ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

@claudiacragg speaks with @davedaley3, author: "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" & "Unrigged: How Americans Battled Back To Save Democracy," ex-EIC @salon [email protected] Following Ratf**ked, his "extraordinary timely and undeniably important" (New York Times Book Review) exposé of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation's leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in the wake of his and other reporters' revelations. With his trademark journalistic rigor and narrative flair, Daley reports on Pennsylvania's dramatic defeat of a gerrymander using the research of ingenious mathematicians and the Michigan millennial who launched a statewide redistricting revolution with a Facebook post. He tells the stories of activist groups that paved the way for 2018's historic blue wave and won crucial battles for voting rights in Florida, Maine, Utah, and nationwide. In an age of polarization, Unrigged offers a vivid portrait of a nation transformed by a new civic awakening, and provides a blueprint for what must be done to keep American democracy afloat.

@claudiacragg speaks with The Washington Post's David Ignatius @ignatiuspost about his new novel, The Paladin. He is a prize winning novelist who has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for nearly four decades. The story is this: when a daring, high-tech CIA operation goes wrong and is disavowed, the protagonist Michael Dunne sets out for revenge. A CIA operations officer Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence service. Headed by an American journalist, the self-styled bandits run a cyber operation unlike anything the CIA has seen before. Fast, slick, and indiscriminate, the group steals secrets from everywhere and anyone, and exploits them in ways the CIA can neither understand nor stop. Dunne knows it's illegal to run a covert op on an American citizen or journalist, but he has never refused an assignment and his boss has assured his protection. Soon after Dunne infiltrates the organization, however, his cover disintegrates. When news of the operation breaks and someone leaks that Dunne had an extramarital affair while on the job, the CIA leaves him to take the fall. Now a year later, fresh out of jail, Dunne sets out to hunt down and take vengeance on the people who destroyed his life. Reviewers have compared Ignatius's work to classic spy novels like those by Graham Greene. Ignatius's novels have also been praised for their realism; his first novel, Agents of Innocence, was at one point described by the CIA on its website as "a novel but not fiction." His 1999 novel, The Sun King, a reworking of The Great Gatsby set in late-20th-century Washington, is his only departure from the espionage genre. His 2007 novel, Body of Lies, was adapted into a film by director Ridley Scott. It starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe. Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have acquired the rights to Ignatius's seventh novel, The Increment.[19] The Quantum Spy, published in 2017, is an espionage thriller about the race between the United States and China to build the world's first hyper-fast quantum computer. His most recent book is The Paladin: A Spy Novel (2020). He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and currently Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program. He has received numerous honors, including the Legion of Honor from the French Republic, the Urbino World Press Award from the Italian Republic, and a lifetime achievement award from the International Committee for Foreign Journalism.

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks with astrophysicist  @Mario_Livio about his new book, Galileo and the Science Deniers. This work aims for distinction in trying to place the original Renaissance man, Galileo, and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts. In particular, Livio argues, the charges of heresy that Galileo faced for his scientific claims in the seventeenth century have their counterparts in science deniers’ condemnations today.  Born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy, into an intellectual family of declining fortune, Galileo pursued medicine at the University of Pisa. But he soon abandoned his course to study mathematics, his enduring passion. The Universe, he famously wrote, “is written in the language of mathematics”. It was an argot that allowed him to break reliance on the Aristotelian cosmology prized by the Catholic Church, and to forge a new, quantitative study of nature. Many consider Galileo to have been the Stephen Hawking of his day – both famous and respected. Nonetheless, he was ordered by the Pope to stand trial before the Italian Inquisition, the most feared and notorious court in all of Europe. His crime – Galileo’s Science, daring to state the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe – was pure heresy! ​The Inquisition had been rooting out what it considered sacrilege and witchcraft since the Dark Ages. Throw into this irrational mess Galileo’s evidence disproving long held Church teachings and you had the recipe for a life-threatening stand. Mario Livio (born 1945) is an   and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. For 24 years (1991-2015) he was an astrophysicist at the , which operates the . He has published more than 400 scientific articles on topics including cosmology, supernova explosions, black holes, extrasolar planets, and the emergence of life in the universe.  His book on the  , The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002), won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on mathematics.

