Beneath The Surface with Suzi Weissman

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On tonight’s program we begin with Jane D’Arista, former staff economist for the Congress, now at U Mass Amherst and author of the two volume history of US monetary policy and financial regulation, The Evolution of U.S. Finance. She recently testified at the Financial Services hearings and joins us to talk about the proposed regulatory reform: is it enough and will it work?

We are then joined in studio by Shem Bitterman, Alan Rosenberg and Steve Zuckerman, writer, actor and director of the currently playing “Influence” at the Skylight Theatre on Vermont. This terrific play from the Katselas Theatre Company is the third in Bitterman’s celebrated Iraq War trilogy, this one about Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. This intelligent, superbly written, directed and acted play is running until May 9 and you shouldn’t miss it.

And finally on tonight’s Beneath The Surface, Al Sandine joins us in studio to talk about his new book, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees, a journey into American history that sees the crowd and social protest as the antidote to despair and the soul and center of the country and its progress.

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Tonight our theme is labor and immigration. We begin with Harold Meyerson, with us to talk about SEIU’s international clean-up Sodexo Campaign. Today outgoing SEIU President Andy Stern, Danny Glover and others were arrested in an act of civil disobedience in Gaithersburg Maryland, part of the SEIU’s global campaign to persuade Sodexo to stop interfering in the rights of workers to unionize. We’ll also ask Harold to assess Andy Stern’s stewardship of the labor movement’s largest union.

We are then joined by Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara, for a deeper look into Andy Stern’s leadership and legacy of the SEIU, Change to Win, and we’ll ask him about labor’s prospects.

Continuing on the labor theme, Jackie Goldberg, former California State Assemblywoman who serves on the National Workers’ Rights Board on the Los Angeles Carwash Industry joins us with Maria Aide Hernandez, a carwashera, to talk about the Carwash campaign in Los Angeles, where wage theft, environmental, health and safety abuses are widespread.

And finally, on tonight’s BTS, we talk to Jeffrey Kaye, veteran journalist (“Newshour” on PBS) and author, on his new book, Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration. He joins us in studio to talk about migrants today – people who are treated as supplies to be shifted around to meet demand — all are pieces of a larger system Kaye calls "coyote capitalism." Kaye knocks down myths about why immigrants come to America, what role they play in the economy, and challenges the view that immigrants themselves motivate immigration, rather than the policies of businesses and governments, and he finds surprising connections between globalization, economic growth and the convoluted immigration debates taking place in America and other industrialized countries. Kaye concludes that America's approach to importing workers looks from the outside like a patchwork of unnecessary laws and regulations, but the machinery of immigration is actually part of a larger, global system that satisfies the needs of businesses and governments, often at the expense of workers in every nation.

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Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, on the court since 1975, announced his retirement today, giving President Obama his second pick on the Supremes, before the 2010 midterm elections. Will Obama be bold in his pick and what names are floating around? We’ll ask The Nation’s John Nichols.

We then turn to the former Soviet world: John CK Daly reports on the dramatic events in Kyrgyzstan, where Bakiev’s administration has been overthrown amid violence and a transitional regime has been installed. John Daly, an expert on the region says the events represent a significant diplomatic conundrum for Washington, Moscow and Beijing, and he’s calling it peril and opportunity in Kyrgyzstan.

We then talk to Stephen Cohen about the nuclear pact just signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev. We’ll ask Professor Cohen about the state of US-Russian relations, what the recent terrorist bombing in the Moscow subway and the events in Kyrgyzstan portend for Medvedev’s professed ideals and Putin’s cold, pragmatic rule.

And finally on tonight’s BTS, Jack Rasmus joins us to talk about his forthcoming book Epic Recession/Prelude to Depression. We’ll ask him whether he believes we are in a recovery and what he makes of the semi-mea culpas by Greenspan and Rubin yesterday. We’ll ask for his economic prognosis too.

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This week on Beneath the Surface, we bring you excerpts from the Truthdig debate on Religion and Politics, between Chris Hedges (author of American Fascists and War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning), and Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation).

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Tonight we examine what has happened to Liberalism and Conservatism in the US. The economic crisis and prospect of a long decline has fueled rage and exposed the deep polarization of the country. Passage of the long debated and watered down health insurance reform bill brought that simmering but inchoate rage to the surface and raises questions about the future of the two parties and indeed of governance.

We’ll talk to Kevin Baker, whose cover story “The Vanishing Liberal” appears in the April Harpers magazine, and Robert Scheer, who writes that moderate Republicans are a disappearing species on Truthdig.com, about the political moment we face.

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Greece is bankrupt, and the EU has decided to manage its path to recovery with bailouts and austerity. Many Greeks think it is being treated like a protectorate as draconian measures are imposed. The population has responded with street demonstrations, two general strikes, and continuing protests. Californians should take note: unlike the EU, the US federal government has offered neither bailouts -- nor austerity measures. Savas Michael Matsas, cancer radiologist, philosopher and political activist joins us from Greece to report from the streets.

We then talk to Michael Hudson, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who says if you think Greece is in dire economic straits heading down, you ought to look at Latvia, – he joins us for a revealing insight into troubles in the Euro zone, the proliferating examples of debt peonage from Chile to Europe and even here at home as individual, state and national sectors of the economy are drowning in debt. Michael Hudson will be in a panel with me at the Left Forum next weekend in NYC – and we’ll ask him to preview his talk titled “The Final State of Finance Capitalism: From pension fund capitalism to bubbles to bailouts to the coming Oligarchic Decade of Foreclosure.”

