Talk World Radio

Alice and Lincoln Day have produced an amazing film about the impact of war on the natural environment, which fits perfectly with World Beyond War's upcoming conference on that theme. Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives was produced between 2006 and 2007 in Australia, California, Vermont, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia. The feature-length version premiered at the 2008 DC Environmental Film Festival. Since then, the film has been screened in film festivals throughout the U.S. and some countries overseas, winning 15 awards along the way. A shorter 56-minute version of the film was created that aired nationally on Public Television in 2011 and 2012, and will be screened at the No War 2017 conference in September in Washington DC -- see WorldBeyondWar.org. The film's website is ScarredLandsFilm.com.

Ed Kinane is based in Syracuse, New York, and has been a big part of efforts to oppose drone piloting at Hancock Air Base for the past 10 years. His amazing array of work over the past decades has included teaching math and biology in a one-room Quaker school in rural Kenya, hitchiking Africa and North America, providing protective accompaniment to targeted activists in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, serving as chair of Peace Brigades International’s Sri Lanka Project and a member of PBI’s national coordinating committee and a member of School of the Americas Watch national board, twice serving time in federal prisons. Ed Kinane spent Shock and Awe in Baghdad with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has worked with Witness Against Torture. He's been on delegations to Afghanistan, Iran, and Palestine. He's spoken around the U.S., and spent a week at Standing Rock. But his focus now is on the Upstate Drone Action at Hancock. See http://www.upstatedroneaction.org

James Loewen's books include Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Earlier this year, he spoke at a symposium in Richmond on Confederate monuments and memorials, available on C-SPAN. And a couple of years ago he wrote an article in the Washington Post called "Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong." His website is http://sundown.tougaloo.edu We discuss confederate statues.

Patricia Axelrod is a military scientist for peace and the Director of The Desert Storm Think Tank and ALL Veterans' Advocate - a project dedicated to analyzing and reducing the impacts and consequences of war to civilians and soldiers alike. She is a past recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research and Writing Award for her analysis of the modern electronic battlefield as well as a Project Censored Award. She has testified before Presidential Advisory Committees on issues of Persian Gulf Illness and other veteran health issues and her work has been incorporated into Congressional Research projects as well GAO efforts. Temporarily residing in Illinois Axelrod has conducted in-theater bomb damage assessment post Desert Storm throughout Iraq (wherein she was held captive by the Hussein gov't) as well as from Budapest to Kosovo following American warfare against Kosovo. Her work on behalf of veterans serves to obtain medical treatment for individual sick and dying veterans otherwise deprived of care by the VA. Her long-term experience battling with the VA leads her to believe that the VA healthcare system is corrupt and broken beyond repair and therefore should be abolished and replaced with medicare and/or another civilian healthcare system.

During each of 20 trips to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe that “where you stand determines what you see.” In June, 2016, Kathy participated in a delegation that visited five cities in Russia, aiming to learn about Russian opinions regarding NATO exercises taking place along their border. Kelly has joined with activists in various regions of the U.S. to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of U.S. military bases in Nevada, California, Michigan, Wisconsin and Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri. In 2015, for carrying a loaf of bread and a letter across the line at Whiteman AFB she served three months in prison. From 1996 – 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kelly traveled to Iraq 27 times, during that period. She and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing. They have also lived alongside people during warfare in Gaza, Lebanon, Bosnia and Nicaragua. She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) at Whiteman Air Force Base and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.

Kathy Kelly will be speaking this week at the Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, inlcuding the Peace and Democracy Conference organized by World Beyond War, and will be speaking in September at the No War 2017: War and the Environment conference in Washington, D.C. See WorldBeyondWar dot org. For more from Kathy see http://vcnv.org

Joshua Holland is a fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and a contributor to The Nation who focuses on the intersection of money in politics and inequality. He is also the host of Politics and Reality Radio. Before joining The Investigative Fund, he wrote for Moyers & Company and was a senior writer and editor at Alternet. He also authored The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). We discuss this video.

Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation, where she co-writes “The Score,” a monthly column on economics, and a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times. One of her recent columns is called "Women Won’t Have Equality Until Dads Stay Home."

Barbara Wien teaches gender, global security and peace education at American University. Since 1981, she has worked to strengthen grassroots civil society networks for peace and democracy in 58 countries. She has led eight national nonprofit organizations, taught at six universities, and helped spark the development of 200 university Peace Studies programs. She is the author-editor of 23 publications in gender, economics, and nonviolence. She has protected civilians from the death squads using nonviolent strategies for Peace Brigades International. She was recognized for her leadership and "moral courage" for denouncing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a U.S.government official. We discuss the march from the NRA, resistance trainings for federal employees, and the state of peace studies in U.S. academia.

Nick Mottern has worked as a reporter, researcher, writer and political organizer over the last 30 years. He is the author of Suffering Strong, recounting experiences of his first trip to Africa. He manages www.KnowDrones.com a website devoted to education and organizing to stop drone warfare and surveillance. He was director of the 2012 national Know Drones Tour and was an organizer of the 2013 April Days of Action and 2014 Spring Days of Action, and he publishes “The Drone Organizers Bulletin.” He is also an organizer of the Boycott and Divest Honeywell campaign, begun in 2014 because of the firm’s involvement in drone war. http://www.badhoneywell.org/ His articles have appeared in Truthout since 2008.

Rob Kall is host of the Bottom up Radio show, which explores our culture's transition from top down to bottom up, and founder publisher of OpEdnews.com, a left of liberal progressive news and opinion site publishing 500-1000 articles a month. He was honored, as publisher of OpEdNews, by the American whistleblower community, with the Pillar Award, for supporting whistleblowers. He pioneered positive psychology in the mid 1980s, organizing the world's first conference on it, founded and organized Storycon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and application of story, bringing together, for the first time, experts from all the worlds of story, and founded and organized the Winter Brain Meeting, weaving together neurofeedback, consciousness, heart and spirit. "I've come to see myself as working towards empowering and awakening people, first through biofeedback and self regulation training, and more recently, as a progressive publisher, writer of over 2000 articles and host of a radio show exploring a return to our bottom up roots, with the vision that bottom up values offer humanity a kinder, more sustainable future.

Ajamu Baraka is National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. He is a human rights defender whose experience spans four decades of domestic and international education and activism. He has provided human rights trainings for grassroots activists across the country, briefings on human rights to the U.S. Congress, and appeared before and provided statements to various United Nations agencies. Baraka was the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network. He held various leadership positions at Amnesty International USA including directing Amnesty’s National Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. He has served on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Africa Action, and the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights. Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch. He ran for vice president on the Green Party ticket. And he and I both spoke at a recent conference of the United National Antiwar Coalition.

https://blackallianceforpeace.com