Beneath The Surface with Suzi Weissman

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We begin tonight's program with Harold Meyerson on Health Insurance reform: Harold wrote in Wednesday's Washington Post that the proposal to tax the Cadillac Plans is more like a Chevy Tax. We’ll ask him to comment on the House Plan, which leaves out the Kucinich amendment that allows states to opt for single payer.

Then Daniel Ellsberg joins us. He leaked the Pentagon Papers -- top-secret government documents that showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the Vietnam War -- in 1971. Today he talks to us about Mathew Hoh, the first US official to resign in protest over the Afghan war. Ellsberg calls Matthew Hoh’s resignation “The highest form of patriotism.” As for the war, Ellsberg sees the situation as Vietnamistan… stay tuned to find out what he means.

And later in the hour Richard Walker, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley talks to us about how California's budget meltdown and cutbacks in higher education are killing California’s Public University System. A coalition of Faculty, Staff and Students are fighting back,– and on Tuesday are joining the Latina/o community in using Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, to mourn these losses and to re-imagine a transformed university that could emerge from the current crisis.

And finally on tonight's BTS, we talk to Jack Rasmus about the so called recovery amidst increasing unemployment, falling consumer spending, the falling dollar, continuing foreclosures and economic decline.

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Barbara Ehrenreich joins us to talk about her new book:  Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. Millions of Americans are losing their jobs and their homes, and they are undeniably angry. Yet they are told to look on the bright side – as if visualizing happiness will chase away cancer, money will fall from the sky and foreclosures won’t happen. Pursuing happiness is one of our inalienable rights, but Ehrenreich shows how it has been turned into a “cult of cheerfulness,” that requires Americans to “think positively” rather than to take positive action for change.  There’s no excuse for failure, we’re told, optimism is the key to material success -- as if concentrating on the good makes the bad cease to exist.  If we lose our jobs and our homes, it must be our own fault, we didn’t focus enough on the good, right? ‘Be sure to tune in for Ehrenreich’s sensible, savage, and hilarious critique of the positive thinking movement’s pseudo-science and pseudo-intellectual foundation.

Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds, covered the pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times from 1999 to 2003. She recently wrote in the LA Times that allowing the government to use its substantial buying power to negotiate lower prices for medicine is one remedy missing from the legislation being written on health insurance reform.  That’s because drug companies, with the help of hundreds of hired lobbyists, have succeeded in keeping this proposal off the table, even though studies indicate it would save billions of dollars a year. Melody Petersen shows in her book on the pharmaceutical industry how the most profitable business sector in America (from 1995-2002) with nearly 65% of the population on physician-prescribed medicine, has lost its way. Rather than plowing their profits back into life-saving drugs, the drug makers have used the money to influence the science of medicine with their cash, making drugs that are profitable but not always an advance. In too many, cases, whether a medicine helps or harms a patient has become secondary to how much it will bring shareholders in profits.

Plus: We talk to Israeli historian (University of Tel Aviv) Shlomo Sand whose book on nationalism and Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People, (Verso) spent 19 weeks on the bestseller list in Israel and won the coveted Aujourd’hui award in France.  It also sparked considerable debate and scandal – Sand’s scholarly study demolishes myths and taboos that surround Jewish and Israeli history.  Was there really a forced exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans? Sand evaluates the national myth of the Jewish exile from the promised land and finds the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times — when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story --  and the evidence shows that that there was a Jewish religion, but not a Jewish people, and the exile never happened. Jews actually descend from converts whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Bertell Ollman of NYU says “This may be the most important and surprising book on Zionism, Israel and Judaism written in the last fifty years. Nothing in the Middle East looks the same after reading it.” 

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If you pay attention to Wall Street, mainstream economists and investor blogs, the verdict on the economy -- one year after its near collapse -- is that the recession is over and the recovery is about to begin (or is underway).  Sure unemployment is at an all time high with little end in sight, but the banks are back and the stock market could hit 10,000 at any minute now.  But the dollar is falling and that makes economists rush for the ‘gold standard’ mentality, the one that worsened the depression because it obsesses about inflation in the face of deflation, opposes easy credit when it is desperately needed and is against government creating jobs. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman worries about this mentality, and Jack Rasmus decries the falsity of recovery, and the banks mostly failed the stress test. The banking panic is over but a year after near collapse, the financial system is fragile at best, with moribund credit and lending, commercial property in trouble, a broke FDIC  and the real economy in deep trouble, at best a “pause on the way down.”

Health insurance reform is moving forward, but Jamie Court says the Baucus bill is a major step backward. Over all it is a gift to the insurance industry, and the public option was smothered in a lobbyist love blanket. But is it dead on arrival? We’ll ask our favorite consumer watch dog --Jamie Court.

