Here’s another in our series of short video interviews, each running a minute (give or take), with PBC authors. This one is with Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy, which details how investing in green jobs will solve the nation’s two most pressing challenges: how to alleviate poverty and make the economy work for all Americans and how to tackle climate change.

Here’s another in our series of short video interviews, each running a minute (give or take), with PBC authors. This one is with Robert Scheer, who talks about his recent book The Pornography of Power, which tells how defense hawks hijacked military spending after 9/11 and made America less safe.

Here’s the first in a series of short video interviews, each running a minute (give or take), with PBC authors. This one is with Samantha Power, who dropped by the PBC offices last fall to talk about her book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.

[Posted by The Media Consortium Media Wire]

Weekly Immigration Wire

by Nezua, MC MediaWire Blogger

On May 30, 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores were shot to death, purportedly by a group of far-right anti-immigrant activists who broke into the Flores home by posing as police officers. On Friday, Shawna Forde, anti-immigrant activist and Executive Director of the Minutemen American Defense, (MAD) along with accomplices Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola were arrested on two counts of first-degree murder and burglary charges related to the Flores murders.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes that the MAD website denounces the murders, but wryly adds that the distancing is “a tad belied by headlines down the page,” like “Subhuman Mexicans (God’s Children?) Prey on Countrymen.” The Flores murders are part of a palpable political and social climate of hostility and revulsion toward Latin American immigrants that is running amok in our nation.

Read More

[Posted by Elena Sytcheva]

Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press investigates the cutting-edge coverage of liberal politics during the 2008 presidential campaign, presenting colorful portraits of its major players, some well known, others less so. The cast of characters includes:

Heather Parton, aka Digby

Blog: Hullabaloo
Background: Studied theater at San Jose State, and worked in the film business at Chris Blackwell’s Island Pictures, Polygram, and Artisan.
More about: She emerged as a voice for the progressive community and had a small hand in changing the face of Democratic politics, while shocking the male-dominated blogosphere when it came out that she was a woman.
Boehlert says: “She had always been a political junkie, and the chance to host an ongoing, in-depth discussion with curious and articulate readers was pure heaven for her. For years she had observed politics with great interest, devouring books on the subject, and was well prepared to start discussing politics publicly. Thanks to her lucid take-downs and insightful analysis, Digby was instantly admired and toasted among the best essayists in the entire overeducated liberal blogosphere. ‘She’s the best writer in our little gang,’ Markos at Daily Kos told me. . . . Her work represented the kind of smart, tough-minded analysis that liberals online craved but searched in vain to find in the mainstream press.”
In her own words: “The Internet became available just as American politics turned batshit crazy.” On blogging: “I had no idea that I had the capacity. I was astounded, number one, that I could do it. And number two, that people liked it and got something out of it.”

Glenn Greenwald

Blog: Originally Unclaimed Territory; now blogs at Salon.com
Background: He graduated from George Washington University, studied law at New York University, and became a constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He is now a contributing writer at Salon.
More about: Greenwald criticized Obama for his stance on wiretapping and immunity and nearly single-handedly elevated the wiretapping FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) issue to national importance, forcing candidates to take notice.
Boehlert says: “He’s the one providing constant adult supervision over the blogosphere. His posts are deadly serious and often much more earnest than those of his colleagues. The illustration of Greenwald that appears on his site shows him sitting ramrod straight with his arms crossed and wearing a dress shirt and tie. Very unbloggy. . . . His takedowns, which often unfolded over days via multiple posts, with Greenwald returning to rhetorically pound his foe again and again, were epic. That’s why he got dubbed ‘Glennzilla’ online. Greenwald notched more clear knockout wins in his belt than perhaps any other blogger.”
Digby says: “Greenwald changed blogging. . . . I didn’t know that somebody could come along at that late date, do blogging in a completely different way, and become a sensation. Glenn truly was an overnight blogging sensation. People loved his work immediately.” Read More

TPMCafe Book Club: The Bloggers on the Bus
Amanda Marcotte, Versha Sharma, Armando Liorens, and Ari Melber join in a discussion of Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press with author Eric Boehlert
Related Book: Bloggers on the Bus (Learn more)

WBUR’s On Point: Reading Netherland
Netherland author Joseph O’Neill — and James McBride, bestselling author of The Color of Water — on President Obama’s first read in the White House.
Related Book: Netherland (Learn more)

Charlie Rose: Conversation with Naomi Klein and William Greider
The authors discuss the financial crisis, the bank bailout, the Obama administration, and more.
Related Book: Come Home, America by William Greider

WBUR’s On Point: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor
The celebrated author discusess his new book, a novel about “black boys with beach houses.”
Related Book: Sag Harbor (Learn more)

What is the true import of the events unfolding in Iran and what is the proper US response?

Slate’s Fred Kaplan (author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power) thinks it at least plausible that Ahmadinejad is on the outs with some influential mullahs, even some who’ve long supported him.

[R]eports have circulated in recent months suggesting that some Iranian clerics, even a few in high places, are displeased with Ahmadinejad’s harsh rhetoric and his mishandling of the economy. Some evidence of electoral fraud has reportedly been leaked from dissidents from within Iran’s interior ministry. The supreme leader has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate allegations of fraud—this after publicly ratifying the election’s results (without, suspiciously, observing the three-day waiting period that Iranian law requires)—though it may be that this order is mere subterfuge and that the investigation will be just as fraudulent.

