Beneath The Surface with Suzi Weissman

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A unique strain of swine flu is the suspected killer of more than 100 people in Mexico. The worrisome new virus — which combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before — also sickened people in Texas and California. Confirmed or suspected cases have also been reported in Canada, Brazil, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Mike Davis, author of The Monster at our Door about Avian flu, says “The really dangerous swine wears suits.” He’ll tell us why.

Plus, Paul Mason joins us in our continuing coverage of the economic crisis. His book Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, published by Verso today (April 27), tells the story, blow by blow, of the financial crash that destroyed investment banks and brought the global economy to its knees, undermining three decades of neo-liberal orthodoxy. He’s the Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight, so he had a ringside seat. It explains how we got here - from the shadow banking system, to subprime, to the commodities speculation that forced a billion people to go without meals in mid-2008. Paul says the neo-liberal era is over – and has a few suggestions about what kind of capitalism could emerge from its ruins.

And -- The first-ever Labor and Social Justice Fair at CSU Dominguez Hills will take place on Thursday, April 30, in prep for May Day, commemorating the martyrs of Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Massacre, who were fighting for the eight-hour work day. We’ll talk to Mannie Lares and Vivian Price.

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Is Capitalism bankrupt? Are the rescue efforts just transferring/laundering money from the taxpayers to the financial fraudsters? We’ll talk to Matt Taibbi, who says the global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. He writes that Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution and Obama's top economic adviser (Lawrence Summers) is greedy and highly compromised.

Continuing in our “Sounds like Socialism” series, Bertell Ollman joins us to talk about the return of Marx: Surveys show that confidence in capitalism is slipping and in Germany Marx’s books are flying off the shelves. We’ll ask Bertell, who says difference between the real economy (Main Street) and the finance/virtual economy (Wall Street) is the latter is all about giving (or denying) people permission to use the goods and services that make up the real economy about the crisis of confidence in capitalism and where he thinks it will lead.

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The economy continues to be our top story as President Obama returns from the G20 meeting where he tried to persuade European economies to participate in large stimulus packages to coordinate the global response to a global downturn/depression/epic recession.

Max Fraad Wolff worries that justified public anger is getting in the way of understanding the rescue plan which spends REAL taxpayer money. He understands why the public is VERY, VERY angry but says we are ignoring the Fed, FDIC, and Treasury plans that bypass Congress and spend trillions, while we focus on Madoff and AIG bonuses. Instead, the public should focus on how to save millions of jobs, college educations, retirements, homes, hopes, enterprises and industries.

Christopher Phelps joins us to look beyond Economic Revival to an examination of New Deal approaches which are still viable -- and worth emulating. We’ll also talk about the role of labor – then and now.

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President Obama goes to London this week for the G20 summit meeting, tasked with rescuing, revitalizing and rebuilding the global financial system. In an incredibly prescient article, Peter Gowan argues against mainstream accounts, that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Call it the era of plundering finance capital or, as Gowan does, the New Wall Street system. He traces the contours of the Atlantic model, and the geopolitical, ideological and economic implications of its blow-out. We’ll ask him what can be expected from the G20 summit, his views on the economic crisis and the prospects for the future.

In the second half of the program Richard Lichtman joins us for a philosophic and political exploration of the used and abused concepts of freedom and relates it to our current economic malaise.

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We’re in an economic meltdown with public anger boiling over at the bankers, insurers and bonus-getters among them. In the second half of the hour we’ll talk to Tom Geoghegan, fresh from his bid for Congress in Chicago, who has the cover story in the current Harpers Magazine: he writes that unlimited interest rates (aka usury) have destroyed the economy – and he has plenty to say about Labor in telling the story.

But first we’ll talk to John Nichols who has written in the April 6 issue of The Nation with Robert McChesney that the collapse of journalism threatens democracy itself and that’s why we need a government rescue. They say that the threat to newspapers and journalism in communities across America is the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the USA.

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Lizz Winstead, co-creator and head writer of the Daily Show joins us in studio to talk about the state of the bloated morning television talk-shows. Her send-up satire “Wake Up World” boasts that it is, “America’s only six-hour morning show.” Wake Up World responds to current topical news but its true goal is to capture and satirize all the conventions of morning shows. Lizz Winstead and her “Shoot the Messenger” group will have two performances in Los Angeles at the Steve Allen Theater on March 17 & 18.

UCLA economic historian Robert Brenner, author of The Economics of Global Turbulence and The Boom and the Bubble returns tonight to explain the origins of the deepening economic crisis, the bail-outs and what we can expect from the Obama economic team.

