Archives

  • For tonight's Conversations With Great Minds - I'm joined by one of America's leading investigative journalists. The winner of the 2012 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism - Gareth Porter is known for reporting that cuts through mainstream narratives and tells largely unknown truths about American foreign policy. A Vietnam specialist by training with a Phd in Southeast Asian studies - he worked as the Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service during the height of the Vietnam War and later served as the co-director of the Indochina Resource Center right here in D.C. Since 2006 - Gareth has been hard at work uncovering the true story behind the US-Iranian nuclear standoff - which he has writtten about in his fascinating new book - "Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare."


  • Thom Hartmann talks to film director and political activist, Robert Greenwald noted in the 2000s for his documentaries critical of Fox News, war and the health industry. "Sick for Profit" and "Rethink Afghanistan" are his two recent films.


  • In "Conversation with Great Minds" Thom Hartmann has an in depth conversation with President of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka about wealth, wages, unemployment, deficits, progressives, Democrats, Republicans and the the White House messaging.


  • Economist Dr. Richard Wolff, Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown/Democracy At Work/The New School, joins Thom. Is the neverending recovery of the Great Recession the fault of austerity or the fault of capitalism itself?

    For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com. You can also watch tonight's show on Hulu - at Hulu.com/THE BIG PICTURE and over at The Big Picture YouTube page. And - be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter!


  • There's a new search engine on the web - and it's not afraid to stand up to the government and corporations - in order to protect your privacy rights For tonight's Conversations with Great Minds Thom is joined by Gabriel Weinberg - the CEO and founder of Duck Duck Go - a search engine that keeps its users' data personal and private.


  • This Sunday will mark the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Fukushima nuclear disaster - and a year on - the disaster continues to devastate the people and nation of Japan. Towns and cities within miles of the Fukushima plant are still covered in a fine layer of radioactive dust - and have been turned into nuclear wastelands - devoid of life. Those lucky enough to have survived the earthquake and tsunami are now battling radiation poisoning and and the probability of cancer and birth defects. As hundreds of thousands of people across the world prepare to commemorate the tragedy over the course of the next month - we need to ask ourselves - is nuclear power really worth enduring such a horrible and deadly disaster? Will there ever be a way to make nuclear power a safe form of energy - or do we need to move away from it all together? Tonight we have a special edition of Conversations with Great Minds - featuring Stephanie Cooke. Stephanie is one of the world's top reporters and authors on the issues of nuclear energy and the use and history of nuclear weapons and is a real industry insider. Her articles on nuclear topics have appeared in a variety of publications - including Readers Digest - The International Herald Tribune - and GQ magazine. Stephanie first began her reporting career in 1977 at the Associated Press - and later moved to London where she covered the Chernobyl disaster for Business Week. She returned to the United States in 2004 to complete her most recent book, "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age." Currently - Stephanie is the editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly - part of the Energy Intelligence Group.


  • Thom Hartmann Conversations With Great Minds with Michael Ratner, Pres. The Center for Constitutional Rights Part 1. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which Michael Ratner leads, states that its mission it to defend civil liberties in the US. The group's efforts have included a legal challenge to the USA PATRIOT Act and a lawsuit on behalf of post-9/11 immigration detainees in the US. The Center also representated Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was sent, orrendered, to Syria, where he was tortured. Ratner and his office have also sued two private military contracting companies in Iraq, alleging their employees were involved in the abuses and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.


  • Economist Ian Fletcher and author of "Free Trade Doesn't Work", breaks down the plague on our economy that is free trade and what we can do to turn things around.


  • Right now - the debate in Washington is over what can be done to help those in poverty - but that's not really the question that we should be asking. I'll talk to Ona Porter - founder of ProsperityWorks - about wiping out poverty altogether - in tonight's Conversations with Great Minds.


  • Kate Pickett joined Thom to discuss how inequality and equality can be changed to your advantage.

    This latest edition of Conversations with Great Minds talks about the new book 'The Inner Level' from Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson.

    Thom reads an excerpt from the book here: https://youtu.be/8JtNSIV-mRk

    The book is available from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2S4OtCs


  • In this week's Conversations with Great Minds Harriet A.Washington joins Thom. Her book Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself is an exposé of the medical industrial complex's rush to own and exploit the raw materials of human life - including your body tissue and DNA! Her book "Medical Apartheid" documents how people of color - particularly African Americans - have been subjected to everything from medical experimentation and vivisection to the denial of medical services from the days of slavery to today.


  • In 1991, Anita Hill shed new light on sexual harassment when she testified during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Thirty years later, while awareness is at an all-time high, society’s approach to dealing with gender-based violence—socially, legally, and legislatively—still falls far short of where it needs to be. In BELIEVING: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence Hill uses her decades of experience and breadth of knowledge to show the pervasive impact of gender-based violence and what needs to change.


  • Alan Weisman, author Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth, the long awaited follow-up to his previous book "The World Without US" which also became a documentary for PBS' NOVA program.


  • Dale is the founder and brainchild behind UnCollege - an organization that provides resources for those students pursuing a self-directed path to higher learning. A critic of the traditional higher education system - he left college during his second semester and has been "unschooling" himself ever since. He's also a recipient of the prestigious Thiel Fellowship and a frequent commentator on education at the Washington Post - New York Times - and the Huffington Post. His new book is called Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures - Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will.


  • Frederick Kaufman, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food joins Thom Hartmann. What do the malnutrition and starvation epidemics in Africa have to do with a decision made by big bank Goldman Sachs in 1991?


  • In tonight's “Conversations with Great Minds" Thom discusses what a post carbon planet would look like with the Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg, author of the book "Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.”