A growing number of businesses and individuals worldwide have stopped using banknotes in fear that physical currency, handled by tens of thousands of people over its lifetime, could be a vector for the coronavirus. Public officials and health experts have said the risk of transferring the virus person-to-person through the use of banknotes is low, but they don't rule it out. While it is of course eminently sensible to avoid every possible source of Covid 19 contamination, the consequences of a cashless society inevitably hit hard the credit-poor, those who can least afford it. 'And the cashless society', says Brett Scott, is a euphemism for the "ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society". Rather than an exchange occurring directly between the hotel and me, it takes the form of a "have your people talk to my people" affair. Various intermediaries message one another to arrange an exchange between our respective banks. That may be a convenient option, but in a cashless society it would no longer be an option at all. You'd have no choice but to conform to the intermediaries' automated bureaucracy, giving them a lot of power, and a lot of data about the micro-texture of your economic life.

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with David Rohde @RohdeD who is two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an executive editor of The New Yorker website, an MSNBC contributor, and a former New York Times, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor reporter.  He is the author of the just published ': The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State”  Today, three-quarters of Americans polled believe that a group of unelected government and military officials are secretly manipulating national policy. Americans increasingly distrust the politicians, lobbyists and journalists who they believe unilaterally set the country’s political agenda. American democracy faces its biggest crisis of legitimacy in a half century. Based on dozens of interviews with CIA operatives, FBI agents, current and former White House officials and members of Congress, IN DEEP chronicles forty years of FBI and CIA scandals and exposes the erosion of the post-Watergate system of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents, CIA operatives and FBI agents from abusing their powers. Investigating the claims and counterclaims of the Trump era, and the relentless spread of conspiracy theories online and on-air, Rohde concludes that there is no “deep state”— not in the conspiratorial way that Trump uses the term. Whether out of fear or calculation, however, Trump is creating a parallel, private government filled with like-minded loyalists, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity, without transparency, democratic norms, or public processes — a “deep state” of his own.

According to a new report from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, African Americans are being "disproportionately affected by COVID-19." The data showed that 33% of those hospitalized are black, a rate that outstripsrelative population size. KGNU's Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg speaks here with Daniel E. Dawes, a nationally recognized leader in healthcare law and policy, who has been an instrumental figure in shaping the Affordable Care Act, aka 'Obamacare' and who also founded and chaired the largest advocacy group focused on developing comprehensive legislation to reform the US health care system. This advocacy group of more than 300 national organizations and coalitions, the National Working Group on Health Disparities and Health Reform, worked to ensure passage of the landmark health reform law and to include provisions to improve healthcare quality and delivery.

At least 10 percent of American workers have lost their jobs in the past three weeks amid the coronavirus pandemic and a record 6.6 million new claims for unemployment benefits were filed last week. Weekly new claims topped 6 million for the second straight time last week as tough measures to control the novel coronavirus outbreak abruptly ground the country to halt. The Labor Department said today that first-time claims for unemployment benefits in the week ending April 4 totaled 6.6 million, down slightly from an upwardly revised 6.87 million the week before. In total, at least 16.8 million Americans have now filed for unemployment aid in the past three weeks as the coronavirus spread throughout the country and businesses closed. In response the Administration has passed the CARES act. To discuss this act, and with suggestions on how best perhaps the federal government should move forward with truly effective efforts to help the most people in the quickest time, Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg, speaks here with Ellen Brown. Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In the best-selling Web of Debt (2007, 2012), she turned those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust," showing how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how we the people can get it back. In The Public Bank Solution (2013) she traces the evolution of two banking models that have competed historically, public and private; and explores contemporary public banking systems globally. She has presented these ideas at scores of conferences in the US and abroad, including in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Malaysia, Mexico and Venezuela. Brown developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. She also co-authored the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, which has sold 285,000 copies. Ellen ran for California State Treasurer in 2014 with the endorsement of the Green Party garnering a record number of votes for a Green Party candidate. Her 330+ blog articles are at http://EllenBrown.com. The Public Banking Institute is at http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

