Interviews

BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Martha Rosenberg

When I was shark hunting, my overarching goal was to find, subdue and kill a great white shark. The NRA, pigeon shoots, corrupt politicians and corrupt corporations are my great white sharks today.
_{-- Steve Hindi, founding president of Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK)}

Eighteen years ago, Steve Hindi would have been more likely to be behind the barrel of gun instead of in front of it.

After hunting for most of his life, Hindi turned around when he witnessed a horrific example of live pigeon shooting. From that point on, compassion, not killing, became his life goal. Martha Rosenberg interviewed Hindi about protesting, getting shot at by hunters and the cruelty of "canned hunting."

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Martha Rosenberg

Dr. Rowan Chlebowski is a lead investigator of the Women's Health Initiative. BuzzFlash contributor Martha Rosenberg spoke with him about the physical and mental costs of hormone therapy for women and the influence of Big Pharma on doctors and researchers.

Rosenberg: The Women's Heath Initiative findings about hormone therapy (HT) were definitive enough that both the estrogen and estrogen plus progestin arms of the study were terminated. Yet claims of heart and memory benefits for women, if HT is started early enough, continue in the media. Is there new information that has changed the risk/benefit ratio?

Chlebowski: The new information was a secondary analysis of WHI data which ran in JAMA in 2007 and found HT may not be as detrimental for coronary heart disease as previously thought, if started in early menopause. Risk for stroke did not change, however, and there are indications that breast cancers appeared earlier, when hormones were started earlier.

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Martha Rosenberg

Martha Rosenberg: Your new book, When Everything Changed (Little, Brown) covers the cascade of rights women won between 1964 and 1972 from equal pay and the right to their own credit rating to the right to wear pants and to be called by the honorific "Ms." Why was this second women's rights movement necessary fifty years after women won the right to vote?

Gail Collins: While the suffragists succeeded in getting the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920, they also believed that women's role should be at home as mothers and wives. Without the economic power of participating in the workplace and positions of influence in society, women's status after getting the vote could really not change much.

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Head On Radio Network's Bob Kincaid Talks to BuzzFlash About What Air America's Failure Can Teach Us About Progressive Success.

BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Meg White

With the demise of liberal talk radio station Air America last month, liberals lost their voice in commercial radio. But is that really such a huge loss?

Bob Kincaid, a progressive radio host based in rural West Virginia and co-founder of The Head On Radio Network (HORN), will be the first to tell you he's not happy Air America is gone.

"It's a sad thing," Kincaid told me in a telephone interview Wednesday. "I don't want less liberal radio; I want more liberal radio."

As the host of Head On with Bob Kincaid, he welcomed left-wing competition against his online radio show, which has outlasted the recently-defunct liberal experiment of the AM airwaves. But he does have a strong opinion as to how we got to this barren landscape in progressive radio.

"I think part of the reason Air America failed was because it was set up to work on a right-wing business model," Kincaid said. "I think it's highly unlikely that [model] is going to be successful down the road."

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

We're headed for disaster. You'd have to be totally blind not to recognize that. So if we don't change -- if this crisis doesn't force us to change -- there will be more and more and more and more. And who knows what the ultimate outcome will be? If we continue to resist, we'll disappear. I mean, you have to be sustainable at some point don’t you, by definition?

-- John Perkins

* * *

Initially, John Perkins seems to be a character you'd love to hate. His tales of spreading exploitation and pushing World Bank loans across the planet as an "economic hit man" make him easy fodder. Perkins has been a member of a group that finds itself more and more unpopular every day since the implosion of Wall Street last year.

In his latest book, he introduces himself as one of the "'hired guns' who promote the interests of big corporations and certain sectors of the U.S. government." He adds that though he had a "fancy title" his "real job was to plunder the Third World."

This was Perkins' basic narrative in his wildly popular book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But in his latest book, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded -- and What We Need to Do to Remake Them, he connects the plundering of the last three decades to the roots of today's economic crisis.

"We were so successful in the Third World that our bosses directed us to implement similar strategies in the United States and across the rest of the planet," he writes. This is where the global economic crisis came from, and we can only fix it if we understand that.

And that's why BuzzFlash had to talk to the economic hit man himself. Turns out, the H-word that came to mind was not hate, but hope.

In this interview, Perkins explains why "economic recovery," in the mainstream sense of the word, is not desirable for our country, and that such a "return to normal" will only precipitate the next looming crisis. He also told us what he thinks about the supposed "change" as represented by the Obama Administration a year after inauguration and what it's going to take to transition from toxic, predatory capitalism to a sustainable, fair-market society.

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Meg White

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that Americans are exposed to 3,000 advertising messages a day. No one wants to believe that those messages have an effect on them, as we're much too savvy for that. Such assertions are part of the reason ads work so well, and also the reason Adbusters is still around after 20 years.

Adbusters Media Foundation was formed in 1989 in British Columbia, Canada by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz as a non-profit organization questioning the wisdom of a culture based on consumerism. They publish three versions of their ad-free magazine, Adbusters, every two months. The group also supports or runs a large number of campaigns, from Buy Nothing Day to spoof ads to Digital Detox Week (formerly known as TV Turnoff Week).

Just think of them as Greenpeace for your brain.

"Just like a physical environment can be polluted, so can the mental environment," Adbusters contributing editor Micah White (no relation) told me. "The mental environment can be polluted by advertising."

