Between The Lines

Announcements

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

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

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

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

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

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

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

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

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

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

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

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

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

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

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

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

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

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

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

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

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

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"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.

BTL Blog

"The Rogue World Order: Connecting the Dots Between Trump, Flynn, Bannon, Spencer, Dugin Putin," by Anna Manzo (GlobalHealing), Daily Kos, Feb. 13, 2017

"Widespread Resistance Begins to Trump's Muslim Travel Ban at U.S. Airports," by Anna Manzo (GlobalHealing), Daily Kos, Jan. 28, 2017

"MSNBC Editor: Women's March is a Revival of the Progressive Movement," by Anna Manzo (GlobalHealing), Daily Kos, Jan. 24, 2017

"Cornering Trump," by Reginald Johnson, Jan. 19, 2017

"Free Leonard Peltier," by Reginald Johnson, Jan. 6, 2016

"For Natives, a "Day of Mourning"by Reginald Johnson, November 23, 2016

"A Bitter Harvest" by Reginald Johnson, Nov. 15, 2016

Special Programming

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Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

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Corporate-Funded Tea Party: Repeal New Deal Government Programs

Real Audio MP3

Interview with Matthew Rothschild, editor of Progressive magazine, conducted by Scott Harris

teaparty The corporate-funded Tea Party movement, which came into prominence for their virulent hatred of President Obama, deficit spending and government programs, appears to have virtually taken over the Republican Party. Over recent months, the movement's sponsored candidates have won several important primary victories - the latest being Christine O'Donnell's defeat of Delaware's GOP- endorsed candidate to run for U.S. Senate. But O'Donnell, who has declared that masturbation is adultery and that women shouldn't serve in the U.S. military, now stands accused of campaign ethics violations, and is far behind in recent polls against her Democratic opponent.

Other successful Tea Party-endorsed Senate candidates, such as Sharron Angle of Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky have taken controversial stands against many government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and civil rights legislation - while favoring tax breaks for the nation's wealthiest citizens.

Many polls suggest that widespread anger at continuing high unemployment could cost Democrats control of the House and/or Senate in this November's midterm congressional election, but it's not clear how much voters really know about the Tea Party and Republican agenda to eviscerate the nation's social safety net. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, who gauges the popularity of the Tea Party - and examines why voters would embrace candidates promising to end cherished New Deal programs during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: On the one hand, the ideology that they're espousing is a just a kind of a libertarian, free-market ideology which is what got us into this mess in the first place -- the deregulation of Wall Street -- also got us into the mess in the Gulf of Mexico with BP. And the other very weird thing is we're in the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and the people who are suffering the most -- young people, poor people -- we have almost record levels of poverty now. (For) minorities, there's a record number of home foreclosures. We are not seeing the people in the streets who just lost their jobs, just had their farm or their home taken by the bank, the kids who can't find jobs. We're not seeing them; instead, we're seeing this crowd of white people who are from the petty bourgeoisie who are small shop owners, or -- and I interviewed some of the Tea Party people in Madison on April 15 -- and there were realtors, there were carpenters, there were printers, there were construction people. There weren't people who had just been laid off. And this is troubling because this is the constituency of fascism, after all. And Noam Chomsky himself has been issuing warnings, as has Chris Hedges, about the risk of fascism in the United States. And this is a mass-based far-right movement that we haven't seen in this country for decades. And I think we mock it at our peril.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Matthew, I wanted to ask you a bit about why you think we have candidates who espouse this Tea Party line that we should get rid of Social Security and Medicare, that we should oppose planks of the 1964 civil rights legislation that banned racial discrimination by businesses, that we should stop unemployment insurance to those people who are unemployed, that we should revoke the 14th Amendment that says that people born here in this country are citizens, and favor tax breaks for millionaires. It seems that either people out there in this country are not very well acquainted with these positions, or they are very consciously voting against their own economic self-interest.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, they're drunk with this right-wing ideology. And the ideology has been paid for by the huge corporations and these billionaires like the Koch brothers, the oil guys down in Texas who have been trying to gin up a grassroots movement for years and years and finally succeeded, and the issues that they talk about are almost incidental. I mean, it was irrational that this group of people not only opposed any regulation on free enterprise, but also that they opposed healthcare reform was very irrational. I mean, do you want your kid or yourself to be stripped of health insurance just because the insurance companies can say you had a pre-existing condition? I mean, I don't think there are a lot of Americans who wanted that to happen and yet the health care issue was the issue that they seized on -- initially at least.

And so I think what this was a group of far-right Republicans who were able to become politicized, some who had never been overtly politicized -- "getting-out-in-the-street political -- and got politicized by the fact that we had a black man in the White House. And all of a sudden, the issues that didn't concern them during the Bush years -- like civil liberties, like the Constitution, like the debt -- all of a sudden concern them. And so, that's irrational, that kind of response and very sudden. And so I look for explanations in the fact of Obama's race, and in the fact that Obama is pushing an agenda that they don't like for either long-held political reasons or newfound political reasons that are fed to them by their pay masters.

BETWEEN THE LINES:It seems that the Tea Party movement, the corporations that are funding it, seem to have the goal of eviscerating America's modest social safety net. How do progressives, how do people who support the government -- when it comes to assisting those who are vulnerable and elderly, and sick -- how do progressives in general combat this, the message from the Tea Party (that) unfortunately, just seems to go unanswered in so much of our media?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, it's not answered coherently either by the Democrats or by the Obama administration. I mean you're right, the Tea Partiers, you know, they're not just puppets of these billionaires either, there is a genuine grassroots movement that has caught fire here. They want to essentially repeal the New Deal. And some of it is out of ignorance and some of it is out of just pure ideology. They don't want any government at all; they'd rather fend for themselves, even though they're going to get screwed by corporate power. What we need to do is say that the Obama administration has acted inadequately.

In fact, the Tea Partiers are correct when they say, look, the bank bailout was ridiculous. It was ridiculous because Obama should have squeezed the banks when he had them on their hands and knees, and said, "We'll give you the $700 billion, with a few strings attached. The strings are you can't foreclose on anybody for two years. The strings are: You've got to reduce everybody's mortgage by 30 percent, 'cause the market was hyper-inflated.

Every person in America who had a mortgage at that point would have benefited. One of the problems Obama's facing is that he hasn't given people tangible reasons to vote for him or Democrats at this point. He's talking like he's delivered this great change, but people haven't felt the great change because he hasn't wrestled with corporate power aggressively enough. I think the fight has got to be against corporate power. There are some Tea Partiers who agree with the proposition that we should amend the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens' United that said corporations are persons and corporations should be able to buy elections eventually. You know, I think there's some room there to talk to people at the grassroots on some of these issues, with some of them anyway, but some of them are unreachable by reason.

Now, I worry sometimes that we've entered the dusk of the age of reason. Because you have the Creationists, you have the people who deny global warming, you have the people against stem cells, and you have the people on the Tea Party movement who, some of them anyway, seem so far away from any rational argument.

Visit the magazine's website at progressive.org