As cruel wars rage across three continents and civilian casualties soar, it is easy to forget, or perhaps never to have known, that people have been analyzing the causes of war and organizing and working for peace for a very long time. These days, the term FREE TRADE is associated with right wing free marketers and multi-national corporate globalization, but this was not the story in the 19th century. Beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the transnational peace and anti-imperialist movements of their times.
Marc-Allen Palen is an historian at the University of Exeter specializing in the intersection of British and American imperialism within the broader history of globalization since 1800. He is co-director of The History and Policy Global Economics and History Forum in London. His commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, the BBC, and the Conversation, among other international journals. He is the editor of the Imperial & Global Forum. His earlier book is The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: the Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896.
His second book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World is published by Princeton University Press. In it, he explores how political economy, gender, humanitarianism, religion and ideology have shaped global imperial expansion. He documents the evolution of thinking about the impact of trade policies with social theories and the connections made not only across the Atlantic, but around the world, linking those policies with war and peace. Hard as it may be to believe these days, by the end of 19th century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. And they struggled, too, with rampant nationalism, protectionism and geopolitical conflict, as well as exploitation of underdeveloped regions. The more I learned about the actual history, which Dr. Palen documents, the more dismayed I was that this history has been hidden, and the more determined I became to share it. We spoke with Marc-William Palen on February 20th via Skype.
Michael J. Graetz is professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School. He is a leading authority on tax politics and policy, having served in the US Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy and been an expert witness on a variety of tax matters before Congressional Committees.
He has written or co-written many books, including DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS: THE FIGHT OVER TAXING INHERITED WEALTH; THE WOLF AT THE DOOR: THE MENACE OF ECONOMIC INSECURITY AND HOW TO FIGHT IT; and TRUE SECURITY: RETHINKING AMERICAN SOCIAL INSURANCE.
His latest book, is THE POWER TO DESTROY: HOW THE ANTITAX MOVEMENT HIJACKED AMERICA, published by Princeton University Press. We spoke with him via Skype on February 6, 2024.
We hear much these days about how history should be taught. Although the Civil War was fought and supposedly ended 160 years ago, after the last cannon was shot and formal surrender was signed, a new war began. We are living through it still.
Forgive me for quoting William Faulkner once again, but he said it so well, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past may not be dead, but there were definitely efforts to bury it, and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Howell Raines, set about over six decades to un-bury some of that past, resulting in his most recent book, SILENT CAVALRY: HOW UNION SOLDIERS FROM ALABAMA HELPED SHERMAN BURN ATLANTA – AND THEN GOT WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY, published by Crown.
Howell Raines was born in Birmingham, AL in 1943, and as you will hear, his people go way back in the hill country of northern Alabama. You can be forgiven for not knowing that they voted not to secede from the union during the Civil War, and that they were mocked with the moniker “THE FREE STATE OF WINSTON.” They had hoped to be neutral and left alone by both the Union & the Confederacy, but when the latter legislated the first military conscription in our country’s history, and ruthlessly hounded the 22 counties of northern Alabama to purloin their young men, thousands of them fled north and volunteered for the Union army, where they were formed into the bi-racial 1st Alabama Cavalry, and served with distinction. Howell Raines documents the significant role they played in restoring our union, as well as the collusion between northern and southern elites to erase their story.
Howell Raines began his journalism career, 60 years ago as a reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald. In 1971 he became the political editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He became the NYT national correspondent based in Atlanta in 1979, becoming the Times editorial page editor in 1993 in New York City, where he was known for “the aggressive, colloquial style of his editorials.”
His books include a novel, WHISKEY MAN, set in Depression era Alabama and based roughly on his own family history; and an oral history of the civil-rights movement, MY SOUL IS RESTED: MOVEMENT DAYS IN THE DEEP SOUTH REMEMBERED. We spoke with him via Skype on January 22, 2024.
Our guests today on Forthright Radio are two journalists from the non-profit on-line news organization, The Intercept, Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain.
We watched in horror on October 7, 2023 as Hamas gunmen launched surprise attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets along the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. It came 50 years and a day after Egyptian and Syrian forces launched an assault during Yom Kippur to retrieve territory Israel had taken during the conflict in 1967. The New York Times reports that there were about 1,200 deaths, including 766 Israeli civilians, 36 of them children, and 373 members of the security forces, plus approximately 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers taken hostage, including 30 children. The attack is considered the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history, and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust.
