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Live from the Left Coast: a program from
Ian Masters which features a longer, more in-depth interview
with a special guest on a topic of current interest, followed by a
series of listener phone calls.
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Podcast now available:
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Click for -> Archived programs from 2008
Click for -> Archived programs from 2007
Click for -> Archived programs from 2006
Click for -> Archived programs from 2000 - 2004
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Note: No Live From the Left Coast for February 8th, 2009 due to fund drive.
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November 1st, 2009
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Robert Young Pelton is an author, filmmaker, explorer and journalist. His book, "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," is described as a look into an even darker side of the war on terror: the mercenary military contractors who make up the "coalition of the billing." Robert Pelton has a first-hand perspective on the war on terror from direct contact with the world's most infamous jihadi, rebel and insurgent groups. He has been advising the top US command in Afghanistan since August of 2008.
Ann Louise Bardach is a PEN/USA award-winning investigative journalist who has reported on Cuban-Miami politics for more than fifteen years in the national media including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Slate, Washington Post Outlook, 60 Minutes among others. She is the author of the widely-praised Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana and is the editor of The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro and Cuba: A Travelers Literary Companion. She is a member of the Brookings Institution Cuba Study Project and teaches global journalism at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her new book, just published, is "Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington."
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October 25th, 2009
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Jennifer Burns is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History who specializes in the history of conservative thought. She is the author of a new book, "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right." In writing this book, which took 8 years, Jennifer Burns gained access to the newly opened Ayn Rand Archives, and became the first historian to work in her private papers and read her unedited letters and diaries. Dr. Burn's work on Rand has been supported by the UC Berkeley History Department, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, and the University of Virginia.
Robert Lacey is a British historian noted for his original research, which gets him close to - and often living alongside - his subjects. He is the author of numerous international bestsellers, among them "Majesty," his pioneering biography of Queen Elizabeth II, "The Kingdom," a study of Saudi Arabia published in 1981, "Ford: the Men and the Machine" and "Great Tales from English History." His new book is "Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia," a modern history of the Saudis in their own words, revealing a people attempting to reconcile life under religious law with the demands of a rapidly changing world. Their struggle will have powerful reverberations around the globe, and this book provides, according to critics, "a penetrating look at a country no one can afford to ignore."
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October 18th, 2009
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Michelle Goldberg is a journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World." Michelle Goldberg was a senior writer for Salon.com and her work has also appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation , New York, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic. She is a contributing editor at Religion Dispatches and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect. She has just published a piece at the The New Republic, entitled "Truther Consequences: meet the next Glenn Beck," in which she profiles right-wing radio host Alex Jones, a major source and propagator of conspiracy theories, including the 911 Truth, chemtrails, the Illuminati, water flouridation, vaccination fear and more. A leader of the 9/11 truth movement, he is the executive producer of "Loose Change: the final cut." His other documentaries include "The Obama Deception" and "Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement."
Les Leopold attending Oberlin College and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and then cofounded and currently directs two non-profit educational organizations: The Labor Institute and the Public Health Institute. He designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics. He is now helping to form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. This profound work of non-fiction should be required reading for anyone who has ever had a job and everyone who believes that only fools limit their dreams for a better world. He is the author of the new book "The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destoyed Our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity -- and What We Can Do About It."
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October 11th, 2009
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Max Cleland is a former U.S. Senator from Georgia, disabled US Army veteran of the Vietnam War and decorated war hero, having won the Silver Star and Bronze Star medals for valorous action in combat. From 2003 to 2007, he served on the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a presidentially appointed position. He is currently the secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission. He is the author of several books, including Strong at the Broken Places and Going for the Max!: 12 Principles for Living Life to the Fullest. His new book is Heart of a Patriot: How I found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove. Martin Sheen has said of this book, "With this deeply moving account of his extraordinary life, Max Cleland offers a painfully honest exploration of the personal cost of war and the courage that sustained his journey. A powerful source of inspiration for generations to come."
Zachary Karabell is an author, historian, money manager and economist, who current serves as President of River Twice Research, where he analyzes economic and political trends. He is also a Senior Advisor for Business for Social Responsibility. In 2003, the World Economic Forum designated Zachary a "Global Leader for Tomorrow." He sits on the board of the World Policy Institute and the New America Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs. Educated at Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D., he is the author of several books, including A Visionary Nation: Four Centuries of American Dreams and What Lies Ahead, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (which won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for best non-fiction book of the year), and Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Coexistence, which examined the forgotten legacy of peace among the three faiths. His new book is Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It, which is being published this week.
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September 27th, 2009
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Charles Pierce is a journalist, commentator and author. He has been a writer-at-large for Esquire since 1997 and is a frequent contributor to American Prospect and Slate. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and he is a regular on NPR s Wait, Wait, Don t Tell Me and Only a Game. is a 1975 graduate of Marquette University, where he majored in journalism. His new book is "Idiot America: How stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free."
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, columnist, media commentator and New York Times best-selling author. Blumenthal s work has been featured on MSNBC, The Nation, Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Huffington Post, Salon Magazine, Alternet, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, among others. His investigative reporting has been cited by the Boston Globe, The American Prospect, San Francisco Chronicle, CBS News, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine, among many other news outlets. He has been honored with the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Award for investigative reporting and is sometimes referred to as the Michael Moore of online video, for his numerous widely recognized video reports, which have garnered hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube and other sites. Max is a Puffin Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, a research fellow for Media Matters for America and senior contributor at The Daily Beast. Blumenthal's first book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, was published earlier this month and is now a New York Times best-seller.
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September 20th, 2009
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Nomi Prins is an author, journalist and a Senior Fellow at the Demos think-tank. She is the author of four books, including Other People s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2004 by The Economist, Barron's and The Library Journal. "Jacked: How 'Conservatives' are Picking your Pocket (whether you voted for them or not)." Her novel, THE TRAIL, under her pseudonym, Natalia Prentice. Before becoming an author and journalist, Nomi worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and ran the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, Newsday, Mother Jones, Slate.com, The Guardian UK, and more. Her new book is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.
T.R. Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and author of ten books, most recently The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care. from around the world for National Public Radio, he has become one of America s best-known foreign correspondents. Reid currently lives in Denver. His 2008 Frontline documentary, "Sick Around the World", under the premise that the US health care system is a failure,takes a look at the national health care systems of five wealthy countries around the world. The first two countries visited are the U.K. and Japan, both places where Reid has lived while serving as the Washington Post bureau chief and has had doctors. They are followed by Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland. Frontline asked T.R. Reid to follow-up with a companion documentary, "Sick Around America" which aired March 31, 2009, on PBS. But when it appeared, Reid was nowhere to be seen, and his conclusion, that "You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance," was completely absent from the program. As quoted by Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action and The Corporate Crime Reporter, Reid said "...mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world. I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book."
