Author Archives: forthrightradio

Brendan Ballou PLUNDER: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America

Brendan Ballou is a federal prosecutor, who served as Special Counsel for Private Equity in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Previously, he worked in private practice, and before that, in the National Security Division of the Justice Department, where he advised the White House on counter-terrorism and other policies.

His book, PLUNDER: PRIVATE EQUITY’S PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA, is published by Public Affairs Books. He is clear in stating that “The views expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

He pulls no punches in characterizing what private equity firms are doing as PLUNDER and a PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA.

We spoke with Brendan Ballou via Skype on June 2, 2023 from his office in Washington, D.C.

Articles pertinent to this interview:

‘They were traumatized’: How a private equity-associated lender helped precipitate a nursing-home implosion https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Who Employs Your Doctor? Increasingly, a Private Equity Firm. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/upshot/private-equity-doctors-offices.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=The%20Upshot

from Applebaum & Batt https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-pillage-grocery-stores-workers-risk/

Here’s What Happens When a For-Profit Company Takes Over Your Local ER https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/25/us-health-care-for-profit-emergency-rooms-physician-turnover

Private equity profits from climate disaster clean-up – while investing in fossil fuels https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/07/private-equity-climate-crisis-disaster-cleanup

Private Equity Pillage: Grocery Stores and Workers At Risk https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-pillage-grocery-stores-workers-risk/

Private Equity is Out of Control and Looting America. This Prosecutor Says We Can Fix It. http://• May 2, 2023 | Business & Industry | Government & Politics | Finance https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/private-equity-is-out-of-control-and-looting-america-this-prosecutor-says-we-can-fix-it

Private Equity Is Gutting America – and Getting Away With It https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html?searchResultPosition=1

Toys ‘R’ Us Case Is Test of Private Equity in Age of Amazon https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/business/toys-r-us-bankruptcy.html?searchResultPosition=2

‘It left me with nothing’: the debt trap of payday loans https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jun/02/payday-loans-interest-rates-regulation-minnesota-law

Look at what hedge funds really do – and tell me capitalism is about ‘rewarding risk’ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/25/hedge-funds-capitalism-risk-asset-managers-tax

Asset Management Firms Are Gaining Power Over Housing, Hospitals, Water and More https://truthout.org/articles/asset-management-firms-are-gaining-power-over-housing-hospitals-water-and-more/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=c98960147d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-c98960147d-651106009&mc_cid=c98960147d&mc_eid=f9703b4752

Chai Vasarhelyi WILD LIFE

From Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, WILD LIFE follows conservationist Kris Tompkins on an epic, decades-spanning love story as wild as the landscapes she dedicated her life to protecting. After falling in love in mid-life, Kris and the outdoorsman and entrepreneur, Doug Tompkins, left behind the world of the massively successful outdoor brands they’d helped pioneer like Patagonia, The North Face, and Esprit, and turned their attention to a visionary effort to create National Parks throughout Chile and Argentina. WILD LIFE chronicles the highs and lows of their journey to effect the largest private land donation in history.

WILD LIFE will screen at the Mendocino Film Festival on Friday, June 2nd at 10:00 a.m. in the Festival Tent, as well as Sunday, June 4th at 10:20 a.m. at Coast Cinemas.

Screen shot from **WILD LIFE** showing five national parks created by Kris and Doug Tompkins in Chile and Argentina.

‘It’s like a plague’: land buying by outsiders threatens Patagonia’s peace https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/oct/27/its-like-a-plague-land-buying-by-outsiders-threatens-patagonias-peace

Ian Garrett GROUNDWORKS

GROUNDWORKS travels from traditional acorn gathering spots to the studios where the “Groundworks” performance was rehearsed before being shared at sunrise on Alcatraz—nearly 50 years after the Indians of All Tribes occupied the island and brought attention to Native American rights. Originally initiated by contemporary dance company Dancing Earth Creations, the “Groundworks” project was designed to amplify the oft-forgotten Native presence everywhere in the Americas.

Groundworks weaves together four artists’ stories and their contemporary ways of sharing traditional Indigenous knowledge. By exploring their creative practices, it highlights these Native artists’ contemporary relationships to the Pomo, Ohlone, Tongva, and Wappo/Onastatis territories, languages and traditions. Their efforts to “re-story” the land through creative reclamation are important facets of the Land Back movement.

