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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 2007
Click for -> Archived programs from 2006
Click for -> Archived programs from 2004-20
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May 4th, 2008
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Gregory Levey on his new book, "Shut Up, I'm Talking." Mr. Levey is a contributing writer for Salon, who has also written for The New Republic, The New York Post, The Globe and Mail, The Jerusalem Post, and others. He is the author of the new memoir Shut Up, I'm Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government, which has just been published by Simon and Schuster..Shut Up, I'm Talking is described as a funny and insightful insider take on Israeli politics Levey stumbled into a job as speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations at age twenty-five and suddenly found himself, like a latter-day Zelig, in the company of foreign ministers, U.S. senators, and heads of state. To his surprise, he was soon attending U.N. sessions and drafting official government statements. The situation got stranger still when he was transferred to Jerusalem to become a speechwriter for Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. Gregory is currently on the faculty of Ryerson University in Toronto.
Shibley Telhami on new polling regarding Arab attitudes towards the USA. Dr. Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, and non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland. He has previously taught at several universities, including Cornell, Ohio State, USC, Princeton, Columbia, Swarthmore, and UC Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science. He has served as Advisor to the US Mission to the UN and most recently, served on the Iraq Study Group as a member of the Strategic Environment Working Group. He has contributed to The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. His best-selling book, The Stakes: America and the Middle East was selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the top five books on the Middle East in 2003. He is a co-author of Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and US Foreign Policy in an Unjust World," and he has a book forthcoming Reflections of Hearts and Minds: Media, Opinion and Identity in the Arab World. He has an important new report out, the "2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll."
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April 27th, 2008
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Annabelle Gurwitch on getting fired. Ms. Gurwitch is an actress best known for being the original hostess of Dinner and a Movie. She also played an anchorwoman of Not Necessarily the News alongside Tom Parks. Gurwitch is currently a columnist for The Nation, contributing writer for NPR's Day to Day, Los Angeles Times Magazine and the website Freshyarn.com. Gurwitch once worked for Woody Allen, but was fired during an encounter in which he informed her that she looked "retarded" among other insults. She recently published a book of essays inspired by that dismissal, called Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed. She has also staged a number of live performances based on the Fired! theme, and In 2007, Gurwitch wrote, produced, directed, and appeared in the documentary film Fired!. This film documents the experiences of twenty-five persons, including Gurwitch, who got fired from various jobs. The fired ones recount their firings in the forms of: interviews with Gurwitch, staged skits, stand up comedy routines, and filmed excerpts from the stage play of the same title Gurwitch previously produced.
Andrew Gumbel on fraud in elections. Mr. Gumbel is the U.S. correspondent for Britain's Independent and the author of "Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America.". Before coming to the United States seven years ago, he was stationed mainly in Europe and covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc, the Yugoslav wars of secession, the rise of the prototype corporate media mogul turned politician, Silvio Berlusconi, and the swinging democratic fortunes of post-Hoxha Albania. This book is a riveting and frightening account, in which Gumbel traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present, spotlighting the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, vote buying in the Gilded Age and the history of black disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction South. The last 100 pages are devoted to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Gumbel rehearses the Florida mess and argues that those who care about voting rights should be terrified by Justice Scalia's argument in Bush v. Gore that the Constitution doesn't per se guarantee a right of suffrage. Gumbel shows that the confusion (at best) and cheating (at worst) that went on in Florida are not unusual, describing numerous county and state elections plagued with problems: registered voters purged from the rolls; queues at polling places so long that would-be voters gave up; and confusing ballots. Who are the villains? Not just the Republicans; he shows Democrats equally willing to play dirty.
James Howard Kunstler on a future imperfect as depicted in his novel "World Make by Hand." Mr. Kunstler is an author, social critic, and novelist, who is perhaps best known for his book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States. He is prominently featured in the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet. He is a profilic writer, having written 4 books of non-fiction, and 8 novels. In his most recent non-fiction book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities. And this forms the setting for his latest novel, "World Made By Hand.'
Kevin Phillips on the political and financial situation. 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."
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April 20th, 2008
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Cliff Schecter on the "real" John McCain. 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."
Misha Glenny on the expanding global criminal underworld. Mr. 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 most major U.S. and European newspapers and current affairs 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." McMafia is described as a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation into organized crime worldwide. Misha 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 triumphant material affluence of the West. Current estimates suggest that illegal trade accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.
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April 13th, 2008
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Sidney Blumenthal on the national collapse of the Republican party. Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, Bill Clinton. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, and a regular columnist for the Guardian of London and Salon.com. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, the Washington Post and other major publications. He has authored a number of books including, "The Clinton Wars," a national best-seller and last year's "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime." His new book, just published, is "The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party." He is also a campaign advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton in her effort to win the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
David Sirota on the contest between Obama and Clinton. Mr. Sirota is a political journalist, New York Times bestselling author 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 the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered our Government and How We Can Take it Back." His new book, out at the end of May is "The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington." 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."
