Terrence Mcnally Podcast

Aired 10/07/08 DEAN BAKER is one of the smartest progressive economics thinkers and we talk about the economic crisis, the bailout, the election, and what we might expect from an Obama or McCain administration. DEAN BAKER is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). http://www.cepr.net/index.php/dean-baker/ He is the author of THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (link). He also has a blog on the American Prospect http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

Aired 09/30/08 The US spends over $2 trillion a year — over $6K per person — on health care, yet is the only major industrial nation without universal coverage. 47 million Americans live without health insurance, and 80% of them are from working families who either cannot afford insurance premiums or lose their insurance exactly when they need it most: when they fall ill and can no longer work. Despite spending 50% more on health care than any other country in the world, America ranks 15th in preventable death, 24th in life expectancy, and 28th in infant mortality. The struggles of the four families profiled in CRITICAL CONDITION by ROGER WEISBERG ("Waging a Living," P.O.V. 2006) put a human face on the nation's growing health care crisis. They discover that being uninsured can cost you your job, your health, your home, your savings, even your life.

Aired 09/23/09 THOMAS FRANK, founding editor of The Baffler and a contributing editor at Harper's, is The Wall Street Journal's newest weekly columnist. He is the author of WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, THE CONQUEST OF COOL, ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, and his newest, THE WRECKING CREW. THOMAS FRANK in THE WRECKING CREW: "We can now say of that philosophy which regards good government as a laughable impossibility, which elevates bullies and gangsters and CEOs above other humans, which tells us to get wise and stop expecting anything good from Washington - we can now say with finality that it has had its chance. Whenever there was a choice to be made between markets and free people - between money and the common good - the conservatives chose money. It's time to make them answer for it." www.tcfrank.com

I'd heard of Dr. Bacevich and read some op-eds, but as soon as I saw into his interview a few weeks back with Bill Moyers, I knew I had to talk with him. The next day when I looked at Barnes and Noble for his book I was surprised and pleased that it had jumped to #1 in sales. I believe Andrew Bacevich in his new book pulls things together in ways that I hadn't seen before. Things like our politics of personality, the rise of the imperial presidency, and our national culture of consumption and how all of those link to our military adventures. I say each week that I'm looking for pieces of the puzzle, and I believe today's guest is pulling some of them together in ways that make our problems clearer and change more possible. ANDREW BACEVICH, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, served twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He also lost his son in Iraq last year. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplo

Aired 09/09/08 Clinical researcher and author Neal Barnard, M.D., is one of America’s leading advocates for health, nutrition, and higher standards in research. As the principal investigator of several human clinical research trials, whose results are published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals, Dr. Barnard has examined key issues in health and nutrition. Neal Barnard is the founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Dr. Barnard is also president of The Cancer Project, a nonprofit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through nutrition education and research. If you have diabetes or are concerned about developing it, this program could change the course of your life. Although diabetes is a serious illness that all too often leads to heart problems, nerve damage, blindness, stroke, or kidney failure, it doesn’t have to be that way. A new book by nutrition researcher Neal Barnard, M.D., outlines a completely new dietary approach to preve

Aired 09/03/09 Today I look at security strategy and planning with Thomas Barnett, an expert on how globalization is transforming warfare whom US News & World Report calls, "one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time." THOMAS BARNETT has been a senior adviser to military and civilian leaders in a range of offices, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command and Special Operations Command. From November 2001 to June 2003, he advised the Pentagon on transforming military capabilities to meet future threats. Barnett also led the five-year HYPERLINK "http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/projects/newrulesset/nrs_index.html"NewRuleSet.Project on how globalization is transforming warfare. In his book HYPERLINK "http://www.amazon.com/Pentagons-New-Map-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0425202399/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9598594-4856004?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180360844&sr=8-1"THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, Barnett presents concrete, world-changing stra

Aired 08/26/08 CRAIG VENTER is a remarkable and entrepreneurial scientist. As such, he asks huge questions, takes on huge challenges, and has achieved huge successes. Growing up in California, VENTER was an unremarkable student, with little interest in his schoolwork and even less motivation to complete his education. But the Vietnam War draft led to being a Navy medic, which piqued his interest in science and medicine, and jump-started his education. He received advanced degrees and established himself as a gifted and outspoken scientist. At the National Institutes of Health he introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and his own research institute in 1995 sequenced the first genome of a living species in history, the bacterium. This success led to the dauntingly more ambitious goal of the entire human genome—billions of letters of genetic code that would test the limits of both human and computation abilities.

Aired 08/12/08 Hunter Lovins is the founder and President of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and Natural Capitalism Solutions, a non-profit in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. A professor at Presidio School of Management's MBA in Sustainable Management program, she has co-authored several books including NATURAL CAPITALISM: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and 2006 CLIMATE PROTECTION MANUAL FOR CITIES. Trained as a sociologist and lawyer, Hunter co-founded the California Conservation Project (Tree People), and Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years. Named millennium Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine, she received the Right Livelihood Award, and the Leadership in Business Award.

Aired 08/05/08 Currently editor of The Washington Post's Outlook section and formerly the Post's Los Angeles bureau chief, John Pomfret lived and worked in China off-and-on for a decade - as a student, an AP reporter and the Post's chief in Beijing - and was eyewitness to the '89 Tiananmen Square protests. He has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years, covering big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia by the Asia Society.

