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June 22nd, 2008
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Robert Scheer on his new book "The Pornography of Power." Mr. Scheer is a journalist, author and columnist, whose work has been published across the country for the past 30 years. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle. Scheer also directs the Privacy Project at the Annenberg School. Robert Scheer can be heard on KCRW's political discussion program "Left, Right and Center." After leaving the LA Times, Robert Scheer founded Truthdig, a web magazine that provides expert in-depth coverage of current affairs as well as other content assembled from a progressive point of view. Truthdig has won both the juried Webby Award and People s Voice Award in the category of Best Political Blog. Robert Scheer has written eight books, including The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq, co-authored with his son Christopher, and Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. His latest book, just published, is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America," described as "an impassioned call for a new way of thinking about national defense."
Matt Yglesias on his new book "Heads in the Sand." Mr. Yglesias is a popular political writer, analyst and blogger whose work as appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the American Prospect, the Atlantic Monthly, Talking Points Memo and Slate. While a student at Harvard, from which he graduated magna cum laude, he was the editor-in-chief of The Harvard Independent, a weekly newsmagazine. Yglesias started blogging in early 2002, while still at Harvard, focusing mainly on American politics and public policy issues. Yglesias joined the American Prospect as a writing fellow upon his graduation in 2003, subsequently becoming a staff writer. Yglesias is one of the few bloggers whose work is cited regularly on both sides of the blogosphere, receiving frequent mentions from liberals such as Duncan Black and Kevin Drum, and also from conservatives, particularly Andrew Sullivan. In fact, Sullivan takes nominations on his blog for the Yglesias Award, a tongue-in-cheek honor "for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe." His father is screenwriter and novelist Rafael Yglesias. "Heads In the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws up the Democrats" is Matt Yglesias' first book and has just been published. With "Heads In the Sand," Matt Yglesias provides a starting point for politicians, policy-makers, pundits and citizens alike to return America to its role as leader of a peace-loving and copperative international community.
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June 15th, 2008
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Matt Taibbi on his book "The Great Derangement." Matt Taibbi is an investigative journalist, political writer and author. He currently works at Rolling Stone where he authors a column called "Road Rage" for the print version, and an additional weekly online-only column called "The Low Post". He is probably best known for his coverage of the 2004 US presidential election, and for his former editorial positions at newspapers the eXile, the New York Press, and the Beast. Recently, Taibbi has been a regular contributor to Real Time with Bill Maher. Matt Taibbi is the author of several previous books, including "Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire," "Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season" and "The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia." His new book, a bestseller, is "The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religtion at the Twilight of the American Empire."
Kevin Phillips on his book "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Criss of American Capitalism." Kevin Phillips an author and commentator, who focuses on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist, he held a senior position in the 1968 Nixon campaign and largely credited with the Republican "Southern Strategy," which has held that party mostly in power over the last four decades. Phillips is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers. He is the author of 12 books which include "Wealth and Democracy: a Political History of the American Rich," "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," and "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Kevin Phillip's new book is "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism."
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June 8th, 2008
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David Sirota on the rising tide of populist "uprising" against the status quo and business as usual government practice. David Sirota is a political organizer and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and bestselling author, who has worked in state and national politics all over America. His column runs weekly in the Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Seattle Times, as well as in other newspapers. He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and the founder of the Progressive States Network both nonpartisan research institutions. His first book, Hostile Takeover, was a New York Times bestseller. His new book, widely acclaimed, is "The Uprising: an Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington," a virtual manual on how the people can take their country back, about which one reviewer said, ""After so many decades of fake populism--of revolts by the wealthy, red-state fantasies, and stock-picking grandmas--could we finally be looking at the real thing? In this compelling book, rooted in history but as contemporary as this morning's newspaper, David Sirota gives us reason to hope."
Vincent Bugliosi on his belief that President Bush should be indicted and tried for murder. Mr. Bugliosi is a former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, who is well-known for his successfull prosecution of Charles Manson. Mr. Bugliosi went on to become a multiple best-selling author, with books including Helter Skelter, about the Manson trial . His other books include, "And the Sea Will Tell," "Outrage: the five reasons why OJ Simpsom Got Away With Murder," "No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton - The Supreme Court on Trial," "The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President," and the monumental, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," which took over 20 years to write. The Los Angeles Times called "Reclaiming History," a book for the ages." Vincent Bugliosi's new book is "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," which makes an inrefutable case that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses a war that has not only caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children. In this passionate, reasoned and searing indictment, replete with incontrovertible evidence, George W. Bush is guilty of murder, a crime which, for Vincent Bugliosi, cries out for justice. |
June 1st, 2008
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Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, whose coverage of the Bush administration is widely acclaimed. He was the senior national-affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is currently a distinguished visiting scholar at Dartmouth and writes for various national publications, including the New York Times Magazine and Esquire. He is the author of a number of books, including the best-sellers "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill" and "The One Per-Cent Doctrine." He has a new book, as yet untitled, coming out this Summer. In 2004, two-weeks before the November election, Ron Suskind published, in the New York Times Magazine, what is now recognized as perhaps the seminal article on the inner workings and psychology of the Bush adminstration, entitled "Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush." This article described an administration with a messianic belief that they were "history's actors" who could, by the exercise of power alone, create reality according to their wishes. Now, the controversy surrounding former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book evokes memories of Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," in which Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill went public wiith his grave concerns about the nature of the Bush administration.