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On tonight’s BTS – we begin with the historic Presidential Memorandum President Obama signed this morning at the White House, lifting the restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research imposed by former President Bush, which allowed political and religious ideology to influence scientific decisions across an array of issues. Irv Weissman – director of Stanford University’s Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute, professor of Medicine and the first to isolate stem cells, has been fighting that ban for eight years. He flew to Washington to be at the White House Ceremony and joins us today to discuss the importance of what happened.

We then turn to our ‘sounds like socialism’ series. "We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declared – and as the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. Because Newsweek started the discussion mainstream , the New York Times over the weekend actually had a reporter, Peter Baker, ask Pres. Obama head on if he was indeed a socialist. Surprised by the question, Obama said he wasn’t. The right wants to tarnish Obama’s agenda with the socialist ‘feather’ and the NYT unwittingly played along. But the Nation began a series this week called “Reaimagining Socialism” with the first article by Barbara Ehrenrich and Bill Fletcher Jr. In our own continuing sounds like socialism series, we’ll talk to Bill Fletcher Jr. about his thoughts on socialism, nationalizations and bailouts, as well as the prospects for labor in the current economic climate.

And finally – Mexico’s drug war is destabilizing, violent, hurting tourism on the border as students prepare for Spring Break, and has crossed over the border into US cities and states from California to Alabama, Washington to Alaska and Hawaii. We’ll talk to Laura Carlsen in Mexico about the situation, US involvement and more.

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Tomorrow there is a mayoral election in Los Angeles, and we’ll be lucky if we get a ten-15% turnout. Cities across the nation hardly fare better. We talk to Roy Ulrich for his understanding of the importance and relevance of this election – and why so few seem to care enough to vote.

We then move to the February 12 Israeli election – that has still failed to produce a coalition government. The Center Right Party Kadima (Tsipi Livni) got the most seats, yet the right-wing nationalist Likud (Benyamin Netanyahu) is forming the government. The new feature is the Lieberman factor – he is the Russian deal-maker, and his party – Israel is Our Home -- is crypto fascist and racist. The political configuration is complex and Yoav Peled will help us understand.

Moving to the economy – the Dow plunged below 7000 today for the first time in eleven years, as confidence plummets with the insolvency of the banks and AIG. Jack Rasmus joins us for an update on the continuing and deepening financial crisis behind the stock market collapse and why the Obama administration bank bailout won’t work.

And finally, Saul Landau’s “Fidel” gets its first release on DVD, 40 years after Saul had unfettered access to Fidel for a week. We’ll talk to Saul.

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The "N" word is out in the open, and if lefties are confused that the likes of Lindsay Graham, Alan Greenspan and John McCain are among those calling for nationalization of the failing banks while the Obama administration treads slowly, we’ll ask Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson to sort out the various meanings of nationalization. Their new article on The Nation website "Nationalize Failing Banks? Think Twice" argues that temporarily taking over the banks is necessary, will protect taxpayers and work fast. Like single-payer health insurance, "the great advantage of the scheme is its simplicity. It tackles the main problems head on. It gets the toxic assets -- all of them -- off the books of the banks at once. And it minimizes ultimate costs to taxpayers.” Cost to taxpayers is the talking point, but collapse of the financial system is the issue.

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Adam Curtis (Century of the Self) has a new documentary, The Trap, which examines game theory and the Prisoners Dilemma as the strategic underpinning of the Cold War, based on the belief that humans are alone, act in their own self interest, and make rational choices – and will always betray. A Rand study showed the opposite, that humans cooperate and make the choice not to betray, but no matter – the analysts simply believed they had chosen unfit subjects but the model was correct. The theory came from work of John Nash, a paranoid schizophrenic deeply suspicious of everyone around him. He later repudiated his own theories as part of his illness. Curtis believes that this mathematical model of society, run on data and based on an exaggerated notion of human selfishness, (and the economic theories of von Hayek) has created a ‘cage’ for the Western world.

Using Britain under Blair and America under Clinton and then Bush, Curtis examines the “cage” these theories have created. Drugs like Prozac and psychological symptoms of anxiety and depression were being used to normalize behavior and make humans behave more predictably like machines. Curtis observes that the game theory/free market model is deeply flawed and the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths! Finally, Curtis examines the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced by Isaiah Berlin, which Tony Blair tried to implement .. The documentary reviews the Blair government and argues it achieved the opposite of freedom and the type of liberty it engendered lacked any kind of meaning and its military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the UK, which were then used to justify restrictions of liberty at home. The program concludes that the logical conclusion of following these models – as governments have for the last 50 years – has resulted in a society without meaning populated by selfish automatons.

There is more – and we will be offering this documentary as a thank you gift today for those who contribute to our winter fund drive and become listener-sponsors of KPFK. As the economy sinks there is a small investment you can make that will make a difference: keeping alternative voices on the air, bringing you information, analysis and understanding that will help in navigating these turbulent waters. Please consider pledging and show your support.