Bernadette Smith is a Pomo singer, musician, and playwright from the Point Arena Manchester Band of Pomo Indians. She is an activist leader involved with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and brought her whole family to Standing Rock to protect water rights. She is currently working on reclaiming land traditionally used by her tribe for their acorn harvest, and on protecting the source of those acorns—the tan oak—from hack-and-squirt clearing to make way for managed redwoods.

Profiled in the documentary are Ras K’dee, Pomo, a musician with ties to multiple bands in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties; Bernadette Smith, singer and dancer from the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians; Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a multidisciplinary Ohlone artist from Indian Canyon, a sovereign Indian Nation outside of Hollister, California; and L. Frank, a Tongva-Acjachemen artist, tribal scholar, canoe builder, and language advocate.

We spoke with director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Ian Garrett, about his film, GROUNDWORKS, via Skype on May 16, 2023.

GROUNDWORKS will be screening at the Mendocino FilmFestival on June 4 at 3pm in the Festival Tent. A special program with Coastal Pomo dancers will open the program and a panel discussion will follow.

The Pirate Radio Broadcaster Who Occupied Alcatraz and Terrified the FBI https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-pirate-radio-broadcaster-who-occupied-alcatraz-and-terrified-the-fbi?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Red Natural History https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/red_natural_history/?link_id=3&can_id=26389c9ba4e6ef1db60b08fdce8085f1&source=email-duplicate-me-4-section-template-2&email_referrer=email_1839282&email_subject=red-natural-history-a-growing-movement-of-scientists-and-scholars

Maria Niro – THE ART OF UN-WAR: KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO

Maria Niro is a New York City-based artist and award-winning filmmaker whose work has been broadcasted on television and screened in theatres, festivals, and museums worldwide. She is a member of New Day Films, a filmmaker-run distribution company providing social issue documentaries to educators founded by American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist Julia Reichert in 1971.

She serves on the advisory board of More Art, a nonprofit organization that supports collaborations between professional artists and communities to create public art and educational programs that inspire social justice.

As the National Gallery of Art put it for the East Coast Premiere of The Art of Un-War:

“Internationally renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has dedicated his work and life to denouncing militarization and war. Maria Niro’s recent documentary The Art of Un-War follows Wodiczko’s trajectory from his birth in Warsaw during World War II, to his expulsion from Poland by the communist regime, to today. Combining sculptural elements and technology, Wodiczko’s projects often function as interventions in public spaces, disrupting the valorization of state-sanctioned aggression. Since the 1980s, his deft, site-specific projections of images onto the facades of office and government buildings have grown to incorporate recordings of personal stories told by war veterans, refugees, and immigrants, projected directly onto war memorials, often animating the busts of revered historic leaders. Niro documents many of his major works, including The Homeless Vehicle Project (1988–1989), created in collaboration with homeless communities in Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York City; The Hiroshima Projection (1999), projected onto the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Japan; and the as-yet-unrealized project of transforming Paris’ monument to war, the Arc de Triomphe, into a temporary site for peace activism.”

TOWN DESTROYER: Alan Snitow & Deborah Kaufman

As a nation, we are in the throes of a re-examination of history, but whose history, and who gets to tell it, and how do we live today with various versions of our history, that were memorialized in the past? How do we best evaluate and live with the impacts of different versions of history and the potential harm and even re-traumatization that a particular version creates?

What role does art play in this process? whose art? and for whom?

These are among the questions addressed by the filmmakers, Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, in their documentary, TOWN DESTROYER, which screens on Friday, June 2nd, at 1:00 PM at The Coast Cinemas.

You may recall the furor over whether or not to destroy or cover up the 13 panels of the 1930s murals by Popular Front artist, Victor Arnautoff, THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON, at San Francisco’s George Washington High School. Snitow & Kaufman film students, parents, Native American activists, artists of different ethnicities, scholars, and museum directors, all against a background of vivid cinematography of the controversial panels, as well as many other relevant works of art, both at the high school, and elsewhere across the country.

Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman’s films include the award-winning “Company Town,” “Between Two Worlds,” “Thirst”, “Secrets of Silicon Valley”, and “Blacks and Jews.”

Alan was a producer at the KTVU-TV News, the Bay Area Fox affiliate, for 12 years. Before that, he was an award winning News Director at KPFA-FM. He has served on the Boards of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Film Arts Foundation, California Media Collaborative, Food and Water Watch, and much more.

