Electric Politics Podcasts

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This is George Kenney's idiosyncratic political commentary, including also social commentary, religious commentary, arts commentary, news links, interviews, original reporting and whatever else he finds interesting. Think of it as a miniature, alternative NPR. Primary Format : Liberal Language : English Also Listed as: City : Washington State/Province : DC Country : USA Region : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of Electric Politics Podcasts Methings.com listings of Electric Politics Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

View the full archive of Electric Politics Big Pharma, Unleashed In America, giant pharmaceutical corporations run roughshod over the public. They price gouge, charging 50% more than in civilized countries. They foist useless, often harmful — even deadly — drugs on the market. They profoundly corrupt the medical profession. Adding insult to injury, they pay unimaginable sums of money to get whatever they want from Congress. It's an outrageous situation. To learn the details of what's really going on I turned to Melody Petersen, who's been wr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baghdad Rumbled Forget Afghanistan for a moment. A lot of us, including me, have been worrying that the U.S. may be stuck in Iraq indefinitely. Quil Lawrence, however, says that that may not be the case. Quil, NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, has spent many recent years in Iraq, knows a great deal, has excellent judgment, and his reports must be taken seriously. Since I'm not there and he is, I defer to him despite my intellectual skepticism. I certainly hope he's right. It was great to talk again with Quil an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heartless Israel It's crazy-making to watch the world's indifference to Israel's grinding destruction of the Palestinians. There isn't really even a word for it — either the indifference or the criminal assault, and particularly the latter. But like it or not, admit it or not, Israel has thoroughly implicated America. To talk about all this I turned to a former CIA analyst, Kathleen Christison, whose recent book Palestine in Pieces (with co-author husband Bill Christison) gets pretty much everything ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Free Running Sometimes speaking truth to power, even when you're in power, means risking your life. That's why Abolhassan Banisadr, the first President of Iran following the 1979 revolution, fled in 1981 to take up political asylum in France. Nor has he seen eye to eye with the clerics ever since. What's surprising is that Mr. Banisadr's critique of the Iranian regime, of what's going on in Afghanistan, and of developments in the Islamic world generally, isn't pitched at particular contextual facts so ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Deal Reprise It would be unfair, and incorrect (which is worse?), to say that everything about modern economic theory is based upon delusional thinking about human behavior and markets. Or that the theory has become merely a threadbare excuse to worship greed. Nevertheless, mainstream economists, a priori, are to be regarded with the deepest suspicion. And so it's always refreshing to hear an alternative economic worldview, particularly from a financial practitioner who knows whereof he speaks. Marshal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Building Seven The 9/11 truth movement keeps getting stronger. And the movement's assault on the establishment's preferred narrative, after eight years, has reduced it to a risible absurdity. An abundance of irrefutable scientific evidence exists. The problem remains, however, of getting people to turn their attention from special effects to reality. Many people, for many reasons, really want to believe that the wrong things are true. To help reawaken their critical faculties we have David Ray Griffin's l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité Peace, a fundamental human right.  ✓  Health care, a fundamental human right.  ✓  An egalitarian society, a fundamental human right? Yes, let's add that last one, not because we're Communists, but because it makes sense — and not merely as a theoretical or an ethical fancy, but in hard-nosed pragmatic practice. Of course, it will take an historic political fight for the U.S. to get there... To explain the facts I turned to Richard Wilkinson, who is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Forever From the Earth Farmers are an endangered species. Farmers who fight back against what's happening to them by farming smarter, even more so. But without farmers who respect and love the land, who farm in a sustainable way, we're goners. Here are a few human scale stories, as told by Lisa M. Hamilton, from her marvelous book Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. Also a few policy questions to ponder. It was great to talk with Lisa — even if the problems seem intractable, t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ghosts in the Machine Mysticism and science overlap more than people usually recognize as the former usually promises, in one way or another, adepts a means to enlightenment under their own steam. It's one reason — a pretty good reason — why the early Christian fathers decided the Gnostic gospels were heretical texts, too dangerous to include in the New Testament. Anyhow, it should be no surprise that certain mystical experiences can be shown to have a scientific grounding. Here, I talk with John Ge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ringmaster At this point, to be brutally realistic about it, there isn't much good to be said for Mr. Obama except, perhaps, that he's better than a Republican. One can only hope that he's susceptible to being pinned down by determined opponents from the progressive side