In response, The Israeli Defense Forces launched and sustained brutal retaliatory bombings and near total restrictions on water, food, fuel and other necessities for life, vowing to continue til Hamas has been destroyed. As of January 11, 2024, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them women and children. Unknown numbers of others remain buried beneath the rubble of the obliterated homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, churches, and other crucial infrastructure.
International efforts for a cease fire have been thwarted by the US Government in the United Nations, even as President Biden has gone around Congress to send more US weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. In the United States and around the world, huge demonstrations continue to occur in support of g an immediate and sustained cease-fire. Many of these demonstrations are organized by Jewish peace groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Rabbis for Ceasefire.
These things and much more, leave me uncharacteristically unable to process the emotions that arise. The horror, the knowledge that through my government, without whom this could not and would not continue, I am complicit, my feelings of helplessness to affect change. So, the piece that Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain published on The Intercept on Christmas Eve, Merry Christmas! We All Belong in the Hague, spoke to me and moved me to invite them to Forthright Radio.
Elise Swain is Photo Editor of The Intercept. Prior to this role, she was an associate producer for the Intercepted podcast, while working across various mediums for The Intercept, including writing, photography, video, illustration, and audio. Before joining The Intercept, she worked as a freelance artist and has a BFA in photo and video from the School of Visual Arts. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Before joining First Look Media, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore’s Dog Eat Dog Films and was a research producer for Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” He’s contributed to many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.” In 2003, he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction.
We are especially grateful to David Rovics for permission to include songs from his recent collection, NOTES FROM A HOLOCAUST IN STANDARD TUNING, in the web post of this edition of Forthright Radio. You can find more of his songs here: https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/sets/gaza
The heading photo is of an American flag flying behind barbed wire and fencing at Guantanamo Bay on June 27, 2023 by Elise Swain. Used with permission.
Her latest book, TRUE WEST: MYTH AND MENDING ON THE FAR SIDE OF AMERICA, was published this Fall by Torrey House Press. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focused on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. She has studied various religious traditions over the years, with particular attention to how cultures view landscape and wildlife. The rural American west, pastoral communities of northern Mongolia, and the grasslands of East Africa have been her main areas of interest. She is the president of the Board of Directors of Wild Earth Guardians.
Although TRUE WEST focuses primarily on the intermountain west, what goes on in this region is having tremendous effect on our national politics and well-being. Just two days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided in favor of a suit brought by CO Republican and unaffiliated voters, working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, against CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Donald J. Trump, taking advantage of a CO law that allows voters to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. In this case the eligibility was challenged under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, claiming that the former president had engaged insurrection , based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack by his supporters at his urging. As you will hear in this interview with Betsy Gaines Quammen, recorded in the Beyond the Deep End Studio on the Winter Solstice of 2023, extremist organizing in this region over more than a decade contributed to that insurrection. We share it with you now.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. In addition to being an award winning scholar, she has also been an improvisational comedian. Her 2020 TED Talk (link below) explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her earlier book is Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.
Her book, WRONG: HOW MEDIA, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY DRIVE OUR APPETITE FOR MISINFORMATION, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
As Jaime Settle, author of FRENEMIES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA POLARIZES AMERICA, writes of it ‘Powerful, distinctive, and utterly compelling, Wrong argues that the way we satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community is shaped by our social identities, which are at the core of both the supply and demand for misinformation. Because politicians and the media know this fact, they behave strategically in order to structure politics through this perspective.”
We spoke with Dr. Young on November 7, 2023 via Skype.
Links to articles/videos pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg King in All Species Grove 1987 (courtesy of Greg King)
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
Greg King on traverse during a tree-sit in the middle of 1,000 acre All Species Grove, September 1987. Note sleeping platform on the tree in the background, tied under the lowest branch 150′ above the forest floor. (photo by Mary Beth Nearing, courtesy of Greg King)
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today. We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
In 1996 more than 8,000 people protested ancient redwood logging at the Pacific Lumber log deck along Yager Creek, in Humboldt County. More than 1,000 were arrested. It remains the largest single-day arrest number for an environmental protest in U.S. history. photo by Greg King
As each month breaks historic records for the hottest ever recorded, we realize that hot though they have been, they may very well be the coolest we’ll ever experience in the future. As wild fires, smoke and floods devastate huge swathes of the globe, one asks what can be done? While many dither (or worse), young people take action. Through their courage and determination, with their adult allies, they demand their rights to a livable future in courts around the world.
