In this second part Dr. Hassan states that anti women statements are nowhere in the Koran but were added later by Companions of the Prophet. However questioning a Companion is a capital offense. This program ends with an interview with Dr. Hassan. She gives a most amazing answer to the question whether Eve’s quest for consciousness (the apple story) was good or bad.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Dr. Riffat Hassan, born in Pakistan and educated in England, taught theology in the US. Her feminist friends in Pakistan realized that they needed a theological argument to oppose anti woman legislation and asked her to help. She became, in the mid 1980s, the first trained theologian to take on, at personal risk, the misreading of the Koran with the explicit goal to help women’s liberation.
Recorded on April 1, 1993, at UC Berkeley, this is a two part program that begins with an moving account of her personal journey and ends, for this part ONE, with a painstakingly researched account of the story of Adam and Eve common to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This myth has been used to declare [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
UC Berkeley Microbiologist Chapela asks: Can genetically engineered plants and animals not only make us sick when we eat them but can there be a horizontal gene transfer between their viralized genes and ours and the rest of nature? During his multiyear battle with Monsanto Canadian canola farmer Schmeiser became an international folk hero and expert in describing the dangerous ingredients that are inserted into the DNA of a seed that is engineered in the lab.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Monsanto, the giant multinational agro-chemical company, sued Percy Schmeiser over the presence of their patented canola that had invaded the edges of Schmeiser’s field from a neighbor’s plot. The Schmeiser case has become one of the most watched and most important cases for organic farmers, seed savers, for the movement against the invasion of the biosphere by genetically modified plants, and against corporate ownership of life.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
A movement is spreading through North America and it may play a profound role in the ever clearer contradiction between corporate and community farming, between genetically modified and pure and healthy food, between monoculture and diversity. Today’s speaker, Lawrence Davis-Hollander says that finally, after the farm and gardening revival that began in the 1960 and early 70s, the seed collecting and seed saving movement is flourishing as well.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Monsanto appeared in Federal District Court in Manhattan on January 31st, 2012, to have a suit dismissed that was filed by organic growers. At stake is: Can Monsanto sue farmers whose land was contaminated by pollen or seed from genetically modified plantings by their neighbors? The answer is that Monsanto has asserted their patent rights over those whose land was polluted by GMOs and continues to do so.
Dan Ravicher, the attorney for the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association and others, representing over 300,000 individuals, gave this summary of the landmark suit to stop these lawsuits at the Heirloom Seed Expo in Santa Rosa, CA, on September 14, 2011.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)
Black History Special
Who was the attorney for Rosa Parks and later Martin Luther King at the beginning of the Civil Rights struggle? Fred Gray, just out of law school, had made a commitment to destroy everything segregated in his home state of Alabama when he was in high school. Rosa Parks was only his second case, after Claudette Colvin, a teenager, who nine months earlier had been the first to refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and in turn inspired Rosa Parks.
The early story of the civil rights movement comes to life in this story of Fred Gray’s life and education, as he tells it to the Republican Roundtable in the summer of 2009. He [ . . . ]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Parenti describes the pathologies of capitalism by its inability to respond to climate change. Quoting a cartoon he reads: “While the end of the world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, ..the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.” Also arguments for the benefits of socialism in areas of our lives that should not be managed under the profit system. He lists health care, energy, and transportation.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)
The first talk of 2012 by the social critic and noted author Michael Parenti fit perfectly into the debates of the time, that of the One versus the 99% and the finally no longer taboo question: What exactly is CAPITALISM? Parenti is debunking some of the myths of capitalism: That it creates jobs, peace, democracy and wealth – etc.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)
WHAT DO THE ABOLITIONISTS TEACH US ABOUT CHALLENGING CORPORATE RULE
This program is in remembrance of Richard Grossman, who died of cancer in November 2011. He was one of the great uncompromising, courageous thinkers and activists in the unfolding project to define, limit and abolish corporate power. Ralph Nader called Grossman “the preeminent historian of corporations” and this speech, that Grossman gave at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in November 2006, shows what that meant.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Podcast (file2): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Hitchens discusses whether Nixon and Kissinger stole the election of 1968, offers additional information on Kissinger’s role in Israel, Palestine, and Cyprus, and reviews some of the instruments of international law that may be used to bring war criminals to trial.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. His work on the war crimes of Henry Kissinger may be his most enduring. In this recording he describes Kissinger as a “a one man rolling global crime wave.” Acerbic, witty, fact and passion filled.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Begins with an intriguing archival speech on the history of corporations and ends with two important projects Grossman worked on just before his death, his contribution to the Occupy movement: A law to criminalize hydro-fracking and corporations as a class or group.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
Richard Grossman said: “.. corporations don’t have rights. Rights are for people. Corporations only have privileges, and only those that we the people bestow on them.” In a nutshell that was the essence of his research and teaching for the last 20 years.
Richard died of melanoma on November 22nd, 2011, at a hospital in New York City, where he was born sixty-eight years earlier.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
This is a reading of Moyers’ concise and revealing mini history of the corporate takeover of America’s democracy, beginning with the infamous secret 1971 memo by Lewis Powell to his friends at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell soon became Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Moyers sums it up: “We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the top down..”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
