Turning back the clock on our global warming end-times

December 26

GUEST: Robert Connors, founding member of “Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment," co-founder of “Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline,” and founding member of “Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment," talks about grassroots activism versus the neoliberal fossil fuel industry. 

Stop Fracked Gas Pipeline

Hard to kill a very bad idea like fracking. Hard if that idea is making a lot of money for some elite investors and unethical banks. That's the way it is, and most of us can see it quite clearly in this year of 2020 vision.

Nuclear energy had the same problem. Investors and banks poured money in, the governmental regulators looked the other way, and our media rolled over and died, like the animals around Chernobyl or Fukushima. Like the people.

In fact, petroleum has always attracted the worst of the worst when it comes to human scum. Whether they are polluting Africa, poisoning the atmosphere or buying up our politicians, these investor criminals have always been intent on destroying the world around them for their filthy billions.

People like Robert Connors eschew purple prose; they just organize their grassroots communities to keep the poisons out. They attend meetings, research scientific papers, write letters to the local editors, and sometimes get arrested for standing in the way. Can people like Connors stop the pillage of the world around us? Can they turn the clock back on our global warming end-times?

Join the picket line for your species. 

Taking the resistance to the next level

December 19

GUEST: Creek Iversen, naturalist, environmental educator, summer camp co-coordinator, and sustainable community farmer, talks about the resistance to the massive Cricket Valley fracked gas plant being built in Dutchess County, NY.

Cricket Valley Shut Down

It was a cold day to be at the top of an enormous fracking plant tower. Yet Creek and several other activists held their ground, delaying for another day the construction of the largest frack gas plant in New York State.

Plants like this will spew climate killing gases into the atmosphere for the next several decades, insuring that disasters like the conflagration of Australia will be happening all over the word. The pipelines supplying this plant are almost as bad. They are huge and accident prone due to poor government regulations. Not only do they jeopardize farms and small towns, but larger spills can mean the death of regional aquifers that serve millions of people.

Fracking is fossil fuels gone mad. At the bottom of all this are the neoliberal criminals intent on squeezing the last dollar out of their poisonous investments. I like to think that some day, as our world collapses around us, these CEOs will be dragged out of their gated communities to face justice.

In the meantime, let's congratulate people like Creek Iversen who has taken the resistance to the next level.   

Campus president employed by the State of Israel

December 12

GUESTS: Two students from Bard College talk about their participation in a Students for Justice in Palestine rally and how the college as well as some outside hate organizations are trying to undermine their freedom of speech on Palestinian rights.

SJP Bard College

The war against free speech is heating up again on campuses, including at Bard College. Supposedly known for its "liberal" atmosphere, Bard has been threatening students with disciplinary action after a campus rally for Palestinian rights.

My heart goes out to these students. Despite worries about their academic status on campus and about career opportunities after graduation, they simply forge ahead and do the right thing. They and their group, Students for Justice in Palestine, rallied against a Zionist speaker with a long history of racist statements. They held up protest signs in the audience. Now the college accuses them of being anti-Semites.

We covered a lot of areas in the interview. I hadn't know that the campus president was also employed by the State of Israel (Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra). I was also unaware of the financial pressures that Bard was under, making the college even more hesitant to allow a voice for Palestinians on campus. Some well connected Zionist alums had supposedly demanded that the Students for Justine in Palestine be disciplined.

One of the two students is Jewish, and his expression of solidarity with the Palestinian cause was quite moving. It's a good interview in that it gives listeners an inside look at campus censorship and the resistance against apartheid Israel. 

Exposing the savagery of the few

December 5

GUEST: Dr. Nancy Murray, former director of education at the ACLU of Massachusetts, author of the book Palestinians: Life Under Occupation, and co-founder of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, talks about her over 20 trips to the West Bank and Gaza, and her evolving sense of what justice for Palestinians means. 

Water Justice in Palestine

Dr. Murray gave us the background story. Zionist leaders had long planned to seize and control water resources in the Holy Land. Using the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, and the various invasions of the West Bank since then, Israel has been able to control all the water, giving it freely to five million Jewish citizens while severely limiting it to five million Palestinians.

Of course, the Palestinians can't really grow crops with their restricted access to water. It's all part of the plan. Palestinians in Gaza hardly get any potable water at all, thanks to Israel's invasions and destruction of infrastructure. Half of the apartheid state is thirsty every day. The other half gets an unlimited supply for their pools and manicured lawns.

