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Please donate $1/month to support Essential Dissent. https://www.patreon.com/EssentialDissent Follow on Twitter to be notified of upcoming livestreams: https://twitter.com/e_Dissent This panel took place on 6/28/19 at Left Forum 2019. Abstract: Speakers will address the present day US campaigns to overthrow the governments in these countries. They will focus on US disinformation campaigns against these countries, the present US anti-war movement in defense of Iran's, Venezuela's, and Cuba's sovereignty, and how the peoples in these countries are organizing to combat US threats. 0:00 Dan Kovalik (United Steel Workers) 20:37 Moderator William Camacaro (co-founder and coordinator of the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of New York; artist, radio host, and activist in New York City) 26:56 Bahman Azad (U.S. Peace Council) 43:44 Q&A (Questions have been omitted due to poor audio quality) Event Organizer: Stansfield Smith Daniel Kovalik is Senior Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW). He has worked for the USW since graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993. While with the USW, he has served as lead counsel on cutting-edge labor law litigation, including the landmark NLRB cases of Lamons Gasket and Specialty Health Care. He has also worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against The Coca-Cola Company, Drummond and Occidental Petroleum – cases arising out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, recently described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.” Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia. He has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects. Dr. Bahman Azad is an Iranian-American peace and justice activist living in the United States. He has been active in the peace and justice movement since his arrival in the United States in 1973, first as a student activist against the Shah's regime in Iran and then as a member of the Executive Board of the U.S. Peace Council. He joined the Veterans for Peace in the early 1990s and has been serving as Chair of VFP’s Iran Working Group. He is currently the Organizational Secretary of the U.S. Peace Council, Coordinator of the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases and the Global Campaign Against US/NATO Military Bases, and the representative of the World Peace Council at the United Nations. He was the organizer of USPC’s Peace and Solidarity Delegation to Venezuela which traveled to Caracas in March 2019. Bahman has a Master's degree in Economics and a Ph.D. in Sociology. He is a retired Professor and former Acting Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Please visit these Left Forum links: Website: http://www.leftforum.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theleftforum/?fref=ts Twitter: https://twitter.com/leftforum YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLeftforum