Living in the USA

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CHALMERS JOHNSON on “THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE”: Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, Chalmers Johnson maps America’s vast empire of military bases and the world that supports them. American militarism, he shows, is bankrupting the United States, even as it creates the conditions for a new century of virulent blowback. Chalmers Johnson’s bestselling book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic is out now in paperback.
READ Chalmers Johnson’s new interview at TomDispatch.com.

ALSO: TOM DeLAY is finished. We’ll have analysis from JOHN NICHOLS —he’s The Nation‘s Washington correspondent, and writes “The Online Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

PLUS: Global Warming: The Tipping Point. We are approaching the point when one out of every five living things on the planet will face extinction as a result of greenhouse gases. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most power El Nino ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, and the hottest European summer on record, which killed 26,000 people in two months. TIM FLANNERY will explain: his new book is The Weather Makers.
Take a look at Tim Flannery’s terrific web site: www.tim-flannery.com

More stuff to read: Jon Wiener, “Imposing our will is simply our way,” L.A. Times, Mon 4/3.

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MIKE DAVIS asks, “Who is Killing New Orleans?”: “A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness. The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on.”
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PLUS: historian MICHAEL KAZIN talks about a hero and leader of the Christian left – William Jennings Bryan, who fought the banks and corporations and ran for president as a Democrat in 1896, 1900 and 1908 – and ended up as the voice of fundamentalism in the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Mike teaches at Georgetown; his new book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

Also: AMY WILENTZ has just returned from Dubai, the Gulf state whose economy is based not on oil but rather on its free port (with the largest man-made harbor in the world) and, increasingly, tourism. We’ll have Amy’s eye-witness report on the emirate after the collapse of the American ports deal. Amy was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor of The Nation.

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1965-1968 saw the climax of the civil rights movement and the massive escalation of the war in Vietnam as well as the tremendous growth of the anti-war movement. The intense, dizzying and heartbreaking story of those tumultuous years has now been told with unprecedented power and insight by TAYLOR BRANCH. His new book is At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68.
READ Gary Wills in the New York Review on Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge

Also: It’s the third anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq: JOHN NICHOLS, Washington correspondent of The Nation, says “Nothing, not even the Bush administration’s deception and intransigence, has done so much to continue the quagmire as the failure of Congress to check and balance the madness of President George.”

Plus: Chicago’s Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about immigrant radicals. At the Haymarket demonstration, somebody threw a bomb that killed seven policemen. Eight labor activists were convicted of murder, and four hanged, although they were later proven innocent. Historian JAMES GREEN tells the story — his new book is Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America.

More Stuff to Read: Jon Wiener’s “White Collar Blues: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch”

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Terror: The Bush Deception. According to the Bush administration website lifeandliberty.gov, we are winning the war on terrorism. DAVID COLE disagrees; he says Bush’s disregard of fundamental principles of human rights is the most likely source of the next attack. David teaches law at Georgetown; his article “Are We Safer?” appears in the March 9 issue of New York Review. his most recent book is Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.
David Cole will be speaking on “Domestic Spying, Torture, and the War on Terror” in LA Wed, Mar. 22 at 700pm at 10000 W. Pico Blvd in West LA: email MSmall@akingump.com.

A Hard Bill To Swallow. Last Wednesday the House passed the National Uniformity for Food Act. HAROLD MEYERSON Says it “might better be named the Swallow at Your Own Risk Act.” In one swoop, the bill preempts roughly 200 state laws governing food safety. Harold writes for the Washington Post, The American Prospect, and the LA Weekly.

An Abortion Story. In 1998 in Buffalo, abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed by a sniper. Days later, another local doctor, Shalom Press, was told he was “next on the list.” Now his son EYAL PRESS tells the story of a fight on the front lines of the war over abortion — in his home town. Eyal writes for The Nation; his new book is Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America.

ALSO: Your Minnesota Moment, news from my home town of St. Paul: Garrison Keillor says “Impeach Bush.”

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Iraq, Iran, and the Dubai Ports: IAN WILLIAMS will explain everything. He’s UN correspondent for The Nation; he writes the “Deadline Pundit” blog, and his most recent book is RUM: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.
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PLUS: The Republicans call it “illegal immigration”:
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist SONIA NAZARIO recounts the journey of a 16-year-old Honduran boy who fought immense obstacles and peril to reach his mother in the US, who he hadn’t seen since he was five. Sonia’s book is Enrique’s Journey.

