The Jeff Farias Show Interviews

At 5 PM MST David Swanson returns ! We will discuss his recent article Top 10 Problems with America Killing Its Own Citizens Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder. Whatever happened to Law, courts & trials? David Swanson, author, blogger, and activist. He is the author of “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union“ and of the introduction to “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush,” by Dennis Kucinich. Swanson served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. From 2000 to 2003, Swanson was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

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We’re happy to share today’s earlier conversation with our friend Joe Bageant After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast … lived in communes, hippie school buses… started writing about holy men, countercultural figures, rock stars and the American scene in 1971 … lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s … 14 years in all … became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist … Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues… Moved to the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years … tended reservation bar (The Bald Eagle Bar), wrote for regional newspapers… generally festered on life in America … Moved to Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there … Then moved to Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide. Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love’em but they need a good ass kicking. Died in 2000 when George Bush got elected … died along with 275 million other Americans … Plan to rise again from the dead when he is tossed out …maybe reincarnate as a Commie terrorist on Wall Street … maybe as a sex worker in Amsterdam … can’t decide … both have their advantages.

He is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War

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David Swanson, author, blogger, and activist. He is the author of “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union“ and of the introduction to “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush,” by Dennis Kucinich. Swanson served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. From 2000 to 2003, Swanson was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Following the 2004 elections, Swanson worked for the labor movement for a year, serving as media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, the AFL-CIO’s organization of labor media outlets: newsletters, radio shows, websites, etc.

In May 2005, Swanson was instrumental in making the Downing Street Memos known in the United States and discussed in Congress. He co-founded a coalition at AfterDowningStreet, and led an unsuccessful campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. Swanson worked closely with the peace movement and could be found at the intersection of campaigns to end the war in Iraq and campaigns to punish those who launched that war.

Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats, despite living in Charlottesville, Va. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a convenor of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, chair of the UFPJ working group on Accountability and Prosecution, and a member of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee. Swanson does paid work for various peace and justice groups, including creating websites and organizing campaigns. The AfterDowningStreet website is funded by VelvetRevolution.

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Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.

His books have been translated into more than thirty languages and are used in thousands of universities, corporations and government agencies around the world. His most recent books include The European Dream, The End of Work, The Age of Access, and The Biotech Century.

Jeremy Rifkin has been an advisor the European Union for the past decade. Mr. Rifkin is advising the government of Spain during its presidency of the European Union (1.Jan-30.Jun.2010). Mr. Rifkin also served as an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal, and Prime Minister Janez Janša of Slovenia, during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security. He currently advises the European Commission, the European Parliament, and several EU heads of state, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain.

Mr. Rifkin is the principle architect of the European Union’s Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission as well as in the 27 member-states.

Mr. Rifkin is also the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, comprised of 100 of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies. Mr. Rifkin’s global economic development team is the largest of its kind in the world and is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post-carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures.

His most recent book is The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis From Publishers Weekly:

“For author and social thinker Rifkin (The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy), an E.U. advisor and senior lecturer at Wharton’s Executive Education Program, the central paradox of human existence is, and has always been, the conflict between empathy and entropy: while globalization brings together diverse people, the very good-a rise in “empathic awareness“-is counterbalanced by the very bad-”dramatic deterioration of the health of the planet,” by way of the technology that drives progress. …a thorough, lucid overview of mankind’s history along the “empathy/entropy” spectrum: Spencer’s mischaracterization of “nature red in tooth and claw,” replaced by a more sensitive understanding of the biological and sociological evolution; the progression of socio-economic communities-civilizations-from the Neolithic to the “Modern Market Economy“; the current “Age of Empathy,” in which the dominance of one language (English), “backyard” energies (wind, solar, etc.), the biosphere education in classrooms, and other developments, shine the way forward. Despite windiness and occasional hyperbole, this is the kind of reading fans of Jared Diamond and Richard Dawkins can sink their teeth into, with a contagious sense of urgency over whether we can “reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse.”

