People do not go hungry for lack of food, but for lack of democracy – i.e., control over and access to food. This is a report of active, locally based, and empowered forms of democratic self government: elementary school children are supervising the clean-up of a toxic spill; citizens groups are founding their own radio stations or taking over manufacturing plants. (1995)
code: A 117 To order a cassette copy click here: $8.00
code: N 309 To order a copy click here: $8.00
Mines produce more toxic waste than any other industry but have no obligation for clean-up. Their privileges are based on an arcane law, the 1872 mining act. It says that any person, including corporations, can stake a mining claim on public land, pay $5 per acre and pay zero in royalties. Larry Tuttle heads the Center for Environmental Equity in Portland. He wrote a Mining Activist Guide available at http://www.teleport.com/~cee/ A great web site on mining is: http://www.mineralpolicy.org
60 minutes
code: H207 To order a copy click here: $8.00
The rapid build-out of the wireless communications system and digital TV exposes people to thousands of new antenna sites. Growing evidence links radio frequency exposure to cancer. How can community groups protect themselves? What does the current research show? 50 minutes.
A series of commentaries on the issues, institutions, and political affairs of the day. Drawn from his research and presenting the highlights of his work, the series responds to the limits that are being placed on democratic self-determination. Parenti comments on major institutions such as the military, the CIA, media, corporations, universities, police, and the Supreme Court, offering suggestions on how to regain influence and control.
(Recorded and produced by Maria Gilardin for TUC Radio in 1995)
Each tape or CD is one hour long 12 lectures, 29 minutes each
Total running time: 6 hours
To order a the set of 6 CDs click here: $50.00
To order individual CDs in this series choose from the descriptions below
Part ONE of TWO
Much was made of the April 22, 2016, signing of the Climate Treaty negotiated in Paris last December. At the ceremony in New York UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-moon said that we are in a race against time, and that the window for the goal set in Paris for keeping global temperate rise well below two degrees Celsius, let alone 1.5 degrees, is “rapidly closing.”
During the negotiations in Paris in December 2015 some scientists had already warned that even a 2 degrees Celsius limit in temperature would be almost impossible to maintain unless we were to make significant changes within the next 5 years. Kevin Anderson is one extraordinary and important voice among them.
Anderson is Professor of Energy [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
In all the memories recorded about the nuclear technologies and the disasters of our time the fate of humans exposed to radiation comes last. That was the leading concept of a Fukushima/Chernobyl anniversary talk by Norma Field. She hopes to rescue humans and other living things from oblivion and from the real harm inflicted upon them now and into the future.
Some argue that Norma Field risked her academic standing as professor of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago by not only teaching Premodern Japanese Poetry and Prose, and Women Studies, but also by being public and vocal in her indictment of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Born in Tokyo in 1947 to a Japanese mother and American serviceman father [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Burning Man is four stories tall and glows neon at night: a wooden man-sculpture which is burned each year in the vast expanse of the Black Rock desert of Nevada. This sound collage is part of a post-modern carnival of the absurd. Also: What would America have been without the Caucasian-Americans, with their magnificent shopping malls, their colorful polyesters, and their landfills? This anthropological comedy is based on Beverly Slapin’s workbook for children. 60 minutes
code: A 103 To order a cassette copy click here: $8.00
An activist’s artistic double-take on Life in These United States.
“Toasting the End of Capitalism at NoneSuch Space is Gilardin’s two-pronged take on the state of the nation. Her social-documentarian photographs include “Earthquake, San Francisco Marina,” showing a Loma-Prieta-damaged building under TV klieg lights; .. Her Dadaist/Surrealist montages include “Tasting Room,” in which a gigantic turkey dinner sits on a showroom floor next to Cadillacs (one afire); and “Hard Rain,” a scene of eco-apocalypse, with buildings crumbling and burning, and cars falling from a flaming heaven. Can capitalism learn to behave? Stay tuned.”
