Howard Zinn, State of the Union, Citizens United, and more

“You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” Howard Zinn famously said. He didn’t believe in staying closeted in the academy, though he was a brilliant historian whose book, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present changed the way many people view history. Recently, a documentary based on his work, The People Speak, brought to life the many Americans whose lives and activism would otherwise have been forgotten.

Zinn died on January 27th at age 87. He lived a long, full life and was an inspiration to all of us at. We will listen to a clip from GRITtv when he spoke to Laura Flanders in 2008.

Then we broadcast another clip from GRITtv  focusing on President Obama's State of the Union speech.  In it he called for jobs, health care reform, and fighting the influence of corporations on our government processes, but after the past year, many progressives are skeptical that he’ll actually fight. He did include a sharp critique in his speech of the decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a decision that Steve Cobble called an “intellectually dishonest power grab.”
 
Steve Cobble, a fellow at the Insitute for Policy Studies, joins Laura Flanders to talk about the state of our union and what people can do to fight the corporate power. Also in studio are Mike Lux, founder of Progressive Strategies and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, and Lisa Dodson, professor at Boston College and author of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.

Next we hear from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's CounterSpin. The Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that corporations may not be limited in their spending to influence elections, because they have the same free speech rights as people. Among the many questions raised are not just what this means for elections, but what it means for "free" speech. CounterSpin interviews Charlie Cray of the Center for Corporate Policy on that story.

We conclude with a segment from Riz Khan of Al Jazeera entitled: The Role of Media in the US. Khan interviews Any Goodman of executive producer and host of Democracy Now! and John Maxwell Hamilton, author of Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of Foreign Reporting, about the crisis American journalism is facing and what this means for informing the public debate.MP3 File