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September 13th, 2009
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Sara Robinson is a journalist, commentator and essayist. Fellow, Campaign for America's Future. She has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. Sara Robinson is one of the few trained social futurists in North America. Her skill set includes trend analysis, scenario development, futures research, social change theories, systems thinking, and strategic planning. Sara has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006. Her recent work has also appeared online at Firedoglake, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and Alternet; and in print at The Progressive Christian and Survival: The Journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. She is a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle; and a Fellow with both the Campaign for America's Future and the Commonweal Institute.
Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the Times. From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote often on politics. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. Tanenhaus s previous book, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His new book is "The Death of Conservatism."
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September 6th, 2009
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Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, whose work also appears in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper's, Outside, GQ and many other publications. Over the years he has reported from Beirut, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Israel, Sudan, Sarajevo, El Salvador and many other war-torn countries. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Triage, as well as the nonfiction book The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny and, with his brother Jon Lee Anderson War Zones. Mr. Anderson's recent investigative piece on the Moscow bombings that brought Vladimir Putin to power in Russia 10 years agao was spiked by GQ magazine, which had commissioned it.
Winslow Wheeler on the failure of military procurement reform. Mr. Wheeler worked on national security issues for 31 years for members of the U.S. Senate and for the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO). In the Senate, Wheeler worked for Jacob K. Javits, R-N.Y., Nancy L. Kassebaum, R-Kan., David Pryor, D-Ark., and Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M. While at the GAO, Wheeler directed comprehensive studies on the U.S. strategic-nuclear triad and the air campaign of Operation Desert Storm. Both studies found compelling evidence that prevailing conventional wisdom about the performance of both U.S. and foreign weapons systems, such as Soviet strategic nuclear delivery systems and U.S. high tech tactical weapons, was highly inflated and unsupported by the evidence available in the Department of Defense. In 2002, Wheeler authored an essay, under the pseudonym "Spartacus," about Congress' reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, entitled "Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork." When Senators complained about Wheeler's criticisms, he was invited to resign from his position with the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee. He is now a senior fellow and director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. Wheeler is the author of The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security."
interviewed with
Pierre Sprey is a veteran high-tech defense weapons and systems designer, as well as a high regarded producer of avant-garde jazz and other genre recordings. Mr. Sprey was the primary designer of two key Air Force warplances -- the F-16 fighter and the A-10 ground attack jet. He left the Pentagon in 1986, he said, because "it became increasingly obvious that the atmosphere at the Pentagon was such that it would be impossible to build another honest aircraft." He is the owner of Maple Shade Records, and enjoyed considerable success when one of his recordings was used by Kanye West in the mega-hit "Jesus Walks." Early this year, Mr. Sprey appeared on Bill Moyers' PBS television program, discussing the possibility that Afghanistan will be "Obama's Vietnam."
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August 23rd, 2009
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John Dean became Counsel to the President of the United States Richard Nixon in July 1970 at age thirty-one. Prior to that, John Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of a law reform commission, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Today, John Dean is a best-selling author who writes on the law, government, and politics. He recounted his days in the Nixon White House and Watergate in two books, Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). He has authored 8 books in total, including the best-sellers "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," "Conservatives Without Conscience" and "Broken Government: How Republican Rule destroyed the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches." His latest, co-authored with Barry M. Goldwater is "Pure Goldwater."
Steve Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and is also a Senior Fellow at New America, and previously served as Executive Vice President. Previously, Mr. Clemons served for seven years as Executive Director of the Japan America Society of Southern California, and co-founded with Chalmers Johnson the Japan Policy Research Institute, of which he is still Director. Steve Clemons writes frequently on matters of foreign policy, defense, and international economic policy. His work has appeared in many of the major leading op-ed pages, journals, and magazines around the world. He is the publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note.
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Jane Hamsher is the founder of Firedoglake.com and one of America's most popular and influential political bloggers. She is also a motion picture producer, wth such films as "Natural Born Killers," "Apt Pupil," "Permanent Midnight" and "From Hell." Her political writing and analysis has appeared in a number of other publications, including the Huffington Post, Alternet and The American Prospect. She is author of the best-selling book, "Killer Instinct." She has been one of the leading bloggers covering the health care reform issue.
Wendell Potter on health care reform. Mr. Potter has served since May 2009 as the Center for Media and Democracy as a senior fellow on health care. After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, last year he left his job as head of communications for one of the nation's largest health insurers to try his hand at helping socially responsible organizations including those advocating for meaningful health care reform achieve their goals. Potter is outspoken on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. Before his switch, Potter held a variety of positions at CIGNA Corporation over 15 years, serving most recently as head of corporate communications and as the company's chief corporate spokesman. Prior to joining CIGNA, Potter headed communications at Humana Inc., another large for-profit health insurer.
Robert Young Pelton on Blackwater. Mr. Pelton is an author, filmmaker, explorer and journalist. He is the author of The World's Most Dangerous Places, Come Back Alive, The Adventurist, and Three Worlds Gone Mad. Mr. Pelton has worked for National Geographic, Discovery, 60 Minutes, the ABC Investigative Division, and CNN. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for National Geographic Adventure. His books include "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," described as a look into an even darker side of the war on terror: the mercenary military contractors who make up the "coalition of the billing," among a number of others. He is the co-founder of IraqSlogger.com, a 24/7 subcription-based news service focusing on Iraq.
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August 16th, 2009
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CO-HOSTED WITH JOHN DEAN
John Dean became Counsel to the President of the United States Richard Nixon in July 1970 at age thirty-one. Prior to that, John Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of a law reform commission, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Today, John Dean is a best-selling author who writes on the law, government, and politics. He recounted his days in the Nixon White House and Watergate in two books, Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). He has authored 8 books, including the best-sellers "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," "Conservatives Without Conscience" and "Broken Government: How Republican Rule destroyed the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches." His latest, co-authored with Barry M. Goldwater is "Pure Goldwater."
Mark Karlin is editor and publisher of BuzzFlash.com, a progressive Internet site founded in 2000 and located in Chicago. He is a former public affairs consultant and a graduate of Yale University
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David Neiwert on right-wing extremism on the rise. Mr. Neiwert is one of America's leading journalists on the subject of race, extremism, culture and politics in America Based in Seattle, David Neiwert is the author of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America and In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, which covered the rise of patriot/militia/supremacist extremism in that part of the country. His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2004. The Northwest Progressive Institute named its annual awards to the region's best liberal bloggers after Neiwert. His features and articles can be found at Salon.com, the Washington Post, MSNBC and many other publications. His blog, the highly acclaimed Orcinus ( http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/ ), has won the Koufax Award twice, the most prestigious award for on-line weblogs. He is currently the Managing Editor of the website "Crooks and Liars." David Neiwert's latest book is The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Sidney Blumenthal has said of this book, "David Neiwert is one of the most knowledgeable and careful reporters on the far right in America. The Eliminationists irrefutably documents the connection between extremist word and extremist deed. As Neiwert demonstrates, absolutist language corrupts absolutely. The shocking history he presents is undeniable, but it is not a matter of the past. The danger is clear and present."
