WEEKLY SIGNALS 2004 ARCHIVE

December 28, 2004
SPECIAL PRESENTATION 6 am - 10 am
THE YEAR IN REVERSE TALKATHON

The Program
6:00 am — Nathan Callahan will deliver a prayer blessing for 2004.

6:20 am — Tim Carpenter, Political Director of Progressive Democrats of America, will discuss the presidential vote recount in Ohio and look at the state of peace activism in 2004.

7:30 am — Irvine City Councilmember, public policy expert and former presidential candidate Larry Agran will discuss the 2004 presidential primary process.

9:00 am — Zen Bastard, Grammy nominee, cultural critic and father of the underground press Paul Krassner will gird his satirical loins with awards for the circus of American life circa 2004.

December 21, 2004
Our guest is Benjamin R. Barber, the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. A frequent contributor to Harper's magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Nation, Barber's 17 books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984) reissued in 2004 in a twentieth anniversary edition; the recent international best-seller Jihad vs McWorld (1995 with a Post 9/11 Edition in 2001, translated into twenty languages) and his latest Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy (2003), also published in eight foreign editions.

We will discuss the impact of the naïve “idealists” in the Bush administration who believe that terrorism can be fought through hegemonic wars on rogue states.

Barber's honors include a knighthood (Palmes Academiques / Chevalier) from the French Government (2001), the Berlin Prize of the American Academy of Berlin (2001) and the John Dewey Award (2003). He has also been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Fellowships.

By the late 1930's, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open ports available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world", Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000 mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of freedom. Instead, they found overcrowded ghettos filled with desperately poor masses of Chinese and Japanese. Amid the city's abysmal conditions and its prostitutes, drug dealers, and swarms of rats, the young girl managed to discover a city of exotic, eccentric, and exciting humanity.

Bacon married a young refugee in Shanghai and came to the United States in 1947 where she settled in Denver, raised two children and lived the American Dream. Today, Ursula lectures and conducts writing/publishing workshops. She is a frequent keynote speaker at women's conferences and other educational events.

Social entrepreneurs, writes David Bornstein, are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up — and remake the world for the better.

In How to Change the World Bornstein tells the stories of these remarkable people— many in the United States, others in countries from Brazil to Hungary — providing an In Search of Excellence for the social sector. In America, one man, J.B. Schramm, has helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college. In South Africa, one woman, Veronica Khosa, developed a home-based care model for AIDS patients that changed government health policy.

These extraordinary stories highlight a massive transformation that is going largely unreported by the media: Around the world, the fastest-growing segment of society is the nonprofit sector, as millions of ordinary people — social entrepreneurs — are increasingly stepping in to solve the problems where governments and bureaucracies have failed.

“Wonderfully hopeful and enlightening…. The stories of these social entrepreneurs will inspire and encourage many people who seek to build a better world.” - Nelson Mandela

Also, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange, discusses the upcoming forum:
Medical Aid For The War-Injured Children of Iraq
Wednesday December 8, 2004
7:30 PM.
Venice United Methodist Church
1020 Victoria Ave., Venice
Admission $10
(323) 644-2889 or (310) 838-8131

November 30, 2004
Our guest is Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at UC Irvine, reporter for Alternet and contributing editor to Tikkun magazine. Levine is an emerging leader of the new generation of historians and analysts of the modern Middle East and Islam. With a command of Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Persian, as well as French, German and Italian, LeVine spent the last six years living, researching and reporting from the region, including Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. He has interviewed senior international political figures, reported from Beirut's green line, stood against bulldozers and dodged terrorist bombs. He knows the history, politics, religions–and most important, the peoples — of the region as a friend, but with a highly critical eye.

November 23, 2004
The Thanksgiving Week Pumpkin Pie and Whipped Cream Special
Our guest is author Douglas Mulhall, a leading nanotechnology journalist. In his latest book, The Calcium Bomb, Mulhall writes about a new discovery that may let millions — including Bill Clinton and David Bowie — avoid surgery, endless drugs, or unproven remedies for heart disease.

