They used to be on top of the world. Remember the mighty OPEC countries? With the fall of the price of oil, countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela are reeling. Professor Michael Klare looks at the nightmares unfolding and

Are we watching a train wreck in progress? Journalist Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories, offers his insight into how the 2016 Democratic Party may have ignored important lessons from the 1968 crack up. There will be

To research for his new book, Thomas Frank specifically went to pro-Bill Clinton sources. Yet what he found left a profoundly negative impression of his presidency and what it did to the Democratic Party. Author of 2004’s What’s The Matter

It’s the year of the anti-establishment candidates: in both parties. Jim Rubens is certainly the underdog against incumbent Kelly Ayotte, a Washington favorite. While Rubens is no liberal, he does take on issues such as the power of money in

Q: When is a donation not a donation? A: When it’s an investment. It is a rare super wealthy philanthropist who gives without need of great public recognition? From feudal times, it has been in the interests of the baronial

American exceptionalism is a reality in terms of locking up almost 5 times as many citizens as all other advanced industrialized democracies. Over the last 40 years, the incarceration rate has skyrocketed by nearly 400 percent. How did we get

Tremendous wealth is being sheltered from taxation. The rules for the rest of us apparently don’t apply to the super rich of the world. But think about how that now-hidden wealth might help millions throughout the world. This is the

It’s not just the rapacious, perhaps truly pathological greed of the super rich. The Supreme Court has actively participated in the devastation of the formerly-large middle class. According to law professor Michel Gilman, the US Supreme Court has taken a

Politics is theater and yet the mainstream media is missing the real drama. It’s not on the Republican side: the genuinely close race is for the Democratic nomination. On this podcast, Robert Borosage, founder and president of Institute for America’s

Between 1945 and the Reagan era, Americans understood that work benefited all and when productivity when up, all stakeholders shared in the rewards. Of course that all changed. But in his new book “Shaping the Future of Work: What Future

http://media.blubrry.com/keeping_democracy_alive/dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48358971/Brexit.mp3The European Union was supposed to mean a continent of nations united by democratic ideals. Instead power and decision making has become more concentrated and centralized. First it was Greece, then Spain threatening to pull out of the EU, now

Throughout American history there have been times, rare moments in which the political establishment’s movers and shakers quiver as their best laid plans have gone awry. Their too-often successful efforts to keep citizens believing that we are powerless are on

The 2016 New Hampshire Presidential Primary is history. No one predicted a 22 point blowout for Bernie Sanders. The establishment of both parties was flattened by the results. What the heck happened? Media talent trainer and consultant John Kosinski puts

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The myth of the rugged individualist settling the west is just that: a myth. The work needed to tame the wild and vast open spaces was not done with a lasso. The white people who populated the massive west needed

No question, FDR was our greatest Democratic president. Though we have, at least for the moment, gone beyond the recession of 2008, perhaps we’ve merely swept the problem under the rug, along with opportunities for real economic security. On this

When the combined power of the Troika–European Central Bank, European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund–puts the squeeze of austerity on places like Spain and Portugal, a lot of people feel severe economic pain. But in the Iberian countries, they

Chuck Collins, founder of Wealth for the Common Good and senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies talks about the new report on the top .01 percent and the impact on our democracy. They are not job creators as

SuperPACs are one of the greatest threats to what remains of democracy in the USA. These slippery legal entities circumvent campaign finance laws and enable huge money to own government and elections. The founders idea of democracy is destroyed by

While the left has had very few actual electoral victories, author Michael Kazin argues it has very effectively changed the nation. The author of “A Godly Hero: William Jennings Bryan,” talks about his new book “American Dreamers.” What’s gone right

You may have thought our schools, at least the better ones, successfully tackled the problem of institutional racism. But in this surprising new study, well-established assumptions based on style of clothes, culture, and, really, skin color serve to keep down

The Tea Party these days looks with fondness to the 19th century as a time of rugged individualism and unemcumbered free markets. As with so many mythic images, reality is exceedingly different. Like corporate personhood? Thank the railroads. Ever notice

American Exceptionalism: it’s beyond mere national pride, it is an insistence that we are above the normal rules and that we are God’s gift to the world. Of course if we know someone who feels this way about him or

We’ve all seen the images: refugees crammed in rubber rafts, mobbed trains, young children drowned in the seas. Hundreds of thousands are leaving war zones in hopes of a better life. But in Europe there are those who want to

As the worlds number one jailer,  Americans are finally starting to pay attention to our unique mass incarceration. Author James Kilgore knows about the issue from the inside. His new book is Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key

We’ve all seen the results of economics imposed from the top down. Sometimes it works well, other times we’ve seen communities devastated as a result of this process. But in Cincinnati, there’s an idea taken largely from success in the

Uniting traditional left and right, legislators from all 50 states endorsed a message to the federal government: let us make our own laws on marijuana. Sponsor of the NCSL resolution NH Rep Renny Cushing talks about how and why states

On one hand, the turnout in last November’s elections was pitiful. On the other, there are huge numbers of a massive yet largely untapped political energy. Unfortunately, the only organized political reach-out to these justifiably angry citizens so far has