How does anyone not recognize the monstrosity such treatment? The occupation of Palestine is really a slow genocide, as are most imperialist colonies. The English colonized India and oversaw four major famines that killed over 50 million. The French colonized Algeria and starved large numbers of its native inhabitants. The Germans did the same in Namibia, and the Dutch had a long history of genocide in Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast and South Africa.

The colony of Israel is not an aberration, but only the latest in a long line of European bloodletting for profit. Someday, the occupation of Palestine will be over and the survivors will explore how Western civilization allowed such barbarism to thrive. As Gandhi suggested, Western civilization  would have been a "good idea."

What is left for the rest of us who are not profiting from butchering people in the Third World? We can expose the savagery of the few and demand change. Palestine will be free.

Vigilantes on a dying planet

November 21

GUEST: Jon Bowermaster, writer, long time National Geographic filmmaker, and host of the Green Radio Hour, talks about the climate crisis and other environmental issues impacting the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Oceans 8 Films

Jon's documentaries are moving and believable. He has a knack for finding the right people with a story to tell.

The stories are about an environment under threat from the monied elite and their oil and gas industries. Then there are the facilitators like Obama who talk about climate disaster but keep their activism to catchy phrases and hype. Both Hillary and Obama were in love with fracked gas, the source of much of their campaign funds. They were both frauds, and both managed to damage the system enough to elect a madman as president.

I say all this because Jon really doesn't. He doesn't look for villains in the destruction of the planet. He shows how it is happening, but doesn't personalize. He moves his viewers to become more active, but not to become hateful.

It is almost impossible to predict if any tactic can stop the crazy elite and their drive to destroy the world for profit. In years to come, will vigilantes on a dying planet seek out and murder the CEOs of Big Oil? I hope someone is left to make the documentary. 

In the hands of a pathological madman

November 14

GUEST: Tom Midgley, long time activist and former president of the Alliance@IBM workers' group, talks about how IBM has dealt with its workers over the past several decades, putting profits over the interests of its American employees.

IBM cuts nearly 700 jobs in Dutchess County

We have all seen the shift from workers being valued to corporate kleptocracy. There was a time when IBM employees felt proud of their company and secure in their plans for healthcare and retirement. In the late 1970s all that changed. Those at the top abandoned their previous "responsibility" to their employees and went for the money. Slashing tens of thousands of jobs during the 1990s soon morphed into sending work overseas. A decade later, foreign IT workers were being given guest visas to work at half the wages here in America.

All this was facilitated by loosening governmental regulations. Congress and the President didn't have to be fooled by the likes of Bill Gates making the bogus case for cheap foreign IT workers. Our elected officials were already on the payroll of Big Tech.

The biggest rewards for destroying US jobs, however, went to the very people who planned the transition. The salaries of IBM CEOs skyrocketed, starting with Louis V. Gerstner, who according to The New York Times, "received $4.8 million in salary and bonus, plus stock options and other incentive pay with a current value of more than $13 million." And that was his first year.

Workers' lives get desperate and CEO's make out like the bandits they have become. Will this type of income disparity eventually bring down our democracy? The fact that our country is now in the hands of a pathological madman should answer that question.  

Only path to survival?

November 7

GUEST: Rick Ufford-Chase, peace activist and Moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, and Susan Smith, a Muslim member of Jewish Voice for Peace, talk about the November 12 International Symposium on Migration and Border Solidarity at the at the Westchester Ethical Culture Society in White Plains, NY.

International Sanctuary Principles Statement

Must we rethink everything to support the concept that all humans deserve a chance to live? Rick and Susan ask us to put away our old way of thinking and consider all people to be our brothers and sisters.

In the coming years, the surge of refugees will only get stronger, until millions are roaming the earth asking to simply survive. The US with our endless and fruitless wars abroad is part of the problem. We have never dared leave the model of military spending after World War II, and have poured our trillions of dollars into Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. No one knows how many wars our country is fighting now, the state of mind of characters in George Orwell's 1984.

And then there is climate change, with floods and fires that make larger and larger areas of our world simply unlivable. Like the weapons industry, the petroleum corporations are driving this mass exodus from lands that once supported hundreds of millions.

Will the earth become a killing field. What will be our part in the die-off of our species? In the die-off of all species?

Rethinking our human experience may emerge as the only path to survival.