glasgow University Media Group. His first book was "Bad News from Venezuela: 20 years of fake news and misreporting" published in April. He is currently working on a book called "Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent" which updates Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model (and is scheduled for release in the winter). He recently wrote an article titled "The Utility of the Russiagate Conspiracy," for FAIR.
James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, and Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Colombus, as well as Teaching What Really Happened, The Mississippi Chinese, and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and many other awards. We discuss, among other things, the new edition of his book Sundown Towns.
David Gallup is President of the World Service Authority, a global public service human rights organization founded in 1954. Previously he was a Dean’s Fellow at the Washington College of Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, where he researched asylum and international human rights issues, developed and maintained a human rights document library, coordinated a human rights education workshop and represented asylum applicants. For fifteen years, he was the Secretary of the United Nations Association Task Forces on UN Restructuring and on Cultures of Peace. Gallup wrote several chapters in a United Nations Association Report entitled, “Restructuring the UN to Meet 21st Century Global Needs.” He is the legal columnist for World Citizen News.
Anna Feigenbaum is author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today, which we discuss. She is also co-author of the book Protest Camps, and her work has appeared in Vice, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, Salon, Financial Times, Open Democracy, New Internationalist, and Waging Nonviolence. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her website is www.annafeigenbaum.com. Follow her on Twitter: @drfigtree.
Yasha Levine is a Russian-born American investigative journalist. He is the author of Surveillance Valley, a book about the forgotten military history of the Internet. See https://yashalevine.com
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist focusing on women’s incarceration. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women which I highly recommend and co-author of Your Home Is Your Prison (coming out next year).
Since 2003, she has edited Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison. She recently published an article in In These Times magazine called "Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor. Some Say It’s Slavery." Her website is victorialaw.net
Francesco Duina is the author of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country.
William Geimer, author, peace activist, is a veteran of the U.S. 82d Airborne Division and Professor of Law Emeritus, Washington and Lee University. After resigning his commission in opposition to the war on Vietnam, he represented conscientious objectors and advised peace groups near Ft. Bragg NC. A Canadian citizen, he lives with his wife near Victoria, British Columbia where he is a member of the Vancouver Island Peace and Disarmament Network. He is the author of Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars and serves as advisor on policy issues of peace and war to Elizabeth May, Member of Parliament and Leader of the Green Party of Canada. Bill Geimer, welcome back to Talk Nation Radio.
A Debate: Is War Ever Justifiable?
Pete Kilner and David Swanson
Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and War Is Never Just. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He holds an MA in philosophy from UVA.
Two debates were held, one at Radford University on February 12, 2018, one at Eastern Mennonite University on February 13, 2018. Alternative Radio recorded the first debate. Last week we aired the first half of that first debate, this week the second half. With thanks to Alternative Radio.
Complete videos of both debates are here.
A Debate: Is War Ever Justifiable?
Pete Kilner and David Swanson
Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and War Is Never Just. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He holds an MA in philosophy from UVA.
Two debates were held, one at Radford University on February 12, 2018, one at Eastern Mennonite University on February 13, 2018. Alternative Radio recorded the first debate. This week we air the first half of that first debate, next week the second half. With thanks to Alternative Radio.
Complete videos of both debates are here.
Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is a co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School – now taught in twenty-four states across the country which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials – which assists groups to create new community campaigns which elevate the rights of those communities over rights claimed by corporations. Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community, the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability, co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States, was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film 11th Hour and We the People 2.0, assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable rights of ecosystems.
https://celdf.org
Jamil Simon is a documentary filmmaker who has worked in over 25 countries, developing communication strategies to promote social and environmental reform. He has promoted sustainable agriculture in Malawi, conflict resolution skills in Jordan, democracy in Mali, and water conservation in Tunisia. Most of this work has been done for USAID, DFID, and the World Bank. Simon was a conscientious objector during the war on Vietnam. Recently, he put together an event in New York City called War Stories Peace Stories. It took a deep look at the impact of the way the news media covers peace and conflict on public perceptions, and also how can it be done differently. Simon is currently producing a film about Peacebuilding in Burundi that will become part of a more ambitious film about peacebuilding in 4 countries– Burundi, Ireland, Sri Lanka and Colombia. See: https://www.newsdeeply.com https://www.warstoriespeacestories.org http://spectrummedia-boston.com
Greg Shupak is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, which can be purchased on the website of OR Books. He has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. His fiction has appeared in a wide range of literary journals and he regularly writes analysis of politics and media for a variety of outlets including Electronic Intifada, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, In These Times, Jacobin, Literary Review of Canada, Middle East Eye, TeleSUR, This Magazine, and Warscapes.
Gail Davidson is a legal activist working for a better world through advocacy and education to enhance understanding of and compliance with, international human rights and humanitarian law. She is the founder and Executive Director of Lawyers Rights Watch Canada a volunteer-run committee of lawyers and other human rights defenders in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN that promotes international human rights and the rule of law through advocacy, education and legal research. Gail was the co-founder of Lawyers against the War, an international committee of jurists and others formed to oppose war, advocate adherence to international humanitarian law and promote accountability for violators. As part of LAW advocacy, Gail brought torture charges against George W. Bush and pursued the right of a private person or group to prosecute torture suspects using universal jurisdiction, through appeal courts in Canada and the UN Committee against Torture.
Gail Davidson will be speaking at the conference on law and war that World BEYOND War is holding in Toronto in September, and we are very much looking forward to that, and people can sign up to attend at http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2018
This week on Talk Nation Radio we will be speaking with and listening to the music of Tom Neilson. He has received over two dozen awards, including two song of the year awards from Independent Musicians. In 2017, he received the Arab American Women Association Award for Education About Palestine Through Performance Art. In 2015 he was nominated for the United Nations Nelson Mandela Award for Lifetime Achievement in Peace and Justice. Tom and his partner Lynn Waldron will be performing this September in Toronto at the annual conference held by World BEYOND War: http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2018
Visit: http://tomneilsonmusic.com
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. In January 2003, Ray co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose how intelligence was being falsified to “justify” war on Iraq. His website is raymcgovern.com
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who worked in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War. And he recently published an article in the American Conservative called "Trump’s Rush to Judgment on Syria Chemical Attack."
Norman Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1988. He is the author of ten books that have been translated into 50 foreign editions, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering and, most recently, Gaza: An inquest into its martyrdom. His books include What Gandhi Says, About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage. His website is NormanFinkelstein.com. He will be speaking at World Beyond War's annual conference this September in Toronto, Canada.
The fact that 3,100 Google employees signed a letter opposing Google doing work for the U.S. military is wonderful for what it reveals.
Our guest, James Marc Leas, is a Vermont attorney and a past co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Free Palestine Subcommittee. He has been a leader of a campaign to block the stationing of F-35 jets in Burlington, Vermont, and of the formation of a Vermont chapter of World Beyond War. Jimmy Leas, welcome back to Talk Nation Radio.
Petition to cancel the F-35: https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12514
How to contact the Mayor of Burlington and politely ask him not to veto: Miro Weinberger, Mayor Room 34, City Hall / Burlington, VT 05401 Phone: 802-865-7272 mayor@burlingtonvt.gov
Mitchell Plitnick is former vice president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is the former director of the U.S. Office of B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and was previously the director of education and policy for Jewish Voice for Peace. He's published an article called "John Bolton: The Essential Profile." See:
https://lobelog.com/john-bolton-the-essential-profile
Shahid Buttar, who should be familiar to peace and justice activists, is now running for public office in an open California primary for the seat in Congress now occupied by Nancy Pelosi. Learn more: https://shahidforchange.us
Jeffrey Kaye is a retired psychologist and the author of Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri. He has written for Alternet, The Guardian, Shadowproof, and Al Jazeera America. He has just published an article titled: REVEALED: The long-suppressed official report on US biowarfare in North Korea.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and served as the Architecture Critic of The New Republic from 2005-2013. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The American Prospect, and Art In America, and she has contributed scholarly essays to many publications, including Assemblage, The Harvard Design Magazine, and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Goldhagen's new book is Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives.
David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker born in Canada, now reporting from Israel/Palestine. His work focuses primarily on racial tensions and religious extremism. In 2017, Sheen was named a Front Line Defenders Human Rights Defender, the only person in Israel to receive that honor in a decade. Learn more: http://www.davidsheen.com
Michael Knox is an Emeritus Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida, Chair of the US Peace Memorial Foundation, and Editor of the US Peace Registry. His antiwar activities began in 1965 in opposition to the war in Vietnam. As a delegate to the 20th National Student Congress, he introduced a successful resolution to hold an antiwar demonstration in August of 1967 in front of the White House. In 1970, Knox co-founded a draft counseling center and in 1971 he blew the whistle on classified D.O.D. weapons research at the University of Michigan. Since then he has continued to engage in antiwar actions. Dr. Knox founded the US Peace Memorial Foundation in 2005 to honor Americans who stand for peace. See USPeaceMemorial.org
Christine Ahn is Founder and International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, women mobilizing for peace in Korea. She is a writer and organizer working for peace, justice, and demilitarization of our world.
Nasim Chatha works at Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). As coordinator for the Prison Imperialism Project, she uncovers and analyzes the way the United States builds and manages prisons in other countries. Her writing has appeared in Mask Magazine, Truthout, The Abolitionist, and Upside Down Magazine. Here’s where to learn more about the issues she researches: https://afgj.org/prison-imperialism
Ken Hughes is an expert on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Hughes’s work has illuminated the uses and abuses of presidential power involved in (among other things) the origins of Watergate, Jimmy Hoffa’s release from federal prison, and the politics of the Vietnam War. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate and Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War and the Casualties of Reelection . Hughes is currently at work on a book about President John F. Kennedy’s hidden role in the coup plot that resulted in the overthrow and assassination of another president, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
Colman McCarthy is a former Washington Post columnist, from 1969 to 1997, and the director of The Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. He teaches courses on nonviolence at Georgetown Law, Georgetown undergraduate, American University, the University of Maryland and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. He’s a pacifist, a vegetarian, and the author of several books including I’d Rather Teach Peace.
Jackson Lears is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. Lears is the editor of the journal Raritan: A Quarterly Review. His books include: Something for Nothing: Luck in America and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. He recently wrote an article called "What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking" for the London Review of Books.
Jim Paul for 19 years was the exzecutive director of Global Policy Forum and was chair of the NGO working group on the UN Security Council. He is the author of the just-released book Of Foxes and Chickens: Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.
