WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts: Recent Episodes
WhoWhatWhy
The biggest companies shaping how we ride, rent, borrow, and think are private — and private means they owe you nothing. A former SEC director on the economy you're not allowed to see. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
What if the roots of fascism weren't European at all, but embedded in America's founding struggles over democracy and race? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The AI debate is endless. One writer decided to measure it by asking not how smart the machines are, but how humane they are. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
We spend our time arguing about change. The future may belong instead to the people who quietly build it.
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The future is arriving faster than ever. So why are we more anxious than excited? A conversation about progress, innovation, and American ambition. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Five scholars, one uncomfortable question on America's 250th: Is our democracy's trouble a rough patch — or built into the 18th-century design itself?
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What if the real crisis isn't aging leaders, but an aging democracy where power never seems to change hands? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The real threat to democracy isn't AI. It's a government that never learns to use it. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A veteran of three tech eras on how the innocence was lost — and whether AI actually might win it back, through what he calls "enlightened AI." Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Putin didn't seize a democracy — he hollowed one out. Twenty-five years inside Russia's slow spiral, and what it tells us about our own moment. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
From Beijing to Washington to Cuba, the old world order has collapsed. Is this the most dangerous moment since 1945? One man says yes, and the clock is ticking. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Everything feels broken at once — but the failures aren't separate. They're the same collapse, playing out at different scales. Yet there's surprising reason for hope. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Iran's real conflict may have less to do with uranium than with a regime losing control of its people, its proxies, and its purpose. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Prediction markets are everywhere. But nobody's explaining how they work, why they beat experts, or why institutions fight them so hard. Until now. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Understanding Iran's power structure, nuclear future, missile red lines, the negotiations, and what both sides are getting dangerously wrong about each other. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When an authoritarian regime offers no ideology, no story, no reason to believe, it plants the seeds of its own destruction. Minneapolis and Iran show this story. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The old rules are gone. The new ones aren't written yet. And no one in charge knows how to write them.
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The inside story of how greed, ambition, and rivalry destroyed AI's safety mechanisms — and why human failings, not technology, are driving us toward catastrophe. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A jury just shattered Big Tech's legal shield. Meta and YouTube: guilty of engineering addiction. This is social media's tobacco moment — and AI is next. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
New questions about Iran challenge what we think we know — about power, society, and risks that rarely surface in mainstream coverage. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
War without strategy. Drones without limits. Data without wisdom. How the Iran conflict is stumbling toward World War III — and no one can explain why. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
China loses two oil partners to US action. Their response? Strategic patience. Are we watching restraint or preparation for what's next?
Iran didn't ask for regime change. It asked for bread. How a protest movement got hijacked — and turned into a war nobody planned for. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The guardrails weren't real — they were simply norms. The Constitution wasn't a firewall. And the Madisonian dream? Always more myth than reality. So now what? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
China is the justification for our AI policy, our defense spending, our tariffs, even our alliances. What if we're wrong about all of it? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
They're booing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Canada. What's happening to our closest neighbor is a preview of what Trump does to both countries and companies. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The largest massacre in modern history happened in 48 hours. Shay Khatiri on what comes next in an Iran on the brink. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
While America abandons climate action, the world races ahead—and watches in dismay. A look at the cost of US denial and what's happening without us. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Can democracy survive computerized vote counting? Systemic and man-made vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure may threaten integrity. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Two garbage trucks of plastic hit the ocean every minute. Microplastics are in your brain. Recycling doesn't work. What the plastic industry never told you. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Arkansas whipped prisoners until 1968. Now we celebrate El Salvador's concentration camps. A reckoning with punishment's price. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig challenges nearly everything we think we know about gun violence — and, by extension — violence itself. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Eleven federal workers reveal what it felt like to be fired by Musk's DOGE — the emails, the trauma, and the institutional destruction we've never heard about. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
We're not one nation split by politics — we're 11 regional cultures that have been at war since the colonies. And now the divisions are life and death. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When billionaires mock the Pope with memes and fund "cheating apps," something's gone seriously wrong.The collapse of tech idealism; betting takes its place. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Families who voted for Trump now carry passports to prove they belong here. Inside the fear, resistance, and betrayal reshaping Latino communities.
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Tech oligarchs abandon democracy, embrace Trump. Performance or conviction? When they control the platforms shaping reality, does it matter?
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Mangione isn't alone. A generation of alienated young men are reaching the same dark conclusion: The system is broken and only violence can fix it. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Suppressed jobs data, tariffs hitting consumers, and trillions in AI spending built on sand. The one force that still moves public opinion is breaking. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Millions may march this weekend. Some will go home thinking it didn't matter. Here's why they're wrong — and right. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The economy may be democracy’s last hope. Beneath calm headlines, inflation persists and wealth accumulates. The numbers reveal what matters most. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Revisiting my 1998 conversation with Jane Goodall — her voice, her vision, and her timeless reminder of our bond with the natural world. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The bipartisan bet that created unprecedented prosperity for the world also delivered Donald Trump to America. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Today’s America can’t handle what’s coming — not just from Trump but from mass automation, currency wars, China, resource battles. We need radically new politics. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Political violence isn’t an aberration in American democracy — it’s a defining trait. From the Boston Tea Party to January 6, it’s how we settle our differences. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Lying has become a viable strategy for success. How influencers, algorithms, and crowds turn deception into accepted reality in the digital age. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
How tariffs became America’s most expensive policy failure, destroying manufacturing jobs they claim to protect while emptying consumer wallets. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
What Ghislaine Maxwell knows about her father Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein may be the final untold chapter of two of the great scandals of our time. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A decades-long trail of money and kompromat that isn’t just scandal — it’s a threat to the world order and to democracy itself. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Russia’s brief democratic promise died when Putin chose autocracy over capitalism. A chilling preview of what could happen in America today. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When government systems collapse under complexity, democracy itself breaks down — fueling the populist frustration reshaping American politics today. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The journalist who first published Epstein’s black book reveals a network of corruption and systemic coverup reaching the highest levels of power.
