Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.
Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.
His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.
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Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement
Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris
Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.
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who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!
For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video
Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.
Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.
"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.
Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.
Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.
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Tweets by @BTLRadioNewsPosted July 11, 2012
Interview with Mark Hertsgaard, journalist and author, conducted by Melinda Tuhus
The year 2012 is on track to be the hottest in recorded history, while high temperatures and drought conditions have been linked to destructive forest fires and other natural disasters that are exactly the kinds of occurrences that climate scientists have predicted will come with global warming.
Yet, the June Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which commemorated the first Earth Summit held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, was widely criticized as a failure for producing an international agreement which lacks enforceable commitments to confront and reverse climate change.
Mark Hertsgaard, author of “Earth Odyssey,” reports on the environment for The Nation magazine, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and other publications. His newest book is titled, “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth,” which he wrote for his daughter's generation. Hertsgaard says after his daughter Chiara was born seven years ago, he became even more adamant about addressing climate change and holding to account the political and business leaders who ignore the Earth's and its people's plight. In his book, he notes that climate change has arrived almost a century ahead of predictions. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Mark Hertsgaard about the worsening weather and environmental conditions connected with climate change and a new group he’s organizing called Climate Parents.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Yeah, we are living with climate change now. It's going to get worse simply because of the physical inertia of the climate system, the fact that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for decades after it's emitted. So we've got a big job in front of us, there's no doubt. And meanwhile, we've got the president of the U.S. not saying a word about global warming, even though he knows very well what the science tells him. We don't see any real leadership coming from the national level, so I think, as always in history, it's going to rely on people from the bottom organizing together and forcing their leaders to do what's right. And that's something I'm getting started now with a group called Climate Parents -- we want to try to organize and mobilize parents around the climate issue because it – climate change – certainly endangers the thing we all hold most dear in our lives, and that's our kids.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Say more about Climate Parents.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Climate Parents is a new group that a number of us are just beginning now, and its agenda is simple: We think parents are the most under-organized constituency on climate change, which is quite bizarre when you think about what's at stake for our kids. And so what we want to do is give voice and political impact to parents across the country and across the partisan political spectrum. We don't believe that climate change should be a partisan political issue, because we think all parents want to have a safe and healthy future for their kids. But we also think that dealing with the climate issue now is part of your job description as a parent, just like providing your kid with proper food and clothing and shelter and health care and all those things, climate change and dealing with it is part of the job description of being a parent, because we now know that my daughter, Chiara, who's 7 years old – she and the rest of her generation – are now fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with what will be the hottest and most volatile climate in the 10,000 years of human civilization.
So you can think of today's young people as what I call Generation Hot, and we owe it to them, having put them in this predicament. We owe it them as their parents, their grandparents, aunts and uncles and anyone who cares about young people. We owe it to them to try and find the ways to let them cope with this problem successfully. And let's emphasize here, we know how to deal with climate change. We have the solutions; we know what to do technologically. It's all there – solar and wind power and geothermal and energy efficiency and all of the other solutions – I go into them in great depth in my book, "Hot."
The problem is the lack of political will and the fact that our government is under the control of very large business interests who profit from the current situation, you know, the oil companies, the coal companies, natural gas... It is remarkable, and bizarre, that our tax dollars are now being spent, in the billions, to subsidize ExxonMobil, the single richest, most profitable corporation in human history. We are subsidizing them to wreck the climate for our kids.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Mark Hertsgaard, so this is a group to apply political pressure on officials?
MARK HERTSGAARD: We do think that it does have to be political involvement. It's nice, and it's important as a first step, for a family to change their lifestyle choices and consumption patterns. So maybe you take mass transit more often than the car, or eat less meat and more vegetables, take the bicycle – there are a lot of personal lifestyle changes that you can make, and those are useful, but they are much, much less than what's necessary to solve this problem.
As long as we have this economic system, and rules of the road economically that essentially allow carbon dioxide pollution to be emitted for free, nobody pays a price for that, certainly not the corporations, or us the consumers. It's not incorporated into the price; indeed, as I said, we're subsidizing oil and coal and natural gas. As long as that's the case, we can't make much difference. We've got to change the main drivers of climate change, and those are the government policies and the business practices of today's world. We can do this; we know how to do this. It's a matter of changing the big political decisions, and that requires people to get involved in politics. I know, for some people, that's about as enticing a prospect as getting a root canal. But I just would remind you – especially if you're a parent or a grandparent – there are a lot of things we don't feel like doing, but we do them because they will make a difference for our kids.
Learn more about Climate Parents and the effects of climate change on weather and the environment at ClimateParents.org (a new website coming soon).
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