Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired 09/30/08The US spends over $2 trillion a year — over $6K per person — on health care, yet is the only major industrial nation without universal coverage. 47 million Americans live without health insurance, and 80% of them are from working families who either cannot afford insurance premiums or lose their insurance exactly when they need it most: when they fall ill and can no longer work.Despite spending 50% more on health care than any other country in the world, America ranks 15th in preventable death, 24th in life expectancy, and 28th in infant mortality.The struggles of the four families profiled in CRITICAL CONDITION by ROGER WEISBERG ("Waging a Living," P.O.V. 2006) put a human face on the nation's growing health care crisis. They discover that being uninsured can cost you your job, your health, your home, your savings, even your life.

Aired 09/23/09 THOMAS FRANK, founding editor of The Baffler and a contributing editor at Harper's, is The Wall Street Journal's newest weekly columnist. He is the author of WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, THE CONQUEST OF COOL, ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, and his newest, THE WRECKING CREW. THOMAS FRANK in THE WRECKING CREW:"We can now say of that philosophy which regards good government as a laughable impossibility, which elevates bullies and gangsters and CEOs above other humans, which tells us to get wise and stop expecting anything good from Washington - we can now say with finality that it has had its chance. Whenever there was a choice to be made between markets and free people - between money and the common good - the conservatives chose money. It's time to make them answer for it."www.tcfrank.com

I'd heard of Dr. Bacevich and read some op-eds, but as soon as I saw into his interview a few weeks back with Bill Moyers, I knew I had to talk with him. The next day when I looked at Barnes and Noble for his book I was surprised and pleased that it had jumped to #1 in sales.I believe Andrew Bacevich in his new book pulls things together in ways that I hadn't seen before. Things like our politics of personality, the rise of the imperial presidency, and our national culture of consumption and how all of those link to our military adventures. I say each week that I'm looking for pieces of the puzzle, and I believe today's guest is pulling some of them together in ways that make our problems clearer and change more possible.ANDREW BACEVICH, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, served twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He also lost his son in Iraq last year. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author several books, including THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM and his newest, THE LIMITS OF POWER: The End of American Exceptionalism

Aired 09/09/08Clinical researcher and author Neal Barnard, M.D., is one of America’s leading advocates for health, nutrition, and higher standards in research. As the principal investigator of several human clinical research trials, whose results are published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals, Dr. Barnard has examined key issues in health and nutrition.Neal Barnard is the founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Dr. Barnard is also president of The Cancer Project, a nonprofit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through nutrition education and research.If you have diabetes or are concerned about developing it, this program could change the course of your life. Although diabetes is a serious illness that all too often leads to heart problems, nerve damage, blindness, stroke, or kidney failure, it doesn’t have to be that way.A new book by nutrition researcher Neal Barnard, M.D., outlines a completely new dietary approach to preventing, controlling, and even reversing diabetes. The program is based on a series of research studies Dr. Barnard and his colleagues have conducted over the years, the latest funded by the National Institutes of Health. Published in the August 2006 issue of Diabetes Care, that study found Dr. Barnard’s program to be three times more effective than the American Diabetes Association dietary guidelines at controlling blood sugar.The studies also show that by adopting a low-fat vegetarian diet—free of all animal products and added vegetable oils—individuals can lower their cholesterol, reduce their blood pressure, and lose weight. Best of all, the diet doesn’t demand one count calories, cut portion sizes, or give up all carbohydrates. On the contrary, you can eat as much as you want.The book explains how the diet actually alters what goes on in an individual’s cells. Rather than just compensate for malfunctioning insulin, like other treatment plans, Dr. Barnard’s program helps repair how the body uses insulin. It also includes helpful tips on adopting a plant-based diet and more than 50 delicious and easy-to-make recipes

Aired 09/03/09Today I look at security strategy and planning with Thomas Barnett, an expert on how globalization is transforming warfare whom US News & World Report calls, "one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time."THOMAS BARNETT has been a senior adviser to military and civilian leaders in a range of offices, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command and Special Operations Command. From November 2001 to June 2003, he advised the Pentagon on transforming military capabilities to meet future threats. Barnett also led the five-year HYPERLINK "http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/projects/newrulesset/nrs_index.html"NewRuleSet.Project on how globalization is transforming warfare.In his book HYPERLINK "http://www.amazon.com/Pentagons-New-Map-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0425202399/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9598594-4856004?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180360844&sr=8-1"THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, Barnett presents concrete, world-changing strategies for transforming the US military -- adrift in the aftermath of the Cold War and 9/11 -- into a two-tiered power capable not only of winning battles, but of promoting and preserving international peace. He is author also of HYPERLINK "http://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Action-Future-Worth-Creating/dp/0425211746/ref=sr_1_2/002-9598594-4856004?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180361200&sr=1-2"BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION: A Future Worth Creating and writes regular columns for HYPERLINK "http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/articles/esquire.htm"Esquire.