The book is available free in English or German: http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/of-foxes-and-chickens
Silvio Carrillo is an Oakland-based freelance multimedia journalist, director of the website BertaCaceres.org and nephew of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran activist who was assassinated there in March 2016 after being awarded the Goldman Prize for her environmental activism. Carrillo just wrote the New York Times op-ed "America’s Blind Eye to Honduras’s Tyrant."
He can be found at Twitter.com/JusticeforBerta or Facebook.com/justiceforberta
Help pass the Berta Caceres Act.
This week's show looks at the Christmas truces.
Resources here: http://davidswanson.org/christmastruce
Olympic truce here: https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=13181
January 12. On this day in 1970 Biafra, the breakaway region in southeastern Nigeria, surrendered to the Federal Army, thus ending the Nigerian Civil War.
January 9. On this day in 1918, the U.S. fought its last battle with Native Americans at the Battle of Bear Valley.
January 8. On this day, A.J. Muste (1885 - 1967), a Dutch-born American, began his life.
January 6. On this day in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a speech that introduced the term “Four Freedoms,” which he said included freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion; freedom from fear; and freedom from want.
January 3. On this day in 1967, Jack Ruby, the convicted killer of President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, died in a Texas prison.
January 2. On this day in 1905, the Conference of Industrial Unionists in Chicago formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as The Wobblies, an all-inclusive effort to form one big labor union with every worker in the world in it.
Thomas Buonomo is the Humanist Studies Coordinator with the American Humanist Association. His areas of concern revolve around the influence of religion in politics, U.S.-Middle East relations, conflict prevention and resolution, energy and climate security, and human rights. His writing on these subjects has been published by the Atlantic Council, The National Interest, Securing America's Future Energy, Forbes, The Cipher Brief, Oil&Gas Investor, Renewable Energy World, The Hill, CQ Roll Call, The National (UAE), Daily Star (Lebanon), Secular Coalition for America, The Humanist, and other outlets.
His articles in The Humanist are here: https://thehumanist.com/contributor/thomas-buonomo
Jonathan R. Latham, PhD is co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Editor of Independent Science News. Dr. Latham holds a Masters degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in Virology. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Genetics, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published scientific papers in disciplines as diverse as plant ecology, plant virology, genetics and genetic engineering. Dr. Latham is also the Director of the Poison Papers project which publicizes documents of the chemical industry and its regulators.
His latest article is "Gates Foundation Hired PR Firm to Manipulate UN Over Gene Drives."
See also: https://bioscienceresource.org http://poisonpapers.org http://independentsciencenews.org http://www.etcgroup.org http://www.etcgroup.org/content/gene-drive-files http://www.gmwatch.org/en/
Shireen Al-Adeimi is a former middle school teacher and is currently finishing her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was born in Yemen and has lived in the United States for 10 years. She recently wrote an article published by Common Dreams titled "Only Americans Can Stop America’s War on Yemen."
Shireen Al-Adeimi on Twitter.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer whose work primarily focuses on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, media criticism, and movements for economic and social justice. He lives in New York City. One of his recent articles at Alternet is called "How Trump's CIA Used Bin Laden Files and a Neocon Think Tank to Escalate Tensions With Iran."
Chip Gibbons is policy and legislative counsel for Defending Rights & Dissent, as well as a journalist. His work has been featured in the Nation and Jacobin. He has contributed to the Henry Kissinger Files, forthcoming from Verso Books. His recent article in the Nation is called "The Prosecution of Inauguration-Day Protesters Is a Threat to Dissent."
Follow him on twitter @ChipGibbons89
Here's his website: https://chipgibbons.org
The late Eduardo Galeano’s forthcoming book, Hunter of Stories, has five or ten sentences on each page — each page a tiny story, their combination engaging and powerful. Galeano includes the story of a war resister who chose to die rather than kill, and that of an Iraqi who foretold and pre-grieved the 2003 looting of the National Museum, also the story of former drone pilot Brandon Bryant who quit after killing a child and being lied to that the child had been a dog, not to mention the story of the World War I Christmas truces. These are all true stories, some new and some familiar, all well documented elsewhere, but Galeano doesn’t bother with the documentation here. He simply tells the stories — extremely simply, he tells the stories. He inspires me to offer the following, and to search for more. If you have ideas for the very best incidents to recount that fit into the following pattern, please let me know. The stories here are meant, not to depict every aspect of war or peace, much less to cover the entire history of war and peace. There’s no need to send me the full list of thousands and millions of stories not included here. The stories below are meant to encourage questioning of war-thinking. Send me the best anecdotes that further that project please. http://worldbeyondwar.org/warstories
This week on Talk Nation Radio: Climate chaos and militarism. We're joined by Nick Buxton, who is the co-editor of an important book called The Secure and the Dispossessed - How the military and corporations are seeking to shape a climate-changed world. Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working as a publications editor and supporting online learning and support of activist scholar communities for Transnational Institute. He works actively on issues of climate change, militarism and economic justice. He has been based in California since 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: U.S. and North Korean relations. We're joined by Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute. Granoff is an international lawyer and former professor of international law, and serves as a Senior Advisor and Special Representative to the United Nations for the Permanent Secretariat of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. He is the Chair of the Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association, and Ambassador for Peace and Security of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He serves on numerous advisory and governing boards such as the NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security at the UN, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, Middle Powers Initiative, Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, and the Jane Goodall Institute. He is a Fellow in the World Academy of Arts and Science and recipient of numerous awards such as the Arthur E. Armitage, Sr. Distinguished Alumni Award of Rutgers University School of Law.
This week on Talk Nation Radio: How the "Fake News" Scare Is Marginalizing the Left. That's the title of an article in In These Times by our guest, Julianne Tveten. She writes about the technology industry's relationship with socioeconomics and culture. In addition to In These Times, Julianne Tveten's work has appeared in The Baffler, Current Affairs, The Outline, Rewire News, Truthout, and elsewhere, and she is the irregular tech correspondent on This Is Hell! Radio.
See: http://inthesetimes.com/article/20596/fake-news-left-facebook-twitter-tech-companies
This week on Talk Nation Radio, a new book called King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spy Master in Korea by Blaine Harden.
Blaine Harden served as The Washington Post's bureau chief in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. He also worked as national correspondent for the New York Times and has contributed to The Economist, PBS Frontline, Time, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot; Escape From Camp 14, an international bestseller that has been published in 28 languages; A River Lost; and Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, which won a Pen American Center citation for a first book of non-fiction.
This week on Talk Nation Radio we discuss the United States provision of weapons to dictatorships. We're joined by Rich Whitney, who is an attorney from Carbondale, Illinois, now working as an appellate public defender. He is one of the founding members of the Illinois Green Party, currently serves on its Executive Committee, and in 2006 served as that party's first-ever candidate for governor, winning over 360,000 votes, about 10.5 percent of the total. He is currently serving as interim co-chair of the Green Party Peace Action Committee. He is also a commentator, satirist and disc jockey at community radio for Southern Illinois, WDBX, 91.1 FM and occasional actor with The Stage Company in Carbondale. But we've invited Rich on because he's published an article at truthout.org titled "US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World's Dictatorships."
This week on Talk Nation Radio: two authors of an excellent new book called Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that affect us today by Cynthia Levinson and Sanford Levinson. Cynthia Levinson is a former teacher and educational policy consultant and researcher and the author of several books for young readers. Sanford is a professor in the law school and the dept of govt at the University of Texas and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
See: https://faultlinesintheconstitution.com
Daniel Kovalik is author of the recently-released book The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia. He teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He has worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against The Coca-Cola Company and Occidental Petroleum – cases arising out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, recently described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.” Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia.
Trita Parsi is an award winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. His latest book - Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy - reveals the behind the scenes story to the historic nuclear deal with Iran.
Scott Shapiro and Oona Hathaway have just published The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.
Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, where he is the Director of the Center for Law and Philosophy. He is also the Visiting Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London. He earned his BA and PhD degrees in philosophy from Columbia University and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was senior editor of The Yale Law Journal. He is the author of Legality and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Oona A. Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and the Director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges. She has published essays and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy. She served as the Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense in 2014-2015, for which she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State and an active member of the US Supreme Court bar. She earned her BA from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Law Journal. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
David Swanson's review of The Internationalists is here: http://davidswanson.org/how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928
Heidi Tilney Kramer is a mom and independent scholar focusing on Critical Children's Studies and U.S. Media. A former elementary school teacher, she teaches Childhood in America at Eckerd College in Florida and lectures widely. Her new book is Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children's Culture.
Alice and Lincoln Day have produced an amazing film about the impact of war on the natural environment, which fits perfectly with World Beyond War's upcoming conference on that theme. Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives was produced between 2006 and 2007 in Australia, California, Vermont, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia. The feature-length version premiered at the 2008 DC Environmental Film Festival. Since then, the film has been screened in film festivals throughout the U.S. and some countries overseas, winning 15 awards along the way. A shorter 56-minute version of the film was created that aired nationally on Public Television in 2011 and 2012, and will be screened at the No War 2017 conference in September in Washington DC -- see WorldBeyondWar.org. The film's website is ScarredLandsFilm.com.
Ed Kinane is based in Syracuse, New York, and has been a big part of efforts to oppose drone piloting at Hancock Air Base for the past 10 years. His amazing array of work over the past decades has included teaching math and biology in a one-room Quaker school in rural Kenya, hitchiking Africa and North America, providing protective accompaniment to targeted activists in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, serving as chair of Peace Brigades International’s Sri Lanka Project and a member of PBI’s national coordinating committee and a member of School of the Americas Watch national board, twice serving time in federal prisons. Ed Kinane spent Shock and Awe in Baghdad with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has worked with Witness Against Torture. He's been on delegations to Afghanistan, Iran, and Palestine. He's spoken around the U.S., and spent a week at Standing Rock. But his focus now is on the Upstate Drone Action at Hancock. See http://www.upstatedroneaction.org
James Loewen's books include Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Earlier this year, he spoke at a symposium in Richmond on Confederate monuments and memorials, available on C-SPAN. And a couple of years ago he wrote an article in the Washington Post called "Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong." His website is http://sundown.tougaloo.edu We discuss confederate statues.
Patricia Axelrod is a military scientist for peace and the Director of The Desert Storm Think Tank and ALL Veterans' Advocate - a project dedicated to analyzing and reducing the impacts and consequences of war to civilians and soldiers alike. She is a past recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research and Writing Award for her analysis of the modern electronic battlefield as well as a Project Censored Award. She has testified before Presidential Advisory Committees on issues of Persian Gulf Illness and other veteran health issues and her work has been incorporated into Congressional Research projects as well GAO efforts. Temporarily residing in Illinois Axelrod has conducted in-theater bomb damage assessment post Desert Storm throughout Iraq (wherein she was held captive by the Hussein gov't) as well as from Budapest to Kosovo following American warfare against Kosovo. Her work on behalf of veterans serves to obtain medical treatment for individual sick and dying veterans otherwise deprived of care by the VA. Her long-term experience battling with the VA leads her to believe that the VA healthcare system is corrupt and broken beyond repair and therefore should be abolished and replaced with medicare and/or another civilian healthcare system.
