Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

  Larry Bowlden reviews the coming-of-age-in-the-seventies book by Jessica Anya Blau, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties. While those who were adults in the 1970s found the era liberating, Blau offers well-written and humorous reflections on the difficulties of too-early... Read more

  Joe Clement talks to Jan Haaken about an upcoming screening of her new film Mind Zone: Therapists Behind The Front Lines on July 19 at the NW Film Center. The film explores the work of clinicians that deploy with Army combat stress control units in Afghanistan and ho... Read more

Laurie Mercier talks with retired letter carrier Jamie Partridge about his recent participation in a hunger strike in protest of Congress's decision to starve the US Postal Service by mandating that it prefund retiree health benefits 75 years in advance. The hunger str... Read more

Iven Hale comments on the torture of isolation and incarceration, the recent Senate hearings on solitary confinement, Dostoevsky, Alcatraz as a tourist attraction, her work with high-risk felons on parole and probation, and the need for prison abolition because priso... Read more

Bill Resnick talks with Peter Watt, co-author with Roberto Zepeda of Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy, about the recent reports of drug-related violence in Mexico. Watt notes that government violence has functioned to preser... Read more

Tom Becker reads from Robert Reich's recent essay The Wall Street Scandal of All Scandals about the LIBOR ("London interbank offered rate") scandal, in which bankers fixed interest rates in order to siphon trillions of dollars from ordinary people. Read more

Tom Becker hosts this episode of the Old Mole in which we hear about the need to save the Postal Service and the need to abolish prisons, as well as about the economic incentives behind the violence of the Mexican drug trade and "drug war"; and the latest revelations abo... Read more

Denise Morris and Jan Haaken discuss The Healthcare Movie, a locally-made independent film comparing the present and historical differences between the US and Canadian health care systems. After World War II, local grassroots activism built a single-payer system in Sa... Read more

At 9am Monday, July 2, 2012 The Old Mole Variety Hour focuses on health and healthcare and features Bill Resnick and health-policy analyst Chris Lowe on the recent SCOTUS decision Jan Haaken on Pink Ribbons, Ink Denise Morris on The Healthcare Movie Frann Michel hosting an... Read more

Frann Michel discusses the phenomenon of "healthism," the elevation of health to an individualized and pervasive moral value, a neoliberal attitude used to rationalize withholding care from those deemed undeserving. You can read her comments and follow links to som... Read more