Latest Content for Old Mole Variety Hour

Host Denise Morris talks with Johnanna Brenner about welfare -- its history and meaning.  Is welfare something to be demeaned, as it is when we call the subsidies and tax breaks for corporations "welfare for the rich"? Doesn't that play into the right-wing idea that welf... Read more

Denise hosts this episode of the Old Mole in which she interviews Portland sociologist and activist Johanna Brenner about reclaiming the idea of welfare.   Also on the show: Bill Resnick talks with Portland writer Kristian Williams about the function of policing in class... Read more

Larry Bowlden reviews The Little Bride, a first novel by Anna Solomon about a mail order bride coming from Odessa to live in a sod house on the prairie in the 19th Century. Read more

The function of police in the U.S. has always been to protect the property and status of the ruling elite (aka the 1%), according to Kristian William's important book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Here he talks with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick about h... Read more

Tom Becker hosts this show focusing on Occupations, especially here in Portland.  We hear extensive interviews with participants in the local Occupation, an indictment of the "Party of Wall Street," and aboutfactory occupations in Argentina. For information about our the... Read more

Marxist scholar and teacher David Harvey argues, "The aim of [the OW movement] in the United States is simple. It says: “We the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed powers that currently run it." Host Tom Becker reads from David Harvey's blog a... Read more

 Kate Sherman was in on the Occupation from near the beginning, and here she talks with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick about her experience of its intense participatory democracy and community solidarity.  This interview was recorded on Thursday, November 10, prior to the c... Read more

Workers occupied and operated factories being closed by their owners in Argentina during a time of financial collapse.  Jan Haaken and Nancy Hollander discuss the documentary film about those events, The Take.  Read more

 After the eviction of the Occupy Portland encampments at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, where does the movement go from here?  Bill Resnick talks with two occupiers, Kate Sherman and Jay, about what might be ahead.   Read more

Joe Clement hosts and we hear: Jan Haaken and Mike Snedecker, our Left and the Law duo, discuss the constitutional right to peaceful assembly in the context of the occupation movement and the question of enforcing local laws that limit it. They pay some special att... Read more