Interview with Chris Hunt from GRACE – 12.03.15

Special Advisor on Food and Agriculture

Chris Hunt serves as special advisor on food and agriculture at GRACE, where he provides strategic input on the organization’s efforts to build a sustainable food future. Chris has written extensively about food and agriculture issues; his work has appeared in Civil Eats, Huffington Post, AlterNet and Ecocentric. His areas of interest and expertise include industrial livestock production, food waste, urban agriculture and food systems advocacy. Before GRACE, Chris worked as an Alumni Memorial Scholar research fellow at Colgate University, and has served two terms on the board of directors of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Chris earned a BA in environmental economics from Colgate University. He’s an ardent proponent of bicycling, composting, accepting peculiar travel suggestions and walking up mountains.

Richard Eskow – The “New Democrats” Confront a New Reality

Several recent news articles have suggested that, in the words of a Washington Post headline, “there’s … a big economic fight happening in the Democratic Party.” It’s true. The corporate-friendly policies of the party’s more conservative wing have fared poorly, both as policy and as politics, and as a result the party has moved to the left. The insurgent candidacy …

Progressive Commentary Hour – 11.10.15

Guest #1 –

Roger Stone is a renowned political consultant, lobbyist, GOP campaign strategist and author who has worked intimately as a senior staffer on eight national election campaigns including Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George Bush Senior. In the past he has been regarded as the Republicans’ primary “hitman”. He was the keeper of the Nixon’s flame during Nixon’s post presidential years, serving as Nixon’s man in Washington. He has worked on many election campaigns and was instrumental in the bringing down of Elliott Spitzer’s governership. Roger has since left the GOP and is aligned with the Libertarian Party. Roger writes articles for the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller, his site StoneZone.com and has been profiled in numerous television programs, newspapers and magazines. He has written on JFK assassination implicating President Lyndon Johnson and his most recent book is “The Clintons’ War on Women” which thoroughly presents the evidence behind why Clintons should be behind bars and not public servants

Guest #2 –

Robert Fantina is an historian, author an activist for peace and international human rights. An American citizen, he moved to Canada following the 2004 presidential election. He has authored several books including a history of desertion in the US military “Desertion and the American Soldier 1776-2006” and more recently “Empire, Racism and Genocide: A History of US Foreign Policy.” He is a regular contributor articles on foreign policy, the military, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the US intervention in the Middle East and more recently on Hillary Clinton for Counterpunch, Mint Press, and other alternative and progressive news and commentary sites. Robert’s website is RobertFantina.com

Infectious Myth – Judicial Abuse of Children – 10.13.15

David discusses judicial abuse of children in custody battles with the sisters Hope and Elizabeth Loudon. Just a few years ago, when they were 14 and refused to spend time with their father, they were put in handcuffs and spent several days locked in a juvenile detention facility before the judge backed down and eventually gave full custody to the mother. Many other situations do not end nearly as well. The sisters wrote an article in the Washington Post describing a situation in which three children claimed their father was abusive, but this led to them being sent to juvenile detention. An international outcry ended up changing this to a summer camp. But afterwards, rather than giving custody to the mother, even partial custody, the judge awarded full custody to the father.

Michael Krieger – The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area

We were told we needed to bail out Wall Street in order to save Main Street. Well the results are in… Wall Street has never done better, and Main Street has never done worse. From the Huffington Post: Low-income workers and their families do not earn enough to live in even the least expensive metropolitan American communities, according to a new analysis …

David Morris – Sanding Down the Rough Edges of Capitalism Is Not Enough

The catalyst for a recent column by David Brooks was a speech delivered by his New York Times colleague Anand Giridharadas at the Aspen Action Forum. (Giridharadas writes the Letter from America column for the Global Edition of the Times) Giridharadas questioned the “Aspen Consensus” that the wealthy and powerful, the benefactors of the Aspen Institute, could be asked to …

Daniel Barker – VA hospital kills more American soldiers than our enemies

The extent of the shameful neglect on the part of the Department of Veterans Affairs toward sick veterans seeking health care is only now becoming apparent. A leaked document has revealed that more than 238,000 veterans died while their applications for treatment were pending. That’s nearly one-third of the more than 800,000 veterans with pending VA health care applications. The …

US Drone Program to Remain in Shadows as Obama Abandons Key Reform Promise – Deirdre Fulton

U.S. President Barack Obama has made a sharp U-turn on his two-year-old promise to move the CIA’s controversial drone program out of the “legal shadows,” according to new reporting by the Huffington Post. In a May 2013 speech at the National Defense University, Obama vowed to move the “out of the covert shadows and into the relative sunlight of the Defense Department,” writes HuffPo reporter Ali Watkins, …

The Hidden ‘Betrayal’ In Obama’s Trade Agenda – Laura Barron-Lopez

As Congress prepares to give President Barack Obama expedited powers to “fast-track” trade deals through Congress, many U.S. steel mills and skeptics of Obama’s trade agenda are worried about steel dumping, the term commonly used to describe countries selling steel below market price. In an interview with The Huffington Post on Tuesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of the many …

Drug Industry Attacks Bioidentical Hormones Again – Jeffrey Dach

Just when things have calmed down, the drug industry opens a new salvo in its war against bioidentical hormones, perceived as stealing market share from their women’s hormone pill, Prempro, currently in litigation for causing cancer and heart disease. The attack article appeared in the Huffington Post by Phyllis Greenberger, CEO of Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR), an industry-sponsored mouthpiece that …