Culture and Society

Talk Nation Radio: Rebecca Gordon on Mainstreaming Torture

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A new book called Mainstreaming Torture argues that torture has been with us for a long time and remains with us and has been mainstreamed and increased in acceptability in the years since Bush and Cheney left office.  We speak with the author, Rebecca Gordon. She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. Previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua  read more

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Olympic Capitalism: Bread and Circuses Without the Bread

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The author of Brazil’s Dance With the Devil, Dave Zirin, must love sports, as I do, as billions of us do, or he wouldn’t keep writing about where sports have gone wrong.  But, wow, have they gone wrong!

Brazil is set to host the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2016.  In preparation Brazil is evicting 200,000 people from their homes, eliminating poor neighborhoods, defunding public services, investing in a militarized police and surveillance state, using slave and prison read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Betsy Leondar-Wright on Cross-Class Activism

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Betsy Leondar-Wright is the Project Director and Senior Trainer at Class Action, a non-profit that raises consciousness about class and money.  Her new book is called Missing Class: How Seeing Class Cultures Can Strengthen Social Movement Groups. She describes read more

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Here Comes Ukrainian Hemp

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So the United States wants to buy hemp from the Ukraine. I suppose we should be happy. Anytime the U.S. government gives a country money that is not earmarked for weapons, we probably shouldn’t too closely examine the unelected neo-liberals and neo-Nazis handling the cash.  Nobody pays attention to the Saudi government or the oil, wars, and terrorism it provides in exchange for U.S. largesse.

Of course if the hemp buy is part of a larger package deal that impoverishes the Ukraine for read more

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Can We Really Blame Sociopaths?

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I’ve been hearing increasingly from multiple quarters that the root of our problems is psychopaths and sociopaths and other loosely defined but definitely different beings from ourselves.  Rob Kall has produced a quite interesting series of articles and interviews on the subject.

I want to offer some words of caution if not respectful dissent.  I don’t think the “because chickenhawks” dissent found, for example, in John Horgan’s “The End of War” read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Portland Oregon Supports Its Teachers and Students

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Portland Oregon is sitting on a budget surplus while overworking and undersupporting its teachers. And it’s not just the teachers who aren’t going to take it anymore.

Eric MacCartney is a member of the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT). He has been teaching for over six years, and now teaches fifth grade at Kelly Elementary, a Title I school in Portland’s Lents neighborhood. Before that he taught read more

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Misplaced Lessons of Tahrir

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I still want Dirty Wars to win the Oscar, but The Square is a documentary worth serious discussion as we hit the three-year point since the famous occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo that overthrew Mubarak — in particular because a lot of people seem to get a lot of the lessons wrong.

I suppose some people will leave Dirty Wars imagining that we need clean wars, whatever those would be.  But too many people seem to be drawing from The Square lessons they brought with read more

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The Thugs of Halftime

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Three remarkable items in Thursday’s Charlottesville Daily Progress.  First, a football player explaining that when he proclaimed his superiority to his opponent after a game he was caught up in the game’s passion, and that the overblown reaction to his obnoxious comments seems racist. Indeed it does, but it seems to reflect another type of willful ignorance as well.

Spectators at gladiator matches don’t want to see too deeply into the minds of the gladiators.  We want read more

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Now Two States Pursue Truly Affordable Education

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Maryland may soon join Oregon in exploring solutions to the crisis of student debt and unaffordable education.

Education is supposed to be a human right.  But the United States puts people into deep debt to pay for it.  Short of taxing billionaires or dismantling bombers (both of which we’re all, I hope, working on), what’s the solution?

The state of Oregon has passed a law creating a commission to study a plan called “Pay it forward. Pay it back.”  See read more

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Global Rescue Plan

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When the wealthy nations of the world meet as the G8 or in any other gathering, it’s interesting to imagine what they would do if they followed the golden rule, valued grandchildren, disliked unnecessary suffering, or wished to outgrow ancient forms of barbarism, or any combination of those.

The United States alone is perfectly capable, if it chooses, of enacting a global marshall plan, or — better — a global rescue plan.  Every year the United States spends, through various read more

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Death Penalty Dying Out

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Most of the world’s governments no longer use the death penalty.  Among wealthy nations there is one exception remaining.  The United States is among the top five killers in the world.  Also in the top five: the recently “liberated” Iraq.

But most of the United States’ 50 states no longer use the death penalty.  There are 18 states that have abolished it, including 6 in this new millennium, including Maryland this week.  Thirty-one states haven’t read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Richard Wolff on Putting Workers in Charge at Work

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Richard Wolff is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Democracy at Work.  See http://democracyatwork.info

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code from Archive or  AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!

Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Wenonah Hauter on Foodopoly

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Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of Food and Water Watch and the author of Foodopoly.  She discusses the 20 companies that make our processed food — and the 2 companies, both foreign, that make our beer (despite the hundreds of brands all pretending a diversity of origins and owners).  Hauter tells a story of how we got here and how we can get out of here.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code read more

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Talk Nation Radio: The Crisis in Mali and How to Stop Contributing to It

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Ana Edwards is the host of Defenders Live on WRIR in Richmond, Va.  Edwards tells us what we should know about Mali, the crisis there, the causes of it, what the Pentagon should stop doing, and what the people of Richmond are doing to help.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code from Archive or  AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations read more

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February 15 Ten Years Later

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On February 15, 2003, the world protested a long-announced pending war of aggression by the United States against Iraq.  The protest was the largest in world history, and we haven’t topped it since.  It persuaded many nations of the world and the United Nations to oppose the war.  It built an international movement that went on to limit, reduce, and prevent wars, including thus far a fullscale war on Iran, as well as to educate a new generation about the evils of war.  read more

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