During each of 20 trips to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe that “where you stand determines what you see.” In June, 2016, Kathy participated in a delegation that visited five cities in Russia, aiming to learn about Russian opinions regarding NATO exercises taking place along their border. Kelly has joined with activists in various regions of the U.S. to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of U.S. military bases in Nevada, California, Michigan, Wisconsin and Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri. In 2015, for carrying a loaf of bread and a letter across the line at Whiteman AFB she served three months in prison. From 1996 – 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kelly traveled to Iraq 27 times, during that period. She and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing. They have also lived alongside people during warfare in Gaza, Lebanon, Bosnia and Nicaragua. She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) at Whiteman Air Force Base and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.
Kathy Kelly will be speaking this week at the Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, inlcuding the Peace and Democracy Conference organized by World Beyond War, and will be speaking in September at the No War 2017: War and the Environment conference in Washington, D.C. See WorldBeyondWar dot org. For more from Kathy see http://vcnv.org
Joshua Holland is a fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and a contributor to The Nation who focuses on the intersection of money in politics and inequality. He is also the host of Politics and Reality Radio. Before joining The Investigative Fund, he wrote for Moyers & Company and was a senior writer and editor at Alternet. He also authored The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). We discuss this video.
Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation, where she co-writes “The Score,” a monthly column on economics, and a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times. One of her recent columns is called "Women Won’t Have Equality Until Dads Stay Home."
Barbara Wien teaches gender, global security and peace education at American University. Since 1981, she has worked to strengthen grassroots civil society networks for peace and democracy in 58 countries. She has led eight national nonprofit organizations, taught at six universities, and helped spark the development of 200 university Peace Studies programs. She is the author-editor of 23 publications in gender, economics, and nonviolence. She has protected civilians from the death squads using nonviolent strategies for Peace Brigades International. She was recognized for her leadership and "moral courage" for denouncing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a U.S.government official. We discuss the march from the NRA, resistance trainings for federal employees, and the state of peace studies in U.S. academia.
Nick Mottern has worked as a reporter, researcher, writer and political organizer over the last 30 years. He is the author of Suffering Strong, recounting experiences of his first trip to Africa. He manages www.KnowDrones.com a website devoted to education and organizing to stop drone warfare and surveillance. He was director of the 2012 national Know Drones Tour and was an organizer of the 2013 April Days of Action and 2014 Spring Days of Action, and he publishes “The Drone Organizers Bulletin.” He is also an organizer of the Boycott and Divest Honeywell campaign, begun in 2014 because of the firm’s involvement in drone war. http://www.badhoneywell.org/ His articles have appeared in Truthout since 2008.
Rob Kall is host of the Bottom up Radio show, which explores our culture's transition from top down to bottom up, and founder publisher of OpEdnews.com, a left of liberal progressive news and opinion site publishing 500-1000 articles a month. He was honored, as publisher of OpEdNews, by the American whistleblower community, with the Pillar Award, for supporting whistleblowers. He pioneered positive psychology in the mid 1980s, organizing the world's first conference on it, founded and organized Storycon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and application of story, bringing together, for the first time, experts from all the worlds of story, and founded and organized the Winter Brain Meeting, weaving together neurofeedback, consciousness, heart and spirit. "I've come to see myself as working towards empowering and awakening people, first through biofeedback and self regulation training, and more recently, as a progressive publisher, writer of over 2000 articles and host of a radio show exploring a return to our bottom up roots, with the vision that bottom up values offer humanity a kinder, more sustainable future.
Ajamu Baraka is National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. He is a human rights defender whose experience spans four decades of domestic and international education and activism. He has provided human rights trainings for grassroots activists across the country, briefings on human rights to the U.S. Congress, and appeared before and provided statements to various United Nations agencies. Baraka was the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network. He held various leadership positions at Amnesty International USA including directing Amnesty’s National Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. He has served on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Africa Action, and the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights. Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch. He ran for vice president on the Green Party ticket. And he and I both spoke at a recent conference of the United National Antiwar Coalition.
https://blackallianceforpeace.com
Ray McGovern has been studying/analyzing Russia for more than five decades, both in academe and government. A senior analyst at the CIA during the 80s, he also conducted early morning briefings, one-on-one, of the President's Daily Brief for President Reagan's most senior foreign policy advisers. McGovern's work is supported by the ecumenical Church of the Saviour, which strongly believes that church/synagogue/mosque leaders must find ways to find their voice and speak out.
See: http://raymcgovern.com
Lisa Ling is one of the U.S. drone whistleblowers profiled in the terrific movie National Bird. Ling is a former technical sergeant on drone surveillance systems, grew up in California and initially joined the military as an army medic and nurse. When it became apparent that she was adept with computers, she transferred to a combat communications squadron, which later became a so-called intelligence squadron. Her final deployment as a technical sergeant was to Beale Air Force Base, California, where she worked on the Distributed Ground System (DGS), a weapons system that makes use of drones to collect vast amounts of data to find and kill targets. Like other whistleblowers featured in the film, Ling had a top-secret clearance.
See: http://nationalbirdfilm.com
Suzie Dawson is an accomplished independent New Zealand journalist and activist. She specialises in writing about whistleblowers, intelligence agencies, and technology. She currently resides in Moscow, Russia, where she has applied for temporary asylum due to severe persecution she reports being subjected to by those whose corruption she worked to expose. We discuss the state of activism and media and civil liberties in New Zealand, as well as the view of the United States from Moscow.
Dawson's website is: suzi3d.com
Dawson and Ksenia Terenteva have begun producing a video series called Kiwi in Moscow.
Charlotte Dennett is an attorney, author, and investigative journalist. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, she became a roving correspondent for The Middle East Sketch in 1973 and a reporter for the Beirut Daily Star. Escaping Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, she returned to New York where she met her future husband, author Gerard Colby. They spent the next 18 years researching and writing Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. She has written for The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, and the Vermont Law Journal. In 2010, she authored The People v Bush based on her campaign for Vermont Attorney General with legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. We discuss her father's role in the U.S. pursuit of Middle Eastern oil just after World War II.
Read: The New York Times: A Dead Spy, a Daughter's Questions, and the CIA.
The Village Voice: CIA Paranoia and the Lady from Vermont.
Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. Professor Boyle has served as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority. He has represented the Blackfoot Nation, the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. And he has been a strong advocate over the years for the proper use of the power of impeachment.
John Lindsay-Poland is a writer, activist, researcher and analyst focused on human rights and demilitarization, especially in the Americas. From 1989 to 2014 he worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation as coordinator of the Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean, as research director, and founder of FOR’s Colombia peace team. From 2003 to 2014, he edited a monthly newsletter focused on Colombia and U.S. policy, Latin America Update. Previously he served with Peace Brigades International (PBI) in Guatemala and El Salvador, and co-founded PBI's Colombia Project in 1994. He now works for the American Friends Service Committee. His work focuses mostly on stopping arms sales to Mexico, including a massive gun deal between Sig Sauer and the Mexican military; and on police demilitarization in California.
You can check out afsc.org/stoparms and johnlindsaypoland.com.
Watch this film: https://vimeo.com/214922986
Hyun Lee is a New York City-based writer and activist. She is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. She is also a Korea Policy Institute fellow and a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. Find her work also at ZoomInKorea.org.
John Washington is a writer and translator based in Arizona. His most recent translation, A History of Violence, about Central American politics, was published by Verso Books in 2016. He writes regularly for The Nation and In These Times. We discuss his recent articles on U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Nation's appeal for a whistleblower.
Read Washington's articles: https://www.thenation.com/authors/john-washington
Submit information anonymously: http://www.thenation.com/tips
Find John Washington on Twitter at @jbwashing
Deirdre Enright is director of investigation for the University of Virginia Law School's Innocence Project Clinic. Enright previously worked at the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center, where she represented clients and consulted on cases in all stages of capital litigation, with primary focus on federal and state post-conviction proceedings and Supreme Court certiorari review. After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1992, Enright worked as a staff attorney at the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Center. We discuss the work of freeing innocent people from prison.
See: http://www.innocenceprojectuva.org
Dale Brumfield is an Adjunct English Professor and the author of seven books. His last two, Richmond Independent Press (2013) and Independent Press in D.C and Virginia: An Underground History (2015) were both nominated for Library of Virginia Literary Awards in nonfiction. Dale is a weekly history columnist for the Staunton News Leader, and is a frequent contributor to Richmond Magazine, Style Weekly and North of the James magazines. His work has also appeared in the Richmond Free Press, Richmond Times-Dispatch and USA Today. His next book, a history of the Virginia Penitentiary, will be published fall, 2017. We discuss the history of state murder in Virginia.
See http://dalebrumfield.net
Dennis Kucinich is an internationally renowned champion of diplomacy and peace. His distinguished career in public service dates back to 1969 and spans councilman, clerk of courts, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio State Senator, 8 term Member of US Congress and 2-time Democratic candidate for President of the United States. We discuss U.S. warmaking in Syria. See http://kucinich.com http://facebook.com/denniskucinich
Vijay Prashad is Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford CT. He is the author of over twenty books, most recently The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution. He reports regularly for Frontline and The Hindu (India), BirGün (Turkey) and Alternet (United States). He is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). We discuss his recent articles on George W. Bush, Trump, Syria, Iraq, and attacks on U.S. immigrants.
Jay James is the assistant director of Bridge Ministry. We discuss an alternative to incarceration.
See http://www.bridgeministry.info
William Geimer, author, peace activist, is a veteran of the U.S. 82d Airborne Division and Professor of Law Emeritus, Washington and Lee University. After resigning his commission in opposition to the war on Vietnam, he represented conscientious objectors and advised peace groups near Ft. Bragg NC, once representing Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory and Donald Sutherland in negotiations with police. A Canadian citizen, he lives with his wife near Victoria, British Columbia where he is a member of the Vancouver Island Peace and Disarmament Network. He is the author of Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars and serves as advisor on policy issues of peace and war to Elizabeth May, Member of Parliament and Leader of the Green Party of Canada.
Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of American history at Yeshiva University and a leading authority on McCarthyism. Her books include Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism in the Universities. We discuss the history of McCarthyism and its current manifestations.
