Old Mole Variety Hour

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in the edufactory

A briefer version of this appears on the February 3, 2013 Old Mole Variety Hour. You may already know that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and Common Core have been detrimental to K through 12 education. You may know that the Portland Association of Teachers has b... Read more

20 Years of Zapatista resistance to neoliberalism

A slightly shorter version of this appeared on the Jan 6, 2014 Old Mole Variety Hour. The well-read red considers Zapatista resistance to neoliberalism. This month marks "the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in . . . Mexico, a short moment with a long legacy of st... Read more

Poverty

It's hard to be poor. People who are not poor often fail to understand this, and the attempts of social scientists to explain things are often less illuminating than the narratives of the poor or formerly poor. Recently, a number of sites have reposted a blog entry from Lin... Read more

Pillaging Public Pensions

WRR: Pensions Last week, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber called for a special legislative session (to begin 8am September 30th) noting that "we have an opportunity to combine cost savings from reforms to the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) and new revenue to restor... Read more

Happy Labor Day?

Happy Labor Day. Or, is it? You might have noticed that Labor is not doing so well lately. Multiple recent studies confirm that while productivity has grown over the past thirty years, and even over the last ten, wages have slowed, stagnated, and declined. Recent income g... Read more

Monsters of the Market reviewed

A shorter audio version of this review was broadcast on the January 7, 2013 Old Mole Variety Hour. Vampires and zombies abound these days in popular culture and in the culture of the market. In 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi famously dubbed the investment bank Goldman Sachs... Read more

young white men with guns

There have been so many of these incidents that it's useful to have timelines and maps just to keep track of these things. We can certainly see the ironies of the situation. Juan Cole reminds us to consider not just the children killed in Connecticut last week, but also th... Read more

ALEC helps corporations write state laws

Produced for: Old Mole Variety Hour

[For the 21 May 12 Old Mole, posted 5/20/2012] We all know money in politics is a problem. As Marx noted, "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." One of the strongest links between capital and the ... Read more

a revolution in happiness?

Audio here The other day, in line at the grocery store, I noticed that the cover of Real Simple magazine's January issue invited me to "be happier this year." I can't tell you about the "9 surprising strategies to get you there," because I was pretty sure that spending $... Read more

Eyjafjallajokull

Produced for: Old Mole Variety Hour

For the Old Mole Variety Hour May 3, 2010 I've been thinking about volcanoes and air travel. Last month, I was scheduled to attend a conference in London, and stopped on the way to visit an old friend now living in Ireland. Of course I never made it to the conference, bec... Read more