Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen


Latest Episodes

A New CCC to Save the Planet?
September 14, 2020

FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps achieved remarkable success in so many areas: Creating meaningful work for young men in a time of mass unemployment, planting forests, conserving our natural resources. It ended with the start of World War II. Perhaps now

Unsafe to Protest? Realities Behind the Portland Picture
September 11, 2020

We’ve seen it on the nightly news: the police, the tear gas, the fires, and the wall of moms. Our guest today, David Rovics is there in Portland Oregon and he explains that the city’s police protected the far right

The Pandemic is Boosting Unions in the South
September 09, 2020

The standard picture we northerners have of The South may no longer be accurate. Average working people are starting to see that the anti-union governments there are really just serving the rich. The long-thought-dormant left populist tradition of peop...

Racism in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
September 03, 2020

There’s a brand new Central Park monument of feminist leaders Stanton, Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. It was a hundred years ago that the 19th Amendment became law: women won the right to vote. But what kind of compromises did the

Why is Sexual Freedom So Frightening?
September 01, 2020

The nuclear family, white hetero male dominance and control is not the only way it can be. Why can we can have firearms freedom but not sexual freedom? On this show, Janet Jakobsen professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Armed Poll Watchers: To Protect or Intimidate?
August 25, 2020

Blurring the lines between law enforcement and vigilantism, why are off duty police at the polling stations mainly in black and brown neighborhoods? New Jersey in 1981 is a case study in what has happened and most likely will happen

Black and Indian, Kamala Harris: A New Mandate?
August 20, 2020

She is exactly what Trumpists hate: a strong woman who is both black and Indian. Both groups were the subjects of white male dominance and control. American slavery and British rule over India both had their peak at the same

Crowds Win in Waves Over Time
August 18, 2020

Many of us were taught to be wary of “mob psychology.” But according to history professor Peter Stearns who has studied the effects of crowds on political change, emotion is not necessarily in conflict with rationality. The protests of the

“Homeland Security:” Ideal Authoritarian Tool
August 13, 2020

Other countries, like those we defeated, use the paramilitary domestically, not America. Or so it was before the Department of Homeland Security was transformed into the ideal authoritarian tool. Former CIA analyst and professor of government at Johns ...

“Homeland Security:” The Ideal Authoritarian Tool
August 13, 2020

Other countries, like those we defeated, use the paramilitary domestically, not America. Or so it was before the Department of Homeland Security was transformed into the ideal authoritarian tool. Former CIA analyst and professor of government at Johns ...