Washington Liberals

Good news!  You can watch Pirate TV with streaming or downloaded video, from the comfort of your computer.   I have never been able to watch the broadcast shows (on my boob tube) at the appointed times, so the availability of streaming and downloadable films greatly expands the value of the service.

Here, for example, is a streaming video of ex-insurance company executive Wendell Potter describing how Corporate PR is Killing Healthcare.

This search page lets you find other streamable videos. (The interface is a bit awkward.)

If you click on one of the entries further below, or at the following link, you can access wmv files, which you can save to your disk.  The files are large (hundreds of megabytes).  But, hey! They’re free and the speakers are top notch.

Pirate TV Seattle — Challenging the Corporate Media Blockade!

Peter Ward: Our Flooding World	Chris Hedges: Death of the Liberal Class	Gwynne Dyer: The Geopolitics of Climate Change	Noam Chomsky: When Elites Fail
Peter Dale Scott: State of Emergency	Peter Dale Scott: America’s Afghanistan	John Dean: Conservatives w/o Conscience	David Suzuki: The Big Picture
Bill McKibben: Eaarth	William Calvin: Putting the CO2 Genie Back in the Bottle	Arjun Makhijani: Carbon & Nuclear Free in 30 years!	David Korten: A New Game; A New Economy
Antonia Juhasz: Black Tide	Sanho Tree: Addicted to Failure	James Billmaier: The Electric-Vehicle Revolution	John Perkins: 2012 Prophesy: Radical Global Change
Malalai Joya: US Out of Afghanistan Now!	Dan Imhoff: Why the Farm Bill matters and what we can do about it!	After Citizens United: What Now? Forum	Daniel Tucker: Changing Our Food System

“The Pirate Television Production Company was started in 1997 and produces an award winning weekly 58 minute cable television series that runs on SCAN- Seattle Community Access Network and PSA- Puget Sound Access in King County Washington.  Pirate TV has also shown on Free Speech TV and provides audio for David Barsamian’s outstanding Alternative Radio and KEXP Mind Over Matters 90.3 FM Seattle. ” . (source)

Interestingly, the vast majority of speakers seem to be white men. I’m sure that is not intentional.

Ed Mays, the producer of Pirate Television, has exacting leftist standards for content he will broadcast. He writes:

The question arises: Is Eric Alterman radical enough to be on Pirate TV? I feel I have to bring this up to protect my own credibility. Because Eric Alterman is a stenographer for the party line in a few too many instances and a promoter of a few too many official myths for my taste and methinks many of you may feel the same. For instance: The Nation columnist and author of “Why We’re Liberals” says “The killing of Osama bin Laden was a just and necessary undertaking.” I thought we were liberals because be believe in the rule of law? Because we know that if Osama bin Laden, Bradley Manning, or anyone else targeted by the government doesn’t have a right to a fair trial, neither do we.”

I’m not that leftist, though in recent years I’ve moved to the left somewhat.

This week’s show was good.  (I watched it by downloading it).  It described how US crop-dusting planes destroy not only cocoa leaves but also farmers’ legitimate crops in South America.

Sanho Tree: Addicted to Failure

Just possibly the pre-eminent expert on drug policy in the United States is Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project. In this talk, the prolific writer and former military historian, takes the so-called “war on drugs” apart piece by piece and exposes how in every possible way, the U.S. drug war has the exact opposite effect than its purported intention, which, we are told, is to stop drugs. In fact, prohibition is the price support mechanism that makes the illegal drug economy possible and makes regulation impossible.