Deborah Kaufman founded and for 13 years was Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest independent Jewish film showcase in the world. She has been a Board member of the California Council for the Humanities, the New Israel Fund, and Amnesty International USA. She has been a consultant, programmer, lecturer, and activist with a variety of human rights, multicultural and media arts organizations.

We spoke with Deborah and Alan on May 8, 2023 via Skype.

“Early Days” Pioneer Monument by Frank Happersberger, Installed 1894 in SF Civic Center Plaza

These High School Murals Depict an Ugly History. Should They Go? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/design/george-washington-murals-ugly-history-debated.html?searchResultPosition=1

Think Confederate monuments are racist? Consider pioneer monuments https://theconversation.com/think-confederate-monuments-are-racist-consider-pioneer-monuments-100571

San Franciscans demand removal of anti-native monument https://sf.curbed.com/2017/8/22/16184590/pioneer-monument-confederate-statues

California reparations panel OKs state apology, payments https://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/california-reparations-task-force-to-vote-on-18082723.php

David Treuer – The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present https://forthright.media/2019/03/14/david-treuer-the-heartbeat-of-wounded-knee-native-americafrom-1890-present/

Benjamin Madley – AN AMERICAN GENOCIDE: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846-1873 https://forthright.media/2016/10/05/benjamin-madley-an-american-genocide-the-united-states-and-the-california-indian-catastrophe-1846-1873/

Clarence Lusane – TWENTY DOLLARS AND CHANGE: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy https://forthright.media/2023/01/12/clarence-lusane-twenty-dollars-and-change-harriet-tubman-and-the-ongoing-fight-for-racial-justice-and-democracy/

Stan Rushworth – WE ARE THE MIDDLE OF FOREVER: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth https://forthright.media/2022/08/11/stan-rushworth-we-are-the-middle-of-forever-indigenous-voices-from-turtle-island-on-the-changing-earth/

Daniel Golding – CHASING VOICES: The Story of John Peabody Harrington https://forthright.media/2022/05/10/daniel-golding-chasing-voices-the-story-of-john-peabody-harrington/

Gale Anne Hurd MANKILLER https://forthright.media/2018/05/31/gale-anne-hurd-mankiller/

William Hogeland – THE AUTUMN OF THE BLACK SNAKE: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West https://forthright.media/2017/07/19/william-hogeland-the-autumn-of-the-black-snake-the-creation-of-the-u-s-army-and-the-invasion-that-opened-the-west/

JAMIE MACGILLIVRAY: The Renegade’s Journey by John Sayles, 2022

BODY PARTS: Kristy Guevara-Flanagan & Helen Hood Scheer

The documentary, BODY PARTS, traces the evolution of “sex” on-screen from a woman’s perspective, uncovering the uncomfortable realities behind some of the most iconic scenes in cinema history and celebrating the courageous individuals leading the way for change. It’s an eye-opening investigation into the making of Hollywood sex scenes, shedding light on the actors’ real-life experiences, and tracing the legacy of exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, as well as recent hard fought changes in that industry.

On May 1, 2023, we spoke with Director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Producer, Helen Hood Scheer, about BODY PARTS, which will be screening at this year’s Mendocino Film Festival at Crown Hall on Sunday June 4 at 1pm.

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among other venues). Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary and experimental films have screened at the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and HotDocs film festivals and the Getty Museum. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.

Helen Hood Scheer  is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, freelance producer, and associate professor at California State University Long Beach, where she spearheads the creative nonfiction track and serves as the internship advisor for students in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts. In 2023, she won CSULB’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Throughout her instruction, service, and professional work, Helen is a strong advocate for students. In 2020, she  received the  Advancement of Women Award from the  CSULB President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and both Helen and her students were  featured in Claiming the Director’s Chair, an article expressing the CSU’s commitment to preparing  the next generation of female filmmakers for California’s multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.

Actors’ deal includes pay rises and intimacy co-ordinators, union says https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67387475

Katherine S. Newman MOVING THE NEEDLE: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor

Katherine S. Newman became the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs of the University of California in January of 2023. She was simultaneously appointed as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at U. C. Berkeley. Dr. Newman is the author of fifteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship, to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.

Her latest, co-authored with Elizabeth S. Jacobs, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, is MOVING THE NEEDLE: WHAT TIGHT LABOR MARKETS DO FOR THE POOR, published this month by the University of California Press. We spoke with Dr. Newman on April 24, 2023.