CONFIDENTIAL SOUCRCE INTERVIEW on the protests against Health Care reform.
Dr. Robert Altemeyer on authoritarianism as a political force. Dr. Altemeyer is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. He has written extensively on authoritarianism and his work is extensively referenced in John W. Dean's 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience.
Phil Giraldi was, for 17 years, a CIA operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism, who served in Europe and the Middle East. He now works in the private sector with Cannistraro Associates doing security consulting and he writes a column in the American Conservative on international security issues. Giraldi was one of the few who early-on expressed concern in his column and elsewhere that those who brought us the war with Iraq--the neocons--were focusing considerable attention on Iran. He reported in 2005 that Vice President Cheney had tasked StratCom to develop a plan of attack, utilizing conventional and nuclear forces, against that country. He is a columnist at Antiwar.com and the American Conservative.
interviewed with
Robert Baer spent twenty years running agents from inside the CIA s Directorate of Operations, from 1976 to 1997, working against Hizballah, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations. He is considered by Seymour Hersh as "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer ever to serve in the Middle East." Robert Baer is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: Sleeping with the Devil, about the Saudi royal family and its relationship with the United States; and See No Evil, which recounts Baer's years as a top CIA operative. See No Evil was the basis for the acclaimed film Syriana, which earned George Clooney an Oscar for his portrayal of Mr. Baer. Robert Baer writes regularly for Time.com and has contributed to Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the Middle East. His most recent book is "The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower."
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August 9th, 2009
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Frank Schaeffer on the psychology and motivations of the astro-turf rank-and-file who have been manipulated by lobbying firms and their agents into disrupting town hall meetings on health care reform. Mr. Schaeffer is a bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction, and a documentary and feature film director. He is the son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer. By the time he was nineteen, Frank Schaeffer s parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had achieved global fame as bestselling evangelical authors and speakers, and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. He would go on to speak before thousands in arenas around America, publish his own evangelical bestseller, and work with such figures as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Dr. James Dobson. But all the while Schaeffer felt increasingly alienated, precipitating a crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to his departure even if it meant losing everything. He has written several internationally acclaimed novels depicting life in a strict, fundamentalist household including Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma. Mr. Schaeffer is also the author of the nonfiction book "Crazy for God." Jeff Sharlet has described "Crazy for God" as "a brilliant book, a portrait of fundamentalism painted in broad strokes with streaks of nuance, the twinned coming-of-age story of Frank and the Christian right. But this story moves in more than one direction: both coming-of-age narratives are pulled against the current by the tragedy of Francis Schaeffer, a man who let his children, biological and ideological, guide him down a path from which he'd spent his whole life struggling to get off."
David Wessel on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the politics of our economy. Mr. Wessel is the economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the Capital column, a weekly look at the forces shaping living standards around the world. David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrongdoing. He appears frequently on National Public Radio and is a regular on PBS s Washington Week. His new book is "In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic," about which Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has said "David Wessel brings his deep knowledge of the Federal Reserve and U.S. politics and economics to a topic that will be studied by historians for decades to come...No one can understand what happened and what did not happen without reading this book."
DISCUSS: The Book
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August 2nd, 2009
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Authors of the new book "China Safari: on the trail of China's expansion in Africa." This book, co-authored by Serge Michel, Michel Beuret and Paolo Woods is a unique insight, mostly unknown in the West as to major developments taking place in Africa. Where others only see chaos, the Chinese see opportunities. With no colonial past and no political preconditions, China is bringing investment and needed infrastructure to a continent that has been largely ignored by Western companies or nations. Traveling from Beijing to Khartoum, Algiers to Brazzaville, the authors tell the story of China s economic ventures in Africa. What they find is tantamount to a geopolitical earthquake: The possibility that China will help Africa direct its own fate and finally bring light to the so-called dark continent, making it a force to be reckoned with internationally. We'll speak to co-authors Serge Michael and Paolo Woods. Serge Michel is West Africa correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. Paolo Woods is an award-winning photojournalist. His photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Stern, Le Monde, Geo, and many other international publications. His website is www.PaoloWoods.net. With Serge Michel he has published three books and is currently working on a new project on Iran.
Robert Dreyfuss on Iran and the Middle East. Mr. Dreyfuss is an investigative journalist based in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, a Nation contributing editor, and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones. He has been covering the Iran and the Middle East extensively on The Dreyfuss Report at TheNation.com.
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July 26th, 2009
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Thom Hartmann on the "crisis of Western culture." Mr. Hartmann is a nationally syndicated radio host, author of 19 books, former psychotherapist and entrepreneur, and liberal political commentator. He is a scholar of the history and textual analysis of the United States Constitution, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), electronic voting fraud, and environmental issues like global warming. Hartmann's original article "Talking Back To Talk Radio" became part of the original business plan of Air America Radio. His new book is "Threshold: the Crisis of Western Culture," described as illustrating the mistakes we have made as a culture, as a country, and as individuals and provides the inspiration and motivation to build a better, more sustainable world. Part prophecy, part call to arms, part policy prescription, Threshold is the wake-up call our society so badly needs."
Dr. Matthew Lasar on the past, present and future of Pacifica Radio, the originator of listener-sponsored public radio in America. Dr. Lasar is a highly regarded author, journalist and commentator on broadcast media in the United States. He is a regular contributor to ArsTechnica.com and RadioSurvivor.com, writing on media technology, political and regulatory issues. Dr. Lasar is also the foremost authority on the history of Pacifica radio and is the author of the books "Pacifica Radio: the rise of an alternative network" and "Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio's Civil War." He is a Professor at UC Santa Cruz.
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July 19th, 2009
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Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Republican War on Science, and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He contributes to many publications including Wired, Slate, and The American Prospect. His latest book, co-authored with Sheril Kirschenbaum, is "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future," which probes the why the disconnect between the scientific community and mainstream American culture grows wider every day, even as climate change, the energy crisis, global pandemics, nuclear proliferation many of the most urgent problems of the twenty-first century require science-based solutions. But, rejectiion of science is rampant in America: 46 percent of Americans deny evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; large numbers of Republicans continue to attack the science of climate change; and the public including its wealthiest and best educated sectors is in dangerous retreat from childhood vaccinations.
Charles P. Pierce has been a writer-at-large for Esquire since 1997 and is a frequent contributor to American Prospect and Slate. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and he is a regular on NPR s Wait, Wait, Don t Tell Me and Only a Game. His new book is "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free," which is described as a razor-sharp look at how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it. He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping.
