Author Archives: Maria

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima by Arjun Makhijani (ONE of TWO)

Disarmament is more urgently needed now that nuclear weapons have spread far beyond the original weapons states. Makhijani shows that we can only find the path back from the abyss if we are clear and honest about how nuclear weapons were invented and first used. And there is much information in this talk that has been shunned or kept secret: Why was the US fleet moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor? Does the Japanese attack have anything to do with the US oil embargo? What were the original goals of the Manhattan Project and why and when were they changed? And who was in charge of this secret program when even the US Vice President or the generals responsible [ . . . ]

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Happy Birthday Bertolt Brecht – 115 years since February 10, 1898

Even though the German playwright, poet, director and theoretician of the stage was persecuted by the Nazi’s, and then forced to leave his exile home in the US when he was accused of being a communist, he did become a major influence on visual and performance artists such as Jean Luc Godard, Robert Wilson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Augusto Boal, Pina Bausch, Dario Fo and many others.
His most famous plays, the Threepenny Opera and the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were just two of over sixty plays. During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the “Literature in Exile”. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most often performed plays: [ . . . ]

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A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (TWO of TWO)

Schneider gave the opening address at the “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” conference at the Hadley Centre in England on February 1, 2005. At the request of the British government 200 scientists convened to counter the refusal of the US administration to acknowledge the urgency of the problems related to climate change.
Data on the accelerated melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream that brings warm waters from the tropic across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe caused the greatest concern – but were not covered in the commercial US media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (ONE of TWO)

When the Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider died on a return flight from a climate conference in Sweden in 2010 the world lost one the great and courageous climate scientists. He and Prof. James Hansen risked their careers by researching and publishing on climate change since the 1980s and the world would be a very different place today had their warnings been heeded instead of denied and disparaged.
This conversation was recorded in March 2001 in the garden of Schneider’s home near the Stanford Campus. He had just returned from his work with the IPCC. Thousands of scientists are making contributions that are reviewed by the IPCC and then must be approved line by line by all 120 plus member nations. [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Global Warming – A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings

Remembrance of the late Dr. Stephen Schneider
Topics: CO2 now 20% higher than in last half million years; rate of CO2 increase higher than in geologic time; extreme weather; solutions: carbon pricing and equity.
In TUC radio’s last program you heard Hansen’s acceptance speech. This – by extension is my credit to Schneider whose name on the press coverage of the award came up only as a quote: “a Stanford professor who died”. Nothing about his very unique and holistic view based on his expertise in biology and atmospheric science, his ability to describe how climate and life evolved together – and how that process is falling apart as humans are disturbing the earth. And nothing about his work with the Intergovernmental [ . . . ]

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Dr. James Hansen: CALL TO ACTION – LEAVE COAL IN THE GROUND AND PUT A PRICE ON CARBON

Topics: Superstorm Sandy, carbon pricing VS cap and trade.
Dr. James Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is one the first climate scientists to issue an urgent warning on climate change and has been embattled ever since – and stood his ground. Now, a quarter century later he speaks, campaigns, and issues scientific papers with an ever growing group of concerned scientists from across the world. He works with Bill McKibben on the campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, joined in civil disobedience and was arrested. Hansen has very clear ideas as to what needs to be done politically to face the immediate danger of climate change.
On December [ . . . ]

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Michael Parenti: The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism (TWO of TWO)

Parenti explores how the post World War II prosperity emerged in the US and how at the same time the organized destruction of the human and environmental support systems accelerated.
This is the conclusion of a one-hour speech by Dr. Michael Parenti, given in October 2012 at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. Parenti, with a Ph.D. from Yale, is an independent scholar, lecturer and author of over 20 books.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)

Michael Parenti: The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism (ONE of TWO)