Dr. Richard Falk on what are the implications of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's comments about Bush's involvement in promoting the Iraq war. Richard Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of more than 20 books including "The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order after Iraq." Quoting Dr. Falk, "as we see from today's news, even former White House spokesperson McClellan is admitting that the administration orchestrated events and information to push for the invasion of Iraq in defiance of the UN Charter. This amounts to an aggressive war. Attempts by citizens like George Monbiot to hold officials accountable stem from the fact that the governmental institutions have failed in their duty to hold such individuals accountable for violations of international law. The Center for Constitutional Rights formally urged the prosecution of Rumsfeld in Germany and France, but those cases were dismissed for political reasons. There were attempts to do citizen arrests against [then-Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger and other U.S. officials during the Vietnam War. Having structures to ensure accountability of government officials for international crimes of state are an elementary facet of a real democracy in our globalized world."
Professor Michael Greenberger on what is behind the tremendous run-up of gasoline prices. Professor Greenberger is the Director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, which works on issues pertaining to natural and man-made disasters. He designed and currently teaches two courses focused on counterterrorism and emergency response: He is also a professor at the School of Law, teaching Constitutional Law and a seminar on Futures, Options and Derivatives at the Law School. In 1999, Professor Greenberger became Counselor to the United States Attorney General, and after that, the Justice Department's Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, where he assisted in supervising the work of the Justice Department s Civil, Civil Rights, Environmental, Antitrust, and Tax Divisions. In 1997, Professor Greenberger became the Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with responsibility for supervising exchange traded futures and derivatives. He also served on the Steering Committee of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, and as a member of the International Organization of Securities Commissions' Hedge Fund Task Force. |
May 25th, 2008
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Cliff Schecter on the Presidential race. Mr. Schecter is a veteran campaign strategist, syndicated columnist and political commentator, whose work has been featured in a variety of publications including The Miami Herald, The American Prospect, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Fordham Urban Law Journal, The Sacramento Bee, The Huffington Post and Salon.com. Schecter was a pollster for the successful reelection of President Bill Clinton in 1996 and fundraiser for former Governor of Virginia Mark Warner in 2001. He has also consulted for the DNC and the DCCC. Additionally, Schecter has provided analysis on American politics for international diplomats, journalists, students and politicians as part of The State Department Bureau of International Information Programs. Schecter holds an MA in International Affairs from the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and is currently receiving his Ph.D. in American History at American University. Cliff Schecter's new book is "The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't," described by US News and World Report as "laying out a detailed blueprint for how Dems can mine presumed GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain's political and personal past--including already well-documented incidents of his temper -- to defeat him in the fall."
Winslow Wheeler on waste and fraud in government contracting. 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 from the U.S. Naval Institute Press. The book has been the subject of commentary and interviews on 60 Minutes and numerous of media outlets. He has also authored a 2002 essay on Congress authorization of war against Iraq, The Week of Shame: Congress Wilts as the President Demands an Unclogged Road to War, and he wrote various commentaries on Congress and national security, which have appeared in The Washington Post, Government Executive, Defense Week, Barron s, Army Times and elsewhere.
Iraq Veteran Liam Madden on the meaning of Veteran's Day 2008. Liam Madden was a communications and electronics specialist with the Marines in Iraq. He co-founded the Appeal for Redress, a way in which individual service members can appeal to their Congressional Representative and U.S. Senators to urge an end to the U.S. military occupation. He left the military in January. Quoting Madden: "The notion that we have to keep funding the war to 'support the troops' is insulting the intelligence of the troops. Obviously if you keep funding a war based on lies -- treating the troops like pawns -- the troops will be stuck in Iraq. Without the funding, the troops would not be there; Bush would have to withdraw. "Congress is attempting to defuse the sentiment of a lot of people who want this war to end by giving the impression that Congress tried to end it when in fact that's not what the bill would have done. The entire argument between Bush and Congress has been a farce." |
May 18th, 2008
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Senator Lincoln Chafee on his experiences in the US Senate, his observations on American politics today and his new day. Senator Chafee served in the United States Senate as the Republican senator from Rhode Island from 1999 to 2007. He was the only Republican in the Senate to have voted against the use of force in Iraq. He is pro-choice, in favor of gay rights, pro-environment, and opposes the death penalty. After being defeated for re-election in 2006, he left the Republican party and became an independent. Currently, he is a distinguished visiting fellow at Brown University, and he has been mentioned as a candidate for governor of Rhode Island in 2010. He has endorsed Barrak Obama for President of the United States and is involved in the J-Street Project, a pro-Israel peace lobby. He is the author of a new book, "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President," described as a behind the scenes look into what happened as catastrophic decisions were taken by an extremist president, while the congress abdicated it's oversight responsibilities. In this book, Chafee sounds a wake-up call to all Americans, by challenging our government to strive, as Abraham Lincoln once articulated, to elevate the condition of men.
Eric Schlosser on the spying by US corporations on farmworkers and their advocates. Mr. Schlosser is one of America's great investigative muckracking journalists. The winner of numerous awards, Eric Schlosser is currently a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His first book, Fast Food Nation, which is widely considered a modern classic, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and appeared on the bestseller lists of the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His other books include "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market," "Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food" (co-authored by Charles Wilson) and "Americans." Schlosser has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNN, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and many more. He is currently at work on a book about the American prison system. He recently testified before congress about the corporate harrassment of farm workers and their advocates. On May 7, Eric Schlosser had an op-ed published in the New York Times, entitled "Burger, with a Side of Spies."