But then again:

[I]t is possible (how likely it might be, no one can say) that the popular revolts might sharpen the fissures within the circles of Iran’s ruling elite. Of course, those circles are so opaque that few outsiders can tell whether there are fissures, much less what their boundaries are. Does the CIA or the National Security Agency know? I hope so, but I don’t know.

Robert Dreyfuss, writing at The Nation, thinks recent events are evidence of a stronger Ahmadinejad.

My own view — and this was confirmed by a number of insiders I met with in Tehran — is that the traditional balance of power has been upended. According to conventional wisdom, Iran’s president is a figurehead with little or no power, while the Leader (often mistakenly called the “Supreme Leader”) is the all-powerful commander in chief and decision-maker. At the very least, that balance is tilting, and I’ll leave it to closer watchers of Iranian politics than me to figure out how far it’s moved. But it’s clear that Ahmadinejad, his military and paramilitary allies, and the radical clerics that support him have at least surrounded if not neutralized Khamenei, the Leader.

Writing at the American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias (author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats) is leaning that way too.

The theft of the election…raises more foreign-policy implications than any clean result could have. For one thing, at this point if Mousavi and his followers somehow manage to prevail, it will be a victory not for a “reform” movement but for something more like a revolution that holds the promise of completely changing the context of U.S.-Iranian relations. Unfortunately, a more likely scenario is that the opposition will be crushed, with uncertain consequences for American policy. Consolidation of power under Ahmadinejad is likely to change the U.S. domestic political context.

As for the American response, Steve Clemons says the US should remain aloof…

[T]he Iranian election belongs not to Frank Gaffney or John Bolton, or to the Obama administration - but to the Iranian people themselves.

As Americans, we need to remove ourselves from the process and allow it to unfold on Iranian terms.

…while Kaplan thinks Obama should get tough.

Whatever is going on inside Tehran’s ruling circles, now is not the time for Obama to engage in outreach. Rather, it’s time to up the ante, to make the mullahs—especially those who might be inclined to cast off Ahmadinejad—realize that if they’re going to play democracy, they can’t rig the deck and violate the will of their people, at least not so blatantly.

Clearly, this one will take some more figuring out.

Via Juan Cole, noted blogger, Middle East historian, and the author of Engaging the Muslim World, here’s a very useful Al Jazeera report on the power struggle dividing Iran’s ruling elite — not the one pitting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against his presidential rival Mir Hossein Mousavi, but a perhaps more significant one, between former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i. (Related: PBC Interview with Juan Cole.)

Watching just those three minutes gives you a sense that the internal dynamics in Iran are a lot more complicated than most media accounts suggest. For good background on what’s happening in Iran (and smart analysis that takes account of these complexities), I’d recommend two quite different PBC titles:

Engaging the Muslim World, by Juan Cole

Chapter 6 is devoted to Iran. Here are some snippets:

“While the regime in Tehran is indeed authoritarian and implements hidebound laws in harsh ways, most of the other charges against Iran are either completely untrue or need to be so extensively qualified that they may as well be. Nor should the vitality of Iranian civil society be underestimated, despite the setbacks visited on the reform movement in recent years. …

[Some] ayatollahs have mobilized to oppose [Ahmadinejad's] election to a second term, on the grounds that he is a heretic. The Speaker of the house, Ali Larijani, is reportedly furious at Ahmadinejad for his confrontational approach on the nuclear energy research program.

Khamenei’s patience with [Ahmadinejad] is said to have been stretched thin. It may be that he chose not to move against the president because Ahmadinejad’s removal would weaken the hard-liners and damage Khamanei’s own prestige, given the hard-liners’ earlier support for him. For American and European pundits to speak of Ahmadinejad as though he were in a position to launch a war or even independently set major policy is profoundly misleading.

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power by David Sanger

Part I, all four chapters, is devoted to Iran, with the main emphasis on the US response to its nuclear research activities.

Snippet from the Introduction:

“Early in 2008, Bush authorized something just short of an attack [on Iran]: a series of new covert actions, some that the United States would conduct alone, others designed in consultation with the Israelis and the Europeans. Most were centered on a last-ditch effort to undermine the industrial infrastructure around Natanz the site of Iran’s largest known nuclear enrichment plant. Such attempts had been made before…but now the clock was ticking faster. Few believed the effort would amount to much. “We may be past the point of stopping the Iranians,” one senior intelligence official acknowledged to me months after Bush signed the orders. But the hope was that the covert actions would at least slow down Iran’s effort to produce enough nuclear fuel for several weapons.

Obama had vowed never to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. During the post-election transition, however, several of his top advisers acknowledged that the harder question, never discussed on the campaign trail, would be how close to that goal Obama would allow the Iranians to get. …”

Get either book for free when you join PBC. (Click here to get started!)

Click on the play button below to read the transcript of a live chat with Gov. Howard Dean, whose new book, Howard Dean’s Prescription for REAL Healthcare Reform, is due out in July (and available right now for FREE on pre-order when you join Progressive Book Club). The chat, a joint effort of Democracy for America,  took place on Tuesday, June 9, at 9 PM ET and ran a little over one hour. Thousands of people took part, submitting hundreds of questions about healthcare reform, of which the governor answered as many as time would allow.

Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. He’s an associate professor of Latin American history at New York University.

What’s the greatest book in your field?

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (being re-released this year by Norton for its 50th anniversary [with a new afterword by Andrew J. Bacevich]).  It was published a month after the Cuban Revolution, and William’s analysis of what he dubbed “imperial anticolonialism” reads like a script for the US-produced horror movie that followed — in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and now the Middle East.  And, for an update published two decades later, there’s Williams’ great prose poem Empire as a Way of Life.