More Austerity? Government vs People in Greece. An interview with Costas Panayotakis

—————————————————————————————–

About this this week’s guests:

Stephanie Seguino

Stephanie Seguino is professor of economics at the University of Vermont. She recently wrote “Help or Hindrance? Religion’s Impact on Gender Inequality in Attitudes and Outcomes.”

Quote: “By making it harder for women who work for Catholic organizations to access contraceptive insurance (researching to find the name of the insurer, taking the time to make the arrangement), access is constrained. This may seem trivial to some, but for women juggling many household responsibilities and stresses, this is a significant impediment. For young women not knowledgeable about insurance practices, this is even more of a barrier. Moreover, we do not know what the impact will be on the work climate, on social norms about using contraception, and whether women in these workplaces will feel pressured to not avail themselves of insurance for fear of the impact on their job. These are unknowns, but it is safe to say that access is made more difficult than if contraceptive care were part of the insurance package Catholic organizations provide.”

—————————————————————————————-

Costas Panayotakis

Costas Panayotakis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York and author of Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy.  He has written extensively on Greece and has appeared on dozens of TV and radio shows around the world

Quote:
“A Greek parliament that, according to all the polls, no longer represents the views of Greek citizens has passed a new austerity package that, like the previous austerity packages dictated by the European Union and the IMF, will not only lead to the collapse of people’s living standards but also prove ineffective by adding to the Greek economy’s severe depression. The reliance, by the government of the unelected former banker, Lucas Papademos, on intense police repression did not prevent very large protests from taking place both in Athens and around Greece. Though marred by fires that burned many buildings in downtown Athens, these protests have intensified the pressure on the Greek political class, leading to over 40 deputies from the socialist and conservative parties supporting the government to vote against the new austerity package. Adding to a third party’s withdrawal of support for the government and the resignation of six cabinet members over the last few days, this latest development shows that, as the Greek economic and social crises intensify, the Greek political system is now hanging by a thread.”

See Panayotakis’ pieces: “The Eurozone Fiasco”
http://www.indypendent.org/2011/12/19/eurozone-fiasco

Debunking the Greek (and European) Crisis Narrative”
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/panayotakis171111.html

About our guests this week:

Ann Lee

Ann Lee

Ann Lee is the author of the book ‘What the U.S. Can Learn from China” and a senior fellow at Demos. She also teaches graduate finance and economics at New York University and was formerly a professor at Peking University and Pace University. Before that, she was a former investment banker and hedge fund partner. Ms. Lee was educated at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton, and Harvard.

Articles:

A World Without China

10 Lessons the U.S. Can Learn From China

More: Ann Lee

Book:

What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher

—————————————————————————————–

Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes is an American science writer. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia. His book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It was released in December 2010. In December 2010 Taubes launched his own blog at GaryTaubes.com to promote the book’s release and to respond to critics.

Born in Rochester, New York, Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard University and aerospace engineering at Stanford University (MS, 1978). After receiving a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981,

Taubes joined Discover magazine as a staff reporter in 1982.^[2] Since then he has written numerous articles for Discover, Science and other magazines. Originally focusing on physics issues, his interests have more recently turned to medicine and nutrition.

Taubes’s books have all dealt with scientific controversies. Nobel Dreams takes a critical look at the politics and experimental techniques behind the Nobel Prize-winning work of physicist Carlo Rubbia. Bad Science is a chronicle of the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989.

About our guests this week:

Sam Pizzigati

A veteran labor journalist, Sam Pizzigati has written widely on economic inequality, in articles, books, and online, for both popular and scholarly readers. Pizzigati edits “Too Much,” the weekly Institute for Policy Studies newsletter on excess and inequality. He recently wrote the piece “The 10
Greediest Americans of 2011,’ which will be the topic of this interview.

Currently as associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., Pizzigati has been editing Too Much, a newsletter on inequality and excess, since the publication’s 1995 debut. His op-eds and articles on income and wealth maldistribution have appeared in a host of major American dailies, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, as well as a broad variety of magazines and journals.

Pizzigati, 62, has edited publications for four different national American unions and directed, for twenty years, the publishing operations of America’s largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. The 1992 anthology he co-edited, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press), remains the primary reference for trade union journalists.

Pizzigati’s most recent book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), builds on work he began with his 1992 Apex title, The Maximum Wage. Greed and Good, published in 2004, earned an “outstanding title” of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006).

Pizzigati’s next book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The forgotten triumph over plutocracy that created the American middle class, will be forthcoming in spring 2013 from Seven Stories Press.

