Richard Wolff on Democratizing the Economy and Robert Naiman on Julian Assange

Economist Richard Wolff speaks about his new project to build a movement for Worker Self Directed Enterprises called Democracy at Work. And Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy speaks about Julian Assange’s request for asylum from the Ecuadorian government.

Article about this show:

The Foundation of a New Democratic Economy is Worker Self-Directed Enterprises

 

Show #25 with economist Richard Wolff of DemocracyatWork.info & Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud

Guests:

Richard Wolff –  Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He has a new book to be released Sept 1 “Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism” and he launched a new website Democracyatwork.info.

Democracy at Work is a project, begun in 2010, that aims to build a social movement. The movement’s goal is transition to a new society whose productive enterprises (offices, factories, and stores) will mostly be WSDE’s, a true economic democracy. The WSDEs would partner equally with similarly organized residential communities they interact with at the local, regional, and national levels (and hopefully international as well). That partnership would form the basis of genuine participatory democracy.

Utilizing media, from short video clips that go viral to our already well-established weekly and increasingly syndicated “Economic Update” radio program (WBAI, 99.5 FM, New York) and from podcasts to articles to blogs, this interactive website reaches and engages a fast growing audience.

Robert Naiman – is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Mr. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at Huffington Post. He is president of the board of Truthout. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Naiman delivered a letter to Ecuadorean Embassy urging Ecuador to grant asylum for Julian Assange on June 25^th.

Naiman said today: “As Americans who appealed to Ecuador to grant Julian Assange’s request for political asylum from the threat of U.S. persecution, we are delighted with the decision by Ecuador to grant Assange asylum.  But there are three questions the media should be asking.

“The UK is now saying that it does not respect diplomatic asylum and has threatened to raid Ecuador’s embassy, which would be a grave breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The UK threat to violate international law is particularly extreme when one considers that these three basic questions have never been answered: 1) why Sweden won’t agree to question Assange in the UK; 2) why Sweden won’t promise not to extradite Assange to the United States if he voluntarily goes to Sweden; 3) why the UK won’t promise to oppose an extradition request from the U.S. to Sweden if Assange voluntarily goes to Sweden.”

 

 

Climate Change Justice and Resistance from Doha to East Texas

Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project discusses the recent climate conference in Doha, Qatar which is characterized more as a trade show for corporations looking to profit from climate change than a conference about solutions, and the increasing exclusion of non-corporate voices. She says solutions to the climate crisis are coming from the bottom up.   Ramsey Sprague of the Tar Sands Blockade describes the growing resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and the upcoming direct action training camp and action Jan. 3 to 8. Co-hosts Margaret and Kevin will participate in that action and urge you to support it or participate as well. And ecology activist Diane Wilson who is on her 19th day of a hunger strike describes why she is risking her life to hold Valero Oil accountable to her community.

Guests

Anne Petermann  is the Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project. She is also the Coordinator of the STOP GE Trees Campaign; the North American Focal Point for the Global Forest Coalition; and a member of the Board of Directors of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series.

She has been involved in movements for forest protection and Indigenous rights since 1991; and the international and national climate justice movements since 2004. She co-founded the Eastern North American Resource Center of the Native Forest Network in 1993, and the STOP GE Trees Campaign in 2004. She also participated in the founding of the Durban Group for Climate Justice in 2004, and Climate Justice Now! in 2007 at the Bali UN Climate Conference. In 2008, Global Justice Ecology Project spearheaded the founding of the North American Mobilization for Climate Justice.

She is the author of several reports detailing the dangers of genetically engineered trees, and second generation cellulosic biofuels agrofuels, including their impacts on forests and forest dependent peoples.  She is also a frequent contributor to Z Magazine. She was banned from the Doha international climate meeting in 2012 because of her participation in “un-permitted” protests at previous meetings.

Letter telling Petermann she is not welcome at the Doha climate talks:

Anne Petermann today (21 October), speaks on behalf of Global Justice Ecology Project, in an intervention on Biofuels and Biodiversity at the UN CBD in Nagoya, Japan. Photo: Simone Lovera/GFC

Ramsey Sprague is an activist and spokesperson with the Tar Sands Blockade. The Blockade is a coalition of Texas and Oklahoma landowners and climate justice organizers using peaceful and sustained civil disobedience to stop the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. They intend to force the termination of this dangerous pipeline to create a more clean and livable world that works for everyone.

