Aired: 11/17/13

The gap between rich and poor is huge and growing…legislative stalemate paralyzes the country…corporations fight federal regulations…the influence of money in politics is greater than ever…new inventions speed the pace of daily life.

Sound familiar? Those headlines from the early 1900s set the scene for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book The Bully Pulpit-a history of the first decade of the Progressive era – a time when courageous journalists and an ambitious president took on the Robber Barons – the 1% of their day – and won.
Goodwin tells the tale through the long friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft – a relationship that serves both until it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that cripples the progressive wing of the Republican Party and helps elect Woodrow Wilson.

Getting equal billing in her account is the golden age of journalism led by the muckraking press at McClure’s magazine. Together a bold and progressive press and a strong and progressive president served the people of the US rather than the super wealthy and the corporations. What lessons can we learn to help us turn this country around a century later?

www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com

d? Even more, how have they felt?

Aired: 11/10/13

How much do you know about what has taken place in Egypt since the start of 2011? Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of August 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. But what have these events evolved on the ground? Even more, how have they felt?

How much do you know about what has taken place in Egypt since the start of 2011? Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of August 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. But what have these events evolved on the ground? Even more, how have they felt?

 Aired: 11/3/13

Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.

After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as
we can from what works?

This week’s guest, JAY HARMON is doing just that, translating nature’s lessons and models into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. He’s the author of THE SHARK’S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. I believe biomimicry – a way of looking and working and designing – has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. I find this one of the most exciting developments in the world at this time.

www.thesharkspaintbrush.com

www.paxscientific.com

 Aired: 10/06/13

Aired: 10/06/13

What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to “support the troops?” If you’re like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, “Yeah, how? Where?” In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that’s flying over Pakistan or Yemen? 

Today’s guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don’t matter. 

The United States has been “at war” for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened between America’s soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an “abstraction” and military service “something for other people to do.” 

In his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of privatecontractors unable to achieve victory.

Aired 09/29/13

A new documentary film opened Friday 9/27 in 23 cities, including Los Angeles, starring former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, Berkeley professor, best-selling author, and frequent guest on this program, Robert Reich. Titled INEQUALITY FOR ALL, can it do for this “inconvenient truth” what the original did for climate change? My first guest this week will be the film’s director JACOB KORNBLUTH.

Early reviews are positive. It’s got a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93%. Here’s Ken Turan in the LA TIMES: Smart, funny and articulate, Robert Reich is the university professor we all wish we’d had. He’s so accessible and entertaining he takes a subject that sounds soporific and makes it come alive like you wouldn’t believe.

Here’s just a few numbers to remind you how crazy things have gotten:
* In 1978, a typical male worker made $48K, a typical member of the top 1% $393K. In 2010, a typical male worker made $34K – a drop of 30%, while a typical member of the top 1% made $1,101K a gain of 180%.
* In 2013, the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150M.
* And as remarkable as those numbers are, I think the most important number in the film is this one: Consumer spending = 70% of the US economy. (i.e., Middle class = job creators).

The last quarter of the show, we’ll get an important update on the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant from HARVEY WASSERMAN.