What is the unemployment situation today, and what can and should be done about it?  Dedrick Muhammad, researcher and writer at the Institute for Policy Studies talks with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick about jobs and the performance of the Obama adminstration  in creating them.  

It's time to stop talking about charity for Haiti and start talking about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness.  Frann Michel puts the Hatian disaster in historical context and demonstrates how " Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank" (Richard Kim, The Nation).  You can read this piece here, where you'll find links to much more information.  

 Media critic Robert McChesney was in town this week to talk about his new book, co-authored with John Nichols, Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy.  The Old Mole's Denise Morris talks with him about what independent journalism needs in order to survive.  McChesney is co-founder of  Freepress, and you can read an article  summing up his book here.   

 Book Mole Larry Bowlden reviews Portland writer Heidi V. Durrow's first novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.  It's about being neither black or white in a world  that thinks in black and white. 

An archive of Larry's reviews can be found  here.

 In times like these -- times like the 1930s and 40s -- a tradition of protest music emerges that sings from the viewpoint of working people and people who can't find work.  Last week's show was about contemporary rap music.  This week, we feature music from the Great Depression by the likes of Pete Seeger and Josh White. These musicians consciously made music that touched on many aspects of the growing working class movement: unemployment, Jim Crow and lynching, union organizing, anti-fascism, etc.

 Hosted by Bill Resnick, this show features music of the Great Depression, a discussion of what Obama has and has not done to create jobs, putting Haitian poverty in historical context, a conversation about how to save journalism (and what it needs to be saved from); and a review of a novel about the confusions of bi-racial identity.