Chatting Up A Storm - Claudia Cragg

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU #ItsTheEconomy with President of the  in Colorado The last 6 months have been an unprecedented challenge to the health of all, to our economy, and to our concepts of racial equity. This makes the work for the more important now than ever, says Campbell.  Despite very tough conditions, the ACC continues to provide culturally competent economic development and business opportunities for its Members.  The ACC also advocates a strong understanding of the Asian American Pacific Islander communities that conduct business in a manner that is unique to their heritage..

(Reprise from 2014, but very sadly the US - and indeed the world's - financial system has not been reformed to offset inbuilt disadvantages against the economically underserved or deprived. Here at #ItsTheEconomy there is hope that perhaps #COVID19 might offer an opportunity for a much needed rethink.) Popular anger against the financial system has never been higher, yet the practical workings of the system remain opaque to many people.  aims to bridge the gap between protest slogans and practical proposals for reform. Claudia Cragg (comments and suggestions warmly welcomed at @claudiaragg) speaks here for @KGNU #ItsTheEconomy broadcast show with @Suitpossum. Brett is a campaigner and former s broker who has a unique understanding of life inside and outside the financial sector. He builds up a framework for approaching it based on the three principles of 'Exploring', 'Jamming' and 'Building', offering a practical guide for those who wish to deepen their understanding of, and access to, the inner workings of

Claudia Cragg speaks here for @KGNU with Dr. Jennie C. Stephens, @jenniecstephens, the Director of the and the Dean’s Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy  at  in Boston, Massachusetts.  She is also the Director for Strategic Research Collaborations at Northeastern University’s  and is affiliated with the , the department of  and the department of . Her research, teaching, and community engagement focus on integrating social justice, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives into climate and energy resilience, social and political aspects of the renewable energy transition, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, energy democracy, gender in energy and climate, and climate and energy justice. Her unique trans-disciplinary approach integrates innovations in social science and public policy with science and engineering to promote social justice, reduce inequalities and redistribute power (electric power, economic power and political power). Diversifying Power: Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on

Claudia Cragg @KGNU (@claudiacragg) addresses the business operational adjustments everyone is having to make in what we hope will soon be a post-COVID world. At Zenreach, where he is CEO, John Kelly (@zenreach) is addressing entrepreneurs and operators, both small and large, to let them know that as a company they do recognize the unique challenges that have presented themselves during these unprecedented times.  in this wide-ranging conversation,  a number of issues are explored. Listeners might also want to know that ZenReach has started a weekly webinar series  showcasing merchants and industry experts who have found creative ways to adapt—and in some cases thrive—in this environment where most have had to shut our doors. Second, they have compiled a very useful dedicated section of our website with some best practices that we have learned from our merchant partners. You can find that here: .  

Claudia Cragg @KGNU speaks here with Craig Unger about his new book, What IS Donald Trump's relationship with Russia? "Just how compromised was [/is] he? American Kompromat is situated in the ongoing context of the #TrumpRussia scandal and the new era of hybrid warfare, kleptocrats, and authoritarian right-wing populism it helped accelerate. To answer these questions and more, Craig Unger reports, is to understand 'kompromat'--operations that amassed compromising information on the richest and most powerful men on earth, and that leveraged power by appealing to what is for some the most prized possession of all: their vanity. This important work is based on extensive, exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources--Soviets who resigned from the KGB and moved to the United States, former officers in the CIA, FBI counterintelligence agents, lawyers at white-shoe Washington firms--and analysis of thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Laura Levitt @llevitttemple about her book, n. On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between int

Many Americans have been distraught for the last four years as tightly held economic and political power drowned out their voices and values. But now, with a new administration and the Biden-Harris partnership, there is hope that building on small past successes real success could be found.  Claudia Cragg @KGNU speaks here (2017) with legendary Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé @fmlappe who together with co-writer and organizer-scholar Adam Eichen offers a fresh, surprising response to this core crisis. This intergenerational duo opens with an essential truth: It’s not the magnitude of a challenge that crushes the human spirit. It’s feeling powerless—in this case, fearing that to stand up for democracy is futile. It’s not, Lappé and Eichen argue. With riveting stories and little-known evidence, they demystify how we got here, exposing the well-orchestrated effort that has robbed Americans of their rightful power. But at the heart of this unique conversation are solutions. Even in this divisiv

Claudia Cragg speaks here for @KGNU with Caitlin Stronell, for an update about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, an 11 March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The event was caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. It was the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Stronell of @CNICJapan, is Editor of Nuke Info Tokyo. She explains here that plans remain in place by the Japanese government and TEPCO to dump massive volumes of contaminated water stored at Fukushima Daiichi into the Pacific Ocean which thus far have been stalled by strong domestic and international opposition and the official announcement that the dumping has again been postponed. International pressure to save the world's oceans from radioactive contamination, Stronell says, is very important, and which they will hand to the government at a hearing to take place soon. Please see their website linked above in this paragraph for deta

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with an essential mental health worker on the Colorado front lines in the age of the COVID19 pandemic. 

