Trans author and activist Matt Kailey has, very sadly indeed, passed away this past weekend.

In 2006, KGNU's Claudia Cragg spoke with Matt about his memoir, Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide to the Transsexual Experience. The work relayed Matt's experience as a 42­-year­old straight woman turned gay trans man with a highly personal account of his gender transition that is known to have given a great many others the courage to transition themselves.

"Matt didn’t just blaze trails as a gay trans man demonstrating how the T fit with the LGB. He wasn’t just a role model for those of us who transitioned late in life." He was also one of the first visible trans journalists, who wrote for one of the oldest LGBT publications in the West, Colorado’s Out Front. His 2007 promotion to managing editor made Matt the highest­ ranking trans journalist at a queer publication, a distinction he continues to hold.

Although he was dedicated to his work at Out Front, Matt also became an award ­winning activist and educator. He represented the trans male community in numerous news articles, television spots and five documentary films. He founded the award­ winning blog Tranifesto. He spoke at dozens of conferences and colleges and developed his own training program for employers who needed guidance embracing trans people into the workplace

In 2011, after eight years with Out Front, Matt stepped down to focus on his other writings and teaching. He published a collection of essays, Teeny Weenies and Other Short Subjects, about his life before and after transition — and as always he managed to balance heartfelt moments with his great sense of humor.

Matt also created the guidebook, My Child is Transgender: 10 Tips for Parents of Adult Trans Children for parents of transitioning adult children.

During the past few years, Matt also embraced teaching. As an adjunct instructor at Red Rocks Community College, Matt taught courses in psychology and human sexuality. At the same time, he worked at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he designed several courses, including a transgender studies course and a class called “Writing Your Gender.”

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the radio interview

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department. He spent a year in Iraq, an experience that led to his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. As a result, the US Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department with his full benefits of service.

The main point of discussion here though is Van Buren’s personal work experience (in the hiatus when suspended from the State Dept) working for a store he calls 'Bullseye' in the minimum wage Big Box economy. This led to his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent based on his up close take on the drastic effects of social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980’s right up to today.

Notes for the book (from Van Buren's Blog); Some Background from a Real Economist

Economist Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes clear there has been a significant increase in income inequality in America. Our inequality rate is higher than it ever has been in our own history, is growing, and is higher than in countries in Western Europe and Canada.

In the United States, the top one percent own 35 percent of all capital, and the top ten percent of wealth holders own roughly 70 percent. The bottom 50 percent have roughly five percent. Note also that until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were also considered capital.

The inequality is driven by two complementary forces.

By owning more and more of every thing (capital), rich people have a mechanism to keep getting richer, because the rate of return on investment is a higher percentage than the rate of economic growth. This is expressed in Piketty’s now-famous equation R > G. The author claims the top of layer of wealth distribution is rising at 6-7 percent a year, more than three times faster than the size of the economy.

At the same time, wages for middle and lower income people are sinking, driven by factors largely in control of the wealthy, such as technology employed to eliminate human jobs, unions being crushed and decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage more and more Americans now depend on for their survival.

CLICK 'Pod' icon above left to listen to the interview

In June 2011, KGNU's Claudia Cragg spoke with the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson about her then just published book, 'Reckless Endangerment'. More than 5 years on since the world financial catastrophe of 2008, nothing much has changed and many consider 'endangerment' not only persists but may now be even more prevalent. 

In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy. Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.

Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.