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April 6th, 2008
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Paul Waldman on how the press gives Senator John McCain a "free ride" in their covereage. Mr. Waldman is a columnist for The American Prospect and a writer whose work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the books Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success and The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World. He is also a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. His latest book, authored with David Brock, is "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media."
Leslie Thomas on the on-going humanitarn crisis in Darfur. Ms. Thomas is an architect and curator who created the DARFUR/DARFUR project out of a desire to bring the individual faces of the humanitarian crisis in western Sudan and eastern Chad to the world. Exhibiting at such venues as the Los Angeles Hammer, the Boston ICA, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and FORMA in Milan the exhibit has brought its large scale projections to the streets of the world s major cultural centers. A founding principal with LARC Inc. and LARC Studio, a national architectural practiced based in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, she is a graduate of Columbia University and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. A National Endowment for the Arts awardee and an Emmy award winning art director she is committed to the use of design and media for social change. Projects in development include the exhibits Body of Water and an untitled traveling project highlighting the extreme violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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March 30th, 2008
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Greg Mitchell on the very poor performance of the American media in covering and questioning the Iraq war. Mr. Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher, the journal of the newspaper business which has won several major awards for its coverage of Iraq and the media. He has written eight books, including Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton) and The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics. His articles have appeared in dozens of leading newspapers and magazines and he blogs at Talking Points Memo.. His new book is "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq." Bill Moyers has said of "So Wrong for So Long," "Greg Mitchell has given us a razor-sharp critique of how the media and the government connived in one of the great blunders of American foreign policy. Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looks to the press to help keep them separate should read this book. Twice."
James Moore on the many scandals associated with former Bush advisor Karl Rove, the most recent being the political targeting of Alabama governor Don Seigelman. Mr. Moore is the coauthor, with Wayne Slater, of the bestselling Bush s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and the author of Bush s War for Reelection. An Emmy Award winning television news correspondent, he has traveled extensively with every presidential campaign since 1976. His latest book, again with co-author Wayne Slater, is "The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power," which details Rove's efforts to forge a long-term Republican political hegemony and the marginalization of the Democratic Party.
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March 24th, 2008
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Colonel Lawence Wilkerson on his assessment of Iraq five years on and his sharing of his experiences in the Bush administration. Colonel Wilkerson was Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff at the Department of State from August 2002 to January 2005. But, Colonel Wilkerson's career with General Colin L. Powell goes back much further--to in March 1989 at the U.S. Army s Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia as his Deputy Executive Officer. He followed the General to his next position as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving as his special assistant. Upon Powell's retirement from active service in 1993, Colonel Wilkerson served as the Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia. Upon Wilkerson s retirement from active service in 1997, he began working for General Powell in a private capacity as a consultant and advisor. In December 2000, Secretary of State-designate Powell asked Wilkerson to join him in the Transition Office at the U.S. State Department and, later, upon his confirmation as Secretary of State, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to his Policy Planning Staff with responsibilities for East Asia and the Pacific, and legislative and political-military affairs. In June of 2002, the Director for Policy Planning, Ambassador Richard Haas, made Wilkerson the Associate Director. In August of 2002, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to the position of Chief of Staff of the Department. In October of 2005, Colonel Wilkerson, after considerable soul searching, went public to tell the truth of what he knew: that Vice President Cheney had provided the "guidance" that led to America's torture disgrace in Guantanamo, Abu Ghriab and elsewhere; and that Secretary Powell's February 2003 presentation to the UN security council was "the lowest point" of his life; saying " I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." This is a recording of what Colonel Wilkerson had to say on March 18, 2008 at the UCLA Hammer Forum, which was hosted by Ian Masters.
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March 16th, 2008
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Dr. Juan Cole on the sorry anniversary of five years in Iraq and what the future might hold. Dr. Cole is a professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan and is widely considered to be one of America leading scholars of contemporary Iraq and the Middle East. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared around the world in print and television, as well as providing testimony before the United States Senate. He is the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War," a definitive examination of the Iraqi Shiites. In 2006 he published "The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq." His most recent book is "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East." His weblog, Informed Comment, at JuanCole.com is one of the most popular blogs on the web, for its unique insight and deep analysis of the critical Middle East region.
Jim Lobe on the resignation of Admiral James Fallon. Mr. Lobe is a journalist, analyst and the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service, specializing in national security, defense and foreign policy. He has also written for Foreign Policy In Focus, Oneworld.net, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Asia Times, and many other publications. Lobe is credited with doing some of the first coverage which showed the linkage of Bush administration policy to the Project For a New American Century, in late September 2001. His weblog, entitled "LobeLog" has been looking into the resignation of Admiral James Fallon.
