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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
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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

• U.S. Pakistan Policy “Threatening Another 9/11″ – an interview with Fred Branfman
• Government and media cover up of the BP oil spill – an interview with Hugh B. Kaufman

Fred Branfman

Fred Branfman has written a dozen articles warning that U.S. policy towards Pakistan is a national security disaster, including two recent Salon pieces entitled “The Petraeus Projection, The CIA Director’s Record Since The Surge“. Branfman is best known for having exposed the CIA’s secret war in Laos.

Quote: “Short-sighted U.S. policy is creating a national security disaster in Pakistan. The U.S. policy of trying to win in tiny Afghanistan by extending its war-making into giant, nuclear-armed Pakistan — including drone strikes, cross-border raids, illegal U.S. ground assassination and forcing the Pakistani Army to wage scorched-earth offensives … threatens the greatest U.S. foreign policy disaster since its support for Iran’s Shah, including another domestic 9/11. …U.S. policy has led to an increase in the strength of militant groups in Pakistan, vastly increased the ranks of potential anti-U.S. suicide bombers in both Pakistan and the West, and increased the possibility of an anti-U.S. military coup. And, most significantly, as former U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson has secretly warned, it has vastly increased the possibility of materials from Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile — the world’s fastest-growing and least stable — falling into terrorist hands. U.S.-Pakistan policy, largely designed by David Petraeus, had led over 69 percent of Pakistanis — over 125 million people — to regard the U.S. as their ‘enemy,’ and is thus sowing a whirlwind which threatens disaster in coming years. The U.S. badly needs to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, end the drone strikes in Pakistan, and vastly increase its economic aid to Pakistan — particularly helping to extend its electricity grid, its top domestic priority — to reduce the threat of terrorism. Present U.S. policy is vastly increasing the threat of another 9/11 on American soil.”

Branfman’s previous articles include “Unintended Consequences in Nuclear-Armed Pakistan“.

Hugh B. Kaufman

Hugh B. Kaufman is presently a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER). Kaufman was a leading critic of the Federal government’s decision to use massive amounts of the toxic dispersant Corexit, on oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico after BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20, 2010. Prior to joining the EPA in the beginning of 1971, he was a Captain in the US Air Force. He helped write all the Federal laws regulating the treatment, storage, disposal, and remediation of solid and hazardous waste. For four decades he has been the EPA Chief Investigator on numerous contamination cases, including Love Canal and Times Beach.

In 1976, when he was Chief Investigator on Hazardous Sites, he came up with the idea for a major Government Emergency Response and Clean-up Program called “Superfund,” that was enacted in 1980. Beginning in 1997, he served as Chief Investigator for EPA’s National Ombudsman. In that role, he conducted numerous Federal investigations (which included public hearings) around the country on EPA’s response, clean-up, and remediation at hazardous sites. In this role, he led the investigation that uncovered the EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cover-up of the environmental effects of the collapse of the World Trade Center after the terrorist acts on September 11, 2001.

Mr. Kaufman is an engineer, holding both Bachelors and Masters degrees in that field from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has testified numerous times before Congress as an expert on solid and hazardous waste and Federal response to releases of hazardous materials.

Links:

More about Hugh (Sourcewatch)
The Big Fix Official Trailer – YouTube

• The House is trying to pass a bill that would make it illegal for the Obama administration to have any diplomatic contact with Iran – an interview with Stephen Zunes
• The Iraq war is not over – an interview with Raed Jarrar

Stephen Zunes

Stephen Zunes

Stephen Zunes analyzes the likely passage of a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives that would bar the Obama administration from having any diplomatic contact with Iran.  If the bill becomes law, it would be the first time in history, even during wartime, that Congress would legally prevent the White House or State Department from negotiating with another country.

Article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/iran-threat-reduction-act-_b_1090132.html

The bill already has 349 sponsors, so passage is almost certain.  (See http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR01905:@@@P to find out if your member of Congress is one of the co-sponsors and the let them know how you feel.)

You can find other articles by Zunes about Iran at http://stephenzunes.org/category/topic/iran/ and additional articles of his at www.stephenzunes.org

Raed Jarrar

Raed Jarrar

Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi-American blogger and political analyst based in Washington, D.C.

