Counterpoint with Scott Harris
1) People For The American Way, Director of Leadership Programs, Markus Batchelor discuss PFAW’s recent “No More Excuses Rally” and direct action protest in support of passage of the John Lewis Civil Rights Advancement Act, as well as the For The People Act in an effort to protect and restore U.S. democracy.
2) Veteran labor journalist, author and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow Sam Pizzigati, discusses his recent article, “Let’s Take the Profit Out of War,” written against the backdrop of U.S. war hawks decrying the tumultuous end of America’s longest war in Afghanistan.
3) Jeff Cohen, a founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and co-founder of RootsAction.org, talks about opposition to President Trump’s nomination of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Japan. Opponents site Emanuel’s role in covering up a Chicago police murder of Black teenager Laquan McDonald, in 2014 — and his neo-liberal war against a long list of progressive goals, including Medicare for All, a healthcare public option, and his disturbing ties to the healthcare industry and Wall Street.
4) Greg Palast, known for his investigative reports for The Guardian, Rolling Stone and Democracy Now and author of several New York Times bestsellers including “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” discusses Chevron’s prosecution of Steven Donziger, an American attorney who represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous Ecuadorians from the Amazon rainforest in a case against Chevron’s environmental damage and health effects caused by the company’s oil drilling Donziger has been under house arrest since August 2019 and faces a possible prison sentence.
Monday, August 30, 8 pm and archived.
North Fork Works with Hazel Kahan
This month my guests are many and varied: scientist divers and other more land-locked scientists who describe their work surveying the underwater habitats around Plum Island. Although the results of this five-day survey will be available early next year, the divers confirm the enormous abundance and biodiversity they saw in these subtidal environments where Long Island Sound and Peconic Estuary meet. We hear detailed descriptions of the transects and quadrant methodology they used to literally count, sample and record, on underwater paper and pencil, everything visible ten to 30 feet below the surface. This is the second phase in what is hoped to be an ongoing project to refine understanding of Plum Island’s unique pristine underwater communities with the urgent goal of protecting and conserving this important aspect of New York’s natural cultural heritage. Interviews include scientists from Save the Sound and New York Natural Cultural Heritage Program, scientist divers from Innerspace Scientific Diving and two passionate Plum Island supporters from Connecticut. This project follows the major victory achieved by conservationists in December 2020 when Congress passed a bill formally preventing Plum Island from being auctioned off to private developers.