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The mile thick Greenland ice sheet would raise the oceans of the world by 7 meters if all of it melted. Climate change deniers say this massive ice sheet, second only to the Arctic, could never thaw completely – or at a rate that concerns us.
Examining a drill core collected during the Cold War and forgotten for almost 60 years, Andrew Christ and his Vermont Colleague Paul Bierman found evidence of plant life from less than a million years ago. They found frozen under nearly 1.4 km of ice, well-preserved fossil plants and biomolecules sourced from at least two ice-free warm periods in the past few million years.
Andrew Christ was interviewed at the end of March 2021. Thanks to [ . . . ]
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For over 100 years, it has been illegal for Indigenous tribes in California to practice traditional burning to prevent catastrophic wildfires. Now, the Karuk Tribe in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties is bringing fire back.
Julia Muldavin’s 11 minute film is entitled: This California Tribe Is Fighting Wildfires With Fire. Karuk spokespeople include Herman Albers, and Chook Chook Hillman, Karuk Department of Natural Resources. The film was posted on YouTube in October 2019.
Sadly the message and cultural fire practice did not spread fast enough to lessen the catastrophic impact of the 2020 record-setting California wildfire season. It burned 4 1/4 million Acres.
In an extraordinary case of symmetry that shows that cultural intentional burning is a shared practice among indigenous peoples – the [ . . . ]
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March 2021 Rebroadcast from the TUC Archives
In the last ten years, from 2011 to 2020, the US had the most catastrophic fires in memory. According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2020 alone, wildfires burned 10.3 million acres, nearly 40% of these acres were in California. And climate change is only part of the explanation.
Cultural burning and intentionally set fire, as practiced by Dennis Martinez, are essential tools in managing forests, and restoring California’s fire-adapted ecosystems.
Dennis Martinez and Tribal elders have for decades called for the re-introduction of such practice. However current laws and regulations and the outsized power of the logging and insurance industries have prevented the needed change and limited the power of Native American Tribes.
This is the [ . . . ]
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ARCHIVE – for Women’s History Month 2021
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. 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 the preservation of the environment.
This segment opens with war. Under the GDP accounting system war is the biggest growth industry of all. A segment recorded in the Philippines shows that the labor of women feeding [ . . . ]
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ARCHIVE – for Women’s History Month 2021 Marilyn Waring’s work and intriguing life is 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 after the end of the Covid Epidemic.
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 film, “Who’s Counting” traces her quest [ . . . ]
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In Memory of Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Rebroadcast of the original 1998 recording
In October 1998 Lawrence Ferlinghetti became the first poet laureate of the city of San Francisco. Major Willie Brown said he got the idea during a visit to the city of Seoul, South Korea. He had been asked when the city Poet Laureate would be giving his annual talk. A decision had to be made very fast to create the office and, as City Librarian Regina Minudri said, picking Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a no-brainer. She introduced him as a literary legend, a voice of dissent, and an internationally acclaimed writer, artist, bookseller and publisher.
Mayor Willie Brown came to the reading and said a few words. Since he later became [ . . . ]
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TUC Archives – a 29 minute audio-documentary of a January 2010 art exhibition in the small former logging town of Willits, CA, with poems and paintings by Ferlinghetti; and collages, and photos from Indian reservations by Maria Gilardin.
The re-broadcast of this documentary was scheduled to honor Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his 102nd birthday, March 24. City Lights Publishers just announced that he died last night on February 22nd, 2021. They said that: “He continued to write and publish new work up until he was 100 years old .. His curiosity was unbounded and his enthusiasm was infectious, and we will miss him greatly.” – I agree.
Even though this is not the formal Obit Ferlinghetti deserves, I decided to present this [ . . . ]
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The 2020–2021 Indian farmers’ protest is an ongoing campaign against three farm laws which were passed by the Parliament of India in September 2020. National and international media have been heavily censoring what is now known as the largest peaceful and enduring protest in the history of social movements. It all began on November 26, 2020 in India. 250 million people stood together in a united worker/farmer strike. Farmer unions and their representatives demanded that the laws be repealed and will not accept anything short of it.
