KPFK Wed. 4/9: Barbara Ehrenreich: The Truckers

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Until now, BARBARA EHRENREICH says, “Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” then on April 1, truck drivers started standing up—in New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois – challenging the high cost of diesel fuel.
READ the Truckers’ website; READ Barbara’s report at TheNation.com.

Also: the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction was awarded yesterday to UCLA historian SAUL FRIEDLANDER for his book on the holocaust, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. He talks about the cooperation of “bystanders,” the passivity of elites in occupied Europe, 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. (originally broadcast July 11, 2007.)
READ my Q&A with Saul Friedlander in Dissent.

PLUS: Israel, Palestine, and a tenure battle at Barnard College: a story about the campaign to block tenure for anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, born in America of Palestinian parents.
She wrote Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. In 2006, she came up for tenure at Barnard; JANE KRAMER of The New Yorker reports that “No one in her department doubted she would get it.” But in August 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” was posted on the Internet.

KPFK Wed. 4/2: Howard Zinn: The American Empire

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HOWARD ZINN says the American empire has run into problems lately–but not for the first time. His classic People’s History of the American Empire is out now as a graphic book, co-authored by cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian Paul Buhle. It’s narrated by Howard himself and begins on 9-11, then moves back to the history of US expansionism and to Zinn’s own story of growing up in the tenements of Brooklyn.
READ Zinn on “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire” at TomDispatch.com
WATCH the ANIMATED YOUTUBE VIDEO narrated by Viggo Mortensen.

Also: OBAMA and Rev. Wright: KELEFA SANNEH visited Barack Obama’s now-famous church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and reports on its background and its senior pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. “Mainstream acceptance,” Sanneh writes in the new issue of The New Yorker, “is what Wright has volubly disdained; he prefers to cast himself as a rebel preacher, telling the hard truths that most black churches avoid.”

PLUS: SUSAN CHOI’s novel A Person of Interest explores the personal and political repercussions set off by a campus bombing reminiscent of the Unabomber and the Wen Ho Lee case.
Publishers Weekly called the book “haunting”; Booklist called it “mesmerizing”; and The New York Times called it “beautifully written.” Susan’s last novel, American Woman, told a story about a seventies terrorist group involving a Patty Hearst-like figure; it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

George Bush: “No Gene Kelly” – The Nation

When New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd wrote recently that George Bush has “turned into Gene Kelly,” she set off a firestorm of protest from fans of the late dancer, director and choreographer.

Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, declared that “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”

In a letter to the Times, she wrote that “when Gene was compared to the grace and agility of Jack Dempsey, Wayne Gretzky and Willie Mays, he was delighted. But to be linked with a clunker — particularly one he would consider inept and demoralizing — would have sent him reeling.”

Dowd’s column, “Soft Shoe in Hard Times,” asked “why the president is in such a fine mood” – at a time when “the dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving.” Nevertheless, she noted, Bush “has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called ‘The Most Happy Fella.'”

Kelly’s widow contrasted her late husband’s achievements with those of the president. Kelly, she wrote, “graduated with a degree in economics from Pitt,” and, unlike the president, was “a most civilized man. He spoke multiple languages; wrote poetry; studied history; understood the projections of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. He did the Sunday Times crossword in ink.”

. . . continued at TheNation.com

KPFK Wed. 3/18: Victor Navasky: The Iraq Experts

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It’s the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. For comment and analysis we’ll feature VICTOR NAVASKY – his new book is MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak. Samples: “Military Action will not last more than a week” – Bill O’Reilly, Jan. 23, 2003. “I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukah” – George W. Bush, at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, Dec 10, 2001. Victor of course is publisher emeritus of The Nation.
READ Victor Navasky in today’s LA Times op-ed page

Also: TOM ENGELHARDT talks about what we’ll be saying a year from now, when the war will still be going strong – even if Obama is elected, Tom points out, he will have been in office only two months in March 2009, and is unlikely to have removed significant numbers of troops by that point. Tom edits the indispensable TomDispatch.com.

Plus: LOUISE STEINMAN’s memoir begins with the fundamental rule of her childhood in the 1950s: “never mention the war to your father.” Then, after his death, she discovered nearly 500 letters he wrote during the Pacific War – and a mysterious Japanese flag. She set out to uncover his story and the story of the flag. Her book is THE SOUVENIR: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. Louise is curator of the ALOUD series at the LA Public Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, and she writes for the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications.