Ian Williams on the UN and Burma/Myanmar. Mr. Williams has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, including the Australian, The Independent, the New York Observer the Village Voice, the Financial Times and the Guardian. He is the UN correspondent for the Nation and The Tribune. He has been a pundit on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBC, and others. Online, he writes for Salon, AlterNet and MaximsNews, among many others. He currently apppears several times a week in Comment is Free on Guardian Unlimited. He is the author of a number of books, including "The United Nations for Beginners," "Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and his Past, "The Alms Trade: Charaties past, present and future," and "Rum: a Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776." He has recently written about the crisis in Burma/Myanmar. He joins us from Puerto Rico. |
May 11th, 2008
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Walter Shapiro on the Presidential race. Mr. Shapiro is the Washington bureau chief of SALON, a position he has held since early 2006. Walter Shapiro is now covering his eighth presidential campaign. He recently completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center for the People and the Press at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. From 1995 to the end of 2004, he was the twice weekly political columnist for USA TODAY. He is the author of "One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In," a chronicle of the early skirmishing for the presidential nomination. A long-time magazine writer, Shapiro spent the first four years of the Clinton administration writing a monthly column, "Our Man in the White House" for ESQUIRE. From 1987-93, he was a senior writer for TIME and was also their correspondent covering the 1992 Clinton campaign. At NEWSWEEK (1983-87), he was the lead political writer. He was a reporter for the WASHINGTON POST from 1979-83. Prior to joining the POST, he served as a White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and a special assistant and speechwriter for Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall.
Dr. Josef Silverstein on the human tragedy in Burma/Myanmar. Dr. Silverstein is a distinguished emeritus professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He is an expert on Myanmar and the author of "Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation" and "Burmese Politics: the Dilemma of National Unity."
Dr. Stephen Cohen on the situation in Russian. Dr. Cohen is a scholar of Russian studies, well known in both Russian and American circles. He is a close personal friend of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, advised former President George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s, helped Nikolai Bukharin's widow rehabilitate his name during the Soviet era, and met Stalin's daughter, Svetlana. He is professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University and has authored several books, including, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 and most recently, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia. He is also a CBS News consultant and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Cohen has a new article at The Nation, where he is also a contributing editor, entitled "The Missing Debate," which asks why aren't the presidential candidates talking about the impact of Russia on our national security. |
May 4th, 2008
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John Marks on how the divide between "red" and "blue" political division affects the presidential race, and our lives as American. Mr. Marks is a former producer for 60 Minutes and former journalist for US News & World Report, and the author of REASONS TO BELIEVE: ONE MAN'S JOURNEY AMONG THE EVANGELICALS AND THE FAITH HE LEFT BEHIND. He also has a documentary, PURPLE STATE OF MIND (www.purplestateofmind.com). In REASONS TO BELIEVE, Marks reaches across sectarian lines to present the evangelical world from the inside out at a time when our country is increasingly divided over questions of faith, spirituality, morality and the very meaning of life. The Los Angeles Times has called John Mark's "Reasons to Believe:" a work of courageous investigative journalism as well as a memoir of startling self-reflection Marks writes with unfailing intelligence, insight and deep compassion
John Stauber on the mainstream media's use of former military spokesmen connected to the Pentagon as "independent analysts." Mr. Stauber is an investigative writer, public speaker and democracy advocate. He is also the founder of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media & Democracy and its newsmagazine PR Watch, He has served as the Center's executive director and has co-authored with Sheldon Rampton six books including the 2003 New York Times bestseller Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq ,Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State and The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq. He has begun or worked with many non-profit public interest groups. He advises a number of organizations, including the Center for Food Safety, Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Media Education Foundation
David Freeman on the future of energy in the US. Mr. Freeman is a leading authority in the production, management and delivery of energy to large populations. He has had the ear of federal officials since the days of JFK and helped bring about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Nixon. He headed the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest nuclear program, under Jimmy Carter. From New York to Los Angeles, Freeman has headed agencies and utilities companies, continually working to make utilities more environmentally safe, more efficient, and more cost-friendly to the customer. He is currently president of the commission overseeing the Port of Los Angeles. David Freeman's new book is "Winning Our Energy Independence (and Energy Insider Shows How). |
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April 27th, 2008
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Kevin Phillips on his new book "Bad Money." Mr. Phillips is an author and commentator, who focuses on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist, he held a senior position in the 1968 Nixon campaign and largely credited with the Republican "Southern Strategy," which has held that party mostly in power over the last four decades. Phillips is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers. He is the author of 12 books which include "Wealth and Democracy: a Political History of the American Rich," "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," and "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Kevin Phillip's new book is "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism."
