Archive for November, 2009
The Thanksgiving Show
November 20th, 2009 | 1 comment
Well, it’s hard to believe that it’s that time of year again. Thanksgiving is less than a week away and although it can be a time of stress, travel, and visiting relatives we might rather forget we’re related to, it’s also a time to eat, a time to give and share with the people we love, and a time to remember everything we have to be thankful for. That’s why this week on Business Matters, we’ll be talking about the business of food; the economy of giving; and the value of gratitude.
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Sharon Astyk, Author
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Sharon Astyk is a writer, teacher and subsistence farmer, and the author of two books on Peak Oil and Climate Change — Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil , the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Sharon used to run a small, Jewish themed CSA, but is now concentrating on subsistence agriculture, growing food to share and teaching others to grow food.
Jonathan Safron Foer, Author
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Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His newest book about not eating meat is called Eating Animals. His work has received numerous awards and been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Lewis Hyde, Author and Scholar, on Giving
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Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Hyde is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce. Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Craig Cuccia, Founder of Cafe Reconcile In New Orleans
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Craig Cuccia is the co-founder and executive director of Café Reconcile, a restaurant that provides on-the-job training in the service industry for inner city teens in New Orleans.
Reforming Health Care
November 13th, 2009 | post a comment
Less than a year since Barack Obama took office as president, but the battle over how to reform our employed-based-insurance health care system has been going on for a half-century. President Obama has made it his top priority to win this battle. Last weekend the House of Representatives passed the most far reaching health care reform bill in a generation, but it seems impossible to cut through the media clutter and see what the legislation is really about. So this week on Business Matters, we are delving into the subject of health care to help you understand what the proposed reform could mean to you and what it would really take to fix our broken system.
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Business Matters News & Michael Mandel, Senior Economist @BusinessWeek
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Michael Mandel is chief economist at BusinessWeek, responsible for formulating BusinessWeek’s coverage of economic policy. Prior to this, Mandel was economics editor. Mandel is the author of several books, including “Rational Exuberance”, “The Coming Internet Depression”, and “The High Risk Society”. He writes the World Economy Blog for BusinessWeek.
Health Care Reform Update: Trudy Lieberman, Contributing Editor @CJR
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Veteran reporter Trudy Lieberman is the president of the Association of Health Journalists, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping the public understand health care issues. She’s also director of the health and medicine reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. For 29 years she covered economic, health policy, and health financing issues at Consumer Reports, and she’s a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Health Care IT: Dr. Blackford Middleton, Prof. of Medicine
&
John Burklow, Associate Director @NIH Office of Communications & Public Liaison
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Blackford Middleton is Corporate Director of Clinical Informatics Research & Development (CIRD), and Chairman of the Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) at Partners Healthcare System, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.
John Burklow is the associate director for communications and public liaison at the National 
Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary medical research agency in the Federal government. NIH’s annual budget is more than $29 billion, which supports a large research facility in Bethesda, Md., and more than 325,000 researchers throughout the United States and around the world. Burklow oversees the news media, editorial operations, online communications, special projects and NIH visitor center functions.
The Mutant Market of Health Care: David Goldhill, Author “How American Health Care Killed My Father” & CEO
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It’s hard enough to lose someone to illness, but when that death could have been prevented, it makes it all the more difficult. After losing his father to a hospital-borne infection two years ago, David Goldhill was drawn into trying to understand what makes the health care industry so unlike any other in our country. His article, How American Health Care Killed My Father, telling his story and proposing some reforms to bring more sanity into the labrynthine system appeared in the September issue of the Atlantic Magazine.
One Person Makes a Difference
November 6th, 2009 | post a comment
This week: Banksters and Bailout Bandits. Do individuals have a chance against the mighty banking dragons? We’ll talk people who have taken on the banks and learn how community organizations are networking nationwide to fight for economic justice. We’ll meet an organizer on Chicago’s North Side who’s pushing back against the banks who are pushing people out of their homes. Also, we’ll hear about how thousands of people converged in Chicago last week from across the country to protest the American Bankers’ Association’s national meeting.
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Catherine Austin Fitts, President, Solari; Former Assistant Secretary of Housing
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Catherine Austin Fitts has an unparalleled perspective on the current banking crisis, having witnessed the corruption in the market during the first Bush and Clinton administrations. Since then, she’s become the founder and managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC.; and President of Solari, Inc. an online media company focused on ethical investment. She’s also been president of The Hamilton Securities Group, investment bank and financial software developer and an Managing Director and member of the board of Wall Street investment banking firm Dillon Read & Co. Inc. (She writes about her experience there in Dillon Read and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.)
Jordan Estevao, Director, Save the American Dream Campaign
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Save the American Dream is a campaign of National People’s Action (NPA), a network of metropolitan, regional, and statewide organizations that build grassroots power. Since its founding in 1972, NPA has worked nationally to build and strengthen people’s organizations, to develop indigenous leadership, and to advance campaigns for a more just, equitable, and sustainable society. NPA works to build the field of organizing, create permanent alliances, run national campaigns that strengthen organizations and develop grassroots leadership; and utilize technology and communications to take organizing and alliance building to a new scale.
Holly Krig, Lead Organizer, Northside Action for Justice
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Northside Action for Justice (NA4J) is a grassroots, member-controlled organization that builds power for low and moderate income people in order to advance the cause of economic and social justice on the north side of Chicago and across the globe. Holly explains some of the amazing successes that her organization has achieved without a lot of money but with a lot of community organizing.
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