Hearings on Federal Plans to Make Hanford a National Radioactive Waste Dump and Abandon Existing Contamination - In Hood River on Tuesday 2/9 and in Portland on Wednesday 2/10

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod interview Gerald Pollet, Executive Director, Co-Founder & Attorney for Heart of America Northwest, a 16,000 member citizens group: providing research and leading organizing, legal and lobbying efforts in the region and nationally for cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation; protecting the Northwest and Columbia River from the threat to resume using Hanford as a national radioactive and radioactive hazardous waste dump; and, working for a safe and clean energy future to reduce global warming without creating more nuclear waste.

For 25 years Gerry Pollet has been organizing on Hanford, environmental and peace issues, and political campaigns in Washington. Gerry has lobbied, written major legislation at federal and state level, and testified to Congress. He will talk about the movement to stop use of Hanford as a national radioactive waste dump and to oppose USDOE's plan to abandon the contamination leaked from the High-Level Nuclear Waste Tanks as it spreads rapidly towards the Columbia River.

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a leading social and political thinker. Until recently he served as Brazil's Minister for Strategic Affairs in Brazil. He recently returned to teach at Harvard Law School. They discuss his new book, "The Left Alternative." The book sets out the principles for a future left and searches for a progressive alternative to neoliberalism.

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod look at the fate of China, the United States, the Global South, and planet with guest Michael T. Klare, whose recent article on TomDispatch is "The Second Decade, The World in 2020" http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175186/

Michael Klare, the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies (a joint appointment at Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), and Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies (PAWSS), a position he has held since 1985 is the author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy,

Klare contends that while the first decade of the twenty-first century still looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999, by 2020, this planet will have a genuinely different look to it. Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by that year as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.

Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod host a discussion of the issue of wearing religious clothing in public schools. In Oregon teachers are prohibited from wearing religious garb in school. The law dates to 1923  when an open supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, presided as speaker of the Oregon House. It was included in the Alien Property Act of 1923, which prohibited Japanese Americans from owning property in Oregon, and was designed to prevent nuns and priests from wearing religious garb in classrooms.

Oregon House Speaker Dave Hunt says the law should be overturned. Hunt plans to introduce a bill to repeal the law in the upcoming special session.

Speaking in favor of overturning the Oregon law is Kevin Finney, currently public policy director at the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO). In recent years, Kevin Finney has served as political director with the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, California outreach coordinator with the Union of Concerned Scientists and climate change program director with the Coalition for Clean Air.

Opposing the law change is Oregon Attorney Charlie Hinkle, who has been lead counsel in many landmark decisions construing the Oregon Constitution in the areas of religious liberty, open courts, commercial speech, election law, and property rights. He is one of the most active and prominent cooperating attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union in Oregon.