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July 12th, 2009
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Philip Delves Broughton was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England. From 1998 to 2004, he served successively as the New York and Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph of London and reported widely from North and South America, Europe, and Africa. He led the Telegraph s coverage of the 9/11 attacks on New York and his reporting has twice been nominated for the British Press Award. His work has also appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and Spectator. In 2006, he received an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is the author of "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School."
Daniel Gross is a journalist, author, and editor who specializes in business history, political economy, and the money culture. He writes the "Moneybox" column for Slate.com and contributes to the "Economic View" column of the New York Times. He has worked as a reporter at The New Republic and has contributed to more than 60 publications. Since 1999, he has edited STERNbusiness, the semi-annual management journal published by New York University's Stern School of Business. Gross has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, and on more than 35 radio programs, including NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (no relation). In 2001, he was a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Times; Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance; and Generations of Corning: 150 Years in the Life of a Global Corporation, 1851-2001, co-authored with Davis Dyer. His most recent book is "Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation."
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July 5th, 2009
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David Kilcullen is at once part of General David Petraeus' brain trust in Baghdad, an Australian anthropologist, a Pentagon-based counterinsurgency theorist, and an on-the-ground officer/military advisor who has worked in hotspots ranging from East Africa to the Javanese highlands to the jungles of the Philippines. The "go-to guy" for journalists when it comes to counterinsurgency, he's quoted frequently in The New York Times. David Kilcullen is a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. His new book is "The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One." "This book should be required reading for every American soldier, as well as anyone involved in the war on terror. Kilcullen's central concept of the 'accidental guerrilla' is brilliant and the policy prescriptions that flow from it important. And that's not all; the book has many more insights drawn from various battlefields." --Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Dr. Pavel Felgenhauer on relations with Russia. Dr. Felgenhauer is a Moscow-based defense analyst, columnist and journalist. He previously served as researcher and senior research officer in the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and received his Ph.D. from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. Dr. Felgenhauer has published numerous articles on topics dealing with Russian foreign and defense policies, military doctrine, arms trade and the Russian military-industrial complex. In the early '90's, he wrote for Moscow's Nezavisimaya Gazeta, as Defense Analyst and Defense Correspondent. He was later a member of the editorial board and Chief Defense Correspondent for a Moscow daily Sevodnya. Since May 1994, till Oct. 2005 Felgenhauer has published a regular column on defense in the English language local daily The Moscow Times. In July 2006 after being more than six years an independent defense analyst Felgenhauer joined the staff of Novaya Gazeta. Felgenhauer's regular commentary on Russia appears in many other local and international publications.
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June 28th, 2009
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Kathryn Bigelow is the director of the new film, "The Hurt Locker," set in post-invasion Iraq. Bigelow's previous films include Blue Steel, Point Break, The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker.
interviewed with
Mark Boal, a journalist and screewriter who has been published at the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Playboy. His the writer of the films "In the Valley of Elah" and "The Hurt Locker."
Chris Hedges on the possibility that the world will not use the dollar as a reserve currency and what consequences that would have. Mr. Hedges is an journalist and author, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a reporter for fifteen years. Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He has written an article for Truthdig on the reserve currency issue.
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June 21st, 2009
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Douglas Rushkoff on the corporatization of American life. Mr. Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other s values. He teaches media studies at the New School University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world. His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He wrote a series of graphic novels for Vertigo called Testament, and is currently working on another book for Vertigo as well as a new series of graphic novels for Smoking Gun Interactive. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance.He has just released his most important book to date: an analysis of the corporate spectacle called Life Inc. for RandomHouse, as well as a series of short films called Life Inc Dispatches. He is the winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity
George Lakoff on the importance of language in politics. Dr. Lakoff is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and the co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. He previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. Dr. Lakoff has published a multitude of articles in major scholarly journals and has authored a number of books, including "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," " "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate," and "Whose Freedom.?" His new book, "The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain." In What s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.
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June 7th, 2009
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William K. Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. He is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One," which Nobel Prize-winner Dr.George Akerlof called a classic. Paul Volcker praised its analysis of the critical role of Bank Board Chairman Gray s leadership in reregulating and resupervising the industry: "Bill Black has detailed an alarming story about financial - and political - corruption. The specifics go back twenty years, but the lessons are as fresh as the morning newspaper. One of those lessons really sticks out: one brave man with a conscience could stand up for us all." Robert Kuttner, in his Business Week column, proclaimed: "Black's book is partly the definitive history of the savings-and-loan industry scandals of the early 1980s. More important, it is a general theory of how dishonest CEOs, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time -- enough to create massive damage." Black developed the concept of control fraud frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a weapon. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined and kill and maim thousands. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae s former senior management.
Frank Schaeffer is a bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction, and a documentary and feature film director. He is the son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer. He has written several internationally acclaimed novels depicting life in a strict, fundamentalist household including Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma. By the time he was nineteen, Frank Schaeffer s parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had achieved global fame as bestselling evangelical authors and speakers, and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. He would go on to speak before thousands in arenas around America, publish his own evangelical bestseller, and work with such figures as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Dr. James Dobson. But all the while Schaeffer felt increasingly alienated, precipitating a crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to his departure even if it meant losing everything. Mr. Schaeffer is also the author of the nonfiction book "Crazy for God." Jeff Sharlet has described "Crazy for God" as "a brilliant book, a portrait of fundamentalism painted in broad strokes with streaks of nuance, the twinned coming-of-age story of Frank and the Christian right. But this story moves in more than one direction: both coming-of-age narratives are pulled against the current by the tragedy of Francis Schaeffer, a man who let his children, biological and ideological, guide him down a path from which he'd spent his whole life struggling to get off."
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May 31st, 2009
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Mark Benjamin on whether or not photos depicting torture and suppressed by President Obma will ever see the light of day. Mr. Benjamin is an award-winning investigative reporter with Salon.com s Washington bureau, Mark Benjamin has focused on national security issues with an emphasis on the plight of returning veterans and detainee abuse. He has been hailed for exposing problems caring for veterans at Walter Reed starting in early 2005 and also obtained for Salon the Army s entire Abu Ghraib investigative files. Benjamin has been a consultant for CBS 60 Minutes, a freelance on-air reporter for CNN and has appeared on all of the major television networks.
Dan Neil on General Motors entering bankruptcy. Mr. Neil is an automotive columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2004. The Pulitzer board praised his: "one of a kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astutue cultural criticism." Prior to coming to the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Neil wrote for the New York Times, Autoweek magazine Car and Driver, among others. Besides the Pulitzer prize, Dan Neil has also won the Ken Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism, from the International Motor Press Association, 2001. His work was selected for Houghton Mifflin's Best American Sports Writing, 2002.
