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Ike was right about the Military-Industrial Complex — that’s what ROBERT SCHEER argues. The US military budget for 2008 was $647 billion, more than 25 percent larger, in real terms, than the one for 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex today is more powerful, more wasteful, and more destructive than ever. Bob is editor in chief of Truthdig.com, co-host of ‘Left, Right and Center’ on KCRW; his new book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Also: A Palestinian life: Sari Nusseibeh is a leading Palestinian intellectual and political figure, a long-time advocate of a two-state solution, and the PLO’s chief representative in Jerusalem in 2001 and 2002. His memoir Once Upon a Country is out now in paperback (originally broadcast May 2, 2007).

Plus: the ‘good news’ from Iraq, we are told, is that ‘the surge is working,’ violence is down. TOM ENGELHARDT says ‘don’t be fooled’: “Iraqis are still dying in prodigious numbers, and significant numbers of those dying are doing so at the hands of Americans.” Tom’s prediction: “This cannot end well. Not for Washington. Not for the U.S. military. Not for Americans. And, above all, not for Iraqis.” Tom edits the indispensable blog TomDispatch.com; his new book is The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.

Your Minnesota Moment: A state judge in Minneapolis ruled that Wal-Mart violated state laws on rest breaks and other wage matters more than 2 million times and as a result could face more than $2 billion in fines.

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Politicians tell us how smart the American people are. But the evidence is overwhelming: American voters are ignorant, shortsighted and swayed by meaningless rhetoric. A Washington Post poll in 2003 found that 70 per cent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. A majority continued to believe this even after the 9/11 Commission reported that the claim was groundless. RICK SHENKMAN, author of the new book JUST HOW STUPID ARE WE? says we can blame the president and the media, but we also have to face the truth about the American voter. Rick teaches history at George Mason U. and founded the History News Network website.

Also: BARBARA EHRENREICH tried living on low-wage work — she tells that story in her classic book Nickel and Dimed, out now in a new paperback edition (originally broadcast May 22, 2003.

Plus: The ‘State Secrets Privilege’ allows the president and the executive branch to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block civil litigation in the same of national security. It didn’t always exist — it was created in 1953. BARRY SIEGEL, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has undercovered the facts that led the Supreme Court to create the privilege — a mysterious 1948 crash of an Air Force B-29 in Georgia, and the efforts of the families of the men who died in the crash to find out what happened. Barry�s new book is CLAIM OF PRIVILEGE: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets.

Wed. June 18: I’m preempted on KPFK today for the fund drive . . . . but there is more stuff to read, at TheNation.com: my new piece “Warriors for Zion–in California”:

Columbia and Barnard aren’t the only campuses where right-wing Zionists have fought bitter campaigns in the name of defending Israel and Jewish students. The unlikely site of the latest battle, as intense and angry as anything in Manhattan, is the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I should know–I teach there.

While the campaigns at Columbia and Barnard failed to persuade those schools to deny tenure or otherwise penalize faculty members the right-wing Zionists found objectionable, at UCI the professor who occupies the chair in Jewish history, Daniel Schroeter, has decided to leave after being condemned for failing to support the right-wing Jews’ campaign. Thus that campaign has had its first big success–but instead of getting rid of a Palestinian professor, they’ve gotten rid of a Jewish one.
. . . continued at TheNation.com

Wed. June 11: I’m preempted on KPFK today for the fund drive . . . . but there is more stuff to read, at TheNation.com: my review of The Shifting Grounds of Race by Scott Kurashige:

From 1920 to 1960, Los Angeles was the whitest and most Protestant city in the United States, and the American city with the smallest proportion of immigrants–just 8 percent in 1960. By the end of the twentieth century, it was a multiracial place: 3.7 million residents, with 30 percent white, 10 percent black, 10 percent Asian and almost half Latino. During “the white years” in LA history, you might think Asian immigrant groups and black migrants from the South lived in separate worlds. The truth is more complicated: sometimes they were pitted against each other, sometimes they fought–and sometimes they joined forces in left-wing campaigns for jobs, housing and political power. Those competitions and alliances are the subject of Scott Kurashige’s fascinating and important new book, The Shifting Grounds of Race.

. . . continued at TheNation.com (and in print in the June 11 issue).

Okay, the primaries are over. How much damage did Hillary do to the Democrats — and to Obama? “The Clintons have behaved execrably,” Bob Herbert writes in the NYTimes, “But weak-willed party leaders showed neither the courage nor the inclination to stop them from fracturing the party along gender and ethnic lines.” HAROLD MEYERSON will comment: he’s executive editor of The American Prospect and writes for the Washington Post op-ed page.

Also: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times: AMY GOODMAN talks about grassroots activists who have taken politics out of the hands of politicians, ordinary citizens who have challenged injustice — and won. Amy of course is host of �Democracy Now� , which airs on KPFK and more than 600 radio and TV stations around the world and on Democracynow.org. Her new book, co-authored by her brother David Goodman, is Standing Up to the Madness.