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How the aristocrat’s blueprint for populist conservatism became today’s reality. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
What if everything we believe about changing political minds is wrong? The real work of transformation happens elsewhere. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A regime that once ruled through fear now faces its own collapse. Shay Khatiri explains why this moment changes everything — and what happens next. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Tales and wisdom from three foreign correspondents who covered conflicts across decades, when journalism drove the global narrative. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren reveals the “original sin” and decades-long miscalculation that led to this moment — and what comes next.
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Despite global chaos, America’s economy shows puzzling resilience in the face of emerging capital flight, dangerous policy uncertainty, and spiraling debt. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
$500 drones destroyed $100M Russian bombers. This attack changes everything about modern warfare and exposes America's most critical vulnerabilities. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
China’s contradictions may be its greatest strength — and weakness. A look inside the civilization attempting something unprecedented in history. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A former NATO ambassador shows how Trump has shattered 80 years of global trust in just 120 days, forcing allies to act without America for the first time. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When we stop thinking, we enable harm. Elizabeth Minnich warns that systemic evils don’t need monsters — “it takes all of us” through everyday compliance. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
A covert alliance of wealth, faith, and fear is quietly dismantling American democracy — one lie, one spectacle, and one grievance at a time. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
NPR: Broadcasting tote bags since 1971. But can they survive a knife fight, their own risk aversion, and that they still think they’re college radio? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Foreshadows and Forewarnings: We Were an Early Warning System for Democracy - Daniel Ziblatt
Foreshadows and Forewarnings: We Were an Early Warning System for Democracy - Yascha Mounk
China dominates global manufacturing while facing population collapse. Can Beijing’s rush to automation save an economy where factories operate without humans? Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
America once built highways and reached the moon. Now we can’t even fix a bridge. The reason? The reforms meant to improve government have paralyzed it. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
New tariffs spark economic drama as investor confidence plummets, alliances shift, and experts warn of a self-inflicted wound on America’s global standing.
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The US, from protector to threat: How Trump’s annexation talk and tariff threats upended Canada’s election and forced the nation to reimagine its future. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
America was once defined by mobility, with a third of its population moving yearly. Today, restrictive housing policies are driving inequality and stagnation. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Think you know how wealth moves through the economy? Dean Baker reveals the hidden rules and policies that actually determine who gets ahead. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Private armies now threaten democracy. When billionaires can buy their own military force, warfare itself becomes a deadly business venture. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Democracy’s greatest achievement — creating a “big tent” for all — may have destroyed our constitutional system’s ability to adapt and govern effectively. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Geopolitical expert reveals hidden forces reshaping global power, from Trump-Zelenskyy tensions to Russia and China’s strategic calculus. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Not democracy’s end but the Gilded Age reborn. Trump’s McKinley obsession reveals imperial ambitions and endless corruption. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
America’s rapid transformation from a nation that could laugh at itself to one consumed by judgment and cynicism, threatens the future of democracy itself. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
From Reagan's Star Wars to Trump's Iron Dome vision, the quest for an American missile shield faces harsh technical realities and poses unprecedented global risks. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
China projects global dominance in AI and economics, but internal pressures and risky strategies reveal a superpower on the edge. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
LA’s fires weren’t just a “natural” disaster but a climate-driven weather event, revealing how global warming is reshaping California’s future. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
At a time when partisan warfare threatens democracy, stronger, not weaker, political parties might be our salvation. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When LA’s hydrants failed during massive fires, misinformation spread. What really happened – and the hard truths about our urban water systems. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Is technology helping us thrive or tearing us apart? Explore how rethinking innovation could lead to a more connected and human future. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
An MIT economist reveals why short-term fixes fail, and offers a blueprint for a complete system transformation. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Democrats once counted on the votes of blue-collar workers, but two rival teams of consultants saw change coming. Their fight over the party’s future still echoes today. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
From civil rights foe to progressive hope: How states’ rights flipped from a conservative weapon to a liberal shield to protect democracy. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Glazing hams and carving turkeys hide a sinister truth: Our food supply is increasingly dangerous. A look at the meatpacking industry's dark secrets. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
It’s not just about fake news — our hunger for control and community makes us surprisingly eager to embrace comfortable lies over difficult truths. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
When ‘burning it all down’ becomes reality: The toxic mix of personal rule and zealous ideologues threatens to dismantle federal power. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
What happened to women voters as Harris drew fewer of them than Biden in 2020? Even in pro-choice strongholds, economic concerns trumped reproductive rights. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
The dangerous game of private, back-channel diplomacy has long corrupted American elections. How the 1980 October surprise still haunts American politics. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Want your vote to really count? See how AI meets democracy in a Princeton lab.
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Think you know everything about January 6? Think again. Jon Long’s raw, footage reveals shocking truths. Democracy hangs in the balance. Listen. Watch. Decide.
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Experts reveal the dangers behind Trump and Project 2025’s radical agenda and how the deliberate dismantling of government agencies threatens democracy.
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Is mobile voting the future? It could boost turnout and reduce polarization. Piloted in some states, it has the potential to transform elections nationwide.
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Attacks on US education and historical truth mirror global authoritarianism.