Aired 08/26/08 CRAIG VENTER is a remarkable and entrepreneurial scientist. As such, he asks huge questions, takes on huge challenges, and has achieved huge successes. Growing up in California, VENTER was an unremarkable student, with little interest in his schoolwork and even less motivation to complete his education. But the Vietnam War draft led to being a Navy medic, which piqued his interest in science and medicine, and jump-started his education. He received advanced degrees and established himself as a gifted and outspoken scientist. At the National Institutes of Health he introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and his own research institute in 1995 sequenced the first genome of a living species in history, the bacterium. This success led to the dauntingly more ambitious goal of the entire human genome—billions of letters of genetic code that would test the limits of both human and computation abilities. He announced he'd do it more quickly and for far less money than the government sponsored Human Genome Project's prediction for completion—a goal he fulfilled in 2001. http://www.jcvi.org/

Aired 08/12/08 Hunter Lovins is the founder and President of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and Natural Capitalism Solutions, a non-profit in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. A professor at Presidio School of Management's MBA in Sustainable Management program, she has co-authored several books including NATURAL CAPITALISM: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and 2006 CLIMATE PROTECTION MANUAL FOR CITIES. Trained as a sociologist and lawyer, Hunter co-founded the California Conservation Project (Tree People), and Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years. Named millennium Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine, she received the Right Livelihood Award, and the Leadership in Business Award.

Aired 08/05/08Currently editor of The Washington Post's Outlook section and formerly the Post's Los Angeles bureau chief, John Pomfret lived and worked in China off-and-on for a decade - as a student, an AP reporter and the Post's chief in Beijing - and was eyewitness to the '89 Tiananmen Square protests.He has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years, covering big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia by the Asia Society.

Aired 07/15/08 In late summer1989 I spent a week living among and interviewing the fishermen and citizens of Cordova, Alaska. Once they'd realized that federal, state and corporate entities were moving too slowly to save their fisheries, many of them had moved heroically to import and place booms around the most vulnerable areas. Fishing was destroyed for that year so many of them were employed by Exxon in that summer's massive cleanup efforts. Though the luckiest among them earned the newly coined designation - “spillionaires,” the natural, social, and economic fabric of Cordova and Prince William Sound have never been the same. Last month, 19 years after the spill -- and two days after climate change scientist James Hansen told Congress that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel CEOs "should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" for their role in delaying the global response to climate change -- the Supreme Court reduced a $2.5 billion punitive judgment against Exxon for the Valdez disaster to $500 million. Exxon made more than $40 billion in profits last year. RIKI OTT and I took a look at the long sad aftermath of the oil spill -- with an eye toward the broader context of corporate power versus nature and humanity. OTT believes this is the civil rights movement of our day. RIKI OTT Marine biologist, former commercial salmon "fisherma'am" and Author of SOUND TRUTH AND CORPORATE MYTHS: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill; NOT ONE DROP: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spillhttp://www.soundtruth.info/

Robert Scheer, Editor-in-chief of the web magazine http://www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, the “left” of KCRW's nationally syndicated Left, Right, and Center, a weekly columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a contributing editor to The Nation. His latest book is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America." THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER serves as an update to the World War I-era book WAR IS A RACKET. The former expands on the latter's theme of money, not security, as the reason for both military action and peacetime military spending. (You can read WAR IS A RACKET for free on-line with a web search of the title.) A sensible response to box cutters and poorly-constructed cockpit doors should cost taxpayers less than billions of dollars for F-22 Raptor fighter planes. Yet as THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER details, the Bush Administration and Congress used the September 11, 2001, hijackings as an excuse to place orders for those and many other expensive, unnecessary killing machines beneath the Christmas trees of their weapons manufacturer campaign contributors. Oh, and don't forget jobs. As if it were a contest to see if people will accept the stupidest rationale for spending tax dollars on overpriced, needless weapons, public officials cite jobs, THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER recounts. Imagine the community improvement were the government to spend all that money on hospitals, schools or infrastructure instead of unnecessary military stuff - while creating as many and probably a lot more paychecks. Perhaps school children should lobby Congress during their recess. Nearly 100 years since World War I, war still proves the greatest racket.