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Exonerated Death Row Inmate Speaks Out
GUEST: Juan Roberto Melendez, former death row inmate, exonerated in 2003, now serving on the Board of Director of “National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.”

This week, on December 8th, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will hold a clemency hearing for multiple Nobel Prize Nominee Stanley “Tookie” Williams. The hearing will allow two sides to argue their position on clemency in 30 minutes or less. Schwarzenegger, who has the authority to commute a death sentence to life without parole, did not hold this type of meeting for past clemency petitions which he has received. Although Stanley “Tookie” Williams was the founder of the notorious Crips gang in LA, he feels that through his writing award winning international anti-gang books for children, he has redeemed himself. He additionally maintains that he is innocent of the crimes he was convicted of. Today we open the show with an interview with Juan Roberto Melendez, another death row inmate, who spent 17 years awaiting his execution and was finally exonerated.

For more information, visit www.ncadp.org.

The Pacifica Radio Archives Presents: War and Peace
GUEST: Brian de Shazor, Director of Pacifica Radio Archives

On Tuesday December 6, that’s tomorrow, the entire Pacifica network will pre-empt its regularly scheduled programming to bring you an 18 hour simulcast celebrating the treasures in its audio archives, and also commemorating the 35th anniversary of the historic WBAI reading of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. In December 1970, as the Vietnam war was raging on, the staff of WBAI teamed up with well known figures such as actors Dustin Hoffman and Mel Brooks, and Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of author Leo Tolstoy. This year the Pacifica Radio Archives uncovered the entire four and a half day broadcast.

For more information, visit www.pacificaradioarchives.org, or www.supportPRA.org.

Empire Notes
GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade

We go now to our weekly commentary Empire Notes by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is about the US Strategy in Iraq.

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal
GUESTS: Billy Parrish of Energy Action, and Rosa Kouri of Sierra Youth Coalition, both are members of the youth delegation to UN Climate Change Conference

Representatives of almost 190 countries have been meeting in Montreal, Canada at the 11th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The meeting will end on December 9 and its goal is to assess progress on climate change measures and discussing future international action when the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012. More than 100,000 people took to the streets internationally in the first worldwide demonstrations demanding action to end global warming. Five environmental groups, including Greenpeace delivered a petition signed by 600,000 Americans to the U.S. consulate in Montreal urging President Bush and Congress to help slow global warming. Meanwhile an article published in Science magazine this month concludes that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are now the highest they have been in 650,000 years.

For more information, visit the Sierra Youth Coalition at www.syc-cjs.org, and Energy Action at www.energyaction.net.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

Economist Robin Hahnel said, “We should know that only replacing the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation will guarantee a globalization that takes advantage of potential efficiency gains in ways that also promote environmental protection, international equity, economic democracy, and variety. ”