Aired 07/15/08 In late summer1989 I spent a week living among and interviewing the fishermen and citizens of Cordova, Alaska. Once they'd realized that federal, state and corporate entities were moving too slowly to save their fisheries, many of them had moved heroically to import and place booms around the most vulnerable areas. Fishing was destroyed for that year so many of them were employed by Exxon in that summer's massive cleanup efforts. Though the luckiest among them earned the newly coined designation - “spillionaires,” the natural, social, and economic fabric of Cordova and Prince William Sound have never been the same. Last month, 19 years after the spill -- and two days after climate change scientist James Hansen told Congress that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel CEOs "should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" for their role in delaying the global response to climate change -- the Supreme Court reduced a $2.5 billion punitive j

Robert Scheer, Editor-in-chief of the web magazine http://www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, the “left” of KCRW's nationally syndicated Left, Right, and Center, a weekly columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a contributing editor to The Nation. His latest book is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America." THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER serves as an update to the World War I-era book WAR IS A RACKET. The former expands on the latter's theme of money, not security, as the reason for both military action and peacetime military spending. (You can read WAR IS A RACKET for free on-line with a web search of the title.) A sensible response to box cutters and poorly-constructed cockpit doors should cost taxpayers less than billions of dollars for F-22 Raptor fighter planes. Yet as THE PORN

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, is a leading thinker on technology and Internet policy. He is the founder of Creative Commons and author of "Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free Culture." You can learn more at http://change-congress.org Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using our tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. Our community will link candidates committed to a reform with volunteers and contributors who support it. Our Principles Change Congress is a national movement to end corruption in America's congress. We're organizing citizens to push candidates to make four simple commitments: 1. No money from lobbyi

Aired 07/01/08 Stuart Kauffman is the Director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary and Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute. His newest book: REINVENTING THE SACRED: A NEW VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON, AND RELIGION With economic and communications globalization, some form of a global civilization is beginning to emerge. Just as we confront the challenges of global warming and peak oil, and the likelihood of growing hunger and resource wars, our diverse cultures are being crushed together. One response is a retreat into fundamentalisms, often religious, often hostile. Clearly there's an urgent need for new thinking. STUART KAUFFMAN says that's why he wrote Reinventing the Sacred. Rooted in hard science, the book - and it's passionate author -- aims for nothing less than a revolution in how we see the world, reality, God, and our role in it all. I think he's onto something.

SUSAN JACOBY – "THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON" American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in mathematical literacy. Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30-40 % of Americans believe in each. A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey, and President George Bush says “the jury is still out.” in the summer of 2005 nearly two-thirds of Americans told pollsters that they believed creationism should be taught in schools alongside Darwinian evolution. Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments. This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so tragic or dangerous. According to the Program on International Polic

AHMED RASHID – DESCENT INTO CHAOS In his new book, DESCENT INTO CHAOS, AHMED RASHID asks what has gone wrong since the invasion of Afghanistan. This interview was recorded June 13th. This from an editorial in that morning’s New York Times: “There is enormous confusion about what happened Tuesday night on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Pakistani officials say that American air and artillery strikes killed 11 of their paramilitary troops, and some are angrily demanding an end to all military cooperation. The Bush administration says that American forces were firing in self-defense — against Taliban fighters crossing into Afghanistan — and made conflicting statements about whether any Pakistani troops had died.” A center of global instability for many decades, this is just the latest example of why Pakistan may now be the most dangerous place on Earth. Bordering Iran, Afghanistan and its perennial enemy, India, the nation straddles racial

Aired 05/27/08 What if there were a simple way to provide students with the books, technology, and supplies that they need to learn? What if people from all walks of life could connect directly with public schools, learn about specific classroom needs, and choose how to help? http://www.donorschoose.org makes this possible. Julie has almost 10 years of work experience in advertising, marketing, non-profit finance, and general management. Prior to joining DonorsChoose.Org, she worked at Sempra Energy Utilities promoting low income customer assistance programs. Julie has also worked at the UCLA Johnson & Johnson Management Fellows Program, http://www.SeeitandStopit.org (an organization dedicated to ending teen dating violence), Peace Games, and Oscar Mayer, where she toured the country in a Wienermobile. She has a dual BA in Advertising and Psychology from Syracuse University and an MBA from UCLA.

Aired 05/28/08 Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. Glenn is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. Glenn's third book, "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press.

Aired 05/28/08 Executive Director Josh Silver co-founded Free Press with Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in 2002. He oversees all programs, campaigns, fundraising and special projects. Josh previously served as campaign manager for the successful statewide ballot initiative for public funding of elections in Arizona and as the director of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He has served as the director of an international youth exchange program and as a development and management consultant. Josh publishes frequently on media, campaign finance and other public policy issues. http://www.freepress.net/ Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications. Our work fo

Aired 05/20/08 Anuradha Mittal (Oakland Institute) http://www.oaklandinstitute.org on the global food crisis. World food prices rose 39% in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March -- an increase of 50% in two weeks alone -- while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high. Food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can't afford to feed themselves or their families. Obvious causes: increased demand from China and India, rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change. But less obvious causes have also had a profound effect on food prices. In the last 30 years, the US, the World Bank and the IMF have imposed devastating policies on developing countries. By requiring them to open up their agriculture market

Robert Bryce is a journalist in Austin, Texas and the author of Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron (PublicAffairs, 2002; a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year) and Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate (PublicAffairs, 2004). Bryce was a reporter for the Austin Chronicle for 12 years, and is now the managing editor of the Energy Tribune. His most recent book is Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence" (PublicAffairs 2008), which the New York Times said he wrote “with all the gusto of a hunter clubbing baby seals.”