For years medical researchers have been intrigued by disease symptoms that suggest infection, but each time they treat what seems to be a viral or bacterial cause, many illnesses continue unabated.

Now, teams in the U.S., England, Finland, Germany, India, Spain, and China have published research showing that a previously undetectable infection is present in many calcium deposits.

The slow-growing ‘time bomb’ is so small that it challenges standard scientific definitions of life. Critics have doubted its existence, but now scientists at universities in many countries have photographed and cultured it.

November 16, 2004
Our guest is Derrick Jensen, co-author (with George Draffan) of Welcome to the Machine — a look at our modern culture, where corporate might makes technology right, government money feeds the greed for mad science, and absolute surveillance leads to absolute control and corruption. Through meticulous research and personal narrative, Welcome to the Machine moves beyond journalism and expose to question our civilization's mode of existence and ultimately defies our willingness to submit to the institutions and technologies built to rob us of all that makes us human: our connection to the land, our kinship with one another, our place in the living world.

Derrick Jensen is also the author of The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, and Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, a USA Today Critics Choice for one of the best nature books of 1995. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.

November 9, 2004
Investigative journalist Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud, guests. Unger will discuss the re-election of George W. Bush and the hidden Bush/Saud relationship that began in the 1970s, when the oil-rich House of Saud began courting American politicians in a bid for military protection, influence, and investment opportunity. With the Bush family, the Saudis hit a gusher — direct access to presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. To trace the weave of Saud- Bush connections, Unger interviewed three former directors of the CIA, top Saudi and Israeli intelligence officials, and more than one hundred other sources. His access to major players is unparalleled and often exclusive — including executives at the Carlyle Group, the giant investment firm where the House of Bush and the House of Saud each has a major stake.

November 2, 2004
Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow, Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, guests. Men of Tomorrow is the first book to tell the surprising story of the young Jewish misfits, hustlers and nerds who invented the superhero and the comic book industry. Animated by the stories of some of the last century's most charismatic and conniving artists, writers and businessmen, Men of Tomorrow brilliantly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes gained their cultural power and established a crucial place in the modern imagination.

Gerard Jones's previous books include Killing Monsters, The Comic Book Heroes, and Honey I'm Home: Sitcoms Selling the American Dream. He is also a former comic book writer and screenwriter whose credits include Batman, Spider-Man, and Pokemon, and his own creations have been turned into video games and cartoon series. Jones is the founder of Media Power for Children and serves on the advisory board of the Comparative Media Studies Program at M.I.T.

October 26, 2004
Lewis Lapham, author of several books of essays and editor at Harper’s magazine since 1976, guests. In addition to his monthly column at Harper’s, he has written for Life, Commentary, National Review, The Yale Literary Magazine, Elle, Fortune, Forbes, The American Spectator, Vanity Fair, The London Observer, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

In his latest book, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy, Lapham argues that never before have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream political conversation in the US: they are criminalized, marginalized, and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties and by an ever-more concentrated and profit-driven media, in which the safe and the selling sweep all uncomfortable truths from view. As a result, we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history.

“What the Bush administration has in mind is not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy,” Lapham says, “but the protection of the American oligarchy from the American democracy."

Our guest is Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer and co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy whose written a series of articles on the dangers of computerized voting. Dugger has also written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, as well as hundreds of articles for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive and other periodicals.

October 12, 2004
Our guest is author and host of A Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor. His latest book, Homegrown Democrat, is a celebration of liberalism as the "politics of kindness." In his inimitable style, Keillor draws on a lifetime of experience amongst the hardworking, God- fearing people of the Midwest and pays homage to the common code of civic necessities that arose from the left: Protect the social compact. Defend the powerless. Maintain government as a necessary force for good.