Raj Patel on the global food crisis and why so many are obese. Raj Patel is a scholar, journalist, activist, author and a former policy analyst for Food First, a leading food think tank. He has been a contributor to both The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. His new book is "Stuffed & Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System," which is about why the world experiences both obesity and hunger on a broad scale. Raj Patel received his PhD in Sociology from Cornell. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale and currently is at the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the United Nations -- he's also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them. More recently he has lived and worked extensively in Zimbabwe and in South Africa. He was refused a visa extension by the the Mugabe regime for his political involvement with the pro-democracy movement. He has written a number of influential criticisms of various aspects of the policies and research methods of the World Bank and his website is www.stuffedorstarved.org |
April 20th, 2008
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Sean Wilentz on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and the electoral college. Dr. Wilentz is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University. He is the author of a number of award-winning books on history, including "Chants Democratic," recently republished,. "In The Kingdom of Matthias," "The Key of Liberty" and others. His most recent book is "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln," published in 2005, and which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He has written some two hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces for publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the American Scholar, the Nation, Le Monde, and Salon. A contributing editor at The New Republic, Wilentz writes widely on music and the arts as well as history and politics, and has received a Grammy nomination and, from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a Deems Taylor Award for musical commentary. He is the historian-in-residence of bobdylan.com, the official Bob Dylan website. In 2006 he wrote an article about the George W. Bush presidency, titled "The Worst President in History?" which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Wilentz has been a prominent supporter of the presidential candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Frances Kissling on the Pope's visit to the United States. Frances Kissling is the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an independent organization of progressive Catholics based in Washington, DC, Under Ms. Kissling s leadership, CFFC has become a leading force for change on gender, sexuality and reproduction. She was described in MS. Magazine as the Woman Who makes the Vatican Sweat. She has been a prominent spokesperson for progressive Catholic views at all Papal trips to the US was arrested while demonstrating at the Vatican Embassy during the 1987 Papal visit to that city.. Ms. Kissling is an out-spoken voice on issues of church and state, reproductive health and ethics, religious fundamentalism and Catholic church reform. Ms. Kissling has given formal presentations in Britain's House of Lords, debated the US bishops' spokesperson on abortion and brought thousands to their feet with an address at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. A prolific writer, Ms. Kissling has contributed to 7 books and authored more than 60 published articles and an equal number of op-eds. She is currently A fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she is writing a book, How to Think about Abortion: Pro-choice Reflections on Rights and Responsibility.
Martin Welz is the Editor in Chief of the South African monthly investigative journal, Noseweek, which broke the fascinating story of a Taiwanese freighter with a shipment of guns bound for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The boat docked at a South African harbor. When the South African dock workers discovered that the arms were intended for Mugabe's use against the people of Zimbabwe, they heroically refused to unload the boat. |
April 13th, 2008
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General William Odom on the situation in Iraq and why troops must be withdraw as quickly as possible. General Odom is a senior fellow and director of National Security Studies at Hudson Institute's Washington, D.C. office. He is also an adjunct professor at Yale University. As director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation's signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as assistant chief of staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was military assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. On the National Security Council staff, he worked on strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970. Earlier this month, on April 2nd, he presented testimony advocating rapid withdrawal of American troops from Iraq to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Lawrence O'Donnell on the troubled Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. O'Donnell is an MSNBC senior political analyst and a panelist on The McLaughlin Group. He was an Emmy winning producer of NBC s The West Wing. and a former contributing editor of New York Magazine and a former Democratic Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance and for the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Mr. O Donnell has also served as Senior Advisor to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He can be seen as an actor on HBO's hit series "Big Love." Mr. O'Donnell has a new piece out on both The Huffington Post and New York Magazine which forsees a possibly nightmarish deadlocked Democratic convention in Colorado.
Judith Todd on the increasing dire situation in Zimbabwe. Judith Todd is a human rights activist and author who was born and raised in what is now Zimbabwe and focuses her activism on that country. She is the daughter of Sir Garfield Todd, the liberal colonial Rhodesian Prime Minister, who ran the country from 1953 to 1958. Judith Todd later became a heroine of the struggle to liberate Rhodesia from the minority rule of white supremacist Ian Smith' regime. For her efforts, she was jailed by Smilth in 1972, force-fed during a hunger strike and then forced out the country to spend eight years in exile in England. She returned to Zimbabwe shortly before independence was achieved in 1980, and soon realized that, far from being the solution to Zimbabwe's ills, Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu party were increasingly becoming a serious problem. As the country slid into economic and social decay, Todd had a front-row view from her position as director of an international aid agency, the Zimbabwe Project Trust. In 2003 she became one of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans stripped of their citizenship and thus their right to vote by the Mugabe regime. At present she lives, exiled again, in Cape Town, South Africa. Over the first 25 years of Mugabe's rule, she kept journals, notes and copies of letters and documents from which she has compiled an intensely personal account of life in Zimbabwe, published to worldwide acclaim in her book "Through the Drakness: A Life in Zimbabwe." The Economist picked this book as one of their 2007 "Books of the Year," describing it as "a harrowing tale of courage and betrayal by a white heroine of the liberation struggle against Ian Smith and who has been punished and stripped of her citizenship with extraordinary vengefulness by Robert Mugabe for speaking out about his regime's abuses of power." |
April 6th, 2008
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Scott Horton on Attorney General Mukasey, domestic spying and FISA. Scott Horton is a writer, analyst and attorney known for his work in international law, human rights and the law of armed conflict. Scott Horton served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He was hired by the Associated Press to represent Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who was detained without charges by the US military for over a year. He is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has also been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association. He is the author of over 100 articles and is a contributing editor at Harpers in legal affairs and national security. His Harpers weblog, No Comment, is highly regarded and has been analyzing Attorney General Mukasey's shut-down of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Unit.
