Podcasts

Independent Radio on CDs, DVDs and the Internet

Edward Said: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights, Archive 2003

Edward Said’s last major speech on Palestine before his death in September 2003      Among the over twelve hundred programs in the TUC Radio archives this is one of my favorites. That’s based on the respect I have for the speaker, Edward Said, and the ongoing sadness that, to this day, so little is known about the history of Palestine.
This is Edward Said’s last major speech on Palestine, the war on Iraq and the Bush administration. On September 25, 2003, a message made its way around the world. Edward Said, Palestinian American, world famous professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and fearless defender of the Palestinian cause had died of leukemia in New York City, far from the [ . . . ]

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Ilan Pappe: The US has NO LIMITS when it comes to ISRAEL

The historian Ilan Pappe comments on the missile launch towards Tel Aviv, the ICC ruling, and his own interrogation by the FBI     Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and political scientist. He is now a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
His best known book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Based on declassified British and Israeli government documents, the book explains that the expulsions of Palestinians were executed based on a plan drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. Ilan Pappe left Israel in 2008 after being condemned in the Knesset. A minister of education had called for him to be sacked.
Frank Barat, the French activist, [ . . . ]

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John Mearsheimer discusses Gaza – Interview on TRT, the Turkish public broadcast service

On May 18, 2024, Paul Salvatori, Presenter & Senior Producer at TRT World, invited Professor John Mearsheimer for a conversation     Professor Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer is best known for describing the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the desire to achieve regional hegemony.
Mearsheimer is also internationally known for the 2007 book he co-authored with Stephen Walt, entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”. The core argument is that the Israel Lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S. policy – both domestic and international.
Mearsheimer has recently been in high [ . . . ]

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Professor Richard Wolff: Freedom of Speech, Gaza and students’ right to protest

and The conflation of antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government         Within a week, in early May of 2024, the renowned professor of economics put out two commentaries on his Wolff Responds podcast that break the mainstream media taboo, or misinformation, on the responses by university administrators and police to campus opposition to the war on Gaza.
Richard Wolff is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School in New York City.
This is also a personal response by Prof. Wolff to the extraordinary harsh actions by the New School administrators to the pro-Palestinian encampments at the university. They called the New York City [ . . . ]

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This is an archival TUC Radio program on Mining in America with Larry Tuttle

With 2024 Updates of the 1872 Mining Law   Even though mines – from iron to copper to gold to minerals, such as lithium mines can be so huge that they can be seen from space – and are destructive to land and water and forests – recent proposed legislation in the US aims at expanding mining.
It turns out that, ironically, the transition to a green economy with wind turbines, solar arrays, electric vehicles and battery storage requires an unprecedented increase in mining for lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, tungsten, aluminum, graphite and more.
Here is an archival TUC Radio program on Mining in America. In 1995 I bought a beat up RV, put all my radio equipment in it and took off [ . . . ]

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Jonathan Haidt with Tristan Harris: Social Media and the Epidemic of Childhood Mental Illness

Excessive screen time on phones coincides with the sharp increase in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people     Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Anxious Generation and the Epidemic of Childhood Mental Illness, published in March 2024. He is in conversation with Tristan Harris, an ex-employee of Google. Harris had a key role in the Netflix documentary film The Social Dilemma and explained how the design of social media platforms manipulates people’s views, emotions, and behavior.
Thanks to the Commonwealth Club of California Jonathan Haidt and Tristan Harris appeared together on stage on April 1, 2024.
This is a 24 minute excerpt of their conversation. For the full hour recording, that also shows the images of the graphs that present the [ . . . ]

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Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, April 2024

A crucial effort to ship humanitarian supplies to Gaza and bring about a ceasefire    “We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.” That’s a message from Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of CODEPINK.
She is one of hundreds of participants from 32 countries that are now gathered in Istanbul, Turkey, to sail on three ships to Gaza, carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid.
TUC Radio is helping spread the word of this crucial effort by quoting George Galloway from the UK, and former U.S. Colonel Ann Wright in an interview with Eleanor Goldfield of Project Censored. Also a brief clip from a news report [ . . . ]

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Billionaires are pillaging America. How to fight back? Chris Hedges with Les Leopold

Les Leopold is the author of Wall Street’s War on Workers   Chris Hedges interviewed Leopold on April 5, 2024 on The Real News Network. Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. He hosts the program The Chris Hedges Report on The Real News Network.
Leopold co-founded the Labor Institute and wrote How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the working-class – And What to Do About It. Published on Feb. 22, 2024
This is a 26 minute excerpt of an extraordinary 54 minute video that I urge you to see on line under the title: Billionaires are pillaging America. How to fight back?
Please make use of the facts and strategies presented in this program, they might play a crucial role [ . . . ]

