Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

By Burt CohenSociety & CultureNewsPolitics
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Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen episodes

  • The Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls
    All too often, schools function as a pipeline to prison for troubled kids. Kicking out troublemakers, punishing for bad attitudes leaves kids feeling they are disposable. Authoritarian models too often make schools feel like locations for punishment, when they can become places for healing individuals and the community. In her new book, Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liuberation of Black qand Brown Girls author Monique W. Morris follows her earlier book Pushout, The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools with workable, practical solutions that do work. More police do not mean safer schools, on the contrary. Adults co-constructing with students the skills needed to navigate other kids does enhance safety. Instead of kicking out badly behaved kids, teach them how to be in the community.   Education can be a tool for real liberation. It is do-able.
    1 hr
  • “How Ya Gonna Pay for Medicare for All?” Here’s How
    The public is way ahead of politicians on this. Frightened of looking “soft on defense,” elected members of both parties duck and cover when polls show wide support for giving a serious haircut to the wild and woolly lands of trillion dollar military spending.  The question is arising: what does America get for all these trillions spent on so-called defense? Investigative reporter for The Nation and founder of ThisCantbeHappening.net, Dave Lindorff cuts through the weeds to reveal an uncomplicated way to fund not just Medicare for All but any number of job creating, environment-saving initiatives. Is all that spending yielding greater national security? Not hardly. Listen in!
    1 hr
  • The Psychological Base of “Powerarchy”
    We traditional Americans are doing what we can to take on oligarchy, plutocracy, and patriarchy.But our effectiveness is limited if we do not figure out the whys and hows of what our guest Melanie Joy calls “powerarchy.” Her new book is Powerarchy: Understanding The Psychology of Oppression for Social Transformation. The psychologist and author points to aspects of our culture which bolster this structure which is embedded in even liberal social and political movements. She talks of “toxic moral perfectionism” in systems which unintentionally maintain the power structure. She says “Powerarchy is a non-relational system,” meaning it depends on our feeling disconnected from one another. Even in “left” organizations there can be shaming and judging. Because of that psychological dynamic we are less able to get out of old familiar boxes. The antidote, she says, is empathy. To make real change we need to have a thorough understanding of the bases of our accepted powerarchy.
    1 hr
  • Democrats Took The Wrong Lessons from McGovern 1972
    Conventional Democratic Party wisdom is that McGovern lost to Nixon because he was too liberal, and as a result of that belief, ever since that loss party insiders have trended steadily to the right. But if today’s measuring tools had been available, it would have been obvious no Democrat could win that year. So according to author and historian Joshua Mound, the party took all the wrong lessons from that election. There was a a prophetic element in McGovern’s message and the coalition was way ahead of its time. The irony is those same party insiders still push for the direction of our 2016 nominee who lost what should have been easy, whereas no Democrat had a chance in 1972. The wrong lessons were learned. Abandoning economic populism was a big mistake.
    1 hr
  • Cruelty Steers the New Supreme Court Docket
    It’s not only Trump who is pushing cruelty. Since right wing Republicans have very successfully gained control over the third branch of government, the judicial branch, we should expect to see many examples of cruelty dictating decisions by the Supreme Court. John Roberts may be the chief justice, but it is really Kavanaugh and Gorsuch  driving the court as the new session begins. On this show Elie Mystal, executive editor of Above the Law, a website that covers the legal industry. Mystal who has written editorials for many newspapers on the topic of law, goes through the new docket. The majority will be aggressively pro-death, against gun safety laws, anti-choice, against LGBTQ rights and will be quite willing to upset established precedent. Buckle in.
    1 hr
  • Impeachment: Restore Entitled “Centrist” Ds and Rs to Power?
    No question: today’s biggest unsolved problems came at the hands of the so-called centrists of both parties. Historian and author Professor Andrew Bacevich argues that while of course Trump must be removed, the constant focus of impeachment is a way not to talk about the failed performance of the establishment Democrats and Republicans; the Clintons and the Bushes. Impeachment, Bacevich speculates, may protect these elites from accountability for other more serious problems. Such as dismal foreign policy, horrendous wealth inequities, and protecting the powerful interests responsible for climate change. Nixon’s fall did not bring McGovern to power, it reaffirmed the power elite.
    1 hr
  • A Real Solution To Refugee Crisis
    Across Europe tens of millions of refugees are living in horrible conditions, as countries erect razor wire to keep them out. Our guest today Tim Horgan of the World Affairs Council argues it is best to keep people where they are. Not just for selfless humanitarian reasons but it serves self interests for all of Western Europe and the US to solve the problem at its root. Trumped up fears of “invasions” are of course based on racism. The reality is refugees are a net benefit to the host countries. And since shutting borders is not a solution, helping people where they are actually addresses the problem far more effectively
    1 hr
  • Thom Hartmann: Hidden History of Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America
    It’s become “a nearly despotic branch of government.” But wasn’t the Supreme Court created to be a check on the powers of the executive and legislative, making certain they adhere to the Constitution? Author Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host whose shows are available in over a half-billion homes worldwide. He’s the New York Times bestselling, 4-times Project Censored Award-winning author of 24 books in print in 17 languages on five continents. Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the 9th most important talk show host in America in 2018 and has been in the top ten for over a decade. His soon to be published book holds the history of the Supreme Court under a microscope and he concludes it has become a serious threat to democracy, the will of the people so often ignored. Did the Roe v Wade decision exacerbate the abortion debate? What about the power of corporations? And this “originalism?” It’s a sham, he says. Yet Hartmann says the rights of nature may turn out to be defensible under the Constitution.  We may be less democratic than most democracies, but his book points out that “the people themselves have occasionally gone to war with the court–and won.”
    1 hr
  • Trump and “Disloyal Jews”//The Corpse of Franco and Democracy in Spain
    Did Trump mean to be anti-Semitic with his insistence that Jewish Americans who vote Democratic are disloyal? According to our first guest, civil justice advocate and attorney Mark Bello, without question yes, Trump is anti-Semitic. And he says Trump is one thing but the silence of Republicans is more troubling. And on part two while Generalissimo Franco is still dead, controversy around the status of his corpse is very much alive. Sebastiaan Faber is an expert on Spanish history and politics. He says that the recent Supreme Court decision to remove the corpse from the massive Valley of the Fallen monument has the potential to right some wrongs. Such as questions about Franco’s fortune stolen from Spain and the status of bodies of Franco’s victims and possible reparations to families of those killed and wrongly imprsioned. This may test democracy in Spain.
    1 hr
  • The DNA of Democracy: It’s A Recessive Gene
    We take democracy for granted, but as author Richard C.Lyons tells it, democracy is a recessive gene. Tyranny is much more able to dominate. Tyranny? What does that ancient word even mean? In his new book: The DNA of Democracy, Lyons seeks to connect the reader with the remarkably slow development of the form of government until it exploded in America (not without difficulty). Tyranny can and has risen through democracies, and has been itself be beaten by democracy. See McCarthyism. And Trumpism? The appeal of tyranny is part laziness: let others do it. But citizenship requires action. Which do you prefer?
    59 min

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