Climate Change
Show Details for the week of January 14th, 2013
- Beyond the Obama-Karzai Spin: Oil and Afghan War – an interview with Antonia Juhasz
- Brennan and Hagel – One Claimed no Civilian Drone Killings and the other Voted for Iraq War – an interview with Ray McGovern
Antonia Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz is a fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism and was recently in Afghanistan. She wrote the just-published piece “The New War for Afghanistan’s Untapped Oil,” which states: “With the close of 2012, the Pentagon has revealed a disturbing trend in Afghanistan: Taliban attacks remained steady, or in some cases increased, over 2011 levels. I experienced the Taliban surge firsthand this past November, and can offer a cause not cited in the Pentagon’s report: oil and gas.”
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Reuters reports: “President Barack Obama on Monday will announce the nominations of Republican Chuck Hagel as his next defense secretary and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as the new CIA director, a senior administration official said.”
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern is a veteran CIA analyst. He has scrutinized Brennan’s backing of torture and drone killings. See his interview “Obama’s and Brennan’s ‘Kill List'” and his letter on Brennan, in which he notes: “Nov. 24, 2008 saw the publication of a letter to President-Elect Obama, signed by 200 psychologists, urging him not to select John Brennan to head the CIA because of his open support of ‘dark-side’ policies (Brennan’s, as well as Dick Cheney’s, adjective). Brennan withdrew his name the next day, and The New York Times explained the move as a reaction to ‘concerns he was intimately linked to controversial CIA programs authorized by President Bush. Brennan is now the administration’s strongest advocate of extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens by drones. As for civilian deaths from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Brennan made the preposterous claim [in June 2011] that, over the previous year, ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death’ from CIA drone strikes there.” McGovern is scheduled to speak at a protest at 1:00 p.m. outside the White House, as Obama is scheduled to make the nomination.
McGovern also recently wrote “Obama Needs Hagel in the Pentagon.” McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates.
Show Details for the week of July 9th, 2012
- Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi recently reversed a Constitutional Court ruling declaring the parliament unconstitutional. We talk with Seif Da’na.
- With all the extreme weather we have been seeing across the US the discussion of climate change has been conspicuously absent. We talk about the issue with Neil deMause.
Seif Da’Na
Seif Da’Na is an associate professor of sociology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside specializing in the Mideast and North Africa.
Quote: (Seif said this prior to the most recent events but I leave it here because it explains some context) “Egypt’s SCAF [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] exploited the transitional period and people’s faith in the armed forces to abort the revolution through a slowly, but well-planned coup. The outcome is a major setback to the revolution in Egypt and the region, but might result in significantly weakening the Muslim Brotherhood, whose performance during this period not only divided the revolution camp but also enabled SCAF to carry out its premeditated scheme. “On June 14, 2012, SCAF initiated what most commentators, as well as Egypt’s activists, believe was nothing less than a coup d’etat. Egypt’s High Constitutional Court, whose justices are remnants of Mubarak’s regime, dissolved the newly democratically elected parliament. Later, the Minister of Interior Affairs issued a decree empowering military police and intelligence to indefinably arrest any person considered a threat to public order, which restores the 30-year-old emergency law that was revoked a few weeks ago due to activists’ pressure. “On the eve of the run-off election, the coup was completed with SCAF’s second constitutional declaration that basically revokes the president’s power and places him under its power, in addition to taking over the legislative power of the dissolved Parliament. This renders an expected victory of Mohammad Mursi (the Muslim Brotherhood candidate) rather insignificant (the official results of the runoff elections are scheduled to be announced on Thursday, but both campaigns contest the claims of the other).” See on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/accuracy/egypt
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Neil deMause
Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively about climate change coverage for FAIR’s magazine Extra! — including the article “The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change.”
Quote: “Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is causing dramatic changes in weather patterns — from increasingly deadly heat waves and wildfires to hurricanes and tornadoes — media coverage has bent over backwards to avoid making the connection between extreme weather events and the warming climate. Instead, reporters have largely hidden behind the truism that there’s no way to say that any given event was caused by climate change. Yes, in the same way that it’s hard to show that any given person wouldn’t have gotten cancer without smoking cigarettes — but that doesn’t mean that journalists should avoid reporting that smoking kills.”
Show Details for the week of October 31st, 2011
This is the last show during this pledge drive for KPFT
Please support the show by calling 713-526-5738 and making a tax-deductible donation.
This week’s show looks at the 99% and the 1%.
- According to the United Nations, world population will reach the 7 billion mark today. Is this massive population the cause of environmental issues? Discussing this topic will be Chris Williams
- Occupations and Public vs Congress and Super Committee. The CBO just released a study finding that the top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades. David Swanson returns to the show to talk about his activism, the Occupy Movement and military spending
Chris Williams is author of “Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis” and a professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University.He joins The Monitor to talk about population and the environment.
Quote: “It isn’t population growth that is causing food scarcity or is primarily responsible for the many accelerating global environmental crises. Even if population growth were to end today, worsening rates of starvation, the growth of slums, and ecosystem collapse would continue more or less unabated. Food production continues to outstrip population growth and therefore cannot be considered the cause of hunger. Clearly, there are very serious planetary problems of soil erosion, overfishing, deforestation and waste disposal, to name only a few, which are putting pressure on the sustainability of food production over the long haul. However, these are all inextricably bound to questions of power and a system run in the interest of a small minority — the 1% — where profit continually outweighs issues of hunger, waste, energy use, or environmental destruction. Concentrating on population confuses symptoms with causes.”
Website:
Ecology and Socialism by Chris Williams
David Swanson is with the group RootsAction and has been involved in the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Some from that occupation have protested at recent congressional hearings. Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.”
