CALENDAR

You are invited to a dinner meeting of The Global Security Seminar featuring  a presentation by commentator Robert Scheer on The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Where: UCLA Faculty Center
When:  Thursday, July 17, 2008
Time:  6:30 PM

Seminar Location and Reservations
The seminar location is the UCLA Faculty Center. Dinner will be served at a cost of $25 without dessert per person OR $30 with dessert.

The deadline for reservations is 11:00 AM, Wednesday, July 16, 2008.
Please bring your check payable to "MICHAEL INTRILIGATOR, your UCLA host.

Please submit your reservation and your choice of dessert/no dessert by e-mail to bennettramberg@aol.com. (Parking is available at Structure 2, near the Faculty Center, at the corner of Hilgard and Westholme. NOTE entry to the parking lot 2 has changed. Should you have questions, please ask attendant at the
parking kiosk. Parking fee is $8.)

Seminar Topic: America's Drug War - Eating Us Alive
Drawing on his recent book "The Pornography of Power: How  Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America," commentator Robert Scheer will  discuss the limits of American power and the disutility of our bloated  military budget. Unable to persuade the first Bush and Clinton administrations to  invest in expensive, state-of-the-art weapons, the defense industry found fresh  life as the current President Bush launched his 'war on terror' and military  expenditures swelled to the highest level in history. Scheer argues that war  cannot defeat terrorism.

What's required is simple police work "dogged, boring  and not terribly expensive" not trillion-dollar bombers, submarines and  nuclear arsenal — expenditures he contends are unrelated to defeating terrorists and  of little use in Iraq. He soberly reminds readers that Americans have never objected to wasteful defense budgets, and antiwar elected officials fight as  viciously as neoconservatives to bring money to their district's defense  industries.

The Speaker
Editor-in-Chief of the well respected blog Truthdig.com, Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his  30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the  country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. Between 1964 and 1969 he  was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts  magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los  Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control,  national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated  column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing  editor.

 That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle. During this long career, Mr. Scheer has interviewed Jimmy  Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent  political and cultural figures. Scheer can be heard on the political radio  program "Left, Right and Center"on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in  Santa Monica, Calif.  He has written seven books, including "Thinking Tuna  Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power"; "With Enough Shovels:  Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War"and "America After Nixon: The Age of  Multinational"s;with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq." Most recently, he wrote "Playing President: My  Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not  Prepare Me for George W. Bush." Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended  public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a  Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for  Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a  contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also  been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Seminar Sponsors
Center for Defense Information and Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles.

Seminar Organizers
Philip Coyle (California-based Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration).

Michael Intriligator (Professor of Economics, Political Science and Public Policy, UCLA and former Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations; Senior Fellow Milken Institute).

Martha Argüello (Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles).

Bennett Ramberg (Seminar Director, is a former State Department policy analyst.)

You are invited to a dinner meeting of the Global Security Seminar featuring a presentation by author Mike Gray and discussant UCLA Public Policy professor Mark Kleiman on America's Drug War - Eating Us Alive.

Seminar Location and Reservations
The seminar location is the UCLA Faculty Center. Dinner will be served at a cost of $25 without dessert per person OR $30 with dessert.

The deadline for reservations is 11:00 AM, Wednesday, June 18, 2008.
Please bring your check payable to "MICHAEL INTRILIGATOR, your UCLA host.

Please submit your reservation and your choice of dessert/no dessert by e-mail to bennettramberg@aol.com. (Parking is available at Structure 2, near the Faculty Center, at the corner of Hilgard and Westholme. NOTE entry to the parking lot 2 has changed. Should you have questions, please ask attendant at the
parking kiosk. Parking fee is $8.)

Seminar Topic: America's Drug War - Eating Us Alive
"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget.
With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists... they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are
threatened with a return to the Dark Ages." - Colombian High Court Judge
Gomez Hurtado

The War on Drugs is crippling our criminal justice system and distorting our foreign policy. It has cost over $1 trillion since its inception in 1914 and it has managed to increase our rate of addiction by 500 percent. By simply inserting law enforcement into the doctor-patient relationship, we have managed to fill our prisons to the roof beams. If we do not come to our senses it could well mean the end of our democracy as we know it.

