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SPECIAL AUDIO RECORDING:
Bill McKibben, environmental activist and founder of 350.org talks about the next steps in the climate change campaign


An address by Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, upon receiving the annual Gandhi Peace Award from the New Haven-based group Promoting Enduring Peace on April 18 in Hamden, CT

Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with "The End of Nature" in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. The group he founded, 350.org, has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. The Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was "probably the country’s most important environmentalist."


SPECIAL AUDIO RECORDING:
Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece's Left Party Coalition, on "Anti-Austerity Politics in Greece, Europe and Beyond"


A talk recorded on Jan. 25, 2013 at The City University of New York, in a program sponsored by CUNY's Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work.

Alexis Tsipras, a member of the Hellenic parliament, president of the Synaspismos political party since 2008, head of the SYRIZA parliamentary group since 2009, and leader of the Opposition since June 2012. SYRIZA currently leads in Greek opinion polls. Listen to the audio here.


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.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

"Rand Paul: Making a Point," by Reginald Johnson, March 8, 2013

"The Bipartisan Gift: Budget Cuts," by Reginald Johnson, March 2, 2013

"Fighting for Gun Control," by Reginald Johnson, Feb. 18, 2013

"Tyranny of the Minority," by Reginald Johnson, Jan. 28, 2013

"Is President Obama About to Betray Those Who Re-elected Him Less than 2 Months Ago?" by Scott Harris, Dec. 21, 2012

"Will the Slaughter of the Innocents in Newtown Lead to Gun Law Reform in U.S.?" by Scott Harris and Anna Manzo, Dec. 16, 2012

"My Friend in Sandy Hook," by Doug Moss, posted by Scott Harris, Dec. 16, 2012

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MP3: Glenn Greenwald delivers a keynote address at "A Conference in Defense of Civil Liberties and to End Indefinite Detention" at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain on Dec. 8, 2012.

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian newspaper. He's a former constitutional lawyer, and until 2012 was a contributing writer at Salon.com. Greenwald is the author of "With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful."

Read his column at The Guardian (UK)
Between The Lines' executive producer Scott Harris conducted an interview with Glenn Greenwald at the conference, which will be featured in a BTL program to be released Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012.

Noam Chomsky is linguistics and philosophy professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author of nearly 100 books, Chomsky is one of the world's most widely read progressive dissident intellectuals. He talks about his new book, "Occupy," about the Occupy Wall Street movement and the wider issues of class warfare in the America today.
Listen to this interview (June 6, 2011)
MP3: Nathan Schneider (www.wagingnonviolence.org) has been reporting on the OWS movement from its first days in August, 2011. In this April 3, 2012 interview, Richard Hill asks him to assess the on-going debate in the movement between those espousing a strict adherence to non-violence principles and practices and those advocating a 'diversity of tactics', Interview conducted by Richard Hill, WPKN

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Common Cause to IRS: Revoke Corporate Lobby Group ALEC’s Tax-Exempt, Charitable Status

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Posted May 16, 2012

Interview with Bob Edgar, former six-term congressional representative who now serves as president and CEO of Common Cause, conducted by Scott Harris

ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has come under scrutiny in recent months for its under-the-radar campaign to pass a variety of laws supported by its corporate membership in state legislatures across the U.S. One of ALEC’s signature efforts was their success in 2011 in eliminating public sector labor unions’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. In the aftermath of the Florida shooting death of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, ALEC’s promotion of permissive Stand Your Ground gun laws has been the subject of national media coverage.

Widespread criticism of ALEC for its advocacy of relaxed gun laws, as well as discriminatory voter ID legislation, harsher criminal penalties for juveniles, privatization of education and severe anti-immigration measures has taken its toll. The negative publicity has caused prominent corporate members such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft and McDonald's to resign – and the group to disband its Elections and Public Safety Task Force.

Now Common Cause, one of a national coalition of groups working to shine a spotlight on the corporate front organization’s stealthy activities, has made a formal complaint to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Common Cause charges that ALEC is violating federal laws by posing as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, when in actuality ALEC is spending millions of dollars lobbying for legislation that benefits its corporate membership. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause, a former six-term Pennsylvania congressman, who discusses his group’s demand of the IRS to cancel ALEC’s not-for-profit tax status, collect years of unpaid taxes and “impose necessary penalties.”

BOB EDGAR: About a year ago, we were given about 4,000 documents that were internal documents that the American Legislative Exchange Council had distributed over the course of many years. And what startled us in reviewing those documents was that ALEC files with the IRS as a charity. That means when a large corporation gives a large grant to this organization, they're actually getting tax relief for contributing to a charity when more than 60 percent of what they do is hard-core lobbying.

I've spent 12 years as a member of Congress, was elected as one of the Watergate babies with Chris Dodd and Toby Moffett in 1974. I've seen lobbying up close and personal over those 12 years of service. I know what lobbying looks like, what it acts like, and what these corporations were doing were sneaking into resort centers a couple times a year, sitting side-by-side with state legislators, mostly conservative, some Democrats, mostly Republican. And they were putting forth legislation to help their bottom line. For example, the profit-making prison industry that made for-profit prisons across the country. They got involved in ALEC in order to proliferate the immigration laws so that they could fill some of their prisons that were actually over-billed and empty at times. The for-profit educational industry also was pushing their legislation. Where Common Cause got concerned was there were an awful lot of efforts to push back and suppress the vote, particularly of senior citizens and persons of color and poor people. So as we analyzed those documents, we decided to call out ALEC as what it is, a lobbying organization committing tax fraud.

And on July 14 of last year, we gently sent a 16-page letter to the IRS. We heard nothing from the IRS. So we discovered that there is a whistle-blower law passed by Congress in 2006. We used that particular provision and filed a very formal IRS whistle-blower complaint with the 4,000 documents. We hired a pro bono legal team from San Francisco. They believe that the documents we provided and the evidence that we've shared is some of the strongest whistl-blower evidence that they've seen. They clearly believe that our arguments are accurate. And we believe that some of the reasons that large corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi and Kraft and Johnson and Johnson and some other corporations have fled ALEC. Because they know that if they stick with ALEC, if they stick with this organization after the IRS finds them in noncompliance with the tax code, they'll be subject to penalties and fines for actually doing lobbying work through an organization that claims zero lobbying, yet is filing as a charity under the tax code.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What are your demands from the IRS? What would you like the IRS to do in terms of dealing with ALEC and what you believe to be a fraudulent tax status they've taken out?

BOB EDGAR: We'd like the IRS to call out the fraud that's involved, to impose penalties and fines on ALEC, to force the organization to reorganize itself under clear provisions and exclude corporations from getting any tax deduction for charitable contribution through ALEC. The American taxpayer has been hurt over the last 30 years as corporations have found all kinds of ways to put money into politics and to corrupt the system and we hope the IRS will straighten it out. And if there are large fines and penalties, we want those dollars to go back to the general Treasury and reimburse the government for the fraudulent tax provision that has been perpetrated on the American public over the last few years.

Visit Common Cause at CommonCause.org.

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