Wendell Potter, currently the senior fellow on health care at the Center for Media and Democracy, discusses his new book, Deadly Spin. As an executive for a major health insurance company, Potter was on the inside team that created the public relations strategy to challenge threats from government regulation. He eventually left his 30 year career and wrote his whistle blowing critique, Deadly Spin. In 2009, Potter testified before Congress, giving powerful specifics of industry practices to “dump the sick” to increase shareholder value. This forum was recorded November 30, 2010.
Monthly Archives: October 2010
Renewing Democracy: Change Congress
(recorded in October, 2010) Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argues that American democracy is broken and that only a concerted effort to change the way Congress operates can restore our system of government. What changes are necessary? And how will they come about?
View the presentation on YouTube here.
Bait And Switch: End of the White Collar American Dream?
Social critic and author Barbara Ehrenreich exposes the economic cruelty of today’s globalized, just-in-time, lean and mean world of work. Does education still assure access to the American Dream? Has the middle class reached the limit of its potential for upward mobility? What happens to democracy without a stable middle class? (recorded in 2005)
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Phil Ochs Songs
Sonny Ochs, sister of the song-writer Phil Ochs, brings together a group of musicians, including Fred Small, to perform her brother’s songs and keep his music alive today.
Phil Ochs’ political songs helped shape the social consciousness of the protest movements of the 1960s. These performances are a vivid expression of the power of music to move us and change the world.
Recorded October 23, 2010