Vote like an Egyptian?

Please call 713 526 5738 during the show and support The Monitor. You can also donate securely online – just make sure you pick The Monitor from the list of shows. Our guest two weeks ago was Richard Wolff. You can still get a copy of Wolff’s Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It by pledging $100 to the show or you can get the book and a DVD or CD of a speech by Richard Wolff for $150. You can also get a copy of Gary Rivlin‘s Broke, USA with your $100 pledge.

More about our guest – Gary Rivlin

Gary Rivlin is journalist and the author of 5 works of non-fiction, including most recently Broke, USA, an investigation of the poverty industry (check cashers, payday lenders, pawnbrokers, etc.). Gary is a former NY Times reporter whose work has appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine, Wired, Salon, among other publications. Gary is also co-editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara Ehrenreich.

Rivlin just wrote the piece “America’s Poverty Tax,” where he reports on the exorbitant fees the poor and the working poor pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings.

Quote: “The numbers show it’s very expensive to be poor.” The article states: “Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the 40 million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.”

Article: “America’s Poverty Tax”

Please call 713 526 5738 during the show and support The Monitor. You can also donate securely online – just make sure you pick The Monitor from the list of shows. Our guest two weeks ago was Richard Wolff. You can still get a copy of Wolff’s Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It by pledging $100 to the show or you can get the book and a DVD or CD of a speech by Richard Wolff for $150. You can also get a copy of Gary Rivlin‘s Broke, USA with your $100 pledge.

The Monitor has a goal of $1000 per show. Last week’s show did well and we thank everyone who helped us reach our goal. We do have to do it again this week however and we will have the help of our guest – Sibel Edmonds who just released a new memoir called Classified Woman

Please call 713 526 5738 during the show and support The Monitor. You can also donate securely online – just make sure you pick The Monitor from the list of shows. Our guest last week was Richard Wolff. You can get a copy of Wolff’s Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It by pledging $100 to the show or you can get the book and a DVD or CD of the speech by Richard Wolff for $150.

About this week’s guest:

Sibel Edmonds is the editor of Boiling Frogs Post and founder- director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, and has appeared on national radio and TV as a commentator on matters related to whistleblowers, national security and excessive government secrecy, and has been featured on 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC,  NPR, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The American Conservative, and others.

Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI where she reported serious acts of security breaches and cover-ups, and for that she was retaliated against and ultimately fired. Court proceedings were blocked by the assertion of the State Secrets Privilege, and the U.S. Congress has been gagged and prevented from taking up or even discussing her case through retroactive classification issued by the Department of Justice.

Ms. Edmonds began her career in 1993 as Project Director for the Rostropovich Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organization providing medical and food aid to children of the former Soviet Union. She re-located to St. Petersburg, Russia and managed correspondence, shipments, inventory and security precautions in the largest children’s hospital in St. Petersburg. Later, she worked as the Executive Director & Co-Founder of Edmonds Industries, a Consulting and Holding Company, investing in international business and residential real estate development. Ms. Edmonds also worked as a volunteer for the Alexandria CASA program (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for abused children, and as an instructor for the Alexandria Office on Women’s Domestic Violence Program.

Ms. Edmonds has an MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. She is certified as a Court Appointed Special Advocate and as an instructor for the Women’s Domestic Violence Program, and is fluent in English, Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.

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Please call 713 526 5738 during the show and support The Monitor. You can also donate securely online – just make sure you pick The Monitor from the list of shows. Our guest last week was Richard Wolff. You can get a copy of Wolff’s Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It by pledging $100 to the show or you can get the book and a DVD or CD of the speech by Richard Wolff for $150.

Our guest this week is Richard Wolff. You can get a copy of Wolff’s “Capitalism Hits The Fan” by pledging $100.

More about our guests:

David Shipler

David Shipler is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Former Foreign Correspondent of The New York Times. He worked for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988, reporting from New York, Saigon, Moscow, and Jerusalem before serving as chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, DC.

He wrote the best-seller Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, published in 1983, updated in 1989, which won the Overseas Press Club Award in 1983 as the best book that year on foreign affairs. His book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, was a national best-seller in 2004 and 2005. It was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award. It won several awards, including the Outstanding Book Award from The Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights at Simmons College. He has just finished two books on civil liberties: The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties, published in 2011 and Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Today’s America, in 2012.

Quote: (from the article)
“The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

“But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.”
Article: Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.