See: https://www.ellenschrecker.com
Tressie McMillan Cottom is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. We discuss her book.
See: http://thenewpress.com/books/lower-ed
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor of Dissent, a magazine of politics and culture which has been published since 1954. His main interest is the history of politics and social movements in the United States. Kazin writes frequently for such publications and websites as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs , The Nation, and The Daily Beast.
His most recent book is War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. We discuss World War I, World War II, and peace activism.
Kazin will be speaking on April 4, 2017, at this event:
Remembering Past Wars . . . and Preventing the Next
An event to mark 100 years since the United States entered World War I, and 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous speech against war. A new movement to end all war is growing.
April 4, 2017, 6-8 p.m. Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Streets NW, Washington, D.C.
Speakers: Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918.
Eugene Puryear, journalist, activist, radio host, and author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America.
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK, author of books including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.
David Swanson, director of World Beyond War, author of books including War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War.
Maria Santelli, executive director of Center on Conscience and War, founding director of the New Mexico GI Rights Hotline.
Jarrod Grammel, conscientious objector.
Nolan Fontaine, conscientious objector.
Sponsored by World Beyond War, and Center on Conscience and War, with thanks to Busboys and Poets.
L.A. Kauffman is the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. She has spent more than 30 years immersed in radical movements, as a journalist, historian, organizer, and strategist. Her writings on grassroots activism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, the Village Voice, and many other outlets. She served as executive editor for the radical theory journal Socialist Review and as an award-winning national political columnist for SF Weekly, focusing on dissent and activism. Kauffman was the mobilizing coordinator for the massive February 15, 2003 antiwar protest in New York City. She continued in this role through the years of major antiwar protests, including those that greeted the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Rick Sterling is an independent investigative journalist who just wrote the article "Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War" for ConsortiumNews.com.
Find Sterling's article here: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/11/amnesty-international-stokes-syrian-war
Find the Amnesty International report here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/human_slaughterhouse.pdf
John Burroughs is Executive Director, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (www.lcnp.org), based in New York City. He represents LCNP in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review proceedings, the United Nations, and other international forums. He was a member of the Marshall Islands international legal team in its nuclear disarmament cases in the International Court of Justice. He's the author of numerous publications related to nuclear weapons including contributing to a report called The Climate-Nuclear Nexus, which we discuss.
Burrough's publications include: contributor, Unspeakable suffering - the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons (2013) (available here); contributor, Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization Around the World (2012) (available here); author, The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice (1998). He has also published articles and op-eds in journals and newspapers including Fordham International Law Journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, the World Policy Journal, and Newsday. He has taught international law as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, Newark.
Jeff Fogel is a candidate for Commonwealth's Attorney here in Charlottesville, Virginia. After graduating from Rutgers School of Law in 1969, Jeff received a fellowship to work providing legal services to indigent residents in Newark, New Jersey. After several years, he left that position to become a highly touted criminal defense lawyer. Recognizing that he was limited in impact by representing one criminal defendant at a time, Jeff moved into a civil rights practice with the hope of having an impact on the criminal justice system while preserving the constitutional rights of everyone. Jeff has practiced in NJ, NY, PR and, for the last 10 years, Virginia. He has been the executive and legal director of the ACLU of New Jersey and the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights while teaching civil rights, civil liberties and trial practice at Rutgers and NYU School of Law. See http://fogelforcca.us
Ntebo Mokuena is a senior at American University and is majoring in Political Science with a gender, race, and politics concentration along with a minor in Art History and a certificate in Women, Policy, and Political Leadership. She was born and raised in the DC area and on campus is involved with Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a decentralized student group that supports the BDS movement and self determination of Palestinians. The group is part of the Community Action and Social Justice coalition.
Useful links with regards to Israel-U.S. police exchange programs:
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/01/enforcement-training-terrorism
https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/middle-east/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
https://electronicintifada.net/content/police-training-programs-twin-us-israeli-racism/9834
https://www.kravmaga.com/programs/law-enforcement-military/force-training-division-law-enforcement
As co-founder and executive director of Yes! Magazine, Sarah van Gelder leads the framing and development of each issue of Yes! and writes a column introducing each issue. Sarah blogs at Yes! and Huffington Post, writes articles and does interviews for Yes! Magazine, and speaks on leading-edge innovations that show that another world is not only possible, it is being created. Her new book is called The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From a 12,000-Mile Journey Through a New America.
Antonia Juhasz is an energy analyst, author, and investigative reporter. She recently wrote a profile of Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for In These Times magazine. We discuss Tillerson and the oil spill he floated in on. See also: http://www.antoniajuhasz.net
This week on Talk Nation Radio: millions of Americans lose their everloving minds over unproven accusations against Russia, the ACLU and CAIR publish claim that war on Iraq has been to protect the U.S. Bill of Rights, and a torture report gets buried.
Dave Webb is a member of the World Beyond War Coordinating Committee and chair of the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and well as Vice President of the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and the Convenor of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space: http://space4peace.org
Webb is an Emeritus Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Leeds Beckett University (previously Leeds Metropolitan University). Webb has been involved in the campaign to scrap the UK Trident nuclear weapons system and has also focused on campaigning to close two U.S. bases in Yorkshire (where he lives) – Fylingdales (a missile defence radar base) and Menwith Hill (the huge NSA spy base).
We discuss the upcoming 25th Annual Global Network Conference & Protest: "Pivot Toward War: US Missile Defense & the Weaponization of Space" to be held on April 7-9, 2017, in Huntsville, Alabama: http://space4peace.org
Richard Cahan is a journalist who writes about photography, art and history. He worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1983 to 1999, primarily serving as the paper’s picture editor. He left to found and direct CITY 2000, a project that documented Chicago in the year 2000. Since then, he has authored and co-authored more than a dozen books, including Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows and Richard Nickel’s Chicago. He also works as a curator, creating photo and exhibitions at Chicago museums.
We discuss the new photo book co-authored by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II.
Vincent Emanuele joined the United States Marine Corps as a squad automatic machine gunner in 2002. After two combat-deployments in Iraq, he refused orders for a third and immediately began organizing with Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War.
In 2008, Vince testified to Congress at the Winter Soldier Hearings on Capitol Hill, where he provided detailed accounts of war crimes, atrocities, drug abuse and sexual assault within the military.
See https://www.facebook.com/vincentjr.emanuele
Emanuele is just back from Standing Rock and discusses environmental and antiwar strategy. This show contains the second half of a discussion begun last week.
Robert Alvarez is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Strategic International Studies. He is considered one of the nation’s preeminent experts on civilian and military nuclear programs.
Between 1993 and 1999, Mr. Alvarez served as Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.
Between 1988 and 1993, Mr. Alvarez served on the Majority Staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator John Glenn (D-OH).
His work has appeared in Ambio, Science and Global Security, Science, the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, Issues in Science and Technology (the magazine of the National Academy of Sciences), the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Technology Review, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post and other publications. Mr. Alvarez won the John Barlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism and has been featured on CBS “60 minutes,” the PBS NOVA show, NPR’s All Things Considered, the New York Times, and several documentary films.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. See https://www.craigmurray.org.uk
Murray explains that he has met the leaker of either the DNC or Podesta emails and that both sets of emails were leaked by one or more people at either the NSA or the Democratic Party, that Russia played no role at all.
Vincent Emanuele (pictured at right) joined the United States Marine Corps as a squad automatic machine gunner in 2002. After two combat-deployments in Iraq, he refused orders for a third and immediately began organizing with Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War. In 2008, Vince testified to Congress at the Winter Soldier Hearings on Capitol Hill, where he provided detailed accounts of war crimes, atrocities, drug abuse and sexual assault within the military. See https://www.facebook.com/vincentjr.emanuele
Emanuele is just back from Standing Rock and discusses environmental and antiwar strategy. This show contains half our discussion. The second half will appear next week.
Chip Gibbons is the Policy and Legislative Counsel for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. He is also a writer whose work has been featured in Jacobin, Truthout, and Counterpunch. We discuss U.S. Congressional efforts to censor criticism of the Israeli government, and to create a new McCarthyite Anti-Russia Committee.
George Lakey recently retired from Swarthmore College where he was Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change and managed the Global Nonviolent Action Database research project. His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in. He has served as an unarmed bodyguard for human rights defenders in Sri Lanka. Lakey has led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents, and founded and for fifteen years directed Training for Change. In 2010 he was named “Peace Educator of the Year” and published his authoritative text on adult education, Facilitating Group Learning. We discuss his ninth book, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got it Right -- and How We Can Too.
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter, whose news-breaking stories appear on BBC Television and in The Guardian and Rolling Stone Magazine. Palast has released a new movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, based on his books. Palast says that the recent U.S. election was in fact rigged. We discuss how.
See http://GregPalast.com
Jonathan Simon is author of CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century. He serves as Executive Director of Election Defense Alliance (www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org), a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to restore observable vote counting and electoral integrity as the basis of American democracy. In addition to CODE RED, Dr. Simon has published, both individually and in collaboration, numerous papers related to various aspects of election forensics and election integrity. We discuss the counting of votes in last week's U.S. elections.
The CODE RED website is www.CODERED2016.com.
AUDIO: I discussed elections and other catastrophes with Paulette Spencer on WBAI last night.
Sonia Kennebeck is director and producwer of National Bird, an amazing new documentary about drones. Kennebeck is an independent documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist with more than 15 years of directing and producing experience. She has directed eight television documentaries and more than 50 investigative reports. She lives in New York where she runs her own production company (Ten Forward Films) that makes films about international politics and human rights. Filmmaker Magazine recently selected her as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2016.” Sonia Kennebeck received a Master’s degree in International Affairs from American University in Washington, D.C. and was born in Malacca, Malaysia. National Bird is her first feature-length documentary film.
Learn more: http://nationalbirdfilm.com
James Marc Leas is a founding member of the Stop the F-35 Coalition in Burlington Vermont. He has published some two dozen articles on the F-35 and F-35 basing. To highlight the F-35 issue statewide, he ran for the office of Vermont Adjutant General, the leader of the Vermont National Guard, in 2013, which is elected by the legislature.
Before becoming a patent attorney James was an engineer at IBM, and he holds over 40 patents for his inventions. While an IBM employee he led a vigorous campaign among employees to end IBM sales to South Africa. He also served as a staff physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists in its Washington, DC office for a year in the aftermath of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. He is a graduate of MIT and completed all but the dissertation toward a PhD in physics from the University of Massachusetts. He is a member of the Vermont Bar Association, the American Bar Association, and the National Lawyers Guild.
