Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

What do we learn from Precious, the movie about a pregnant black teenager, about poverty, education, and matriarchy?  What does it leave out or distort?  The Old Mole's Denise Morris talks with Juell Stuart, a writer and activist from Brooklyn whose article on Precious a... Read more

  There is always music inspired by, and that  inspires,  political resistance, and these times are no exception.  Radical musicologist Brad Duncan talks with Bill Resnick about some recent currents in political music, some of which were heard on today's Old Mole:  "Tina... Read more

 As part  of KBOO's special programming for  this day, the Old Mole looks at the WTO and corporate globalization, with pieces on how the WTO protects business from the full costs of doing business, the socialist alternative to the capitalist crisis, issues of race and po... Read more

The WTO works  to protect large corporations from having to bear the real costs of their production -- forcing the rest of us to pay with our health and the quality of our lives.  Magrete Strand of the Sierra Club and the Blue Green Alliance explains how it works in this... Read more

 Is the Healthcare bill now being debated in Congress a step in the right, or in the wrong, direction?  In this piece by long-time health professional Carol Miller, read here by Tom Becker, it's another corporate bailout that will make real reform more difficult to achie... Read more

Do higher taxes make for fewer jobs -- or more?  Is Congress debating real healthcare reform -- or just another corporate bailout?  Is PTSD a good way to think about how people are  affected by violence?   This show takes on these questions, with host Tom Becker, Old Mol... Read more

 Is PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) a useful concept  for thinking about how people deal with a society saturated in violence?   What is gained by using it to treat soldiers suffering from the results of battle mayhem?  Can it be extended  to understand women in ab... Read more

 Do higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals drive down investment and cost us jobs?  Not at all, according to Karen Kraut of United for a Fair Economy in this wide-ranging discussion with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick.  In fact, higher taxes keep surplus wealth ... Read more

 The economy is recovering -- but without jobs.  Heidi Schierholz of the Economic Policy Institute talks with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick about what can and should be done right away to create enough jobs for everyone.  Schierholz is one of the author's of  the annual re... Read more

Bridging the gap between the US and Africa with Hip Hop youth culture -- that's one of the aims of the new film Moving 2 the Beat, produced here in Portland and in Sierra Leone.  Abdul Fofanah, co-director of the film and a Sierra Leonean -American, talks about the film ... Read more