8 O'Clock Buzz

On Monday August 24th, researchers in Hong Kong announced they had discovered a 33 year old man who had contracted COVID-19 a second time after recovering from a prior infection 4 months earlier. This represents the first confirmed case  of re-infection of the SARS COV-2 virus. The Hong Kong man’s second infection is completely asymptomatic, but it still raises concerns about  the effectiveness  and duration of natural immunity to the virus. Dr. Jeff Pothof is the UW Health Chief Quality Officer.  He joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on Monday, August 31.

Democracy in Crisis is a special online series of global roundtable discussions about the use of randomly-selected citizen assemblies to further democracy.  Democracy in Crisis is produced by Ahmed Teleb, Brian Standing, the 8 O’Clock Buzz and WORT-FM.

Welcome to the third and final episode of “Crisis in Democracy,” an in-depth series right here on WORT.  In our previous two episodes, we’ve heard about how representative democracies around the globe are failing to live up to their promise and some innovative ideas to get citizens involved in their own government.  Today, we explore the promise and challenges of citizen juries and assemblies — government by random selection, otherwise known as “sortition.”  Joining host Brian Standing are:

* Dr. Paul Cartledge, is the A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College and Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. He is the author of many books on Athenian history, culture, and politics including Democracy, A Life.

* Hélène Landemore is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, political epistemology, theories of justice, the philosophy of social sciences, constitutional processes and theories, and workplace democracy. Hélène is the author of Democratic Reason and Open Democracy, as well as a book in French on David Hume, two edited volumes, and multiple peer-reviewed articles. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Review, Slate, the Washington Post, L’Humanité, Le Monde, and recently the New Yorker. She is a member of the core group behind the Democratizing Work movement. She is currently serving as expert consultant for the Fr...

Democracy in Crisis is a special online series of global roundtable discussions about the use of randomly-selected citizen assemblies to further democracy.  Democracy in Crisis is produced by Ahmed Teleb, Brian Standing, the 8 O’Clock Buzz and WORT-FM.

Welcome to the second episode of “Democracy in Crisis” an in-depth series right here on WORT.  In our first episode, we heard from global experts about how and why electoral, representative government seems to be failing the promise of democracy.  Today, we explore some alternatives to electoral politics that may get us closer to the ideal of “government of, by and for the people.” Joining host Brian Standing for this episode are:

* Linn Davis is the Program Manager at Healthy Democracy in Oregon, a leading organization in the field of citizens engagement and participation. He holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University and a BA in history from Grinnell College. Prior to Healthy Democracy, he worked at PSU’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies and at Metro, the Portland area’s regional government. His first career was in journalism, including stints at National Public Radio’s On the Media and at several newspapers and magazines in South Africa and India.

* Dr. Jane Suiter, is an Associate Professor at Dublin City University. with a focus on the public sphere and in particular on scaling up deliberation and disinformation. She is a research fellow with both the Irish Citizen and Constitutional Assemblies, and a founder member of We the Citizens, Ireland’s first deliberative experiment.  She was the joint winner of the Brown Democracy Medal in 2019 and the President’s Award for Research.  She has published in 30 plus journals including Science, International Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Politics and the International Journal of Communication and is the author of Reimagining Democracy: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Frontline.

* Dr. Lyn Carson, is a professor with the Business Education Unit at The University of Sydney Business School and is now Research Director at New Democracy Foundation in Sydney, Australia.  For the past 25 years she has taught and researched in the field of deliberative democracy, asking how the wider public can help to resolve policy challenges. She was involved in convening or supporting Australia’s first Consensus Conference, the first Deliberative Polls, the first Australian Citizens’ Parliament, numerous Citizens’ Juries and Community Summits and a host of other public deliberations at local, state and national levels.