Isabel Allende @isabelallende has been through a great deal in her life and that is why perhaps listening to her story now might be helpful to some? Believe it or not, the esteemed poet Pablo Neruda once called Isabel Allende "the worst journalist he had ever met..." This was because she had the effrontery to try and write his memoirs. Nevertheless, today Allende is the author of over a dozen books and memoirs of her own which together have sold fifty-one million copies. Her debut novel in 1982, The House of the Spirits, told the tale of four generations of a Chilean family and at ths time of this interview her latest work was a memoir The Sum of Our Days. This picks up the story where her last memoir, Paula, ended. She recently discussed politics and Pinochet, feminism, her home in Marin County with her second husband, the lawyer Willie Gordon and her extended family, the death of her daughter Paula, as well as the death of Willie's daughter, Jennifer. from a drug overdose and other details of her fascinating life with Claudia Cragg. Allende started the Isabel Allende Foundation on December 9, 1996 to pay homage to her daughter, Paula Frías Allende who experienced a coma after complications of the disease porphyria placed her on a hospital bed. Paula was only twenty-eight years old when she died in 1992. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected.

In this COVID 19 environment, Karen Masterson, a leading academic expert on the US 'malaria project' has been made aware that there is an alleged plan as this interview goes out to roll out the drug Chloroquine nationwide through doctors' offices as a de facto trial for 2020. Masterson thinks that this would unleash serious reactions and death.    President Trump appears to be on the hunt for a 'magic bullet' he probably also seeks but the vast profits and the monopoly that will come to the US corporation that discovers and implements it.    Just this afternoon, Greg Rigano posed as a Stanford Medical School advisor as he pushed using chloroquine to tackle coronavirus. He previously asked for investors to help 'cure death' through his crypotocurrency firm. He set up a secretive LLC in mid-February then went viral with the help of Elon Musk - but Google has removed the document which he formatted to look like a scientific paper, with two universities demanding their names be removed from it. Rigano, a 34-year-old lawyer in a family firm in Melville, Long Island, New York, appeared on a string of Fox News shows - presenting himself as a 'Stanford adviser' - before Donald Trump called himself a 'fan' of his claims about the anti-malarial drug.   Karen Masterson did  a while back. The drug her work focused on is the same 'pet drug', chloroquine, that the White House appears to be pushing hard as a universal panacea for Covid 19.   Such was his enthusiasm in the Twittersphere especially, that an Arizona man died this week from drinking a form of it in an aquarium-cleaning solution. There are also instances around the world from people doing the same with disastrous effect.   Masterson's point is that scientists like Dr Fauci must be allowed to develop drugs or vaccines with the usual science-based, peer-reviewed protocol or lives will inevitably be lost. Her body of work proves in at least two major trials the damage chloroquinine and that group of related drugs has done historically after the Second World War, during the Iraq War and can do now in the wrong hands and in the wrong doses.

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Jennifer Steinhauer @jestei @nytimes about her lively study, "The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress." In January 2019, the largest number of women ever elected to Congress was sworn in—87 in the house and 23 in the Senate - this was a dress rehearsal for the 2020 primary and general election. Democratic women won largely on painting the GOP as incompetent especially around health care. This history-making Class of '19 included many remarkable firsts: the youngest woman ever to serve; the first two Muslim women; the first two native American women, one openly gay; a black woman from a nearly all-white Chicago suburb; and a Hispanic woman from a heavily Republican border region. In many instances, these were the first women and/or persons of color and/or youngest persons to serve from their state or district. Veteran New York Times Capitol Hill reporter Jennifer Steinhauer has been following this historic transition from day one. She uses her rare vantage point to take a behind-the-scenes look at these newcomer's individual and collective attempts to usher in real change in Washington.Offering expert historical context, intimate detail, and you-are-there access to the halls of the Capitol, Steinhauer followed these women closely for their first year, interviewing them and their staff and colleagues. With her seasoned political eye, she assesses not only how these women are doing, but whether their election will have a long-term impact… Will the issues they and their constituents most care about—such as health care, childcare, and pay equity—finally get a permanent place at the table? Can these women, many already social media stars and political punching bags, find a way to break through the partisan stalemate and hidebound traditions of Washington, DC? Which is a more salient marker of change—their gender, or the diversity of age, race, religion and economic status they bring to Congress? Who will have staying power in our era of twenty-four-hour news cycles and nonstop social media feeds, and who will be gone in two years? Jennifer Steinhauer has covered numerous high-profile beats in her twenty-five-year reporting career at the New York Times, from City Hall bureau chief and Los Angeles bureau chief to Capitol Hill. She won the Newswoman's Club of New York Front Page Deadline Reporting Award in 2006 for her reporting on Hurricane Katrina. She has also written a novel about the television business, and two cookbooks.