Interview with:
Glenn Greenwald on Mukasey's odd comments about 9/11 in a recent San Francisco speech. Mr. Greenwald is a best-selling author and popular columnist at Salon.com. Prior to becoming a journalist, he was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. Upon disclosure by the New York Times in December 2005 of President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, Greenwald became one of the leading and most cited experts on that controversy. In early 2006, he broke a story on his blog regarding the NSA scandal that served as the basis for front-page articles in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, all of which credited his blog for the story. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling books "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power and "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency," (just now available in paperback) which examines the role of Manichaean morality and the exploitation of the concept of the "enemy" during the Bush presidency and argues that President Bush's single-minded dependence on good vs. evil themes has rendered his presidency a failure. His new book is, "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics." which exposes the systematic myth-making and hypocrisy of the Republican Party
Robert Dreyfuss on the reality of recent events in Iraq. Mr. Dreyfuss writes extensively on the Middle East, the war on terrorism, and national security for The Nation, The American Prospect, Mother Jones and Rolling Stone. He is a frequent commentator on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC. His latest book is Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the story of America s misguided efforts, stretching across decades, to dominate the strategically vital Middle East by courting and cultivating Islamic fundamentalism. He recently published an article in The Nation entitled "The Lessons of Basra" which described the abject failure of Malali's regime to subdue Muqtada al Sadr's militias. In this article, Robert Dreyfuss exposed what Bush described as a "defining moment" in Iraq as, in fact, Bush's "utter humiliation."
Ambassador Robert Keeley on Zimbabwe and Mugabe. Ambassador Keeley is a 34-year career veteran of the Foreign Service of the United States. He served three times as Ambassador: to Greece, Zimbabwe, and Mauritius. He has been Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in charge of southern and eastern Africa. In Washington he served as Congo (Zaire) desk officer, and as alternate director for East Africa. At his retirement, Keeley held the rank of Career Minister. He is the recipient of the Christian Herter Award from the American Foreign Service Association for "extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual courage, and creative dissent." Other awards he has earned include the Superior Honor Award (for Cambodia), a Presidential Citation (for the Refugee Task Force), and a Presidential Distinguished Service Award (for Zimbabwe). He is a former President of the American Foreign Service Association. Ambassador Keeley has also served as President of the Middle East Institute in Washington, a private, non-profit educational and cultural institution founded in 1946 to foster greater understanding in the United States of the countries of the Middle East region from Morocco to Central Asia. |
March 30th, 2008
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Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar on the flare-up of violence and conflict in Iraq as Prime Minister Maliki attempts to take down the Basra militia of cleric Mugtada al Sadr. Joshua Holland is a senior writer and editor at AlterNet, where he heads the online magazine's Iraq special coverage. Based in New York, Holland is graduate of USC, a 2007 Project Censored Award winner and a recipient of a Schumann Foundation grant for Independent Journalism. Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi-born architect and a political analyst who moved to the US in 2005. He was the Director of the only door to door casualties' survey in Iraq in 2003, and then established a local Iraqi grassroots organization that carried out hundreds of reconstruction projects in ten Iraqi cities. Jarrar is currently the Iraq Consultant for the American Friends Service Committee facilitating meetings between Iraqi and US elected officials, and working on bringing Iraqi voices into the US debate. Raed's blog is "Raed in the Middle." Together Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar have collaborated in numerous published articles providing original Iraq war coverage unique in American media. Their new article at Alternet.org is "Five Things You Need to Know about the Latest Violence in Iraq."
Dr. Michael Perelman on the mismanagement of the American economy and where it is leading. Dr. Perelan is Professor of Economics, California State University at Chico. He is the author of twenty highly-regarded books on economics, society and politics, including Class Warfare in the Information Age, The Natural Instability of Markets, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy, and Steal This Idea. His latest book is "The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression," in which Dr. Perelman shows that in the last three decades, of mostly Republican presidents, there has been a greater redistribution of wealth in America than occured during the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Nicholas Marsh on the international arms trade. Mr. Marsh is a research fellow at the International Peace Research Institute in Norway and an expert in the international arms trade. Nicholas Marsh has followed the story which broke last week about Efraim Diveroli, who at the age of 22 received a $200 million contract from the Bush administration to supply arms to the Afghan military. Questions were raised about Mr. Diveroli when it was discovered that he was supplying 40-year-old ammunition made in China and purchased through Hungary. |
March 24th, 2008
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Dr. Susan Shirk on the conflict at protest in Tibet against Chinese domination, and the Taiwan/Mainland dynamic. Dr. Shirk is the director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of political science at UC San Diego. Shirk first traveled to China in 1971 and has been doing research there ever since. During 1997-2000, Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, an unofficial track-two forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the Koreas. Shirk served as a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, the Board of Governors for the East-West Center (Hawaii), the Board of Trustees of the U.S.-Japan Foundation, and the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Shirk s publications include her books, "How China Opened Its Door: The Political Success of the PRC s Foreign Trade and Investment Reforms;" "The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China;" and "Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China." Her new book is, "China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail its Peaceful Rise."
Dr. Drew Westen on what Presidential candidates are connecting better with the American electorate, and why. Dr. Westen is an author and professor of psychology at Emory University. Dr. Westin received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. His major areas of research are personality disorders, eating disorders, psychotherapy effectiveness, adolescent psychopathology, political psychology, and the interface of psychodynamics and neuroscience. His recently published book is "The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation." Howard Dean has said of "The Political Brain," ""Drew Westen is a must read ... we will win the Presidency if our candidate reads and acts on this book." Last week, in an article published at Huffington Post, Dr. Westen analyzed Presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech on race in America, delivered in the wake of the Reverend Jerrimiah Wright controversy, saying that it was an effective and important speech.
David Enders on the true state of affairs in Iraq and the testimony of the Iraq veteran Winter soldiers. David Enders is a freelance journalist and a co-founder of the Baghdad Bulletin, the first post-invasion attempt to set up an English-language news outlet in Iraq. Since the invasion, he has spent more than 18 months in Iraq and has written for Men's Journal, Mother Jones, and The Nation, as well as London's Sunday Times and other newspapers. His first book, "Baghdad Bulletin," was published by the University of Michigan Press. David Enders has blogged on his experiences in Iraq at the Pulitzer Center's website, as part of their Iraq Project. Last week he covered the Winter Soldier gathering, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, during which hundreds of veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan presented testimony about the horrors of war, including atrocities which they had committed themselves or witnessed. |
March 16th, 2008
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Dr. James Galbraith on the current dire state of the economy and where its going.Dr. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School at the University of Texas, Austin, at which he is also the Director of "The Inequality Project." Galbraith serves as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column called "Econoclast" for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation.
Scott Horton on the apparent politcal targeting of former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. Mr. Horton is a writer, analyst and attorney known for his work in international law, human rights and the law of armed conflict. Scott Horton served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He was hired by the Associated Press to represent Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who was detained without charges by the US military for over a year. He is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has also been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association. He is the author of over 100 articles and is a contributing editor at Harpers in legal affairs and national security. His Harpers weblog, No Comment, is highly regarded and has been analyzing the legal implications of the case of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. He also has a feature article on the subject at The New Republic.
Fadel Gheit on the continuously upward trajectory of energy prices. Mr. Gheit is a graduate of Cairo University and New York University. He is currently Senior Vice President for Oil and Gas Research with Oppenheimer and Company in NYC. Mr. Gheit, who has a degree in chemical engineering, has more than 30 years of experience in oil and gas research. He has previously been with Mobil Oil and JP Morgan Company in New York. The New York Times describes as the "elder statesman" and one of the most respected oil analysits in the world. |
March 9th, 2008
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Bob Mullholland on the presidential race, the role of the superdelegates and the important role California plays in the national race. Mr. Mullholland is campaign advisor to the California Democratic Party, has lots of opinions. And he's not shy about sharing them. Mulholland has been active with the Democratic Party for more than 30 years, managing a number of successful California campaigns and participating in presidential races. He has worked as a consultant to the British Labour Party, and appeared as a commentator on various TV shows, including "48 Hours," "The Today Show" "Larry King" and "Crossfire." A Vietnam veteran, Mulholland served with the 101st Airborne and was wounded in the Tet Offensive. His political insights are shared on Bob's Blog, hosted at cadem.org, the California Democratic Party website.
David Rose on the blundering role of the Bush administration in producing a deadly civil conflict in Gaza. David Rose is an author, investigative journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has previously worked on the staffs of the Guardian, the Observer and BBC TV in England. He is the author of six books, most recently "The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice," which was published last year, and is an investigation into a miscarriage of justice in a Georgia serial murder case. He has an important piece out now in the new April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, entitled "The Gaza Bombshell." This article reveals yet another self-defeating Bush Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra and part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
Dr. Jerrold Starr on the underlying issues of the McCain lobbyist scandal recently revealed in the New York Times. Dr. Starr is Director of Citizens for Independent Public Broadscasting (www.cipbonline.org); a Visiting Professor of Communication, University of California at San Diego; and author of "Air Wars: The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting," published by Temple University Press, among many other works. This book "Air Wars" tells the story of the battle for a public TV station in Pittsburgh that media mogul Lowell "Bud" Paxson was seeking. Bud Paxon was a major contributor to the campaign of Senator John McCain for President in 2000. Lobbying for Paxon in this highly unusual effort to acquire a public station for commercial purposes was Vicki Iseman, whom the New York Times said had an affair with the Senator. Without commenting on the affair, Dr. Starr asserts that McCain broke the law in doing the quid pro quo bidding of the media mogul. According to well-documented reports, Paxson's family, company and law firm were contributing tens of thousands of dollars to McCain's campaign while McCain flew around on Paxson's private jet to rallies and to fundraisers on Paxson's yacht. |
March 2nd, 2008
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Todd Gitlin on media coverage of the presidential race, with a focus on the NY Times possible "innoculation" of John McCain in their reporting of his "affair" with a communications lobbyist. Dr. Gitlin is a professor of Sociology at Columbia, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives and The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. He is a regular contributor to the popular blog Talking Points Memo.
Max Blumenthal on Pastor John Hagee's endorsement of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Max Blumenthal is an award winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect the Washington Monthly 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. Last july he covered a rally held by the Christian Zionist evangelical Reverend John Hagee in Washington, D.C. and his highly praised video report on that event, entitled "Raprure Ready," has been viewed by hundreds of thousands on YouTube.
Robert Bryce on a contrarian take on the future of energy. Mr. Bryce is one of America's foremost energy journalists. He recently resigned as the managing editor of Energy Tribune and a contributing writer for the Texas Observer. The author of Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron and Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate. His new book, just published, is "Gusher of Lies: the dangerous delusions of energy independence," an alternative and somewhat contrarian take on the promise of "energy indepedence," described in reviews as "meticulously researched, illuminating, high-order muckracking" and "a strong and much-needed dose of reality." |
February 17th, 2008
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Fred Kaplan writes the widely regarded "War Stories" column in Slate. He is the author of the classic book The Wizards of Armageddon, and has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT, worked as a foreign policy aide on Capitol Hill, and spent decades as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Washington and Moscow. His new book is "Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power" -- a book which explains why America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated and its soldiers are trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable.
Susan Jacoby is the author of eight books, most recently 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 new book, just published, is "The Age of American Unreason." Susan Jacoby was featured last Friday on the Bill Moyer's PBS television program. |
February 10th, 2008
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Ari Berman on the Presidential race. Mr. Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation, covering national politics, focusing on the 2008 presidential election. He is also an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. His articles about the presidential race may be read at www.thenation.com.
