Against the Grain – March 29, 2011
Social movements scholar George Katsiaficas talks about recent upheavals in North Africa and compares them to the many upheavals that took place across Asia in the 1980s and 90s, from Bangladesh to Taiwan.
12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
Social movements scholar George Katsiaficas talks about recent upheavals in North Africa and compares them to the many upheavals that took place across Asia in the 1980s and 90s, from Bangladesh to Taiwan.
At Left Forum 2011, radicals converged on Manhattan to take stock of the recent upheavals around the world, from Tunis to Madison. Richard Wolff, Paul Mason, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven weighed in on the state of resistance to neoliberalism and suggest what might come next.
Three leaders of Tunisia’s labor movement who were instrumental in the revolution that shook North Africa discuss the actions that inspired uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and even the American Midwest. With guest host John Hamilton.
International bestselling Scottish writer Ian Rankin discusses his life and the social and political context of his work. And he considers the relation between the city as protagonist–such as Edinburgh–and how police procedurals can lay bare the dark underbelly of corruption, deceit, and class conflict at the polar ends of society.
Nuclear power plants pose a risk that insurance companies can’t quantify, and won’t insure–so how did we wind up with so many of them? Journalist Stephanie Cooke, who’s covered the nuclear industry for close to 30 years, provides the long view. With guest host Brian Edwards-Tiekert.
Media critic Robert McChesney talks to Sasha Lilley about his article “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism.”
Gary Rivlin is the author of “Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business.”
Labor journalist and organizer Steve Early talks to Sasha Lilley about rank and file labor struggles in Wisconsin. And he considers the trajectory of Sixties activists in unions, from radicalism to bureaucratism, and the cost of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to workers in this country.
Don Lattin, author of “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” talks about how the lives of Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, Ram Dass, and Andrew Weil intersected in the 1960s. (First-time presentation of the full-length interview.)
Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham talks to Sasha Lilley about the utopian socialists, free love advocates, birth control campaigners, and trade unionists who transformed the status of women at the turn of the last century.