Hillary’s Iraq Vote, Five Years Later: HuffPost

The fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war provides an appropriate moment to revisit Hillary Clinton’s argument in favor of authorizing Bush’s use of force, and to contrast it with the case made at the time by Bush’s opponents.

In the last few years, Clinton has defended her vote by arguing that “if I knew then what I know now, I would never have given President Bush the authority” to attack Iraq.But a majority of Democrats in the House knew enough “then” to vote against the resolution – as did 21 out of 50 Democratic senators.

In Clinton’s Senate speech, still posted on her senate website, she began by accepting Bush’s premise that “if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”The question, she said, was whether war was the appropriate means of stopping those developments.

In supporting Bush, Clinton claimed to be taking a middle path between two extremes – on the one hand, those who believed we should go to war only if the UN Security Council approved it, which she considered absurd, and on the other, those who favored “attacking Saddam Hussein now.”But not even Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld favored an immediate attack at the point the Senate debate occurred — October 2002 – so she was rejecting an argument no one was making.

. . . continued at the Huffington Post 

KPFK Wed. 3/12: Who Would Jesus Vote For?

 

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Evangelical politics is taking a sharp, surprising turn – away from a war on liberalism and toward doing something about poverty and the environment. BOB MOSER explains – his story “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” is on the cover of the new issue of The Nation. Bob has been covering Democrats in the South for book to be published this summer.

Plus: novelist PETER CAREY has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two million copies worldwide. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of Che, a seven-year-old whose parents are part of the Weather Underground.
More Stuff to read: my Q&A with Peter Carey

Also: The Comintern had front organizations – and so did the CIA. The story of the CIA’s funding of supposedly independent cultural groups and magazines—and how Ramparts magazine exposed the secret funding in 1967– is told by HUGH WILFORD; his new book is The Mighty Wurlizer: How the CIA Played America. “By turns hilarious and horrifying” — Kirkus reviews. Hugh Wilford teaches at Cal State U. Long Beach.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “How the Spitzer Sex Scandal Could Help Hillary”

Peter Carey: Growing Up Radical: Dissent

Peter Carey has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two-million copies worldwide. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of a seven-year-old whose parents are in the Weather Underground. I spoke with him in Los Angeles.

Jon Wiener: In His Illegal Self, the year is 1972 and the characters are set in motion by the Weather Underground. I’’m reluctant to talk about the plot because one of the pleasures of the book, especially at the beginning, is figuring out the plot—, told mostly from the perspective of an seven-year-old boy. Could you explain what you want people to know about it?

Peter Carey: This is the number one issue for me at the moment. I spent two years building this book, which really depends on withholding information. It delivers a whole series of surprises and thrills for the reader, I hope, which was not easy to achieve. But we live in a culture where people confuse “story” and “art,” and where reviewers are called upon by their editors to report the story. So while they are praising this book, they are sort of destroying it by giving away all these things.
. . . continued at Dissent magazine HERE

KFPK Wed. 3/5: The Beat Goes On

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Hillary won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio — but she can’t win a majority of elected delegates, no matter what happens in the remaining primaries (as Jonathan Alter has pointed out).
Can we understand what happens next? Yes we can! — with help from HAROLD MEYERSON and JOHN NICHOLS: Harold writes for the Washington Post op-ed page and is executive editor of The American Prospect; John is Washington editor of The Nation and writes “The Online Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

And to get away from Clinton, Obama, and McCain for a moment:
THE WORLD WITHOUT US: ALAN WEISMAN asks what would happen to the earth if humans vanished: how would nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures of human activity? Weissman’s book is a major international bestseller, translated into 27 languages, with 2 million copies sold worldwide; It’s the #1 Nonfiction book of the year for many critics.
Watch the great YouTube video: “Your House Without You”

Obama and the Jews: HuffPost

March 2: Now it’s official: page one of the New York Times reported on Saturday that the Jews have a problem with Obama.

The story, by Neela Banerjee (is that a Jewish name?), did not exactly say there was a “problem.” It said there was a “challenge” for Obama: “navigating” the “treacherous paths” that lead to “winning the trust” of Jewish voters. That task, the Times reported, is “all the more difficult” because of the “tenuous relations” between blacks and Jews.

Not until paragraph nineteen, deep inside the paper on page A12, did readers learn that the Jewish vote is “hardly monolithic.”

READ THE REST OF THIS HUFFINGTON POST STORY HERE.