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In 80 percent of US counties, white sheriffs wield unchecked power, aligning with militias and influencing elections. Democracy hangs in the balance.
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Behind AI’s rapid rise: exploited workers in digital sweatshops and mounting environmental costs. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
From 9/11 chaos to the 2024 ballot box: How the 9/11 aftermath still echoes in young voters’ minds.
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How SCOTUS turned ex-presidents into immune monarchs, made them above the law and protected by an “authoritarian constitution.”
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As Democrats celebrate their successful convention, a 50-year plot threatens the transparent process on which a fair election depends.
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How the war on reality threatens democracy. From January 6 to COVID-19, if truth becomes malleable we lose America’s ability to function coherently.
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Cryptocurrency: Pandemic boom, spectacular bust, now rising again. Is it revolutionizing finance or another factor threatening economic stability?
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From San Francisco DA to presidential hopeful: Kamala Harris’s evolving stance on criminal justice, in her own words.
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Democracy’s fatal flaw: citizens struggle with its complexity. As elite influence wanes, populism surges. Is democracy devouring itself in the digital age?
Feeling anxious in chaotic times? Embracing life’s unpredictability can lead to resilience and impact. A new framework for thriving in an uncertain world.
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Silicon Valley’s Sinister Takeover: The Trump-Vance Ticket and the Rise of Tech Autocracy
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From Seattle’s streets to the White House: How four days of protests in 1999 sparked the populist revolution that’s still shaping America and the world today.
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Felon vs. aging incumbent: Is this the best America can do? How our constitutional system is failing us, and how radical systemic changes could save it.
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When did weather forecasting become life-threatening? Meet Chris Gloninger, the TV meteorologist who faced death threats for reporting on climate change. A tale of science vs. politics.
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Voter apathy is high. Are reforms making it worse? A radical approach to save democracy by empowering busy citizens.
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The world is shifting right, and France is at the epicenter. Decoding the forces reshaping global politics in this crucial election year.
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Reimagining how we measure the economy: moving beyond GDP to focus on key indicators of American well-being, such as health, security, opportunity, and political voice.
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The Supreme Court has been eroding democracy for decades. Nine key cases reveal voter suppression and constitutional threats. Is today’s court the paramount danger to our democracy?
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Cracking the code to predict any presidential race and uncovering the hidden forces shaping the Trump vs. Biden rematch.
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The Israel-Hamas conflict’s complexities, campus protests, global impact, and potential outcomes.
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A RAND report’s chilling predictions for the 2024 election — infrastructure hacks, AI disinfo, a lack of voting machine security — show the risks are worse than we thought.
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A neuroscientist exposes the shocking mental health toll of a warming world.
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Tech has been hijacked by a select few, abandoning the common good for "Technocapitalism."
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Unveiling the heartland’s fury, its rural discontent, and its very real threat to American democracy.
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Democracy’s deep flaws, and some radical fixes to future-proof American governance.
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How a distinguished trial lawyer shaped justice through landmark cases in national security, press freedom, and more.
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Haiti faces marauding gangs, failed governance, and a tragic humanitarian crisis. Violence, kidnappings, and displacement grip the nation, while international aid falls short.
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The Pentagon’s growing alliance with Silicon Valley, where AI and tech innovation are redefining warfare and morality.
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An examination of the dark world of political disinformation and its peril to democracy’s future.
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The right’s love for dictators isn’t new. We reveal a century-long saga of conservatism’s authoritarian infatuation.
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Seismic shifts in global politics: wars escalate, authoritarianism rises, and democracy faces its toughest test in today’s turbulent world.
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Exploring the complexities of US military engagements in Iraq and Syria, from destroying ISIS to the challenges posed by Iran and Israel.
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Discover the forgotten meaning of populism: A story of grassroots struggle, democracy, and the fight for social justice.
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Young, tech-savvy Russians are fleeing Putin’s regime, igniting a silent exodus that could reshape Russia’s political and social landscape.
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Felicia Kornbluh explores the future of reproductive rights post-Dobbs, the possible impact on the 2024 election, and the hurdles in broadening the fight.
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Unpacking the dynamics between Davos elites and the emerging global middle class. Are there opportunities for a win-win future?
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Explore the evolution and deep roots of the MAGA movement, its impact beyond Trump, and an insider’s journey from belief to disillusionment.
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How pivotal events in Israel resonate within American Jewish communities, shaping identity and geopolitics.
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An exploration with economist Noah Smith on why public sentiment about the US economy often contrasts with hard economic facts.
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Exposing the GOP’s dark turn: How the party’s very survival now hinges on embracing autocracy over democracy and its foundational values.
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Brian Stelter analyzes Fox News’s impact on political narratives and GOP influence, and its future in bending American democracy.
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Exclusive interviews with two who knew Lee Oswald, offering unique insights into the enigmatic figure linked to JFK’s assassination. (Ernst Titovets)
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Exclusive interviews with two who knew Lee Oswald, offering unique insights into the enigmatic figure linked to JFK’s assassination.
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Two young activists transform Florida politics, engaging voters all year. Discover their journey and the power of grassroots politics.
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Polling’s adaptability and impact on democracy, amid skepticism and change.
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The SBF fraud and conviction, the crypto craze’s crash, and a $3 trillion delusion laid bare.
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The AR-15 had patriotic beginnings. Today it’s a sad symbol of out-of-control violence in American society. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Tech billionaires’ dangerous game: selling escapist fantasies while ignoring urgent crises like climate change and income inequality.
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The enigma of recent geopolitical events—from rising global terror threats to the uncertain future of Gaza and the limitations of Middle East accords.
