High profile senators called for an investigation into American intelligence agencies about Russian hacking to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential elections. To find out more about this issue, Mitch Jeserich spoke to Dr. Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

And

Bernie Sanders on "Our Revolution".  Letters and Politics played excerpts of the the Bernie Sanders speech at UC Berkeley on December 2nd.

 

 

Our guest for this episode is Peter Irons, an American political activist, civil rights [1] attorney, legal scholar, former prisoner of conscious for three years, and professor emeritus of political science [2] at the University of California, San Diego.

His latest book is A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Case and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution [3].

As a part of our fundraising drive, we are offering a pack of interviews entitled What You Need to Know for the Age of Trump as a premium. It includes this interview and over twenty more. If compelled, please donate whatever you can here [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science

[3] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12670.A_People_s_History_of_the_Supreme_Court

[4] https://secure.kpfa.org/support/

In this episode we listen to an interview with David Cay Johnston, journalist and author of The Making of Donald Trump, about the great farce, criminal, and pop culture phenomenon that is Donald J. Trump. In the interview Johnston reveals Donald's ties to the mob and more.

As a part of our fundraising drive, we are offering a pack of interviews entitled What You Need to Know for the Age of Trump as a premium. It includes this interview and over twenty more. If compelled, please donate here [1].

[1] https://secure.kpfa.org/support/

Our guest on this episode is Peter Linebaugh, an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic.

He is the author of the pamphlet Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12.  [1]

As a part of our fundraising drive, we are offering a pack of interviews entitled What You Need to Know for the Age of Trump as a premium. It includes this interview and over twenty more. If compelled, please donate here [2].

[1] http://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=485

[2] https://secure.kpfa.org/support/

With Eileen Markey, investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice and America Magazine, among others. She is author of the new book: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura.

 

About the book:

The 1980 rape and murder of four American women - three of them Catholic nuns - by the U.S.-trained military of El Salvador shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. But as Congress held hearings, the State Department, CIA, and FBI traded memos, and supporters held emotional memorial services, the women themselves became symbols, shorn of context and background: hapless victims.

In A Radical Faith, journalist Eileen Markey sets the record straight, exploring the full and complex life of one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Raised in a tight-knit Irish Catholic community in Queens, New York during WWII, by the 1970s she was organizing and marching against the dictatorship in Nicaragua and willing to take great risks for a movement to transform El Salvador.

Drawing on interviews with Maura’s family and those she worked with, Maura’s letters, and declassified government documents, Markey weaves an intimate portrait of Maura’s spiritual and political journey during a shockingly violent era. Working in poor communities transformed Maura from an obedient and rule-bound young woman into a provocative critic of authority who pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be faithful to religious conviction and her own heart—even if it meant challenging the CIA-backed regimes that terrorized the poor of Latin America. Maura’s life is a microcosm of the larger evolution of postwar Catholicism: from a inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s, through the dramatic reassessments of Vatican II to a community of Christians grappling with liberation theology and what it meant to serve God in the world and beside the poor in the 1970s.

 

with Bernadine Dohrn, former Professor of Law at Northwestern University

and Bill Ayers, an American elementary education theorist and former Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago .

They were both involved with the Weather Underground Organization, an American militant, radical left-wing organization founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan in 1969. The pair are life partners.

Bill Ayers is the author of the new book "Demand the Impossible! [1]".

 

About the Book:

In an era defined by mass incarceration, endless war, economic crisis, catastrophic environmental destruction, and a political system offering more of the same, radical social transformation has never been more urgent—or seemed more remote.

A manifesto for movement-makers in extraordinary times, Demand the Impossible! urges us to imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible.

In critiquing the world around us, insurgent educator and activist Bill Ayers uncovers cracks in that system, raising the horizons for radical change, and envisioning strategies for building the movement we need to make a world worth living in.

 

[1] https://www.haymarketbooks.org/search?q=Demand-the-Impossible

with Nomi Prins, a journalist, and Senior Fellow at Demos. She has worked as a managing director at Goldman-Sachs and as a Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns, as well as having worked as a senior strategist at Lehman Brothers and analyst at the Chase Manhattan Bank.

and with Dr. Hatim Bazian,  co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States and lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

He will be speaking tomorrow at Zaytuna College in Berkeley at 7:30 PM.

His latest book is Palestine...it is something colonial [1].

[1] http://www.amritpublishers.com/en/news/upcoming-release-its-something-colonial/

with Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History at Salem State University and author of the book A History of the Cuban Revolution.

and Samuel Farber, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and the author of the book Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered.

Mitch speaks with Steven Rosenfeld about the latest on recounting votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights, campaigns and elections, and many social justice issues. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting."

with Rachel Jackson, researcher of radical Oklahoma history at the University of Oklahoma.

The Green Corn Rebellion was an armed uprising that took place in rural Oklahoma on August 2 and 3, 1917. The uprising was a reaction by radicalized European-Americans, tenant farmers, Seminoles, Muscogee Creeks and African-Americans to an attempt to enforce the Selective Draft Act of 1917. They formed a militia and planned to march to Washington, D.C. to overthrow the government, eating "green corn" as they went.