This is an early repost of a recent interview for which no apologies are made. As the 45th incumbent burns out the last days of his Presidency in a downward spiral of self-destruction and bad behavior, this conversation for @KGNU by @claudiacragg with @RuthBenGhiat holds even more resonance. The central challenge of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “” is revealed early, in the book’s introduction, when the author lays out her expansive cast of characters. “I focus on Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Muammar Gaddafi, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Mobutu Sese Seko, Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, with Idi Amin, Mohamed Siad Barre, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Nahrendra Modi, Viktor Orban, and others making cameo appearances,” Ben-Ghiat writes. This is an overwhelming dramatis personae — one that spans not just the globe but a number of ideologies, types of government and two centuries. Ben-Ghiat makes a convincing argument for including Trump in these les

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Christa Parravani about her harrowing account, , the story of one woman's reckoning with life, death and "choice". It is, she says, a memoir of 'Choice, Children and Womanhood.' In 2017 Christa Parravani had recently moved her family from California to West Virginia and was surviving on a teacher's salary and raising two young children with her husband, screenwriter Anthony Swofford. Another pregnancy, a year after giving birth to her second child, came as a shock. Christa had a history of ectopic pregnancies, and worried that she wouldn't be able to find adequate medical care. She immediately requested a termination, but her doctor refused to help. The only doctor who would perform an abortion made it clear that this would be illicit, not condoned by her colleagues or their community. Christa Parravani has crafted, through her own harrowing experiences with healthcare in contemporary America, a brilliant and moving exploration of the choices women have. Christa

This interview is a special KGNU pre-publication interview (the book comes out in February 2021 from The authors, Joanne Samuel Goldblum, (@jgoldblum), founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and journalist Colleen Shaddox who argue that the systems that should protect our citizens are broken and that poverty results from flawed policies—compounded by racism, sexism, and other ills—rather than people’s “bad choices.” Federal programs for the poor often fall far short of their aims: The U.S. has only 36 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income families; roughly 1 in 3 households on Navajo reservations lack plumbing; and inadequate counsel by public defenders can lead to harsher penalties for crimes or time in “debtors’ prisons” for those unable to pay fines or court fees. An overarching problem is that the U.S. determines eligibility for government benefits with an outdated and “irrationally low” federal poverty level of $21,720 for a family of three, which doesn’t take into

We can only hope, going forward from increasingly alarming climate change horrors of the past few years, that the Biden-Harris administration will make climate change a top policy concern after COVID19. The appointment of John Kerry as The Special Presidential Envoy for Climate certainly suggests this intention. And, just in time, since this past August saw the US facing unprecedented climate emergencies, . And for climate at the world at large, for the first time on record, This interview is a reprise of a conversation we had for @KGNU with Dr Todd Sanford during his time at The Union of Concerned Scientists.  UCS is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. The organization "strives for independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices."   What began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at the  in 1969

Five years on from this interview, it should NOT be necessary to remind people that with #COVID19, poverty and inequality are at record levels. Through the roof, they are, as foodbanks around the country increasingly bear witness. As Scott Myers-Lipton, , showed us @KGNU in his book, ": an Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty", there are possibilities for real and long-lasting solutions.  Conditions have renewed demands for a new , an American idea proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The new Economic Bill of Rights has a coherent plan and proclaims that all Americans have the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home, adequate medical care, a good education, and adequate protection from economic fears of unemployment, sickness, and old age. Integrating the latest economic and social data, his book explores each of these rights. Each chapter includes an analysis of the social problems surrounding each right, a historical overview of the attempts to implement t

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, @ruthbenghiat, the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin―enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In , she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. For ours, she says, is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power. Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s

On Election eve, Claudia Cragg speaks for @KGNU with k about Joe Biden, 2020 Presidential Candidate for The Democratic Party. Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.” His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship—an essential quality as he addresses Americans in the nation’s most dire hour in decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on his work for The New Yorker to capture the characters and meaning o

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks with about her new book, . Schroedel is professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University and in this work she weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as they related particularly to Native Peoples. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, South Dakota encouraged voters to use absentee ballots in the June 3 presidential primary election. Although the state received almost 89,000 absentee ballots in the primaries — five times the number of absentee ballots cast in the June 2016 primaries — and voting increased across the state, voter turnout on the Pine Ridge Reservation remained low, at approximately 10%. As Schroedel explains in her book, barriers to Indigenous voting are nothing new. Absentee ballots may only make them worse. Though the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Indigenous people born within the United States, voting can still be difficult for tribal communities. During South Dakota’s 2020 primary

Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) talks here to Heather Lende, (@HeatherLende) a New York Times bestselling author who writes about her hometown  -- Haines, Alaska, She has been discussing what community means since she published If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name in 2006 (selling more than 125,000 copies).  After the 2016 elections, Lende was inspired to take a more active role in politics and decided to run for office in Haines.And…She won! In  (Algonquin Books), Lende uses her trademark humor, wit, and compassion to tell the funny and entertaining story of her first term on her small-town assembly, where we learn that the political, social, and environmental issues her community faces are not so different from the issues that are being played out on the national stage.  The book is a "how to guide" for anyone thinking of beginning a career in local politics.  She explains how the local government makes decisions on things that impact us everyday -- roads, schools, zoning for housing and stores, libraries, a

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Samuel Myers of the . In a recent  with his colleague, Howard Frumkin, Myers states that, of course, elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. His new book with Frumkin is .  Elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. Here we examine these contrasts through the lens of planetary health. A hallmark of the current US administration, say Myers and Frumkin, has been its hostility to environmental stewardship and its embrace of an antiregulatory agenda. President Donald Trump has appointed administration officials from the ranks of polluting industries and their lobbying firms;

Claudia Cragg speaking for @KGNU to on and and her new book is the former deputy director and chief operating officer of the Massachusetts Health Connector—the model for the Affordable Care Act. She is the director and chief operating officer of the Massachusetts Health Connector—the model for the Affordable Care Act.  Medical insurance is complicated and, like virtually everything in American public life these days, has been politicized and in the process made still more confusing. Yet the present collection of crises—a pandemic, the challenge of accessing quality medical care, unemployment and its attendant loss of health insurance—has made clear more than any other moment in modern memory the importance of universal coverage. Add to this the fact that women are responsible for up to 80% of healthcare decisions for their families. Day has written a primer specifically for women on the ins and outs of medical insurance, with the objective of transforming our healthcare system using feminism as th