And finally, on tonight’s Beneath The Surface, Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former war correspondent for the NY Times, joins us to talk about his new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies – and Hedges says we are dying now.  His new book examines the rift between the two Americas – and sees our culture as detached from intellectualism, instead relying on spectacle, false idols and snake oil salesmen to distract us from the economic, political and moral collapse around us. He warns that those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to reassure and entertain them.

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It is one year since Lehman Bros was allowed to fail and finance capital collapsed, credit seized and the world nearly plunged into the abyss. State intervention in the form of bailouts and nationalizations prevented the worst, but Main Street is suffering mightily in this epic recession while Wall Street is still in charge, bolstered by taxpayer cash. Unemployment is at record highs, poverty is soaring, houses are still foreclosing, hitting black and brown families hardest, where depression has become a fact of life. On tonight’s BTS we talk to Nomi Prins about Wall Street and the economy a year after the meltdown, chronicled in her new book, It Takes a Pillage, out later this month. Nomi puts her Wall Street experience and expertise on the “arcane methods used to turn your money into their bonuses” into a scathing account that shows how “the key players escaped being brought to account and kept their pet officials in power.”

We begin tonight’s program with our own Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who has been blogging and broadcasting about the boisterous backlash targeting President Obama’s efforts to reform healthcare. Hutchinson points to the paranoid, racist extreme right wing politics behind the mobilization, whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh -- who along with longer-term leaders of the far right are exploiting the fear, anger and frustration of outright racists, conspiracy theorists, gun enthusiasts and anti-tax activists. Hutchinson writes that hate groups bank on the volatile mix of frustration and hostility toward a government they feel has betrayed them, and a black President whose message of change scares them – to swell their ranks. That, he says, is a chilling prospect for Obama and all of us.

Continuing where Earl Ofari Hutchinson leaves off on the theme of crazy, paranoid, racist politics in our bizarre culture and politics, Paul Krassner joins us to preview his latest collection Who's to Say What's Obscene. With his usual irreverence and unique perspective on obscenity and comedy, Krassner looks at free speech and self-censorship in the face of threats — real and perceived — from religious fundamentalists. He also riffs about busted public figures, counterculture, free speech, late-night talk shows, censorship, sex, and the current state of satire. "These are times of repression," says Krassner, "and the more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those in authority."

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We celebrate Labor Day today with Canada – isolated from workers all over the world who celebrate labor on May 1st -- commemorating the bloody repression of workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square (1886) who were fighting for the 8 hour day. After decades in the wilderness we have a labor friendly administration – but how goes labor? We’ll ask Maria Elena Durazo and Steven Greenhouse.

Maria Elena Durazo, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of labor (AFL-CIO), the largest labor council in the country, makes no apologies for continuing to push her cause: fighting for union workers. The state may be going broke, jobs may be vanishing like the morning mist, and the nation may be enduring its worst economic stretch in decades. But Southern California's top labor leader says this is not the time for unions to beat a retreat. On the contrary. She joins us to talk about the state of labor today.

Steven Greenhouse, labor correspondent for the New York Times and author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker regularly reports on the state of labor, showing how employers have been squeezing the life out of American workers – most recently by cheating low wage workers out of hard earned pay – but also how workers are fighting back, and how consistently their friends in government back them up in the fight they say they also champion.

Plus: Vintage clips from labor heroes Walter Reuther and Eugene V. Debs.

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It’s our Back to School Special:  Education Reform, Charter Schools and the right to equal, public education, a civil rights issue of our time.

We begin our discussion of the staggering injustices and savage inequalities of our education system with long time education reformer, teacher and writer Jonathan Kozol, who insists that children are not commodities to be “herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.”  Reform efforts continue to measure children by the standard of whether “they will be future deficits or assets for our nation’s competitive needs” instead of seeing them for “the blessings that they are.” Kozol writes “so long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.”  We’ll ask Jonathan about the state of schools and reform in the nation today.

We are then joined by Danny Weil, educator and advocate who says that reform proposals in Los Angeles amount to an assault on public education. His book Charter Schools comes out in September and he’s published a three part series on Charter Schools at counterpunch.org. We’ll talk about the move to Charter Schools, their record, and Mayor Villaraigosa’s plan to allow 250 LAUSD public schools to be operated as Charter Schools. Weil writes that the LA Unified School Board has voted to auction off kids, and “outside operators” are poised to start bidding in January 2010.

