Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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The Greatest Evil is War
United States has been at war almost continuously over the last 80 years. Chris Hedges has titled his latest book, The Greatest Evil is War. He is our guest today. What is the driving force behind this nearly a century of war? Who is responsible? What are the institutions in United States that carry it on? What is to be done about it?
What forces in our country can stop the slaughter and the constant waste of resources that is consuming us and threatening us with the possibility of nuclear war, which would wipe out all life on our planet. Today we will explore the economic, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of the American war machine. We will talk about the military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. We will talk about its handmaidens, the media, Congress, the universities and the think tanks which advocate for war.
We will talk about the political consequences of permanent war and the fascist direction America is increasingly going in. Most profoundly we will talk about capitalism and fascism from which it springs. And finally we will talk about the social forces necessary to stop and reverse war.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
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American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served 40 years Is Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons-16 of them on death row -for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer which he did not commit
The judge who convicted him was overheard promising“I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Mumia is an important figure in African-American history. Before his conviction he was a nationally broadcast award winning radio journalist and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and it’s notorious Police Chief and then Mayor Frank Rizzo.
He had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show “ Live from Death Row“. He holds a masters degree and is working on a PhD in history.
On October 26, 2022 Mumia’s attorneys appeared in court in an effort to get him a new trial. His defense petition included newly discovered evidence that had been buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented a key witness receiving promises of money for their testimony and evidence of favorable treatment of another in a criminal case. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
Judge Lucretia Clemons preliminarily denied his constitutional right to present this information. She is likely to finalize this ruling on his upcoming court date in Philadelphia on December 9, 2022.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan is the director of Prison Radio, a multimedia production studio that brings to the public the voices of incarcerated women, men and children. She seeks to honor the agency and humanity of prisoners by bringing their uncensored essays into mainstream discourse. She has produced over 3,500 multimedia recordings from over 100 prison radio correspondents, including the critically acclaimed work of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1995, she brought out of prison his first book, Live From Death Row (Harper Perennial), which became a best seller. In 2013, she co-produced the theatrically released feature documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary (Street Legal Cinema/First Run Features). She received her BA in Gender, Race and Class in the 19th and 20th Centuries from Stanford University, and an MA in Criminal Justice from Boston University. She also holds private investigator licenses in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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Chris Hedges: Social Change And Democracy 2022
You can’t have organized activity for social change without democracy. Social change and democracy are bound up with one another. But America is not a democracy. This is by design. It was never intended to be. The founding fathers – there were no founding mothers – wrote a document 245 years ago in Philadelphia that excluded more Americans than it included.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations are people entitled to free speech rights. So they can give as much money as they want to political campaigns. Last month an industrialist gave $1.6 billion to the Republicans. Like Bob Dylan wrote, “money doesn’t talk it swears.“ It is impossible to have a democracy in a country like ours with such vast income and wealth disparity.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have a lock on the political process. It is nearly impossible to start a third-party. When Ralph Nader ran the Democrats did everything they could to stop him, launching many lawsuits trying to knock him off state ballots.
Since its founding, the ever-growing effects of unlimited money in elections, the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts, the fraudulent removal of poor and minority voters from voter registration rolls, reduction in the number of voting locations in minority districts, the unfair advantage given to Canada is favored by corporate America, including America’s corporate media, all combine to leave us with a very unfair and very undemocratic system of governance in America
Guest – Chris Hedges, the most penetrating journalist we have. He once worked for the New York Times and even won a Pulitzer Prize. But he was forced out. He had a show on our RT which was closed down by our government and some 600 of his show “On Contact” were taken off of YouTube.
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The State of Labor Unions And Recent Worker Strikes
For decades now only about 11% of workers in America have been members of unions, whereas previously more than 35% were union members. Various pieces of pro-management legislation and court opinions caused this diminution in union membership and, as a consequence, a weakening of the rights of American workers. But in recent years, as a result of militant fight back efforts by exploited workers in many industries, unions have once again been having some success in organizing efforts at various workplaces, like Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and Trader Joe’s.
But federal and state laws still create an up-hill fight for those seeking to organize workers into unions, and to win good labor contracts. So today we ask: do these few but growing number of recent labor union victories truly represent a new day for American workers and the unions that serve them? Do these localized labor victories suggest that more and bigger victories for workers are now within reach? Or, have these recent victories been simply exceptions to the still dismal overall state of union organizing in America? Are either of the two capitalist political parties sufficiently committed to advancing the right of workers to organize unions, or is an independent political movement or party needed to make significant union/worker gains? And what about the pending threat of a nation-wide railway worker’s strike? And if the railroad companies and their workers cannot reach a negotiated settlement acceptable to the railway workers, could President Biden step in and use the Railway Labor Act in an effort to prevent a railway strike with its devastating consequences for the U.S. economy?
Guest – Alan Benjamin, long-time union organizer and workers’ advocate. A leader in his own union, he has served on the Executive Council of the San Francisco AFL-CIO Labor Council. He is also one of the principal organizers of the organization known as Labor and Community for an Independent Party, or LCIP.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Ukraine, Russia, NATO and United States Conflict Analysis
As attacks escalate in Ukraine, the push for a no-fly zone over the country grows stronger. However last week there were indicators that top Ukrainian negotiators are moving toward a cease-fire deal. This comes as we’ve reported last week that the United States has baited the Russian bear repeatedly, starting in 1990 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. At that time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the US-led NATO organization would not move “one inch” east towards Russia. This promise was broken.
The Russians were betrayed.Since then, NATO has recruited 11 former Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact countries into its military organization. Led by the United States, NATO is an organization has played an aggressive role, having carried out the bombings of Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Libya.
