Aired 03/28/10

JOHN WEST has been the managing partner and owner of two law firms, practiced civil rights and employment law, and worked as a public defender. John is currently in the process of preparing an intense lobbying effort in various state legislatures where issues of patients' rights, especially Death With Dignity, are being debated and decided. The Last Goodnights Organization is the support arm for his efforts in this regard. The Last Goodnights is his first book.

In the memoir, The Last Goodnights, John West revealed for the first time a secret, which he'd kept from everyone, including his two sisters, for ten years. West helped each of his terminally ill parents commit suicide, a crime in the state of California, where the deaths took place.

http://www.thelastgoodnights.com

 

Aired 03/28/10

DALE BELL and HARRY WILAND, producers of the documentary GROWING GREENER SCHOOLS which will air on PBS stations in the month of April.

Across the country -- from elite neighborhoods to inner cities - a green school-based curriculum leads to increased test scores and more proficient learning. Students benefit from from more exposure to natural day lighting, fresh lunches or an eco-friendly school campus. Where the transformation has taken place, the results, are profound, especially in the face of a national consensus that our public schools are failing.

DALE BELL and HARRY WILAND, co-founders of the Media & Policy Center, are veteran film makers who, between them, have won an Academy Award (for Woodstock), five Emmys, one Peabody, two Christophers and two Cine Golden Eagles. They are both Ashoka Fellows, recognized as social entrepreneurs who use media effectively and creatively to inspire citizen action.

http://www.growinggreenerschools.org/
http://www.mediapolicycenter.org/

 

Aired 03/21/10

I've been trying to book William Greider ever since I read an article of his last August about restructuring the Federal Reserve. For some, the Fed is the at the center of all that ails us. For others, it is the right place to house any new financial regulatory powers we might gain as a result of the current crisis.

There are now 32 co-sponsors for S604 in the Senate and 317 for HR1207 in the House for bills to audit the Federal Reserve, and 95,000 have signed a petition at http://www.auditthefed.com/

Just yesterday The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled the Federal Reserve must disclose the names of banks that could have collapsed if they had not received emergency loans.

Greider wrote perhaps the finest book on the Federal Reserve and always seems to keep an eye on its secretive and too powerful ways. He challenged Greenspan and Paulson long before it was fashionable. And he was right.

We'll focus on the Fed and deal with other economic and political issues if we have time.

 

Aired 03/07/10

JOSEPH STIGLITZ became a full professor at Yale in 1970 at the age of 27, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, as the economist under 40 who had made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Oxford, and is now University Professor at Columbia University, Chair of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought, and co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

Stiglitz was a member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, and later Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ is the author of, among other books, Globalization and Its Discontents, Fair Trade for All, Making Globalization Work, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes, and his newest, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

http://www.josephstiglitz.com/

 

Aired 01/31/10

RICHARD WILKINSON & KATE PICKETT authors of an important new book: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

In the UK, the Guardian says The Spirit Level "might be the most important book of the year, and The New Statesman named it one of the top ten books of the past decade.

Based on thirty years' research, The Spirit Level shows that unequal societies are bad for the well-off as well as the poor, when it comes to health and social problems, child well being, life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, educational scores, drop out rates, illegal drug use, mental illness, homicide, incarceration, CO2 emissions, recycling, social mobility, innovation, and levels of trust.

The good news: If all these ills are related to one measure - income inequality, then, decreasing inequality should be the central goal of our politics because we can be confident that it works.

RICHARD WILKINSON has played a leading role in international research on inequality. He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology, and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School and Honorary Professor at University College London.

KATE PICKETT is a senior lecturer at the University of York and a National Institute for Health Research Career Scientist. She studied physical anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences at Cornell and epidemiology at Berkeley before spending four years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.