Published on Oct 10, 2015
Experts predict a billion people will be obese by 2025.Presenter: Shiulie Ghosh Guests:Dr. Mohamud Verjee – Director of Primary Care at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.Tam Fry – Spokesman for the UK’s National Obesity Forum.Shikha Sharma – Dietitian and founder of Nutri-Health, working on weight management and lifestyle disorders.
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Published on Oct 10, 2015
“Inclusion is always a benefit and never a cost,” says Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Watch and listen to her talking at WikiStage in Lima, Peru, about how economic growth alone is not enough, about her experience of protesting Suharto’s autocratic rule in Indonesia, about her strong and successful mother, and why making exclusive societies more inclusive is always worth the effort.
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Published on Oct 10, 2015
Activists and ministers; economists and heads of state; physicians and chefs; conservationists and capital investors. They came together at the World Bank Group-International Monetary Fund 2015 Annual Meetings in Lima, Peru to share knowledge and aspirations about the goal to end extreme poverty, right as the Bank announced figures indicating global poverty has dipped below 10%. Bank Group President Jim Kim called it “the best story ever,” and you can see why.
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Published on Oct 10, 2015
The Satan Bug (1965), at “Station Three” — a top-secret US bioweapons lab in the Southern California desert — the protagonist investigates the murder of the security chief and disappearance of the director and head scientist; two lethal bioweapons — a strain of “botulinus” and a recently developed virus (the “Satan Bug”) which could wipe out the earth’s population in months — are missing.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), in this James Bond film, women are being brainwashed by the villain to disseminate bio-warfare agents throughout the world.
The Omega Man (1971), a science fiction film starring Charleston Heston; in 1975, BW between China and Russia kills most of the world’s population. The protagonist, a U.S. Army scientist/physician, renders himself immune with an experimental vaccine. (In the source novel, I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, the plague is coincident with a great war, but it is not clear that it originated with BW.)
The Andromeda Strain (1971), although the microbial threat in this science fiction film is a natural one returning to earth with a satellite, the scientific response team comes across germ warfare simulations, strongly indicating that the responsible US government projects were designed to actively search for harmful bio-agents for use in BW.
The Crazies (1973), a US Army plane carrying an untested bio-weapon (a virus code-named “Trixie”) crashes near a small Pennsylvania town contaminating the water; infected victims either die or become violently homicidal; heavily armed U.S. troops in NBC suits and gas masks, soon arrive.
Virus (1980), in this Japanese movie, a deadly virus (“MM88”) has been created accidentally by an American geneticist; it amplifies the potency of any other virus or bacterium it comes into contact with; in 1982, MM88 has been stolen from a lab in the US and a team of Americans vie with a shady East German scientist to recover it, but fail and a pandemic, initially known as the “Italian Flu”, is the result.
Men Behind the Sun (1988), a Hong Kong–Chinese historical war horror film graphically depicting war atrocities at Unit 731, a secret Japanese BW facility, during World War II; details the various cruel medical experiments inflicted upon Chinese and Soviet POWs.
12 Monkeys (1995) Philosophy of a Knife (2008), a Russian-American horror film covering the Japanese Army’s Unit 731, mixing archival footage, interviews, and extremely graphic reenactments of the vile experiments performed there during WWII.
Dasavatharam (2008), an Indian Tamil science fiction disaster film about an virus outbreak from laboratory.
The Crazies (2010), the water in a small Iowa town becomes contaminated with “Trixie” — a “Rhabdoviridae prototype” bio-weapon — after a military cargo plane en route to an incinerator in Texas crashes; infected victims become cold, calculating, depraved, and bloodthirsty killers.
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Crisis? What crisis? How powerful corporations make a killing out of disaster
Award-winning journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across the US, Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and Australia to witness the reality of Disaster Capitalism—the hidden world of privatized detention centers and militarized private security, formed to protect corporations as they profit from war zones. He visits Britain’s immigration detention centers, tours the prison system in the United States, and digs into the underbelly of the companies making a fortune from them. Loewenstein reveals the dark history of how large multinational corporations have become more powerful than governments, supported by media and political elites.