Continuing our discussion of education reform, Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods joins us from Boston. The UMN has two education campaign coalitions: RISE (Rally in Support of Public Education) and BP4BPS (Black People for Better Public Schools) to take on the inequities of public education with committed community involvement in Massachusetts.  He sees education equity and quality as the Civil Rights issue of our time. Small notes that the movement to more Charter Schools is accompanied by increased underfunding for public schools, exacerbating the already appalling state of public education in Boston. The solution? Full civic engagement and forcing change with involved parents and communities. He joins our discussion

Also: an update on the fires raging in Southern California:  Jon Keeley, expert on the ecological impacts and history of wildfires in Southern California joins us for an overview. He teaches in UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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Is it Prosecution Time? Today, the C.I.A. is set to disclose previously unreleased portions of a 2004 inspector general's report, providing fresh details about the CIA interrogation program and abuses inside its secret prisons. Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and national Security Project says, "This is not about a 'few bad apples' that disregarded official policy. Official policy - approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government - itself crossed the line. What we need is a comprehensive, independent inquiry into post-9/11 abuses in our counterterrorism policies." She joins us.

Elections and war in Afghanistan, increased violence in Iraq: Can we stop the wars? Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning thinks there is a connection between war funding and our sorry state of healthcare. The insurance companies have won and Hedges says this isn’t reform, it’s a robbery. The real debate, according to Hedges, “is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation.”

Credit card industry reform went into August 21: did you notice? Danny Schechter, News Dissector, and producer of “In Debt We Trust” fills us in how credit card companies are ahead of the attempts to reform them, just like the insurance companies are with respect to health care reform. Danny also has tips to stop the squeeze.

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Robert Reich, Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, had a seat at the table at the last attempt to overhaul our then-ailing and now broken healthcare delivery system. As the Obama administration signals they are willing to let go of the ‘public option’ it looks like the insurance industry’s twisted tactics Wendell Potter warned about here a few weeks ago – plus the $1.4 million per day the opponents of health care reform are spending -- are winning. We’ll ask Reich what he thinks can be done to get to meaningful reform of health care delivery, why fear mongering demagogues seem to define the agenda, and why the Democrats back down so easily on the only ingredient in reform—the public option— that can actually help repair the system.

Colin Robinson, formerly of Verso Books, The New Press and Scribner knows up close and personally what is going on in the world of publishing. Does Kindle and electronic publishing raise the question, whither books? Colin Robinson remains upbeat and his new start-up in publishing may indicate what is possible in the new world of publishing ideas.

Plus: Loren Goldner, who splits his time between New York and Seoul, South Korea updates us on the factory occupation/strike at Ssangyong Motors at Pyeongtaek that he reported on a few weeks ago.

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On tonight’s program Wendell Potter joins us to talk about what health insurance industry insiders are doing to kill or maim key components of Obama’s health care reform as it makes its way through the congress and Senate – like having a competing public plan and an employer pay-or-play mandate. Wendell Potter should know -- he was the chief corporate spokesman at CIGNA and is now a whistle-blower speaking out on the twisted tactics he knows the industry is using to keep health insurance reform friendly to wall street interests and profits.

We then turn to a significant but under-reported or non-reported story in South Korea – where an heroic factory occupation is in its tenth week, and the government is using draconian methods to defeat the occupying workers at Ssangyong Motors at Pyeongtaek. Riot cops have tear-gassed and beaten workers and those supporting the occupation outside the factory, water and gas supply has been cut to pressure the workers to end their ten week occupation. Loren Goldner, who splits his time between New York and Seoul, South Korea and is writing a political history of the Korean working class, joins us.

Click here for South Korea Strike Updates

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A dozen union presidents met with President Obama today to press labor’s national priorities: health care reform, labor law reform, and labor’s role in making certain the economic stimulus doesn’t leave out working people. On tonight’s Beneath The Surface we’ll look at what a revitalized labor movement and real street heat could mean for the economy, healthcare and labor law reform.

As employer groups and the insurance industry meet with Washington legislative committees to craft health care policy to their liking, Harold Meyerson writes that everyone is waiting for Obama to ramp up street heat -- because the organizing efforts so far to press for genuine reform have about as much chance of affecting the final policy as the phases of the moon.  We’ll talk to Harold about health care reform, and we’ll also ask him about the Sotomayor confirmation show just getting underway, the California budget crisis and prospects for labor law reform.

We follow that with an extended conversation with Steve Early, participatory labor journalist whose new book Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home provides just the kind of historical memory needed as the labor movement struggles to revive in this economic crisis. We’ll talk to Steve about today’s meeting between Obama and labor leaders, the prospects for labor unity, how the struggle for the reforms that matter today compare with reform efforts when there was a muscular labor movement -- labor’s role in economic recovery and more.

And finally, Nalini Lasiewicz returns for more on the upcoming KPFK local advisory board elections: and how the evolution of Pacifica’s governance structure affects your favorite listening. All this, when our program returns, in just a moment.