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Israel’s latest crisis from an insider’s perspective: the role of the US, the state of Israel’s internal politics, and is there a path to diplomacy. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Israel’s clandestine efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions are reshaping the Middle East in unexpected ways.
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Is American democracy at a breaking point? How the Constitution enables minority rule, why distrust in institutions is rising, and what’s at stake for the future of democracy. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Dr. Robert J. Lifton on our collective traumas: The psychic impacts of COVID-19, climate change, gun violence, and divisive politics. A look at resilience in our time.
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Is Google a monopoly or a force for innovation? A look at the US v. Google case that could redefine the internet and the future of antitrust law.
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Reassessing COVID-19 narratives amid resurgence: a critical look at media influence, Fauci’s role, and the culture of fear that shaped our response.
In a week when President Biden announced that Medicare would take the first steps to lower the price of expensive medications, we talk with an advocate of a far more radical overhaul of the US’s flawed health care system.
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Strikes, Streaming, and Hollywood’s Unraveling: Inside the Chaos.
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Only 12 people control vast US economic power via index funds and private equity. Think of the risks for the economy — and for democracy itself.
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Only 12 people control vast US economic power via index funds and private equity. Think of the risks for the economy — and for democracy itself.
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It’s long past time to challenge the American Dream. Alissa Quart reveals its harsh realities and calls for a new ethos that values community, fairness, and class worth.
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Are our rising temperatures humanity’s alarm bell? Can we ever get global unity to cut CO2 emissions? Jeff Goodell explains.
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Israel on the brink: Peter Beinart delves into ethnonationalism, political unrest, and the fight for democracy’s future.
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Norman Solomon discusses the invisible wars the US has been waging for decades, their impact on society, and the role of the media in its perpetuation. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Climate change shapes history, says historian Peter Frankopan. Civilizations thrive or fall on environmental stewardship and adaptability.
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Fentanyl, if left unchecked, is an almost certain death sentence for its users — and for America’s cities. A conversation with Sam Quinones.
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The US’s historical ascent to global dominance, and the implications for China, Russia, and today’s geopolitical landscape.
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After the murder of George Floyd, three police departments confronted aggressive cop culture, overcoming daunting obstacles to champion justice and equity in policing. Read More: www.WhoWhatWhy.org
Exposing the manipulation of the ’60s civil rights legacy by many diverse movements today that are trying to co-opt it for their own ends.
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Like the “Mouse That Roared,” Ukraine should try for a total victory: foreign policy expert Gideon Rose.
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The next fiscal cliff: Impending state/local fiscal crises loom large due to political short-sightedness in budgeting. Urgent action will be needed.
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An examination of the shift in space exploration and satellites from government-led to private sector dominance and how SpaceX has led the way.
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In recognition of Memorial Day I talk with David Morris, an embedded correspondent during the Iraq war, a victim himself of PTSD, and author of a poignant exploration.
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Ben Smith discusses new media’s rise and fall, the power of individual voices, and journalism’s future.
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Michael Lind looks at workers’ wages, how business and government alliances are suppressing bargaining power, and how this contributes to America’s decline.
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A hard-nosed look at the chance of achieving zero-emission aviation by 2050: new tech, alternative fuels, and diverse solutions, all amid uncertainty, rising costs, and limited access.
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A dark look at the unsettling connection between the Second Amendment, America’s gun culture, race, slavery, and the fear of Black retribution.
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Jeff Sharlet explores the complex relationship between religion, religious nationalism, and right-wing politics, and how these forces intertwined with Trumpism.
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The next world war will be fought on a cyber battlefield and the threat of mutually assured destruction is already happening.
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An inside look at the recent Israeli protests, the fragility of the Netanyahu government, the potential for a new coalition, and the influence of demographic changes.
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Environmental leader Paul Hawken discusses a holistic set of solutions for dealing with climate change, while simultaneously making the Earth worth saving.
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Two eminent economists unravel the truth behind Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, its causes, and vital lessons for future financial stability.
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Journalist Matt Johnson argues that Christopher Hitchens’s legacy of universal liberal values can save liberalism from its current wrong turn.
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A former foreign service officer and US Ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan looks at why Russia today is more repressive internally and more aggressive externally.
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Is the US Constitution an elitist rulebook designed to protect capitalism?
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A look at how the myths of American history are being enhanced and weaponized for a partisan agenda.
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Why technological progress is really stuck. A look at what happened to all the cool technology that 1960s science fiction promised us.
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A look at the shocking idea that the end of humanity’s reign on earth might be a good idea and might, in fact, be inevitable.
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From neoliberalism to evangelicalism, a look at history, power, myth, and paranoia in our current politics, and an alternative vision of liberal democracy.
Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/power-paranoia-and-the-fraying-of-our-politics
Felicia Kornbluh argues that the movement must now focus on broader issues and on grassroots politics, not the courts.
Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/50-years-after-roe-the-fight-returns-to-its-roots
Mickey Huff, founder of Project Censored, looks at the importance of independent media and why organizations like WhoWhatWhy have become vital in preserving the free press.
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A case study of one man’s effort to understand the dark side of Cold War history, which remains shrouded in unnecessary government secrecy.
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We end the year with a revealing and inspiring conversation on the power and purpose of art.
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The implications of commodifying citizenship and passports, and the ethical, legal, and cultural implications of this practice.
Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-new-global-citizen-the-buying-and-selling-of-citizenship
RAND Corporation China expert Timothy Heath deconstructs the current wave of protests in China and looks at the broader context of what it might mean and why.
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A look at a little-known Paris- based organization whose job is to keep “bad money” out of the global financial system.