Glenn Greenwald on what is not known about the record of President Obama's nominee to the Supreme court, Sonya Sotomayor. Mr. Greenwald is an author, journalist and blogger, who was previously a constitutional lawyer in New York City. He litigated numerous high-profile cases in federal and state courts around the country, including Civil Rights cases before Judge Sotomayor. Greenwald is the author of two New York Times best-selling books, "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," and "Tragic Legacy: How a Good v. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." His latest book "Great American Hypocrites" reveals how the GOP propaganda machine manipulates the Press.
George Smith on President Obama's just-announced Cyber Warfare Initiative. Mr. Smith is a Senior Fellow at Globalsecurity.org and wrote one of the first books on computer virus writers, "The Virus Creation Labs", in 1994. Over the past fifteen years, he has written frequently on computer security for a variety of publications, more recently "The Register." He also authored the first critical scholarly piece on cyberwar called "Electronic Pearl Harbor -- Not Likely." In the past few years he's analyzed al Qaeda documents said to be devoted to biological and chemical weapons and, as a consequence, has consulted to a couple of terrorism trials.
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May 24th, 2009
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Robert M. Hertzberg on the crisis in California's finances. Mr. Hertzberg previously served as a California State Assemblyman representing the 40th District from 1996 2002 and was Speaker of the California State Assembly from 2000-2002. He chaired the transition team for Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and served on the transition team for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Robert Hertzberg is now a partner at Mayer Brown LLP and is chairman and co-founder of G24 Innovations based in Cardiff, Wales, manufacturers of a new type of lightweight and flexible solar cell that generates power in low, ambient and even indoor conditions.
interviewed with
Dr. Max Neiman is currently Director of the Governance and Public Finance Program at the Public Policy Institute of California, based in San Francisco, which he joined in 2005. Before that he was a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside and his most recent book is titled DEFENDING GOVERNMENT: WHY BIG GOVERNMENT WORKS
Janet Afary on the forthcoming elections in Iran. She is the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Ms. Afary is a native of Iran and a leading historian. Her work focuses on gender and sexuality and charts the history of the nation's sexual revolution from the nineteenth century to today, revealing the extraordinary resilience of the Iranian people, who have drawn on a rich social and cultural heritage to defy the repression and hardship of the Islamist state and its predecessors. It is this resilience that is promoting reforms in marriage and family laws, while demanding more egalitarian gender and sexual relations as well as personal and political freedom.
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May 17th, 2009
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Gillian Tett is an award-winning journalist and one of the world s preeminent authorities on capital markets and the role they have played in the global financial crisis. She is widely credited with being the first to cover the credit crunch in the mainstream press. Beginning in 2004 three years before anyone else she began building a team at the Financial Times of London to cover capital markets, correctly anticipating the need to watch an industry growing uncommonly fast. By 2007, a year ahead of the curve, she began issuing her news-breaking alarms about a looming financial crisis. Gillian is the author of Fool s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe, a vital contribution to our understanding of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then finally we will hear a very insightful analysis of the war in Afghanistan that challenges the premises President Obama is operating under and looks at this deepening quagmire in a different light.
John Mueller on the war in Afghanistan that challenges the premises President Obama is operating under. Dr. Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center, and is professor of Political Science, at Ohio State University where he researches terrorism and particularly the reactions (or over-reactions) it often inspires. His book on the subject, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, was published in November 2006 by Free Press. And his next book is, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, to be published in November by Oxford University Press, suggests that atomic terrorism is highly unlikely and that efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation frequently have damaging results.
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May 10th, 2009
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Jane Mayer on the increasing debate regarding the Bush administration's use of torture. Jane Mayer is the co-author of two best-selling narrative non-fiction books, LANDSLIDE: THE UNMAKING OF THE PRESIDENT, 1984-1988, and STRANGE JUSTICE: THE SELLING OF CLARENCE THOMAS, both of which received glowing reviews, and the latter of which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a Washington-based staff writer for The New Yorker, specializing in political and investigative reporting. Before that, she was a senior writer and front page editor for The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Journal's first female White House correspondent. Her latest book, a New York Times best-seller, is "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," which is just out in a new paperback edition and is described as "Stunning" by Slate, "powerful, brilliantly researched, and deeplly unsettling" by the New York Times, and "one of those rare books that should be read by every concerned American," by the Austin American-Statesman.
Nicholas Schmidle on the increasing concerns about Pakistan. Mr. Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He writes for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, Smithsonian, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and received the 2008 Kurt Schork Award for freelance journalism. As a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, he lived and reported in Pakistan for two years. Schmidle is a graduate of James Madison University and American University. His new book is To Live or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan. This book is described as a gripping and grim account of his time in Pakistan, where his travels took him into the most isolated and unfriendly provinces, and into the thick of interests and beliefs that impede that nation's peace and progress, reporting on the murky relationship between the Pakistani intelligence agencies and the Taliban and how American bombings have actually helped the Taliban gain influence in the border regions.
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May 3rd, 2009
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Jonathan Alter on the first 100 days of the Obama presidency. Mr. Alter is a senior editor at Newsweek, where, since 1991, he has written an acclaimed column on politics, history, media, and society at large. He is also an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News. Prior to appointment as Newsweek's senior editor, Alter was Newsweek's media critic for a decade, where he was among the first in the mainstream media to break tradition and hold other news organizations accountable for their coverage. When Newsweek launched his wide-ranging column in 1991, it was the first time the magazine allowed regular political commentary in the magazine, other than on the back page. He is the author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, which is out in paperback.
Dr. Reza Aslan on the failure of the "war on terror" paradigm. Dr. Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, a columnist at the Daily Beast and a professor at the University of California, Riverside. .He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the board of directors for both the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, Abraham's Vision, an interfaith peace organization, and PEN USA. Dr. Aslan's first book was the New York Times Bestseller, "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam," which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. Aslan is Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East, as well as Editorial Executive of Mecca.com. Reza's new book is "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror."
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April 26th, 2009
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Max Blumenthal on the reality of right-wing extremism in the context of the new DHS report. Mr. Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and videographer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect the Washington Monthly, The Daily Beast and other publications. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute and a Senior Writer for The Daily Beast. His blog is maxblumenthal.com. For the past six years he has covered right-wing political movements in America. His YouTube videos have received hundreds of thousands of hits. His forthcoming book is "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the movement that Shattered the Party," which will be available in July.
Jonathan Kirsch on the history of the use of torture. Mr. Kirsch is the author of ten books, including the national bestseller The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, and his recent book, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, A History of the End of the World. Mr. Kirsch is also a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a radio broadcaster, an Adjunct Professor on the faculty of New York University, and an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property in Los Angeles. Jonathan Kirsch is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a three-time past president of PEN Center USA West. His new book, just published, is "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: a History of Terror in the Name of God." This is a powerful and cautionary history which traces an unbroken thread from the Inquisition to the Salem witch trials, to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, to interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. This book plumbs the dark, historic and contemporary questions of human cruelty, torture and madness, and gives us a lens to clearly see what has been called a "war on terror" as terror itself.
