This is a panel from Left Forum 2017, held June 2 - 4 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The conference theme was "The Resistance."
From the Organizers:
The converging crises of fascism, endless war, climate change, mass migrations, and economic/racial/gender oppression create unprecedented urgency for united, radical action – in the street and in the voting booth. At previous Left Forums – and over the past many decades – progressives have debated the merits of working to “reform” the Democratic Party versus building a united independent radical political front.
Chris Hedges is an author, critic and was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy, the Triumph of Spectacle and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for Truthdig.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. Described as "one of America's most committed -- and most effective -- fighters for human rights" by New York Newsday, and "one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement" by the Los Angeles Times, she was one of 1,000 exemplary women from 140 countries nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the millions of women who do the essential work of peace worldwide. She received numerous prices, including: the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Peace Prize by the US Peace Memorial, the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Award. She is a former economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization.
Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party 2016 Presidential Candidate
Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Her Freedom Rider column appears weekly in Black Agenda Report, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City
Linda Thompson, Left Elect (Not actually a panelist, but she said a few words at the end.)
Note: The Left Forum asked me to film and stream their nightly plenaries, and with only 20 minutes between the scheduled end of this panel and the start of the next plenary, I was unable to stay to the end. If I had I would have missed the start of the plenary. As it turned out I was able to film the presentations, missing only the Q&A.
You can see a complete, if somewhat glitchy, livestream of this panel here.
Trump's pro-billionaire agenda and plans to wage war on the environment, deport three million immigrants, undermine public sector unions, and nominate a reactionary Supreme Court justice are not just idle threats. Yet the neoliberal leaders of the Democratic Party cannot stop Trump now, anymore than during the election. How can we build powerful mass movements capable of decisively defeating the right and providing a real alternative for ordinary working people, immigrants, LGBTQ people and youth? Can the Democratic Party be reformed, or does the left need to build independently?
This is Session 1 from the 2015 Left Forum, held May 29 -31 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The conference theme was "No Justice, No Peace: Confronting the Crises of Capitalism & Democracy."
From the Organizers:
This panel will explore Hollywood and entertainment technology as an organ of U.S. cultural, political, economic, and military dominance. For example, U.S. military surveillance, targeting, and weapons systems use technology, which was primarily developed for motion pictures and entertainment software (or the consumer electronics market). U.S. military hegemony is based on the ability of the U.S. Navy to dominate the world's oceans (due partially to the superior numbers and technology of US naval vessels), augmented by U.S. dominance in space-based reconnaissance technology, which is made possible by entertainment software consumers and movie-goers worldwide. The U.S. media and entertainment sectors are the only American sectors that boast a surplus balance of trade with nearly every nation in the world. Information clearinghouses and data heuristics from social media are now part of an exploding U.S. private industry in league with the U.S. Intelligence Community and law enforcement.
Panel Chair:
Alexa O'Brien is a investigative journalist. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in the UK for her coverage of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, and she had written extensively on the technical cross fertilization between entertainment and defense industries.
Panelists:
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author. He will speak to the social and political impact of Hollywood movies like “American Sniper”. He recently wrote a review of the film entitled, “Killing Ragheads for Jesus”.
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and author. He will speak about the role of U.S. private intelligence companies in mass surveillance as well as Sony Corporation's ties with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Rand Corporation in the context of the movie, "The Interview" about the assassination of the leader of North Korea.
Ray Nowosielski is a national security journalist and documentary filmmaker whose covers the CIA. He was threatened with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for his journalistic work uncovering the identity of a woman reportedly behind the CIA Global Jihad Unit and drone kill list program. He will speak to Hollywood’s portrayal of the CIA and the war on terror in films like Zero Dark Thirty.
The Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition coordinated a weeklong series of events leading up to the International Day of Climate Action on October 24, 2009 as a part of the international campaign being organized by 350.org.
Launched by eminent scientists, activists, and environmentalists, 350.org called for coordinated action around the world on October 24, 2009 to build awareness of the need to bring greenhouse gases under control – from our current 390 ppm to below 350 ppm. In particular, the campaign aimed to put pressure on world leaders who planned to meet in Copenhagen six weeks later to achieve international agreement on ways to deal responsibly and adequately with the threat of climate change. Details on the global campaign are at 350.org.
Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig.org every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He served for eight years as the Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, for coverage of terrorism. Hedges also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.
In 2009 the Los Angeles Press Club honored the original columns that Hedges writes for Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year and granting him the Best Online Column award for his Truthdig essay “Party to Murder,” about the December 2008-January 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza.
Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), "I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Hedges, who holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a master of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School, is fluent in Arabic and also speaks French, Spanish, Greek and Latin.
