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Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Leonard talks with H. Bruce Franklin for a discussion on the modern history of American military action.

Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. But once he joined the Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, he saw that even as U.S. leaders preached high ideals of peace and freedom, in reality the country was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.In “Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War,” Bruce draws from his 50 years as a renowned cultural historian share his hard-learned lessons about the real American history.

 

Today, Leonard Lopate at Large Features Joe Mantegna And Ronnie Marmo on their new Off-Broadway production: “I’m Not A Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce”. Today’s show chronicles the life of comedy’s original bad boy.

Directed by multi Award-winning actor and director Joe Mantegna, the Off-Broadway production of “I’m Not A Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce” stars Ronnie Marmo brilliantly chronicling the life and death of the most controversial comedian of all time, Lenny Bruce. Busted for obscenity, Lenny fought for freedom of speech all the way to the Supreme Court before dying of a morphine overdose in 1966 while out on appeal.

On today’s edition of Leonard Lopate at Large, Jenny Murray discuses the role of brave women in the Nicaraguan revolution of the late ’70s.

“The documentary “‘¡Las Sandinistas!” compiles the reminiscences of women who fought with the Sandinistas, the revolutionary group in Nicaragua that toppled the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979 and then ruled that country until 1990,” writes Ben Kenigsberg of the New York Times.

“In focusing on the testimonies of women, this film by Jenny Murray aims to memorialize what one participant, the poet Daisy Zamora, calls the ‘revolution inside the revolution.’ It argues that, despite chauvinism and sexual harassment from the movement’s male leaders, the Sandinistas were as groundbreaking for feminism as they were for ostensibly socialist governance.”

On today’s Leonard Lopate at Large, Leonard, Lonnie and Derrick will discuss false confessions, government misconduct, and why progressive civil rights groups often don’t get involved with issues involving wrongful convictions. Lonnie Soury has managed media relations and public policy strategies for prominent wrongful conviction cases like Damien Echols and Marty Tankleff.  One of his clients served 20 years in prison for murder before having his conviction overturned.

Today, Leonard’s guest is Andrew Cockburn, of Harpers On The Policing Of America

Andrew Cockburn writes the Letters From Washington column for Harper’s magazine. His most recent column “Blood Money: Taxpayers pick up the tab for police brutality” takes a hard look at the way local police forces are funded in America. Andrew and Leonard today will examine what kind of police force we are getting for our tax dollars.

On Today’s Leonard Lopate at Large, Former U.S. Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses, who has had a distinguished career in public service spanning more than three decades. 

After serving as Special Advisor and Special Counsel to President Jimmy Carter, President Clinton appointed Moses to be the American ambassador to Romania in 1994, where he served for three years.  This followed his 20-year effort to free Jews and others in Communist Romania.

Ambassador Moses’s book “Bucharest Diary: Romania’s Journey from Darkness to Light” details the fall of the Communist dictatorship in 1989 and the Western diplomatic efforts he was involved in to help transform Romania into a free, democratic society in the 1990s.

On today’s Leonard Lopate at Large, Jonathan Taplin talks about his cover article from the latest issue of Harper’s magazine, “Rebirth of a Nation: Can States’ Rights Save Us From a Second Civil War?”

“The national security expert Keith Mines estimates, as he told Foreign Policy, that the United States faces, over the next ten to fifteen years, a 60 percent chance of civil war—some variety of violent political conflict on a large scale,” writes Jonathan Taplin in his cover article from the latest issue of Harper’s magazine, “Rebirth of a Nation: Can states’ rights save us from a second civil war?”“There is a solution built into the Constitution for defusing tensions created by such imbalances of power that conservative Supreme Court justices have shown great deference for: the Tenth Amendment, which declares that any power not specifically reserved for the federal government is granted to the states. The origins of the amendment stem from Thomas Jefferson’s debates with his friend James Madison during the 1787 Constitutional Convention.”

In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Jonathan, who serves as the director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, tells Leonard why he believes empowering the 50 states could save the nation.

In his novel “A View of the Empire at Sunset,” about the Dominican-born, British writer Jean Rhys, Caryl Phillips wrote, “there was something terribly illicit about her own waiflike presence in the world.” Though she was the author of revered works like “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Rhys rarely received the literary credit her work deserved during her life or after her death in 1979, which is why she is the subject of the latest installment in our Underread Book Series.

On today’s show, Leonard interviews Shraysi Tandon, Director of Invisible Hands and Margaret Wurth from Human Rights Watch.

Produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Charles Ferguson, “Invisible Hands” is the first feature documentary to expose child labor and trafficking within the supply chains of the world’s biggest companies. Filmed in six countries including India, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Ghana, it is a harrowing account of children as young as 6 years old making the products we use every day. The film marks the directorial debut of journalist Shraysi Tandon and features Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kailash Satyarthi, New York Times writer and two-time Pulitzer prize winner Nicholas Kristof, journalist Ben Skinner, author and activist Siddharth Kara and Columbia Law School professor Mark Barenberg.

Leonard’s guest today, Susannah Drake, talks about environmentally conscious design.

Since founding DLANDstudio in 2005, Susannah Drake has worked on projects ranging in scale from intimate gardens to large-scale urban planning initiatives. Her design for QueensWay transforms a 3.5 mile stretch of abandoned railway in Central Queens into a family-friendly linear park and cultural greenway. A leader in implementing design strategies to confront the impacts of climate change, DLANDstudio’s Gowanus Canal Sponge Park is a working landscape that improves the environment of the EPA Superfund site over time.https://youtu.be/VKH-KF3Psnw