David Goodman on citizen activism in today's American politics. Mr. Goodman is an independent journalist and author, most recently of the critically acclaimed Fault Lines: Journeys in the New South Africa. He is the co-author, with his sister, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, of The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them, STATIC: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back and their latest, just published, Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. David Goodman was featured on a panel today here at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on authors as activists.
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April 19th, 2009
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Congressman Don Payne on Somalia and the Somalian pirates. Congressman Payne represents the 10th Congressional District of New Jersey and was New Jersey's first African American Congressman, now serving his eleventh term. A past Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, he is a member of the Democratic Whip Organization and has served as a member of the House Democratic Leadership Advisory Group. He was a Congressional delegate to the United Nations and is a member of the House Committee on Education and Labor, the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he serves as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health and as a member of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight. He also headed a Presidential mission to war-torn Rwanda to help find solutions to that country's political and humanitarian crises. Congressman Payne was successful in winning passage of a resolution declaring genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The measure was the culmination of more than two years' work by many churches, religious organizations, anti-slavery groups, and resettled Sudanese through broad grass-roots support. His involvement in Africa led him to meet with Darfur refugees at the camps in Chad, where he heard many of their stories first-hand. Congressman Payne also gained national recognition when he was selected to manage the debate on the floor of the House of Representatives in opposition to the use of force in Iraq before fully exploring a diplomatic solution. He has just returned from Somalia, where he met with top leaders. As his plane was departing, the airport was hit with a mortar attack.
Mark Danner on President Obama's release of the memos by now Federal Court judge Jay Bybee and others which served as the legal cover for what is widely viewed as torture. Danner is a writer, journalist and professor who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, Balkans and Iraq, among many other stories, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the late Cold War and afterward, and about violations of human rights during that time. His books include The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travel's Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004) and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where he directs the Goldman Forum, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and Humanities at Bard College.
Niala Mohammad on conflicts in Afghanistan related to the rights of women. Ms. Mohammad works for Voice of America s newest Pashto language program, VOA Deewa Radio in Afghanistan, where she selects which popular Pashto artists and songs to be played on the VOA Deewa airwaves. Prior to joining VOA, Niala worked at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC researching human rights and Afghan-Pakistan relations for senior diplomats. Niala also worked with Pakistan s Human Rights Commission - Peshawar office where she researched health care in the North West Frontier Province. During this time Niala also had the opportunity to work at Khyber TV, a Pashto language satellite channel, in their Peshawar bureau where she engaged in concept writing to develop ideas for new programming. Niala recently completed her Masters in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London, where her focus was International Law, specifically as it relates to human rights. She has performed extensive research on the indigenous and tribal peoples in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Niala was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Massachusetts - Boston.
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April 12th, 2009
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Misha Glenny on the prevelance of international crime. Misha Glenny is an investigative journalist and author based in London. During the early 1990s he was the central Europe correspondent for the BBC World Service, and in 1993 he won a Sony Award for his coverage of Yugoslavia. He has contributed to many U.S. and European newspapers and magazines and is regularly consulted by U.S. and European governments on Balkan issues. He is the author of The Rebirth of History, The Fall of Yugoslavia (which won the Overseas Press Club Award in 1993 for Best Book on Foreign Affairs), and The Balkans, 1804 1999. His new book is "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld." In McMafia Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the material affluence of the West. Current estimates are that international crime accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.
Strobe Talbott on US diplomacy and Russia. Mr. Talbott is currently president of the Brookings Institution, and has had a career which spans journalism, government service, and academe. He is an expert on U.S. foreign policy, with specialties on Europe, Russia, South Asia, and nuclear arms control. As deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Talbott was deeply involved in both the conduct of U.S. policy abroad and the management of executive branch relations with Congress. Tablbott's many positions and titles include: Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University; Deputy Secretary of State (1994 2001); Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States (1993 94); Editor-at-Large and Foreign Affairs Columnist (1989 92), Washington Bureau Chief (1984 89), Diplomatic Correspondent (1977 84), White House Correspondent (1975 76), State Department Correspondent.
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April 5th, 2009
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Michelle Goldberg is an investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author. A former senior writer at Salon.com, Goldberg has written for Glamour, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (UK), and many other publications. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.and has taught at New York University s graduate school of journalism. Her previous book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism was a critically-acclaimed bestseller. Her new book, just published, is The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. This book won the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities. His new book is "The Lords of Finance: the Bankers who Broke the World." Booklist describes this book: "With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth century."
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March 29th, 2009
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Dr. Juan Cole on the state of affairs in Iraq, the Middle East in general and his new book." Dr. Cole is an author, journalist, professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan and President of the Global Americana Institute. Dr. Cole is widely considered to be one of America leading scholars of contemporary Iraq and the Middle East. As an expert analyst, he has appeared around the world in print, television and radio, testified before the United States Senate and has provided high-level consultation to a number of elected officials. His weblog, Informed Comment, at JuanCole.com is one of the most popular blogs on the web, for its deep and authoritative analysis of the Middle East. Juan Cole's books include "Sacred Space and Holy War," "The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq" and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East." His new book, just out, is "Engaging the Muslim World" described by Dr. John L. Esposito, Professor of religion & International Affairs at Georgetown University as "a MUST read, the right book at the right time for anyone who wants to understand what went wrong, why, and where do we go from here."
Craig Mullaney on the future of Afghanistan and his new book, "The Unforgiving Minute." Mr. Mullaney is a West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and Army Ranger who, in 2003, led an infantry rifle platoon along the hostile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan with the 10th Mountain Division as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. His platoon operated along the entire spectrum of military operations from humanitarian assistance with the first Provincial Reconstruction Team established in Afghanistan to combat engagements against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Following his return to the United States, Craig served for three years as the Army Exchange Officer to the history faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland where he focused on American foreign policy. After leaving the military, Craig served as a national security adviser on Barack Obama s presidential campaign, led veterans outreach efforts in western Pennsylvania, and was the Chief of Staff for the President-elect s Department of Defense Review Team. Craig s military decorations include the Bronze Star, Army Commendation Medal with V device, Combat Infantryman s Badge, Ranger Tab, and Parachutist Badge. Craig Mullaney has authored a new book, which has garnered wide acclaim, about his time in Afghanistan, entitled "The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education." Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens describes The Unforgiving Minute" as "one of the most compelling memoirs yet to emerge from America s 9/11 era. Craig Mullaney has given us an unusually honest, funny, accessible, and vivid account of a soldier s coming of age. This is more than a soldier s story; it is a work of literature.
