Aired 12/06/09

This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Organization's confrontation in Seattle with 50,000 protestors against corporate globalization. We look back at Seattle and at the ten years in between with two guests who played important roles.

First, we talk with NORM STAMPER -- who oversaw the police response -- about those events and about his life and work in the decade since. Now retired, Stamper wrote the book, BREAKING RANK and has become a prominent spokesman for LEAP, Law Enforcement Against (Drug) Prohibition.

NORM STAMPER, former Seattle Police Chief author BREAKING RANK: A TOP COP'S EXPOSE OF THE DARK SIDE OF AMERICAN POLICING

http://www.normstamper.com/
http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php

Second, KEVIN DANAHER, who was centrally involved in organizing the Seattle WTO protests. His goals remain the same but his focus has evolved. His latest books are THE GREEN FESTIVAL READER: Fresh Ideas from Agents of Change, and BUILDING THE GREEN ECONOMY: Success Stories from the Grassroots

http://www.globalexchange.org/
http://www.globalcitizencenter.org/
http://www.greenfestivals.com/

 

Aired 11/22/09

NICHOLAS KRISTOF, oped columnist at the New York Times, and author with his wife, former Times editor Sheryl WuDunn, of HALF THE SKY: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide."

Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He joined the NY Times in 1984. In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."

In his column, NICHOLAS KRISTOF was an early opponent of the Iraq war, and among the first to warn that we were losing ground to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. He was among the first to raise doubts about WMD in Iraq, he was the first to report that President Bush's State of the Union claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa was contradicted by the administration's own investigation. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area ten times.

Prior to their newest, HALF THE SKY, Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of CHINA WAKES: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A RISING POWER and THUNDER FROM THE EAST: PORTRAIT OF A RISING ASIA.

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://halftheskymovement.org/

 

 

Aired 11/22/09

PHILLIPE DIAZ is writer director of a new documentary THE END OF POVERTY that exposes the roots of the south’s poverty first in colonialism and then in the policies of the World Bank, IMF and the WTO.

The film features: Nobel prize winners in economics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; expert authors Susan George, Eric Toussaint, John Perkins, Chalmers Johnson, government ministers such as Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, and leaders of social movements in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania.

THE END OF POVERTY’s opening line by narrator Martin Sheen: “Why, in a world of so much wealth, do we still have so much poverty, where billions of people live on less than one dollar a day?” According to writer-director PHILLIPE DIAZ, the ultimate goal of the film is to change the dialogue around the poverty debate from "poverty is a shame," to "poverty exists for a reason."

Born in Paris France, PHILIPPE DIAZ studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and began his film career as a director in 1980. He produced a number of features both in France and the US, and in 2003, with a consortium of partners he created Cinema Libre Studio, to provide an alternative structure for intelligent, independent films. His directorial debut, THE EMPIRE IN AFRICA won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at Slamdance 2006.

According to Diaz, “The end of greed on Wall Street will not end poverty in the world. The problem is much deeper than that; it is centuries old. Our economic system since colonial times requires cheap labor and cheap resources from the global South to succeed and to finance our lifestyle in the North. Without changing that we will never alleviate poverty.“

http://www.theendofpoverty.com/

 

Aired 11/15/09

Malalai Joya is an Afghan politician who has been called "the bravest woman in Afghanistan." As an elected member of the Wolesi Jirga from Farah province, she has publicly denounced the presence of what she considers warlords and war criminals in the parliament.

The daughter of a former medical student who lost a foot while fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Malalai Joya was 4 years old when her family fled Afghanistan in 1982 to the refugee camps of Iran and later Pakistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, Malalai Joya returned to Afghanistan in 1998 during the Taliban's reign. As a young woman she worked as a social activist and was named a director of the non-governmental group, Organisation of Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC) in the western provinces of Herat and Farah

Title of Joya's autobiography "Raising My Voice", which was published in the US/Canada under the title of "A Woman Among Warlords" was published in October 2009

Noam Chomsky writes: "Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this inspiring memoir is that despite the horrors she relates, Malalai Joya leaves us with hope that the tormented people of Afghanistan can take their fate into their own hands if they are released from the grip of foreign powers, and that they can reconstruct a decent society from the wreckage left by decades of intervention and the merciless rule of the Taliban and the warlords who the invaders have imposed upon them."

http://malalaijoya.com/index1024.htm

 

 

Aired 11/15/09

A former Marine captain with combat experience in Iraq, Matthew Hoh, also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. This summer he was the senior US civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. In September Hoh became the first US official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war.

His four page letter of resignation explains that he became convinced that our war in that country will not only inevitably fail, but is fueling the very insurgency we are trying to defeat.

He points out that "next fall, the United States' occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union's own physical involvement in Afghanistan."

"I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The Pentagon’s own 2004 report concluded: "Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America's national security . . . Direct American intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for Islamic radicals."

"American families," Hoh said at the end of his letter of resignaton, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

http://www.stopafghanistan.org/