Adbusters is credited as leading the "culture jamming movement," one that seeks to expose modern consumerism as unnatural and damaging. They have educational programs contesting the wisdom of established economic and design principles. They even, somewhat paradoxically, have their own brand of shoe.

The Blackspot Shoe is made of "hemp, recycled tires and vegan leather and produced in fair-trade or unionized factories." It's only available through Adbusters and independent retailers.

Starting at $75, the shoes represent a buy-in diametrically opposed to Nike; Adbusters says they give members a chance to "unswoosh." Yet, is this not a form of branding in and of itself? Do promotions for the shoe in their magazine count as advertising?

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Meg White

There are a lot of wild theories about what is driving Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to oppose healthcare reform. Why would a man who has recently expressed support for health insurance reform, universal healthcare, expanding Medicare and SCHIP turn around and oppose those things once they had a chance at becoming law?

Many think he's been bought off by Big Pharma and the powerful health insurance companies in his home state. Others point to his bitterness over being abandoned by the Democratic Party in his 2006 bid to keep his Senate seat, or just to his ego. Some of the wilder theories revolve around Israel, blackmail and White House involvement.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. So when I got a chance to talk to Lieberman's former roommate at Yale, writer David Wyles, I had to ask.

"I wish I knew. I think there are aspects of those theories that are true," Wyles told me (though he agreed with me that the Israel motive is far-fetched). "Certainly he holds a grudge against the Democratic Party."

And though the idea of Lieberman taking a job in the insurance or pharmaceutical industries amounts to the type of quid pro quo that would repel most of us, Wyles is pretty certain of that possibility.

"They can offer him a big job as a lobbyist or as an executive," he said. And Lieberman will take it: "He has become shameless."

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

I would call the GOP the ZOP -- instead of the Grand Old Party, it’s the Zombie Occupied Party. It has no ideas. It has no capacity for maneuvering on constituent concerns.  It’s just like a zombie that’s lurching towards Obama and towards all the moderate Republicans and yelling, "Brains!" And eventually, it’ll eat itself alive. However, and at the end of George Romerez’ Land of the Dead, the zombies figure out how to use guns.

-- Max Blumenthal

* * *

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and blogger whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and a writing fellow for the Nation Institute.

But we know Max as a former night editor for BuzzFlash.com and for his fearless work in taking on right-wing zealots -- religious and otherwise -- by going to their events and challenging them.

Ever since we talked to Max last year about the hate and racial politics emanating from the 'angry white men' of talk radio, we've been looking forward to the 2009 release of his new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Meg White

Originally, Midge and Dan Hough only went to Rep. Dan Lipinski's town hall meeting on Nov. 14 to thank him. As a somewhat conservative Democrat representing a blue-collar district in south Chicago, Lipinski had been cautious about supporting healthcare reform efforts in the House, but ultimately came out in support of the bill.

"He has a hard time there because he has these people to deal with," Midge said of Lipinski. "We went there to thank him."

Little did Midge know, it would be her and her husband having to deal with the anger of the town hall attendees. At the town hall meeting, Lipinski asked Midge to tell the heart-wrenching story of her daughter-in-law Jenny. Jenny was a healthy 24-year-old pregnant mother this summer. Now she was dead, along with her unborn child, both symbols of the failure of our country's healthcare system.

But when Midge told the story to the people gathered at the town hall meeting, she was jeered, mocked and laughed at. They didn't believe her, or didn't care.

Midge still told Jenny's story, and her bravery shines in a YouTube video of the event, which now clocks in at well over 100,000 views and functions as a symbol of what the tea party movement has become.

Telling Jenny's story

When Jenny was about seven months pregnant, she came down with severe cold/flu symptoms. Because she didn't have healthcare insurance, her husband Sean brought her to a hospital emergency room. After four hours of waiting to be seen, they told Jenny she had a cold and sent her away with a couple of prescriptions.

The next morning she was much worse, so they went to a different emergency room. Worried about being turned away, Sean lied about their insurance situation and said they forgot their card. By that night, Jenny was in an intensive care unit [ICU], diagnosed with double pneumonia, respiratory failure and septic shock.

Midge said that the medical staff at the second hospital told her there is no way Jenny could have deteriorated to such a degree in a mere 24 hours. In their cursory exam of Jenny the day before, the first hospital must have missed something.

Jenny spent the next 55 days on a respirator. She suffered through a heart attack, two collapsed lungs, partial paralysis, and the delivery of a stillborn daughter. Yet she still fought to survive, trying to talk and smile and get better. She died on Aug. 26, 2009.

Telling this story of horrifying loss was hard enough for Midge, but she was mostly astonished by the group's total lack of compassion:

"How they could not know I was devastated, I'll never know."

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BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
by Meg White

With the holidays coming up, you may be asking yourself, "What do I get for the mavericky, million-dollar mom who has everything?" And I'd like to submit that a coloring book would satisfy her need to scribble outside the lines.

A coloring book may sound like a strange way to approach telling the story of the Momma Bear of Alaska Sarah Palin, but once you hear the reasoning behind Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book, everything falls into place.

As a former editorial artist and political cartoonist at a number of newspapers across Arizona who has worked with Jerry Scott of "Zits" and "Baby Blues" fame, Julie Sigwart turned the jokes she was hearing about Palin's upcoming memoir coming with a free pack of crayons into a parody everyone can enjoy.

"It's an editorial statement about Palin's policies and approach to politics," she said. "We didn't want to tell a narrative like a comic book and instead put together a collection of editorial cartoons disguised as a kids' coloring book."

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