We end this edition of Forthright Radio with audio from the last floor speech that Montana’s first transwoman elected to Montana’s State Legislature, Zooey Zephyr, before she was censured by the necessary 2/3 vote of House on April 26, 2023. Her offense? Calling out that the gender affirming health care they were outlawing would result in deaths, and used the phrase, “blood on their hands.”

Articles pertinent to this edition of Forthright Radio:

Poverty Is the 4th Leading Cause of Death in the US, Research Shows https://truthout.org/articles/poverty-is-the-4th-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-us-research-shows/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=0f21dc5882-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-0f21dc5882-651106009&mc_cid=0f21dc5882&mc_eid=f9703b4752

Study: Racism Plays Bigger Role in Black-White Infant Mortality Gap Than Wealth https://truthout.org/articles/racism-not-economics-plays-bigger-role-in-black-white-infant-mortality-gap/

Living on the edge: how the ‘benefits cliff’ holds women back https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/09/benefits-cliff-housing-vouchers-cost-of-living

Oregon grocery store worker, 91, retires after raising more than $80,000 online https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/27/oregon-winco-betty-grocery-store-worker-retire

Post-WW2 Anti-Fascist Educational Film | Don’t Be a Sucker | 1947 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K6-cEAJZlE

Gianforte’s son one of many lobbying governor against trans bills https://montanafreepress.org/2023/04/26/montana-governor-gianforte-lobbied-by-son-to-veto-trans-bills/

A Transgender Lawmaker Is Exiled as Montana G.O.P. Flexes New Power https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/montana-trans-legislature-zephyr.html

Michael Sakir and Intermountian Opera’s Rigoletto

On May 5th & 7th, Intermountain Opera concludes their 2022-23 season with a performance of Verdi’s opera, Rigoletto. We spoke with Intermountain Opera’s Artistic Director, Michael Sakir, about the opera and his work with Intermountain Opera.

You can find Olivia Weitz’s segment on Yellowstone Public Radio about Intermountain Opera’s Wheels of Harmony Tour:

Opera tour shares Indigenous music, culture with Montana students https://www.ypradio.org/arts-culture/2023-04-13/opera-tour-shares-indigenous-music-culture-with-montana-students

Kathy Kasic & John Priscu THE LAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

Sacramento State University Professor, Kathy Kasic, in Antarctica documenting the SALSA Project (photo courtesy of Billy Collins)

The Bozeman Doc Series afforded us the opportunity to interview the filmmaker of the film, of THE LAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Kathy Kasic, and the ‘main character,’ Professor of Ecology in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at MSU Bozeman, John Priscu.

John Priscu holding a container extracted from Mercer Lake

He has been organizing expeditions since 1984. He is a principal investigator in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project and SALSA, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access project, which is the subject of this film. His work, and the work of his teams, have revolutionized our understanding of our Earth, as well as the diversity of life on our planet and beyond.

Kathy Kasic is a director/cinematographer and Associate Professor at California State University Sacramento. Twenty years ago she traded researching evolutionary biology in the Ecuadorian Amazon for filmmaking. Since then her artistic vision and craving for adventure have brought her to film off the bow of a ship, underwater in wild mountain rivers, and on the ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica. Using a sensorial emphasis on place to unveil the human relationship with the natural world, her 100+ productions have appeared at international festivals, on television (BBC, Discovery, Smithsonian, PBS, National Geographic), art galleries, museums (The Hirshhorn, Portland Art Museum, The Crocker), and won numerous awards. Most recently, Kasic field directed for BBC’s Earth Shot: Repairing Our Planet (feat. David Attenborough and Prince William) and directed The Lake at the Bottom of the World, a sensory vérité feature film about an international team of scientists exploring a subglacial lake 3,600 feet beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. She has been part of three National Science Foundation grants and mentored 12 graduate students. She believes that filmmaking is a way to give voice to what is not voiced, to see and hear more deeply, and to foster compassion across cultures.

THE LAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD will be screening at the Emerson Crawford Theater on Sunday, April 30th, 2023 at 7pm.

You can find out more here: http://www.bozemandocseries.org

Q&A: Sac State film professor Kathy Kasic returns from Antarctic expedition https://statehornet.com/2019/02/qa-sac-state-film-professor-kathy-kasic-returns-from-antarctic-expedition/

The Lake at the Bottom of the World site: https://www.antarcticlakefilm.com/