As Keillor tells it, these are articles of faith that are being attacked by hard-ass Republican tax cutters who believe that human misery is a Dickensian fiction. In a blend of nostalgic reminiscence, humorous meditation, and articulate ire, Keillor asserts the values of his boyhood — the values of Lake Wobegon— that do not square with the ugly narcissistic agenda at work in the country today. A thoughtful, wonderfully written book, Homegrown Democrat is Keillor’s love letter to liberalism, the older generation, John F. Kennedy, the University of Minnesota, and the yellow-dog Democrat city of St. Paul that is sure to amuse and inspire Americans just when they need it most.

October 5, 2004
Our guest is Maryn McKenna, an award-winning science and medical reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the only journalist ever given full access to the US Epidemic Intelligence Service in its fifty-three-year history. In her new book Beating Back the Devil, McKenna follows the first class of disease detectives to come to the CDC after September 11, the first to confront not just naturally occurring outbreaks but the man-made threat of bioterrorism. They are talented researchers — many with young families — who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group that has helped eradicate smallpox, push back polio, and solve the first major outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and E. coli O157.

Since the mid-1980s Lakoff has been applying cognitive linguistics to the study of politics, especially the framing of public political debate. He is the author of the influential book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

In Don't Think of an Elephant Lakoff explains how conservatives think, and how to counter their arguments. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues, and provides examples of how progressives can reframe the debate.

September 21, 2004
Our guest is Mark Crispin Miller, author of the Bush Dyslexicon and a professor of media studies at New York University, where he also directs the Project on Media Ownership. In his latest book, Cruel and Unsual, Miller argues that under the Bush administration we are living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers: a state that is neither democratic nor republican, and no more "conservative" than it is liberal. Miller exposes the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet, and — above all — their emotional dependence on sheer hatefulness. Miller's writings on film, television, advertising and rock music have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Nation and The New York Times.

September 14, 2004
Our guest is Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a former top Pentagon official, and one of America’s leading scholars of nuclear strategy and national security. In Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Allison gives us an urgent call to action. He makes the case that nuclear terrorism is inevitable — if we continue on our present course — and he sets out an ambitious but achievable plan for preventing a catastrophic attack before it’s too late.

"Graham Allison's Nuclear Terrorism is absolutely first-rate. Our survival as a civilization may well depend more than anything else on our heeding the recommendations of this chilling and superbly crafted book."
— R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence

No one has more authority to call the shots the way they really are than Krugman, whose provocative New York Times columns are keenly followed by millions. One of the world's most respected economists, Krugman has been named America's most important columnist by the Washington Monthly and columnist of the year by Editor and Publisher magazine.

In The Great Unraveling, Krugman chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, how fiscal responsibility collapsed. From his account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of dishonesty in the Bush administration, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States lost its way. And he gives us the road map we will need to follow if we are to get the country back on track.

Krugman teaches at Princeton University and is a winner of the John Bates Clark medal for the best American economist under forty .

Our first guest is Max Blumenthal, a contributor to Salon, The American Prospect and Alternet. Blumenthal will discuss the role of the United States in destabilizing the democratically-elected government of Jean Bertrand-Aristide through the International Republican Institute, a federally-funded, nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to the Bush administration.

Nyhan argues that George W. Bush has seriously misled the nation and that, if left unchallenged, all the President's spin could soon become standard practice — a devastating development for our democracy.

"A clinical, dispassionate, and intellectually bulletproof analysis of the ways President Bush has manipulated public opinion. The authors meticulously paint a troubling picture of the way our national debates function. It ought to shame the press corps into mending its ways."
— Jonathan Chait, The New Republic

Arianna Huffington, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of ten books, is our guest. In 2003, she ran for governor as an Independent in California's recall election. Her populist grassroots campaign was widely praised for putting the media spotlight on the corrupting influence of special interest money on American politics.

Her latest book, Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America, offers both a scathing portrait of our contemporary political landscape and a bold, inspiring, yet practical approach to restoring America to the promise envisioned by our greatest leaders.