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our conversation with Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, USA. For their criminal policy & practice of “extraordinary rendition” & torture perpetrated upon about 100 human beings, Professor Boyle has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against:

·         George W. Bush,

·         Richard Cheney,

·         Donald Rumsfeld,

·         George Tenet,

·         Condoleezza Rice, &

·         Alberto Gonzales

In 2001 he was selected to be the Dr. Irma M. Parhad Lecturer by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary in Canada. In 2007 he became the Bertrand Russell Peace Lecturer at McMaster University in Canada. Professor Boyle is listed in the current edition of Marquis’ Who’s Who in America. Professor Boyle is Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, conducting its legal affairs on a worldwide basis. Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare. He has written and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on the relationship between international law and politics. His eleventh book, Breaking All the Rules: Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment was recently published by Clarity Press. His Protesting Power: War, Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield Inc. 2007) has been used successfully in anti-war protest trials. In the September 2000 issue of the prestigious The International History Review, Professor Boyle’s Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations (1898-1922) was proclaimed as “a major contribution to this reinterrogation of the past” and “required reading for historians, political scientists, international relations specialists, and policy-makers.” That book was translated into Korean and published in Korea in 2003 by Pakyoungsa Press.

…Also, most regretfully, the new Obama administration has publicly stated that it will continue the Accused’s policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition,” which is really their euphemism for enforced disappearances of human beings and consequent torture by other States. Hence the Highest Level Officials of the Obama administration fully intend to commit their own Crimes against Humanity under the I.C.C. Rome Statute – unless you stop them! Your opening an investigation of my Complaint will undoubtedly deter the Obama administration from engaging in any more “extraordinary renditions” — enforced disappearances of human beings and having them tortured by other States. Indeed your opening of an investigation into my Complaint might encourage the Obama administration to terminate its criminal “extraordinary rendition” program immediately and thoroughly by means of issuing a public statement to that effect. In other words, your opening an investigation of my Complaint could very well save the lives of a large number of additional human beings who otherwise will be subjected by the Obama administration to the Rome Statute Crimes against Humanity of enforced disappearances of persons and their consequent torture by other States, inter alia. The lives and well-being of countless human beings are now at risk, hanging in the balance, waiting for you to act promptly, effectively, and immediately to save them from becoming Victims of Rome Statute Crimes against Humanity perpetrated by the Highest Level Officials of the Obama administration as successors-in-law to the Accused by opening an investigation of my Complaint. Otherwise, I shall be forced to file with you and the I.C.C. a follow-up Complaint against the Highest Level Officials of the Obama administration. I certainly hope it will not come to that. Please make it so. Finally, for reasons more fully explained in the Conclusion to my Complaint, I respectfully request that you obtain I.C.C. arrest warrants for the Accused in accordance with Rome Statute articles 58(1)(a), article 58(1)(b)(i), article 58(1)(b)(ii), and article 58(1)(b)(iii). The sooner, the better for all humankind….

You can add your support to this complaint by contacting the ICC Prosecutor The Honorable Luis Moreno-Ocampo Office of the Prosecutor International Criminal Court Post Office Box 19519 2500 CM, The Hague The Netherlands Fax No.: 31-70-515-8555 Email: OTP.InformationDesk@icc-cpi.int

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The Haymarket Squares perform live in our studios. Presenting a high energy mix of upright bass, mandolin, guitar and three part harmonies, the band’s greatest strength may be it’s lyric’s. They are gearing up for a California tour in February in support of their debut CD Punkgrass for the People.

They will be a part of the upcoming & well-anticipated Sheriff Joe Arpaio Protest

·         Mark Sunman: Vocals, Mandolin, Guitar

·         Marc Oxborrow: Vocals, Bass

·         John Luther Norris: Vocals, Guitar, Banjo

The Haymarket Squares: review, Live, by Linda Ray … With such small steps, revolutionary roads are traveled. …Top-shelf venom coursed through a new song about Sheriff Joe, but throughout the set, the band’s premium, metro-Phoenix snaps filled the room with knowing chuckles.

Fortunately for their prospects outside of Arizona, most Haymarket Squares songs focus on more universal themes: one part war, a couple parts religion, and one part activist smörgåsbord (environmental, food and animal cruelty; the economy; solidarity).

Chicago’s Haymarket Square is notoriously the site of an 1886 labor rally that anarchists turned into a riot when police tried to shut it down. Several people died. The echoes of that event were very much alive in what the Haymarket Squares call their “Punkgrass for the People.”

Parachute instructor and band founder Mark Sunman got the idea for the band when he bought a mandolin and started listening to ’90s anarchist punks This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb. It wasn’t clear if he’s ever heard of Bill Monroe, though. About the only link to bluegrass was acoustic instrumentation, including upright bass, banjo and mandolin.