We will be featuring Standing Up to the Madness today as a KPFK fund drive premium – Pledge Online.
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Plus: Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary “The 11th Hour” argues that we’ve arrived at the last moment when change is still possible, when our impact on the earth’s ecosystem is not yet fatal. We’ll talk about the film and listen to clips featuring Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, scientist Stephen Hawking, R. James Woolsey (former head of the CIA) and sustainable design experts.
We will be featuring “The 11th Hour” as a KPFK fund drive premium–pledge online.

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The Age of Reagan: is it coming to an end? In 1964 the conservative movement seemed nearly dead. Then it manged to seize power and dominate American politics for the past 35 years. Historian SEAN WILENTZ will talk about Ronald Reagan – how his rise was hardly inevitable; how his successes had little to do with conservative ideology; and how the nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal was a fundamental challenge to the constitution and democracy. Sean teaches history at Princeton; his new book is The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.

Plus: Your Minnesota Moment: in preparation for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, the local FBI is soliciting informants to keep tabs on local protest groups and their “vegan potlucks” — a report by Matt Snyders in CityPages.

Also: The “Frozen Chosen:” MICHAEL CHABON won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay – now after seven years he’s back with another one that’s dazzling fun: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, out now in paperback. In the wake of WWII, the US permits immigrant Jews to settle in Sitka, Alaska (which was in fact proposed by FDR) after the defeat of the nascent state of Israel. Our hero is detective Meyer Landsman, “a crazy little Jew with a question and a gun.” (originally broadcast May 9, 2007)

LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST: at iTunes we are listed under “News & Politics” and “4 O’Clock Wednesdays.”

J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director for forty-eight years, and he was also an author–a bestselling author. His Masters of Deceit, published in 1958 by Henry Holt, spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 250,000 copies. In paperback it sold more than 2 million. But dealing with the director presented unique challenges for Holt. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com

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ARIANNA HUFFINGTON talks about Tuesday’s primaries, which finally gave Obama a majority of pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses. The big questions: Will Hillary’s white supporters vote for Obama in November? And how strong a candidate will John McCain be? Arianna of course is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post; her new book is Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness).

Plus: BARBARA EHRENREICH talks about the politics of joy – her book Dancing in the Streets is out now in paperback. (originally broadcast Jan. 10, 2007)

Also: In the last Gilded Age, people stood up to greed – why don’t we? STEVE FRASER talks about irrational exhuberance and market panic; dreams of wealth and hatred of the power of money. He wrote about “The Two Gilded Ages” for TomDispatch.com, and his new book is Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace.

More stuff to read: “Nixonland, Then and Now” — my interview at TheNation.com with Rick Perlstein.

Born in Oxford, raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. His new book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Jon Wiener: There are six million Tibetans. But you write in your new book that Tibet today is “slipping ever closer to extinction.” Those are chilling words.

Pico Iyer: I wish they were overstated words, but they’re not. The Tibet autonomous region is more and more a Chinese province. Lhasa is now 65 percent Han Chinese, so Tibetans are a minority in their own country. The Chinese are practicing what the Dalai Lama has called “demographic aggression”—trying to wipe out Tibetan culture through force of numbers. Two years ago they set up that high speed train, which allows 6,000 more Han Chinese to come to Tibet every day. I first saw Lhasa in 1985 just when it opened up to the world. It was still a classic Tibetan settlement—two story traditional whitewashed buildings, and the Potala Palace, the great residence of the Dalai Lama. If you go there now, sadly, it’s like an eastern Las Vegas—huge shopping malls, blue-glassed department stores, high rise buildings. From most parts of Lhasa you can’t even see the Potala Palace.

. . . continued at Dissent Magazine online.

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After Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, all the pundits said the Republican right was dead. Eight years later, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states – exploiting the toxic resentments, cultural paranoia and racial hatreds of the era. Do we still live in Nixonland? RICK PERLSTEIN says “yes we do.” His new book is NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
Rick will be reading Thursday, May 15, 7PM, at Pi on Sunset (next door to Book Soup), 8828 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.

Plus: Politics and modern music: teenage Hitler went to the Strauss opera “Salome”; Stalin walked out on a Shostakovitch opera—a bad sign; and Joe McCarthy subpoenaed Aaron Copland (but missed the fact that in the 1930s he had spoken to communist farmers in Minnesota). ALEX ROSS will explain; he’s music critic for The New Yorker, his award-winning book is THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the 20th Century, and his famous website is www.TheRestIsNoise.com.

News update: The new campaign slogan chosen by House Republicans — “Change You Deserve” — turns out to also be the trademarked slogan of the antidepressant Effexor.