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

  • While We’re Not Paying Attention; Remaking State Governments
    We all focus on the top, the presidency and then congress. But more than you may think is at stake at the state level. Top corporations are focused where they can accomplish a lot for themselves relatively cheaply. A little corporate money goes a long way toward changing labor laws, cutting funding for public education, and actually protecting their ability to steal money from workers paychecks. In his new book: The One Percent Solution, Gordon Lafer describes “How Corporations are Remaking America One State at a Time. One of their goals is to lower the public’s expectations of what government can do for the common good.
    1 hr
  • The Real Story of North Korea: It’s Complicated
    Behind the simple image of two madmen facing off with nuclear weapons, there’s a lot more to the North Korea story we don’t know. For example, who knew that more bombs were dropped there in the early 50s than in the entire Pacific theater in WWII? Whole cities were destroyed as about 10% of the population was killed. That did not make for a trusting government. As foreign policy columnist for The Nation Patrick Lawrence explains, the current emergency was “more or less scheduled to proceed no matter who took the White House in November. Trump’s 59 missiles sent in to Syria were targeted really at Beijing. North Korea participated in six party talks but according to Lawrence, the US cut that possibility off. And Trump has yielded decision making to the military, the opposite of Truman in the Korean War. Dig in: it’s as fascinating as it is scary.
    1 hr
  • Better Than Bombs: Freedom from Want
    Franklin Roosevelt understood that to be successful at defeating foreign threats, reliance on military power alone was insufficient. In this discussion from 2012 with David Woolner, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute looks beyond the presidential candidates of the day to what really works. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms centered on the most basic, and that is Freedom from Want: take care of that and you’ve got a real and dependable friend. The power of devastation from the air only gets you so far in the quest for global peace and security. Woolner argues it is still possible to re-establish America’s pre-eminence in the world.
    59 min
  • The Top 1% Want Us to Hate Taxes
    As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” But today’s greed-driven super-rich are determined to destroy America’s traditional valuing of the common good. If regular people hate taxes, then the top one tenth of one percent can more easily avoid them altogether. As a result, today impoverished undocumented immigrants pay a higher percentage of their taxes than the very richest among us. As our guest Josh Hoxie, tax policy specialist with the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org tells us, in places like Denmark, where the living standard is well above America’s, citizens actually celebrate tax day! It will take sustained pressure, but we the people can make our revenue system serve the common good again.
    1 hr
  • Trump Bombs Syria: Now What?
    On the one hand, somebody had to do something. Using Sarin gas to kill babies must not go unchallenged. On the other hand, what did the Tomahawk missile attack accomplish? What about the thousands of innocents already killed by all sides, including the US? What about real humanitarian intervention? On this show, Stephen Zunes professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, and senior policy analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies untangles the multiple realities of the war in Syria. No doubt, the attack temporarily diverted attention from Trump’s domestic problems, but now what? It is not hyperbole to see that the very future of humanity may be at stake.
    1 hr
  • Has Populist Wave Crested?//World War One Never Ended
    The Democratic nominee was the very antithesis of populism; with her hand out to big money interests seeming to ignore everyday people. So we got Trump. In an article written by internationally recognized historian Alfred McCoy has written about The Bloodstained Rise of Global Populism. His now-classic book was The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. He says that in troubled times, people everywhere often look to strongmen to simply fix things. Trump fits that, and the good news is Europeans see the disaster he is and as a result, McCoy senses that the right-wing populist wave may have already crested. His newest book: In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global power is due out this fall. And on the second half of the show we discuss how 100 years after the US entered the war, we are still paying a high price to this day. Roots of today’s global issues go back to The Great War and remain unresolved.
    1 hr
  • MLK’s 4/67 AntiWar Speech Kicked off Today’s Split Among Liberals
    It was the beginning of a 50 year split among liberals. Those in power, President Johnson in particular, wanted to relegate Dr. Martin Luther King to his safe civil rights leader role. But boldly, Dr. King spoke out against imperialism and militarism in his famous Riverside Church speech of April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before he was killed). Leading liberals were for civil rights and also for continued war in Vietnam. As Professor Eric Tang explains, King saw that our war against the poor in Vietnam who sought their own independence was an example of America’s half-hearted commitment to real justice. The split among Democrats today between the hawkish Hillary wing and the Bernie Sanders wing exemplifies this 50 year split. The last half hour is a portion of King’s speech that day. Listen in, see what resonates today.
    1 hr
  • Why Direct Action Works
    Direct action is successful when it creates a crisis for those in power. It baffles the powers that be because it is truly democratic, merely a movement of movements. So says L.A. Kauffman, organizer of many direct action events, and author of the new book Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (Verso). There is a link between Gandhi, MLK, the Clamshell Alliance, MayDay 1971, Seattle 1999, the Occupy Movements, and today’s resistance against Trumpism. Does direct action instantly correct problems? Of course not. But it radically and often permanently changes the discussion and unquestionably achieves results where other methods do not. When is it appropriate? Listen in!
    1 hr
  • The Threat of Reading//The Danger of Gorsuch
    The right wing depends for its power on people not reading. Books have always been subversive. They lead to critical thinking. On the first part of this show, Ken Gloss,  proprietor of the internationally renowned Brattle Book Shop talks about the role of books in the 21st century. And on the second half, law professor Marjorie Cohen reveals who Neil Gorsuch really is: a far right demonstrably heartless nominee for the Supreme Court intent on taking down all traditional protections of the average citizen from big money and big power. And he’s only 49. Here’s why he’s such a danger to us all.
    59 min
  • Black Bloc Weather?
    Violence at anti-Trump protests is a gift to the powers being protested. Just as the Weathermen in the late sixties were greatly appreciated by Nixon, so too the Bannon/Trump Right loves to label protestors as violent thugs. A veteran of many successful anti-war events, Robert Levering talks with Burt Cohen about today’s window-smashing so-called anarchists Block Bloc. History teaches that what is needed is active, resistant creativity, not random violence.
    1 hr

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