The United States spends more on military arms, equipment and personnel than any other country. More than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and England combined, according to the National Priorities Project. We sell most of the weapons that countries like Saudi Arabia, England and others buy.

In no small measure, the business of the United States is war.

Between our foreign policy and our defense spending, we create markets for weaponry and wars and then pivot to respond to the siren cries of those markets.

And, while the U.S. Defense Department stands resolute in its commitment to respond to climate change to protect its bases and national security interests, the Department is a major source of greenhouse gases as a profligate burner of fossil fuels.

The No War 2017 Conference at American University in Washington in September sought to find paths to link the anti-way and peace movements with the climate and environmental movements. That effort naturally puts the U.S. military at the center of the debate.

The conference was a project of World Beyond War, an international peace organization.

I was invited to speak about the successful fight to prevent the open burning of 16 million pounds of munitions propellant at Camp Minden following an explosion of a small amount of some of the materials in 2012. After a strong grassroots effort that engaged thousands of northwest Louisiana citizens in the fight, the area’s congressman, one Senator, and a dedicated state representative.

While at the conference, I conducted several interviews, three of which are included in this podcast.

In order of appearance they are:

Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright;

Alice Slater;

and Nick Mottern.

They constitute roughly the second have of the program. I talk about the conference and Camp Minden in the first half.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Joint Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, left office with a nationally televised Farewell Address. In it, he warned Americans to guard against the influence of the Military Industrial Complex. The video of the full 16-minute speech is below.

https://youtu.be/OyBNmecVtdU

Dr. Willie Parker was born into poverty and Christianity in Birmingham, AL. He became a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. He later joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu.

During his first 12 years of practice, Parker did not provide abortion services for any of his patience. While some of his Christian friends were opposed to it and believed abortions to be immoral, Parker says he avoided dealing with the moral complexity of the issue by not providing the services himself. He did observe other providers perform the procedures, but he kept his distance from the controversial subject by not directly providing services.

Things changed when a change of leadership at the hospital led to the end of providing abortion services there. It sparked a crisis at the hospital and a rebellion among some physicians and nurses who saw the necessity of the legal services.

When some of his peers decided to create a clinic separate from the hospital where they would provide the mostly poor women the abortions they wanted, Parker came to a personal reckoning with abortion.

In this interview, he talks about how listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech, delivered in Memphis, TN, the night before he was assassinated changed his perspective on abortion and moved him to get trained and certified so that he, too, could provide the services for his patients.

The part of Dr. King’s sermon/speech that moved him, Parker says in the interview, was when the Civil Rights leader talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jewish traveler had been beaten and injured while traveling. A priest and a Levite pass him but ignore his needs. A Samaritan (considered enemies of Jews at the time) stopped to help.

Parker says that it was the Samaritan’s perspective of asking what the fate of the traveler would be if he did not stop to help is what swayed him to change his position about performing abortions — “What would become of my patients if I wasn’t willing to help them?”

Parker talks about his decision to leave his faculty position in Hawaii to go to the University of Michigan’s Medical School to get his training and the needs his patients in this interview. The interview was recorded by phone from an airport while Dr. Parker was en route to a speaking engagement about his book which chronicles his life, his faith and his decision to become an abortion provider.

For six years, there has been an epic David v. Goliath battle being fought in Louisiana over the fate of public education in our state. The Goliaths in this fight are members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) who owe their elections to a group of out-of-state pro-charter school billionaires who have bought that board in each of the two most recent election cycles. The front man for the Goliaths is Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, who has direct personal ties to a number of the billionaires, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. White spent about seven months running the Recovery School District before being named superintendent in January 2012 by the freshly-bought BESE members who won election in 2011. Then-governor Bobby Jindal served as in-state cheerleader for White until the two had a falling-out (real or feigned) over support for Common Core. The Davids in this struggle have been teachers and friends of public education who see the charters as an attack on teaching as a profession and as an attack on the civic role that public schools play, namely creating citizens. Among those opposing the store-bought charter advocates are a handful of activist, bloggers, and authors all of whom happen to be directly connected to public eduction and believers in its central purpose. Mike Deshotels is one of the stalwarts in that group. The retired classroom teacher has been a legal spur under John White’s saddle, having taken the superintendent to court on at least four occasions to force the release of data which Deshotels then used to discredit White’s rose-colored glasses narrative of charters’ alleged success in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans. Deshotels has won each fight and earned the distinction of being sued by White himself — which drew some national attention. In this podcast, Deshotels talks about the way White’s Department of Education has manipulated data to spin narratives of success and what that data (obtained through the courts) ultimately revealed. Mike Deshotels discusses his persistent efforts to de-spin John White’s fairy tales. Check it out.