Racist Attacks on Asian Americans in Denver and Beyond

Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with Robert Kuttner (@rkuttnerwrites) whose latest book is. Some of those interviewed in this long-running series are in such high demand that time in discussion is sorely limited. Recently, one such has been Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of and professor at Brandeis University's Heller School.  In 'The Stakes....', Kuttner argues that the 2020 presidential election will determine the very survival of American democracy. To restore popular faith in government―and win the election― Kuttner believes that Democrats need to nominate and elect an economic progressive. The Stakes explains how the failure of the economy to serve ordinary Americans opened the door to a demagogic president, but also how democracy can still be taken back from Donald Trump. Either the United States continues the long slide into the arms of the bankers and corporate interests and the disaffection of working Americans―the course set in the past half century by Republican and Democratic presidents alike―or a progressive Democrat is elected in the mold of FDR. At stake is nothing less than the continued success of the American experiment in liberal democracy. That success is dependent on a fairer distribution of income, wealth, and life changes ―and a reduction in the political influence of financial elites over both parties. The decay of democracy and economic fairness began long before Trump. The American republic is in need of a massive overhaul. It will take not just a resounding Democratic victory in 2020 but a progressive victory to pull back from the brink of autocracy. The Stakes demonstrates how a progressive Democrat has a better chance than a centrist of winning the presidency, and how only this outcome can begin the renewal of the economy and our democracy. The American Prospect is "devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective. In print quarterly and online daily, the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary to create good legislation. (They) help to dispel myths, challenge conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue." We are delighted to run this interview here even though it was curtailed by sheer pressure of those in a long long queue wanting to pick Kuttner's brains to promote a winning outcome in 2020. We were lucky to get to speak to him at all.  Kuttner also writes for HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and The New York Review of Books.

10 Okt 201913min

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with geriatrician and author, Dr. Louise Aronson () on her new book, , an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."

7 Okt 201934min

The news cycle rarely passes these days without negative news of Russia and, sadly for the people of that region, Ukraine. What about the people?  Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Caroline Walton (@carolineski) who,  during three decades of visiting Russia and Ukraine, met some exceptional women and men, people who had known famine, war and nuclear disaster. Each of them underwent a process of transformation, and in so doing they transcended their circumstances in ways that were little short of miraculous. “Where there was the 'holodomor'," she says, "there was my grandfather-in-law, Petro, who forgave everything. Where there was the Gulag, there were people such as de Beausobre who made it her personal Calvary. And where there was the most terrible siege in human history, there were people who sang Ode to Joy to their Nazi besiegers.” From a village wise-woman to survivors of the siege of Leningrad and the Chernobyl disaster, to the family she married into, they helped Caroline transform her own western-centric world view. "A wonderful combination of meticulous research and wide personal experience. Caroline Walton has met so many extraordinary people in Russia and Ukraine who have developed their cultures’ spirituality to survive the impossible. " - says, Dr Mary Hobson, Pushkin Medal winner. Caroline Walton’s love for this part of the world began with her teenage reading of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She visited the Soviet Union twice before its collapse and in 1992 she went to live in Samara, Russia. Later she travelled to Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev and the Crimea. She has written several books on Russia and the USSR (including and ). She lives in London where she also works as a Russian to English literary translator. Caroline is married to a Ukrainian-Russian of Cossack descent.

2 Okt 201942min

For this show, Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with Jason DeParle (@JasonDeParle) a veteran reporter for The New York Times, about his new book,  (Viking, 1st Edition edition, August 20, 2019. Throughout his career, De Parle has written extensively about poverty and immigration. His book, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Helen Bernstein Award from the New York City Library. He was an Emerson Fellow at New America. He is a recipient of the George Polk Award and is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. De Parle's latest work is powerful examination of one of the day’s most important topics: global migration. In many ways, the latest is a summary effort of the past three decades of his core research that began in the Philippines when he was a much younger reporter launching his career. Some of the close relationships he forged during his time there became lifelong friendships—and helped lead to this crucial and timely volume about the increasingly explosive and controversial phenomenon of global migration. Three decades ago, when the author was reporting on the poverty of the shantytowns of Manila, he met Tita Comodas, who reluctantly took him in as a boarder. Unable to provide for his family, Emet, Tita’s husband, was forced to take a job abroad in Saudi Arabia, and he spent the next 20 years living far from his loved ones in order to send remittances home and afford his children a higher standard of life. Identifying the book’s title as the family mantra, DeParle focuses on their daughter, Rosalie, then a 15-year-old studying nursing. He follows her through the years as she graduated and took nursing jobs abroad, eventually arriving in Galveston, Texas, and her own lifelong dream fulfilled: a job in the U.S. Moving in and out of the narrative of Rosalie’s journey, the author chronicles her daily struggles, tying them to the bigger picture of migration movements and globalism as well as the economic, political, and cultural particulars of immigration in North America. Giving a human face to the issue of immigration, De Parle does a great service to his readers and his subjects.