Dr. Michael Parenti gave this keynote speech for the 4th Annual People’s Movement Assembly at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington in October, 2012. He talked about economics, neo-liberalism, globalization and the history of capitalism.
Parenti spoke and wrote about these topics long before most other academics dared mention – and much less critique –capitalism, the chosen economic form in the US, and really the world.
Raised in a working class Italian family in East Harlem, New York City, Parenti went on to receive his Ph.D. in political science at Yale in 1962. His academic career was cut short by his dismissal after he was arrested for protesting the US war on Vietnam. Parenti became an independent scholar, lecturer and author of over [ . . . ]

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Ward Churchill: A Little Matter of Genocide (TWO of TWO)

This segment on Genocide ends with an extraordinary statement by Ward Churchill on the importance of knowing history: “We got an entire society here that, with its own collaboration, quells certain knowledge that would disrupt its very convenient scenarios of what it wants to be by denying what it has been… And so we punch holes into the domes of false reality that have been constructed to shield the society from an understanding of itself. All this in order to get to the subliminal circumstances which can motivate people to tangibly, finally, oppose the order of things that we encounter in such a way as they can be transformed. I think the key to the whole of America lies right [ . . . ]

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John Trudell: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HUMAN BEING (TWO of TWO)

The Native American musician, poet and former national chairman of A.I.M., John Trudell, continues his moving, thought provoking spoken word and poetry address. He is opening this part with a surprising new analysis of the practice of voting for the lesser of two evils and continues with thoughts about democracy, technology, and dominance, and the curious construct of god in a human form.
Trudell describes Columbus as one who did not know what a human being is, and tries to activate ancient memories of those who arrived with and after Columbus and their long submerged links to their own tribal ancestry that was erased by the inquisition. Respect and responsibility are the leading values Trudell refers to and he asks [ . . . ]

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John Trudell: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HUMAN BEING (ONE of TWO)

This is a moving, thought provoking spoken word and poetry address by the Native American musician and leader John Trudell. He did not set out to be a writer. His poetic gift developed out of the remarkable, sometimes unbearable circumstances of his life.
Trudell grew up on and around the Santee Sioux reservation near Omaha, Nebraska. In 1969 he participated in the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz. From 1973 to 1979 her served as national chairman of the American Indian Movement. The government response to A.I.M. was swift Trudell said, “They waged a war against us. They hunted us down. They killed, jailed, destroyed by any means necessary.”
In 1979 that war took a terrible personal toll on John Trudell. [ . . . ]

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Edward Said: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights (Part TWO of TWO)

Said gives a report on GAZA, still under military occupation, but then and now a huge prison. He also refers to the first and second Intifada, the beginning of the building of the separation wall; and the divestment and boycott campaign in the US. All events are important historic dates that are eerily contemporary.
Said ends with a very personal description of the healing collaboration between him and the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. The youth orchestra that they founded together in 1999 to bring Palestinians and Israelis together still performs in 2012.
In 1948 Said and his family were forced to leave Palestine for Cairo when the newly founded state of Israel took their ancestral home. Later Said came to the US, [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

Edward Said: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights (Part ONE of TWO)

This is Said’s last major speech on Palestine, the war on Iraq and the Bush administration. On September 25, 2003, a message made its way around the world. Edward Said, Palestinian American, world famous professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and fearless defender of the Palestinian cause had died of leukemia in New York City, far from the city of Jerusalem where he was born in 1935.
In 1948 Said and his family were forced to leave Palestine for Cairo when the newly founded state of Israel took their ancestral home. Later Said came to the US, studied at Princeton and Harvard and went on to teach at Yale and Columbia. He was not only a renowned academic [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)

Miko Peled: The General’s Son (Part TWO of TWO)

In this second half of his talk Miko Peled, son or General Matti Peled, one of the founding fathers of Israel, talks about the moment in his life where everything changed. His 13 year old niece Smadar was among those killed in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers. Miko Peled learned from his sister Nurit. She surprised the world press by blaming not the Palestinians but the Israeli government for the death of her daughter. She said the brutal occupation of Palestine had led to a measure of despair that caused the young suicide bombers to take their own lives, along with that of her daughter. Peled also explains why the two state solution is no longer possible and calls [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)