AlternativeRadio

Income and wealth inequalities have huge health impacts. What are the health advantages of being rich as compared to being poor? You’ll live longer and your quality of life will be better. With deep pockets you get lots of vacation time, live in capacious apartments or houses, you have nannies to take care of the kids, cooks and house cleaners. And you eat well. Organic arugula, shitake mushrooms, fresh-squeezed carrot juice. You have access to the best medical care money can buy. You get annual checkups. Whereas if you are indigent you wait and wait and hope the lump on your breast will disappear and the pain in your tooth will just go away. Being well off frees you from the mental stress of worrying about where your next meal is coming from and where you will sleep tonight.

As Voltaire once said, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” States don’t like to be called out on their crimes. Silence is strongly preferred. Fall in line and keep your mouth shut. This is particularly true of the United States because it globally projects a cultivated image of being a beacon of democracy and human rights and crucially, adherence to the rule of law. Instead of encouraging, celebrating and honoring whistleblowers the Obama administration punishes them, setting a record for prosecutions and imprisonments. Individuals like John Kiriakou tried to do the right thing and ended up going to jail. Edward Snowden has his passport cancelled and is forced to live in exile. The government is confusing dissent for disloyalty. What a chilling message this sends to other potential whistleblowers.

The book The Management of Savagery is a teaching manual of the so-called Islamic State, aka ISIS. It defines the techniques of deploying terror. The book outlines how a group of militants could seize land and establish their own self-governing Islamic state. It lays out how to create small pockets of territorial control and from there to establish a caliphate. ISIS has become notorious with its sectarian violence and atrocities. Its meteoric rise took Washington and all the experts by surprise. Initially, Obama dismissed them as the equivalent of a JV, junior varsity, an amateur basketball team. The media fail to pose the crucial questions: What fuels ISIS? What makes it tick? How does U.S. policy in the Middle East and that of its regional allies contribute to the instability that ISIS thrives on? What’s the relationship between Arab jails and American jets?

For decades we have been hooked on fossil fuels. Time is long past for humankind to kick this habit. The Paris climate accord, signed with much hoopla by 175 countries, is, given the magnitude of the crisis, totally inadequate. A coalition of environmental groups calls it “a dangerous distraction that threatens all of us. The Agreement relies on voluntary versus mandatory emission cuts that do not meet targets scientists say are necessary to avoid climate catastrophe.” On an individual level you might say, Hey, I’m doing my part. I drive a hybrid and bike whenever I can. It ain’t enough. We are being lulled into complacency. Radical action is required to reverse global warming. Can we break away from our destructive addiction that is endangering life as we know it?

I’m often asked about Noam Chomsky. How did I connect with the legendary MIT professor? Very simply, I wrote him a letter around 1980 and to my surprise he responded. A correspondence ensued. We did our first interview in 1984. Two years after that I decided to launch Alternative Radio as I was determined to get his voice on the air. Since then we’ve done many programs and a bunch of books. Chomsky is easy to work with. He is patient and practices the egalitarianism he preaches. But behind his soft-spoken voice is an extraordinary intellectual acumen. In our latest interview he covers a lot of ground, in typical Chomsky fashion, from Latin America to India to elections to where he sees signs of hope to creating a better society.

The logic of global capitalism is destroying the planet. It puts profits over the welfare of people and excessive production over ecological sustainability. Massive protests against powerful institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization as well as so-called free trade deals draw in more and more people who believe that it is time for a different model that is sensitive to humans needs and the environment. How might we move beyond capitalism to a deeper understanding of how commodification and commercialism affect relationships both between people and nature?