"Arianna Huffington is one of America's foremost foes of folly and fanaticism, corruption and cruelty. She's already run for governor of California, and after you read her latest book, you'll be asking: When is she going to run for president?"
— Barbara Ehrenreich

Robert McChesney, author of eight books on media and politics, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and host of the weekly talk show, Media Matters, on WILL-AM radio is our first guest today. McChesney’s will discuss his latest book, The Problem of the Media and provide insight into the coming Republican National Convention coverage.

"This is a book that desperately needed to be written. With clear, straightforward, almost clinical prose, Robert McChesney sets out the diagnosis for the American cultural disease. Snap out of the toxic clouds of culture war rhetoric and find out exactly what's wrong with us — and exactly what we can do about it."
— Thomas Frank, author, What the Matter with Kansas?

Our second guest is UCI alumnus Kem Nunn. Nunn will discuses his latest surfer noir novel Tijuana Straits. Nunn now lives in Northern California, has contributed articles to Surfer Magazine, and added university work and screenwriting to his list of occupations alongside his fiction, screenplays including Wild Things and The Ransom, both directed by John McNaughton.

Nunn will be appearing at Book Soup in South Coast Plaza on Sunday, August 15 at 2 pm.

"Kem Nunn is one of a rare breed, a novelist who knows how to plot and tell a story. There is amazing energy here"
— Elmore Leonard

Since taking office, George W. Bush has relished the role of "Commander in Chief." His military posturing is intended to convince Americans that he alone can lead them to victory in the war on terror and is designed to appeal to the votes of the armed forces and veterans. But his military record is disastrous. While George W. Bush supported the Vietnam War, his family influence got him into the Texas Air National Guard, which, short of World War III breaking out, guaranteed that he would never see military action. Even in this safest of positions, Lieutenant Bush broke under the strain and went AWOL in Alabama for the better part of a year — canvassing for the Republican Party. In contrast, George W. Bush's Administration calls up contemporary national Guardsmen for front-line action in Iraq, and extends their terms in a form of backdoor conscription. As the military budget soars, the war is being fought with a dangerously inadequate number of troops. The Administration ships home the dead and disabled under cover of darkness; those who do eventually return in one piece find their veterans' medical benefits and facilities axed. Drawing on the extensive research on the President's still mysterious military career, Williams convincingly argues that our Commander in Chief is guilty of breathtaking hypocrisy, cynical doublethink and egregious neglect of the actual defense of the United States.

His articles have also appeared in The American Prospect, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, American Enterprise, Mother Jones, and Dissent.

Among other things we'll talk to Judis about "The July Surprise" — Bush's election year push to capture Osama bin Laden.

July 13, 2004
Rick Perlstein, journalist with The Village Voice and author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Concensus, discussest his latest articles, "The Politics of Piety" and "How Can the Democrats Win?"

"Before the Storm is one of the finest studies of the American right to appear since the days of Hofstadter. Read it and understand where the mad public faiths of our own day came from."
— Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler and author of What's the Matter with Kansas?

July 6, 2004
Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA, and one of our favorite guests returns to Weekly Signals for the third time.

McGovern will discuss the transition of power in Iraq and the trial of Saddam Hussein. A co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner-city of Washington D.C., McGovern is also a contributor to Imperial Crusades, a collection of essays that chronicles the lies that are now returning almost daily to haunt the Bush administration, their secret agendas and the under-reported carnage of the war in Iraq.

June 29, 2004
Alain de Botton guests. The Swiss-born, London-based author of the influential handbook How Proust Can Change Your Life discusses his latest book Status Anxiety.

'Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories," says de Botton. The first — the story of our quest for sexual love — is well known and well-charted. The second — the story of our quest for love from the world — is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first.'

Status Anxiety is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.

Alain de Botton asks where worries about our status come from and what if anything we can do to surmount them. With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, he examines the origins of status anxiety (ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends), before revealing ingenious ways in which people have learned to overcome their worries in their search for happiness. We learn about sandal-less philosophers and topless bohemians, about the benefits of putting skulls on our sideboards and of looking at ruins.

