Watch the full episode here.
Watch the full episode here.
Listen to the episode here.
“This came out as an idea because I receive a lot of poems from young people. One day, Len McCluskey [former general secretary of Unite the Union] and I were in my office one day talking about economic policies and strategies and he asked me: “Why do you have those poetry books in your office?” I was quite offended, and I replied “Why not?,” to which he then replied, “I haven’t got that one, can I borrow it?” So we decided to publish this book.”
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“From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance. But what exactly is it? What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes? Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan – “everyone’s favourite desi drag queen aunty” – joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more. And to discuss “Ishtyle”, Kareem’s ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire and fun in the lives of global Indian workers too often stereotyped as cogs in the wheels of globalisation.
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“If you’re going to transform society, you’re not going to do it by bureaucratic manoeuvres; you’re going to do it by popular action and popular culture, which is why, through the Peace and Justice Project, we’re doing everything we can: ‘Music for the Many’, the union membership campaigns, and above all on culture: we’re doing a book on Poetry for the Many. It’s about mobilising popular culture for justice and equality and not allowing arrogant elitism to take over and run our movement.”
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“Gary Younge, the award-winning former columnist for The Guardian, talks about Black writing and Black writers—and his own writing about Mandela, Obama, Travon Martin, and Claudette Colvin.
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“Community and collective action are the surest way to forestall despair. So while there is plenty to despair about – sorry I keep saying the word despair so many times – like the rise of fascism in this country in particular, there’s plenty to point to as reason for hope, like the rise of unions and worker solidarity, which is what it will take to solve any of these problems. We are nothing without each other. We can do nothing without each other.
As far as personal despair goes, that comes with its own kind of stigma. We talk a lot about recognizing mental health issues now, and we love to tell people that help is available, but what kind of help and in what form exactly and from whom? And how much will it cost?”
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“My motivation for writing this memoir was simple. I see the world through a writer’s lens, so within months of taking the job as Chomsky’s assistant I saw what was going on in our office, what kind of man he was, what types of people met with him or invited him to lecture. I noticed small quirks about his work style, and larger characteristics of his personality, his interaction with all kinds of visitors, talk organizers, colleagues, students, staff. I worried that the details of our daily lives might be lost, so I assigned myself to be note keeper, writing pages of essays and scribbling on sticky note pads.”
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One of the key elements of the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been increasing aggression against Iran. Trump has cozied up with the Saudi regime, but at the same time, has repeatedly called for the overthrow of Iran’s government. Well, joining us to discuss this is a leading figure in the U.S. peace movement who has been helping to lead the fight to save the Iran Nuclear Deal. I’m speaking with Medea Benjamin, who is a co-founder of the women-led peace movement, Code Pink, and also the author of a book on Iran that expels many of the myths about the country, called Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Read the full article here.
A bold transformation of Mexico’s economy is one of the many promises the newly inaugurated President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, is promising his people. Some have deemed this the fourth transformation of Mexico. But that won’t be easy for the newly elected president. Joining me now to discuss the challenge is Vijay Prashad. He is the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. Vijay, good to have you back.
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George H.W. Bush was the only president in U.S. history to serve as CIA director, a role that would come to define his career and politics. He once described the intelligence agency as “part of my heartbeat.” Bush Sr. was at the helm of the CIA from January 1976 to January 1977. We speak with Ariel Dorfman, best-selling author, playwright, poet and activist, who teaches at Duke University. In 1973, he served as a cultural adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende’s chief of staff. He says George H.W. Bush was “presiding over the CIA when Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, had concentration camps open. They were torturing people. They were executing people. They were persecuting people. And they were killing people overseas.” We also speak with Greg Grandin, prize-winning author and professor of Latin American history at New York University, and José Luis Morín, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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Greg Shupak, author of “The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media,” joins the show to discuss his book that sharply critiques how establishment and left-of-center media cover the Israeli military occupation.
Listen to the full interview here.
Focus groups have long-been derided by the left, right, and center for watering down culture and reducing creative and political endeavors to dull, show-of-hand reductionism.
But what if focus groups – which first arose from socialist experiments in 1920s Vienna – are not inherently bad? What if they’ve simply been exploited by the capitalist class and could, potentially, have much to offer a left-wing, democratic vision of the world?.
Listen to the full interview here.
Airbnb likes to position its hosts as everyday people offering up their homes for a little cash when they take a vacation or leave on a work trip. But new data assembled for The Coast shows the exact opposite.
