Ralph Nader will be conspicuously absent from the first Presidential debate in Boston next week. The debate commissars say a guy who’s polling well under 5 percent doesn’t belong in the center ring. It doesn’t help that Nader’s people can show you 60 percent of America wants him on that podium. It matters even less that they claim he’s contributed 85 percent of the substance of a campaign that’s been Oprah- ized and degraded by kisses and earth tones and late night TV jokes.

On Tuesday night Ralph Nader will be another guy in the TV debate audience: This hour, though, is our chance to hear what he would have said to Al Gore and George W. Bush: about workers rights and environmental protection in a world economy, about preventive diplomacy, health care, corporate welfare, drug wars, the death penalty, and dirty movies, too. What he’d tell them. What you’d ask him. We’re talking with the Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ralph Nader, Reform Party Presidential candidate

You remember all those gallows jokes about American cities-like: will the last person out of Cleveland please turn out the lights. And then things got worse-if you went by the numbers and the conversational pall around the basket case of urban America. The white folks left, and middle-class black folks, too; and jobs and business. One of the best of the big-city mayors Ed Rendell of Philadelphia said the cause was lost, because the doctor wasn’t treating a bullet wound; he was confronting rampant cancer, without resources.

So the cities were left for dead, and guess what happened? Paul Grogan says they got vastly better and will get better yet-on the strength of poor-people’s markets and politics, on the further fall of crime rates, and the bust-up of the top-down bureaucracies running public schools and public housing. The really promising secret is that, as the man in Chicago said: “people like it here.” Comeback Cities are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Paul Grogan, author of “Comeback Cities”

The Bulgarian Women’s Choir was locked behind the iron curtain until 1989. They were the official women’s choir for state sponsored radio and television in Bulgaria before a French music scholar discovered them and before Stevie Wonder and Frank Zappa and Linda Rondstadt popularized them in America. The music is exotic and strange, haunting and ethereal.

It shrills and shrieks and yodels. It’s quite literally ancient music that comes from the ancient home of music – the home of the mythological musician Orpheus and of the Thracian tribes that settled the east-central part of the Balkan peninsula. Geography, politics, religion and historical accident have preserved the choir’s music all these years. American pop culture has liberated it. Live music with the Bulgarian Women’s Choir is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The Bulgarian Women’s Choir

Cartoonists are hot again, but not the guys who drew heroes like Dick Tracy and Superman. Instead, think Charles Schulz meets Samuel Beckett, in the world of Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. The protagonists in the new strips are paranoid, dysfunctional, isolated and angst-ridden. Their stories are so hip that Esquire Magazine for the first time included a graphic story in the annual fiction issue.

The new cartoonists don’t write for the teenage crowd, but for their own generation — the babyboomers and Generation Xer’s. Chris Ware, the creator of “Jimmy Corrigan” is known as the Emily Dickinson of comics. Daniel Clowes’s “Ghost World” reads more like “The Catcher in the Rye” than “Conan the Barbarian.” And Ben Katchor just won a MacArthur Genius Award for cartoons, which the MacArthur Foundation praised for its “ironic, compelling and bittersweet nostalgia.” The new, new comics, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ben Katchor, Author

Daniel Clowes, Author

and Chas I. Kidd Assoc. Editorial Director, Pantheon ‘Comics’ division

The New Yorker reporter on the Rwandan genocide Philip Gourevitch went back to Central Africa last summer to see what’s called Africa’s First World War ongoing in the Congo. The spookiest sound he heard was the near silence at the heart of big towns like Kisangani: nothing louder than a gate creaking or feet padding on a pavement at a center city intersection: the sound of a town dying again, the sound of oblivion, he thought: a silence that was pre-modern or post-apocalyptic or both.

“O Congo,” Gourevitch wrote in the New Yorker last week. “What a wreck. It hurts to look and listen, and it hurts to turn away.”

Three years ago Laurent Kabila chased the ruinous Mobutu regime out of Zaire, and declared a Democratic Republic of Congo in its place: today it is not a nation, Gourevitch writes, so much as an all-purpose battlefield under a government that fears peace because it lives on war.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Phillip Gourevitch, New Yorker Correspondent

Trial lawyers are busy calculating their contingency fees in the wake of the Firestone tire scandal. As with asbestos, tobacco, and guns, successful lawsuits and settlements have the power to overhaul entire industries, lining pockets along the way. Advocates of tort reform argue that this kind of regulation-by-lawsuit is vulture vengeance, not justice.

