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(04 Oct) 100602 Noam Chomsky - The New American Imperialism Imperial systems are sustained not only through violence or its threat but through a network of client states and dependent regimes. Take Mubarak of Egypt. After rigging the most recent election he is now Egypt's longest running ruler since the Pharaoh Ramses the Second. Not content with that distinction he once again extended emergency rule which he introduced in 1981. Hardly a peep from Washington because Mubarak serves its interests in the Middle East. And the free press? Well, from Lippmann and Reston of days gone by to Friedman and Brooks today there is a steady chorus of support for U.S. policy. Actual U.S. imperial history, past and present, is often a concoction of fantasies, gaping omissions, selected facts, and unsubstantiated opinion. Orwell described the process, "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." Noam Chomsky is the internationally renowned Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. He practically invented modern linguistics. In addition to his pioneering work in that field he has been a leading voice for peace and social justice for many decades. He is in huge demand as a speaker all over world. The New Statesman calls him, "The conscience of the American people." Howard Zinn described him as "the nation's most distinguished intellectual rebel." He's the author of scores of books including Failed States, What We Say Goes, and Hopes and Prospects. (11 Oct) 100601 Tom Hayden - The Long War and Resistance President Eisenhower's 1953 Cross of Iron speech is often not recalled. The former general said: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all." Two decades earlier, Smedley Butler, another general, not as well known, put it succinctly: "War is a racket. It always has been. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." Today Washington, the global policeman, is in a long war with no end in sight. Tom Hayden has been involved in many of America's social movements for decades. He was the main author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society, the campus-based, activist movement. He went from street protests and being indicted by the Nixon Administration to holding office in Sacramento. He served eighteen years in the California State Assembly and State Senate. Among his many books are Voices of the Chicago Eight, Writings for a Democratic Society, and The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama. (18 Oct) 100504 Arun Gupta - The Mainstreaming of Extremism The rise of right-wing politics is sometimes traced to Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention. But perhaps a better place to start is the 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, who would later be appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court. Powell sent his memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He asserted, "no thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack." He warned: "Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late." Powell's central message was that corporations needed to organize to roll back the popular movements which challenged business hegemony. And did corporations ever respond to the call. The money flowed. Media, foundations and think tanks were created to reestablish the top-down old order and root out all those egalitarian ideas from the dreaded 1960s . Arun Gupta, journalist and activist, was founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper in New York. He's a regular contributor to Alternet and Z. He also appears on Democracy Now, GRIT TV, and Al Jazeera. (25 Oct) 100503 Bill McKibben - Earth to Humans: Enough Already You've heard the bad joke right? If the earth were a bank it would be bailed out. We have been diddling while the planet gradually sizzles. Conferences from Kyoto to Copenhagen come and go. Not much happens. The US Congress? Well, the interests of big oil and coal come first, earth second. We have waited too long. Massive change is under way. For millennia the planet has been habitable and now it is melting, drying, and flooding in unprecedented ways. Leading environmentalist Lester Brown calls for "a wartime mobilization, an all-out response designed to avoid the destabilizing economic and political stresses that will come with unmanageable climate change. An emissions cut of 80 percent from today's levels by 2020, not 2050, would keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million, setting the stage for getting back to 350." Bill McKibben was one of the first to sound the alarm on climate change with his bestselling book The End of Nature. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, he is a leading activist, journalist and author on the environment. His other books include The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild, Deep Economy, and Eaarth. He is co-founder of 350.org.