Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #67

Tom Hayden asks, “Why Die for Karzai?” and Gov. Don Siegelman asks, “Can I get some justice from Justice?” Hayden was an anti-war activist in the ’60’s, one of the Chicago 8 defendants, and served in the California Assembly and Senate. We talk about Obama’s pending decision on troop levels, Hayden touts the new resolution from the California Democratic Party calling for a planned withdrawal of US forces, and offers advice to activists. Gov. Siegelman was the Democratic governor of Alabama until he experienced a stolen election and political prosecution driven by close friends of Karl Rove. Siegelman is now hoping the Supreme Court will review the case, as the Holder Justice Department is not supporting his calls for investigation and a new trial.
listen_button

Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #66

The Health Care Debate: Angela Bonavoglia talks about the Stupak amendment and undue influence by Catholic bishops; Dr. Len Saputo and Byron Belitsos on the defects of the House bill. Film reviewer Gary Chew on Pirate Radio. Bonavoglia is the author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, and we discuss the huge rollback of abortion rights intended by Stupak, and the role of the Catholic bishops in its passage. PBC concludes that this is a poison pill and that the overall bill will make things worse. Saputo and Belitsos chime in, and argue that true reform is unlikely to come from a Congress beholden to the insurance and health industries. They also have just published a paper called The Infection Deception, which raises major questions about the true extent of the epidemic and the value of vaccine efforts. Please read this report before you get a vaccination! Gary Chew says the new Pirate Radio movie is fun for radio geeks, but not a great film. Read his review at www.tulsatvmemories.com
listen_button

Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #65

Stephen Kohn, counsel to whistleblowers. This is the 10th installment of the Boiling Frogs interview series, co-hosted with Sibel Edmonds. Kohn explains whistleblowing as a civil liberties and a First Amendment issue, the role of whistleblowers as enablers of congressional oversight, and discusses the legal and political implications involved in whistleblowing. He talks about the broken Merit System Protection Board, the abuses of secrecy laws and State Secrets Privilege, the current status of whistleblower protection laws in Congress, the case of Halliburton whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse, the current administration’s highly disappointing stand against national security whistleblowers despite President Obama’s endorsement prior to his elections, and more!

SteveKohnStephen M. Kohn is the Executive Director of National Whistleblowers Center, one of the nation’s foremost experts in whistleblower protection law, and the author of the first legal treatise on whistleblowing, Protecting Environmental and Nuclear Whistleblowers: A Litigation Manual. Since 1984, Mr. Kohn has successfully represented whistleblowers in numerous cases (both at trial and on appeal), has testified in Congress on behalf of whistleblower reforms, and has worked directly with the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee on drafting the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate whistleblower law. Mr. Kohn has a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law; an M.A. in Political Science from Brown University; and a B.S. in Social Education from Boston University. In addition to his books on whistleblower law, Mr. Kohn is the author of Jailed for Peace and American Political Prisoners.
More info at Sibel’s new website, www.boilingfrogspost.com
listen_button

Posted on Categories Rap Report

A Plague of Pundits

A virus unsettles the nation … and, no, it’s not swine flu. Rather, it is a plague of pundits currently hardening our national arteries with a vast over-supply of ill thought-out yet deeply felt positions. Written, spoken, broadcast, blogged or tweeted, these messages are delivered by Americans who believe in their God-given right to express themselves, often at a decibel level inversely proportionate to a lack of understanding. Along this “pathway to punditry,” things have taken a turn from the merely annoying to the truly preposterous, witness Fox News’s feature, “Kid Pundits” as an exemplar of our mania to talk rather than listen.

“Pundit,” you may know, is a Sub-continental Indian term like “avatar,” “cheetah,” “coolie,” or “dinghy,” intellectual “loot” (another one) appropriated by British colonialists, and adopted into American English. “Pundit,” also written as “Pandit,” (as in Nehru) is an honorific for the learned Hindu advisors to judges during the British Indian Raj. “Pundit” grew to have a meaning similar to “maestro” of which America has had too few, our “maestro pundits” including Henry Adams, Walter Lipmann, Richard Rovere, Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, William Safire, Daniel Schorr, George Will and few others. Except for the final two, all are pundificating from some far more literate place.

Today’s “pundi-monium” began early in the ‘00’s, as cable news networks began to saturate the TV screen with a hail of tyro-pundits. These “experts” were multiplexed, often Hollywood Squares-style, across the screen waiting their chance to out-elucidate their rivals to win the coveted opportunity to climb the “pundit pole,” garnering precious additional square inches of the television screen, until, finally, they are pundificating solo with Keith, Chris, Sean, Bill or Larry.

An important characteristic of what we might call, “The New Pundocracy” is the acceptance of the unalienable popular right to sound off on any topic, any time, and any place. The result of this rampant and ubiquitous punditry is that in a world of unedited, un-reflective, and ultimately self-cancelling blab, very little gets accomplished. Worse, it is now politically inopportune to question the “right” to say or write anything that flits across the brain-pan, leading us to the point where “freedom of expression” perhaps the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy, is now wrongly conflated to “all opinions are created equal.”