Dr. Ellen Frank on the Bush budget. Dr. Frank is an economist with Rhode Island College's Poverty Instititute, which works to promote economic security for low- and moderate-income Rhode Islanders and equitable tax and budget policies through policy analysis, education and advocacy. Dr. Frank holds a PhD. in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has taught economics at many colleges including Emmanuel, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke. Her work has focused on how economic policies affect the prospects of ordinary households. She is a contributing editor to Dollars and Sense Magazine, a staff economist for the Center for Popular Economics, and has served on the Council on Monetary and Financial Policy at the Economic Policy Institute. Her book - The Raw Deal: How Myths about Deficits, Inflation and Wealth Impoverish America, published by Beacon Press in June 2004, argues for a return to strong pro-employment fiscal policy in the U.S.
Alex de Waal on the war taking place in Chad. Dr. de Waal is a researcher, writer and activist on African issues. He is a fellow at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University and the director of the Social Science Research Council program on AIDS and social transformation. In addition, he is a director of Justice Africa in London. In his career, he has studied the social, political and health dimensions of famine, war, genocide and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially in the Horn of Africa. He has been at the forefront of mobilizing African and international responses to these problems. Dr de Waal received his PhD in social anthropology from Oxford University, with his thesis being a study of the famine of 1984-5 in Darfur, Sudan. In 2004, Alex returned to his earliest research interest, Darfur. During 2005-06 he was seconded to the African Union Mediation team for the Darfur conflict and remains closely involved with the search for a lasting solution to the crisis in Darfur. Alex de Waal's blog is "Making Sense of Darfur." |
February 3rd, 2008
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Jacob Weisberg on the presidential race. Mr. Weisberg is the editor in chief of Slate.com. He previously worked for The New Republic and New York Magazine. He was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a columnist for the Financial Times. Weisberg is the originator of Slate's "Strange Bedfellows" and "Ballot Box" political columns and the inventor of the Bushisms series. He is also the author, with Robert Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. Weisberg s first book, In Defense of Government, was published in 1996. His new book, just published, is "The Bush Tragedy,"
Cuauhtemoc "Temo" Figueroa on the "black/brown divide" in the support for Barack Obama. Temo Figueroa is the National Field Director for the Obama for America Presidential Campaign. Before joining the campaign last January, Mr. Figueroa was the Assistant Political Director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal (AFSCME) employees union, based in Washington D.C. He previously served as Director of Policy and Communication for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Temo Figueroa began his career in Washington as a Legislative aide to the late U.S. Representative George E. Brown, Jr of San Bernardino. He has managed many political and union organizing campaigns across the country. Mr. Figueroa is a native of California. He is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Theodore Lowi on Bush's "signing statements" and on the neocons. Dr. Lowi has been the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University since 1972. He received his doctorate at Yale in 1961, served on the Cornell faculty from 1959 to 1965 and on the political science faculty at the University of Chicago between 1965 and 1972. His primary fields are American government, political institutions and public policy. Recent research and writing commitments include the politics of globalization, a critical history of the American Democratic party, and a long-term project with an Italian collaborator to develop a conceptual approach to political theory that is one part thesaurus/encyclopedia and one part methodology through use of the computer to develop a cross-tabulational approach to concepts. He is also completing, with colleague Isaac Kramnick, The Norton Anthology of American Political Thought. Leisure time is devoted, in collaboration with co-authors, to keeping two American government textbooks up to date. Other recent books include The End of the Republican Era (1996); La scienza delle politiche (1999; forthcoming in English) and The Personal President -- Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (1985). Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, Lowi is recipient of honorary degrees from Oakland University, SUNY/Stony Brook, and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques of the University of Paris. He has served as president of the American Political Science Association, the Policy Studies Organization, and the International Political Science Association. |
January 27th, 2008
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Congresswoman Barbara Lee on the Obama victory in South Carolina. Congresswoman Lee has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1998, representing California's 9th congressional district and is the first woman to represent that district. Congresswoman Lee is the First Vice-Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She was the only person in either chamber of Congress who voted against the authorization of use of force following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Congresswoman Lee has endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President.
Ruy Teixeira on the state of play in the Presidential race. Dr. Teixera is a Joint Fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. He is the author of five books, over a hundred articles, both scholarly and popular, and a weekly online column, Public Opinion Watch. His book "The Emerging Democratic Majority," written with John Judis, generated praise across the political spectrum, from George Will on the right to E.J. Dionne on the left, and was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by The Economist magazine. Dr. Teixeira holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution where he wrote the book, The Disappearing American Voter, now a standard reference work on voter turnout. He has also been affiliated with the Progressive Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute and The Century Foundation. In 2000, he published "America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters," a widely-cited and controversial work credited with being a strong influence on the Gore campaign and selected as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.