She will be in conversation with MARC COOPER at the downtown LA Public Library next Wed., March 8, at 7pm — reserve online here.
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TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON:
The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers in Europe between 1943 and 1946. Almost all of them were black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. How an American war of liberation turned into a Jim Crow nightmare: Duke University professor ALICE KAPLAN will explain. Her new book is The Interpreter.

MORE STUFF TO READ: JON WIENER, “A Night at Arianna’s: The Democrats and the War,” at TheNation.com or TruthDig.com.

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TERRY GROSS of NPR’s “Fresh Air” is heard by more than 4 million listeners on more than 400 radio stations — she talks about what went wrong in her interviews with Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and Bill O’Reilly. Also, she answers the question, “What is the deal with rumors that you are a lesbian?” Her book, All I Did was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists, is out now in paperback. (Originally broadcast November, 2004)

ALSO: HAMAS says it expects to head a new Palestinian government. Its leaders have said recently they will never accept the legitimacy of Israel, but will consider a “long-term truce” if Israel withdraws to its 1967 borders. For comment and analysis we turn to ROANE CAREY, he’s acting managing editor of The Nation — he’s also editor of The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent — it’s out now in paperback.

PLUS: MIKE DAVIS has a new book out: PLANET OF SLUMS: “Sometime in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos novenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

AMOS OZ, the great Israeli novelist and peace activist, talks about the Hamas victory – and what it means for those who seek an end to the Israeli occupation. Amos Oz’s new book is How to Cure a Fanatic.

READ JON WIENER’s Q&A WITH AMOS OZ at TheNation.com

Plus: our post-mortem on Bush’s State of the Union address with HAROLD MEYERSON, who will comment on the surprising news that we are “winning” in Iraq — as well as Bush’s statement that “we can only preserve freedom with a renewed commitment to spying on Americans.” Harold writes for the LA Weekly, the American Prospect, and the Washington Post op-ed page.

Also: The politics of country music: Chris Willman explains why, during the 2004 election, the entertainers campaigning for Bush were almost exclusively the country stars, and how the rightward drift of country music has parallelled the transformation of the once-Democratic south into the heart of the Republican mainstream. We’ll also talk about the great exceptions, from Willy Nelson to the Dixie Chicks. Chris Willman is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly; his book Rednecks & Bluenecks is out now frrm The New Press.

Web extra: The dilemma of the mainstream journalist: “How does one report the facts when the facts themselves are biased?” asks Rob Corddry on The Daily Show. “Facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda,” he says – maybe that’s why it’s so hard to find them.

Paradise is lost: Remembering New Orleans
For two decades ANDREI CODRESCU has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. Andrei is a refugee born in Transylvania who found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; and where, in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Alas, as we now know, Paradise is lost. His new book is New Orleans, Mon Amour — an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

ALSO:
For a brief moment, the country tried genuine interracial democracy — in the era of Reconstruction following the Civil War. Historian ERIC FONER explains; his new book is Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

PLUS:
It was thirty years ago today: the legendary “Born to Run” album is back, remastered. ANTHONY deCURTIS of Rolling Stone will comment on the album where Bruce Springsteen left behind his adolescent definitions of love and freedom. Anthony’s most recent book is In Other Words : Artists Talk About Life and Work.

PLAYLIST: “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”; “Thunder Road”; “Backstreets”; “Born to Run.”

“it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us. . . .”

More Stuff to read: Jon Wiener on “UCLA’S DIRTY THIRTY” from The Nation

THE MYSTERIES OF MICHAEL JACKSON: Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the New York Times, talks about the weirdness and the alleged criminality, the great music and the dancing, and the rise and fall of the one-time king of pop. Her new book is On Michael Jackson.
Margo will be speaking Sunday Jan 22 at 5pm at the UCLA Hammer Museum -Wilshire & Westwood.

Also: our Washington update with DAVID CORN, on the CIA’s recent attack on the Pakistani village — an attempt to kill al Qaeda’s No. 2 man – but instead it killed a dozen civilians. “No one pays for this. No one is punished.” David is Washington editor of The Nation, and author of The Lies of George W. Bush.

Plus: how a small group of people eliminated slavery in the British Empire: it took them 50 years, but they never gave up.
Adam Hochschild will explain: His book Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves is out now in paperback.

MORE STUFF TO READ: “Bush on Bin Laden’s Satellite Phone: Wrong Again” by Jon Wiener — TruthDig.com