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March 22nd, 2009
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Dr. Harley Shaiken on the Employee Free Choice Act and it's local implication. Dr. Shaiken is Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He also also shares an appointment with the program in Social and Cultural Studies in the Graduate School of Education. He studies labor and globalization, with a focus on auto manufacturing. Dr. Shaiken has written about the Employee Free Choice Act for the Center for American Progress.
interviewed with:
Daniel Medress on the local implications of the Employee Free Choice Act. Mr. Medress is the communications director for Warehouse Workers United, a group working to organize warehouse workers in what is the largest concentration of warehouses in the world, located to the east of Los Angeles in the "Inland Empire." These workers handle the billions of dollars of goods to supply Los Angeles and other areas every day and night, but they are hired through temp agencies, paid low wages, receive no benefits, and have no job security. A recent report by the University of California Riverside shows how bad these warehouse jobs are and paints a clear picture of the difficulties facing warehouse workers. It also shows that the path to economic recovery in the Inland Empire, which has over 12% unemployment, must include turning these warehouse jobs into good middle class jobs with wages that can support a family, health care coverage, and the freedom to choose to join together in a union, which is the purpose of the Employee Free Choice act.
Nandan M. Nilekani on the present and future of India. Mr. Nilekani is the co- chairman of the board of directors of Infosys Technologies Limited. Nandan is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics. He was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006 and was named Forbes Businessman of the Year in 2007. Nandan received his bachelor s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1978. He is the author of a new book which is attracting wide attention, "Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation," described as a "visionary look at the evolution and future of India by a preeminent business leader."
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March 15th, 2009
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William Cohan on the Wall Street greed frenzy and his book House of Cards." is an author and formerly an award-winning investigative newspaper reporter in Raleigh, North Carolina, who later worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Fr res in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York. In April, 2007 he published his book "The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Fr res & Co." The book won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award on October 25, 2007. His new book, just out, is House of Cards, which describes the last days of Bear Stearns & Co. This acclaimed book was described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. He is currently working on a book about former Westar Energy chief David Wittig.
Patrick Tyler on the history of the US Presidency and the Middle East. Mr. Tyler is the chief correspondent for the New York Times and the author of three books. Tyler studied journalism at the University of South Carolina, graduating in 1974. He worked in various newsrooms until 1979, when he was hired by the Washington Post. While at the Post he wrote a story critical of then Mobil Oil president William Tavoulareas. The story alleged that Tavoulareas had been guilty of nepotism in installing his son as chairman. Mobil sued the Washington Post and secured a landmark 2 million dollar verdict. The verdict was later overturned by a panel of judges that included then Appellate Court judges Antonin Scalia and Kenneth Starr. Tyler later praised the Post, commenting "I had thought my career was over, and so their determination to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary was one of the most singular acts of editorial courage...that I had ever witnessed. Tyler continued to write for the Post until 1990, when he left to join the New York Times. While at the Times, he served in various posts including as chief of the Moscow and Cairo news bureaus. He was promoted to chief correspondent in 2002. In 1986, he published his first book, Running Critical, an expose of General Dynamics and the building of the USS Philadelphia. His second book was Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, which received the Lionel Gelber prize in 2000. His latest book is A World of Trouble: the White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
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March 8th, 2009
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Peter Canellos on the legacy of Senator Ted Kennedy. Mr. Canellos is the Boston Globe's Washington bureau chief and author of the weekly National Perspective column. He oversees all the Globe's national coverage. From 1999 to 2003, Canellos served as metro editor, overseeing all local coverage. Canellos covered the presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, served as a national roving correspondent and for a time was a Sunday writer emphasizing legal affairs. Canellos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School. Peter Canellos is the lead writer and editor of a new book about Senator Edward Kennedy, entitled "The Last Lion: the Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy."
Dr. David Himmelstein on President Obama's failure to include the proven success of the single-payer health care model among the possible solutions being considered for national heathcare reform. Dr. Himmelstein is co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a universal, single-payer national health program, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The author of numerous studies and books, he is recognized as a national leader in the movement for universal health care.
Susan Jacoby on the state of reason and thought in today's America. Susan Jacoby is the author of nine books, a frequent contributor to national magazines and newspapers, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2001 appointment as a fellow of the New York Public Library s Center for Scholars and Writers. She is a panelist for On Faith, a blog published by The Washington Post and Newsweek. Jacoby is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank with offices in Lower Manhattan. Her books include her recent Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which was named a Notable Book of 2004 by The Washington Post Book World and The Times Literary Supplement. Her latest book, being published in a new paperback edition, is "The Age of American Unreason."
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March 1st, 2009
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Dr. John Mill Ackerman on the potential of Mexico becoming a "failed state." Dr. Ackerman is an author as well as a professor at the Institute of Legal Research of the Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico and vice president of the International Association of Administrative Law. He has contributed to many publications in the US, Mexico and the UK on the topics of corruption control, elections, transparency, accountability, autonomous institutions and citizen participation. He has also served as a senior consultant for the World Bank as well as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Global Integrity, Open Society Institute, International Budget Project, Secretary of the Public Function, United Nations Development Programme, Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, the Chamber of Deputies and for the Head of Government of the Federal District.
interviewed with:
Joel Kurtzman is a Senior Fellow and Publisher of The Milken Institute Review. He is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. He was also business editor and columnist at The New York Times. He was a columnist for Fortune, Chief Executive and the European Business Forum, and was an on-air book reviewer at CNN. Kurtzman began his career as an international economist at the United Nations, where he was deputy director of the U.N. s Project on the Future. While at the U.N., he participated in the negotiations between India and the Union Carbide Corporation over the Bhopal disaster. For these efforts, he was awarded India s Indira Gandhi Prize. Kurtzman is the author of 20 books and hundreds of articles. He is a member of the editorial board of MIT s Sloan Management Review and an advisor to Wharton s SEI Center. His latest book is Global Edge: Using the Opacity Index to Manage the Risk of Cross-Border Business" (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). He has a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Mexico's Instability Is a Real Problem: Don't discount the possibility of a failed state next door."
Michael Scheuer on the state of affairs in Afghanistan, and the prospects for President Obama's escalation of the American military mission there. Mr. Scheuer is a twenty-plus-year CIA veteran, best-selling author and commentator. From 1996 to 1999, her served as the Chief of the bin Laden unit, the tracking unity at the CIA's Counterrorrism Center. He then worked as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004. He resigned from the CIA in 2004. Scheuer has been featured extensively on television, including 60 Minutes, and has been the focus of print media worldwide. In November 2004, Michael Scheuer revealed his authorship of Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies' Eyes, both originally published under the byline "Anonymous." His most recent book is "Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam after Iraq," just published in a new paperback edition.
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February 15th, 2009
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William Kleinknecht on the disastrous legacy of Ronald Reagan. Mr. Kleinknecht is a veteran reporter and crime correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger. He has previously covered the crime beat for the New York Daily News. He has won awards from the Associated Press and the American Society of Professional Journalists, and has contributed to American Journalism Review, National Law Journal, the Boston Phoenix and other publications. He is the author of the acclaimed New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America. His new book, just out, looks at the Reagan administration with through the tenacious eyes of a crime reporter: "The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America."
