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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris





SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018





SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven




2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.



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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


Between The Lines on Stitcher

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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

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"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.



JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.


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Vermont Farmer Builds Model for Sustainable Local Food System

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Posted Nov. 9, 2011

Interview with Ben Hewitt, best-selling author and farmer, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

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This year’s Connecting for Change: East Coast Bioneers Conference, took place from Oct. 21 to 23 in New Bedford, Mass. The Marion Institute that has sponsored the conference for seven years now, describes the gathering as bringing together “environmental, industry and social justice innovators to focus on food and farming, health and healing, green business, indigenous knowledge, spirituality and sustainability, all working to catalyze a movement to heal our world.”

Ben Hewitt, one of the keynote speakers at this year's Connecting for Change conference, is a best-selling author and farmer from northern Vermont, where he runs a 40-acre, diversified farm with his family. He lives with his wife and two sons in a self-built home that is powered by a windmill and solar photovoltaic panels.

In his talk, Hewitt described the difficulties of small-scale farming, but also about how small-scale agriculture and the growing local food movement has pumped new life into rural towns like Hardwick, Vt., the subject of his book, “The Town that Food Saved.” After his speech, he spoke with Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus, about his own personal commandments for creating a sustainable local food system and the value of crop diversity in a small setting.

BEN HEWITT: My four rules, the four "commandments" of local food, No. 1 is it should feed the locals. That's self-evident I guess, if you're talking about local food systems. No. 2 is that it should be circular, so the idea is that, right now, most people - 99.some percent of us eat from what I call a straight-line food system, which is where you have a bunch of inputs on one end, mostly non-renewable; you have this food shipped through this convoluted system – the average calorie travels about 1,500 miles in the U.S. before it reaches, ultimately, a stomach. And out the other end you have an enormous quantity of waste, so about 40 percent of the food in this country is wasted.

So what I'm talking about is a circular system that seeks to close the loop, is the term that's often used in conjunction with recycling. I'm talking about doing the same thing with food. So finding a way to create a lot of people call it a food web, where you have people in different points around that circle in connection with one another: producer to customer to retailer to composting facility to wherever. Rule No. 3 is it should be based on sunshine. It's pretty simple, but right now agriculture as a sector is the leading user of energy in this country, and of course most of that energy is derived from finite resources, so the idea that it's going to be based on sunshine is simply to say we're going to use renewable inputs to make this system work. And No. 4, again according to me, is that it should offer viability to the producers. You know, it doesn't really do anyone any good to create a food system where the producers can't make a livelihood from it.

You know, I'm not saying that all these rules work in a particularly symbiotic way because right now, with the state of the food economy and the food system in this country, and really probably in some cases, globally, a couple of these rules stand in contradiction to each other, and that's No. 1 and No. 4. And if you're going to be producing food in a way that honors the circularity and the sunshine commandments, you're probably going to have to be charging...you're basically operating in what I call an honest economic sphere; you're making a true honest accounting for your impacts and your environmental impacts and you're not externalizing all your costs. And that puts you in a tricky spot in trying to price your food so locals can afford it.

BETWEEN THE LINES: BTL: Now, you're a farmer yourself...

BEN HEWITT: That's correct. We have a small farm, 40 acres, and we do a little beef, a little pork. I guess the way I describe it is a turn-of-the-century Vermont hill farm, but not the most recent turn-of-the-century. It's what I think a lot of farms might have looked like in 1900, which is going back quite a ways. It's very small; it's very diversified, and we pretty much sell only direct-to-consumer.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You talked about the necessity of diversity, because locals don't want to eat just one food item. So, just talk a little bit more about that, and also if you could touch on the restaurant that's up there, and how they accommodate that.

BEN HEWITT: Yeah, so, you know I think diversity is an issue that comes up when we talk about small-scale food systems for precisely the reason you mentioned, because if you're really trying to feed the locals, and the locals are really invested in supporting it, it doesn't make sense to have five different cheese makers. Cheese is delicious, but you want to be able to eat more than that.

But there are some less obvious reasons that we really need to think about in the issue of diversity, and one is that whole issue of creating that circular system, because every product is going to require different inputs. And we see this a lot right now in agriculture in our country, where you see regions specialize. Vermont specializes in cheese, and a lot of regions specialize in wine, wherever they find their niche. I think the problem with that, particularly on a smaller scale, is that you begin to overwhelm a region's ability to provide the inputs for that particular agricultural practice, whatever it is.

The other thing diversity does that I think is really important is it offers an opportunity for producers to utilize each other's waste streams. And I'll give you a really small example from our own farm. We raise pigs – not a lot, maybe a half dozen or eight pigs a year. But we raise them almost exclusively on waste milk from local dairy farms. Now, if there were four or five other people raising - even in our small community, but it works on any scale - if there were more people raising pigs in our community, there wouldn't be enough waste milk to support all of those pigs. So we're utilizing a waste resource that, if Cabot were all of a sudden the pig production capital of Vermont, would no longer work, and people would have to be shipping in a lot of grain to feed the pigs as opposed to doing it on this small scale and utilizing this waste resource.

Another point about diversity and I think it's really key, is that if you have diversity among producers and they're producing different products, you really start to step away from this sense that they're in competition with each other and you create opportunities for collaboration. We're raised in this country, I think, to believe we have a competitive business economy and that's what we're taught. But the reality is I think for these systems to work and to maximize the efficiency, we need a lot of collaboration. So diversity of products, I think, really goes a long way toward making that happen.

Find more information on Hewitt’s books at BenHewitt.net

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