From January 3rd to 8th the Tar Sands Blockade will be holding a mass action and training.  Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, co-hosts of Clearing the FOG will be participating in this action. They seeks to create a massive and overwhelming disruption of TransCanada’s ability to steal our land, poison our water, and destabilize our climate.

Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimper, who began fishing the bays off the Gulf Coast of Texas at the age of eight. By 24 she was a boat captain. In 1989, while running her brother’s fish house at the docks and mending nets, she read a newspaper article that listed her home of Calhoun County as the number one toxic polluter in the country. She set up a meeting in the town hall to discuss what the chemical plants were doing to the bays and thus began her life as an environmental activist. Threatened by thugs and despised by her neighbors, Diane insisted the truth be told and that Formosa Plastics stop dumping toxins into the bay.

Her work on behalf of the people and aquatic life of Seadrift, Texas, has won her a number of awards including: National Fisherman Magazine Award, Mother Jones’s Hell Raiser of the Month, Louis Gibbs’ Environmental Lifetime Award, Louisiana Environmental Action (LEAN) Environmental Award, Giraffe Project, Jenifer Altman Award, and the Bioneers Award. She is co-founder of Code Pink and continues to lead the fight for social justice.

Diane is the author of “An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, And the Fight for Seadrift, Texas.”

Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey are undertaking a sustained hunger strike which began on November, 29th when they locked their necks to tanker trucks attempting to enter the Valero refinery in Manchester. They refuse to eat until the following demands are met:
1. Valero completely divest from Keystone XL and all forms of tar sands exploitation
2. Valero invest in the health and well being of the Manchester community
3. Valero refinery shut down and vacate the Manchester community

Article about this show:

The People Must Lead the Way to Save the Planet

Other articles

By Anne Petermann, On Not Attending the UN Climate Conference in Doha, Climate Connections, December 11, 2012.

UPDATE: Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science

Crises in Tuition & Predatory Student Lending

On International Human Rights Day we look at the right to education. Tyler Paige is one of 11 students occupying a building at Cooper Union demanding that the college continue to offer free education. Students, faculty and alumni are united in this effort which is part of the global movement for the right to education. You can follow them on Cooper Union Student Action to Save Our School and Free Cooper Union Facebook page.   Lynn Petrovich, CPA and author of “Sticker Shock,” exposes the fraudulent practices of Sallie Mae and other corporate student lenders. And Danny Weil, author of over 7 books that exposes the financialization of education, the monetization of students, the collusion between government and corporations, Obama’s neo-liberal education agenda and what we can do about it.

Guests

Tyler Paige joined with ten other students to take over the Peter Cooper Suite at Cooper Union.  They occupied the suite for one week as part of a campaign to ensure future students get free tuition as has always been the tradition at Cooper Union. As they say on their website: “The Board of Trustees and the Administration at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art are considering charging tuition at the school for the first time in 110 years. This website serves to document the actions and events current students have organized in response to this unfolding tuition crisis. We are organizing to make this issue as public as possible in order to not only bring attention to our own situation but also to the crisis of student debt in the U.S.”

Tyler Page is second from the left in the top row, with the other take-over students.

Lynn Petrovich is a CPA/MBA calls herself “The Green CPA”. She spends a lot of time volunteering her services in disadvantaged communities during tax time. She is the author of Sticker Shocl: On the illusions of hospital costs and accounting, which exposes the rip-offs of non-profit hospital accounting practices.

Danny Weil is a writer for Project Censored and Daily Censored. He received the Project Censored “Most Censored” News Stories of 2009-10 award for his article: “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model / Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,” published by Counterpunch, August 24, 2009. He writes columns regularly for the Public Intellectual at Truthout.  Dr. Weil has published more than seven books on education in the past 20 years. You can also read much more about the for-profit, predatory colleges in his writings found at Counterpunch.com, Dailycensored.com, dissidentvoice.com and Project Censored.com where he has covered the issue of the privatization of education for years. He can be reached at weilunion@aol.com. His new book, an encyclopedia on charter schools, entitled: “Charter School Movement: History, Politics, Policies, Economics and Effectiveness,” 641 pages, was published in August of 2009 by Grey House Publishing, New York, and provides a scathing look at the privatization of education through charter schools.

Article about the show:

Is Education a Human Right or a Privilege for the Wealthy?

