Welcome to the new web site - we changed to WordPress to make the site easier to search and read on smaller screens. Hope it works for you - any questions please e-mail to tuc@tucradio.org - Maria TUC Radio programs are FREE to all radio stations and listeners: On line as 29 min. mp3 file posted no later than 11:00 pm EST every Tuesday on this site and as podcast; or on radio4all.net and audioport.org; and on the PACIFICA KU Band - every Wednesday, 15:00 EST, LEFT channel.

Helena Norberg Hodge: Big Picture Activism

Local Futures, also known as Economics of Happiness, is an organization founded by Helena Norberg Hodge. They are pioneers of the new economy movement, that is dedicated to the renewal of community, ecological health and local economies world wide.
In July 2017 Helena Norberg Hodge spoke at Schumacher College in England. She began her Earth Talk by recalling the experience that changed her life, her visit to the remote region of Ladakh, in northern India. Ladakh had escaped colonial domination until the late 1970. In 1975 Helena Norberg Hodge found an almost intact traditional culture. But by the late 1980s Ladakhi culture had been dramatically changed and many of their values destroyed – not by war or slavery but by the [ . . . ]

Read More

Dennis Banks left on his Final Journey

Dennis Banks, co-founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, died on October 29, 2017. His family says that he started his journey to the Spirit World on the evening of that day. He was in his 80th year.
Dennis Banks is remembered for having organized, with AIM in a coalition of 8 indigenous nations, the 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties.” They converged on Washington, DC, with 500 followers to protest Indian living conditions and lost treaty rights. They occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly a week, reading and confiscating documents that were later turned over to the UN (in 1977). There they formed the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
In 1973, Dennis Banks [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part SIX)

Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, Professor Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom is best known for her understanding and defense of the commons. As one of the rare political scientists who continued to study reality first and then come up with a theory she has personal experience with hundreds of community managed fisheries, forests and irrigation systems.
In 2009 she was the first and so far only woman who was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, in large part in acknowledgment of her work on the commons. Some say that in the year of the most severe economic crisis in our recent past the Nobel Committee had a hard time finding male economists.
Elinor Ostrom was Professor of Political [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part FIVE)

Kate Raworth: How modern economics has failed the poor and wrecked the earth while making a few people very rich
Kate Raworth spoke on October 4, 2017, at the Stockholm Resilience Centre on her new book Doughnut Economics. Published in the UK and US in April 2017 the book has already been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese.
Kate Raworth says that economics dominate public policy and our decision-making for the future. It guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. However economic theories as taught today  are centuries out of date. That’s why it is time, Raworth says, to revise our economic thinking for [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part FOUR)

Marilyn Waring on War (Part TWO of Sex, Lies and Global Economics)
This film was a secret favorite for those who wanted to decode the economic system of perpetual, destructive growth. And for those who looked for an intelligent explanation of the connection between economics and war. Marilyn Waring was only 22 when she was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament. Re-elected three times she soon became chair of the prestigious Public Expenditures Committee, the sole budget, appropriations, and public accounts committee of Parliament.
This segment is about war. Under the GDP accounting system war is the biggest growth industry of all. When John Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone invented the GDP formula during WWII they explicitly designed is as a [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part THREE)

Kate Raworth “Why it’s time for a new version of human prosperity”
Kate Raworth came to international attention in 2017 with the publication of her most recent book: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist. She critiques the Gross Domestic Product system of accounting – including the so-called Green or sustainable growth models.
In Kate Raworth’ doughnut model the goal is to raise the well being of humans trapped inside the doughnut hole, while placing limits on climate change and pollution that are near or have crossed the outer circle of the doughnut.
Kate Raworth is teaching at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Over the last two decades she has worked as [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part TWO)

Marilyn Waring’s 30 Year Effort to Dismantle the GDP
Safe drinking water counts for nothing. A pollution-free environment counts for nothing. Even some people – namely women – count for nothing. This according to the United Nations System of National Accounts, the SNA, that sets the standard and imposes economic and budgetary decisions for almost 200 countries.
The SNA produce the GDP, the Gross Domestic Product that allegedly measures well being within a country. However war and catastrophes deforestation and mining show up as beneficial for the economy under the GDP.
Marilyn Waring, former New Zealand M.P., now professor of public policy at Auckland University, writer, and goat farmer, explained this in her book: Counting for Nothing. She gave a 30 year update [ . . . ]

Read More

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part ONE)

This is the beginning of a TUC Radio mini series on how to resist the demands of permanent economic growth and protect the earth, indigenous communities, local agriculture and women. Here first is the archive edition of Who’s Counting, Marilyn Waring on sex, lies and global economics based on the audio of the film by Terre Nash.
Marilyn Waring was shocked and dismayed when she learned that all countries that are members of the UN are forced to keep their books and design their budgets under the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). This GDP system counts only cash transactions in the market and recognizes no value other than money. This means there is no value to peace and to [ . . . ]