The laws, often called the Farm Bills, have been described as “anti-farmer laws”. They would leave farmers at the mercy of corporations with monopoly control over the purchase, pricing, and distribution of farm [ . . . ]
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Does Public Banking Work – Project Censored named The Public Banking Revolution one of the top 25 most censored stories of 2020. The independent media pointed out that a public banking system on a national scale could finance the Green New Deal, as Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation did. A state or city based Public Bank can keep money local and fund projects like affordable housing and infrastructure without concern for maximizing profits or shareholder returns. A living example for such a bank already exists for 100 years in the Bank of North Dakota.
Economist Richard Wolff appreciated Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval of a bill allowing local governments in California to establish public banks. Wolff said if people only knew how public [ . . . ]
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Updated Archive
Who was the attorney for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement? 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.
When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for violating the segregated seating ordinance, 26-year-old Martin Luther King was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and 24-year-old Fred Gray also became his and the movement’s lawyer. Gray’s [ . . . ]
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Polarization, Then a Crash In December 2020, Lynn Fries, founder and producer of GPEnewsdocs interviewed the economist Michael Hudson. Lynn’s focus is on the global political economy.
Among contemporary economists Michael Hudson uses and refines terms that explain the specific brand of today’s finance capitalism. That includes the acronym “FIRE” and the term “Rentier Economy”. The FIRE sector, says Hudson, stands for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Hudson uses the term to make clear that we are experiencing a huge power shift from industrial to finance capitalism.
Lynn Fries wrote in a brief introduction on her website that she wanted to explore with Michael Hudson how: “Allied with landlords and monopolists, this powerful finance sector is extracting economic [ . . . ]
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Financialization and De-Industrialization
Paul Jay, the former CEO of The Real News Network, now is founder and publisher of theAnalysis.news and President of Counterspin Films.
On November 2, 2020 he invited the renowned economist Michael Hudson on theAnalysis.news.
Michael Hudson is professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s also a former Wall Street analyst.
Jay and Hudson began by discussing whether Trump policies have brought jobs and industries back home – as Trump still claims. They also discuss the huge and mounting Covid related debt of ordinary people and the need for writing it down.
Michael Hudson elaborates on the difference in the amounts of money in the Covid stimulus plan [ . . . ]
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In Honor of Western Shoshone Elder Carrie Dann – She passed on January 2, 2021
For over 40 years the Dann Sisters were keeping Shoshone tradition and land rights alive against formidable opposition: Expanding gold mines, confiscation of their horses and cattle by armed federal agents and nuclear testing and waste storage.
Christopher Sewall was Environmental Program Director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project from 1992-2005. He spoke at the entrance to the Nevada Test site at the Shoshone peace and anti nuclear gathering in May 2003 – unraveling the broken Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863.
We were broadcasting him on a micro power radio station LIVE into the high security area of the test site that was then administered by the [ . . . ]
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Who will Protect the Earth?
On January second, 2021 a message began traveling out from Crescent Valley, Nevada. Western Shoshone elder Carrie Dann had passed and joined her sister Mary in the Spirit World.
For over 40 years the Dann Sisters were keeping Shoshone tradition and land rights alive against formidable opposition: Expanding gold mines, confiscation of their horses and cattle by armed federal agents and nuclear testing and waste storage.
In honor and in memory of Carrie Dann I’m returning to recordings I made on Shoshone land. In June 2003 we came in support of the Danns against the recent violent armed raids by federal agents on their horses and cattle.
The traditional Shoshone held council in a camp at the base [ . . . ]
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Future of Public Banking – Professor Richard Wolff just finished another book. The sub-title is: “When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.” Longtime critic of the private for profit banking system, Ellen Brown, campaigns to return control of money and credit to states, cities, and communities. She invited Richard Wolff to a an interview on Zoom on December 17, 2020. The 30 minute conversation is archived on the YouTube channel of The Public Banking Institute, founded in 2011 by Ellen Brown.
She is an attorney and author of 12 books, among them “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution”. Here she traces the history and evolution of the current private banking system, showing how it took [ . . . ]
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