Quote: “The Iraq war is not over yet. Shortly after President Obama’s announcement that the U.S. is going to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta started talking about planned negotiations with the Iraqi government on a new role for troops inside the country. Most of Iraq’s politicians believe the Pentagon is trying one last attempt to keep trainers by sending them under the NATO umbrella. The Iraqi government signed a training agreement with NATO in 2009, but did not send it to the parliament for ratification until earlier this month, a day after the immunity talks with the U.S. collapsed. The agreement, which grants NATO trainers some level of immunity, will be debated in the Iraqi parliament after the recess that ends on November 20th. It is not likely the Parliament will pass the agreement.

“But even if the Pentagon’s attempt fails, the U.S. is planning to leave up to 16,000 State Department personnel in Iraq after the end of this year. This number includes 8,000 armed mercenaries and 4,500 so-called ‘general life support’ contractors who provide food and medical services, operate the aviation equipment, etc. This huge presence will be distributed over several sites around the country: The massive U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone, two consulates in Basra and Erbil, two support sites in Iraqi airports, three police-training facilities, and one diplomatic presence office in Kirkuk. A report by the Office of Inspector General in 2009 recommended downsizing the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The OIG report, number ISP-I-09-30A, described the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as ‘overstaffed,’ and confirmed it should be able to carry out all of its responsibilities with ‘significantly fewer staff and in a much reduced footprint.’ The report claimed that there is a ‘clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the Embassy’ that the time has come for a ‘significant rightsizing,’ and it recommended that ‘the rightsizing process has to begin immediately.’

“The plan to leave 16,000 personnel in Iraq, the size of an Army division, contradicts the OIG’s recommendations and puts the future of the U.S.-Iraqi relationship in jeopardy. The U.S. intervention in Iraq started more than 20 years ago, and it will not be over from an Iraqi perspective until the U.S. downsizes its massive footprint in Iraq.”

Background Article:

“Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style”

• Hip Hop, politics and music – an interview with Immortal Technique
• WikiLeaks Reveals U.S. Ties to Honduran Drug Dealer – an interview with Dana Frank

Immortal Technique

Immortal Technique in Afghanistan

Felipe Andres Coronel better known by the stage name Immortal Technique, is an American rapper of Afro-Peruvian descent as well as an urban activist. He was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Harlem, New York. Most of his lyrics focus on controversial issues in global politics. The views expressed in his lyrics are largely commentary on issues such as class struggle, poverty, religion, government and institutional racism.

Tech was in Houston this weekend at Fitzgerald’s as part of his tour promoting his new album, The Martyr. The album is available for free at Viper Records. The interview was conducted backstage prior to his gig. More tour dates:

Mon. Nov. 14 AUSTIN, TX MOHAWK

Wed. Nov. 16 EL PASO, TX CLUB 101

Thu. Nov. 17 ALBUQUERQUE, NM SUNSHINE THEATRE

More dates

Dana Frank

UCSC history professor Dana Frank reporting on protests in Honduras on the anniversary of the June 28, 2009 militrary coup.

Dana Frank is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of many books, including “Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America,” which examines the banana workers’ unions of Honduras. She recently wrote “WikiLeaks Honduras: U.S. Linked to Brutal Businessman.”

Quote: “New Wikileaks cables reveal that the U.S. embassy in Honduras — and therefore the State Department — has known since 2004 that Miguel Facussé, the richest man in Honduras, who is allegedly responsible for the deaths of campesino activists in the Aguan Valley, is a cocaine importer. U.S. `drug war’ funds and training are being used to support a known drug trafficker’s war against campesinos.

“The U.S. is funding and training Honduran military and police that are conducting joint operations with the security guards of a known drug trafficker to violently repress a campesino movement on behalf of Miguel Facussé’s dubious claims to vast swathes of the Aguán Valley, in order to support his African palm biofuels empire.

“Despite strong anti-drug rhetoric from U.S. officials, State Department cables recently made available by Wikileaks show that the U.S. has been aware of the drug ties of one of Honduras’ most powerful and wealthy individuals since 2004, yet has continued to support him. U.S. military and police assistance is also aiding the businessman, landowner and coup-backer Miguel Facussé, in a campaign of repression targeted at the campesinos whose land Facussé wants for production of palm oil. Despite the objections of 87 members of Congress, U.S. funding for the Honduran military and police continues, even though reports continue to emerge of police involvement in killings, such as in the recent case of the son of a university rector, and journalists and human rights activists continue to be targeted, with impunity.”