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Sandy Rosenthal is an American civic activist and founder of Levees.Org, an organization created in October 2005 to educate the American public about the cause of the levee failures and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.  In the aftermath of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, Words Whispered in Water tells the story of one woman’s fight―against all odds―to expose a mammoth federal agency―and win. It’s a horror story, a mystery, and David and Goliath story all in one. In 2005, the entire world watched as a major U.S. city was nearly wiped off the map. The levees ruptured and New Orleans drowned. But while newscasters attributed the New Orleans flood to “natural catastrophes” and other types of disasters, citizen investigator Sandy Rosenthal set out to expose the true culprit and compel the media and government to tell the truth. This is her story. When the protective steel flood-walls broke, the Army Corps of Engineers―with cooperation from big media―turned the blame on natural types of disasters. In the chaotic aftermath, Rosenthal uncovers the U.S. corruption, and big media at the root. Follow this New Orleans hero as she exposes the federal agency’s egregious design errors and eventually changes the narrative surrounding the New Orleans flood. In this engaging and revealing tale of man versus nature and man versus man, Words Whispered in Water proves that the power of a single individual is alive and well.

An intriguing and accessible nonfiction graphic novel about the role that wealth and influence play in American democracy.Despite our immense political divisions, Americans are nearly united in our belief that something is wrong with our government: It works for the wealthy and powerful, but not for anyone else. Unrig exposes the twisted roots of our broken democracy and highlights the heroic efforts of those "Unrigging" the system to return power to We the People.This stirring nonfiction graphic novel by democracy reform leader Daniel G. Newman and artist George O’Connor takes readers behind the scenes—from the sweaty cubicles where senators dial corporate CEOs for dollars, to lavish retreats where billionaires boost their favored candidates, to the map rooms where lawmakers scheme to handpick their voters. Unrig also highlights surprising solutions that limit the influence of big money and redraw the lines of political power.If you're overwhelmed by negative news and despairing about the direction of our country, Unrig is a tonic that will restore your faith and reveal the path forward to fix our broken democracy.Daniel G. Newman is a national expert on government accountability and money in politics. He is president and co-founder of MapLight, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes transparency and political reform. Newman has appeared in hundreds of media outlets, including CNN, CBS, MSNBC, FOX Business News, and NPR. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As with past years, we conclude 2019 with our annual Heroes and Zeros show with our good friends Brenda Christensen and Dan Tynan.Except this year, we are covering Heroes and Zeros both for 2019 and the decade as a whole.

Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids and the poetry book Monetized. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nationand The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America (Ecco) is her most recent book. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options.

Miriam Pawel is the author of In The Browns of California, journalist, and scholar. Miriam weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance. The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time.

CLBR presents its annual year-end Heroes and Zeros episode as guests Brenda Christensen, Denise Howell and Dan Tynan highlight those doing wonderful things on the internet and those deserving a cyber lump of coal. Plus, Bennet announces sadly, it most likely will be our last live broadcast as I have decided its time to move on.  Officially, he is taking a break for a few months before finally deciding whether to continue with the show for a ninth season.

Beth Macy is the author of the widely acclaimed and bestselling books Truevine and Factory Man. Based in Roanoke, Virginia for three decades, her reporting has won more than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Little, Brown and Company) is the only book to fully chart the devastating opioid crisis in America: "a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency" (New York Times) from a bestselling author and journalist who has lived through it. In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse.

A former reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Pam Kelley has won honors from the National Press Club and the Society for Features Journalism. She contributed to a subprime mortgage exposé that was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She is the author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South (The New Press). Meet Money Rock. He’s young. He’s charismatic. He’s generous, often to a fault. He’s one of Charlotte’s most successful cocaine dealers, and that’s what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic. This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.

Michael Beschloss is the author of nine books on presidential history, including, most recently, the New York Times bestsellers Presidential Courage and The Conquerors, as well as two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes.  He was also editor of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. He is the NBC News Presidential Historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor and has received an Emmy and six honorary degrees. Presidents of War (Crown) is a groundbreaking and often surprising saga of America’s wartime chief executives. Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of War is a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending hundreds of thousands of American men and women to their deaths. 

Gillespie explains that his book I have been writing about the impact of platforms and the digital transformation for fifteen years,” said Gillespie. “This book explains how content moderation works: how the platforms think of their responsibilities, the way they create and articulate the rules, the labor behind the scenes, and recent efforts to automate it all.” Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this book contributes to the current debates about the public responsibilities of platforms, be it about harassment, data privacy, or political propaganda. Gillespie argues that content moderation still receives too little public scrutiny. How and why platforms moderate can shape societal norms and alter the contours of public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society.

