The Socialist Program Creators & Guests

Brian Becker is a political activist and commentator, National Director of the ANSWER Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.

Producer at Breakthrough News.

Greg Mello is a founder and Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group and has led its varied activities since 1992, including policy research, environmental analysis, congressional education and lobbying, community organizing, litigation (FOIA, civil rights, NEPA), advertising, and the nuts and bolts of funding and running a small nonprofit. From time to time he has served as a consulting analyst, writer, and spokesperson for other nuclear policy organizations. Greg was educated as a systems engineer with a broad scientific background (Harvey Mudd College, 1971, with distinction) and as a regional planner with emphases in environmental planning and regional economics (Harvard, 1975, with distinction, HUD Fellow in Urban Studies). During the early 1980s Greg was a high school science and math teacher, then a hazardous waste inspector and statewide hazardous materials incident commander, and in the late 1980s a supervising hydrogeologist, for the New Mexico Environment Department. In 1984 Greg led the first regulatory enforcement at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In the early 1990s Greg was a consulting hydrologist in parallel with the early Study Group, with cleanup projects in New Mexico and California. In 2002, Greg was a Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Greg’s research, analysis, and opinions have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Issues in Science and Technology, in the New Mexico press, and elsewhere. He has been interviewed thousands of times by U.S. and international news media (print, radio, and television). Greg’s research has been the source or impetus of many of these media articles and programs. In addition to speaking at hundreds of public meetings and events in New Mexico, Greg has been a guest speaker at several international disarmament events here and abroad.

Esther Iverem is a multi-disciplinary artist, author, and independent journalist. Her diverse body of work, which includes a show on Pacifica Radio, four books, two digital media projects and several visual art exhibits, is about social justice and human existence—its history, current state and possible futures. It is also about the environment, including its mysteries extending into the universe.

Kenneth J. Hammond is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Hammond was a student and Students for a Democratic Society leader at Kent State University from 1967 to 1970. He later (1985) completed his degree in Political Science, then studied Modern Chinese language at the Beijing Foreign Languages Normal School in Beijing. Hammond received an M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia (1989), and a Ph.D in History and East Asian Languages (1994) from Harvard University. In 2007, Hammond was appointed director of the Confucius Institute, a cultural initiative funded in part by Hanban on the NMSU campus that is dedicated to studying and publicizing China and Chinese culture. He is the editor of the journal Ming Studies. The Confucius Institute was closed in 2020 due to political pressure from the Federal government.

Gloria Estela La Riva is an American political candidate and communist activist with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Peace and Freedom Party. She was the PSL's nominee and Peace and Freedom's nominee in the 2020 presidential election, her tenth consecutive candidacy as either a presidential or vice presidential candidate. She was previously a member of the Workers World Party. She ran as the PSL's and the Peace and Freedom Party's presidential candidate in the 2016 presidential election, with Eugene Puryear and Dennis J. Banks as her running mates respectively. She was the PSL's presidential nominee in the 2008 presidential election. For the 2020 election, Sunil Freeman was her running mate.

K.J. Noh is a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of the Asian continent who writes for Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. He is special correspondent for KPFA Flashpoints on the “Pivot to Asia,” the Koreas, and the Pacific.

Eugene Puryear is an American journalist, author, activist, politician, and host of By Any Means Necessary Podcast.

Dr. Nazia Kazi is an anthropologist and educator based in Philadelphia. Her work explores the role of Islamophobia and racism in the context of global politics. She has lived in Dubai, New York City, and the Chicagoland area.She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stockton University in New Jersey, where she teaches courses on race, ethnicity, immigration, and Islam in the U.S. She is the author of Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics, out now in an expanded second edition from Rowman & Littlefield. Kazi is also a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights.

Internacionalista in Beijing • Art director and researcher at The Tricontinental Institute • Member of Dongsheng News collective

Rania Khalek is a journalist, writer, political commentator, and host of the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast.

Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist, host of the video show & podcast Economic Update, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York.

Walter Smolarek is a Philadelphia-based journalist and activist, covering both political developments inside the United States as well as the international activities of U.S. imperialism. Since becoming involved in the movement against the Iraq War as a high school student, he has also participated as an organizer in social movements ranging from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to the 2014-2015 wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing mutual aid relief efforts in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. He is a contributor to BreakThrough News, currently serves as the editor of Liberation newspaper, and is the managing editor of LiberationNews.org. He is a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow. [From LA Progressive author profile]

Gerald Horne is an American historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and activist. He is the host of the weekly comedy news show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian Marxist historian and commentator. He is an executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and a professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, United States, from 1996 to 2017. He is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2013 to 2018. Dean has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author and editor of thirteen books. Her most recent book is titled Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso 2019).

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. His journalism focuses primarily on geopolitics and US foreign policy. He is based in Latin America and speaks English and Spanish.

Miko Peled (born 1961) is an Israeli-American activist, author, and karate instructor. He is author of the books The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five. He is also an international speaker.