Newest Catalog Items

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Chris Hedges interviews Matt Taibbi on Hamilton 68

Hamilton 68 was a Twitter based dashboard designed to be used by reporters and academics to “measure Russian disinformation”
Chris Hedges wrote: The panic over Russian disinformation that followed the election of Donald Trump often relied on a source now known to have been fraudulent, Hamilton 68.
Matt Taibbi wrote: Virtually every major news organization in America has used material from the Hamilton 68 dashboard, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.
This is a February 10, 2023, interview by Chris Hedges of Matt Taibbi on The Real [ . . . ]

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Ukraine’s President Zelensky is promising ‘big business’ for Wall Street and US corporations

Credit to Ben Norton, founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report
In his speech to the U.S. National Association of State Chambers on Jan. 23rd, 2023, Zelensky credited asset managers and corporations that are already active in Ukraine – among them BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan Chase, Elon Musk’s Starlink and Westinghouse.
But that is just the beginning. Rebuilding Ukraine, Zelensky said, “will be the largest economic project of our time in Europe.”
The areas of investment listed by Zelensky range from weapons and defense to construction, from communications to agriculture, from transport to IT, from banks to medicine. “And, I invite you to work with us right now”.
Ben Norton, investigative journalist and the founder and editor of the Geopolitical Economy [ . . . ]

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How Science Is Manipulated By Industry

With Prof. Yogi Hendlin & Ari Whitten
When this conversation took place in April 2022 Ari Whitten and Prof. Yogi Hendlin had just met in Costa Rica and were inspired by their common interests.
Here are excerpts from their 90 minute conversation on environmental toxins and how they affect our health. They discuss in detail how industries, that produce these toxins, manipulate research and evade responsibility.
Ari Whitten is the founder of The Energy Blueprint, and a best-selling author.
Prof. Yogi Hendlin is an environmental philosopher and public health scientist. He has a PhD in Environmental Philosophy from the University of Kiel, Germany, and holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and UCLA and bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley. He’s currently [ . . . ]

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Marilyn Waring: War is the biggest growth industry of all – Archive TWO of TWO

Killing people, or preparing to kill them, is considered very valuable in the international economic system
Marilyn Waring was only 22 when she was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament. She 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 system of National Income Accounting. The international trade in arms is the biggest growth industry of all. Killing people, or preparing to kill them, is considered very valuable in the international economic system. The death, homelessness, injury, poverty and starvation caused by the use of these weapons is not even registered as a deficit.
This segment opens with war. Under the GDP [ . . . ]

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Marilyn Waring: Our economic system assigns no value to peace and to the preservation of the environment – Archive ONE of TWO

Under the GDP accounting system war is the biggest growth industry of all 
Marilyn Waring’s work and inspiring life are described in a documentary film by Terre Nash. I’m bringing back the soundtrack of this film to support a debate on the unquestioned need for economic growth at all cost and on what course to take to end the war on Ukraine.
At age 22 (in 1974) Marilyn Waring became the youngest member of the New Zealand Parliament. She chaired the prestigious Public Expenditures Committee and became familiar with the Gross Domestic Product system and decided to disclose its pathologies in a film, her teachings at AUT University in Auckland and really her life as a feminist economist. The [ . . . ]

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A New Global Treaty on Plastics is Being Negotiated at the United Nations

Mark Leon Goldberg interviews Andres del Castillo
By now we have all seen images of plastic garbage patches floating in the ocean, beaches and riverbanks swamped with plastic trash, entangled sea-creatures suffocating – but data on the presence of plastics in soils and air are new – Discarded plastics break down into microplastics less that 5 mm in length – and they degrade further into nano-plastics that can only be seen under a microscope.
There are now microplastics found in human lungs and blood and placentas; and the latest scientific studies show that babies are drinking microplastics in their mothers’ milk.
Here is a report from the first meeting to control plastic held in Uruguay in December 2022. 160 of the 192 [ . . . ]

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A Poison Like No Other – Matt Simon

How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies
Microplastics are making the news. This program opens with a clip from Auckland, New Zealand, broadcast on December 15, 2022. Research published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal shows that 74 tons of microplastics fell from the air on Auckland in 2020.
Almost all plastics in use today are so called “petrochemicals,” products made from fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas. This industry is booming and plastics are showing up not just in manufacturing, construction and road building, but in our personal environment, our homes, households, clothes, furniture, and the food distribution systems we depend on.
The very thing that makes plastic so useful – its toughness – means it never really [ . . . ]

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Michael Parenti: How I Became an Activist – PARENTI SPECIAL