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Margaret Hu

Margaret Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School and is the author of a forthcoming article in the U.C. Davis Law Review titled “Reverse-Commandeering.” Her research interests include the intersection of immigration policy, national security, and civil rights, as well as critical legal studies.  She joined the Duke Law faculty in 2010 as a senior lecturing fellow in Duke’s Program in Public Law.  Hu previously served as senior policy advisor for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and also served as special policy counsel in the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC), Civil Rights Division, U. S. Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C. As Special Policy Counsel, Hu managed a team of attorneys and investigators in the enforcement of the anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and was responsible for federal immigration policy review and coordination for OSC.

Quote:“As the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Arizona v. U.S., one of the main legal questions it considered is this: Whether Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) is preempted by federal immigration law under the Supremacy Clause. This is a statutory-driven inquiry that misses the constitutional mark. The more relevant question is this: Whether SB 1070 poses a threat to the vertical separation of powers. …

“The recent tidal wave of thousands of immigration control efforts proposed by state and local governments can best be characterized as ‘reverse-commandeering’ laws. Setting migration policy at the national level, like establishing a national currency, falls within the sole power of the federal government. Reverse-commandeering by the states is an effort to usurp the federal government’s sole prerogative. This growing movement represents an attempt to control the terms of what federal resources and officers must be appropriated to accommodate a myriad of state immigration enforcement programs. It is a deliberate attempt to skew the immigration enforcement power in favor of the states. …

“Given the impact of immigration policy on foreign and interstate commerce, international treaties, and foreign relations, the Court has concluded that controlling migration patterns is strictly the prerogative of the federal government. Consequently, the growing proliferation of thousands of proposed state and local immigration laws should be examined doctrinally within a commandeering jurisprudential frame. To fail to do so — to continue to accept mirror image theory carte blanche as a favored method of statutory interpretation under the existing preemption doctrine — threatens federal sovereignty. Put another way, it eviscerates the federal government’s ability to develop and implement a coherent, efficacious, and uniform immigration policy at the national level.”

Article:
SB 1070 and Reverse-Commandeering Immigration Laws

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More about this week’s guests:

Stephen M. Kohn

Stephen M. Kohn serves as a supervising attorney for the legal work performed by attorneys associated with the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund. He is the author of The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step by Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself (Lyons Press, 2011).

Kohn started representing whistleblowers full-time in 1984 as the Clinical Director and Director of Corporate Litigation for the Government Accountability Project. In addition to the Handbook, Kohn has written seven other books on whistleblower law and civil liberties, including, in 1985, the first-ever legal treatise on whistleblower law. His clients have blown the whistle on billion dollar tax frauds, unsafe disposal of toxic wastes, illegal “no-bid” contracts given to corporate insiders, high level misconduct in the White House, and forensic fraud in the world-renowned FBI crime lab that prejudiced important criminal investigations, such as the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombing cases.

Kohn worked with Congress on drafting the whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts, and he was extensively involved in the SEC’s whistleblower rulemaking proceeding.

Kohn earned his Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude from Boston University, a Master’s Degree in political science from Brown University and a Juris Doctor degree from the Northeastern University School of Law. Mr. Kohn is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia.

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Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein

Mikey Weinstein is the Founder and President of the four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominated civil rights organization known as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and author of WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. He is an honor graduate of the USAF Academy, a former White House Counsel in the Reagan Administration and former General Counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corporation. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

MRFF represents over 27,000 soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, cadets, midshipmen, and armed forces veteran clients. MRFF also represents more than 10% of all Muslim Americans in the armed forces.

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More about our guests:

Lenny Charles Labanco

Chicago based MB Financial Bank is on another financial rampage. The bank is again  trying to use the court system to white wash a fraudulent loan and turn it into a legitimate mortgage note for the purpose of foreclosure and sale of a valuable New York City property. If it succeeds with the scam, the bank will realize a $10MM + payday in selling off the building that is worth upwards of $20 MM. And, when  the smoke clears, a prominent progressive media resource called INN and the community center will soon be closed.

The not for profit news group INN World Report headed by a 10 year veteran news reporter and its President/Founder Lenny Charles Labanco is about to lose not only its studios, but also the popular community center at 56 Walker Street in TriBeCa that it has operated for the last 5 years. As a news reporting team specializing in social justice and rights issues INN “the International News Net” broke stories daily for Free Speech TV, WBAI, and dozens of affiliates across the country since 2003. As operators of the 200 seat center on the ground floor, which goes under the name of ‘Epifaneo Cafe,’ it has been a host to Occupy Wall Street, conferences, film screenings, fund raisers, art exhibits, and live music events on a weekly basis. The list of guests featured by INN for events and TV appearances is impressive, including names like Presidential candidates Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, activists such as  Bobby Kennedy, Jr, ,Gore Vidal, etc.

