Al Franken’s Nutritional Candy
Written on February 11th, 2005February 11, 2005 | This interview originally aired on Free Forum with Terrence McNally on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio.
After a wonderful career on Saturday Night Live and then debunking right-wing propaganda in his best-selling books and Grammy-winning audio books, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken has taken the fight to America’s airwaves on Air America. With co-host Katherine Lanpher, Franken offers three hours a day of commentary and comedy, as well as substantive interviews – last week’s guests included FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmunds, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, The Innocence Project’s Barry Scheck, David Brock, author of The Republican Noise Machine, and Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.
The fastest growing network in radio history, Air America is now on in 50 markets, including seven of the top 10, and doing very well against Rush, Hannity and the rest of the rabid right.
And while Franken isn’t yet running for senator of Minnesota, could a leap into politics be too far in the future?
Welcome, Al Franken, to KPFK and Free Forum.
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Matters of Justice
Written on September 29th, 2004September 29, 2004
| Cornel West argues in his new book, “Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism,” that if America hopes to be a steward of democracy around the world, we must first face up to our own history of imperialist corruptions. According to West, these include racism in America, Christian fundamentalism and its political influence, Israeli-U.S. relations, and the weakness of the Democratic Party. And finally he asks of Americans: Do we have what it takes to be citizens in the ancient Greek vision of democracy?
Cornell West is Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University, after a fairly public exit from Harvard in 2002. The author of “Race Matters,” winner of the American Book Award ten years ago, West is a multimedia citizen, featured as Counselor West in “The Matrix” films, and creator of two hip-hop CDs, “Street Knowledge” and “Sketches of My Culture.”
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Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy
Written on September 21st, 2004September 21, 2004 | Over the last few years Arundhati Roy has become a powerful and important global citizen writing and speaking out against the excesses of corporate globalization, privatization of essential resources, and United States imperialism. Naomi Klein says “with her writing and her actions, Roy has placed herself in opposition to anyone who treats people as collateral damage – of a mega-dam, a terrorist attack, or a military invasion,” and Roy has described herself as “a black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience.”
Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “The God of Small Things.” She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.
Roy has also become known internationally for her literate and powerful political essays in books like “Power Politics,” “War Talk,” “The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile” (interviews with David Barsamian), and her latest, “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.”
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Back to Kansas
Written on August 20th, 2004August 20, 2004 | Why does the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, his job, and his pension? Why do blue-collar workers all over America, who embrace a moral agenda focused on things like opposition to abortion and gay marriage and support for school prayer, consistently vote against their own interests?
In ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,’ Thomas Frank looks to his traditionally “red-voting” native state of Kansas to examine the GOP’s success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street millionaires, between workers and bosses, between populists and right-wingers.
The bio on Thomas Frank’s website reads: “Born on the wild plains of Kansas, Tom pulled himself up by his bootstraps, learned to read, write, and cipher. He likes big steaks, bar-b-que, and most other meat dishes.”
Let me add: Founding editor of The Baffler, Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool, and a contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, and The New York Times op-ed page.
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Voices of the Invisible People
Written on August 16th, 2004August 16, 2004 | During the past 20 years, more than 65 million people across the globe have become infected with HIV. Around the world, 25 million have died – more than all of the battle deaths in the 20th century combined. By decade’s end there will be an estimated 25 million AIDS orphans. If trends continue, by 2025, 250 million global HIV-AIDS cases are a distinct possibility.
According to Greg Behrman, author of “The Invisible People: How The U.S. Has Slept Through The Global Aids Pandemic, The Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe Of Our Time,” the pandemic is reshaping the social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions of our world. Decimating national economies, creating an entire generation of orphans, the disease is generating pressures that will lead to instability and possibly even state failure and collapse in sub-Saharan Africa. Poised to explode in India, China, Eastern Europe and Russia, AIDS will have devastating and destabilizing effects that will reverberate throughout the global economy and the international political order.
Despite all this, Behrman points out the United States has consistently failed to act decisively.
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