——————————————————————————————

Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an historian with a PhD in South-east Asian studies from Cornell University in New York state. He was Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service in 1970 and 1971. Porter has taught international studies at City College of New York and American University and has written several books on Vietnam, the most recent being “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War”, published by the University of California Press in 2005. He has also written on war and diplomacy in Cambodia, Korea and the Philippines. Porter has been a news analyst for IPS focusing on U.S. policy and developments in Iraq and Iran since September 2005.

We will be talking to Gareth about his most recent article: U.S. Leak on Israeli Attack Weakened a Warning to Netanyahu -
When Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius this week that he believes Israel was likely to attack Iran between April and June, it was ostensibly yet another expression of alarm at the Israeli government’s threats of military action.

You can read his other articles here:

Gareth Porter – North America – Inter Press Service

Author of the New York Times and international bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse, Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde.

“A cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes” (Jim Hightower, The Nation), Greg Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering. Palast’s reports appear on BBC’s Newsnight and in Britain’s Guardian, Rolling Stone and Harper’s.

Palast directed the US’ government’s largest racketeering case in history (that garnered a $4.3 billion jury award) and the investigation of the Exxon Valdez.

Palast is recipient of the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Prize for his BBC television documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.

You can get a copy of his latest (and best) book – Vultures’ Picnic by calling 713.526.5738 and pledging $100 or more. Greg is a regular guest on the show and one of the last great muck-racking investigative journalists. Check out the website above and see why.

Vultures’ Picnic:
In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators. A tale of oil, sex, shoes, radiation and investigative reporting.

From the Arctic Circle to the Islamic Republic of BP, from a burnt nuclear reactor in Japan to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Palast uncovers a story you won’t get on CNN.

Greg Palast’s crew of journalist-detectives chase down British Petroleum bag men, CIA operatives, nuclear power con men—and “The Vultures,” billionaire financial speculators who, through bribery, flim-flam and political muscle, take entire nations hostage for mega-profits.

The action begins when the Deepwater Horizon explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and a confidential cable arrives on Miss Badpenny’s desk from a terrified insider. He has the real, hushed-up facts of the disaster—which can only be found hidden in the files of a Central Asian dictatorship.

The show needs your support! Please call 713.526.5738 or go online to KPFT.org to make a pledge.

Thank you!

—————————————————————————————–

Timothy Casey

Timothy Casey

Timothy Casey is senior staff attorney with Legal Momentum, “the nation’s oldest legal defense and education fund dedicated to advancing the rights of all women and girls.”

Quote: “When it comes to programs to aid the poor, some of the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are rushing to the bottom. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have played the race card, implying that Food Stamps and other programs for those in need are programs for Blacks. But the facts are to the contrary — only one quarter of Food Stamp recipients are African-American. Gingrich has also said that poor children have no one around them who works. In fact, the majority of poor children have working parents. Comments like these cheapen public and political discourse as they distort the facts. Due to its official renaming as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Food Stamps program is now known as SNAP. Gingrich and Santorum have also criticized the growth in SNAP participation in recent years. However, that growth was due to recession and a slow recovery. SNAP and other programs for the needy are designed to expand when economic times are hard. This counter-cyclical increase in spending both aids the poor and helps fuel job growth.

The truth is that the SNAP program provides vitally important food aid to help the needy achieve a nutritionally adequate diet. The program currently serves 22 million low income households with 46 million household members. Three quarters of participants are in households that include children and one quarter are in households that include elderly or disabled individuals. Only low income households are eligible — the vast majority of participants have net incomes lower than the official poverty standard, currently $18,530 a year for a family of three. Benefits can be used only to purchase food and are meager in amount, averaging $135 per person a month. Even with these benefits, about half of Food Stamp households report that they are still having difficulty in obtaining enough food and about one fifth report that they have had to reduce their food intake due to insufficient funds.

Mitt Romney, as well as Gingrich and Santorum, are urging SNAP ‘reforms’ based on the ‘welfare reforms’ enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress and President Clinton in 1996. Those reforms ‘block granted’ cash assistance, placing an arbitrary cap on federal spending and repealing national protective standards. Block granting cash welfare assistance reduced benefit receipt from 60 percent of poor families pre-reform to only about 20 percent of poor families today, and from over 80 percent of eligible families pre-reform to less than 40 percent today. Block granting cash aid also led to sharply reduced benefits that in every state are now less than half the poverty standard.

Because of the cuts in cash assistance, the SNAP program now aids several times more poor children than cash assistance does. In an average month in 2010, Food Stamps aided 8.9 million families with children while cash assistance aided only 1.9 million.