Sign the petition to cancel the F-35: https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12514
Learn more: http://stopthef35.com
Timeka Drew is National Director of the Liberty Tree Foundation, a position she has served in since February of 2016. Previously she served as Liberty Tree's Communications Director and worked as lead organizer of the Global Climate Convergence. Timeka came to the Liberty Tree community via her work with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) and local democracy, food sovereignty, and anti-racist organizing in Los Angeles and her hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
For more information, see http://libertytreefoundation.org and http://NoMoreStolenElections.org
Emily Johnston and Annette Klapstein face felony charges for having shut down fossil fuel pipelines.
Johnston says:
To be honest, I’d love to be able to lead a quiet life right now—building things, reading and writing all day, taking long walks with my dog, having time for dinners and vacations with my loved ones.
But to live like that at this moment in time would be to shrug off responsibility for the very world I was busy loving; we’re in a crisis of unimaginable proportions, and the fact that we here in the US can (between terrible storms and terrible droughts) live normal daily lives, doesn’t mean that we aren’t.
I’ve said enough about why I’m doing this: it needs to be done. I feel incredibly privileged to be alive in this moment, when so much is still so beautiful, and there’s still a chance to save it. But for years (decades, for some people) we’ve tried the legal, incremental, reasonable methods, and they haven’t been anything like enough; without a radical shift in our relationship to this Earth, all that we love will disappear. My fear of that possibility is far greater than my fear of jail. My love for the beauties of this world is far greater than my love of an easy life.
If others feel the same way, there’s hope for us yet.
Klapstein says:
My name is Annette Klapstein. I am a retired attorney and the mother of 2 grown children. Three words embody my decision to take action: love, solidarity and responsibility.
It is my job as an older person to step up and put my body on the line to protect my children and all children. Being retired and freed from those obligations, there is nothing more important than insuring a habitable planet for all our children. Our political system has failed to respond to the grave threat of climate change - this is my taking responsibility.
There was a call for International Days of Prayer and Action with Standing Rock Sioux Tribe this week - this is my prayer and this is my action. My life is only marginally affected by climate change right now, but there are mothers and children around the world in frontline communities - mostly low-income communities of color - who are being drastically affected right now. This is my act of solidarity.
Like mothers everywhere, I act from a deep love for my own children that extends out to all children and young people, and all living beings on this planet. I have signed hundreds of petitions, testified at dozens of hearings, met with most of my political representatives at every level, to very little avail. I have come to believe that our current economic and political system is a death sentence to life on earth, and that I must do everything in my power to replace these systems with cooperative, just, equitable and love-centered ways of living together. This is my act of love.
For more information, see http://www.shutitdown.today
Ann Wright is a retired U.S. State Department official and army colonel who resigned in 2003 in protest of the war on Iraq. She's just returned from another attempt to reach Gaza by sea.
For more information, see http://WomensBoatToGaza.us
Samantha Nutt is an award-winning humanitarian, bestselling author and acclaimed public speaker. A medical doctor and a founder of the renowned international humanitarian organization War Child, Dr. Nutt has worked with children and their families at the frontline of many of the world’s major crises – from Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone to Darfur, Sudan.
Dr. Nutt is a respected authority for many of North America's leading media outlets. In November 2015, Dr. Nutt spoke at TED Talks Live “War & Peace” at The Town Hall Theater in New York, which aired on PBS on May 30, 2016. Dr. Nutt’s TED Talk can be viewed on TED.com:
http://www.ted.com/talks/samantha_nutt_the_real_harm_of_the_global_arms_trade
Dr. Nutt’s critically-acclaimed debut book, entitled Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid, was released by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. (a division of Random House) in October 2011 and was a #1 national bestseller in both hardcover and paperback.
For more information, see www.warchildusa.org or www.samanthanutt.com
Benjamin Madley is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also chair of American Indian Studies. He discusses his new book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe.
Reese Erlich is a foreign correspondent and book author. The paperback edition of Erlich's book Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect, has just been published this week. See https://reeseerlich.com
Coleen Rowley is an FBI whistleblower, peace activist, retired FBI agent, former legal counsel who taught law enforcement ethics, and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. See http://coleenrowley.com
Coleen Rowley will be participating in No War 2016. See http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer, who in 2007 became the first U.S. Government official to publicly confirm and describe CIA use of waterboarding on al-Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture. In January 2013, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison and was released after serving more than 23 months. Since then, he has become a tireless writer and speaker on whistleblowing, torture, and civil liberties. Kiriakou is the sole U.S. Government official to have been jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture – a victim of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on government truth-tellers. When President Obama openly acknowledged at a White House press conference on August 1, 2014, “We tortured some folks,” John was in prison for having said essentially the same thing seven years earlier.
Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), and of Sam Adams Associates. She writes for Consortium News.
Murray and Kiriakou will be speaking at No War 2016. See http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016
Christopher Simpson is a professor of Journalism known internationally for his expertise in propaganda, democracy, and media theory and practice. He has won national awards for investigative reporting, historical writing, and literature. His books include Blowback, The Splendid Blond Beast, Science of Coercion, National Security Directives of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, Universities and Empire, Comfort Women Speak and War Crimes of the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. Simpson’s work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His current teaching and research includes macro-social dynamics of communication technologies, impact of geographic information systems on democratic decision-making and some aspects of communication law.
Kathy Kelly has recently returned from Russia. She has made 20 trips to Afghanistan as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APVs). She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence continually learn from the APVs perspective and actions. She has protested drone warfare by joining nonviolent civil resistance actions at U.S. military bases in Nevada, New York, Wisconsin, and Missouri. In 2015, for carrying a loaf of bread and a letter across the line at Missouri’s Whiteman AFB, Kelly served three months in federal prison. In 1988 she had been sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites at Whiteman. She also spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.
Simpson and Kelly will be speaking at No War 2016. See http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016
Maurice Carney is co-founder and executive director of Friends of the Congo. He has worked with Congolese for two decades in their struggle for peace, justice, and human dignity. Carney served as the interim Africa Working Group coordinator for Jesse Jackson while Jackson was Special Envoy to Africa. Carney has worked as a research analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and as a research consultant for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He worked with civic associations in West Africa where he trained local leaders in research methodology and survey techniques.
Harvey Wasserman is a life-long activist who speaks, writes and organizes widely on energy, the environment, history, the drug war, election protection, and grassroots politics. He teaches (since 2004) history and cultural & ethnic diversity at two central Ohio colleges. He works for the permanent shutdown of the nuclear power industry and the birth of Solartopia, a democratic and socially just green-powered Earth free of all fossil and nuclear fuels. He writes for Ecowatch, solartopia.org, freepress.org and nukefree.org, which he edits. He helped found the anti-war Liberation News Service. In 1972 his History of the U.S., introduced by Howard Zinn, helped pave the way for a new generation of people’s histories. In 1973 Harvey coined the phrase “No Nukes” and helped found the global grassroots movement against atomic energy. In 1990 he became Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA. Harvey’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of U.S. History, which dissects our national story in terms of six cycles, will be published soon at www.solartopia.org.
Pat Alviso is the National Coordinator for Military Families Speak Out (see MFSO.org) , a national organization with members across the United States who have or have had loved ones in the military since September 11, 2001. As a mother of an active duty Marine, she speaks on behalf of military families nationally and has helped lead three delegations to the White House. She has counseled thousands of military families, Gold Star families and military, providing support services, and creating forums and opportunities for them to speak out against the unjust wars in the Middle East. Her 40 years of experience in the classroom have allowed her to serve on the steering committee for the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, NNOMY.
David Hartsough (pictured) is a co-founder of World Beyond War and author of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Hartsough has organized many peace efforts in such far-flung locations as the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Phiippines, and Kosovo. In 1987 Hartsough co-founded the Nuremberg Actions blocking munitions trains carrying munitions to Central Amcerica In 2002 he co-founded the Nonviolent Peaceforce which has peace teams working in conflict areas around the world. Hartsough has been arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience more than 150 times, most recently at the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory. Hartsough has just returned from Russia as a part of a citizens diplomacy delegation hoping to help bring the US and Russia back from the brink of nuclear war. Hartsough is a Quaker, a father and grandfather and lives in San Francisco, CA.
Alviso and Hartsough will be speaking at No War 2016. See http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016
Judy Bello (pictured) is on the Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and is a founding member of the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars. In the previous decade she has traveled with Peace Delegations to Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria. She has just returned from a fact finding mission in Syria with a delegation from the U.S. Peace Council.
Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and government official. He's been a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University and Harvard’s Institute of Politics. He is the author of critically acclaimed books on the atomic bomb and atomic diplomacy. Alperovitz has served as a legislative director in both houses of Congress and as a special assistant in the State Department. He is also the president of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives and is a co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and co-chair of the Next System Project. And he will be speaking at No War 2016, a conference we are organizing in September in Washington DC through World Beyond War. See worldbeyondwar.org.
John Pilger provides an outside perspective on U.S. politics. Pilger is a journalist, film-maker, and author who lives in Lambeth, south London. He is only one of two to win British journalism’s highest award twice. For his documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award. His epic 1979 Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the ten most important documentaries of the 20th century. His Death of a Nation, filmed secretly in East Timor, had a worldwide impact in 1994. His books include Heroes, Distant Voices, Hidden Agendas, The New Rulers of the World and Freedom Next Time. He is a recipient of Australia’s international human rights award, the Sydney Peace Prize, “for “enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard” and “for fearless challenges to censorship in any form”.
While the U.S. public is distracted by endless election circuses and the hunt for more bread, the U.S. military and NATO are stirring up WWIII in Eastern Europe. This week we speak with Phil Wilayto. He is editor of The Virginia Defender newspaper and a member of the Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). Phil has been spending time in Ukraine and Poland working with antiwar and anti-fascist groups. For more on UNAC see https://unacpeace.org
Jill Stein is Green Party candidate for U.S. President. Learn more at http://jill2016.com
Edward Hasbrouck is a long-time member of the War Resisters League and maintains one of the most comprehensive websites about "Selective Service," the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance. His website at http://www.resisters.info includes news about the current proposals to expand draft registration to women as well as men, and FAQs about what to do if you don't want to be drafted. Edward was one of 20 people who were prosecuted for organizing resistance to draft registration in the 1980s. He spent 4 1/2 months in a federal prison camp in 1983-1984 before the government gave up trying to enforce the Selective Service law in 1987 in the face of massive noncompliance.