Chuck Lewis on the lies of the Bush administration that led to war. Mr. Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1989 and served as its executive director until December, 2004. He is now the president of The Fund for Independence in Journalism. During his tenure at the Center, Lewis wrote or co-wrote several of the Center's books and studies that systematically track political influence, including The Buying of the President 2004, The Corruption Notebooks, The Cheating of America, The Buying of the President 2000, The Buying of the Congress and The Buying of the President. Described by the Village Voice as "the Paul Revere of our time," Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1998. The Center for Public Integrity has just released a major study of the statements of Bush administration officials in the run-up to the Iraq war, entitled "Iraq - the War Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War." This study has identified 935 false statements by high-level officials, which pushed the public towards war. |
January 20th, 2008
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Walter Shapiro on the latest in the Presidential race. Mr. Shapiro is the Washington bureau chief of Salon, a position he has held since early 2006. Walter Shapiro is now covering his eighth presidential campaign. He recently completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center for the People and the Press at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. From 1995 to the end of 2004, he was the twice weekly political columnist for USA Today. He is the author of "One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In," a chronicle of the early skirmishing for the presidential nomination, published by PublicAffairs in November 2003. A long-time magazine writer, Shapiro spent the first four years of the Clinton administration writing a monthly column, "Our Man in the White House" for Esquire. From 1987-93, he was a senior writer for Time and was also the magazine's correspondent covering the 1992 Clinton campaign. At Newsweek (1983-87), he was the lead political writer. He was on the reporting staff of the Washington Post from 1979-83. Prior to joining the POST, he served as a White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and a special assistant and speechwriter for Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall.
Doug Henwood on what appears to be a looming economic recession in America. Mr. Henwood is the editor of the Left Business Observer, which he founded in 1986. Henwood is also a contributing editor of The Nation and does a weekly program on New York Radio. He is the author of the books "The State of the USA Atlas," "Wall Street:how it works and who for" and "After the New Economy."
Roger Lowenstein on Fed chief Ben Barnanke. Mr. Lowenstein is an American financial journalist, who reported for the Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, including two years writing its influential "Heard on the Street" column.. Lowenstein has authored three books, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, and Origins of the Crash. He has written for many publications, including Smart Money and The New York Times. Lowenstein is a regular book reviewer for the The New York Times and has written a number of major articles and cover stories for the The New York Times Magazine including "Subprime Time," from last November and "The Education of Ben Bernanke," today's cover story in the New York Times Magazine. |
January 13th, 2008
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Gloria Steinem on the US presidential race and matters related. Ms. Steinem is the United States' most influential, eloquent and revered feminist more than three decades after founding Ms. magazine. A devoted activist and writer, Steinem continues, as she has for more than thirty-five years, to travel nationally and internationally and speak about gender, racial, and other civil inequity issues. She is the author of numerous books, many of them considered classics, including "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," "Revolution from Within" and "Moving Beyond Words." Her latest book is "Doing Sixty and Seventy" and she is working with Jane Fonda to create a radio network for women. She had an op-ed published last week in the New York Times regarding her analysis on the race for the United States Presidency.
Gideon Levy on Bush's visit to the Middle East. Mr. Levy is an Israeli journalist who writes for Ha'aretz and is the former spokesman for Shimon Peres. Gideon Levy's writing is highly praised and noted for their keen analysis, insight and understanding of the Israeli as well as the Palestinian perspectives. He has been covering Bush's diplomitic mission to Israel.
Mark Schmidt on the presidential race. Mark Schmidt is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, with expertise in American politics and specializing in developing new approaches to finding the balance between money and expression in the political process. He is a noted voice on reform of the political process and an authority on campaign finance and congressional procedure. He has written extensively on budget and tax policy, and on the history and role of ideas in politics. He writes monthly column, The Out Years, in The American Prospect. He has also written for The New Republic, The Financial Times, and many other publications, and has contributed chapters to numerous books. In 2003, he launched The Decembrist, which was named one of the five best political blogs in 2004 by Forbes, and is a frequent contributor to the widely read blog, Talking Points Memo. Before joining the New America Foundation, Mr. Schmitt was Director of Policy and Research at the Open Society Institute, and served for seven years in the U.S. Senate as a speechwriter and later as Policy Director for Sen. Bill Bradley. He was also a senior policy advisor on Bradley s 2000 presidential campaign. Schmitt serves on the boards of the Center for Policy Alternatives and the Proteus Fund. He is working on a book on the emergence of strong political parties in the United States. |
January 6th, 2008
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Muthoni Wanyeki on the state of affairs in the troubled African nation of Kenya in the violent and chaotic aftermath of what appears to be a highly questionable election. Ms. Wanyeki is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, a non-governmental organization. She is also a columnist for the weekly newspaper The East African.
David Sirota on the US Presidential race, Democratic and Republican, and matters related. Mr. Sirota is a political journalist, New York Times bestselling author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--And How We Take It Back and a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network. He writes a weekly, nationally syndicated column for Creators Syndicate which was launched in the Fall of 2007 and which now appears in The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Idaho Statesman and others. Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times magazine, and is working on his second book, due out in the Spring of 2008. He has been profiled in Newsweek and the Rocky Mountain News and is widely known for his reporting on political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties. The New York Times has called him a "populist rabble-rouser" with a "take-no-prisoners mind-set," while the Philadelphia Daily News labeled him "a progressive powerhouse." The American Prospect said Sirota is "the kind of pundit you'd like to have on your side in a knife fight and wouldn't want to cross in a dark alley." David Sirota will be appearing in person with John Dean at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, in the Hammer Forum this coming Tuesday night at 7pm. It's free and open to the public. There will be ample seating.
John Dean on the state of what he describes as our "broken government," the Presidential race and matters related. Mr. Dean became Counsel to the President of the United States 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. He served as Richard Nixon's White House lawyer for a thousand days. John Dean, a best-selling author, writes on the law, government, and politics, and 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." and "Conservatives Without Conscience." His latest, another best-seller, is "Broken Government: How Republican Rule destroyed the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches." His forthcoming book, out in 2008, will be about Barry Goldwater. John Dean will be appearing in person with David Sirota at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, in the Hammer Forum this coming Tuesday night at 7pm. It's free and open to the public. There will be ample seating. |
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Contact Ian
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