How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates

How the Democrats and Republicans manage to shut out all third parties from the presidential debates. The Obama and Romney campaigns have secretly negotiated a detailed contract that dictates many of the terms of the 2012 presidential debates. This includes who gets to participate, as well as the topics raised during the debates. We’re joined by George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, and author of the book, "No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates."

The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek, contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst, discusses Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Western Buddhism, the West, capitalism, science, ideology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, bodhisattva, samsara, enlightenment, kharma, nirvana, war, Thomas Metzinger, free will, Benjamin Libet, Martin Heidegger, Patricia and Paul Churchland, and The Lion King. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland. 2012 Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj Žižek is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the London School of Economics, Princeton University, The New School for Social research and the University of California, Irvine. He has published over forty books and been the subject of two movies, Žižek! and The Perverts Guide To Cinema. In 1990 he ran unsuccessfully for president in Slovenia's first democratic elections and he has been a consistently powerful voice in the world since then. His essays are regularly published in the New York Times, Lacanian Ink, the New Left Review and the London Review of Books. There is little in contemporary thought that Žižek has not explored on some level. From communism to Maoism, film studies to literature, and from Lenin to the issue of torture in the post-9/11 world, Žižek's work has, and continues to, inform the dialogue that surrounds them. Žižek's first book in English translation, The Sublime Object of Ideology, examines the issues surrounding the placement of "sublime objects" in a regime's iconography which allow it to transgress or alter commonly accepted moral law or thought. It is these objects—be it God, Fuhrer, Dear Leader or Land, the Flag, Democracy—that allow the regimes to "self-sanctify" their actions. While much of Žižek's work is strictly philosophical or psychoanalytical dealing with Hegel, Kant, Freud and Lacan, since 9/11 his work has become increasingly political, directly referencing the illegal actions taken by the Bush administration and the complicit nature of the European regimes of Blair, Sarkozy and Berlusconi. Slavoj Žižek is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture(1991), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock) (1992), Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out (1992), Tarrying With The Negative (1993), Mapping Ideology (1994), The Indivisible Remainder (1996), The Plague of Fantasies (1997), The Abyss Of Freedom (1997), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau) (2000), The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, On David Lynch's Lost Highway (2000), The Fragile Absolute or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For (2000), On Belief (2001), The Fright of Real Tears (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001), The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (2003), Iraq The Borrowed Kettle (2004) Violence (2008), First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (2009), and Living in the End Times (2010). Most recently, 2012, Žižek published his monumental Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on Poverty in the United States

Economic inequality continued to widen in the United States.  The Census Bureau reports the wealthiest Americans increased their share of total wealth by 4.9 percent, while the median income reached its lowest level since 1995.  Some 46.2 million Americans were classified as living in poverty.  Democracy Now is joined by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, who are attempting to start a national dialogue with their new Poverty Tour 2.0, visiting four battleground states.

Tariq Ramadan on the Growing Mideast Protests

As anti-U.S. protests spread across the Middle East, Democracy Now interviews Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar.  Ramadan is considered one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals in Europe and was named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the 21st century.  He was barred from entering the United States for many years by former President George W. Bush.  In 2004, Ramadan had accepted a job to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, but nine days before he was set to arrive, the Bush administration revoked his visa, invoking a provision of the USA PATRIOT Act.  He was not allowed into the United States for another six years.  Ramadan is the author of a number of books, including "Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation" and, most recently, "Islam and the Arab Awakening." 

Glen Ford and Michael Eric Dyson on Obama Presidency

As President Obama accepts the Democratic nomination to seek four more years in the White House, we host a debate on his presidency with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report and Michael Eric Dyson, professor at Georgetown University and author of numerous books. Ford calls Obama the "more effective evil" for embracing right-wing policies and neutralizing effective opposition, while Dyson argues Obama provides the best and obvious choice for progressive change within the confines of the U.S. political system. 

IMAGINE - John Lennon

Documentary -with Spanish subtitles

Elogio de la conversación

En el diálogo auténtico se crea un espacio intermedio donde se suprime la diferencia entre lo tuyo y lo mío. Aparece lo nuestro.  Y allí, como sin querer, se crean nuevas ideas. Se abre una comprensión más profunda de las cosas y de la vida. Enriquecemos nuestra humanidad pues aprendemos algo que ignorábamos. Entonces, aunque el otro ya no esté, seguimos conversando. Y esa prolongación del diálogo es la actividad de pensar que nos permite estar en buena compañía aún cuando estemos solos.
La conversación es la base del amor y la amistad. Robustece los afectos y desarrolla la creatividad. Conversar es como jugar a armar un collage, construir una figura que nadie conoce pero que irá apareciendo. Y no se trata de ganar o perder sino del goce de crear algo juntos. Entonces nos sentimos semejantes, vivimos la democracia. Las creaciones trascendentes se originan en momentos de intenso intercambio. Todas las visiones del futuro surgen de esas conversaciones que no tienen otro principio que la buena voluntad de quienes participan.
Si la conversación es tan maravillosa ¿por qué la gente conversa tan poco? La razón principal es la tentación de la autosuficiencia. Cuesta admitir que el otro tenga una razón relevante, que sea posible crear algo en común. En cambio, la conciencia de nuestra pequeñez nos impulsa a multiplicar nuestra inteligencia. Esta relación puede formularse a la manera de una ley: a mayor pretensión de autosuficiencia menor capacidad de conversar.

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