Potpourri 7 (Football & Other Offenses)

New World Notes #621, 28:05 (January 28)
Broadcast quality MP3 (40 MB)
Decent quality MP3 (13 MB)

A bit of this and that--with a fair amount of the "this" being football. Features Progressive sports commentator Dave Zirin (with Ralph Nader) on traumatic brain injury; George Carlin; radical Black activist and writer Mumia Abu-Jamal (discussing not football but Howard Zinn); yours, truly; and a satiric song by Tom Lehrer (1953).

Thanks to The Ralph Nader Radio Hour (January 2019) for our selection from the Dave Zirin interview, and to Black Agenda Radio (December 2019) for the talk by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Tom Lehrer (1960)

Economics and Inequality

Part 1: New World Notes #619, 28:46 (January 14)
Broadcast quality MP3 (40 MB)
Decent quality MP3 (13 MB)

Part 2: New World Notes #620, 28:10 (January 21)
Broadcast quality MP3 (39 MB)
Decent quality MP3 (13 MB)

Economist Joseph Stiglitz shows that economic inequality in the U.S. is bad, and it is getting worse. Likewise, inequality of opportunity. The causes of the problem--says Stiglitz--are the U.S.'s dysfunctional style of capitalism and a political system that increasingly serves only the economic elite, not "the 99%."

The situation is not only bad for democracy, it's even bad for capitalism, Stiglitz argues. (No socialist, Stiglitz wants to reform capitalism, not replace it.)

Stiglitz's talk is short of proposed solutions, but it is an excellent, lucid, and very listenable survey of the problems we face--and their causes.

Stiglitz's accolades include the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is former Chief Economist of the World Bank and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He gave this talk, in Washington D.C., in 2012 on his tour supporting his book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (Norton, 2012).

 Previously broadcast in February 2016. Files downloaded from the links, above, are identified as NWN #414 and 415.