of things. Due to widespread public outcry, for example, there may yet be a small chance for real health care reform. Considering these circumstances, it makes sense to study Mr. Obama's weaknesses. And to get a thoughtful appraisal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whither Afghanistan? What a tar baby. It's just not so simple to see how we get out of Afghanistan, either in the context of events over there or of politics here at home. One thing, though, is for sure: We won't win a military victory. To get a sense of how things are doing I turned to Wayne White, a former top intelligence analyst. We also talk about Iraq. I'm most grateful to Wayne for sharing his brilliant and exemplary insight. Anti-war arguments need all the help they can get! Total runtime an hour and t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website ABRACADABRA There's a surprising strain of magical thinking in American culture, indeed, in American politics, which bears examination. As it turns out, much of this is a relatively modern phenomenon dating from the middle of the nineteenth century — thus, in certain cases, political rhetoric which we see as typically American would have been completely unknown to the Philadelphia Convention. (For example, 'Yes, we can!') Anyhow, the whole larger issue of mysticism in American thought all too of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Adjusted Narratives Very little in our mainstream public discourse makes sense anymore. In a way, we're trying to have a collection of meta-discussions about things, but we're not quite smart enough to manage it. What we need to do is figure out how to call a spade a bloody shovel (Oxford English Dictionary, 1919). To get at our narrative issues, including on specifics such as taxes, I turned to the very original and brilliant Larry Beinhart. It was extremely kind of Larry to take the time to talk with me and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Unbelievable Here's 'something a little different' for your late summer listening pleasure. Stacy Horn, an occasional NPR contributor, has written a marvelous book, Unbelievable, about the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory and its findings. Stacy thinks, and I very much agree, that Duke's research demonstrates the existence of something we cannot (yet) explain with conventional science. Possibly something of great importance. It was absolutely delightful to talk with Stacy and I'm so pleased sh ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spasibo Moskva Personally, I think we owe the Russians a lot. Moscow unilaterally dismantled the Soviet Union, thereby ending the Cold War (or the first Cold War, according to Stephen F. Cohen), and making the world a much better, safer place. Clearly, we should welcome good relations instead of trying to take advantage. To get a sense of things Russian, I turned to Tom Lasseter, McClatchy's Moscow Bureau Chief. Tom is, I think, the future of print journalism. It's always a pleasure to talk with him, and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Factory Girls One out of every ten persons on the planet, roughly, is a Chinese woman. It's fair to say that their entry into the twenty first century defines a modern China, and that that China is preoccupied with its own problems and is not particularly interested in exercising its considerable power abroad. To get at the story of Chinese women I turned to the journalist Leslie T. Chang, author of the fascinating book Factory Girls, who made a decade long journey into China to write it. A highly recom ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website From Heaven To Hell In a horrific sacrifice to darkness, the money men of Washington continue to sanction mountaintop removal for coal mining in Appalachia. This abomination must stop! It's Mr. Obama's sacrifice now, his irreversible legacy, an unmistakable mark of his true nature. Will he face down corporate coal, or will he shirk his responsibility? To get at the issue of mountaintop removal — including its implicit moral imperatives — I turned to Rob Perks, of the Natural Resources Defense Coun ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Health, Not Profits! It's scandalous that the U.S. lags so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to health care. It seems as if everybody but us has realized that it's immoral to profit from people's ill health and, conversely, that a healthy society tends to be a happier and more productive one. In any case, who better to explain the political jujitsu than a fellow who spent most of his professional life working the other side? It was a great pleasure to meet and talk with a convert, and I'm delighte ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deadly Dust It takes a theory to beat a theory. Up to now, that's played to the strengths of the establishment narrative for 9/11. But with the discovery and analysis of nano-thermite residue from dust collected in lower Manhattan immediately after 9/11, the counterfactual burden falls the other way. To get the story from the source I turned to Dr. Niels Harrit, lead author of a recent paper (.pdf) that examines the dust in exhaustive detail. A professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen fo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website First Things First Most American economists are deep in an intellectual rut because they don't really understand that economics is about human behavior. Our choices cannot be reduced to a neat mathematical algorithm. If this seems theoretical, consider how it may apply to the possible demise of the Eurozone, if not the European Union itself, or the great advantages which could accrue to the U.S. through protectionism. Or how the political left benefits from a proper understanding of the issues. To get at som ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website