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

  • “Go Home” Rhetoric is as American as Immigration Itself
    It’s a long and oscillating history: America welcoming immigrants and telling them to go home. As Washington Post senior editor Marc Fisher explains, it didn’t start with Trump: “there’s a long history of rejecting “different” Americans:” Eastern European, Irish, German, Italian, Latin American, or African American.  Interestingly, most Republicans want more immigrants to boost the economy. Even conservative icon Ronald Reagan declared “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. We draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world.” But Trump bucked the Republican Party in 2016.  And he’s not concerned that he is seen as racist and that his policies anger most Americans. He only cares about keeping his base solid. And they are just the latest in a long line of “nativists.”
    1 hr
  • Are Most Americans Unpatriotic?
    If we criticize Trump, we don’t love America. If we learn history, we are disloyal. You know that’s what a lot of people on the right (in larger numbers than we’d imagined) are claiming. But what is Patriotism? Does the right own it? On this show, historian Steve Hochstadt explains the famous quote from 1775, that patriotism can be the last refuge of scoundrels. For example, Trump’s picture literally hugging the flag, is a cover for bad behavior. And in the new alleged patriotism, anyone who favors reasonable restraints on untethered monopolistic capitalism is clearly unpatriotic. What can we, non-Trump people, do to take back “patriotism?” How dangerous to America is this new nationalism?
    1 hr
  • Erasing Unsettling Truth: The San Francisco Mural Controversy
    Safe comfortable myth is so soothing, but art, by its nature, is often about challenging the viewer. You may have heard of the controversy about large Depression-era murals on the walls of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. After 80 years, why did the school board vote to spend $600,000 to now cover it up? Painted as part of the New Deal’s WPA by renowned artist Victor Arnautoff, these frescoes show the real George Washington, slave owner and the white settlers whose progress meant destruction of Indians. It is disturbing. But as our guest, SF photographic artist and author David Bacon tells us, racism and not the mural is the cause of any trauma on the part of students. Bacon argues there are other participatory solutions than covering it up.
     
    1 hr
  • The Brave Freedom of Satire: Mad Magazine’s Crucial Legacy
    Gleefully ferreting out deception and laughing at it. An overall spirit of irreverence arising out of the rigid white-bread conformity of the 1950s, Mad Magazine has published its last all-new edition. Today we talk with national affairs correspondent for The Nation Jeet Heer, whose new article is Mad Magazine Told the Truth About War, Advertising, and the Media. William Gaines, long term publisher of Mad, exemplified the ethos of never letting himself be intimidated by the powerful. Millions of American teens got their introduction to politics from Mad, which respected them, and young people learned they were able to participate and fight injustice. With humor. As Heer says, Mad celebrated the “sheer pleasure of chaos.” With its artistic freedom and good-natured disrespect for authority, Mad was a seedbed for a lot of today’s successful political humor. Which Donald Trump never got. Luckily the rest of us do.
    1 hr
  • Supreme Court Whittles Away Democracy
    President Reagan’s former solicitor general and Harvard law professor Charles Fried calls it a “Day of Sorrow for American Democracy:” the day the US Supreme Court issued its 5 to 4 decision abandoning protection of one person one vote. In a truly precedent setting case, the court’s majority decided to allow even extreme gerrymandering. Fried, a Republican, argues the ruling violates the Fourteenth and First Amendments, this by a body created by our founders to protect and preserve our constitutional liberties and rights. In disagreeing with the ruling, Fried argues the court certainly did have the legal right to intervene and that Roberts’ clear injection of partisanship uniquely and seriously imperils our democracy.
    59 min
  • Reactions from Iran and Honduras: What Do You Expect?
    Of course Iran shot down a US spy drone. Any country would do the same. And Trump’s intention for greater tension is achieved. On this segment, legal scholar Marjorie Cohn argues that Iran had a legal right to shoot down the spy drone. And what a surprise, since Trump abrogated the nuclear deal, Iran has been pushed into exceeding uranium enrichment standards. And on part two, we look at Honduras ten years after the Hillary Clinton-approved overthrow of democracy. Central America expert James Phillips sheds light on what motivates so many to flee Honduras for the US. For example, under the new government if you criticize a powerful person, you can be charged with a “crime against honor.” And if you speak out at all you can be labeled a terrorist. Poverty is at about 70% while riches are extracted. What hath we wrought?
    1 hr
  • Making The Democratic Party Democratic
    We’ve all seen it in recent years: the leadership of the DNC and the DCCC dictating policy and acceptable “centrist” positions for their chosen candidates. And how well has that worked out? Toward correcting that hierarchy’s grip on the party candidates, a group of over a million called RootsAction.org has just released a report called BadBlues: Some of the House Democrats Who Deserve to be Primaried. Co-founder Norman Solomon explains who made their target list and why. It’s a question of serving corporate moneyed interests or constituents. So far they’ve met with remarkable success, electing progressives throughout the country. And 2020 has just begun
    1 hr
  • 21st Century Tech Trusts: 1984 on Steroids
    With much of state and federal government in their pockets, the interface between the tech trusts and the infrastructure enables concentration and nearly unimaginable control by the tech giants. As a result they are able to over-charge customers between $40 and $60 billion per year. On this show, the managing director of The Irregulators.org Bruce Kushnick sheds light into the intentionally dark recesses of the tech giants political power over all of us. With their ability to literally control our conversations, and purposely opaque accounting methods, hardly anyone understands what’s going on.  Kushnick says “5G is a con,” and that wireless in the US is six times more expensive than in the EU. And he explains what The Irregulators are uniquely doing and what they are up against. And though the tech giants have done a good job convincing us we are powerless, we are not.
    1 hr
  • Nixon Could Have Used a Mitch McConnell
    (Please note: this is a corrected audio version) The force behind Trump, the real power in the Republican led senate is Mitch McConnell, who calls himself the grim reaper for killing good bills. Our guest in this discussion, Michael Winship, formerly senior writer for Bill Moyers, now senior writing fellow for commondreams.org, explains why he calls him “Mitch the Impaler.” The majority leader “uses people’s lives to get what he wants;” a strong statement which Winship backs up. His main goals are to keep and increase power to pervert and destroy regulations which safeguard the public, largely through judicial appointments. Regarding the future, Winship reminds listeners “they have the money but we have the people; the shoe leather on the ground can work.”
    1 hr
  • Nixon Could Have Used a Mitch McConnell
    The force behind Trump, the real power in the Republican led senate is Mitch McConnell, who calls himself the grim reaper for killing good bills. Our guest in this discussion, Michael Winship, formerly senior writer for Bill Moyers, now senior writing fellow for commondreams.org, explains why he calls him “Mitch the Impaler.” The majority leader “uses peoples lives to get what he wants;” a strong statement which Winship backs up. His main goals are to keep and increase power to pervert and destroy regulations which safeguard the public, largely through judicial appointments. Regarding the future, Winship reminds listeners “they have the money but we have the people; the shoe leather on the ground can work.”
    1 hr

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