Dump draft registration, don’t extend it to women (Op-Ed by Edward Hasbrouck, San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 2016) https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002261.html
Support H.R. 4523 to end draft registration https://hasbrouck.org/draft/HR4523.html
Petition to the U.S. Congress: Pass the new bill to abolish the military draft http://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/pass-the-new-bill-to-abolish-the-military-draft
Women: Do not register for the draft. (by Rivera Sun, PeaceVoice, June 17, 2016) https://hasbrouck.org/draft/women-refuse.html
Gender-Neutral Draft Registration Would Create Millions of Female Felons (U.S. News & World Report, May 3, 2016) http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-03/gender-neutral-draft-registration-would-create-millions-of-female-felons
Dr. Joseph Gerson has just attended an anti-NATO summit in Poland and has just authored an article called Imperial NATO: Before and After Brexit. Gerson is Director of Programs for the American Friends Service Committee’s Northeast Region and Director of AFSC’s Peace & Economic Security Program. He focuses on preventing nuclear war and achieving nuclear weapons abolition, education and organizing for peaceful and just alternatives to U.S.-led militarization of the Asia-Pacific, and prevention of U.S. wars, focusing most recently on NATO, Ukraine and Iraq. His books include Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World and The Sun Never Sets…Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases.
Mel Duncan is a co-founder and current Director of Advocacy and Outreach for Nonviolent Peaceforce, an international non-governmental organization that provides direct protection to civilians caught in violent conflict and works with local civil society groups on violence deterrence throughout the world. He has received numerous awards. The Utne Reader named Duncan one of “50 Visionaries Who are Changing Our World.” The American Friends Service Committee nominated Nonviolent Peaceforce for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
Harvey Wasserman is a life-long activist who speaks, writes and organizes widely on energy, the environment, history, the drug war, election protection, and grassroots politics. He teaches (since 2004) history and cultural & ethnic diversity at two central Ohio colleges. He works for the permanent shutdown of the nuclear power industry and the birth of Solartopia, a democratic and socially just green-powered Earth free of all fossil and nuclear fuels. He writes for Ecowatch, solartopia.org, freepress.org and nukefree.org, which he edits. He helped found the anti-war Liberation News Service. In 1972 his History of the U.S., introduced by Howard Zinn, helped pave the way for a new generation of people’s histories. In 1973 Harvey coined the phrase “No Nukes” and helped found the global grassroots movement against atomic energy. In 1990 he became Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA. Harvey’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of U.S. History, which dissects our national story in terms of six cycles, will be published soon at www.solartopia.org
Peter Kuznick is Professor of History at American University, and author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists As Political Activists in 1930s America, co-author with Akira Kimura of Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives, co-author with Yuki Tanaka of Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power, and co-editor with James Gilbert of Rethinking Cold War Culture. In 1995, he founded American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute, which he directs. In 2003, Kuznick organized a group of scholars, writers, artists, clergy, and activists to protest the Smithsonian’s celebratory display of the Enola Gay. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States. Kunick will be screening an episode of that program and speaking at the No War 2016 conference in Washington, D.C.: http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016
Nicolas J "Sandy" Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, with a preface by Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President, and a chapter titled "Crime By America: No Accountability, No Justice, No Peace" in a new book, Crime and Punishment in America, due out in the fall of 2016. He writes regularly about U.S. aggression and war crimes for Consortium News, Warisacrime.org and other alternative media outlets. He served as an issue team leader on war and peace issues for Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and he drafted Roots Action's current "Appeal from U.S. to World" to ask foreign governments to come together and stand up for international law in the face of systematic U.S. aggression and war crimes.
See: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12247
Ahmed Salah is an Egyptian democracy activist. He was a co-leader of three of Egypt’s most prominent protest movements—Kefaya, Youth for Change, and the April 6th Movement—and a principal organizer of the Egyptian Revolution. In 2013, he received the Champion of Justice Award from the Center for Justice and Accountability. His book is called You Are Under Arrest for Masterminding the Egyptian Revolution.
Thanks to Mark Binder, Programmer, “Yesterday’s Dead Today”, Mondays 7-9 p.m. Eastern, WSLR Sarasota Low-Power FM Community Radio 96.5, www.wslr.org
Thanks to Mark Binder, Programmer, “Yesterday’s Dead Today”, Mondays 7-9 p.m. Eastern, WSLR Sarasota Low-Power FM Community Radio 96.5, www.wslr.org
Sam Husseini is the Communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, whom I have to thank for having found and promoted many of my previous guests on this show. Husseini wrote an article titled "Katharine Gun’s Risky Truth-telling" about a British official who crucially leaked evidence of NSA spying against UN officials during the buildup to the Iraq invasion. The Intercept has now published copies of the NSA's internal newsletter that fit into that story. See:
http://www.accuracy.org
http://www.votepact.org
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has taught in the Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, and including An Indigenous People's History of the United States.
She discusses the idea that President Obama is the longest serving war president.
Meike Capps-Schubert is the co-founder and current manager of The Clearing Barrel GI-Coffeehouse in Kaiserslautern next to Ramstein Airbase, Germany, the only GI-coffeehouse outside the United States. A long-time peace and justice activist in Germany, Meike is a counselor with the Military Counseling Network e.V. -- the German branch of the GI-rights-hotline, which provides free, confidential, and accurate information on U.S. military regulations and practices to members of the U.S. military, veterans, and their families. She has also helped build critical support for U.S. war resisters in Germany since 2003. Learn more: http://theclearingbarrel.blogspot.de http://www.mc-network.de https://www.betterplace.org/en/projects/5543-the-clearing-barrel-gi-cafe-germany http://gicoffeehousetour.blogspot.de
Jean Trounstine is the author of Boy With a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner's Fight for Justice.
Karter Reed is the subject of and the author of the Epilogue to the book. He was convicted of murder as a child in an adult court, and was sent to adult prison.
Trounstine and Reed discuss Reed's story and U.S. policies on juvenile crime.
Peter Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. He is also team leader of the Institute for Social Science theme project on the Causes, Consequences, and Future of Mass Incarceration in the United States.
His research focuses on public opinion, representation, mass incarceration, and inequality. Peter also teaches courses on quantitative research methods. Peter’s new book, Incarceration Nation, (Cambridge University Press) explains why the public became more punitive in the 1960s, 70s, 80, and 90s, and how this increasing punitiveness led to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States.
Peter received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007) and his undergraduate degree from Colorado College (1998). Prior to graduate school, he taught high school Spanish for three years in Baltimore, MD, through Teach For America. Additional information on his research and teaching is available on his personal website.
After 1700 years, the Catholic Church is turning against the idea that there can be a "just war." We speak with John Dear.
John Dear is an internationally recognized voice for peace and nonviolence. A priest, pastor, retreat leader, and author, he served for years as the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the U.S. After September 11, 2001, he was a Red Cross coordinator of chaplains at the Family Assistance Center in New York, and counseled thousands of relatives and rescue workers. John has traveled the war zones of the world, been arrested some 75 times for peace, led Nobel Peace prize winners to Iraq, recently visited Afghanistan, given thousands of lectures on peace across the U.S., and served as a pastor of several churches in New Mexico.
His many books include: The Nonviolent Life; Walking the Way; Thomas Merton Peacemaker; A Persistent Peace; Transfiguration; You Will Be My Witnesses; Living Peace; The Questions of Jesus; The God of Peace; Jesus the Rebel; Peace Behind Bars; and Disarming the Heart. He has been nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, including by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sen Barbara Mikulski. He works for www.campaignnonviolence.org, is a priest of the Diocese of Monterey, Cal., and lives in New Mexico. See: www.johndear.org
Statement from April 11-13 Vatican Meeting: http://www.paxchristi.net/news/appeal-catholic-church-recommit-centrality-gospel-nonviolence/5855#sthash.gBLNmWLZ.Ko153230.dpbs
John Hanrahan, currently on the editorial board of ExposeFacts, is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and other news organizations. He also has extensive experience as a legal investigator. Hanrahan is the author of Government by Contract and co-author of Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska. He has written extensively for NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
We discuss these articles by Hanrahan at Truthout.org: As in Libya, Avaaz Campaigned for Syria No-Fly Zone That Even Top Generals Opposed
Avaaz Ignored Libya Lessons When Advocating for Syria No-Fly Zone
Dr. Gregory Shupak has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. He is an activist and a fiction writer and his political analysis appears regularly on Jacobin, Middle East Eye, and elsewhere.He discusses these topics:
"The Case Against Bombing ISIS"
and
"Abolish the Military"
Margaret Kimberley writes at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com and BlackAgendaReport.com where she is editor and senior columnist. She is also on the administrative committee of UNAC, the United National Antiwar Coalition.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a Los Angeles journalist and columnist. She discusses her book I Heart Obama.
Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor and one of the founders of Momentum Training. He is co-author of the new book: This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century.
David Carroll Cochran is the author of Catholic Realism and the Abolition of War. He teaches politics and directs the Archbishop Kucera Center for Catholic Intellectual and Spiritual Life at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He discusses how war might be abolished and what sorts of institutions have been abolished already.
Seth Kershner is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in such outlets as In These Times, Sojourners, and Rethinking Schools. He is the co-author (with Scott Harding) of Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). This is the first book to analyze the grassroots counter-recruitment movement which has been around for more than four decades. He has recently been using the Freedom of Information Act to gain a better understanding of the extent of militarism in U.S. schools, obtaining hundreds of pages of documents in the process. Last fall he and Scott Harding shared some of these findings in an op-ed for Education Week.
Holly Sterling is the wife of unjustly imprisoned CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. She discusses his case, his imprisonment, and efforts to request a pardon.
Mary Anne Grady Flores speaks in this 1-hour special from inside the jail near Syracuse, N.Y., where she has been imprisoned for 6 months for protesting drone murders at Hancock Air Base.
Harvey Wasserman is a life-long activist who speaks, writes and organizes widely on energy, the environment, history, drug war, election protection and grassroots politics. He teaches (since 2004) history and cultural & ethnic diversity at two central Ohio colleges, and is married with five daughters and five grandchildren. Harvey works primarily for the permanent shutdown of the nuclear power industry and the birth of Solartopia, a democratic and socially just green-powered Earth free of all fossil and nuclear fuels. He writes regularly for a wide internet readership through Ecowatch, solartopia.org, freepress.org and nukefree.org, which he edits. His articles also appear at Commondreams, CounterPunch, HuffingtonPost, Buzzflash and others. He hosts the Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show at www.prn.fm. In this show, Harvey discusses the stripping and flipping of U.S. elections.
Dahlia Wasfi is an Iraqi-American justice activist who has written and spoken extensively on U.S. policy in the region of Iraq. She is currently writing a book on Iraq and recently published the article "Battling ISIS: Iran-Iraq War Redux." She discusses the past quarter century of U.S. bombing of Iraq.
