Show details for September 14th, 2008

Due to severe weather conditions and region-wide damage caused by hurricane Ike, KPFT has been off the air, so on September 14th, The Monitor had no show.

As of Friday, September 19, over one million Centerpoint customers still have no power. KPFT Pacifica Radio will renew broadcasting when power is restored to its transmitter and studio facilities.

We’re grateful for your support of The Monitor, and we hope to be back on the air in the very near future. Please tune in, check our website, or visit the KPFT website for updates.

Sincerely,

Pokey Anderson and Mark Bebawi, on-air program hosts,
Todd Simmons, engineer

Show details for September 7th, 2008

This week’s guests:

– Molly Bingham and Steve Connors

– Dean Baker

====================

Molly Bingham and Steve Connors

Molly Bingham and Steve Connors have made what others are calling a “groundbreaking” documentary film which provides unique insight into the personal lives of people involved in the Iraqi resistance. Meeting Resistance explodes myth after myth about the war in Iraq and the Iraqis who participate. Through its unprecedented access to these clandestine groups, the film focuses on the “other side”, clarifying why the violence in Iraq continues to this day and providing a deeper understanding of both the toll of occupation and the human condition of resistance.

Born in Kentucky, director Molly Bingham graduated from Harvard, and began working as a photojournalist in earnest in 1994, traveling to Rwanda in the wake of the genocide. Bingham has also completed two special projects for Human Rights Watch – one on Burundi and another on small arms trafficking in Central Africa. From 1998 through 2001 Bingham worked as Official Photographer to the Office of the Vice President of the United States. In 2001 Bingham returned to work in Central Africa, producing a story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine (published in August 2001) on the mining of the mineral “coltan.” In Washington on September 11 Bingham got some of the only close up pictures of the Pentagon, and followed the story of America’s response to the 9/11 attacks to Afghanistan later in the fall. Bingham went to Iraq shortly before the U.S. attack in March 2003. Bingham was detained for eight days by the Iraqi government security services and held in Abu Ghraib prison with four other westerners during the war, and released to Jordan in early April 2003. Bingham’s first major written story – on the Iraqi resistance – was published in Vanity Fair in July 2004. Bingham teamed up with Connors in August of 2003 to begin a film about who was behind the emerging post-war violence in Iraq.

Born in England, director Steve Connors has been photographing for over two decades, in places like Czechoslovakia as the communist government fell, and then into Sri Lanka. Connors spent the early 1990s covering the wars following the break-up of Yugoslavia and later spending time in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Connors has worked for most of the world’s newspapers and magazines including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times in the United States; The Guardian, The Observer and The Telegraph in London and in Europe he has worked for Der Spiegel, Stern and Paris Match among others. Connors spent fifteen months from November 2001 on in Afghanistan. Starting during the invasion, he went to Iraq, and spent fourteen months there total, working ten months solidly on Meeting Resistance.

View the trailer for Meeting Resistance.

====================

Dean Baker

Macro-economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington. Baker joins us to discuss the unusual action of the United States Treasury today to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s largest mortgage lenders. When Dr. Baker was our guest on The Monitor last summer, he correctly predicted that the worst of the problems in the housing market was yet to come. His blog, Beat the Press, discusses regularly the media’s coverage of economic issues. His books include The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and The United States Since 1980. Baker received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Read a related New York Times article, “Mortgage Giant Overstated the Size of Its Capital Base,” by Gretchen Morgenson and Charles Duhigg.