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Simon Michaux – Unveiling the Paradox: Extracting Non-Renewable Riches for a Sustainable Tomorrow

How to reach a sustainable future with renewable energy    Where will all the metals and minerals come from that we need for solar panels, windmills, batteries and electric cars?
Simon Michaux did 18 years of development and research in the mines of Australia. He knows that minerals and metals are already running short and that we need to create a circular economy based on recycling.
In 2015 Simon Michaux came to Europe to learn industrial recycling and the circular economy at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. Michaux is now Associate Professor at GTK, the Geological Survey of Finland. He works with governments, United Nations agencies, non profits and financial institutions to help develop the renewable grid.
He was interviewed by Tony from Sustainable [ . . . ]

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Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges discuss Israel and Gaza at Princeton University

They spoke on March 28, 2024 before an overflow audience   Here are highlights from an almost two-hour event streamed Live and archived by the Real News Network.
Norman Finkelstein is the author of many books, including the Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. He received his PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Politics and has held faculty positions at Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges, and Rutgers, New York, and DePaul Universities. Finkelstein’s personal experience shaped his life. His mother survived the Majdanek concentration camp, his father survived Auschwitz.
Chris Hedges was the Middle East Bureau chief for the New York Times and a vocal critic of the invasion of Iraq. He left the [ . . . ]

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Michael Parenti: Capitalism’s Apocalypse – ARCHIVE

Why the rich can’t save anybody – not even themselves
                           
2024 Tribute – Updated Archive:  Parenti predicted the financial crisis and said that giant corporate capitalism – by it’s very nature – is an apocalyptic system. When unregulated the built in elements of ever increased growth may well bring the whole system down. And he described the growing national debt not as a tragic mistake but as a means to shift ever more money from the tax payers to the financial institutions in the form of interest payments.
This speech is an analysis of the many structural flaws of a capitalist system that puts it on a permanent collision course with democracy. Recorded on August 23, 2008 at the closing reception [ . . . ]

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The Assassination of Julius Caesar by Michael Parenti – Archive

A People’s History of Ancient Rome with Lessons for Today   Who was Julius Caesar, a dictator or a populist? And who really was Brutus, who murdered him on the Ides of March? A young hero or a participant in a deep seated conspiracy? This intriguing lecture by the noted author, speaker, activist and scholar Michael Parenti provides surprising new insights and parallels to today that are both shocking and amusing.
This rebroadcast is part of the very popular and ever expanding series on what Parenti called Real History, a different and intriguing reading of a surprisingly large number all too familiar stories.
Parenti spoke about his Pulitzer Price nominated book: The Assassination of Julius Caesar, a people’s history of ancient Rome. He [ . . . ]

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Victoria Nuland Resigns – Glenn Greenwald and Ray McGovern Comment

Nuland was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the third highest ranking US Diplomat position     Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and American foreign policy. In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept and was the editor until he resigned in October 2020. Greenwald now is self-publishing on Substack.
The Hill is a source for policy and political news. Glenn Greenwald was interviewed on their news commentary show, “Rising”.
Five days after the Greenwald interview the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern speculated that political differences between Nuland and Biden administration officials may have led to her surprise ouster.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration [ . . . ]

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Ilan Pappe: In Gaza now, it’s worse than ethnic cleansing

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is interviewed by Dareen Abughaida on Al Jazeera English     Dareen Abughaida is a Palestinian-Lebanese broadcast journalist based in Doha, Qatar. She’s currently working as the principal news presenter and host for Al Jazeera English. Dareen previously worked for Bloomberg L.P., CNBC, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
Al Jazeera English is a 24-hour English-language news channel. It is funded by the government of Qatar and the first world-wide English-language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East. Al Jazeera broadcasts in over 150 countries and territories, and has a global audience of 430 million people.
Dareen Abughaida interviewed Ilan Pappe on Feb 25, 2024. Pappe is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This [ . . . ]

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The War on Truth – Julian Assange with Yanis Varoufakis

DiEM25 goes Live Stream while London’s High Court decides whether Julian Assange can be extradited to the US    DiEM25 is a pan-European, progressive movement. They aim to democratize the EU before it disintegrates. DiEM25 members met by ZOOM on Feb 20, 2024, to comment on the court proceedings.
The moderator, Mehran Khalili, is an adviser to DiEM25 and writes about censorship and misinformation.
Yanis Varoufakis, economics professor and acclaimed author, was Minister of Finance in 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during their debt crisis.
Judith Meyer from Berlin, Germany, is a linguist and author and has been working for DiEM25 since 2016.
This recording, The War on Truth – Julian Assange with Yanis Varoufakis, is part of a 58 minute Live [ . . . ]

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