12 Sep 201929min

In 's, 'Lucky Boy, Solimar Castro Valdez is eighteen and drunk on optimism when she embarks on a perilous journey across the US/Mexican border. Weeks later she arrives on her cousin's doorstep in Berkeley, CA, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. This was not the plan. But amid the uncertainty of new motherhood and her American identity, Soli learns that when you have just one precious possession, you guard it with your life. For Soli, motherhood becomes her dwelling and the boy at her breast her hearth.  Kavya Reddy has always followed her heart, much to her parents' chagrin. A mostly contented chef at a UC Berkeley sorority house, the unexpected desire to have a child descends like a cyclone in Kavya's mid-thirties. When she can't get pregnant, this desire will test her marriage, it will test her sanity, and it will set Kavya and her husband, Rishi, on a collision course with Soli, when she is detained and her infant son comes under Kavya's care. As Kavya learns to be a mother - the singing, story-telling, inventor-of-the-universe kind of mother she fantasized about being - she builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child.  Lucky Boy is an emotional journey that will leave you certain of the redemptive beauty of this world. There are no bad guys in this story, no obvious hero. From rural Oaxaca to Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto to the dreamscapes of Silicon valley, author Shanthi Sekaran has taken real life and applied it to fiction; the results are moving and revelatory. Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, LA Review of Books and Huffington Post. She teaches creative writing and literature at Mills College in Oakland, CA.

20 Aug 201914min

The US economy is designed by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, says Ted Howard in conversation here with Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg). His new book, , written with , offers a compelling vision of an equitable, ecologically sustainable alternative that meets the essential needs of all people. Ted Howard is the Co-founder and President of . Previously, he served as the Executive Director of the National Center for Economic Alternatives. Howard and Kelly argue cogently that we now live in a world where 26 billionaires own as much wealth as half the planet’s population. The extractive economy we live with now enables the financial elite to squeeze out maximum gain for themselves, heedless of damage to people or planet. But Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard show that there is a new economy emerging focused on helping everyone thrive while respecting planetary boundaries.  At a time when competing political visions are at stake the world over, this book urges a move beyond tinkering at the margins to address the systemic crisis of our economy. Kelly and Howard outline seven principles of what they call a Democratic Economy: community, inclusion, place (keeping wealth local), good work (putting labor before capital), democratized ownership, ethical finance, and sustainability. Each principle is paired with a place putting it into practice: Pine Ridge, Preston, Portland, Cleveland, and more. This book tells stories not just of activists and grassroots leaders but of the unexpected accomplices of the Democratic Economy. Seeds of a future beyond corporate capitalism and state socialism are being planted in hospital procurement departments, pension fund offices, and even company boardrooms.  The road to a system grounded in community, democracy, and justice remains uncertain. Kelly and Howard help us understand we make this road as we walk it by taking a first step together beyond isolation and despair.

7 Aug 201937min

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Ran Poliakine, a serial entrepreneur, inventor and industrial designer. In 2007, Poliakine founded , a company that utilized  technology to develop  solutions. Then, in 2009, through Wellsense he developed the world’s first bedsore monitoring system and the Monitor Alert Protect (MAP) system. This continuously monitors a patient to display potential development of high-pressure points that lead to  and and is used in major hospitals throughout the world and in the US including the , ,  and Kentucky’s Jewish Hospital. Today he is involved in a myriad of new companies all developing far-reaching new technologies.  Poliakine was born in ,  where he lives with his wife and five children.  You can find .

17 Juli 201932min

On April 13, 1919, a column of British troops marched into the , a public garden in Amritsar, a city in Punjab, where more than 15,000 Indians had gathered for a peaceful protest against the increasingly restrictive policies of the British government, and in particular the deportation of two followers of Gandhi. At the orders of Brig. Gen. Reginald Dyer, the soldiers began firing into the crowd without warning. When screaming men, women and children rushed toward the exits, Dyer ordered his troops to aim at them. Many who were attempting to climb over the high perimeter wall were gunned down, their bloodied bodies falling in heaps. The firing went on for 10 minutes, killing an estimated 500 to 600 people and wounding many more. While Dyer was the one to order the killings, another man was also responsible for the massacre: Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of Punjab, who justified the carnage and defended Dyer’s actions. Anita Anand’s “The Patient Assassin” is the story of Udham Singh, an Indian who sought to avenge the murders of his fellow countrymen by shooting O’Dwyer to death in London in March 1940. In recounting the lives of these three main characters — Singh, O’Dwyer and Dyer — Anand, a British-Indian biographer and broadcast journalist, provides a revealing look at the brutality and oppression of British rule, and how it seeded the desire for retribution in the hearts of so many Indians.  After training as a journalist, British born and raised Anand became European Head of News and Current Affairs for , and one of the youngest TV news editors in Britain at the age of 25.She presented the talk show The Big Debate and was political correspondent for Zee TV presenting the Raj Britannia series – 31 documentaries chronicling the political aspirations of the Asian community in the most marginal constituencies in 1997.  After Zee, Anand joined the BBC in various roles then in June 2012, she took over presenting BBC Radio 4's  the Saturday afternoon current affairs phone-in programme between 2:00 and 2:30 pm UK time from   Interestingly, Anand has also appeared in and won the 2017/2018 UK Celebrity Master Mind (4/10) beating singer Rachel Stevens, actor Asim Chaudhry and comedian Andy Zaltzman. She also appeared on the 2018/2019 Christmas  representing  as captain alongside , , and

4 Juli 201927min