Television news has provided a rich soup for miasmatic pop punditry. Instead of reportorial heavy-lifting, today’s TV journalist often seem content to poke their microphone under the nearest nose, and ask the sina qua non of innocuous news coverage; “how does it feel?”

Innocuous question leads invariably to flaccid answer, like; “It’s a good experience for me,” “My family taught me to do the right thing,” “I’m here because I want everyone to know that my classmates are not criminals,” etc. These are the building blocks of personal punditry designed to turn the conversation away from any actual issue to the self-referential. In confessional America it is simply not enough to live a moral life. We also need to be a “role model” most especially for ourselves.

This “me model” of personal punditry comes clear during call-in radio shows or live forums where actual questions are simply bad form. Instead, the presenter is greeted by a personal manifesto in which audience members expound on how they personally experienced the book or movie in question.

It is television advertising that has done the most to establish this “Everyman a Pundit” era through what we might call “manifesto commercials.” Early among these was a series of ads by British Petroleum in which “average” Americans pundificate on their prescription for solving the environmental crisis. The question is asked: “What do you think cars will be running on in the future?” A woman in a shapeless orange t-shirt suggests “grass, leaves, trees, garbage.” “Hydrogen fuel cells” propounds a bike-toting earth-mother. “Give me that solar car and I’m there,” adds a twentyish Asian-American. “We really need to be conscious about what we put in our cars, just like what we put in our bodies,” states a college student, ponytail exiting back of baseball cap.

The BP ads set off a rash of “people as pundit” advertising that spread, like Mad-Ave H1N1. In ads for American Express, Aleve, DanActive, J.G. Wentworth, ScottTrade, the National Guard, Verizon, Gold Bond Powder, Bayer Aspirin, Playtex, and others, pundificating “real people” became star product pitchers. The irony is that these ads pretend that American consumers are the stars of their own television series, when real control and authority is evaporating faster than mom’s 401k.

Most recently, Internet-based social networking has struck a blow in the name of popular punditry. The inclusion of space for public commentary permits every bit of content on the web to chase its own tail, with ongoing, real-time commentary, often simply semi-illiterate rants that become permanently attached, like a malign conjoined twin, to the text of a story. Worse, the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion has morphed into the notion that everyone has the right to their own facts.

There are several possibly remedies for America’ current Plague of Pundits. We might consider creating a “Pundit-Cap-in-Trade” market where opinions could be bought, sold, swapped and out-sourced. India, which gave us punditry in the first place, might be a particularly good market. We might also find ways to provide material for overworked TV pundits by pairing them with seasoned, out-of-work print journalist. These could fill in the news gaps at the same time reminding their charges of CBS’s Eric Sevareid’s 1977 sign-off in which he urged his fellow pundits, “to retain the courage of one’s doubt as well as one’s convictions.”

###

Richard Rapaport is happy to pundificate at the drop of an opinion. He can be reached at rjrap@aol.com.

Posted on Categories PBC Comments, Politics

One Small Step for Better Health Care; One Giant Step Backward for Choice

I’m not very excited about the health insurance reform that squeaked through the House last Saturday night. There are a few morsels in those 2,000 pages, like striking pre-existing conditions from the list of reasons for denial of coverage. But with coverage mandates, $400 billion in subsidies and a teeny weeny public option (designed to fail?) and the elimination of the Kucinich state-level single payer option, the Pelosi package was teetering on the edge of worse-than-doing-nothing.
Continue reading One Small Step for Better Health Care; One Giant Step Backward for Choice

Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #64

Nomi Prins, author of It Takes A Pillage
Nomi Prins, author of It Takes A Pillage

Nomi Prins talks about Democrats’ moves to weaken Sarbanes-Oxley and the plans to pay out record bonuses; Robert Dreyfuss talks about the “Generals’ Revolt” against Obama re: Afghanistan. Prins is a former Goldman Sachs managing director, and the author of the new book “It Takes A Pillage”; she also talks about Glass-Steagall and its repeal under Clinton, and the obscene bonuses projected by Goldman Sachs this year. Prins is speaking in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club on Tuesday, November 10. Dreyfuss talks about his recent article in Rolling Stone on the leak of Gen. McChrystal’s report and Obama’s response, and suggests that Obama should have fired McChrystal. We also talk about the range of bad options Obama is facing vis a vis the Taliban and al Qaeda; about Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Pakistan, and about her stop in the Middle East and her controversial comments on Israeli settlements. In his blog at www.thenation.com Dreyfuss states that Obama’s peace efforts there are a failure. listen_button

Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #63

One on one with Prof. Henry A. Giroux. A collaboration with Truthout.org this conversation covers Giroux’s new book, “Youth In a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability” [Palgrave/McMillan] which links the corporate propaganda aimed at young people to the pathologies that are created, producing the “youth crime complex”. Giroux is a deep thinker, and his unique analysis connects the commodification of our young people with the erosion of the social compact and the dominance of “the market” in America today. Using California as an example, we discuss the disinvestment in education– to the point that we spend more on prisons than schools. Giroux is the Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. listen_button

Posted on Categories PBC, Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #62

Prof. Stephen Zunes on US repudiation of the Goldstone report; activist David DeGraw says to Wall St.: “Stop, Thief!!” and Tommy Panik files an exclusive report. Zunes is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, and writes for Foreign Policy in Focus. He deplores the 11/4 House vote, 344-36, to reject the Goldstone Commission report as “deeply flawed”, and the comments of UN Ambassador Susan Rice and State Dept’s P.J. Crowley that investigating alleged war crimes by Israel and Palestinians would impede the peace process. DeGraw runs the website www.ampedstatus.com and has intense feelings about the grand larceny of our financial sector presided over by Paulson and Geithner. Panik is our in-depth undercover low budget investigative report, and updates us on White House basketball, Levi Johnston and the Palin soap operas, and the recent reunion of the Cheney torture team. listen_button

Posted on Categories PBC Comments, Politics

A Letter to the Governator

Dear Arnold,

You sure showed Tom Ammiano how clever a governor can be. Sure, he shouldn’t have called you a liar (even though it’s true) or told you to kiss his gay ass, and you shouldn’t have been at that Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco anyway—but your pal Willie Brown invited you and since you’re not doing anything in Sacramento these days, you dropped in and got a predictable response.

So when you stopped bluffing about vetoing all the bills this year (but it was a really cool bluff, cuz it came from you) and signed some of them, you vetoed a minor bill authored by Ammiano and sent him a custom veto letter that was so clever that the letters on the left margin spelled “Fuck you”. This is the coolest, most clever F-bomb since the pop group April Wine released the song “If You See Kay” back in the ‘80’s, your steroids-and-groping decade. You and the frat boys in your office must’ve spent hours crafting the letter and admiring it, and I’ll bet you did it all on a furlough day so taxpayers weren’t pinched by it.

And it was so cool that you resisted the urge to call Ammiano a “girly man”, since he’s about the only member of the legislature who would take it as a compliment. The editorial writers at the San Francisco Chronicle weren’t that cool—the left margin of their editorial slamming your F-bomb spelled out “grow up, girlyman” which is just so, well, 2005.

What’s even cooler is that you have been sodomizing California’s Democrats on just about a daily basis since the summer of 2008. Since our real Governor, Grover Norquist, wouldn’t allow the GOP members of the legislature to work with you to resolve the budget crisis that you created when you killed the car tax on your first day in office (way cool–$26 billion cool!) you managed to get the Democrats to bend over and take it—leading up to the May special election. The Dems acted like your sex slaves—telling us that unless we approved that 6-pack of poison, that life as we know it would cease. The voters are smarter than you all reckoned, and rejected your “solutions” because they knew they were phony.

So then you spent the summer in Sacramento (not cool) and alienated most of the legislators by demanding an all-cuts budget with massive disinvestment in education and a clever offshore oil drilling scheme that didn’t generate much money and showed us that your concern about climate change is just an act from a bad actor.

And after the Democrats survived all-nighters and gave in to virtually all of your demands, you screwed them again with line-item vetoes of programs like domestic violence hotlines, even though you didn’t have the power to do so. Now that’s really clever and very cool—you rock, dude! Who needs a legislature or even a constitution when you’ve got power derived solely from ego?

Over the next 5 to 10 years, as we struggle to repair the considerable damage that you’ve done to California and its most vulnerable people, we will marvel that you were so clever, and so cool as you imposed disaster capitalism on California, dismantled Pat Brown’s dreams and left the rubble to his moonbeam son.

Your stint as governator may be your only foray into politics; I hope so. But I expect that you will let Carly Fiorina run against Boxer as the Republican, and jump in as an independent in the general, and hope that you can write a script that covers your massive failures to date. And we will scour that script carefully for crude and cryptic messages in the left margin.

Posted on Categories Podcast Info

Info on Podcast #61

Robert Parry comments on Matthew Hoh’s resignation and criticism of US Afghanistan policy; attorney Michael Risher of the ACLU talks about DNA profiling, and PBC pays tribute to the late Norton Buffalo. Parry says the US has given al Qaeda more than they wished for, and talks about Obama’s decision on troop additions. We also talk about Daniel Ellsberg and the new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America. And Parry takes a swipe at the mainstream media for declaring the “public option” dead, prematurely. Risher tells how California’s Prop 69 requires police to take DNA samples from felony suspects, even those who are innocent or not charged, and those samples stay in the DNA crime database. And Norton Buffalo, the harmonica genius who died on October 30, is warmly remembered by Peter B. listen_button