They are pushing for state and federal legislation that would limit liability on business’ behalf. The tort reformers have a friend in George W. Bush, who passed a sweeping tort reform package in Texas, including a cap on punitive damages. And the trial lawyers have a friend in Al Gore, who was burned last week by a fundraising memo targeting a big-ticket Texas litigator that implied: pay up, and we’ll kill tort reform.

Both sides are using huge political contributions to make the Gore-Bush race a sort of proxy battle: Is it really about your right to get justice from big business?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sherman Joyce, President of ATLA

Fred Baron, President of ATLA

Jan Schlichtman, trial lawyer.

George Gilder never met a new technology he didn’t love. He’s ecstatic these days to the point of religious frenzy about the expansion of electronic bandwidth. He was in love in the 80s with the power of your personal computer-the world he foresaw in the book, Microcosm. His new bandwidth bible is called Telecosm: about the fiber-optic networks that turn the old trickle of digital data into a flood of fire-hose intensity.

Except it’s bigger than that, oceanic in dimensions and virtually religious in its implications. Beyond the copper cage of your aging computer, George Gilder writes of a new universe out there, boundless bits of information, accessible on gossamer threads of purest glass. It’s not about computers anymore, or even that fiber-optic cable: it’s about the telecosm itself and new cathedrals of consciousness built on light and air alone. We’re talking with the inspired historian of the future, George Gilder, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

George Gilder, “author of Telecosm”

Overlooked in all the news about the human genome project was the discovery of a gene that explains all of your bad behaviors… greed, infidelity, gambling, debauchery, and giving into temptation of all sorts. For ten years, the Harvard economist Terry Burnham and UCLA biologist Jay Phelan have been studying the so called Mean Gene.

As disciples of “The E.O. Wilson School of Evolutionary Biology,” they say go ahead and blame your cavemen ancestors for your weight problem. When food was scarce, your prehistoric cousins adopted a host of strategies to survive, including eating as much as possible, whenever possible, and now you’re hardwired to do so. Likewise, we’re predisposed to spend every penny we earn and have unprotected sex with strangers.

This grand mismatch between modern life and evolutionary development could spawn a new self help movement; one that shuns Freud and celebrates Darwin.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Harvard economist Terry Burnham and UCLA biologist Jay Phelan

Would it help public schools to think of themselves as innovative businesses? Lots of people have tried to apply competition, the profit motive, and shareholder value to improving schools, with only minor success.

Peter Senge, America’s favorite corporate change agent says what he’s trying to do with schools is more than send in the management consultants. He’s applying his famed Fifth Discipline to public education – indoctrinating teachers and principals with systems thinking and organizational learning. He starts from the premise that the drive to learn may be stronger than the sex drive. Schools that teach must also be learning organizations, which surprisingly they are not.

The math teacher, to be successful, must work with the English teacher, though often they don’t. How would you ask an organization guru to redesign the school you care about? The Fifth Discipline meets the schoolhouse, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Senge, Author of “Schools that Learn”

Slobodan Milosevic’s opposition seems to have outvoted him in rump–Yugoslavia’s presidential election yesterday. But they haven’t yet defeated him, much less gotten rid of the super-Serb who bullied his way into losing battles and world disgrace. Now comes the endgame after an election campaign that wasn’t exactly designed to be decisive.

The Milosevic team had announced that he would stay in office till next summer anyway, when his old term runs out. He was also expected to steal the election, if he could, so the question all along was whether the massed opposition could follow the voting with sustained public defiance that might yet bring him down. On the morning after the voting, the Milosevic “ins” and the American-backed “outs” are both claiming to have won. It could be Milosevic’s choice to hold a final runoff election; and the opposition’s choice to fight him in the street.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Zarko Korac, president of the Socialdemocrat Union

Alexa Djilas, Serbian historian from Belgrade

and Steve Erlanger, NY Times correspondent.