Dr. David Korten on the economy. Dr. Korten is a journalist, author, analyst and economist. He is the chairman of the board of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, founded in late 2008 with the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the founder and president of the People-Centered Development Forum; a founding associate of the International Forum on Globalization; a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies; and a member of the Social Ventures Network. He holds MBA and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford Business School and has thirty years experience as a development professional in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In addition, he has been a Harvard Business School professor, a captain in the US Air Force, a Ford Foundation Project Specialist, and a regional adviser to the US Agency for International Development. His books include the international best-seller When Corporations Rule the World; The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism. and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. His latest book, just published, is Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.
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February 1st, 2009
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Craig Newmark on how democracy may be enhanced via technology. Mr. Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based website Craigslist. Newmark is a vocal advocate for keeping the Internet free, for Net Neutrality and for bridging the digital divide. He was an active supporter of candidate Barrack Obama and has taken an active role in helping to guide the integration not only in campaigning, as Barrack Obama did, but in governance. Newmark believes that Barack Obama has the potential to fundamentally alter communication between the presidency and the people. In early January, Craig Newmark joined a panel at the New American Foundation, "Wiki White House: Can Obama Use Technology to Change Government." discuss his support and involvement in the Obama campaign and his support of using the net as a tool to better provide government transparency, and using the net to help solve global issues..
Tia Lessin is director and producer of Trouble the Water, winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Full Frame Grand Jury Prize. Tia was a producer of Michael Moore s Fahrenheit 9/11, winner of the Palme d Or, and the Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine. Her other film credits include line producer on Martin Scorsese s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and coordinating producer on Michael Moore s The Big One. She began her film career working on Charles Guggenheim s Oscar-nominated Shadows of Hate. Tia was awarded the Women of Worth Vision Award by L Or al Paris and Women in Film for Trouble the Water. In television, Tia won the Sidney Hillman award for producing and directing Behind the Labels and her work as producer of the series The Awful Truth earned her two Emmy nominations, one arrest and a lifetime ban from Disneyland. Tia is a Sundance Institute Fellow and an Open Society Institute Katrina Media Fellow.
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Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott were born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and are featured in Trouble the Water. Just 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina flooded her city, Kimberly recorded a day in the life of her neighborhood on her hi-8 camcorder, and continued to tape through the storm until a lack of electrical power forced her to stop. Before the storm, Kimberly was working on her music career in the 9th Ward and, using the MC name Black Kold Madina, had recorded an underground demo album called Tryed and True. She believed all her music was lost in the storm, until she discovered that one of her relatives in Memphis had the only existing copy. Kimberly's husband, Scott Roberts, grew up streetwise in New Orleans and worked odd jobs through most of his adult life. He has overcome many of life's challenges and is now working in the construction industry, a profession he started post-Katrina when he found an employer who, according to him, gave me a chance that I didn't have pre-Katrina. Kimberly and Scott recently started an independent record company, Born Hustler Records: www.bornhustlerrecords.com.
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January 25th, 2009
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Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and education. Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, national and state education systems, non-profit corporations and some of the world s leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe. From 1989 - 2001, he was Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on creativity, innovation and culture. His book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative has been described by Director magazine as a truly mind opening analysis of why we don t get the best out of people at a time of punishing change. John Cleese said: Ken Robinson writes brilliantly about the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and especially in our educational systems. Sir Ken Robinson's new book is The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
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January 18th, 2009
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Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Mr. Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and two-time National Magazine Award winner, who is one of the nation s most influential writers about media, culture, and politics. He is a commentator for CNBC and a founder of Newser.com, the news aggregator. In 2003, he achieved international recognition for his dispatches from the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War began. His work has appeared in numerous publications in The United States, including New York magazine, where he was a columnist, and the Guardian and Spectator in The United Kingdom. He is the author of four other books, including best-sellers Autumn of the Moguls and Burn Rate. His latest book, just published, is "The Man who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch." In this book, with unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the growth of Murdoch's $70 billion media kingdom.
Robert Fisk on the Gaza cease-fire. Mr. Fisk is a best-selling author and acclaimed journalist, based in Beirut, Lebanon. Fisk is the Middle East Correspondent of The Independent and has lived in the region for almost three decades. He holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. The Financial Times described Fisk as "unrivaled as a war correspondent." The London Sunday Times said of him, "He is a devastating witness to the failure of politics to guard mankind against itself." His book, Pity the Nation, a history of the Lebanon war, was published to great critical acclaim. His latest book is a monumental 1,000-page work, "The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East," which has been described by the New York Times as "an unflinching, stunning achievement."
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January 11th, 2009
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Russ Baker on the Bush family's unfortunate impact on the United States. Mr. Baker is an investigative reporter, author and journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire, among others. Baker has received Society of Professional Journalists, Mencken and Common Cause awards, served as a panelist for the national conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and been a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the co-founder of the journalism soirees that evolved into the company, MediaBistro and of the investigative website whowhatwhere.com. Russ Baker's latest book is FAMILY OF SECRETS: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. Bill Moyers has said of Russ Baker, "In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn't know.
Roger Morris on elements of corruption and failure in the Democratic party, and a review of President-Elect Obama's appointments. Mr. Morris served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. An award-winning investigative journalist and historian, he is the author of several books, including "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician." His history of U.S. policy and covert intervention in South Asia and the Middle East, entitled "Shadows of the Eagle," will be soon published by Knopf.
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January 4th, 2009
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Dr. Max Neiman on the importance of government in restoring the economy. Dr. Neiman is currently Associate Director and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, based in San Francisco, which he joined in 2005. Before that he was the Director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Research and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent book is DEFENDING GOVERNMENT: Why Big Government Works, which is a manifesto opposing the Republican anti-government rhetoric and ideology which seeks to destroy essential government programs such as Social Security.
Max Blumenthal on the reality of "America's Pastor" Rick Warren's activity. Mr. Blumenthal is an award winning journalist and videographer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect the Washington Monthly, The Daily Beast and other publications. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute and a research fellow for Media Matters for America. His blog is maxblumenthal.com. For the past four years he has covered right-wing political movements in America. His YouTube videos have received over a million hits. He has a new article out on how the election of Barack Obama may energize the extreme right..
Colonel Rich Riccioni on the waste involved in military spending on major weapons systems. Colonel Riccioni is a retired Air Force Colonel who is considered one of America's great fighter pilots and who consults and comments on the engineering and design of military fighter aircraft. After a career as a fighter pilot, Rich became a designer and advocate for air-air systems. He played a critical role in initiating the Lightweight Fighter Program, which led to both the F-16 and F-18, and organized the first conference on the then-radical concept of supercruise (i.e., sustained supersonic cruise without afterburner), a key characteristic of the F-22.
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