The Speaker
Mike Gray, Academy Award nominee ("The China Syndrome"), spent six years researching the War on Drugs for his acclaimed book, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out published by Random House. He interviewed key players on all sides of the argument in the U.S., Europe and Latin America for first hand account that opens with a shoot-out on the south side of Chicago. Trained as an aeronautical engineer, he has a reverence for facts and his account has the chilling ring of truth.

The Discussant
Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs. He teaches courses on methods of policy analysis and on drug abuse and crime control policy. He is the author of Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control and Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic Books). He edits the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin. In addition to his academic work, Mr. Kleiman provides advice to local, state, and national governments on crime control and drug policy. Before coming to UCLA in 1995, Mr. Kleiman taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Rochester.

Seminar Sponsors
Center for Defense Information and Los Angeles Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Seminar Organizers
Philip Coyle (California-based Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration).

Michael Intriligator (Professor of Economics, Political Science and Public Policy, UCLA and former Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations; Senior Fellow Milken Institute).

Martha Arguello (Director, Los Angeles Physicians for Social Responsibility).

Bennett Ramberg (Seminar Director, is a former State Department policy analyst.)

SAVE THE DATE! Please save the date for Prescription for Change: PSR-LA’s 2008 Gala Dinner. The dinner will be held on Sunday, June 8, 2008 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. Click here for information and to register!

We are proud to announce that producer Lawrence Bender will receive our 2008 Socially Responsible Media Award for using his innovative film-making talents to create social change. Bender’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth has inspired the public to take unprecedented political and person action to stop climate change. His accomplishments in film are extensive; he has been honored with twenty-one Academy Award nominations, including two for Best Picture (Good Willing Hunting, Pulp Fiction.) Bender’s achievements as an activist are also impressive. He co-founded the Detroit Project to decrease US dependence on foreign oil, and created the “18 seconds” campaign, designed to demonstrate the simplicity of becoming part of the solution for global warming – that it only takes 18 seconds to change to a compact fluorescent light bulb – which could collectively save billions in energy costs. Bender is currently making a documentary about nuclear weapons. We look forward to the film and to honoring him in June!

Also to be honored that evening will be Dr. James Yamazaki, who will receive our 2008 Socially Responsible Physician Award for his lifelong work on the effects of radiation and public health. While his parents were interned in an American concentration camp, Dr. Yamazaki served as a combat surgeon in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war. After the war, Yamazaki headed the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. From 1949 – 1951, he worked with children in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and with Marshall Islanders who suffered from American postwar nuclear testing. When he returned to the US, he continued research on the effects of radiation on children and had a general pediatric practice. In addition to his pioneering medical work, he has testified to government commissions about nuclear disarmament.  Dr. Yamazaki is a Clinical Honorary Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus at UCLA and author of Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands.

Dr. Hans Blix will receive our 2008 Peacemaker Award in absentia for his enduring efforts to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. (His acceptance remarks will be presented via video.) As International Atomic Energy Agency director-general and later as head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, Dr. Blix participated in a process that eradicated the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. In 2003, he headed the UN weapons inspectors who were sent to Iraq to find out if Saddam Hussein's regime had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction. Dr. Blix courageously opposed proponents of war, stating that Iraq had probably destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction in the early 1990s. He later declared the war illegal, and in 2004 he was named as chairman of the newly formed International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. The purpose of the commission is to find new ways to achieve the disarming and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Dr. Blix has also written several books about international and constitutional law and international affairs, most recently, “Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters.”

More exciting honorees will be announced soon!

This year’s gala promises to be magnificent and will be even more wonderful with your participation. By becoming a sponsor of the dinner, you will play a critical role in helping PSR-LA continue our important work to address the root causes of America’s most challenging public health threats.

Please join us on June 8 for this exciting event. Click here to register, or for more information, please contact Denise Duffield at 213-689-9170 ext. 102.

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