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March 9th, 2008
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Linda Bilmes on the real costs of the Iraq war, whch she asserts are $3 trillion. Professor Bilmes is widely considered one of the leading experts in US budgeting and public finance. She has held several senior positions in government, including Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Commerce, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Administration, and US Representative to several high-ranking commissions. She is a Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she teaches budgeting, applied budgeting, and public finance. She was recently featured in Charles Ferguson s award-winning documentary film about Iraq, No End In Sight Linda Bilmes has written extensively on financial and budgetary issues. She is the author of a number of important works, with her most recent book being "The Three-Trillion Dollar War: the True Costs of the Iraq Conflict," co-authored with 2001 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz.
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March 2nd, 2008
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Dr. Theodore Lowi on American politics. Dr. Lowi is one of the most respected political scientists in the United States. Professor Lowi is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University since 1972. He has written or edited over a dozen books, among them The Pursuit of Justice, co-authored with Robert F. Kennedy, the highly influential The End of Liberalism. Professor Lowi's argument, advanced in The End of Liberalism, is that during the 1960's this country made an irreversible transition into an entirely new political regime, which he calls "the Second Republic of the United States". His book "The End of the Republican Era," recently published in a new edition, asserts that the Republican party died in the 1990's and morphed into a parochial, religio-moralist, corporatist conservative party, more akin to the British Tories than the American Republican tradition.
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February 17th, 2008
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Michael 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. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, writing regularly for its online publication, Global Terrorism Analysis. 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 new book is "Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam after Iraq."
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.
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February 10th, 2008
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Seymour Hersh on the mysterious strike in Syria last year. Mr. Hersh is an acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, DC. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention. Hersh received the 2004 George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting which honors contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. This was his fifth George Polk Award, the first one being a Special Award given to him in 1969. Besides the five Polk awards and the Pulitzer, Seymour Hersh has won more than a dozen prizes for his journalism. He is the autohor of eight books, his most recent being "Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." In 2006 he wa the first to report on the US military's plans for Iran, which called for the use of nuclear weapons against that country. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters and has a new article in that publication, entitled "A Strike in the Dark," concerning Israel's attack on a Syrian installation last year.
Dr. Chris Fair on the recent Munich conference in which US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned NATO that it must not become a "two-tired alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not," in an attempt to goad alliance members into sending more soldiers to Afghanistan. Dr. Fair, who is an analyst with the Rand Corporation, spent most of the last year in Afghanistan doing a study for the United Nations on the emergence of suicide bombings in that country. She is just back from India and about to go to Pakistan to act as a monitor of the upcoming elections. Dr. Fair was formerly a senior research associate in USIP s Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention, where she specialized in South Asian political and military affairs. Much of her research has been concerned with security competition between India and Pakistan, Pakistan s internal security, analyses of the causes of terrorism, and U.S. strategic relations with India and Pakistan.
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February 3rd, 2008
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Wayne White is an Adjunct Scholar at Washington s Middle East Institute. He most recently served as Deputy Director of the State Dept.'s Middle East and South Asia intelligence Office. He was Head of the State Department Iraq intelligence Team 2003-2005. Wayne White culminated a 33 year career beginning as a foreign service officer, with service in the middle east and finishing with 26 year in the state department's intelligence bureau. He received the State Department s Superior Honor Award on five separate occasions. In 1986, he was named INR s first Analyst of the Year, and, in 2004 received the Secretary s Career Achievement Award from Secretary of State Colin Powell. Mr. White also has received the National Intelligence Certificate of Distinction for service during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In 2000 he received the National Intelligence Medal for Outstanding Achievement, and in 2004, a citation from the National Intelligence Council for his work on the Iraq crisis. He was a 2002 National Intelligence Fellow. Wayne White was also an advisor to the Iraq Study Group for their report issued in 2007.
Robert Baer spent twenty years running agents from inside the CIA s Directorate of Operations, from 1976 to 1997, operating against Hizballah, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and was considered by Seymour Herse perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." He is the author of "Sleeping with the Devil" and his memoir See No Evil was a New York Times bestseller which inspired the movie Syriana starring George Clooney. His latest book is "Blow the House Down: a novel," which was a "fictionalization" of a non-fiction book, which the CIA had refused permission to publish.
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January 27th, 2008
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Dana Milbank on the ways of those in Beltway political live. Mr. Milbank writes the Washington Post s must-read Washington Sketch column, a takedown of the ridiculous and the powerful that appears four times a week. He serves as a political analyst for MSNBC s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and has also appeared on NPR s Weekend Edition Sunday, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and many other national programs.