Such change-the-world folk hasn’t been heard much since Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, except by punk rockers. The Haymarket Squares honored the first principles of punk: velocity, volume and the virtue of D.I.Y.

Band members reported, by the way, that the light-rail mess has turned out well. They say it’s contributing to the growth of a pretty cool scene. Perhaps a few Tucsonans should trek up there and show some solidarity with the handful of like minds….

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We spoke with more great guests from Boiling Frogs Post – journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team who began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul’s television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, we found ourselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Our acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in the spring of 1981, brought us into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news. Following our exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News, we produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 we returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. Arriving in Kabul that spring we told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. Peace in Afghanistan was more than a possibility. It was a desired option. As the first American journalists to get behind the U.S. government’s propaganda on the war, we not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Once the Soviets had crossed the border into Afghanistan, the fate of both nations was sealed. But as we pursued the reasons behind the facade of propaganda that shielded the truth, we found themselves drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions. Big things were brewing in Afghanistan. Old empires were being undone and new ones, hatched. America had launched a Medieval Crusade against the modern world and the ten year war against the Soviet Union was only the first chapter. It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when we were working on the film version of our experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that we began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay a crucial document known as the Team B report (which preceded the Afghan crisis) was declassified. Over the next decade we trailed a labyrinth of clues only to find a profound likeness in Washington’s official policy towards Afghanistan – in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark – whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America’s involvement deepens. In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring our story into sharp focus. Our experience at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism has led us to believe it could become a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Ultimately, Invisible History Afghanistan’s Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American empire.

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At 5 PM MST Dr Richard Wolff returns ! Richard D. Wolff is a American economist, well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis. Wolff received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1969. He frequently collaborates with fellow economist Stephen Resnick. Wolff is married to (and sometimes co-author with) psychoanalyst Harriet Fraad. Wolff taught at the City College of New York from 1969-1973, and then began teaching at the Economics Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been full professor since 1981. He began collaborating with Stephen Resnick during their common appointments at the City University of New York, and continued after they both moved to University of Massachusetts. Wolff and Resnick have jointly published numerous articles and books that formulate a nondeterminist, class analytical approach. Their topics have included Marxian theory and value analysis, overdetermination, radical economics, international trade, business cycles, social formations, the Soviet Union, and comparing and contrasting Marxian and non-Marxian economic theories. Capitalism Hits the Fan chronicles one economist’s growing alarm and insights as he watched, from 2005 onwards, the economic crisis build, burst, and then dominate world events. The argument here differs sharply from most other explanations offered by politicians, media commentators, and other academics. Step by step, Professor Wolff shows that deep economic structures–the relationship of wages to profits, of workers to boards of directors, and of debts to income–account for the crisis. The great change in the US economy since the 1970s, as employers stopped the historic rise in US workers’ real wages, set in motion the events that eventually broke the world economy. The crisis resulted from the post-1970s profit explosion, the debt-driven finance-industry expansion, and the sequential stock market and real estate booms and busts. Bailout interventions by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have thrown too little money too late at a problem that requires more than money to solve. As this book shows, we must now ask basic questions about capitalism as a system that has now convulsed the world economy into two great depressions in 75 years (and countless lesser crises, recession, and cycles in between). The book’s essays engage the long-overdue public discussion about basic structural changes and systemic alternatives needed not only to fix today’s broken economy but to prevent future crises.

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Robert Parry – Consortium News Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. We will discuss his recent articles.

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Joe Brewer is Founder and Director of Cognitive Policy Works. He is a social change strategist and facilitator of idea implementation for people seeking to innovate at the intersection of the advocacy, policy, and technology worlds. Throughout the last decade Joe has sought to understand human values and behavior through the study of cognitive semantics and complex systems with the goal of helping build livable communities for the 21st Century. Much of his work has focused on values, identity, and modes of thought that shape cultural understandings of political and social issues. Joe is interested in developing new practices that empower people to manage large-scale social change while solving problems through collaboration. He would like to see greater levels of trust and cooperation arise through a culture of sharing that enhances life satisfaction and well-being for people everywhere. Joe is dedicated to making Cognitive Policy Works into a world-class educational center and consulting firm that trains people to manage the change process through the application of strategic planning tools and insights into the political, cultural, and psychological aspects of social change.

He contributes to the Strategies for Change project of WWF-UK as a principal researcher

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