Quote: “Super Congress Member John Kerry’s home state is fifth in the nation in military spending, employing lots of registered voters building machines of death for Raytheon, whose former head was brought in by the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Defense and who told the Washington Times in June, ‘The wars of the future will be longer, deadlier and waged against a more diverse variety of enemies than ever before.’ “Super Congress co-chair Patty Murray, Democrat from Boeing, since 2007 has taken $276,000 from war industries, Max Baucus $139,000, Dave Camp $130,000, John Kerry $73,000, and so on. The President who must sign or veto whatever comes out of the Super Congress and the Less Than Super Congress took over $1 million from war industries just in the 2008 election, not to mention $39 million from finance, insurance, and real estate. Targeting our social safety net is a goal that Wall Street and the military industrial complex have shared for many years. And of course the general corporate exploitation of foreign resources and workers depends on the threat of military force. Military spending has increased at the President’s request each year since 2008 as well as since 2001. “Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, a conversation has been launched about the damage the wealthiest one percent is doing to the rest of us. California just pulled out of a mortgage fraud settlement deal that is expected to let the crooks off easy. Who’s to say Occupy Wall Street didn’t influence that decision? “The Super Congressional crusade to slash spending can only be carried through without causing massive misery and death in one of two ways, neither of which the U.S. Congress or President wants to touch, but both of which are central demands of the Occupation movement. The first is to significantly raise taxes on the super wealthy. The second is to significantly cut spending on the military. A progressive demand right now is not ‘Jobs Not Cuts’ but ‘Jobs Not Wars.’ “Seventy members of Congress have pointed out that ending the two biggest current wars in fiscal year 2012 would save $1.8 trillion over the following decade, above planned savings from promised reductions in troops. But war spending is pocket change in comparison with the overall military and security budget. “Leon Panetta, who holds the position that we used to more usefully call ‘Secretary of War,’ considers $350 billion over 10 years, or $35 billion per year, to be serious cuts to the national security budget. But he’s discussing cuts to dreamed-of future budgets. The current budget would still increase under those so-called cuts. But imagine really taking $35 billion from a budget of well over a trillion. (According to Chris Hellman of National Priorities Project, the security budget is $1.2 trillion, including the spy agencies and various other departments.) That would be a cut of less than 3.5 percent. “China spends about $114 billion per year on its military. Let’s generously assume there are enough hidden costs in China’s budget to double it to $228 billion. And let’s assume that we must spend twice as much as they do, because … well, just because. Now we’re at $456 billion. How do we get from there to Panetta describing a U.S. security budget of $965 billion as the lowest we can safely go, and a budget of $950 billion as ‘doomsday’? Is the danger here to us or to the profits of the weapons makers who are also demanding that any cuts made be made to troops’ benefits rather than to weaponry?”
Website:
Friend of the show and best-selling author Greg Palast is coming to Houston as part of his book tour and will be speaking to KPFT listeners to raise money for the station.
This event is a benefit for KPFT.| Print |
Greg Palast is best known as the investigative reported who uncovered how Katherine Harris purged thousands of African-Americans from Florida voters rolls in the 2000 Presidential Election.Author of the New York Times and international bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse, Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde.“Vulture’s Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators”.
Event Details:
Book signing and movie Presentation: Thursday December 8, 2011
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 5501 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77004 (Location Map)
Praise for Greg Palast:
“A cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes” (Jim Hightower, The Nation), Greg Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering. Palast’s reports appear on BBC’s Newsnight and in Britain’s Guardian, Rolling Stone and Harper’s.
Palast directed the US’ government’s largest racketeering case in history (that garnered a $4.3 billion jury award) and the investigation of the Exxon Valdez.
Palast is recipient of the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Prize for his BBC television documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
Fund Raising – shows the week of 10/17 through 10/31 2011
KPFT is fund raising for this and the next two shows. Please support the show by calling 713-526-5738 and making a tax-deductible donation.
Friend of the show and best-selling author Greg Palast is coming to Houston as part of his book tour and will be speaking to KPFT listeners to raise money for the station.
This event is a benefit for KPFT.| Print |
Greg Palast is best known as the investigative reported who uncovered how Katherine Harris purged thousands of African-Americans from Florida voters rolls in the 2000 Presidential Election.Author of the New York Times and international bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse, Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde.“Vulture’s Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators”.
Event Details:
Book signing and movie Presentation: Thursday December 8, 2011
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 5501 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77004 (Location Map)
Praise for Greg Palast:
“A cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes” (Jim Hightower, The Nation), Greg Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering. Palast’s reports appear on BBC’s Newsnight and in Britain’s Guardian, Rolling Stone and Harper’s.
Palast directed the US’ government’s largest racketeering case in history (that garnered a $4.3 billion jury award) and the investigation of the Exxon Valdez.
Palast is recipient of the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Prize for his BBC television documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
Show Details for Monday June 20th, 2011
This week The Monitor looks at the environment and government surveillance with guests Chip Ward and Shahid Buttar
Chip Ward
Chip Ward is a TomDispatch regular, writes from Torrey, Utah. He is the author of two books, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. His essays can be found by clicking here. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global “weirding,” click here, or download it to your iPod here.
We will talk about his recent article: Tomgram: Chip Ward, Fire’s Manifest Destiny
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Shahid Buttar
Shahid Buttar is the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
Quote: “Over Director Mueller’s ten-year tenure, the FBI has repeatedly violated the rights of peaceful Americans, abused its powers, lied to Congress, and overlooked opportunities to better protect national security — yet the White House and Congress seem poised to support these failures by extending the director’s term. The executive branch is off the rails, and the legislature asleep at the switch.”
Background: Recent pieces by Buttar: “Do not Extend FBI Director’s Term” and “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire: Why the FBI Needs New Leadership.“
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