Show details for December 28th, 2008

This week’s program:

– Headlines

– Audio Clip: Rachel Maddow on the government bailout of the banking industry

– Live Calls: What are your choices for under-reported stories in 2008?

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Articles mentioned on tonight’s program:

“‘Eight Years without a Sex Scandal’… Unless You Count These,”
by Pokey Anderson
Democratic Underground
December 27, 2008

“SEC Whistleblower Speaks on Madoff Fraud,”
by Matt Renner
truthout
December 22, 2008

Show details for December 21st, 2008

This week’s guests:

– Jim Hall – on the government bailout of the auto industry

– Lucy Komisar – on AIG and CitiBank, and the bailout of America’s banking industry

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Jim Hall is an automobile industry analyst and managing director of 2953 Analytics.

RELATED ARTICLE:
“Detroit’s Problem: It’s Health Care, not the Union”
by Christopher R. Martin
December 13, 2008

The Senate’s failure to pass the bailout of the U.S. auto industry strikes a big blow at one of labor’s last stands in manufacturing in the U.S.

What’s at stake? According to the bill: 355,000 workers in the U.S. directly employed by the automobile industry; 4,500,000 employed in related industries (the auto industry has the highest job creation multiplier effect of any industry); 1,000,000 retirees (with pensions and health care benefits).

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Lucy Komisar

Lucy Komisar is the only American reporter whose beat is the secret underbelly of the global financial system — offshore bank and corporate secrecy — and its links to corporate crime; tax evasion by the rich and powerful; empowerment of dictators and oligarchs; bribery and corruption; pay-to-play politics; drug, arms and people trafficking; and terrorism.

Her dozens of articles on the subject since 1997 have appeared in publications as diverse as The Nation magazine and the Wall Street Journal. She is a founder of the Tax Justice Network-USA, the American branch of the international Tax Justice Network headquartered in London. The organization works to end tax evasion by multinational corporations and the very wealthy.

WEBSITE:
The Komisar Scoop

BOOKS:

Her chapter in A Game As Old As Empire, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad”

Show Details for December 14th, 2008

This week’s guests:

– Bob Moser on Southern politics, and Galveston’s recovery after Hurricane Ike

– John Bellamy Foster on the intersection of three major global crises: economy, ecology, and imperialism

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Bob Moser

Bob Moser has just taken the helm as the new editor of the Texas Observer, which has been publishing since 1954. He is also an award-winning political correspondent for The Nation. He has chronicled Southern politics for nearly two decades for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The Independent. A native of North Carolina, Bob now lives in Austin.

Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson will talk with him about the Texas Observer, about the fate of Galveston post-Ike (see article link below), and about his book.

His new book is Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority. About stereotypes about the South, Bob writes: “Every North likes to have a South,” and quotes Jacob Levenson, “Talking about race in the South becomes a way of not talking about race in the rest of the country.”

The North has been suspicious of Southerners since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson. Bob writes:

“Whether Thomas Jefferson was appearing publicly in faded overalls, egregiously flouting formal convention at state dinners with first-come, first-served seating, or extolling radical populism — he recommended a revolution every twenty years or so to flush out the political system — it triggered anger and fear. Jefferson’s government of Southern ‘blockheads and knaves,’ proper Yankee Theodore Dwight thundered three months after the Virginian’s inauguration, was out to ‘destroy every trace of civilization in the world, and to force mankind back into a savage state.’” Blue Dixie, p. 60.

BOOK:
Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority

FEATURE ARTICLE IN THE TEXAS OBSERVER:
“The Castaways: Can Galveston’s black community survive the island’s comeback?”
Forrest Wilder
December 12, 2008

WEBSITE:
Texas Observer

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John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is also editor of Monthly Review, which began publishing in 1949 with a lead essay by Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”

Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson will talk with him about the intersection of three major global crises: economy, ecology, and imperialism. We’ll also look at the growing food crisis.

Prof. Foster has written or co-edited a number of books, and has a new one forthcoming in January, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences.

QUOTE:

All ecosystems on earth are in decline, water shortages are on the rise, and energy resources are becoming more than ever the subject of global monopolies enforced by war…. The global ecological crisis that now confronts us is deeply rooted in the “world-alienating” logic of capital accumulation, traceable to the historical origins of capitalism as a system. The transition from capitalism to socialism is a struggle for sustainable human development in which societies on the periphery of the capitalist world system have been leading the way.

And:

Biofuels offered up today as a major alternative to pending world oil shortages are destined only to enlarge world hunger. Water resources are being monopolized by global corporations. Human needs are everywhere being denied … More and more life is debased in a welter of artificial wants dissociated from genuine needs.

ARTICLE:
“The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis”
John Bellamy Foster
April 2008
Monthly Review

SELECTED BOOKS:
The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (forthcoming, January 2009)

Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance (2006)

Imperialism without Colonies (2003)

Hungry For Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (1999)

WEBSITE:
Monthly Review magazine

Show details for December 7th, 2008

This week’s guests:

– Antonia Juhasz – on Iraqi oil law, and her new book, The Tyranny of Oil

– Robert Dreyfuss – on President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet nominations and staff appointments

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Antonia Juhasz

Antonia Juhasz is a policy-analyst, author and activist living in San Francisco.

She is an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, a fellow with Oil Change International, and a senior analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. She has taught at the New College of California in the Activism and Social Change Masters Program and as a guest lecturer on U.S. Foreign Policy at the McMaster University Labour Studies Program in a unique educational program with the Canadian Automobile Workers Union.

Juhasz is the author of The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do To Stop It, described as “A worthy successor to ‘The Prize’… A riveting read with a bold blueprint for ending the madness,” by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s former EPA Secretary, Terry Tamminen. In Tyranny Juhasz provides the hardest-hitting exposé of the oil industry in decades, answering today’s most pressing energy questions: Why are oil and gasoline prices rising so quickly? Where will prices go in the future? Who’s really controlling those prices? How much oil is left? How far will Big Oil go to get it? And at what cost to the economy, environment, human rights, worker safety, public health, democracy, and America’s place in the world?

WEBSITE:
The Bush Agenda: Official webpage for Antonia Juhasz

BOOK:
The Tyranny of Oil: The Most Powerful Industry – And What We Must Do to Stop It

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Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss has worked as an independent journalist who specializes in magazine features, profiles, and investigative stories in the areas of politics and national security. In 2001, he was profiled as a leading investigative journalist by the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2003, he was awarded Project Censored’s first prize for a story on the role of oil in U.S. policy toward Iraq. He has appeared on scores of radio and television talk shows, including MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Pacifica’s Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

Based in Alexandria, Dreyfuss has been writing for Rolling Stone for at least a decade, and currently covers national security for Rolling Stone’s National Affairs section. Dreyfuss is also a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect.

He is best known for ground-breaking stories about the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, and post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. In 2002, he wrote the first significant profile of Ahmed Chalabi by a journalist, for The American Prospect. Also in 2002, he also wrote the first analysis of the war between the Pentagon and the CIA over policy toward Iraq, which included the first important account of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

WEBSITE:
Robert Dreyfuss Official Website

The Dreyfuss Report at The Nation

BOOK:

Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam