All Programs — Page 76 of 169 — Alternative Radio

Occupy Democracy
Cornel West
When language has been mutilated and drained of meaning how are we to understand democracy? Its mere invocation by politicians and their media echoers generates a chorus of hosannas. The reality is different. Democracy has been reduced to elections, awash in money, where there are marginal choices. Sometimes the candidates are so bad one can […]
Ecology & Socialism
Chris Williams
Fifty years ago Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. It gave birth to the environmental movement. Within a few years there was Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. Those were heady days but that was then. Today, around the world the threat to our environment […]
2012 Harvard Trade Union Program
Noam Chomsky
Ever mischievous, when Chomsky saw me recording this session he said, “You’re like a bad penny. You keep showing up.” Ever since 1984 I’ve kept showing up to record him. In this presentation and exchange with trade union activists from around the world, Chomsky discusses a broad range of issues such as: why is the labor movement unable to […]
The End of Growth
Richard Heinberg
There is almost a mystical belief in growth. Nature’s bounty was there to be exploited by man. There is endless palaver about growth as an economic panacea that will cure all ills. Economists have long postulated that growth is normal and natural and could go on forever. But can it? Conventional views of growth are […]
Genocide & Modernity
Peter Balakian
Stalin, once cynically remarked, If you kill one person it is a tragedy, but if you kill a million, it is a statistic. It is difficult to comprehend large-scale horror. The crime of genocide in some ways has defined modern times. With technology, states have become more efficient at mass murder. But the term genocide […]
Tar Sands: Canada’s Mordor
Andrew Nikiforuk
Mordor is the realm of the evil Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien describes it as “a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.” If you look at Canada’s Alberta tar sands you might imagine it’s something like Mordor. The gigantic effort to extract oil has […]
Ghazal: Urdu Poetry
Hafeez Ahmed Khan
Recorded at a mehfil, a house concert where everyone takes their shoes off and sits on pillows and carpets. The informal atmosphere is quite different from a concert hall. In this recording, Hafeez Ahmed Khan sings classic ghazals, Urdu love poems. This mehfil features the poetry of some of Urdu’s greatest poets including Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jigar, and Josh. […]
Local Dollars, Local Sense
Michael Shuman
What do you do if you are fortunate enough to have some extra money? Stuffit under your mattress? Invest in Wall Street? Put it in a bank? Forvarious reasons those may not be your best options. The economic crash andthe Occupy movement have widened the space for alternatives and newthinking. A once fledging choice, investing […]
Banks, Fraud & Looting
William Black
Bankers brought the world’s economy to the brink of collapse and then as the Occupy slogan says, “We got sold out, they got bailed out.” In many ways Goldman Sachs, one of the largest and most important investment banks, epitomizes all that is wrong with the economic system. Its CEO modestly announced that they were […]
Get Up, Stand Up
Michael Moore
Bob Marley sang this song, “Get up, stand up, stand up for your right Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight You can fool some people sometimes But you can’t fool all the people all the time So now we see the light, we gonna stand up for our rights.” The Occupy movement […]
A New Economic Paradigm
Gar Alperovitz
When something doesn’t work you either get it fixed or replace it. Makes sense right? Take capitalism. It careens from crisis to crisis. It has systemic structural problems. The traditional remedies, such as legislative reform, don’t work or if they do they are soon outflanked by power brokers who know how to game the rules. […]
Ideology Over Reality
Thomas Frank
Ideology is a set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political and economic system. It can evolve in strange ways to the point where evidence and facts are not only irrelevant but are treated with scorn and derision. In its distorted form, its followers adopt rigid fundamentalist positions. Anyone who challenges […]

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