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https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/who-sets-the-rules-for-global-banking/
As the Conservtaive government in the UK struggles, progressives like 28-year-old MP Mhairi Black are providing a stark contrast.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/progressive-politics-in-the-uk-a-conversation-with-mhairi-black-mp
A look at the price we pay for an economy that has become irrevocably splintered between a “real” economy and a financial markets-based economy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/wall-street-vs-main-street-never-the-twain-shall-meet
A look at the price we pay for an economy that has become irrevocably splintered between a “real” economy and a financial markets-based economy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/wall-street-vs-main-street-never-the-twain-shall-meet
A look at how the idea of democracy runs counter to MAGA “theology,” and why hate, attention, and bad behavior will win out.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/democracy-will-likely-be-voted-out-on-tuesday
Election experts Jonathan Simon and Lynn Bernstein go deep into how America's myriad of voting systems operate, and the reasons trust in them has cratered.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/us-elections-dangerous-erosion-of-trust-in-a-dangerously-untrustworthy-process
Financial Times economic analyst Martin Wolf gives an overview of global economic forces, and looks at Britain’s economic and political chaos.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/does-economics-drive-all-politics
WhoWhatWhy’s first US Election Report Card is a state-by-state look at the ways in which our voting system is failing democracy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/jonathan-simon-introduces-whowhatwhys-us-election-report-card
An examination of the stark reality of the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, by RAND Corporation senior defense researcher David Shlapak.
Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/russian-nukes-a-second-look
A reporter embedded with the January 6 rioters warns that the dogs of domestic war have now been fully unleashed.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/january-6-was-only-the-starting-gun
Like Mob lawyers protecting their clients, the Jones Day law firm cocoons the extreme right and defends the worst excesses of corporate America.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-law-firm-protecting-trump-and-the-extreme-right
Like Mob lawyers protecting their clients, the Jones Day law firm cocoons the extreme right and defends the worst excesses of corporate America.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-law-firm-protecting-trump-and-the-extreme-right
A look at how “national conservatism” wants to use the full force of government to curtail individual liberty, impose christianity, and destroy its enemies.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/national-conservatism-is-coming-for-us
A look at how “national conservatism” wants to use the full force of government to curtail individual liberty, impose christianity, and destroy its enemies.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/national-conservatism-is-coming-for-us
An interview with the man who asks the question, “Who is the most ignorant person the US is willing to elect?”
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/we-live-in-a-golden-age-of-ignorance
An interview with the man who asks the question, “Who is the most ignorant person the US is willing to elect?”
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/we-live-in-a-golden-age-of-ignorance
Even amid all the anger and distractions of Trump Derangement Syndrome, will we be worse off if Trump is indicted? A conversation with Damon Linker.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/to-prosecute-or-not-to-prosecute-that-is-the-question
Even amid all the anger and distractions of Trump Derangement Syndrome, will we be worse off if Trump is indicted? A conversation with Damon Linker.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/to-prosecute-or-not-to-prosecute-that-is-the-question
Can US democracy learn a lesson or two from Britain’s steady parliamentary system? A conversation with British MP Jesse Norman.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/what-a-peaceful-transition-of-power-looks-like
Can US democracy learn a lesson or two from Britain’s steady parliamentary system? A conversation with British MP Jesse Norman.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/what-a-peaceful-transition-of-power-looks-like
Daniel Pinchbeck has attended Burning Man 18 times. He’s sitting it out this year, but he tells us all about it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/why-arent-you-at-burning-man/
Daniel Pinchbeck has attended Burning Man 18 times. He’s sitting it out this year, but he tells us all about it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/why-arent-you-at-burning-man/
Predictions about the Russia-Ukraine war have been proved wrong. The only certainty is that it’s getting more dangerous, and it may go on for years, even decades.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/russia-ukrainewhere-are-we-now
Predictions about the Russia-Ukraine war have been proved wrong. The only certainty is that it’s getting more dangerous, and it may go on for years, even decades.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/russia-ukrainewhere-are-we-now
The story of an investigative reporter who uncovered corruption — while running afoul of two of Los Angeles’s most powerful institutions.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/getting-at-the-truth-two-perspectives
The story of an investigative reporter who uncovered corruption — while running afoul of two of Los Angeles’s most powerful institutions.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/getting-at-the-truth-two-perspectives
The story of an investigative reporter who uncovered corruption — while running afoul of two of Los Angeles’s most powerful institutions.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/getting-at-the-truth-two-perspectives
The story of an investigative reporter who uncovered corruption — while running afoul of two of Los Angeles’s most powerful institutions.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/getting-at-the-truth-two-perspectives
At the heart of democracy lies a contradiction: The more open the society, the more susceptible democracy is to demagogues, distraction, and spectacle.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/democracy-is-the-mother-of-all-dictatorships
Professor Andrew Fiala on how our own human nature, combined with fools, sycophants, and citizens, is the force that could give rise to tyranny.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/could-tyranny-be-our-own-fault
Why our fight for democracy is not just about process and politics, but about underlying values like free speech.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/its-the-free-speech-stupid/
The progressive New York congressman and member of “the Squad” sees things as they might be and asks: Why not?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/rep-jamaal-bowman-looks-on-the-bright-side
Why did so many Republicans, who knew better, get caught up in the Trump vortex? What is the weakness in human behavior that explains this?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/why-they-did-it-bad-actors-and-those-who-enable-them
A new Rand Corp. study looks at how America is losing its ability to compete — and may never recover.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-end-of-american-competitiveness
One of our top legal scholars on the meaning of privacy — and if it will even matter in the years ahead.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/does-privacy-still-matter-and-do-we-still-have-any
In each of our pockets are devices with the power to bear witness. Suddenly violations of human rights are documented for the ages and may be more easily prosecuted.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-power-of-technology-to-bear-witness-to-war-crimes
Brad DeLong, economics professor and former Treasury official in the Clinton administration, takes us on a not-so-random walk through current economic conditions.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/economy/its-always-all-about-the-economy
A look at how Mitch McConnell laid to rest what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-us-senate
Author and filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan on the still-hidden mysteries of Watergate. Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/watergate-still-holds-secrets-even-after-50-years
Beyond the battlefield, Ukrainians must mobilize against the longer-term health consequences of war.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/ukraines-second-front-disease-famine-toxic-air
WhoWhatWhy Senior Editors William Dowell and Jonathan Simon look at the violent events of the past 10 days in America.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/mass-shootings-and-the-shaky-future-of-america/
As the Fed takes on more responsibility for the economy, it exceeds its legal authority and furthers our economic divide.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-feds-current-role-in-undermining-democracy
All wars do come to an end. A look at how that happens and how it foreshadows what’s next in Ukraine. Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/how-wars-end
An examination of how Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and what could happen next. Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/ukraine/battlefield-nuclear-weapons-really-are-a-thing
A look at how diverse societies have long suffered from the problems of tribalism, domination, and fragmentation, and why diversity may be antithetical to democracy. Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/democracy-and-diversity-dont-mix
Sam Ramani’s must-read Twitter feed on Ukraine is just a teaser for this deep and insightful look at Putin and Russia.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/decoding-putin-and-russia-a-conversation-with-sam-ramani
A look at modern data breaches – and the misguided laws and technology that are failing a society for whom online data is essential.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/why-we-should-not-take-data-breaches-for-granted
You probably distrust what the corporate news media tell you. Ever wonder what they’re not telling you?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/journalism-media/whowhatwhy-project-censored-and-the-news-about-the-news
Michael Wasiura’s journey into the heart of darkness that is Russian news and propaganda.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/michael-wasiurareports-you-decide
Historian Adam Tooze examines the reality of Russian sanctions — and their potential blowback.
More Info:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-global-economic-consequences-of-putins-war
Former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff shoots down the claim that NATO expansion eastward caused this crisis. More Info: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-deepest-roots-of-ukrainian-catastrophe
A look at why Putin may have started the war in Ukraine primarily for his domestic political needs inside Russia.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/putins-real-reason-for-war-a-wag-the-dog-theory
A look at how the war in the Ukraine is changing the balance of great power politics. Who’s winning and who’s losing?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/china-india-russia-the-west-and-the-evolving-global-chessboard
Author and global strategist Shay Khatiri lays out his worst case scenarios for Ukraine, Europe, and the world’s
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/there-are-no-good-outcomes-in-ukraine-only-a-more-dangerous-world
A conversation with longtime Putin nemesis Bill Browder about sanctions, what both the Russian people and the oligarchs are experiencing, and what he sees ahead.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/international/he-battled-putin-and-now-predicts-what-hell-do-next-about-ukraine/
A look at the reasons you should lay awake at night worrying about cybersecurity, crypto, and “The Internet of Things”.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/why-the-internet-is-less-safe-than-flying-or-driving-or-eating
An argument that it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when” an American civil war begins.An argument that it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when” an American civil war begins.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/is-america-appro…its-sell-by-date/
Are Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and the blockchain that they ride on the financial instruments of the future — or a Ponzi scheme to enrich the wealthy?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/is-crypto-a-libertarian-dream-or-a-left-wing-nightmare
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) outlines “The Scheme” by which right-wing forces have spent 50 years capturing control of the Supreme Court.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/how-the-supreme-court-played-capture-the-flag-conversation-with-sen-whitehouse
How and why corrupt political and business systems have become normalized, how they determine the shape of our government, and how they undermine democracy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/corruption-is-americas-operating-system
An up-close look at the thriller-like story and unique characters who ran the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines. Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/whats-the-real-story-of-the-covid-19-vaccine
A bleak but fascinating look across five continents and seven centuries points to climate and political destruction ahead.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/climate-catastrophe-the-fall-of-america-and-a-new-world-order
Futurist and author Parag Khanna looks hopefully at the shifting global migration trends that are shaping our political scenarios.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/a-hopeful-look-at-how-global-migration-moves-the-world-forward
A look at why the narrative of extremism, conspiracies, and terrorism is so appealing, and how and why it’s taken over our politics.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/extremism-is-the-new-normal
Columbia University professor John McWhorter looks at how some ideas about race have taken on the qualities of religion and have been weaponized against those who disagree.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/are-we-all-racists-now
Along with bats and lab leaks, we need to think about how a failed public health system contributed to the spread of COVID-19.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/our-failed-public-health-system-dared-covid-to-attack-us
George Zimmer, the founder of Men’s Wearhouse, talks about the better side of business, honesty, and authenticity.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/business-for-good-a-conversation-with-george-zimmer
We’ve gone from factories to laptops, boardrooms to Zoom, neighbors to followers. We find like-minded people not in communities but on Twitter and Reddit. But at what price?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/when-the-metaverse-and-evolution-collide
How fentanyl became the dangerous drug of the moment and what it means for our cities, for public health, and for the individuals and families devastated by it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/our-insatiable-appetite-for-street-drugs-why-fentanyl-and-why-now
Climate disasters will continue. As long as they do, we will need to focus on getting a lot better at recovering from those disasters.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/if-we-cant-stop-climate-change-we-must-get-better-at-climate-preparedness