Gaurav is Free Press’ policy counsel and works alongside the policy team on topics ranging from internet freedom issues like Net Neutrality and media ownership to consumer privacy and government surveillance. Gaurav’s human rights and civil liberties work has taken him from Capitol Hill to Uganda, India and Liberia. Before joining Free Press, he worked at the Government Accountability Project protecting the rights of national security whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and prior to that as a legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. He earned both his B.A. in international affairs and his J.D. from the George Washington University. Outside of work he can be found getting some fresh air riding his bike to and from one of D.C.’s many roof decks.

It's CyberLaw and Business Report's annual Cyber Thanksgiving Special and for the 7th year, we celebrate the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with a special show featuring a guest panel discussing websites/apps they are grateful for, recommendations for Giving Tuesday and maybe even share what they will be cooking for Thanksgiving. Open source evangelist and troubadour Pete Kronowitt and Benét Wilson, founder and sole proprietor of Aviation Queen LLC, return to join Bennet on what they are thankful for.  

We continue our 2018 Miami Book Fair series with Obama National Security Council Alum Rumana Ahmed who is one of eighteen former Obama administration contributors to “West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House“. Rumana Ahmed interned in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence before becoming a full-time staffer. She then was a liaison to Muslim American and other communities in the Office of Public Engagement, where she also worked on highlighting community-based efforts to address issues like gun violence. Later, as Senior Advisor in the Office for Global Engagement and Strategic Communications in the National Security Council, she worked on advancing relations with Cuba and Laos. A Bangladeshi-American and Muslim who wore a hijab since she was twelve, Rumana was the only (and possibly the first) hijab-wearing staffer in the West Wing.  She played a key role in President Obama’s visit and speech at a Baltimore mosque in response to anti-Muslim hate crimes.

James Miller is a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche; The Passion of Michel Foucault; Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977; and Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. He is the author of Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work?James Miller offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished―and vexed―ideal.

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, and The New York Times. The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America (Flatiron Books) is her most recent book. Kirkus writes it is,"A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion.

We continue our 2018 Miami Book Fair series with lawyer turned acclaimed author Ben Fountain and his new book, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion and Revolution“.  Fountain argues that the United States is in the middle of an existential crisis akin to the Civil War or the Great Depression that will require a “burning” of the old order for a new America to emerge.

At CLBR, we are proud of our record promoting press freedom with guests such as Reporters Without Borders to discuss global press freedom. For the episode on Raif Badawi, we prepared a special backgrounder on human rights in Saudi Arabia. Because of this, CLBR strongly condemns the apparent abduction, torture and murder of  Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey. We also are proud of our record of promoting human rights around the world from China, to Mexico and Saudi Arabia.  This includes a 2016 interview with Human Rights Watch’s Kristine Beckerle on Social Media and Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia and an interview earlier this year with Brandon Silver of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights on the campaign to free jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi.

Bennet Kelley launches our annual coverage of the 2018 Miami Book Fair series with radio host and political commentator Bill Press. He talks about Trump and a life in the crossfire as he discusses his books, TRUMP MUST GO: The Top 100 Reasons to Dump Trump (and One to Keep Him) and From the Left:  Life in the Crossfire. 

Bill Press is host of The Bill Press Show, simulcast on Free Speech TV. He is the former co-host of MSNBC’s Buchanan and Press and CNN’s Crossfireand The Spin Room. Press is the author of several books including The Obama Hate Machine and Trump Must Go: The Top 100 Reasons to Dump Trump (and One to Keep Him). His memoir, From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire (Thomas Dunne Books), has been named a Washington Post bestseller. The name Bill Press is synonymous with honest journalism, intelligent commentary, and progressive politics. But based on where he came from, it's a wonder he didn't end up a Trump voter. He grew up in a blue-collar family in a small town in Delaware south of the Mason-Dixon line, where segregation was the rule. So what went right for him that he swerved so far to the left? In From the Left, Press shows this gradual transformation, starting with two years of studies in Europe and a providential escape to California. From Sacramento he made his way to Southern California television and talk radio as a political commentator and liberal talk show host. Jumping to Washington and national cable TV, Press hosted Crossfire and The Spin Room on CNN, and Buchanan and Press on MSNBC. If you're already on the left, you'll cheer a fellow traveler. If not yet there, you soon will be. In Trump Must Go: The Top 100 Reasons to Dump Trump (and One to Keep Him) (Macmillan) TV and radio host Bill Press offers 100 reasons why Trump needs to be removed from office, whether by impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or the ballot box. Beginning with the man himself and moving through Trump’s executive action damage, Press covers Trump’s debasement of the United States political system and destruction of the Republican Party. In a political climate where the world has learned to expect the unexpected, Press offers readers a twist: one reason not to ditch Donald Trump.

