Month: October 2009

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The CIA’s secret Predator war: JANE MAYER of the New Yorker reports on the secret war being fought with remote controlled unmanned planes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The program has dramatically expanded under Obama.  “Nearly all the victims have remained faceless.”  Jane Mayer wrote about Obama’s predator war for the Oct. 26  New Yorker.

Plus: AMIRA HASS is the columnist for Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper who has often told the hard truths about Israel and the Palestinians. Now she has received the International Women’s Media Foundation 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award for her remarkable bravery as an Israeli citizen who lives and reports from Gaza.  READ her column about the Gaza war, “Lucky my parents aren’t alive to see this.”

Also: WAL-MART, the largest private employer in the nation, is notorious for mistreating its workers in both American stores and Chinese factories. Historian NELSON LICHTENSTEIN looks at the company that started out in Bentonville, Arkansas, and built a corporate culture based in a remote region that was all-white, all Protestant, and almost all poor. Nelson teaches at UC Santa Barbara; his new book is The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.

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How did torture become official US policy?   What arguments did the Bush Justice Dept. use to justify inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment?  And what is being done to bring to justice those responsible?  DAVID COLE looks at the torture memos released by the Justice Department.  He teaches at Georgetown Law Center, he’s also a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His new book is The Torture Memos.

Plus: THELONIOUS MONK wasn’t a naive, childlike, eccentric character.  Historian ROBIN KELLEY says he was basically a musician trying to make it without compromising his vision.  Robin tells the story of the life, the times, and the music of  “an American original.” Robin teaches at USC; his much-heralded new book is Thelonious Monk.
PLAYLIST: “‘Round Midnight,”  “Well You Needn’t,” “Straight No Chaser,” “Sweet and Lovely” – 1947 Blue Note sessions.
WATCH Robin Kelley on Thelonious Monk HERE.

“It’s not a bill I’d vote for” – that’s what Howard Dean says about the health care bill the Senate Finance Committee passed yesterday with one Republican vote. Meanwhile, the Dems are caving on the banking bill:  HAROLD MEYERSON will comment – he’s an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, where his new piece is “Who Will Rein In Wall Street?”

Remember Ramparts? Remember the energy and political punch of this glossy New Left muckraking magazine?  PETER RICHARDSON explains how Bob Scheer and Warren Hinckle did it – his new book is A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.

Also: the rise and fall of cigarettes in America.  ALLAN BRANDT talks about “the drama of consumer desire” in which advertising made cigarettes the tobacco of choice for nearly half of all Americans in 1950. Brandt teaches at Harvard medical School; his book THE CIGARETTE CENTURY: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America is out now in paperback.  (originally broadcast May 23, 2007)

For the record: today at 4 on KPFK, the fund drive will feature a guest host.