Block granting SNAP would threaten the same result that block granting welfare cash assistance has had: far fewer needy households aided by SNAP and sharply reduced SNAP benefit amounts.

A contraction of SNAP assistance would pose an especially grave threat to poor families headed by single mothers, as the cuts in cash assistance have made SNAP increasingly indispensable to these families. In 2010, about 40 percent of single mothers were poor and about 40 percent received SNAP. Only 10 percent received cash welfare assistance.

Poverty rates are already exceptionally high in the United States compared to other high income countries. A SNAP retrenchment would raise poverty rates even higher. In 2010, SNAP brought combined income over the poverty line for four million individuals whose cash income was below the poverty line.”

Website: Legal Momentum
——————————————————————————————–

Muhammad Sahimi

Muhammad Sahimi

Muhammad Sahimi is a professor of chemical engineering and materials science, and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Chair in petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is also lead political columnist for the website PBS/Frontline/Tehran Bureau. In addition to his scientific research, which has resulted in four books and nearly 300 published papers, he has been writing about Iran’s nuclear program and its internal developments for many years.

His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard International Review, and the Progressive, among other publications.

Muhammad has been a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists since 1986, and a contributor to its Partners for Earth program.

Quote: “The latest assassination is part of the covert war that the U.S. and Israel have been waging on Iran for quite some time. The covert war may eventually lead to an overt war, because state-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists may provoke Iran to retaliate, which will spark a war that, if started, may engulf the entire region.”

We have been hearing in the news lately that Iran is threatening to blockage the Straights of Hormuz and we heard the U.S. say that such an action would cross some sort of ‘red line’ so we have Michael Klare back on the show to talk in more detail about this issue.

More about both guests below.

——————————————————————————————

Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes is an American science writer. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia. His book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It was released in December 2010. In December 2010 Taubes launched his own blog at GaryTaubes.com to promote the book’s release and to respond to critics.

Born in Rochester, New York, Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard University and aerospace engineering at Stanford University (MS, 1978). After receiving a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981,

Taubes joined Discover magazine as a staff reporter in 1982.^[2] Since then he has written numerous articles for Discover, Science and other magazines. Originally focusing on physics issues, his interests have more recently turned to medicine and nutrition.

Taubes’s books have all dealt with scientific controversies. Nobel Dreams takes a critical look at the politics and experimental techniques behind the Nobel Prize-winning work of physicist Carlo Rubbia. Bad Science is a chronicle of the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989.

——————————————————————————————

Michael Klare

Michael Klare

Michael Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine, and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Klare also serves on the boards of directors of Human Rights Watch, and the Arms Control Association. He is a regular contributor to many publications including The Nation, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, and is a frequent columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

His new article on Tom Dispatch is titled Danger Waters – The Three Top Hot Spots of Potential Conflict in the Geo-Energy Era. Read it.

Michael has a book coming out in March called “The Race for What’s Left”. We will have him back on the show once I’ve read the new book.

• Is the Military Budget Really Being Cut? – an interview with Catherine Lutz
• Is Alleged WikiLeaks Source Bradley Manning Getting Rigged Trial? – an interview with Jeff Paterson

Catherine Lutz

Cathrine Lutz

Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology, which she chairs. She is also co-director of the Costs of War research project based at the Watson Institute.

Her most recent books include Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effects on Our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), the co-authored Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out against the War (University of California Press, 2010), The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts (New York University Press, 2009), Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007, winner of a Society for the Anthropology of North America book award), and Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Beacon Press, 2001, winner of the Leeds Prize and the Victor Turner Prize). Others include Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993) with Jane Collins, and Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). She is past president of the American Ethnological Society, the largest organization of cultural anthropologists in the U.S.

Quote:
“Despite alarms sent up by politicians looking only at Pentagon press releases or their military industry backers’ interests, the new proposal for Department of Defense base budget reductions over the next five years represents only a 4 percent decline in real, or inflation-adjusted, terms, according to the Project on Defense Alternatives. And the Pentagon’s budget will remain far larger than it was ten years ago. On top of this, all of these calculations exclude, as they should not, billions in funding for the current wars.”

Website:

Home | Costs of War

——————————————————————————————-

Jeff Paterson

Jeff Paterson

Jeff Paterson is a veteran and co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. On August 7, 1990, 22-year-old Marine Cpl. Jeff Paterson refused to board a military plane in Hawaii heading to Saudia Arabia. He was the first active-duty military resister in the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. The photo of Jeff Paterson sitting on the airstrip, bravely defying orders to go fight in the Gulf War, made TV and newspapers around the world.