Dubbed “the leading national watchdog of state and local economic development subsidies” and “God’s witness to corporate welfare,” Greg founded Good Jobs First in 1998 upon winning the Public Interest Pioneer Award. He has been training and consulting for state and local governments, associations of public officials, labor-management committees, unions, community groups, tax and budget watchdogs, environmentalists, and smart growth advocates more than 30 years.Greg backed into subsidy reform accidentally, while creating a national consulting practice against plant closings from Chicago from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s. He is associate producer of the 1984 PBS documentary The Last Pullman Car and consulted for state agencies in Illinois, New York, and Washington State. His 1986 Early Warning Manual Against Plant Closings (upon which he trained all 50 states’ Dislocated Worker Units under contract to the U.S. Department of Labor) and his 1989 study “Intervening With Aging Owners to Save Industrial Jobs” (the first study to quantify the risk of job loss due to a lack of succession planning) set precedents that guided many public agencies and non-profits.Numerous plant closings he worked on involved abuse of economic development subsidies; factories that had received past incentives were now being shuttered. Usually, the fine print revealed that such abuses were technically legal; those revelations lead to public outrage and the enactment of clawbacks and other safeguards to prevent future waste. Sometimes there was a basis for legal challenge: in 1987, Greg wrote a study that triggered the City of Duluth’s successful lawsuit against Triangle Corporation; the nationally-reported verdict arrested the closure of that city’s largest factory, Diamond Tool, based on an Industrial Revenue Bond contract. Between 1990 and 1992, he assisted the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers in Elkhart, Indiana in their multiple-abuse lawsuit against American Home Products that settled for $24 million on the eve of trial.Collecting the reforms prompted by these revelations (clawbacks, disclosure, job quality standards, etc.), Greg wrote No More Candy Store: States and Cities Making Job Subsidies Accountable in 1994. It was lauded by the International Economic Development Council as “very impressive research” and reviewed by the National Conference of State Legislatures a “famous polemic that contends that subsidies for economic development are mere corporate giveaways, and that calls for greater accountability and public restraint.”Founding Good Jobs First in Washington, DC in 1998, partnering with the Fiscal Policy Institute to launch Good Jobs New York in 2000, and welcoming the Corporate Research Project in 2001, Greg has built a full-service resource center for constituency-based organizations and public officials seeking to reform economic development. Since its first report in 1999, Good Jobs First has issued more than 100 studies, setting a long string of influential research precedents about economic development subsidies.Good Jobs First’s 50-states-plus-DC “report card” studies, such as “Show Us the Subsidized Jobs,” have made it de facto the arbiter of best state and local practice in transparency (disclosing deal-specific costs and benefits online). It is also the go-to source on best practices for job creation and job quality standards, and for enforcement including “clawbacks,” or recapture safeguards. Led by research director Phil Mattera, Good Jobs First research analysts Leigh McIlvaine, Tommy Cafcas and Kasia Tarczynska monitor subsidy news in all 50 states and provide front-line technical assistance.In response to GJF’s 2003 study, A Better Deal for Illinois, that state enacted the nation’s best subsidy disclosure system. In 2005, New York City enacted the best local disclosure ordinance in the nation (enhanced in 2010) after repeated agitations by Good Jobs New York’s Bettina Damiani with the NYC Industrial Development Agency.Greg’s 2005 book The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation (Berrett-Koehler Publishers) was widely reviewed by daily newspapers, specialty tax and development publications, C-Span’s Book TV, The New York Review of Books, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Business Week called it a “powerful compendium of corporate tax dodging in the U.S.” and State Tax Notes wrote: “meticulously documented …scrupulously accurate …evocative storytelling…”He has book chapters in Building Health Communities: A Guide to Community Economic Development for Advocates, Lawyers, and Policymakers (American Bar Association, 2009) and Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis (MIT Press, 2009).Greg summarizes the job-creation benefits of smart growth for working families in this article in Urban Habitat’s Race, Poverty and the Environment entitled “Public Transit and Urban Density Create More Good Jobs.”