A three-part TV documentary, to be shown in the U.K. and in Australia, and hosted by de Botton, has been commissioned to promote the book.

June 22, 2004
James Dalessandro author of 1906 guests. This historical novel follows the forces of corruption that plagued San Francisco civic, law enforcement and governmental agencies up to the devastation of the city during the great earthquake. 1906, however, goes futher than the accepted history and poses the question: Was there a cover-up regarding the 1906 quake? The book was sold to Warner Brothers after a heated Hollywood bidding war. Dalessandro is currently writer and co-director of the film, with four-time Oscar winner Ben Burtt, of The Damndest Finest Ruins, a feature documentary about the 1906 earthquake.

James Dalessandro's 1906 is a bold, sweeping novel inspired by one of the biggest epic disasters in American history, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. It's a richly textured, engrossing, and extraordinary tale.
— Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter

June 15, 2004
Thomas Frank, founding editor of The Baffler, contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, and The New York Times op-ed page guests. Frank's new book What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America tells the real-life story how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs convinced America that they spoke on behalf of the common man.

From What's the Matter With Kansas:
"Hard times, instead of snapping people back to reality, only seem to stoke the fires of the conservative backlash. Indeed, those segments of the working class that have been hardest hit by the big economic changes of recent years are the very ones that vote Republican in the greatest numbers. We seem to have but one way to express our anger, and that’s by raging along with Rush — against liberal bias in academia, liberal softness on terrorism, liberal permissiveness, and so on. Our reaction to hard times is thus to hand over ever more power to the people who make them hard. In fact, the election of 2002 provided a perverse incentive to the men who gave us the dot-com bubble and the Enron fiasco: Keep at it. The more you screw the public over, the more they will clamor to cut your taxes. The more you cheat and steal, the angrier they will become — at the liberal media that expose your cheating and stealing."

June 8, 2004
Susan Jacoby is the author of five books, including Wild Justice, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a contributor to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, and Vogue. Her latest book, Freethinkers A History of American Secularism, paints a striking portrait of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution.

Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanists. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.

Also John Dullaghan, Director of the film Bukowski: Born Into This, discusses the Los Angeles poet and his life.

Exploring the minute ways that “the cult of masculinity” persists in all branches of the United States military today, Burke unearths fascinating details and offers eye-opening anecdotes about basic training, military dress and speech, the history of the marching chant, the disdain some veterans still harbor for Jane Fonda, and the colorful — and sometimes questionable — rituals of military manhood.

Postulating that culture is made — not born — Burke urges the military to consciously change its policy of “gendered apartheid” so it can evolve into the gender-, race-, and sexuality-neutral democratic institution it needs to be.

“As Carol Burke makes clear in this important book, American military culture is now driven less by soldierly professionalism or patriotic zeal than by a toxic combination of misogyny and homophobia . . . Razor-sharp in its analysis, and harrowingly well-informed, it is essential for those concerned with our military, democracy, and culture.”
— Mark Crispin Miller, author of
The Bush Dyslexicon:
Observations on a National Disorder

May 25, 2004
George McGovern guests. McGovern, a decorated B-24 bomber pilot during World War II served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1957-61. In 1962 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, later becoming an outspoken critic of defense spending and one of the first senators to oppose the Vietnam War. In 1971, he won the nomination of the Democratic party for the presidency on a platform promising to end the war in Vietnam, cut defense spending by $30 billion, and provide a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. Watergate co-conspirator and Orange County native son Richard Nixon — after directing the burglary of McGovern's campaign headquarters — won that election in a landslide. McGovern subsequently served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations under Presidents Ford and Carter. Under President Clinton, he served as U.S. representative to the Food and Agriculture Organization and in 2001 became the World Food Program's first global ambassador on hunger. His latest book is The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time.

May 18, 2004
Mahmood Mamdani, a political scientist, anthropologist, Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University guests. In his latest book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen?

Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.