And finally on tonight’s BTS, we are very fortunate to talk with the extraordinary Chilean musicians from Inti Illimani. They are playing a benefit concert tonight in Los Angeles – to celebrate the LA Unified School District’s renewed charter for the Los Angeles Academy of Arts & Enterprise. Since this concert was planned the 8.8 earthquake intervened and LAAEE is sharing the proceeds to donate to the Chile Earthquake Relief fund. We are fortunate to catch up with this historic Chilean musical group who have become Chile’s ambassadors of cultural expression with their unique sound “forged with passion and poetry .. a mantra for peace in the world. ”They are still around thanks to being on tour in Europe at the time of the 1973 coup that killed President Allende’s Popular Unity government and inaugurated the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet.

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On tonight’s Beneath The Surface we look at Earthquakes natural, economic and social from Chile to Haiti.

We begin with Chile, where a massive 8.8 giant earthquake struck in the early hours last Sunday, followed by an erroneously reported Tsunami on the Chilean central coast that caused many of the approximately 800 deaths. Fault lines run deep in Chile and the social crisis is mounting with the return to the streets of the Military attempting to bring order out of natural chaos. Arturo Cifuentes recently returned to Chile after spending years in the US working first in earthquake engineering and then in finance. He says he went from one disaster – the subprime – to another, the giant 8.8 earthquake which hit Chile last Sunday.

We are then joined by Michael Deibert, author of Notes from the Last Testament: A Struggle for Haiti, who just returned from Haiti, where he reports horrific devastation and friends who died, but says the country’s heart is still beating. We’ll talk to him about what he saw and reported as well as Haiti's long-term structural, political and economic development, taking a broad historic view of this recent tragedy.

And finally on tonight’s program, Andy Klein joins us for Oscar talk in advance of Sunday’s Academy Awards.

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***KPFK is in the final days of our Winter Fund Drive, and we need your help.***
Click here to visit KPFK.ORG and show your support.

We are joined tonight by Ezra Klein, columnist for the Washington Post, for a post-mortem on President Obama’s health insurance reform summit yesterday. Health insurance premiums are skyrocketing, more and more people are left without access to health care, and Obama’s efforts at bi-partisan consensus have failed. The seven hour televised gab-fest featured a lot of posturing and little agreement. Will the Democrats go to reconciliation to get the bill through and is the public option truly dead? Will exchanges feature pools for those with pre-existing conditions (and does that include aging, those who have had accidents or suffered domestic abuse?)

We then talk to Joshua Pechthalt, Vice President of UTLA/AFT, about the March 4 Statewide Day of Action to protest the savage and suicidal cuts to education and vital community services. The broad coalition behind the day of action (and planned march to Sacramento beginning March 5) includes K-12, Community Colleges, and the UC system plus a wide array of unions and community organizations. They aim to show the face of Californians under attack and shame legislators to fund education and social services.

Plus: KPFK needs your help. Tonight we'll be offering Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, Richard Wolff's documentary Capitalism Hits The Fan, and more. Click here to visit KPFK.ORG and show your support.

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Harold Meyerson joins us to talk about the early seating of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and the stalled nomination to the NLRB Craig Becker. Unlike the prolonged battle to seat Senator Al Franken, the Democrats complied to the request to seat Brown a week early. Was the rush to seat Brown to prevent NLRB nominee Craig Becker from being seated? Were the Democrats out maneuvered or did they deliberately let down one of their own causes and Constituencies – labor?

John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harpers Magazine (we’re offering subscriptions today as a thank-you gift in our fund drive) joins us to talk about the legacy and future of that literary, brainy and politically hard-hitting, oldest continuously published monthly magazine in America. The March issue breaks another important story – with Scott Horton’s cover article busting the official account of the Guantanamo suicides. We’ll also talk to Rick about the outrageous barriers to democracy, the subject of his latest book You Can’t be President.

Plus: We are in our winter fund drive and we ask for your support. Please visit KPFK's Winter Fund Drive Pledge Page, where you can browse a list of our thank-you gifts and pledge your support.

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Tonight we begin with the economic State of the Union –the state of the budget with Max Fraad Wolff, economist in New York. What does Obama’s appeal to the independents with deficit reduction and a three year select spending freeze mean for economic recovery? The Keynesian solution to the current economic solution would require much more deficit spending, an economic stimulus that creates jobs by investing in vital infrastructure to ensure decades of economic growth, but the concentrated fire of the right and the nature of the Democratic party – owned by finance, insurance and Pharma while appealing to ordinary people with policies they cannot or will not enact – makes doing the right thing nearly impossible.

Jonathan Regis in Boston and Jenny Ulysse in Haiti join us to talk about her case: Jenny is Haitian American, a community organizer in Boston who was home in Haiti for the holidays, was trapped and injured in the earthquake and can’t get home. Her story is emblematic of the chaos and difficulties facing Haitian Americans trying to get back and tells us something about the rescue effort. Sign the petition to let Jenny return home.

Then Emil Draitser joins us to preview the conversation we will have on Wednesday February 3rd at the LA Public Library’s Aloud Series. He talks about his memoir Shush: Growing up Jewish Under Stalin.

Plus: Remembering Howard Zinn.

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