On September 27, 2023 in Strasbourg, France, The hearing of 6 Portuguese youth plaintiffs in the historic lawsuit, Duarte Agostinho v. Portugal and 32 Others, took place at the European Court of Human Rights.
The plaintiffs want governments to set and meet science-based targets for cutting carbon emissions in the 33 countries: all EU member states, plus Norway, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
The fact that the European Court of Human Rights elevated this case to its Grand Chamber demonstrates how seriously the Court takes allegations that the inadequate climate policies of these 33 States breach their legal obligation to prevent climate-related harm.
Among the third party interveners in Aghostino was the Center for International Environmental Law. We invited Nikki Reisch, the Director of the Climate & Energy Program, at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) to be our guest on Forthright Radio. At CIEL, Nikki works at the intersection of human rights and the environment, overseeing research, analysis, legal and policy advocacy related to climate change, its causes, consequences, and responses to it.
Prior to joining CIEL, Nikki Reisch was the Legal Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a Supervising Attorney in the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law. She was also an Adjunct Professor in the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at CUNY School of Law. Her work focused on human rights and environmental harms related to a range of domestic and international issues, including open-pit mining, surveillance of human rights defenders, immigration enforcement, torture, and arbitrary detention.
Her engagement in climate justice began with her five-year tenure as the Africa Program Manager at the Bank Information Center, where she worked to curb development finance for fossil fuels and supported front-line communities challenging extractive industry projects. In her subsequent position as the Policy Advisor on Forests and Climate Change at Rainforest Foundation UK, Nikki co-founded a global coalition tracking reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation in the UNFCCC negotiations and pursued transnational advocacy with partners in the Congo Basin to mitigate the human rights risks posed by climate change and policy responses to it.
She has litigated before domestic and international courts, appeared before UN treaty bodies and the accountability mechanisms of international financial institutions, and co-authored amicus briefs in several human rights cases. She is co-editor with Philip Alston of Tax, Inequality, and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) and has published other articles and reports on human rights and environmental matters.
In our far ranging conversation, which was recorded on October 3, 2023 via Skype, she told us “Sometimes when politics break down — as they have despite decades of climate negotiations — the law can break through.”
In our conversation, Nikki referred to the European Court of Human Rights decisions as binding on the “Member States of the EU.” She actually meant The Council of Europe (46 member states, including the 27 EU states).
Award winning filmmaker Andrew Morgan’s latest film is the documentary, TEXAS, USA. As in his earlier films such as THE TRUE COST and THE HERETIC, he informs us about big topics through the impacts on individual lives.
TEXAS, USA explores what it takes to build a new, hopeful vision for democracy against entrenched, well funded forces against the full participation of all Texas citizens. The film follows progressive candidates, Lina Hidalgo, Greg Casar and Beta O’Rourke, as well as community organizers, Tori Gavito, Brianna Brown (Texas Organizing Project – TOP) and Adri Pérez, during the 2022 elections.
We see the human side of politics – whether going door to door in major cities or addressing crowds in small, rural town-hall meetings. It documents that democracy is very much alive and succeeding even in an era of reactionary politics aimed at suppressing it.
We spoke with Andrew on October 2, 2023 via Skype.
Robert P. Jones is the author of the book, THE HIDDEN ROOTS of WHITE SUPREMACY and the PATH to a SHARED AMERICAN FUTURE, published by Simon and Schuster.
His earlier award winning books include WHITE TOO LONG: THE LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY; THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA; and PROGRESSIVE AND RELIGIOUS: HOW CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM AND BUDDHIST LEADERS ARE MOVING BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS AND TRANSFORMING AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE.
In this latest book, he reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin, but rather the continuation of a pattern of genocide and dispossession that began with the first European contact with the Indigenous peoples of this land. His reframing of America’s origins explores how the founders of the US could build a democratic society on the foundations of mass racial violence, and why this paradox survives today in the form of White Christian Nationalism. Through three stories from our history and current re-examination and reckonings by those living today, he has illuminated the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of true democracy.
We spoke with him on September 20, 2023 via Skype.
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