May 11, 2004
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a lifelong conservative, was appalled as the neocon wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors at the Pentagon Planning Department, ignored internal dissent, disregarded its own intelligence and arrogantly pushed for a war with Iraq.

According to Kwiatkowski, the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — was a prime mover in what she calls a "neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon."

Kwiatkowski is a columnist with Military Week, a regular contributor to LewRockwell.com, and has had articles about her work with the Department of Defense published recently in the American Conservative.

May 4, 2004
Our guest is Sibel Edmonds, a translator at the FBI's language division with top-secret security clearance in the months before 911, who claims that documents that detailed what the FBI heard on wiretaps and learned during interrogations of suspected terrorists weren't translated because the divison was riddled with incompetence and corruption.

Edmonds testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.

"We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available," Edmonds said.

April 27, 2004
“Father of the underground press,” according to People magazine Paul Krassner published The Realist from 1958 to 1974. His style of personal journalism constantly blurred the line between observer and participant. He interviewed a doctor who performed abortions when it was illegal; Krassner then ran an underground abortion referral service. He covered the antiwar movement; then co-founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He published material on the psychedelic revolution; then took LSD with Tim Leary, Ram Dass and Ken Kesey, later accompanying Groucho Marx on his first acid trip.

He edited Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and with Lenny’s encouragement, became a stand-up comic himself, opening at the Village Gate in New York in 1961. Ten years later — five years after Lenny’s death — Groucho said, “I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce.”

April 20, 2004
James Moore, an Emmy Award-winning TV news correspondent with more than a quarter century of print and broadcast experience, guests. Moore is the author of Bush's War For Reelection in which he shows how the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a Bush goal before 9/11 — and how 9/11 became the justification. He also examines the unprecedented efforts by the Bush administration to suppress and distort intelligence, and withhold the truth from the American public, including an in-depth discussion with Joseph C. Wilson, the former ambassador, whose CIA agent wife was allegedly exposed by Bush operative Karl Rove.

Moore also wrote — along with Wayne Slater — the New York Times bestseller Bush's Brain.

Moore has traveled extensively on every Presidential campaign since 1976. His reports have appeared on CNN, NBC, and CBS. His professional honors include: an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association, and the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners' Foundation.

Amy Goodman
Wednesday, April 21,
7:00 PM
Immanuel Presbyterian Church
3300 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles
(S.W. Corner of Wilshire & Berendo - Parking Lot Behind Church, Street Parking Available)

April 13, 2004
This Tuesday's guest is UPI Investigations Editor Mark Benjamin who is closely following the hidden U.S. casualties from the Iraq war. In February, Benjamin won the American Legion's Fourth Estate Award for uncovering the plight of hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers, many who served in Iraq, held in hot cement barracks at Fort Stewart, Georgia, while they waited — sometimes for months — to see doctors. Benjamin's reporting led to major improvements in medical care for the soldiers. Benjamin's other investigative military health investigations include the nearly 4,000 U.S. troops medically evacuated from Iraq for non-combat reasons. More than 20% had psychiatric or neurological problems.

April 5, 2004
Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA, will discuss Condoleezza Rice, the 911 Commission, Shiite Muslim cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr and the US reaction to Fallujah. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner-city of Washignton D.C.

March 30, 2004
Joe Klass, chairman of Citizens Against Violent Crime — a group that is now circulating a petition to amend California's current Three Strikes Law — guests. That law went into effect in March 1994 after the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klass, Klass's granddaughter.

The Klass family, along with a majority of Californians, supported the passing of the Three Strikes Law as a measure of putting criminals away for violent crimes. However, the law extended its boundaries to include petty criminals.

Klass now feels that former Gov. Pete Wilson deceived his family on the statues of the law.