* Dr. Hans-Liudger Dienel researches planning and citizen participation as part of the social science faculty at Technical University Berlin and co-founder of Nexus Foundation Berlin. He studied mechanical engineering, history, philosophy and sociology in Hanover,

Democracy in Crisis is a special online series of global roundtable discussions about the use of randomly-selected citizen assemblies to further democracy.  Democracy in Crisis is produced by Ahmed Teleb, Brian Standing, the 8 O’Clock Buzz and WORT-FM.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s western-style democracy appeared ascendant and inevitable.  U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush hailed events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as heralding a New World Order, based on democracy and global capitalism.  But the last thirty years have seen, not an expansion of democracy, but a rebirth of authoritarianism.   Across the globe,  electoral fraud, political corruption, disenfranchisement of political minorities and the specter of fascism now seem the rule rather than the exception.  In 2017, the London-based Economist Democracy Index hit its lowest score ever, including the downgrading of the United States from a “Full Democracy” to a “Flawed Democracy.”  Today, we start a three-part series, Democracy in Crisis, which will explore the failures of our current electoral system and perhaps, provide some hope for an alternative model.  Joining WORT host Brian Standing are:

* Dr. Roslyn Fuller trained in law before writing her PhD in Democracy and International Law at Trinity College, Dublin. She frequently writes and lectures on issues pertaining to technology, ancient and modern democracy, privacy and international law, with her work appearing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Financial Times, BBC, The Nation, and Forbes. She is the author of five books, including Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose and In Defence of Democracy (recently a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards). She ran as an Independent on a platform of direct digital democracy in the 2016 Irish national elections, and is the Managing Director of the Solonian Democracy Institute.

* Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons. His books include: They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, America, Compromised and 

In this week’s ExPO hour, Jerome Dillard and fellow ExPO workers Aaron Hicks and Carl Fields stray from the usual topic of prison reform to address the ongoing injustice and indignity of the police shooting of Jacob Blake and others suffering at the hands of police violence against Blacks.

Damita Brown is joined by…

* Anna Moffit, Executive Director of National Alliance on Mental Illness – Dane County Chapter to talk about what NAMI does, how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting people with mental illness, breaking the stigma of mental illness, and how their programming is changing.

* Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero, a groundbreaking beatboxer, vocal percussionist and breath artist who pushes the boundaries of the human voice within and outside the context of hip hop music and culture, to talk about his art and virtual master class on breath art and breath music, presented by Dodgeville-based cultural arts center Folklore Village.

Last week, the Democratic National Convention concluded. The event ostensibly took place in Milwaukee Wisconsin, but in fact mostly took place in virtual space. Instead of large arenas filled with cheering delegates and balloons, we had a series of addresses from Party leaders speaking from living rooms and quietly reaching out to individual viewers. How did the virtual nature of the convention change the messaging or the reach of the convention?  Allison Prasch, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing.

In 2018 the city of Madison completed renovations on the historic Madison municipal building at 215 Martin Luther King Boulevard. The project won numerous awards for its treatment of the 1929 neoclassical building that was at one time the centerpiece of planner John Nolen’s vision for the downtown Boulevard. While the renovations lovingly restored much of the interior and exterior of the building, one historical feature was missing. For the first time since 1929, the US Postal Service had no presence in the building. Instead the post office was moved across the square to a nondescript corporate rental space. The treatment of the post office in Downtown Madison reflects the fortunes of the US Postal Service over the  last 50 years.  Patty Heyda is a professor of Urban Design and architecture at Washington University in St Louis. She argues that the post office has always been about more than just delivering mail.  Patty Heyda joined the Monday Buzz on August 24, 2020.

If you’re going to make a list of difficult jobs, School teachers probably would be near the top of most people’s list. Low pay, Stressful working conditions and a lot of responsibility make teaching not the most attractive profession in today’s job market. Wisconsin teacher preparation classes saw a 37% decline in enrollment between 2011 and 2016. Now the University of Wisconsin Department of Education is proposing a new loan forgiveness program, called the Teacher’s Pledge, to help keep teachers in Wisconsin. Diana Hess, Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, the Karen A. Falk Distinguished Chair in Education, and a former high school teacher joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on August 24, 2020.

U.S. Postmaster General is scheduled to appear before a special session of the Senate on Friday and the House of Representatives on Monday — this would not have happened without a huge grassroots effort, coordinated, in a large part, by the Communities and Postal Workers United organization. Organizer Jamie Partridge talks about the national efforts and the proposed “Delivering for America Act“, which would would prohibit the Postal Service from implementing any changes to the operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020, until the COVID-19 pandemic has ended. More political actions are planned on August 22 to keep the pressure on the Administration.