Between The Lines - James Gustave "Gus" Speth: Failed Politics, Runaway Consumerism Root Cause of Environmental Decline (Week Ending Nov. 28, 2014)

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.

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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.

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Failed Politics, Runaway Consumerism is Root Cause of Environmental Decline

Posted Nov. 19, 2014

Interview with James Gustave "Gus" Speth, environmental movement activist, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

James Gustave "Gus" Speth has been called the ultimate environmental insider for his founding roles in the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, his chairing of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Jimmy Carter, and his leadership of the United Nations Development Program. He then served as dean of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for ten years. Speth currently teaches at the Vermont Law School.

In recent years, Speth has been a critic of the large, national environmental groups of which he was such an intrinsic part. Now 74 years old, Speth just published a memoir titled, “Angels By the River,” in which he recalls his many years of activism as well as his childhood in pre-civil rights era South Carolina. He considers his 2011 arrest in front of the White House for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline as one of his proudest accomplishments.

Speth was in New Haven, Connecticut on Nov. 8 to accept the Thomas Berry Award, given jointly by Yale’s School of Forestry and Divinity School. There, Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with him about his view of what many environmental activists maintain is the incompatibility of laissez-faire capitalism and implementing corporate regulations necessary to protect our ecosystem and ensure the survival of life on planet earth.

GUS SPETH: I think we need to ask ourselves now again, afresh, what is an environmental issue? The answer normally is it's air pollution, climate change, biodiversity. But what if the answer to an environmental issue is really any issue that affects environmental outcomes, any issue that affects whether we succeed. And if you answer it that way then you have to dig deeper and look at the root causes, and certainly our failing politics is a tremendous cause of environmental decline, a perpetual cause of environmental decline. There's great social inequality, insecurity in the country. Our runaway consumerism, our affluenza, our failure to really change our lifestyles, our very materialistic values and anthropocentric values, and values that focus on now and not tomorrow. These set of values that dominate in our culture, we ought to be challenging them, and there's a whole list of things. We ought to building new corporate types, new structures for business: public/private hybrids; for profit-not for profit hybrids; all kinds of co-ops; local banking; state banks; and new types of finance that have a lot more democratic governance of the way our investments are going in the country. There's just a whole host of big deep changes we need to make.

So what some of us are doing is trying to create new institutions and change old institutions so we are actually promoting deeper systemic change in the country that can lead basically to a new economy, an economy that really does give true and honest priority to people, place and planet. We're determined to keep building the strength of these institutions and these ideas till the point that we begin to get enough momentum to change the system, to move to a next system. And we don't have to know everything about it, but we need to know the general directions of change and I think we're getting a lot of good information and ideas on that.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, throughout the book I was reading – and other people talk about this too – you talked about the need for a "transformative change in existing capitalism," that the capitalism we have now is completely out of control; it's heading for wealth for fewer and fewer people and poverty for so many more. Can we transform capitalism enough that it would still be capitalism and we could have a sustainable world, or do we need to move to a different system? You quoted Barry Commoner at one point in the book and he was pretty much saying capitalism isn't the system...I mean, if you change it enough to make it sustainable, it really wouldn't even be capitalism anymore. Do we even need to go down that road? Does it even matter what we call it? Do you think that capitalism can be reformed enough to get us through this?

GUS SPETH: Well, it depends on what you mean by capitalism. I think what we need to think about is moving dramatically beyond the rapacious capitalism we have today, this consumerist capitalism that we have. And one of the ways to do that is to really have much more democratic control over where capital is spent. There may still be investors in this world of the future, but the public would be the major part of the steering about where money is spent and where money is invested. We have a system now where the banks make all the decisions with a little bit of influence from government on infrastructure and things, whenever that happens, but by and large, the decisions about making investment decisions are based on high financial returns by banks and the people who are seeking to make investments through the banks. And we need a system where we recognize the tremendously high social and environmental returns that we could get from other investments. So we need a heavy democratic guidance for investment decisions, and that implies that we have to have effective government. We have to have a government that works, that's deeply democratic.

Sometimes when I think about these issues, I say we need to save our failing democracy first, because people are not going to trust government to make these decisions if it's the government we have now. So we need government ... and we're beginning to see a lot of hybrid arrangements of community investment corporations around the country, community development corporations which are public institutions that are steering the development of their cities. So I think in the future, there should be a role for the market. I think we need to take back as citizens a lot of the things that have been commodified and taken away from us as commoners, but I can see a role for the market to do certain things, but it ought to be a heavily regulated market, one that's really regulated to act in the public interest. Right now, just on environmental issues, the uncompensated damages of corporate actions – this is on a global basis – are estimated to be over a third of corporate profits. So if they really paid for the damages they were causing, it would consume more than a third of corporate profits. So this is not a market that is now managed for current and future generations.

James Gustave "Gus" Speth, a leading environmentalist and both an architect and critic of the U.S. environmental movement. His memoir, “Angels By the River,” was recently published by Chelsea Green. Read Speth's views of the urgent need to develop a new, sustainable economy at the New Economy Coalition.