Citizen Peacebuilding Program
Paula Garb
7th Floor, Social Science Tower
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
email: pgarb@uci.edu
phone: (949) 824-8687

March 16, 2004
P.W. Singer, a security analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors, discusses the privatization of the military. In his book, Singer takes pains to establish the improvements in capability and effectiveness privatization allows, but is concerned with it's negative implications. Technical issues, like contract problems, may lead to an operation ending without regard to a military rationale. A much bigger problem is the risk of states losing control of military policy to militaries outside the state systems, responsible only to their clients, managers, and stockholders. Nor can the moralities of business firms be necessarily expected to accommodate such niceties as the laws of war. Singer recommends increased oversight as a first step in regulation, an eminently reasonable response to a still imperfectly understood development in war making.

For an overview of privatized military firms read War, Profits and the Vacuum of Law by P.W. Singer (here, in pdf format).

March 9, 2004
Weekly Signals East Coast Political Correspondent Tim Carpenter analyzes Ralph Nader's entry into the presidential race, John Kerry's campaign and Mass Voters for Clean Elections.

February 24, 2004
US Senate candidate Jim Gray discusses his Libertarian Party platform and the March 2nd election.

"Republicans talk about reducing the size of government," Orange County Superior Court Judge Gray says, "but it has increased at the same rate during Republican administrations as in Democratic. The Heritage Foundation estimates that government regulations cost the average household at least $8000 per year, and the cost to the private sector in complying with government regulations consumes about 9 percent of our gross domestic product. People talk about reducing taxes, but I don't — taxes are just the symptom. If we reduce government size, spending and bureaucracy, lower taxes will naturally follow."

February 17, 2004
Chalmers Johnson, author, historian, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego discusses his new book The Sorrows of Empire.

Johnson thoroughly explores the new militarism that is transforming America and compelling its people to pick up the burden of empire.

Among Johnson’s provocative conclusions is that American militarism is putting an end to the age of globalization and bankrupting the United States, even as it creates the conditions for a new century of virulent blowback. The Sorrows of Empire suggests that the former American republic has already crossed its Rubicon—with the Pentagon leading the way.

February 10, 2004
Ray McGovern, whose 27-year career as an analyst with the CIA spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush, will discuss the future of CIA director George Tenet, Bush's Meet the Press appearance and the war in Iraq. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner-city of Washignton D.C.

February 3, 2004
James Goldsborough, Foreign Affairs Columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune discusses Bush's amnesty plan for undocumented workers in light of Southern California's Grocery strike and the rise of Wal-Mart.

January 20, 2004
Peter Phillips, Director of Project Censored runs down the highlights of the year’s twenty-five most important underreported news stories. In past years, the project's annual book, Censored, has been instrumental in helping push underreported stories into the mainstream. In the 1997 edition, Karl Grossman’s article "Risking the World: Nuclear Proliferation in Space" led to 60 Minutes doing a national feature on the subject. Censored 1999 featured Monsanto’s "terminator seed" project, which was subsequently discontinued because of negative publicity. Censored 2001 exposed the disasterous impact of the increasing privatization of the global water supply, a story that is rapidly becoming one of the major issues of the twenty-first century. We can expect more of the same vital and aggressive coverage from Censored 2004.

Dwight Smith of The Catholic Worker tells us why he's refusing to follow Santa Ana city orders to kick more than 100 homeless people — mostly women and children — out of his Santa Ana home. The Catholic Worker feeds and shelters hundreds of homeless every week purely on volunteer assistance. If you would like to help, contact Dwight at:

"A one-of-a-kind filmmaker capable of melding science, philosophy, poetry and sheer whimsy into an elaborate meditation on mankind's mysteries."
— Janet Maslin
The New York Times

"I like the idea of making films about ostensibly nothing. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in a position of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around."
— Errol Morris
from a converstion with the
The New Yorker's Mark Singer

January 6, 2004
Robert Greenwald, director of the film, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, guests. Uncovered takes you behind the walls of government, as CIA, Pentagon and foreign service experts speak out, many for the first time, detailing the lies, misstatements and exaggerations that served as the reasons to fight a "preemptive" war that wasn't necessary.