Anniversary Date: April 26, 1986
In September 2015 a next generation nuclear field engineer from Chicago went to Chernobyl to join the 3,500 workers on site. They are completing the largest movable structure humans have ever built: Tall enough to enclose the Statue of Liberty and wide enough to cover the exploded Unit Four of the Chernobyl power plant including the sarcophagus that was built over the plant in 1986.
Bechtel corporation, the lead contractor, says the $1.3 billion confinement structure will keep water out and radioactive dust and debris in — for at least a century. Radiation levels in some locations are still high enough to cause premature failure of structural materials. The gigantic arch had to be built away from the destroyed [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Against the background of an increasingly more urgent debate over the sources of conflict in the Middle East, the growth of ISIS, the refugee crisis, and the role of the US armed interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria; this question takes on great importance: Who is setting Middle East policy in the US? These and other topics were addressed at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2016, at the conference on Israel’s Influence.
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is the highest ranking US foreign policy whistle blowers to date. He was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff from 2002-05 during the fateful time of the US war on Iraq.
Before coming to the State Department, Wilkerson served [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)
Excerpt from the March 25, 2016, event at the University of Arizona
Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, and Noam Chomsky were exploring the urgent topic of privacy in todays surveillance state at the event entitled: “Conversation on Privacy”.
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden was participating by video-stream from Russia. The excerpts in this program focus on him and Glen Greenwald. Greenwald is best known as having met with Edward Snowden on his way into exile in Hong Kong in 2013. He received the documents that Snowden had taken in order to prove the extraordinary depth of government spying that Snowden had observed while employed by the CIA and as contractor for the NSA.
Greenwald was a columnist for the British Guardian and is now founding [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
Updated as essential backstory for Obama’s visit to Cuba
As President Obama became the first sitting US President in almost 90 years to visit Cuba he took the same stage where Calvin Coolidge in 1928 lectured the Cubans on democracy. The US then controlled Cuban national and foreign politics and the Cuban economy and had done so since the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. The US had refused to end the military occupation of Cuba unless Cuba changed its constitution and ceded its sovereignty to the US.
The infamous Platt Amendment of 1901 gave the U.S. the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs and included a clause that eventually led to the perpetual lease of Guantanamo Bay.
All this [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
After the explosions and melt-down of the Fukushima Nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, 160,000 people were evacuated. Five years later almost 100,000 of them are still living in refugee housing because their homes, land and towns are still too radioactive for life. The current Abe government of Japan has begun a campaign to end the refugee crisis by a variety of measures: by changing the radiation standards and telling the exiled that it is now safe to go home, by ending disaster payments as well as cost of living allowances unless they return to the broken down ghost towns or relocate to other parts of Japan.
In several cases Arnie Gundersen was the first outsider who came to [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
What happens to the lives of birds, insects and plants in the radiation zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Tim Mousseau is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. For 15 years he and his scientific collaborator Anders Moller from the University of Paris, Sud, have done research in the most contaminated areas of Chernobyl. When Fukushima Daiichi exploded they began field work there as well. They study birds, insects, microbes, and plants at over 1,000 sites, creating the most diligent inventories of each study area and returning year after year. They found significantly increased rates of genetic damage in proportion to the level of exposure to radioactive contaminants.
This is an update given on September 2, 2015, at [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
From Fairewinds Energy Education
The Gundersens came to California for a speaking tour at the end of 2015 and offered to meet me in the afternoon before giving a Fukushima update at the Point Reyes Dance Palace. Both worked in the nuclear industry, Maggie in public information, Arnie as an engineer and executive. He was fired from Nuclear Energy Services in 1990.
I started by asking them a question that had troubled me for a long time – given that Arnie Gundersen is one of only a handful of whistle blowers. How early did people in the nuclear industry become aware that they were dealing with a monstrously dangerous technology?
Arnie and Maggie Gundersen are a close team in the nuclear [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