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Democracy Now! Published on Oct 9, 2015
When disaster strikes, who profits? That’s the question asked by journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new book, “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe.” Traveling across the globe, Loewenstein examines how companies such as G4S, Serco and Halliburton are cashing in on calamity, and describes how they are deploying for-profit private contractors to war zones and building for-profit private detention facilities to warehouse refugees, prisoners and asylum seekers. Recently, Loewenstein teamed up with filmmaker Thor Neureiter for a documentary by the same name that chronicles how international aid and investment has impacted communities in Haiti, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea and beyond.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. When disaster strikes, who profits? That’s the question asked by journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe. Traveling across the globe, Antony examines how companies, such as G4S, Serco, Halliburton, are cashing in on calamity. He describes how they’re deploying for-profit private contractors to war zones and building for-profit private detention facilities to warehouse refugees, prisoners, asylum seekers. Now Loewenstein has teamed up with filmmaker Thor Neureiter for an upcoming documentary by the same name that chronicles how international aid and investment has impacted communities from Haiti to Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea and beyond. This is the trailer.
…(read more).
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Published on Oct 10, 2015
Kevin Martin, Project 21 & Sam Sacks, The District Sentinel & Bryan Pruitt, RedState all join Thom Hartmann. Why don’t we cut all of the subsidies to the big banks and fossil fuel companies – and fund a Green New Deal to create jobs and to bring American infrastructure into the 21st century?
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An illuminating history and groundbreaking investigation tracing how a single trade organization turned itself into the most dangerous political weapon in America
When Americans hear the words “Chamber of Commerce,” many still think of the local business associations that spruce up Main Streets and sponsor Little League teams around the country. But the United States Chamber of Commerce is a different animal altogether. The Chamber was originally founded to give big business a voice during the long—and now almost inconceivable—period in American history that saw the rise of workers’ rights, consumer protections, and environmental awareness as national priorities. But over time, driven by an antigovernment ideology and its desire for financial and political power, the Chamber metastasized into a fighting force designed to protect the worst excesses of American industry.
The Chamber, through its veiled corporate sponsors, can take credit for some of the most disturbing trends in American life: the reversal of environmental protections, the destruction of unions and worker protections, the rise of virulent antigovernment ideology, the enlarged role of money in campaigns, and the creation of “astroturf” movements as cover for a corporate agenda. Through its propaganda, lobbying, and campaign cash, the Chamber has created a right-wing monster that even it struggles to control, a conservative movement that is destabilizing American democracy as never before.
The Influence Machine tells this history as a series of gripping narratives that take us into the backrooms of Washington, where the battles over how our country is run and regulated are fought, and then out into the world, where we see how the Chamber’s campaigns play out in real lives. In the end, Alyssa Katz reveals the hidden weaknesses of this seeming juggernaut and shows how its antidemocratic agenda can be reversed.
Praise for The Influence Machine
“Important and probing . . . a valuable and a sobering contribution to the study of power in American society . . . Katz has assembled a work of synthesis and insight. . . . The chamber has, she argues, effectively countered the influence of labor unions and contributed to the widening economic divide in American society. Those points are made forcefully and backed up impressively.”—Los Angeles Times
“An urgent look at the ‘political assault weapon’ that is transforming the country . . . [Katz] does invaluable work in tracing how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a relentless engine for pressing a ‘business of enterprise unfettered by government.’ . . . An eye-opening, maddening read.”—Kirkus Reviews
“With clarity and verve, but without polemic, investigative journalist Katz describes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s evolution into a many-armed behemoth. . . . [She] illustrates with several examples of how the organization has managed to influence courts, strong-arm Congress, cripple federal agencies, and sway the public with ‘voter education’ ads—and, more recently, it has exported cutthroat American business practices abroad.”—Publishers Weekly
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Published on Oct 10, 2015
Alyssa Katz, THE INFLUENCE MACHINE: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life joins Thom. How DID the Chamber of Commerce get so powerful? And what does that say about the corporate capture of our democracy?
Part 2:
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Uploaded on Mar 28, 2007
Utilizing excerpts from the award-winning non-fiction text “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid, Life & Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas.
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Transition Studies 