KPFA - Letters and Politics

Guest: David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He currently is authoring the Prospect Magazine special series First 100: An In-Depth Look at President Biden and the New Administration.  David Dayen is the author of Monopolized: Life in an Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize for a first book in the public interest (both from The New Press). photo: Sahand Hoseini via Unsplash   The post The Senate & The Politics of the Economic Recovery Act appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Ioan Grillo is a journalist and author specializing in crime and drugs.  He is the author of the books Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, and his latest, Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. The post How America Arms Gangs and Cartels appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Reese Erlich is a best-selling book author and freelance journalist covering the Middle East for more than 35 years.  He is an adjunct professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco.   Image: Matthew Bruch Credit: U.S. Air Forces Central Command Copyright: Public Domain   The post Biden’s Air Strike in Syria and the Imperial Presidency appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who has covered business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for three decades. He currently serves as the Times’s business columnist and hosts its business blog, The Economy Hub. His books include Big Science, The New Deal, Colossus, Dealers of Lightning, and The Plot Against Social Security.  Michael Hiltzik received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.  On Twitter @HiltzikM. The post The New Deal: A Modern History appeared first on KPFA.

Guests: Dr. Richelle Brooks is a Black Momma, Educator, the founder of ReTHINK It, an organization dedicated to addressing antiblackness through education and mutual aid, and a Grassroots Organizer and Biden Jubilee 100 Striker.  She is the co-founder of Los Angeles chapter of the Debt Collective and wrote the piece Why I Joined the Jubilee 100 Student Debt Strike. Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, author, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of What Is Democracy? and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. The post The Burden of Student Loans in America & the Debt Cancellation appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Congressman Eric Swalwell represents California’s 15th congressional district since 2012.  The district currently covers most of eastern and southwestern Alameda County as well as part of Contra Costa County.  He is now in his fourth term and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committee.  Congressman Swalwell was one of the nine Impeachment Manager for the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.  He is the author of the book Endgame: Inside the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump.     The post Inside the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Elizabeth Kolbert is an environmental reporter and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her latest book is Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.  photo: Oakland by Diana Martinez      The post The Future of Nature appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb and a research associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He is the author of the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area and Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia.  He coedited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. He is the founder and codirector of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.  His latest book is Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly.   The post The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly: Ben Fletcher -Fund Drive Special appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Jacqueline Jones is the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and the Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas, Austin.  She is the author of Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical and the winner of the Bancroft Prize for her previous book Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow.   Photo source: Wikimedia commons The post The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical – Fund Drive Special appeared first on KPFA.

Guest:  Todd Miller is a journalist and author who has researched and written about border issues for more than 15 years, the last eight as an independent journalist and writer.  He is the author of the books Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, Storming the Wall: Climate Change; Migration, and Homeland Security;  Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, and his forthcoming, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders.  Todd Miller is based in Tucson, Arizona.   The post Global Migration and the Militarization of the Borders -Fund Drive Special appeared first on KPFA.