• With nearly half the Supreme Court justices who will pass judgment on the 2010 healthcare law beyond the age where they have to worry about their access to basic care, a leading voice for nurses is saying that “all Americans should have the same level of security about their health.” We talk to Karen Higgins about health care treatment, mandates, costs and Medicare.

More information about our guests this week:

Jeremiah Goulka

Jeremiah Goulka is an independent writer and public policy analyst who comments on the politics and policy of U.S. national and homeland security.  From 2007 to 2010, he was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he conducted research for the U.S. military.  He was the lead author of “The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum”, a member of the RAND team that helped end “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and a staffer on the Congressionally-mandated Military Leadership Diversity Commission.  Previously, he worked on Hurricane Katrina recovery, served as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, and was a law clerk to a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  He studied history at Bowdoin College and the Sorbonne and has law degrees from the universities of Chicago and Edinburgh.

One of the people whose work I often recommend on the show is Glenn Greenwald. He has been on The Monitor and writes for Salon.com One of his recent pieces features Jeremiah’s work. Says Greenwald: “Jeremiah Goulka worked as a lawyer in the Bush Justice Department, and then went to work as an analyst with the RAND Corporation, where he was sent to Iraq to analyze, among other things, the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), publishing an oft-cited study on the group. MEK has been in the news of late because a high-powered bipartisan cast of former Washington officials have established close ties with the group and have been vocally advocating on its behalf, often in exchange for large payments, despite MEK’s having been formally designated by the U.S. Government as a Terrorist organization. That close association on the part of numerous Washington officials with a Terrorist organization has led to a formal federal investigation of those officials.

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Karen Higgins

Karen Higgins is a staff nurse at Boston Medical Center and a past president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. She has been actively involved with the  MNA for nearly twenty years, and has been a key player in all of its important advocacy and legislative initiatives—from safe staffing to single-payer healthcare. Karen has also served as the MNA Board’s secretary and on its Cabinet for Labor Relations as both chair and vice chair. In addition, she was the co-chair of the MNA’s Statewide Campaign for Safe Care, the chairperson of the MNA’s Nursing Shortage Task Force, and a founding member of the Task Force on Workplace Violence. Karen is a fiercely loyal union sister and she has been a leading voice at the MNA for the need for a strong national union by and for front line nurses. Her commitment to nursing and her leadership role in the creation of National Nurses United were key factors in the MNA memberships’ endorsement of her position as one of three co-presidents of the new organization.
National Nurses United is the country’s largest union and professional organization of registered nurses, with more than 150,000 members nationwide.

Quote:
“For these judges, that means no concerns about being bankrupted by medical bills, denied needed treatment because some insurance agent deemed it ‘experimental’ or ‘not medically necessary,’ barred from choosing the provider of their choice because they were ‘out of network’ or forced to keep an unwanted job to maintain their present employer-paid coverage.”

“That guarantee could be achieved by extending Medicare, for which four of the nine judges already qualify, to everyone, without raising constitutional questions posed by the individual mandate that forces everyone without coverage to buy private, commercial health insurance” said the 170,000-member National Nurses United in a statement today.

Higgins added: “The Obama administration and Congress could have pre-empted the legal fight over their law by instead just expanding Medicare, a more humane, cost effective system which has no constitutional questions, to everyone under 65.

“Even now, Congress and the President could pre-empt an adverse court ruling by passing Medicare-for-all legislation currently in Congress, S 915 and HR 1200, and end our healthcare nightmare once and for all.”

This week’s show features interviews with two guests around the theme of revolution and social change. Our first guest is Chuck Collins, author of 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do about It. Our second guest is Cindy Sheehan, author of Revolution, A Love Story: A Better World is Possible.

More about our guests:

Chuck Collins

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and directs IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and author of several books, including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, co-authored with Felice Yeskel. (New Press, 2005). He co-authored with Bill Gates Sr. Wealth and Our Commonwealth, (Beacon Press, 2003), a case for taxing inherited fortunes. He is co-author with Mary Wright of The Moral Measure of the Economy, a book about Christian ethics and economic life.

He is co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good, a network of business leaders, high-income households and partners working together to promote shared prosperity and fair taxation.

In 1995, he co-founded United for a Fair Economy (UFE) to raise the profile of the inequality issue and support popular education and organizing efforts to address inequality. He was Executive Director of UFE from 1995-2001 and Program Director until 2005.

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Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan is an American anti-war activist whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended anti-war protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch—a stand that drew both passionate support and angry criticism. Sheehan ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008. She is a vocal critic of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Her memoir, Peace Mom: A Mother’s Journey Through Heartache to Activism, was published in 2006. Her most recent book is Revolution, A Love Story: A Better World is Possible.