NATO has placed missiles in Poland within 100 miles of the Russian border. Missiles on the long border between Ukraine and Russia could hit Moscow in 10 minutes making it impossible for Russia to defend itself. Russia’s attempts to make United States understand that they have crossed a red line has been consistently rejected.
This is not to defend Russia’s actions but to place them in historical context. The world now has come to the edge of an abyss. A nuclear war could easily be started, annihilating all of humanity. The rule of law must be restored.
Russia must honor a cease-fire and withdraw. The United States must forswear arming Ukraine and recruiting the Ukraine into NATO. Ukraine must go forward as a neutral country like Austria or Finland.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
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Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
Assata Shakur is an inspiration to many young Black and brown activists today. She was a Black Panther Party member in New York in 1968 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said that the Panthers were the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.“ Hoover launched the Cointelpro program to eliminate the Black Panthers.
When the Panthers broke up, Assata became a member of the Black Liberation Army. She was seriously wounded and apprehended in 1973 by state troopers in a shoot-out on a New Jersey highway. She was tried and convicted of murdering a state trooper even though the medical evidence showed that she was badly injured and could not have fired a gun.
Assata escaped from prison in 1979 and five years later, she was given political asylum in revolutionary Cuba where she lives today. The FBI has put a $2 million bounty on her head. She has a target on her back inasmuch as she is wanted dead or alive.
Guest – Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Murch, who specializes in African-American and US History, Black Radicalism, and History of Mass Incarceration, is known as the historian of the Black Panther Party. She has recently written the book “Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives” published by Haymarket Books. In it, she analyzes the forces giving rise to Black Power and Black radicalism, mass incarceration, the militarization of the police who target people of color, and the genesis of Black Lives Matter.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture
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Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
American society is in an ever deepening crisis. Half the population is poor or near poor. Three men including Jeff Bezos of Amazon own as much as all these tens of millions of people combined. Climate catastrophe threatens life on our planet. Equally threatening is a very real potential for a nuclear war. Democracy and the rule of law are in free fall.
A manifestation of this societal crisis is our system of mass incarceration. It is the largest in the world, warehousing well over 2 million people. It is, along with militarized police, the primary form of social control, especially for poor people of color, in de-industrialized cities where the poor have been abandoned and are treated little better than human refuse.
Black Americans have especially suffered. They are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans. Nationally, one in 81 Black adults in the U.S. is serving time in state prison. Wisconsin leads the nation in Black imprisonment rates; 1 of every 36 Black Wisconsinites is in prison. In 12 states, more than half the prison population is Black: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Seven states maintain a Black/white disparity larger than 9 to 1: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Chris Hedges has taught in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system for over a decade.
His new book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, is the story of a class he taught in East Jersey State Prison. His 28 students, who collectively had spent 515 years in prison, wrote a play about their lives called “Caged.”
The process of writing the play, which was eventually performed at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey to sold out audiences and was published by Haymarket Books, ripped down the emotional walls most erect in prison and allowed his students to express in heartbreaking detail the trauma, grief, loss and violence that marked their, as well as the institutionally racist structures, often unseen by those on the outside, which keep the poor poor. And yet, the play they wrote was, at its core, about radical love, the solidarity and bonds that keep them human outside and inside prison walls.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Chris Hedges Analysis Of Pre-Election Society In The United States
We are living in extraordinary times. At the same time we face both tremendous danger and extraordinary opportunity.
The danger comes from a failed state, a failed racist capitalist state they cannot afford safety let alone opportunity to its citizens. Our opportunity comes from the massive social mobilizations that we have not seen in 75 years. A young generation has risen up. White people are involved with black people who are providing leadership. Perhaps 20 million have taken to the streets.
Trump is desperate and resorts to stoking fear of violence, race baiting, lying, explaining to his followers that all the unrest is due to agitators, antifa, Marxist and socialists.
The Democratic Party has chosen to oppose Trump with Joe Biden. The best you can say about him is that he’s not Trump. He has vowed to veto a medicare for all bill if it comes across his desk and has suggested that police violence could be curbed if they shot people in the legs, not the chest. He is for giving police departments more money. The worst you can say about Biden and the Democratic Party is that they are not a bulwark against fascism.
The big financial backers of the Democratic Party crushed the Sanders campaign indicating they would rather have Trump than a social democrat who would cost them money and raise expectations. Sanders for his part missed his historic moment, twice, when he refused to break from the Democratic Party in both 2016 and 2020.
Instead he performs the function of a sheepdog herding people back into a moribund capitalist party that has nothing to offer as a way out of the combined climate, economic, race, the health crisis, and nuclear annihilation and nuclear annihilation
Guest – Chris Hedges about where we are at, how we got here, and what to do next. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He was the foreign correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years and served as middle eastern bureau chief. He is the host of Emmy award nominated RT America show On Contact and the author of numerous books Including America: The Fairwell Tour, Empire of Illusion, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
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Global Peace Film Festival 2020
At the end of September each year since 2003, the Global Peace Film Festival has used the power of the film to advance peace on earth. The Festival views “peace” not as the absence of conflict but as a framework for channeling, processing and resolving conflict through respectful and non-violent means. This year, the festival will be virtual, and runs from Monday September 21 until Sunday October 4.
In keeping with the spirit of the festival, the films highlight themes such as civil rights, environmental justice, ethics, human rights, immigration, LGBTQ+, music, social justice, voting, wellness and wildlife. Each year, our program is carefully curated to create a place for open dialogue, using the films as catalysts for change.
Guest – Nina Streich, The Global Peace Film Festival founder and executive director.
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