Quote:

“Military officials are continuing their star chamber prosecution after abusing Bradley Manning of his rights for 18 months. The investigating officer is not only biased to produce an outcome that is favorable to his employer at the Justice Department — he’s under pressure from his Commander-in-Chief, who has already placed undue influence on this case. … It’s clear that the administration never had any intention of giving Bradley Manning a fair hearing. It appears that only their witnesses will be examined. Only their evidence will be considered — and they will exercise total control over what information is available to the press. The administration’s continuing retaliation against PFC Manning increasingly undermines their credibility on civil and human rights.”

See updates about the court proceeding at: Bradley Manning Support Network

• Post Election protests in Russia – an interview with Stephen F. Cohen
• How Maliki and Iran outsmarted the U.S. on troop withdrawal – an interview with Gareth Porter

Stephen F. Cohen

Stephen F. Cohen is professor of Russian studies and history at New York University and professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University.  He is a contributing editor to The Nation and a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose Show and other broadcast media.

His most recent book,  just out in expanded paperback edition from Columbia University Press, is Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives – From Stalinism to the New Cold War.

He joined The Monitor to talk about the recent elections in Russia, the protests that followed them and the way the U.S. media covers those elections. You can read more of his work by clicking the link below.

Articles by Stephen F. Cohen available online at The Nation

——————————————————————————————–

Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. A strong opponent of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, he has also written on the potential for diplomatic compromise to end or avoid wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Iraq and Iran. He is the author of a history of the origins of the Vietnam War, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

He returns to The Monitor to talk about his most recent article: How Maliki and Iran Outsmarted the U.S. on Troop Withdrawal

You can read more of his work by clicking on the link below.

Gareth Porter’s articles on the Inter Press Service website.

• CIA Drone goes down in Iran – an interview with Reese Erlich
• 70 years of lying about Pearl Harbor – an interview with David Swanson

———————————————————————————————-

Reese Erlich

Reese Erlich is a veteran foreign correspondent. Erlich’s books include “The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis” and  “Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire.”

Reese Erlich‘s history in journalism goes back 42 years. He first worked as a staff writer and research editor for Ramparts, an investigative reporting magazine published in San Francisco from 1963 to 1975. Today he works as a full-time print and broadcast, freelance reporter. He reports regularly for National Public Radio, CBC, ABC (Australia), Radio Deutche Welle and Market Place Radio. His articles appear in the SF Chronicle and Dallas Morning News. His television documentaries have aired on PBS stations nationwide.

Erlich’s book, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You co-authored with Norman Solomon, became a best seller in 2003. The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis was published in 2007. Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba was published in 2009. His latest book, Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire, was published in 2010.

Erlich shared a Peabody Award in 2006 as a segment producer for Crossing East, a radio documentary on the history of Asians in the US. In 2004 Erlich’s radio special “Children of War: Fighting, Dying, Surviving,” won a Clarion Award presented by the Alliance for Women in Communication and second and third place from the National Headlines Awards.

Quote:

“The CIA has now acknowledged that a spy drone went down in Iran. Iranian authorities say their military shot it down; the U.S. maintains there were mechanical problems. The incident has forced the U.S. government to admit for the first time that it is conducting regular spying on Iran. Officials claim that the U.S. uses drones to look for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. More likely, the U.S. seeks information about existing conventional weapons and potential responses to a U.S. or Israeli military attack. The recent incident reveals that the U.S., not Iran, is the aggressor. The U.S. has used the excuse of a supposed nuclear weapons program to engage in spying, arming of ethnic guerrillas and targeted assassinations against Iranian scientists. Yet even the CIA and other intelligence agencies admit that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and is years away from developing an atomic bomb.”

Websites:

www.reeseerlich.com

www.iranproject.org

————————————————————————————————–

David Swanson

David Swanson is the author of “When the World Outlawed War,” “War Is A Lie” and “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org

He recently wrote the article “70 Years of Lying about Pearl Harbor” in which he talks about the way the attack was used to push the American public into agreeing to go to war, again. Last week was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor – an event that was critical to securing US participation in WWII.

David Swanson is also the author of “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush,” by Dennis Kucinich (2008).

Swanson wrote the foreword to “Another Life” by Karen Malpede, 2011, and contributed two chapters to Fix America, 2011.

Swanson holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, Voters for Peace, and the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, and chair of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee.

Swanson joined the board of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy in December 2011.

Swanson helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011.

• American Jobs going overseas – Civil Defense Attorney James Otto Files Lawsuit So Americans Can have Equal Access to American Jobs
• The attack on the British Embassy in Iran – an interview with Trita Parsi

James Otto

Trita Parsi