Elliott Adams is a former Army paratrooper in Vietnam, Japan, Korea, and Alaska; and former National President of Veterans For Peace. He has conducted nonviolence and social movement trainings for organizations such as Fellowship Of Reconciliation, School Of Americas Watch, Peacemakers of Schoharie, Student Environmental Action Coalition, War Resisters League. He currently works with the Meta Peace Team and is co-chair of Creating a Culture of Peace. In 2014 and again in 2015 he spent several months as a member of Meta Peace Team using third party non-violent intervention in the West Bank, Palestine.
See http://metapeaceteam.org
Patrick Hiller is the Executive Director of the War Prevention Initiative by the Jubitz Family Foundation and teaches in the Conflict Resolution Program at Portland State University. As a Peace Scientist, his writings and research are almost exclusively related to the analysis of war and peace and social injustice. Among other involvements, Patrick serves on the Executive Committee of the Governing Council of the International Peace Research Association and on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War where he works with me at http://worldbeyondwar.org. We discuss the remarkable discoveries of peace researchers reported in the newly created Peace Science Digest.
See http://communication.warpreventioninitiative.org
This interview was the basis for Swanson's article at http://ahtribune.com/us/2016-election/436-jill-stein-bernie.html titled "Jill Stein's platform more viable than Bernie's"
Bill Fletcher Jr. has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web. You can find him at billfletcherjr.com
He wrote the article Obama Morocco and Saharawi Self-Determination.
Colin Beavan attracted international attention for his year-long lifestyle redesign project and popular book and documentary film, No Impact Man. He has appeared on Nightline, Good Morning America, The Colbert Report, The Montel Williams Show, and NPR, and his story has been featured in news outlets from Time magazine to The New York Times. A sought after speaker by wide-ranging audiences, he also consults with businesses on improving eco-friendly and human-centered practices. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. And his new book is called How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness That Helps the World.
Cynthia McKinney has served in the Georgia State Legislature and the United States Congress where she voted against NAFTA, opposed the war on Iraq, and introduced the first resolution for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
She didn't leave Congress until Diebold voting machines flipped votes away from her right in front of voters' eyes.
She has been a Green Party candidate for U.S. President.
She recently completed a PhD in Leadership and Change.
Read her dissertation: “El No Murio, El Se Multiplico!” Hugo Chávez : The Leadership and the Legacy on Race
And her books.
Cian Westmoreland is a former Air Force technician who served in Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan at the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron. He assisted in building a signal relay station that was used for transmitting and receiving data, radio, and radar picture for unmanned and manned missions for approximately 250,000 square miles over Afghanistan. In a report provided to him after his tour, he was credited with assisting in 2,400 close air support missions and 200+ kills of supposed enemies. The UNAMA report for that year, 2009, claimed however that this number also included 359 civilians killed in airstrikes. Westmoreland discusses his experience.
Learn more: http://projectredhand.org
See related film: http://dronethedocumentary.com
Support whistleblowers: https://whisper.networkforgood.com
William M. Arkin is a scholar, analyst, author and journalist who has been working on the subject of militarism for over 40 years. He is author, most recently of Unmanned: Drones, Data and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare (Little Brown, 2015). He is a national security consultant at Vice News and to NBC News Investigates, the investigative arms of NBC News. His website is at https://williamaarkin.wordpress.com Arkin is the author with Alexa O'Brien of a report on Vice News called "The Most Militarized Universities in America."
Chris Williams wrote the book Ecology & Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. He is a long-time environmental activist with a scientific background and has authored numerous articles on the science and politics of climate change and energy for various media outlets. He's a writer-in-residence at Truthout, and an educator and professor at Pace University in the dept of chemical and physical sciences. He discusses climate change after Paris.
Jon Schwarz's new job is with The Intercept. He previously worked for Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog Films and was Research Producer for Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. He's contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.” In 2003 he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction. See: https://theintercept.com/staff/jonschwarz
Eric Bonds is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He studies and writes about the often times overlapping fields of human rights, war/militarism, and the environment. His work has appeared in Z Magazine, Foreign Policy in Focus, and numerous academic venues. See: http://fpif.org/pentagon-comes-short-climate
and
https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/the-wastes-of-war-in-afghanistan
and
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2015.1090369#abstract
Peter Werbe is a radio host in Detroit. He discusses his long involvement with The Fifth Estate, which has been publishing radical ideas for 50 years now. See: http://peterwerbe.com http://fifthestate.org
Johan Galtung is the founder of the discipline of peace studies. He founded the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research in 1964, and has helped found dozens of peace centers. He has taught peace studies at universities all over the world, and mediated hundreds of conflicts. He is author or coauthor of over 160 books, and is cited and discussed in many thousands. He is the founder of Transcend Peace University and Transcend International. See http://transcend.org
Husain Abdulla, originally from Bahrain, is the founder and Executive Director of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain. As Executive Director, Husain leads the organization’s efforts to ensure that U.S. policies support the democracy and human rights movement in Bahrain. Husain also works closely with members of the Bahraini-American community to ensure that their voices are heard by U.S. government officials and the broader American public. In 2012, the Government of Bahrain revoked Husain's Bahraini citizenship in retaliation for his peaceful advocacy for the respect for human rights in his home country. Husain holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from the University of West Florida and a BA in Political Science and Mathematics from the University of South Alabama. See http://adhrb.org
Dave Chaddock is the author of This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since.
Céline Nahory is International Coordinator for Peace Boat and the Global Article 9 Campaign. She also serves as Regional/International Representative in the International Peace Bureau's Council. She has worked for fifteen years with NGOs in the US, Japan and India, carrying out research and running advocacy campaigns on issues of peace, security, disarmament, economic justice and sustainable development. See: http://peaceboat.org/english https://facebook.com/peaceboat http://article-9.org/en/index.html https://facebook.com/article9
Diana Johnstone is a writer based in Paris, France. Her past books include Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions. Her new book, which we discuss, is Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton.
Laurence H. Shoup has taught U.S. history at the university level and has been a historical consultant on California history for over 30 years, authoring or co-authoring over 200 reports for a variety of clients. His new book which we discuss is Wall Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. Among his past books is Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy. Find Shoup at http://rulersandrebels.com
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
Grossman discusses a proposed change in policy by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that would permit nuclear radiation on the grounds that it is safe or even good for us. Submit your comment here: http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=NRC-2015-0057
Or write to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention:Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff. Docket ID. Needed to be noted on any letter is the code NRC-2015-0057.
Some articles by Grossman: Radiation Is Good for You, and Other Tall Tales of the Nuclear Industry The Nuclear Cult Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission Nuclear Power/Nuclear Weapons Embracing Nuclear Power Like a Religion Money is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy Nuclear Power Through the Fukushima Perspective Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe The Perils of Nuclear-Powered Space Flights
Maria Santelli is Executive Director of the Center on Conscience & War, a 75-year old organization founded to provide technical and community support to conscientious objectors to war. Based in Washington, D.C., Santelli has been working for peace and justice since 1996. She discusses conscientious objection and this week's attack on a hospital in Afghanistan.
Mike Ferner is a candidate for mayor of Toledo, Ohio.
See http://www.mikeferner.com
Mike Ferner grew up in rural Ohio, working on farms much of his youth. After 12 years of Catholic education and a head full of John Wayne movies, he enlisted in the Navy right out of high school in 1969.
During three years as a hospital corpsman he nursed hundreds of wounded soldiers returning from Viet Nam, an experience that radicalized him for life starting with his discharge as a conscientious objector.
Mike has been an independent member of Toledo City Council and a candidate for mayor of his city; an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); Communications Director for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy and has served as national president of Veterans For Peace.
Just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he lived there for a month with a Voices in the Wilderness delegation, returning in 2004 for another two months as an independent journalist and wrote "Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq" (Prager 2006). His activism includes several arrests for “disturbing the war,” including disrupting a session of Congress.
His current interest is learning how the Populists organized the largest democratic, mass movement in U.S. history and how to apply that to work he’s doing with Move to Amend.
Khury Petersen-Smith is an activist who lives in Boston. He traveled to Gaza in 2009 as part of the Viva Palestina medical relief delegation. He also traveled to Iraq on a peace delegation in 2004. His organizing and writing focus particularly on Black liberation, Palestine solidarity, and U.S. empire. He was an organizer of a new statement of black solidarity with Palestine: www.blackforpalestine.com
Also find him here: http://facebook.com/black4palestine and here: http://twitter.com/black4palestine
James Kilgore discusses his new book, Understanding Mass Incarceration: An Introduction to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.
On this day in 1785 the King of Prussia Frederick the Great signed the first post-independence treaty with the United States. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce promised peace but also addressed how the two nations were to relate if one or both were at war, or even if they fought each other, including proper treatment of prisoners and civilians — standards that would forbid most of what war consists of today. “And all women & children,” it reads, “scholars of every faculty, cultivators of the earth, artizans, manufacturers and fishermen unarmed and inhabiting unfortified towns, villages or places, & in general all others whose occupations are for the common subsistence & benefit of mankind, shall be allowed to continue their respective employments, & shall not be molested in their persons, nor shall their houses or goods be burnt, or otherwise destroyed, nor their fields wasted by the armed force of the enemy, into whose power, by the events of war, they may happen to fall; but if any thing is necessary to be taken from them for the use of such armed force, the same shall be paid for at a reasonable price.” The treaty was also the first U.S. free trade agreement, although 1,000 pages too short to resemble a modern free-trade agreement. It was not written by or for or about corporations. It included nothing to protect large companies against small ones. It established no corporate tribunals with the power to overturn national laws. It included no prohibitions on national restrictions on business activities.
His books include War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy saw a contradiction between opposing murder and accepting war. He framed his concern in terms of Christianity. In his book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he wrote: "Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others. Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin, whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery, theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the blessing of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction."
He had followed the Irish campaign for home rule in the 1880s which included a rent strike. He had studied the Russian mass strike of 1905. He had drawn inspiration from numerous sources and created a Passive Resistance Association in India in 1906 to resist new discriminatory laws against Indians. Back in his native, British-occupied India in 1920, on this day, Gandhi won approval by the Indian National Congress for a campaign of nonviolent noncooperation with British rule. This meant boycotting schools and courts. It meant making clothes and boycotting foreign cloth. It meant resignations from office, refusal to support the occupation, and civil disobedience. The effort took many years and advanced by stages, with Gandhi calling it off when people used violence, and with Gandhi spending years in prison. The movement advanced new ways of thinking and living. It engaged in the constructive program of creating self-sufficiency. It engaged in the obstructive program of resisting British operations. It engaged in efforts to unite Muslims with Hindus. Resistance to a salt tax took the form of a march to the sea and the illegal manufacture of salt, as well as attempts to enter an existing salt works, which included brave protesters stepping forward to be violently beaten back. By 1930 civil resistance was everywhere in India. Prison became a mark of honor rather than shame. The people of India were transformed. In 1947 India won independence, but only at the cost of splitting Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan.