Jim Wallis on the diminishment of the religious right in America. Mr. Wallis is an Evangelical Christian writer and political activist, best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners Magazine and of the Washington, D.C..based Christian community of the same name. His books include God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Faith Works: How Faith Based Organizations Are Changing Lives, Neighborhoods, and America, and The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left." Jim Wallis teaches a course in religion and politics at Harvard University. He is also the convener of Call to Renewal, an interfaith effort to end poverty. His new book is "The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America."
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January 20th, 2008
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Jacob Heilbrunn on the neocons and what their ideological movement put into practice has done to America and the world. Mr. Heilbrunn is a Senior Editor at the National Interest, and author of a history of neoconservatism, just published, entitled "They Knew They Were Right." He is a former editorial writer for the LA Times and a former senior editor at the New Republic. He was a Japan Society Fellow in 1998. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the Washington Monthly.
Allen Raymond on how the Republican party engages in legal and illegal tactics to affect the outcome of an election. Mr. Raymond is a ten-year veteran Republican political consultant, who spent three months in federal prison for his role in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal. He is the author of the book "How To Rig and Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." In this book, Mr. Raymond tell how his former Republican National Committee colleague James Tobin approached him with a plan to tie up the phones of NH Democrats on Election Day 2002, during a close Senate race between Republican John E. Sununu and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Raymond collected $15,600 from the NH Republican State Committee and paid Idaho telemarketing company $2,300 to make non-stop hangup phone calls to six NH phone lines. At the time of the 2002 phone-jamming, Raymond owned a Virginia-based GOP phone-bank company (GOP Marketplace) and also held a paid position as executive director of the Republican Leadership Council. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Raymond said he took part in the phone-jamming because he "had been reluctant to turn down a prominent official of the RNC, fearing that would cost him future opportunities from an organization that was becoming increasingly ruthless."
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January 13th, 2008
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Alex Gibney on his new film Taxi to the Dark Side. Mr. Gibney is an Emmy- and Grammy-award winning director and film producer. His works include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and 2006's The Human Behavior Experiments. Gibney is President of Jigsaw Productions, a production company which produces independent films, music documentaries, and TV mini-series. His latest film is Taxi to the Dark Side, focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed in 2002.
Reese Erlich on the naval incident between US warships and Iranian speedboats in the Straits of Hormuz. Mr. Erlich began his award-winning career in journalism 35 years ago as a staff writer and research editor for Ramparts, a seminal investigative reporting magazine published in San Francisco from 1963 to 1975. A former journalism professor, he currently works as a full-time freelance journalist and radio producer. He produced the award-winning public radio documentaries "The Struggle for Iran," and "The Russia Project," both with the legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. The programs were heard throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. He reports regularly for a variety of radio networks, including National Public Radio, CBC, ABC (Australia), The World, and Common Ground Radio.and his newspaper articles have appeared in 16 daily papers in the United States and around the world, including the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Tribune. Reese Erlich has covered the Middle East for 20 years. He is the co-author of the best-seller "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." His new book is ""The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis," which is available in bookstores everywhere. His website is www.theiranagenda.com .
Gayle Smith on Kenya. Ms. Smith is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Gayle Smith served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council from 1998-2001, and as Senior Advisor to the Administrator and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 1994-1998. Smith was based in Africa for over 20 years as a journalist covering military, economic, and political affairs for the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Globe & Mail, London Observer, and Financial Times. Smith has also consulted for a wide range of NGOs, foundations, and governmental organizations including UNICEF, the World Bank, Dutch Interchurch Aid, Norwegian Church Relief, and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation. She won the World Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council and the World Hunger Year Award in 1991, and in 1999 won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace. Smith is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of Oxfam America, the Africa America Institute, USA for Africa, and the National Security Network. She also serves on the policy advisory boards of DATA, the Acumen Fund, and the Global Fairness Initiative, and is the Working Group Chair on Global Poverty for the Clinton Global Initiative.
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January 6th, 2008
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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-two books, including novels, history, journalism, and letters. The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dark Sun, about the development of the hydrogen bomb, was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History. An affiliate of Stanford University s Center for International Security and Cooperation, he lectures to college and professional audiences. His new book is "The Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race," described by one critic as a masterful history "of manipulated intelligence, miscalculation, and fatal ideology -- it is alarmingly relevant."
Robert Kuttner on the US Presidential race and his new book, The Squandering of America. Mr. Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. His magazine writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Dissent, Columbia Journalism Review, and Harvard Business Review. Robert Kuttner is the author of a number of books, Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997). The book received a page one review in the New York Times Book Review. Of it, the late economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, "I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in Everything for Sale." His other books include The End of Laissez-Faire (1991); The Life of the Party (1987); The Economic Illusion (1984); and Revolt of the Haves (1980). Robert Kuttner's new book, his seventh, is The Squandering of America, exploring the political roots of America's narrowing prosperity and the systemic risks facing the U.S. economy. He has just begun work on a new book on the challenge of regulating global capitalism.
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