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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

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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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

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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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

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.


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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

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"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.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

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.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

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Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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New Global Movement Now Waging Humanity's Most Important Struggle – to Confront Climate Change

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Posted April 24, 2013

Excerpt of speech by climate change activist Bill McKibben accepting the Gandhi Peace Award April 18, 2013, produced by Melinda Tuhus

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Writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben was in Hamden, Conn., on April 18 receive the Gandhi Peace Award from the group Promoting Enduring Peace, which in the past has recognized leaders such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Cesar Chavez, and Daniel Ellsberg. It was the first time in the award's 50-plus year history that it was bestowed for environmental work. McKibben published “The End of Nature” in 1989, the first book about climate change for a non-scientific audience. Over the past decade, he has become one of the most outspoken proponents of serious steps to address existing climate catastrophe, with the prediction of more severe disasters to come.

In 2008 McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Vermont’s Middlebury College co-founded 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009 demanding government action and regulations to address climate change.

In his remarks accepting the Gandhi Peace Award before a crowd of about 200 at the Hamden Unitarian Church, McKibben gave a brief history of the movement, starting with a 2006 50-mile walk of a thousand people across Vermont to a rally in Burlington, the state’s largest city. He recounted that participants were feeling very good about it, until the next day.

BILL MCKIBBEN: But the thing that was depressing was opening the newspaper the next day and read this story that said the 1,000 people that gathered there was probably the largest demonstration about climate change that had yet taken place in the U.S. – this was in 2006. When I read that, I thought, no wonder we lose; we've got the superstructure of the movement; we've got Al Gore; we've got the scientists, the policy people. The only part of the movement we forgot was the movement part (laughter) – there's nothing there, and that's what we're going to have to build. So that's what we started trying to build, and 350.org we started shortly after. When I say "we" I mean me and seven undergraduates at Middlebury College, seven seniors. We had no money or organization or anything. We had this name, which we took from [climate scientist] Jim Hansen, who told us 350 ppm CO2 was the most we could safely have in the atmosphere – a number we're, sadly, well north of. We took it mostly because we wanted to organize globally, and the thing we were most worried about was how we were going to communicate across language barriers, and, you know, Arabic numerals travel. As you saw in that beautiful video you saw at the beginning, all over the world people figured out what these numbers meant and got to work.

When we started, there were seven undergraduate students, and seven continents, so each one took one (laughter). The guy who took the Antarctic also took the Internet (laughter). And we set out and within a year we had this first big day of action which had 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries (applause). One of the things that it proved was that having an organization made up entirely of 21-year-olds was not a handicap; it was a great advantage, because they knew how to use these new tools that we now have that allow, suddenly, organizing on a different kind of scale and it's beautiful. Over the next two or three years, we did three or four of these huge global days of action. We had 20,000 rallies – every country on the earth except North Korea; tremendous amount of climate education got done and that was necessary, but it's insufficient by itself to the task at hand, so we've been trying hard and consciously to try and deepen this work, this movement. And our decision to go after the Keystone pipeline and to do it with civil disobedience was very conscious. This is a huge pool of carbon up in Canada that no one knew anything about. And to build the pipeline – and this is the other key part – you need a permit signed by the president of the United States. Congress – because of a kind of arcane law about infrastructure that crosses a border – Congress has nothing to do with it; it's up to the president. So we figured there was a chance.

Civil disobedience was probably something we've neglected for too long in this country. And when we decided to do it, it was a conscious decision to experiment and to see if there was support in the environmental community for ramping things up some, and I was really pleased to find out that there was. The people that we found – capitalism being the great thing that it is, there's somebody to do everything in this world – and we found a team in Washington whose expertise and career was in arranging civil disobedience (laughter). They are cool people who have now become our great friends and colleagues. We hired them and they were very eager to go to work, but they kept saying, "You have to understand" – I told them we were going to do this every day for two weeks, get people arrested every day at the White House – and they said, you have to understand that we can do it but it will be four or five people a day, because they'd been doing this for a long time and that was the scale this had been going on at. I said, No, I think we'll get more. I think there are more people out there worried about this. Indeed, when we got there that first day, there were 80 or 90 of us waiting to get arrested, which was way more than we expected and way more than the police expected (applause). That's why we got to go to jail, because the police knew there was two weeks of this planned, and they didn't want it. And they said, We're going to try to deter you. So instead of doing what they normally do in Washington, which is to take you to the police station and fine you $100, and that's what we were expecting. I think everybody had $100 in their pocket. They instead took us to Central Cellblock in D.C. for three days and two nights, which was just as much fun as it sounds like (laughter).

It worked the way civil disobedience is supposed to do: it both brought attention to the problem and underlined the moral urgency and helped us kick off this campaign that so far has kept this cursed pipeline at bay for a year-and-a-half and so kept half a billion barrels or so of tar sands in the ground.

It's wonderful to see it happen – all the things that people are doing in a thousand local places to stand up to the local coal-fired power plant that's driving up asthma rates; to stand up to the pipeline that's going through their back yard; to stand up as part of 350 or whatever else – all those things kind of knit together, and we're going to knit them together further.

This segment was recorded and produced by Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus. Find more information on the growing global climate change movement by visiting 350.org.

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