Read More

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

From the TUC Radio Archives
The many remembrances that were written about John Trudell after his passing on December 8, 2015, showed the extraordinary width and depth of his engagement. Most know of his music and poetry, or of the films that he participated in. Not everybody knew that up to 1979 writing and performing was not even a thought or plan or dream of his.
In this part TWO John Trudell opened with a surprising analysis of the practice of voting for the lesser of two evils and continued with thoughts about democracy, technology, and dominance. Trudell described Columbus as one who did not know what a human being is, and tried to activate ancient memories of those who arrived with [ . . . ]

Read More

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

Rebroadcast with new introduction for the U’wa of Columbia
This is a moving, thought provoking spoken word and poetry address by the Native American leader and musician John Trudell. He spoke at a benefit for the U’wa in San Francisco. Memories of that benefit in March 2001 came rushing back in the summer of 2017 when Amazon Watch announced the good news: U’wa are returning to their ancestral land from which they had been expelled.
In July 2017, ten U’wa families packed up their belongings and returned to the hamlet known as Río Negro. The region had been a salt mining site. If all goes according to plan, in the next six months another 50 or so families will resettle in the [ . . . ]

Read More

Forgotten History of the War on Korea (ONE of ONE)

With Utah Phillips, Christine Ahn, and Jeff Blankfort
The extraordinary threat issued by Donald Trump to bring fire and fury on North Korea has been pushed into the background by the events of Charlottesville and the flooding of Houston. But the firing of Steve Bannon brought Korea back into focus. Blankfort and Ahn say that Bannon was not fired for his right- wing nationalism but because he objected to any use of force to resolve Washington’s conflict with North Korea and supported the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea as part of a deal to defuse the current crisis.
The great late folk singer and story teller Utah Phillips said that being drafted and stationed in Korea changed his life. He [ . . . ]

Read More

Radioactivity from Madame Curie to Fukushima (ONE of ONE)

Includes Dick Gregory after Three Mile Island
This is a small tribute to Dick Gregory, who also needs to be remembered for his antinuclear work, embedded in a program about the phenomenon of radiation and ways to monitor it.
Opening with a clip from the song Radioactivity by Kraftwerk, leading into a sketch of the life and death of Madame Curie. She discovered radiation but was unable to understand its danger and died from radiation poisoning.
Next the comedian Dick Gregory who states that radiation is worse than hunger and war: “Because I can feel hunger. I can see war. .. I cannot see radiation… I look around one day and I am dead.”
On to the synopsis of 36 years in the [ . . . ]

Read More

Ira Helfand and Alan Robock: Nuclear Blast and Nuclear Winter (ONE of ONE)

Nuclear war will kill the attacker as well as the attacked
Dr. Ira Helfand explains what happens when a nuclear weapon hits the center of an American City. Professor Alan Robock is the leading expert on Nuclear Winter. He says that the firestorm of the burning city raises a cloud of dust into the Stratosphere where it circles and eventually covers the globe for up to a decade. Even a limited nuclear war using less than 1% of the existing weapons will bring darkness and famine to the Northern Hemisphere.
A US president threatening casually “fire, fury and .. power the likes of which this world has never seen before” displays ignorance of nuclear physics as well as Republican politics.
When Ronald [ . . . ]

Read More

The Beginning of the Nuclear Age (TWO of TWO)

The First Nuclear Chain Reaction – Enrico Fermi and Henry Moore – ARCHIVE
The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi set off the first nuclear chain reaction in an underground tennis-court at the University of Chicago in 1942. His experiment led directly to the building of the plutonium bomb that destroyed the city of Nagasaki.
Exactly 25 years after that experiment, with Fermi already dead of radiation induced leukemia, a statue by Henry Moore was unveiled on December 2, 1967, at that location, to commemorate the first self sustained nuclear chain reaction.
Boal describes the fascinating clash of ideas, from the early anti nuclear resistance by SDS students in the US and the British CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), to the visual impression of Moore’s [ . . . ]

Read More

The Beginning of the Nuclear Age (ONE of TWO)

The First Nuclear Chain Reaction – Enrico Fermi and Henry Moore – ARCHIVE
The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi set off the first nuclear chain reaction in an underground tennis-court at the University of Chicago in December 1942. His experiment led directly to the building of the plutonium bomb that destroyed the city of Nagasaki.
There are competing claims as to the beginning of the nuclear age. Was it the day of Trinity, was it Hiroshima, or was it Fermi with his willingness to risk a nuclear explosion in the middle of a crowded city.
But more important than the date is the need to comprehend the fundamental change that the beginning of the nuclear age has brought about. Albert Einstein said that the [ . . . ]

Read More