2023 Rebroadcast to remember and honor Michael Parenti who will turn 90 later this year
Parenti rarely talked about his life. How does a NYC street kid get accepted to Yale? How does he lose the privilege of his PhD. in an arrest at a demonstration against the war on Vietnam, and become an internationally acclaimed author and lecturer?
Michael Parenti grew up in a poor, working class Italian community in New York City. When he received his PhD in political science from Yale in 1962 he was the success and pride of his family. He risked and ended his academic career when he openly opposed the war on Vietnam. Ultimately the choice he made then was a good one. He now [ . . . ]

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A Love Letter to my Grandmother and a Detour into Fast Fashion

I’m recording this at the end of December 2022 – as a celebration of three decades of producing TUC radio as an independent community program. And as a love letter to my grandmother who did all the clothes-making and repairing at home.
If she were now by my side would she even recognize the land she walked on when she was a teenager at the turn of the century? And how would she react to fast fashion?
An article in the Guardian says that textile production consumes more oil than Spain uses in a year, and significantly contributes to the fashion industry’s huge climate footprint. Synthetics also continue to have an impact long after production, shedding plastic microfibers into the environment when [ . . . ]

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WWI – The Christmas Truce of 1914

Silent Night in trenches of the Western Front
The Christmas Truce was an unofficial cease-fire on parts of the Western Front. Guns fell silent for one to several days. Soldiers emerged from the trenches and talked, exchanged gifts and kicked around a soccer ball. Trenches were close in some places, separated by 50 yards or less.
The Story of the Christmas Truce WWI is a documentary film about this spontaneous cease-fire. Thanks to historians Peter Hart, Taff Gillingham and Robin Schaefer, and their choice of rare documentary photos, footage and archived letters from soldiers of both sides. The documentary focuses on the section of the trenches where British and German soldiers were facing each other.
This radio program goes into distribution on [ . . . ]

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Joanna Macy – Inspiration for December 2022

“On the way to destroying our world we are beginning to wake up from a millennia long sleep.”
Here are excerpts from a conversation between the scholar of Buddhism and activist Joanna Macy and Vicki Robin, a writer, speaker, and host of the What Could Possibly Go Right podcast. Robin’s goal is to interview people who see far and serve the common good and help us to see more clearly and act more courageously.
Joanna Macy wrote: “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment is not that we are on the way to destroying our world – it’s that we are beginning to wake up – as if from a millennia long sleep.”
Joanna Macy is an author, teacher and a scholar [ . . . ]

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TUC Archives: The Quest for Water and the American West

By Dr. Gray Brechin: Imperial San Francisco
This is Part TWO of the history of San Francisco. The town that grew from 16 houses on sand dunes in 1850 to the largest city on the West Coast in only 30 years.
Gray Brechin explains in the first chapter of his book Imperial San Francisco how the gold rush connected two major factors for city building: A swelling of the population and the growth of investment capital.
But the mix of people and money was lacking another major ingredient: water. As the first wave of destruction of California was brought about by gold mining, the second wave was caused by the damming of rivers, and the flooding of land for reservoirs, even eventually [ . . . ]

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TUC Archives – The Underground History of the Gold Rush

By Dr. Gray Brechin: Imperial San Francisco
This is part of the history of a city, grown from 16 houses on sand dunes in 1850 to the largest city on the Pacific Coast in only 30 years. The book, Imperial San Francisco by Dr. Gray Brechin, is one of the few examples of a scholarly dissertation that becomes a very popular book. Imperial San Francisco brings to light the huge sacrifices extracted from the surrounding land by large cities, from Babylon to the Italian city states to the instant cities of North America.
This program focuses on the Gold Rush and the early conflicts between mining and farming. Next week we’ll talk about the valleys flooded and the rivers diverted to [ . . . ]

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Rebecca Solnit, HOLLOW CITY – TUC Archive

The destruction of San Francisco in the late 1990s
A new generation of writers Rebecca Solnit, Mike Davis, and Gray Brechin are inspiring us into seeing our familiar surroundings with new eyes. They also offer a different perspective on the radical transformation that development and venture capital have brought to so many cities. San Francisco, formerly famous for taking a travelers heart away, is now reaching for the soul and the wallet. A dot com boom combined with the growing biotechnology industry have driven housing prices up and residents and local small businesses out.

Rebecca Solnit says she wrote Hollow City in a hurry to document the beauty and rich culture that was being destroyed, and to support the growing movement of [ . . . ]

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Prof. Michael Hudson: Super Imperialism, from the World Bank to Ukraine

Here are excerpts from a conversation on the new podcast site: India & Global Left. The well prepared host, Jyotishman Mudiar wants to know: “Why the US has a unique place in the history of imperialism?” And Michael Hudson describes how much power can be projected by control of the instruments of finance.
Michael Hudson is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City – But unlike most academics he has also practiced banking as a balance of payments economist in Chase Manhattan Bank from 1964 to 1968.
Michael Hudson acts as an economic advisor on finance and tax law to governments worldwide including China, Iceland and Latvia.
Michael Hudson is the author of many books, among them:
Super Imperialism: [ . . . ]

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