Israel, Gaza and Egypt

In this show we talk with Sydney Levy of Jewish Voice for Peace about the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, the UN vote to give Palestinians UN state observer status and the work of JVP for human rights for all people. JVP promotes the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions campaign to pressure Israel to give Palestinians freedom and equal rights and is calling on President Obama to require that US aid to Israel is not used to violate human rights. Then we speak with Mokhtar Kamel, president of the Alliance of Egyptian Americans in North America, about the ongoing struggle in Egypt for real democracy. He speaks about the new constitution being drafted, the efforts to undermine the revolutionaries, lessons they are learning and how we can support them.

Guests:

Sydney Levy  has worked for over 15 years in nonprofits advocating for LGBT human rights organizing for media justice, and assisting in the preparation of death row appeals. He is the son of Egyptian Jews who immigrated to Venezuela, where he was born. Sydney lived in Jerusalem for seven years, where he received his Masters degree in Jewish History from the Hebrew University. Sydney has been working with JVP–first as a volunteer, then as a staff member–since 2000.

Mokhtar Kamel has been a political activist for about 9 years and is presently the president of the Alliance of Egyptian Americans, an NGO working on the democratization in Egypt and the empowering of Egyptians in the US.  Kamel graduated from the School of Economics and Political Science in Cairo University. While in Egypt in the seventies, he worked as a journalist and an editor in the Egyptian TV and Broadcasting Corporation in Cairo. He later joined the IMF from 1980 to 2001, after which he focused on voluntary work with Egyptian American NGOs.

Article about the show:
Clearing the FOG on Palestine, Israel and Egypt

 

Archive of Clearing the FOG Shows

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese speaking in Ashland, OR in 2012.

The Clearing the FOG website went public at the end of 2012. All shows that were produced prior to that time can be listened to at the archive here. We have had a lot of great guests covering a wide range of important issues, among them are:

– Steve Early and Shamus Cook discussing the state of the U.S. labor movement.

 

– Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Chris Hedges, who has covered revolutions around the world on what we can learn from revolts in other parts of the world.

– Cindy Sheehan, activist and writer, on war tax resistance.

– Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report discussing U.S. imperialism and the threat of war in Syria and Iran.

– Larry Pinkney of Black Commentator discussing what fascism means in 21st Century America.

– Jill Stein of the Green Party discussing what it is like to run as a third party candidate in the United States and the illegitimacy of the presidential debate commission.

– Ralph Nader discussing fair wages and the need to increase the minimum wage.

These are just a handful of examples of great shows on the economy, politics and culture, with a special emphasis on progressive activism, the occupy movement and the developing culture or resistance in the United States. You can find them all here.

Show on Global Agriculture and Trade Policy

This show featured noted Indian Journalist P. Sainath and International Program Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Karen Hansen-Kuhn. We speak about rural agriculture and poverty and the real effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies. Subsidies and trade policies have led to failing farms around the world and farmers committing suicide in India at alarming rates, over 275,000 suicides so far. Karen speaks about efforts to include the views and needs of farmers in trade negotiations and what fair trade looks like.

Guests:

Palagummi Sainath:

Palagummi Sainath is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts, is an award winning Indian development journalist – a term he himself avoids, instead preferring to call himself a ‘rural reporter’, or simply a ‘reporter’ – and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of globalization in India. He spends between 270 and 300 days a year in the rural interior (in 2006, over 300 days) and has done so for the past 14 years. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu, and the website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Amartya Sen has called him “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger”. He is also published in Counter Punch. He is the author of “Everybody Loves a Good Drought.”

 

 

 

 

Karen Hansen-Kuhn:

Karen Hansen-Kuhn joined IATP in September 2009. She has been working on trade and economic justice since the beginning of the NAFTA debate, focusing especially on bringing developing countries’ perspectives into public debates on trade, food security and economic policy. She has published articles on U.S. trade and agriculture policies, the impacts of U.S. biofuels policies on food security, and women and food crises. She writes for the Think Forward Blog. She was the international coordinator of the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART), a U.S. multisectoral coalition promoting just and sustainable trade, until 2005. After that, she was policy director at the U.S. office of ActionAid, an international development organization. She holds a B.S. in international business from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree in International Development from The American University.

 

 

Relevant Articles:

See, Neoliberalism Really Works! by P. Sainath Nov. 26, 2005

India’s Farm Suicides: A 12-year saga by P. Sainath Feb. 4, 2010

World Food Day: Keep farmers on the land by Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Oct. 16, 2012

 

Listen to the show:

Show #36 in Agriculture and Trade with P. Sainath and Karen Hansen-Kuhn by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud