Living in the USA

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Sometimes numbers can tell a story in ways nothing else can. TOM ENGELHARDT added up some key numbers at TomDispatch.com: Number of American troops stationed in Iraq: 162,000, an all-time high. Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq War: $10 billion/month. Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: 2 million. Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007: Just over one million. Tom’s new book is Mission Unaccomplished, where he interviews American iconoclasts and dissenters.

Plus: The presidential races: “Democrats Say Leaving Iraq May Take Years” (New York Times) — JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation explains what’s going on with Hillary, Barak Obama and John Edwards; also, why that weekend Iowa Republican straw poll matters.

Also: Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death in Memphis in 1976. PETER GURALNICK will take up the question of “cultural theft” — did Elvis rip off black music? We’ll listen to Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” and compare them to Elvis’s. Peter is the author of the definitive bio Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley; his-op-ed, “How did Elvis get turned into a racist?“, ran in the New York Times on Saturday.

More stuff to read: my piece in the LA Times Book Review about The Argument, Matt Bai’s book about progressive Democrats.

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Can Democrats win in places they abandoned to the Republicans decades ago? BOB MOSER reports from “Bible-thumping, economically slumping” Wilkes County, North Carolina – and the news is good. Bob wrote the “Purple America” cover story in the new issue of The Nation, and his reports on politics in the red states will be running in the magazine through the campaign year.

Also: Opportunities in Abstinence Training: BARBARA EHRENREICH says “unlike any of the rest of the coaching industry–career coaching, life coaching, sales training, etc.–this form of training is generously subsidized by the federal government, and has been since President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill of 1996, which provided abstinence training for impoverished women (though not, alas, for him.)”  Barbara’s latest book is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Plus: JULIAN BOND on SNCC, the sixties, and civil rights: his essay, “The Movement We Helped Make,” appears in the book Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, edited by Alexander Bloom. (originally broadcast July 31, 2001).

More stuff to read: my Q&A with Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander
Your Minnesota Moment at TheNation.com, “Al Franken’s Rising Fortunes”

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First they said the war was justified to get rid of WMD in Iraq. Then they said war was justified to bring democracy to Iraq. Now they are saying war is justified to prevent genocide in Iraq. We’ll ask JUAN COLE what he thinks – he writes the indispensable “Informed Comment” blog on the war in Iraq and teaches Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. His new book is Napoleon’s Egypt:Invading the Middle East.

Also: Should corporations be bottling and selling our drinking water? The more the public accepts bottled water, the more it accepts that corporations, not local governments, should provide people with a shared common resource like water. That’s what GIGI KELLETT says—she’s director of the “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign of Corporate Accountability International.

Plus: our Washington political update with HAROLD MEYERSON. We’ll talk about Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and of course the opposition party. Harold is he’s executive editor of the American Prospect and op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

More stuff to read: in my new piece at TheNation.com, “President Rudy,” I ask Kevin Baker whether Giuliani would be a better president than Bush.

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The words “health care” and “comedy” aren’t usually found in the same sentence, but in MICHAEL MOORE‘s new movie ‘SiCKO,’ they go together hand in (rubber) glove. We’ll speak with KENNETH TURAN – he’s film critic for the LA Times – and he calls “SiCKO” Moore’s “most important, most impressive, most provocative film.”
Watch the trailer for “SiCKO”

Also: Bush’s new “ban” on torture: We have learned that when President Bush says, “We don’t torture,” it’s important to read the fine print. DAVID COLE explains – he’s a law professor at Georgetown University and contributor to Salon.com, The New York Review and The Nation.

Plus: RUDY GIULIANI is the leading Republican candidate for the 2008 race. President Giuliani would be “a fate worse than Bush” – that’s what KEVIN BAKER says – he wrote the cover story in the new issue of Harper’s.

More stuff to read: my interview with Carl Bernstein on Hillary’s politics from 1968 to 2008 – it’s at TruthDig.com.

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Is Hillary a closet leftist and radical feminist? Has she been targeted by a vast right-wing conspiracy? Or will she do whatever it takes to win? We’ll talk with CARL BERNSTEIN about Hillary’s 1960s; why she left Washington for Arkansas in 1974; why her 1993 health care plan ended in disaster; and why so many people don’t like her. Carl Bernstein of course is the Watergate Pulitzer Prize-winner; his new book is A WOMAN IN CHARGE: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Plus: KATHA POLLITT says Alexander Cockburn is wrong when he argues that the anti-war movement is weak because it fails to show “international political solidarity” with “Iraqi resistance fighters.” Katha writes the blog “And Another Thing” at TheNation.com and the “Subject to Debate” column in The Nation magazine.

Also: BIG COAL. If you think of coal as a relic of 19^th century industrialization, you’re wrong. Coal today supplies more than half of the electricity in the US today. George Bush calls coal our “economic destiny” – because we’ve got so much of it, and it’s so cheap. But as JEFF GODDELL explains, Coal-fired power plants in the US are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans in the last 20 years. Jeff’s book is Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.

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Since its founding in 1947, the CIA has consistently failed at its primary mission: to understand the world. Instead, it has been turned into a secret police force. TIM WEINER of the New York Times has spent 20 years studying the Agency, “an incapable and incoherent service whose deepest secret is its own weakness and ineptitude” —most evident on 9-11. Tim is a Puliter-Prize winning reporter who broke more than 100 page-one stories on the CIA. His new book is LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA.

Plus: THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews. UCLA Historian SAUL FRIEDLANDER discusses the cooperation of “bystanders” and the victims’ initial blindness towards their fate and then their willingness to follow orders. He also draws extensively on individual voices – perpetrators, collaborators, victims. Saul Friedlander wrote a magnificent memoir, When Memory Comes, about his boyhood in Nazi-occupied France.

Also: CHINA’S BRAVE NEW WORLD: JEFFREY WASSERSTROM explains what’s happening in the world’s most rapidly changing society by looking at its fast-food palaces, coffee shops, and bootleg video parlors – and asks why the Communist Party is still in power, and why, if tens of thousands of protests happen in China each year, the regime remains strong. Jeff teaches history at UC Irvine and has written for The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and the LA Times op-ed page.

The KPFK Fund Drive continues!Today: the award-winning documentary “Iraq in Fragments” presents a stunning portrait of three worlds. We see the war in Baghdad through the eyes of an 11-year old boy, who has been apprenticed to the domineering owner of a Baghdad garage; next, followers of Moqtada al-Sadr enforce Islamic law at the point of a gun; and finally a family of Kurdish farmers welcomes the US presence.American director James Longley’s film won Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Editing awards at Sundance in 2006.”This one demands to be seen,” said Kenneth Turan of the LA Times.It “mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.”We’ll be featuring the film as a fund drive premium.
Watch the trailer for “Iraq in Fragments”

PLUS: DANNY SCHECHTER the News Dissector talks about the crisis of credit card debt – and the financial forces profiting from it. Danny is an Emmy-award winning TV news producer and documentary film maker, and executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network.
His new film, “In Debt We Trust,” is about the money we owe, and the bill that’s coming due.We’ll be featuring the DVD as a fund drive premium.

Do you want lies with that? Brutal working conditions, food poisoning, animal cruelty, low wages, plus sex and drugs in the packinghouse: all those stories are told in the film FAST FOOD NATION, out now on DVD, which will be our featured premium in the KPFK Fund Drive today. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called it “The most essential political film from an American director since Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’” The film stars Patricia Arquette, Greg Kinnear and Kris Kristofferson. ERIC SCHLOSSER wrote the book and co-wrote the screenplay for “Fast Food Nation”; he was also executive producer on the film, and we’ll be speaking with him about it.

Also: Hitchens v. Hedges, arguing about religion and politics. In Berkeley last month, Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, debated Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Although Hedges denounces the Christian Right, he also praises the pious, while Hitchens, a supporter of the war in Iraq, argues that “human emancipation begins when this nonsense ends.” We’ll play highlights of the debate, and offer the books and a DVD of the debate as fund drive premiums.

More stuff to read: my interview with Christopher Hitchens, “Religion Poisons Everything,” at TruthDig.com

no show today — I’m out of town. It’s the 40th anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War –you can read my interview with Tom Segev about it at TheNation.com.

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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS says “Religion poisons everything.” The Old Testament is “a nightmare,” and the New Testament “exceeds the evil of the ‘old” one.” Religion doesn’t make people behave better, and Eastern religions are no better than the Western ones. You say religion might not be true, but it provides comfort in the face of suffering and death? Hitchens replies: “How contemptible.” His new book is God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Christopher will be reading and signing Mon. June 4 at 7pm at the downtown LA Public Library in the ALOUD Series— the event is officially “full-standby only” — and also Tues. June 5 at 7pm at Barnes and Noble on the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica.

Also: What would it take to build a nuclear bomb today? William Langewiesche set out to see how hard it would be for a buyer to get his hands on a nuke—just one device, powerful enough to devastate a city like L.A.. He finds the necessary highly enriched uranium in a closed nuclear city in Russia’s southern Urals – and figures out how to get it out, through Georgia or Turkey. But it wouldn’t be easy. Langewiesche’s new book is The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor.

More stuff to read: my piece “A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40,” at TheNation.com.