Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen


Latest Episodes

Pan-Africanism: Can Colonialism Be Overcome?
September 11, 2018

Nearly every inch of Africa used to be owned and controlled by the colonial powers: British, French, German, Portuguese, Belgian, Spain. Mussolini’s Italy finally went after its share with a one sided assault on Ethiopia in 1936. Is the long

Chicago Plus 50: Positive Lessons for 2018
September 06, 2018

Blood in the streets. Chaos at the convention. The establishment Democrats won and then they lost. From the vantage point of 50 years later, it may surprise some how less has changed and been learned than we might have thought.

The Prison Strike: You’re Not Supposed to Know About It
September 04, 2018

America’s prisons are where we warehouse and punish bad people. But how much injustice behind the walls and razor wire is acceptable? Is using inmates as slaves OK? Is it a good idea to maintain a system that reinforces people’s

Big Brother Much Bigger Than 1984
August 30, 2018

Those who were surprised that Facebook was widely distributing personal information were quite naive. Our expectation of privacy is so very quaint. This according to veteran private eye Judith Coburn, whose new article on TomDispatch is titled Goodbye ...

Must Truth Be Outside the Mainstream? Assange and Journalism
August 28, 2018

“What we’ve got here is a systems problem.” Americans honor brave whistleblowers and serious investigative journalists who  reveal covered up truths. But according to today’s guest Professor Lawrence Davidson, in his article on CounterPunch,

Using “Anti-Semitism” to Defeat Jeremy Corbyn
August 21, 2018

He’s spoken openly about his concern for justice for Palestinians. As Jeremy Corbyn is continuing to rise as he leads the traditional left Labour Party of the United Kingdom, his detractors are working feverishly to discredit him as an anti-Semite.

Israel’s New Nation-State Law: Codifying Apartheid
August 16, 2018

At least it’s now out in the open. All Israelis who are not Jewish have had their rights diminished. Given the longstanding discrimination against non-white non-European Jews, Palestinians and Druze are now just third class citizens.

Freedom As Tested By 1968
August 14, 2018

What is freedom? Coming from a context of widespread economic security, young people across the US and Europe in 1968 drove older generations crazy with the insistence that there was more. More than the grey flanneled conformity in which we

Sky’s The Limit for Military Waste: $717 Billion ’19 Budget
August 09, 2018

With near consensus from both sides of the aisle, congress just rubber-stamped a nearly three quarters of a trillion dollar spending plan for defense contractors. There is no limit on what we will spend on weapons, according to today’s guest

Has the Time for NATO Passed?
August 07, 2018

If we’re spending billions on a defense system that actually makes us more vulnerable,maybe it’s time to reconsider. According to today’s guest Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Conn Hallinan, NATO has gone from serving as a bulwark against the Soviet