The Environmental Impacts of Large Dams and Reservoirs with Patrick McCully, updated Archive

McCully was the executive director of the International Rivers Network
This is the second part of a program on the epic struggle over dams, displaced people and the environment, that I recorded for TUC Radio in 2006.
Patrick McCully was then the executive director of the International Rivers Network. They are supporting communities around the world that are impacted by destructive dams.
On their 2023 website International Rivers Network dot org list 217 dam projects around the world that they have helped delay or stop. Globally the building of mega dam-projects is slowing down but the world is left with dams and reservoirs that are decaying and becoming a danger to people downstream.
Just this morning, as I’m preparing this program for [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

The Environmental Impacts of Large Dams and Reservoirs – updated Archive

Jacques Leslie is a foreign correspondent turned non-fiction writer who once covered the war on Vietnam for the Los Angeles Times
Jacques Leslie discovered when he wrote for Harper’s that “At the core of every argument about water are dams, the modern pyramids, generators of extravagantly apportioned electricity, water storage, and environmental and social disasters.“
Millions of people have been displaced and some of the most fertile land been drowned. In spite of their size dams are not forever. Sooner or later they will all silt up and become expensive waterfalls. They pose a constant looming danger to life downstream when they fall into disrepair or are damaged by earthquakes or acts of war.
A battle is being fought by independent scientists and [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 39.8MB)

Chalmers Johnson – Nemesis – The Last Days of the American Republic, Archive TWO of TWO

Johnson’s name is being quoted in the 2023 work of analysts and historians
Today’s analysts and historians say that one statement is more timely now than when Johnson first made it in 2006 that “nothing is more dangerous to democracy, than military expansion and war” and argued that the U.S. is in danger of internal collapse, due in large part to the vast expenditures required to maintain its ever-expanding empire.
Chalmers Johnson is the acclaimed author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis. He is a former analyst for the CIA and professor emeritus of the University of California San Diego.
Chalmers Johnson was interviewed by the California based author of “Imperial San Francisco”, Gray Brechin, in March 2007.
DATES: March, 2007
Location: [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Chalmers Johnson – Nemesis – The Last Days of the American Republic, Archive ONE of TWO

Johnson’s name is being quoted in the 2023 work of analysts and historians
Chalmers Johnson wrote that “nothing is more dangerous to democracy, than military expansion and war” and argued that the U.S. is in danger of internal collapse, due in large part to the vast expenditures required to maintain its ever-expanding empire.
Chalmers Johnson is the acclaimed author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis. He is a former analyst for the CIA and professor emeritus of the University of California San Diego.
He was interviewed by the California based author of “Imperial San Francisco”, Gray Brechin, in March 2007.
DATES: March, 2007
Location: MLK Junior High in Berkeley

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Ray McGovern, Veteran CIA Analyst on Russia, Warns of Nuclear War

An August 9, 2023, conversation with Robert Scheer
McGovern told Bob Scheer: “I spent six decades following Soviet and now Russian policy. Most of that time professionally… I have never, never had so much fear that we are on the cusp of a nuclear catastrophe.” They discuss why the danger is so high right now, and how a peace agreement could be reached.
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst on the Soviet Union and Russia from 1963 to 1990 and advisor to seven US presidents. He prepared the President’s Daily Brief. In 2006 he protested the CIA’s involvement in torture.
Bob Scheer came out of the student movement of the 1960 and was and remains a journalist and author of books. He [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Dismantle the Doomsday Machine – Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Daniel Ellsberg at the gates of Lawrence Livermore Lab
There are two locations where all US nuclear weapons are designed. Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California is one of them. Since 1983 Tri-Valley CAREs has monitored nuclear weapons and environmental clean-up throughout the US, with a special focus on Livermore Lab.
Every year on August 6 Tri-Valley CAREs and supporters gather at the gates of Livermore Lab to remember the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This year, 2023, the silent vigil was also dedicated to Daniel Ellsberg. He had been at the gates of Livermore Lab many times in the past and gotten arrested for blocking the entrance. He died in June of this year at age 93. [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Oppenheimer and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Paul Jay and Peter Kuznick challenge the claims that the bombing ended WWII
Two weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day 2023 Paul Jay and Peter Kuznick had a conversation about the just released film Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. They acknowledged the importance of the film at a time when the risk of a nuclear war is the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But they also raised the question why it is still possible to claim that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved lives by ending WWII.
Thanks to Paul Jay, host and co-founder of The Analysis, for inviting Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and co-author with [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible

How America hides the human toll of its Military Machine
Kirkus Reviews called this book “a powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy” and “a provocative overview of the consequences of the media’s appalling failures in making important truths known.”
Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, author and activist. He is the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder and national director of the online organization RootsAction.org, which now has upwards of 1.3 million online supporters. He is the author of 13 books, among them Made Love, Got War; War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death; and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.
Massachusetts [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Historic Heat of the Summer 2023 – Passing the Threshold

Join Dr. Peter Carter, Paul Beckwith and Regina Valdez in a discussion of the recent temperature records set in the first truly global heatwave on land and in the ocean
This recording was made on July 12th when the World Meteorological Organization confirmed one record hottest day after another. Dr. Peter Carter, is expert reviewer for the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the director of the Climate Emergency Institute. Paul Beckwith is a physicist, engineer, and now a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. And Regina Valdez is Climate Reality Project Director, NYC. They met by Zoom on July 12th, 2023.
And as I am recording this on Tuesday, July 18, AXIOS news reports that again – [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

In Memory of Bertolt Brecht (Archive)

For Brecht’s 100ds birthday in 1998 the Royal National Theatre from London gave a performance in his honor at Theater Artaud in San Francisco
Bertolt Brecht and many other artists in post WWI Germany were courageously and proudly democrats, socialists or communists. They had experienced the horror of the first World War and were determined to prevent a second one. So when Hitler and the Nazi party actually assumed state power in 1933 they were all marked and most of them left the country immediately. Their exodus destroyed much of the cultural/political rebellion of the 1920s.
Even though Brecht, the playwright, poet, director and theoretician of the stage, was persecuted by the Nazi’s, he was forced to leave his home in [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

The Pentagon, Climate Change and War

Neta Crawford, Professor in international relations at the University of Oxford
Neta Crawford co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University in 2010 and currently serves as a project co-director.
She is the author of “The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions” (MIT Press). She spoke at a book release event on September 29, 2022, at Harvard University.
The military has for years (unlike many politicians) acknowledged that climate change is real, creating conditions so extreme that some military officials fear future climate wars. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense—military forces and DOD agencies—is the largest single energy consumer in the United States and the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter. [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Seniors for Peace – A celebration of 20 years of Peace Work (TUC Archives)

Redwoods Retirement Center in Mill Valley, CA
When I joined Seniors for Peace at their second ever rally for peace in Iraq on February 7, 2003, I did not dream that 20 years later they would still be coming out every Friday from 4 to 5 pm to the busy intersection near their home. Undaunted – even by hostility – they have called for peace in all the subsequent wars since then.
Among those who I met in 2003 was a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden and a Red Cross worker in London who saw the young men dead on both sides and still mourned their loss of life.
I’m honoring them now – 20 years later – for the [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

John Pilger on Depleted Uranium in Ukraine

First the United Kingdom, now the Biden Administration, are planning on sending Depleted Uranium tank shells to Ukraine
When the UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) made the announcement on March 20, 2023, peace groups and investigative reporters raised the alarm. Toxic and radioactive uranium dust, that appears when these DU shells are detonated, pose a danger to the health of anyone who inhales it. And they contaminate the soil and water.
The investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker John Pilger remembers the devastating effects the DU shells had when they were used in Iraq. In conversation with John Pilger is Phil Miller, chief reporter for Declassified UK. Miller was the first to expose Britain’s plan to send Depleted Uranium ammunition to Ukraine. Miller [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on: How we can make peace with Russia by learning from JFK’s example

The Community Church of Boston celebrated the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s speech on World Peace on June 10, 2023
They invited Professor Jeffrey Sachs to speak to the congregation. Sachs wrote a book on the American University speech entitled: To Move the World – JFK’s Quest for Peace.
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist, academic, and public policy analyst. He is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and President of the UN Sustainable Solutions Network, and an SDG advocate for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Sachs has credentials for Eastern Europe and Russia as former advisor to the economic team of Presidents Michael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. He also spent time in Ukraine as advisor to the President of independent [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

The Land Back Symposium 2023, Corrina Gould on Indigenous Land Trusts and LANDBACK in the S.F. Bay Area

The Land Back Symposium was a day-long event at Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, held on March 24, 2023
The event focused on the indigenous peoples of Northern California and how a growing LandBack movement can protect former tribal land from mining, logging and climate change.
Corrina Gould is the co-founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. She is the Spokeswoman and Tribal Chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, now known as the San Francisco Bay Area.
Five of the eight Ohlone Tribes lived on that land and their sacred sites are now buried under cement slabs and their rivers turned into toxic storm drains and their food trees were cut down. Today nobody even wonders why there is [ . . . ]

Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)