This week on Talk World Radio we're talking about peace activism in 2021 and looking ahead to 2022. Our guest Greta Zarro is Organizing Director for World BEYOND War, where I'm Executive Director. Greta previously worked as New York Organizer for Food & Water Watch. There, she campaigned on issues related to fracking, genetically engineered foods, climate change, and the corporate control of our common resources. Greta and her partner run Unadilla Community Farm, a non-profit organic farm and permaculture education center in Upstate New York.

This week on Talk World Radio, we're discussing the state of war and peace in the world with peace activist Kathy Kelly. Kathy's efforts to end wars have led her to living in war zones and prisons over the past 35 years. In 2009 and 2010, Kathy was part of two Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegations which visited Pakistan to learn more about the consequences of U.S. drone attacks. From 2010 - 2019, the group organized dozens of delegations to visit Afghanistan, where they continued learning about casualties of U.S. drone attacks. Voices also helped organize protests at U.S. military bases operating weaponized drone attacks. She is now a co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones campaign and serves on the Advisory Board for World BEYOND War.

This week on Talk World Radio: We're all going to die. Our guest, Helen Caldicott, is founder and president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, founder of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, Co-Leader of the 1980 Nuclear Freeze Voter Initiative Campaign, founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (now called Beyond Nuclear), founder of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, and initiator of the movement against French atmospheric tests in Australia and New Zealand. Her website is at http://HelenCaldicott.com She is also a member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and will be hosting an online book club with her book Sleepwalking to Armageddon that you can sign up for at http://worldbeyondwar.org/bookclubs

This week on Talk World Radio, the sneaky and sleazy bipartisan privatizing of Medicare. Our guest, Kay Tillow, is chair of Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care and Coordinator of Unions for Single Payer Health Care. She is a retired union organizer who has worked for decades with nurses and other hospital workers.

Alfred W. McCoy is the author of a tremendous new book called To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. He also holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After earning his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale in 1977, his writing has focused on Philippine political history, the history of modern empires, and the covert netherworld of illicit drugs, syndicate crime, and state security. His first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), sparked controversy over the CIA’s attempt to block its publication. His book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006) provided the historical dimension for the Oscar-winning documentary feature, Taxi to the Darkside.

This week on Talk World Radio, the U.S. colony of Guam. Our guest, Chris Gelardi is a New York City-based journalist. His work appears in The Nation, The Intercept, and The Appeal, among other publications. His recent article in The Nation is called "Guam: Resisting Empire at the 'Tip of the Spear'."

This week on Talk World Radio, Is Wall Street Taking Over Ownership of Nature? Our guest Randall Wray is a professor of economics at Bard College. His current research focuses on providing a critique of orthodox monetary theory and policy, and the development of an alternative approach. He also publishes extensively in the areas of full employment policy and, more generally, fiscal policy. Wray’s most recent book is A Great Leap Forward: Heterodox Economic Policy for the 21st Century.

This week on Talk World Radio, we're going to hold a bit of a respectful and civil debate. I'm going to take the position that we should be focused on preventing wars and defunding militaries even at the expense of working to reform wars. My guest, Leonard Rubenstein's position includes support for reforming war to protect healthcare workers and patients. Rubenstein is the author of Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War. He is professor and director of the Program on Human Rights and Health in Conflict at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2011, he founded and now chairs the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a group of 40 humanitarian, human rights, health provider organizations working at the national and global levels that seeks to reduce attacks on and interference with health workers, patients, facilities and transports. Leonard Rubenstein was previously president of Physicians for Human Rights and is a recognized global expert on violence against health care.

Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility. He has been an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and provided advice to UK negotiators to the UN climate change convention. He then spent a year working for Friends of The Earth, co-ordinating research and policy work highlighting the link between environmental problems and social injustice. His reports include The environmental impacts of the UK military sector; and Under the radar: the carbon footprint of Europe's military sectors. He is also co-author of a book on the Kyoto Protocol, and an editor of the Responsible Science journal. Stuart Parkinson will be speaking at an event in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 4, presenting a petition to the COP26 conference demanding that militaries be included in climate agreements. You can sign that petition at http://cop26.info

Daniel Ellsberg is a former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events, and as an author of critically important books, and as a guest on this program and many others. Dan Ellsberg has recently published with Norman Solomon an article in The Nation magazine titled "To Avoid Armageddon, Don't Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them." See:

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/eliminate-nuclear-missiles