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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




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



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




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SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

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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.


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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.

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Latin American Left Suffers Political, Economic Setbacks, But Remains a Potent Force

Posted June 8, 2016

MP3 Interview with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, conducted by Scott Harris

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After decades of U.S. domination over Latin American politics and economic policy, popular progressive leaders and parties emerged in the late 1990s that moved the region into a new era of independence. The so-called pink tide that swept South American nations began when Hugo Chavez of Venezuela won his nation’s 1998 presidential election, followed by a succession of victories for the left in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Honduras and Peru. Left parties in many of these nations launched new social programs that expanded education, job opportunities and improved housing, benefiting the poor majority. Washington, which had a long history of overt and covert military interventions in the region and overthrew dozens of governments had lost much of its power to influence policies and events in the hemisphere.

But in recent years, economic and political instability has struck many of these nations, where left parties have suffered electoral defeats, or have been weakened by accusations of corruption by their conservative political opponents. In Argentina, the candidate from outgoing president Christina Fernandez de Kirchner’s FPV party lost to center right candidate Mauricio Macri. In Brazil, opposition legislators impeached Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff. In Venezuela, which is suffering a major economic downturn and shortages of basic goods following a steep decline in world oil prices, opposition parties won a majority in the national legislature.

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who examines the recent economic and political setbacks for Latin America’s left governments, and the outlook for their future prospects.

MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think the world economy, you know, the whole world economy has slowed in recent years and so has Latin America. The whole region didn't grow last year and it's projected to shrink by about half-percent this year. Some of that is the world economy, but not most of it. I think most of it is mistakes that these governments made, and you see this in Brazil, for example, where the government of the Workers Party headed by the suspended Dilma Rousseff. Most of that slowdown you saw, which the recession began in the first half of 2014, that was due to government policy. They cut spending, they raised interest rates, both at the wrong time. The media was a major player also. It's been against the government. It's kind of like Fox News on most of the stations of the U.S. there in terms of its opposition to the government. But nonetheless, Dilma would not be in this kind of trouble if she had not taken this wrong turn in terms of economic policy. And the sad part is that she didn't have to do it because the country has $350 billion in reserve, so they're not facing a balance of payment crisis, like say, Venezuela is or even Argentina in the run-up to that election, you know after the ruling of that judge in New York. They couldn't borrow on international markets, so they were constrained much more than Brazil.

But if you go country, by country, you see different stories. They're not all the same. The slowdown of the world economy made things more difficult, but they weren't the major cause of these problems.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What have been the accomplishments of many of these leftist governments across over the last decade or so?

MARK WEISBROT: There were huge achievements. Look, the simplest two numbers you can look at, is just look at economic growth in the 21st century, you had real economic growth, You had almost none. In the 1980-2000, you had 5.7 percent total growth for the whole period per capita, income per person. So that was almost like zero, and .3 percent annually, .5 maybe. And then in this period, the period prior to the last couple years in the 21st century, it grew by about 1.8 percent annually, which is not like it was from 1960-1980, but a vast difference.

The second most important number and probably the most important of the two would be just look at poverty in the region. It was about 44 percent in 2002 and that fell to 28 percent in 2013. You know, for the 22 years prior to 2002, it was actually rising. And you go country by country, and especially the left governments of course, most did better than the average, even Venezuela did very well from 2003, when it got control of the oil industry, to 2014 even, you could take it to, and they still did very well in terms of cutting poverty by more than half, extreme poverty by more than two-thirds.

Now they've lost a lot of ground in the last three years. But they haven't wiped out the gains that they made even though it's a very chaotic situation there with a lot of shortages, high inflation. But if you look at Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, all of them had huge gains in terms of reducing reducing, increasing employment and wages.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What's the outlook for the Latin American left in the years ahead and the future of many of the social programs that these governments across Latin America instituted to address the problems of the poor majority in those countries?

MARK WEISBROT: How is the left going to do? I think they will come back. The other side doesn't have anything really coherent to offer, even in the worst situation – which is Venezuela – the opposition is offering nothing. They have no economic program, they're not putting forward anything, even. They just want to get rid of the current government. And I think in Argentina and Brazil, you can already see what kind of a future they're offering. They've appointed a cabinet of all white men. Got rid of the ministries for women and racial equality. They got rid of the ministry of culture until they were forced to take that back. They're totally corrupt. But I think that the left is there to stay, because these setbacks are going to be temporary because people got used to being able to elect the government that they wanted, which in the past they couldn't even really do. The United States would intervene as they did in Chile, for example, in 1973 to overthrow these governments as they did in Haiti more recently in 2004, and Honduras as well. They intervened to consolidate that coup, as Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her book, that she helped to prevent the return of the democratically-elected president. So the U.S. is still able to pick off some of the weaker governments. But they have much more democracy than they had in the 20th century.

For more information, visit the Center for Economic and Policy Research at cepr.net.

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