Over half of the Airbnb listings in the urban core seemingly belong to property owners with multiple listings. The exact figures, however, are difficult to pin down.
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Argentina’s legislature approved a drastic austerity budget for fiscal year 2019 on Thursday which will cut social spending by as much as 35 percent and increase debt service payments by 50 percent. The budget is expected to cause a further contraction of Argentina’s economy. The austerity budget is being implemented to a large extent. At the urging of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, which has given Argentina alone a $56 billion dollars, one of its largest loans ever.
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Liza Featherstone talks to me and Gabe about focus groups and how they’re ruining politics. We discuss her latest book “Divining Desire: the Culture of Consultation,” her latest piece in The Baffler “Sorry to Bother You,” and the midterms.
Listen to the full interview here.
THE APARTMENT WAS in one of those large luxury apartment buildings, like dorms for young New Yorkers lucky enough to have the money to buy a real home but still lacking the inclination to do so. The property had several sprawling lounges, a weight room, and a doorman. A pets-inclusive happy hour was advertised in the elevator.
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At 62 years old, artistic provocateur Karen Finley has worn many outfits over her storied lifetime. Most recently she’s donned a red Make America Great Again baseball cap, as well as a frumpy, untailored blue suit, a billowy blue cotton dress with a headscarf, and a white power suit topped with a blond wig, variously impersonating Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.
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On today’s episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by economist and political analyst Shabbir Razvi; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, and the author of “Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran;” and University of Tehran Professor Mohammad Marandi.
Listen to the full interview here.
No one knows provocative quite like Karen Finley. The artist’s politically charged writing and performances have brought her both admiration and notoriety since the early 1980s. Her ninth and most recent book, Grabbing Pussy, is an outrage-driven, anger-filled, yet often satirical examination of the psychosexual obsessions of men in power. Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein and, of course, President Donald Trump all get the Finley treatment.
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When author and journalist Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly and former editor of Harper’s, turned his shrewd gaze on the go-go ‘80s in “Money and Class in America,” he never imagined the era’s avatar of greed would one day become President Donald Trump. Three decades later, Lapham shares his views on the decades-long deterioration of democracy in an interview with INET’s Lynn Parramore. An expanded and revised edition of his book is now available with a new foreward by Thomas Frank from OR Books.
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As the US tries to keep countries such as India from dealing with Iran and Russia, it is driving more and more countries to seek alternatives to the US dollar, threatening the dollar’s hegemony, says Vijay Prashad.
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In the third segment “By Any Means Necessary” is joined by Dr. Greg Shupak teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto to talk about his new book “The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media”, the reasons why the media is pro-Israel, the biggest fallacies around the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, and the role of US imperialism in advancing Israeli political and economic goals..
Listen to the full interview here.
Liza Featherstone in Divining Desire: Focus Groups & the Culture of Consultation shares with journalist Chris Hedges how advertising techniques developed by early Viennese intellectual elites were adapted and coopted by US elites to control politics, consumption and opinion.
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Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went missing October 2 after having entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was “a mild critic” of the Saudi government, peace activist Medea Benjamin told Radio Sputnik Tuesday. Nonetheless, “the royal family makes sure” dissidents are rarely heard, she said, even abroad.
Listen to the full interview here.
Fears are growing over the fate of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Turkish officials say they believe was murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week. Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post who had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States, entered the Saudi Consulate in Turkey seeking a document he needed to get married and has not been seen since. .
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In today’s episode of Going Underground, we speak firstly to Medea Benjamin, the fearless anti-war activist who stormed a Trump official’s stage to denounce US attempts at inflaming tensions with Iran. Among the issues we discussed with her were the Iran deal, Trump’s sanctions on Iran, and the US-Saudi alliance. Plus we speak to John Duffy, author of the book ‘The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark’ talks to us about 9/11, the CIA, and NSA mass surveillance. Lastly, Elliot Grove, the founder of the Raindance Film Festival, talks to us about the importance of independent films for democracy as well as persistent American propaganda in Hollywood films.
Watch the full interview here.
Iran and the EU have come up with a payment system to work around the US’s sanctions against Iran and anyone doing business with Iran. This is yet another fracture of the EU and US’s relationship. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a speech that there would be hell to pay if Iran harmed the US. Medea Benjamin, an anti-war and anti-torture activist who is the co-founder of Code Pink, and whose most recent book is “Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”, joins Brian..
Listen to the full interview here.
BackStory is a public radio program & podcast that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today.
Watch the full interview here.
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