David Rothauser is a playwrite, filmmaker, teacher, and peace activist. We discuss his new film, Article 9 Comes to America.
That court, located in the Hague, resolved a long and bitter dispute between the United States and Great Britain. The example of two heavily militarized and war-prone nations submitting to the rule of an international body and peacefully settling their dispute was widely seen as an encouraging example for the world, and remains such to this day, despite the outbreak four years later of World War I. Within weeks of the settlement, a number of nations submitted cases for arbitration to the Permanent Court, including a dispute between the United States and Venezuela. The actual settlement of the Newfoundland Fisheries case gave both the United States and Britain some of what they had wanted. It allowed Britain to create reasonable regulations for fishing in the waters of Newfoundland, but gave the power to determine what was reasonable to an impartial authority. Would the United States and Great Britain have gone to war in the absence of this arbitration? Likely not, at least not right away, and not over the question of fishing. But had one or both nations desired war for other reasons, fishing rights might have served as a justification. Less than a century earlier, in 1812, somewhat similar disputes had served to justify a U.S. invasion of Canada in the War of 1812. Just over a century later, in 2015, disputes over trade agreements in Eastern Europe were leading to talk of war from the Russian and U.S. governments.
She would receive the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize as one of that minority of Nobel Peace Prize winners over the years who actually met the qualifications laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will. Addams worked in many fields toward the creation of a society capable of living without war. In 1898 Addams joined the Anti-Imperialist League to oppose the U.S. war on the Philippines. When World War I began, she led international efforts to try to resolve it. She presided over the International Congress of Women in The Hague in 1915. And when the United States entered the war she spoke out publicly against the war in the face of vicious accusations of treason. She was the first leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919 and of its predecessor organization in 1915. Jane Addams was part of the movement in the 1920s that made war illegal through the Kellogg-Briand Pact. She helped found the ACLU and the NAACP, helped win women’s suffrage, helped reduce child labor, and created the profession of social worker, which she viewed as a means of learning from immigrants and building democracy, not as participation in charity. She created Hull House in Chicago, started a kindergarten, educated adults, supported labor organizing, and opened the first playground in Chicago. Jane Addams authored a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She opposed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and predicted that it would lead to a German war of revenge.
Eve Spangler is a sociologist and a human and civil rights activist. For the last decade, her work has focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict. We discuss her new book, Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict.
Why sail food from Maine to Boston, and what do salt and the British colonies in North America have in common with Gandhi's India?
Rivera Sun is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha, and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She tours nationally speaking and educating in nonviolent civil resistance. Her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. See http://riverasun.com
Marada Cook is a food entrepreneur who can be found at Crown O'Maine Organic Cooperative, Northern Girl, and Fiddler's Green Farm.
Read Rivera Sun's article "Maine Sail Freight Revives: A Salty History of Revolution, Independence."
Find the Maine Sail Freight at http://thegreenhorns.net
September 3. On this day in 1783, the Peace of Paris was made as Britain acknowledged U.S. independence.
D. Inder Comar is legal director at Comar Law, a boutique law firm in San Francisco. We discuss the case of Saleh v. Bush in which he is lead counsel, currently in the 9th Circuit, seeking to hold George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and others responsible under the laws of Nuremberg for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. See: http://witnessiraq.com
Cat J. Zavis is the Executive Director of the Network of Spiritual Progressives ( http://spiritualprogressives.org ). We discuss their proposed Enviroinmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ESRA) ( http://spiritualprogressives.org/newsite/?page_id=117 ). Zavis is a Collaborative Divorce Attorney, Mediator, Child Advocate, Coach for Parents co-parenting their children after divorce and Author of the upcoming book, Parenting with Your Ex: Another F***ing Growth Opportunity. She is also a sought after trainer in empathic communication, having trained hundreds of Collaborative Attorneys, Coaches, Therapists, Mediators, spiritual practitioners and parents. In 2009, she was awarded a Peace Builder Award for her business.
Amirah Lidasan is the leader of the Filipino activist group Suara Bangsamoro. She has been in the United States to testify at the International People's Tribunal on Crimes Against the Filipino People. See http://internationalpeoplestribunal.org We discuss the impact of the U.S. military in the Philippines.
Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside. His most recent book is Perplexities of Consciousness. We discuss his article "Cheeseburger Ethics" on his research into whether ethics professors are any better behaved than anyone else. See http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
September 2. On this day in 1945, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay.
Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong are the authors of Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated. We speak with both of them about the book and the current crisis in Ukraine.
A review of Ukraine by David Swanson is here: http://davidswanson.org/node/4799
September 1. On this day in 1924 the Dawes Plan went into effect, a financial rescue of Germany that might have prevented the rise of Nazism if begun sooner and made larger or more generous.
David Vine is Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. David is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). His new book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Overseas Harm America and the World, will be published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt in August 2015. Many of David’s articles and information about his books and other work can be found at www.davidvine.net.
A review of Base Nation by David Swanson is here: http://davidswanson.org/node/4825
Aspen Baker is the author of Pro-Voice: How to Keep Listening When the World Wants a Fight, and spokesperson for Exhale. She discusses how to transform discussions of abortion. Her website is http://aspenbaker.com
Andre Vltchek is a writer, reporter, playwright, photographer, and filmmaker. He has reported from around the world. His latest book, which he discusses, is Exposing Lies of the Empire. His website is http://andrevltchek.weebly.com
Posted with permission of Lila Garrett, host of Connect the Dots.
David Swanson, worldbeyondwar.org Author & Nobel Prize nominee on Congress' cop-out on voting war up or down. Leaves total decision to President. What precedent does this set? House rolls over on Fast Track & sends it back to Senate. The good news? Big new housing project for Iraqis by Iraqis, & Swanson delivers rant on a thriving country with no military, Costa Rica. Former Exec. Dir. of Pacifica. Grace Aron with logistics on upcoming election at KPFK. Join KPFK by July 14th to vote or run for the Board. Grace fills in the details.
Kevin Gosztola is a journalist for Firedoglake.com and co-host of the weekly podcast radio show, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He regularly covers whistleblowing, secrecy and WikiLeaks. He extensively covered the court martial of Chelsea Manning and co-authored Truth and Consequences: The US v. Private Manning with The Nation's Greg Mitchell. He discusses recent FBI arrests of alleged supporters of ISIS, the imprisonment of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, and the harassment of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum.
If you'd like to write to Jeffrey Sterling, write to Jeffrey Sterling, 38338-044 FCI Englewood FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION 9595 WEST QUINCY AVELITTLETON, CO 80123 He can receive letters and cards only. Anything else is considered contraband and will be confiscated. All incoming correspondence is reviewed. It is important that all content be of an uplifting nature as any disparaging comments about the government, the trial or any peoples involved will have negative consequences for Jeffrey.
David Hartsough is the author, with Joyce Hollyday, of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Hartsough is executive director of Peaceworkers, based in San Francisco, and is cofounder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. He is a Quaker and member of the San Francisco Friends Meeting. He has a BA from Howard University and an MA in international relations from Columbia University. Hartsough has been working actively for nonviolent social change and peaceful resolution of conflicts since he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956. Over the last fifty years, he has led and been engaged in nonviolent peacemaking in the United States, Kosovo, the former Soviet Union, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Iran, Palestine, Israel, and many other countries. He was also a peace educator and organized nonviolent movements for peace and justice with the American Friends Service Committee for eighteen years. Hartsough has been arrested more than a hundred times for participating in demonstrations. He has worked in the movements for civil rights, against nuclear weapons, to end the Vietnam War, to end the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and to prevent an attack on Iran. Most recently, David is helping organize World Beyond War, a global movement to end all wars: http://worldbeyondwar.org
Bill Moyer is cofounder and executive director of the Backbone Campaign. He discussed the kayaktivists who have taken to the water in Seattle to oppose Shell's planned artic drilling. See http://backbonecampaign.org
Diane Wittner is the Baltimore-based owner of a new zero waste, all natural, locally-based cleaning powder business Echotopia LLC. She also discusses the campaign to stop the largest trash incinerator in the U.S. from being built in Baltimore. See http://www.echotopia.org and http://chesapeakecitizens.org And Joseph Brodsky's poem "New Life" is here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/26/new-life
This was the first in a series of six webcasts with whistleblowers. To participate in upcoming webcasts go to http://standupfortruth.org
James Bradley's new book is The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. He describes the China Lobby that convinced the U.S. public in the years prior to WWII that the U.S. could cut off oil to Japan without any blow back.
Tim Wright is the Australian Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. There are now 107 nations committed to legally banning the possession, production, or use of nuclear weapons. Wright discusses the strategy of this abolition movement. See also:
http://www.icanw.org
http://www.politicspersonified.com/2015/05/introducing-radical-dreamer-tim-wright.html
David Segal is the Executive Director of Demand Progress. He discusses the current struggles to end mass surveillance by the U.S. government and to keep the internet free and open. Segal is a former Democratic Rhode Island State Representative, and served on the Providence City Council as a member of the Green Party. During his eight years as an elected official he oversaw the passage of legislation promoting economic justice, renewable energy and open space, banking reform, affordable housing, LGBT rights, criminal justice reform, and a variety of other progressive causes. He recently ran in the Democratic primary for Rhode Island’s first Congressional seat, supported by much of the netroots and organized labor. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, and in a variety of online publications. He has a degree in mathematics from Columbia University. See:
http://demandprogress.org
http://sunsetthepatriotact.org
Rania Khalek discusses her reports on Baltimore police training in Israel, Israel targeting children with drone strikes, and Israeli officials openly advocating genocide. Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass. She is a regular contributer at The Electronic Intifada, where she sits on the editorial board. Her work has also appeared at Truthout, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Al Jazeera America, The Nation, Salon, AlterNet and more. You can follow her work at her website raniakhalek.com and on twitter at @RaniaKhalek. She also cohosts a podcast called “Unauthorized Disclosure."
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence ( http://vcnv.org ) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare. During each of fourteen trips to Afghanistan, since 2010, Kathy Kelly, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She is just out of prison for having protested drone murders at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri. Kelly discusses the state of peace and war.