KPFK Wed. 7/23: Obama in Israel

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In an effort to shore up his support among Jewish voters, many of whom voted for Hillary, Obama visits Israel Tuesday and Wednesday. His schedule includes trips to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and Sderot, the town that is the frequent target of Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza. AMY WILENTZ will comment – she was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker. Her most recent piece, in New York magazine, discusses Jimmy Carter�s place in the current campaign: ‘a walking McCain talking point.’

Plus: Women in politics after Hillary: there’s a serious shortage of women in elected office. In the aftermath of Hillary�s campaign, HAROLD MEYERSON looks at the future of women in politics — and who is leading the next wave of female candidates. Hint: they aren’t from states where religious traditionalism is strong, or where old-line political organizations hold power. Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect and op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.
SEE the Vanity Fair McCain parody of the New Yorker‘s Obama cover.

KPFK Wed. 7/16: Heavy Metal Islam

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Young people in the Mideast are not all religious fundamentalists. MARK LeVINE found Morroccans who loves Black Sabbath, rappers in the Gaza Strip, and a young Lebanese singer who quotes Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song.’ — Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and reggae are each the music of protest — across North Africa and the Mideast, Mark says. Mark is a musician and historian at UC Irvine; his new book about the globalization of popular music is HEAVY METAL ISLAM: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.

Also: UC Workers on strike: JACK MILES writes in the LATimes, “A single parent living in Riverside County or Orange County needs to earn $24.74 an hour to make ends meet. . . . But after 10 months of negotiation, $11.50 an hour is the last, best offer the 10-campus University of California has made to 8,500 gardeners, janitors, kitchen workers, parking attendants and the like. In response, their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, called a five-day strike, which began Monday.” — continued here.

Plus: one Guantanamo story: Adel Hamad was a hospital adminsitrator from Sudan who was doing refugee relief work in Pakistan when he was taken from his apartment, hooded and shackled, and moved to Guantanamo Bay on charges of connections with al-Queda. He�s been there for four years. He has an attorney: STEVEN T. WAX, a federal public defender in Portland. Steve�s book is KAFKA COMES TO AMERICA: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror — A Public Defender�-‘s Inside Account — he�ll be speaking in the ALOUD series at the downtown LA public library, 5th and Flower streets, Wed. at 700pm: reservations free but recommended: here.

KPFK Wed. 7/9: Barbara Ehrenreich: Their Land

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‘If a place is truly beautiful,’ BARBARA EHRENREICH says, ‘you can’t afford to be there.’ Barbara’s new book is THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND; she’ll be reading and signing at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont, Thursday July 10, 7:30pm.
JOIN Barbara and the L.A. CLEAN Carwash campaign
WATCH Barbara on The Colbert Report— she tells Stephen, “I’m talking about the super-rich. I don’t think you qualify.”

Plus: LALO ALCARAZ of the Pocho Hour of Power talks about “Clash of the Pochos,” the July 27 KPFK benefit concert featuring Culture Clash.

Also: Obama in the center: TOM HAYDEN says Obama “could put his entire candidacy at risk if his audacity on the war in Iraq continues to shrivel.” Tom writes about Obama and the war in the new issue of The Nation. We’ll also talk about his life as a writer, and the relationship between writing and activism.
His new book, a collection of his writings over the last 40 years, is Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader.

KPFK Wed. 7/2: Robert Scheer: Ike was Right

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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.

KPFK Wed. 6/25: Stupidity in America

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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.

Jews and Muslims at UC Irvine: The Nation

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

City of Fear: Los Angeles 1935-1965 – The Nation

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).

KPFK Wed. 6/4: How Hillary Hurt Obama

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.

We Still Live in Nixonland: The Nation

“Nixonland” – that’s Rick Perlstein’s term for the political world where candidates win power by mobilizing people’s resentments, anxieties and anger, where politics destroys is victims. Perlstein’s new book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Jon Wiener: Do we still live in Nixonland?

Rick Perlstein: Yes we do. I don’t mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late sixties. But the way Richard Nixon used the sixties to define the ideological contours of American politics is still with us. On right wing radio today, they keep talking about how snobby and elitist the liberals are — just like Richard Nixon did.

You are suggesting there was a time when the Republican Party did not win power by mobilizing resentment and anger.

In 1960, there was a strange creature called the Liberal Republican. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, his platform wasn’t all that different from Kennedy’s.

A key turning point in the history of Nixonland is the invention of the “hardhat” as a political figure, which coincided with the rise of the flag as a partisan political symbol. We can identify that moment precisely: the riots on Wall Street following the Kent State killings in 1970.

On May 8, 1970, anti-war students rallied at the statue of George Washington in Lower Manhattan to protest the war and the Kent State Killings. Then 200 construction workers from the area marched in on their lunch break, wearing hard hats and carrying the American flags that topped off building sites. They complained to the cops that flags were not flying at Federal Hall. The reason in fact was that it was a drizzly day and the flag is not allowed to be flown in the rain. But they decided that the kids had taken down the flag, and started beating the protesters. Crowds of people from Wall Street cheered them on.
. . . continued at TheNation.com

KPFK Wed. 5/28: End of the Age of Reagan?

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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)

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