The Rev. Jim Wallis offers a faith-based perspective on the fight for social justice — explaining how religion, rescued from the deadly grip of the Christian right, can help counter the hatred and fear generated by social media.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/who-will-win-the-battle-for-the-nations-soul
China seeks to become the world’s leading superpower in the 21st century. How should the US respond?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/china-competitor-or-enemy/
A look at how the world economy and individual lives were changed forever by the pandemic, and where that leaves us now.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-post-pandemic-normal-will-never-be-the-way-it-was
The dean of UC Berkeley’s Law School looks at how the courts have prioritized criminal control over civil rights for suspects and defendants.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/what-the-hell-happened-to-police-and-criminal-justice-reform
The Koch family is aging out. Peter Thiel has picked up the mantle as the new Midas of the extreme right.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/peter-thiel-is-the-new-koch/
Rick Doblin, a pioneering researcher on psychedelics, details how these once-criminalized drugs may afford whole new possibilities in the treatment of mental illness.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/are-psychedelics-the-cutting-edge-treatment-for-mental-illness
Middle East scholar and author Shay Khatiri breaks down the realpolitik of the emerging relationships between the Taliban, Iran, Russia, and China. Spoiler alert: The US plays no role.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/iran-russia-china-and-the-taliban
Award-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman examines how 9/11 opened the door to America’s worst historical impulses and led directly to Donald Trump and January 6th.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-direct-line-from-9-11-to-january-6th
This Labor Day marks a fundamental shift in the nature of work. What’s the future for employers and employees?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/labor-day-and-the-changing-nature-of-work
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer, professor, and author, argues that American foreign and military policy must adapt to a radically changed and morally pragmatic world.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/stop-the-world-so-america-can-get-on
Image Caption: The fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975 (inset). Americans and Afghan refugees leaving aboard a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), Afghanistan, August 24, 2021. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Secretary of Defense PDF and © U.S. Air Force/ZUMA Press Wire Service/ZUMAPRESS.com
A conversation with author, journalist, and professor Tom Nichols, who believes that the US has become a nation of adolescents and toddlers.
Photo credit: Rosa Pineda / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Eran Kampf / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Read More: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/america-is-no-longer-a-serious-nation
Harvard law professor Martha Minow on the state of the news business today, and why she thinks the government should play more of a role.
Street Corner News. Photo credit: Silecyra / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), https://www.flickr.com/photos/72999797@N03/6822063821
The story of the water defenders — a community in El Salvador that took on an international mining corporation and, against impossible odds, won a historic victory.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/a-grassroots-victory-against-corporate-greed
Why America’s punitive and often violent response to those with mental illness makes our communities less safe and more inhumane.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/crime-punishment-and-homelessness-the-common-thread
A deep look at why cultural and political battles of the 1960s are far from over, and how the leaders gave us the world we live in today.
Read More:
www.whowhatwhy.org
The investigation of the killing of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse won’t find the real people behind the assassination, according to longtime Haiti scholar Amy Wilentz, who offers insightful analysis of Haiti’s past, present, and future.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/?p=62712&preview=true&preview_id=62712
The real story of the divisions of 2020 and whether we can ever be made whole again.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/george-packer-explains-it-all/
The emotional importance of Juneteenth, as told by a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/?p=62498&preview=true&preview_id=62498
A conversation with Jonathan Rauch about the forces and ideas that once held the country together — and are now unraveling.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/?p=61546&preview=true&preview_id=61546
Former congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich learned early in his career the old adage that the “duty of youth is to challenge corruption.”
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-man-who-fought-city-hall
A look at the burgeoning world of private spies, the elimination of any privacy, and the price we may pay as a society
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/?p=61294&preview=true&preview_id=61294
A look at how the unraveling of Bill Gates’s private life may reveal public malfeasance — some of which may even affect public health.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/06/11/bill-gates-has-always-shown-us-who-he-is/
The real gun problem stems from criminals, drugs, and law enforcement. Not mass shootings and politics.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/06/11/why-we-may-never-solve-the-gun-problem/
A conversation with Nicholas Wade, the science journalist whose deeply researched work has given credence to the Wuhan lab leak theory of SARS-CoV-2.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/06/04/what-happened-in-wuhan/
One of the original JFK assassination investigators breaks down the 58-year-old case into its basic parts.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/05/28/the-original-inconvenient-truth/
Palestinian peace activist Yousef Bashir brings a singular insider's perspective to the conflict in Gaza.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/05/21/a-palestinian-american-struggles-for-peace-in-our-time/
A leading global blockchain and crypto expert, Eloisa Marchesoni, really really tries to explain the future of money in plain english.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/05/14/can-cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-ever-be-explained-in-plain-english/
Lawyer and author Dan Kovalik, who supports the ongoing movements for racial and gender equality and justice, makes the progressive case against cancel culture.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/05/07/should-cancel-culture-be-canceled/
Outspoken Sen. Mazie Hirono (D) opines on Asian American hate crimes, the corruption of Trump, her “usual suspect” colleagues, and how she came to find her authentic voice and became the most honest and plain spoken member of the staid US Senate.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/04/30/a-conversation-with-hawaii-senator-mazie-hirono/
A secret, shadowy army of tax attorneys, accountants, and wealth managers are inventing new ways to hide trillions for the super rich.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/04/23/the-rich-are-different-they-dont-pay-taxes/
Elizabeth Kolbert explains why climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. We are causing geological and ecological changes that will drastically alter this planet and it’s species forever.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/04/16/we-are-the-first-species-to-manage-its-own-extinction/
Cybersecurity journalist Nicole Perlroth looks at how the new cyberwarfare could destroy the world as we know it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/04/09/software-could-end-the-world/
The author of Tangled Up in Blue, Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks, looks deep inside the policing of America’s cities.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/04/02/police-culture-is-all-about-violence-can-it-be-changed/
Households account for 70 percent of all climate pollution, according to climate scientist Dr. Kimberly Nicholas. She makes the case for individual action being just as important as government and corporate efforts to stem climate change.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/26/the-future-of-climate-change-rests-with-joe-biden-xi-jinping-and-you/
An alarming look at the current erosion of medical consent in the treatment of African American patients.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/19/vaccines-black-americans-and-medical-consent/
An up-close look, by a former member of Parliament, at the excess of corporate power and wealth in the British monarchy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/15/the-royals-have-outlived-their-value/
A look at the genetic superiority of women.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/12/in-genetics-its-always-international-womens-day/
Brutal slave labor in China is responsible for many of our daily consumer products. And global corporations collaborating with the Chinese government know all about it — and profit from it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/05/minimum-wage-in-china-zero/
A new wave of international films is sweeping the globe. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple+, and Disney+ are not only changing the way we view films, they are changing the way we see the world.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/02/26/its-a-small-world-after-all/
Author and investigative journalist Criag Unger thinks he has found the unified field theory behind the Trump-Russia connection — and why Trump is still a security risk.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/02/19/was-trump-a-russian-asset/
Why is achieving racial equality so hard? Princeton’s Chair of the Department of African American Studies shows us why, through the lens of James Baldwin.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/02/17/eddie-glaude-jr-james-baldwin-and-black-history/
How economic populism grew into a toxic stew of resentment, nationalism, racism — and the bloody riot of January 6, 2021.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/02/12/why-populism-is-toxic/
A personal look inside the final days and multimillion-dollar shakedowns of the Trump pardon process.
A look at how religious nationalism — more than politics — spurred the events of January 6.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/01/29/josh-hawley-told-us-who-he-was/
A look at why facts, data, and truth have little to do with what we believe.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/01/22/unity-is-probably-impossible/
Why the US Senate is no longer “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” and where it went wrong.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/01/15/why-is-the-us-senate-so-fked-up/
As tech companies move from blue states to blue cities inside red states, what are the long-term political consequences?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/01/12/the-new-color-purple/
More than 1.4 million votes have been cast for the Georgia Senate runoff race set for January 5. Here’s what voters need to know.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/12/22/mobilizing-voters-for-the-georgia-runoff-scrutineers-part-x/
A contrarian history of the US dismissing notions of exceptionalism and triumphalism.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/12/18/why-the-us-is-more-like-wework-and-theranos-than-apple/
Longtime socialist professor and activist Victor Wallis lays out his socialist agenda.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/12/11/sketches-of-a-socialist-dream/
A conversation with Gene Sperling, one of the few progressive economists advising Joe Biden.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/12/08/whose-economy-is-it-anyway/
An in-depth look at why the push to get schools back open is in part about the unspoken limits and failure of remote leaning.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/12/04/why-even-a-pandemic-cant-make-remote-learning-work/
As Georgia gears up for its runoff senate elections, the Coalition for Good Governance advocates for transparency and security from the state government.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/11/30/noise-about-gas-election-system-scrutineers-part-ix/
A conversation with Dr. Michael Mina about a new kind of testing that may be a more effective virus-fighter than a vaccine.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/11/26/testing-is-broken-contact-tracing-has-failed-theres-a-better-way/
A look at how the Republican party, long associated with draconian immigration and racial policies, continues to gain Hispanic voters.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/11/20/the-hispanic-republican-vote/
Energy expert Daniel Yergin on Joe Biden facing a world whose geopolitics have been transformed by climate, fracking, and an insatiable global demand for energy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/11/18/the-geopolitics-of-energy/
Do 1,200 books about the Trump era really help us understand anything?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/11/13/booking-trump/
Two distinguished legal scholars examine the state of election lawsuits, and why our elections today need so many lawyers.
An examination of how our current anger and animosity might very well lead to greater violence — and even secession.
In this week’s Scrutineers, Emily Levy talks to one county recorder who has transformed his community from opaque to transparent in terms of voting knowledge.
Read More:
While politics seems to be the only topic we’re paying attention to, technology may be the one that’s more important. A talk with author, Cory Doctorow.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/23/taming-the-digital-juggernaut/
An examination of the cumulative effect of four decades of stalled income growth and how as a result, 90 percent of workers gave $2.5 trillion of cumulative income to the top 10 percent since the mid-1970s.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/16/proof-positive-of-the-winner-take-all-economy/
Have a problem voting? Report it to SeeSay2020.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/14/publicly-mapping-election-problems-scrutineers-part-vii/
As the bodies pile up, so does the misinformation — which in turn leads to more bodies. Yet, there’s hope, if people would only listen to science. But will they?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/13/an-expert-calls-out-trump-on-covid-19/
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (D) shares his passion and hope that progressive causes and the institution of the US Senate can still flourish.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/09/up-close-and-personal-with-ohio-senator-sherrod-brown/
The simple and quaint past way of voting is over. It’s a brave new world and the authors of the new WhoWhatWhy e-book help us understand it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/10/02/is-this-any-way-to-vote-2/
Cyber criminals may be looking to spread false election results. Here’s how you can help.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/28/trying-to-stop-the-election-attacks-scrutineers-series-part-vi/
Matt Yglesias makes the jaw-dropping argument that 1 billion Americans would make us a better, stronger, and more competitive country.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/25/could-tripling-our-population-make-us-great-again/
Law Professor and election expert Edward Foley on how to understand the election results of 2020, and how long it may take them to come into focus.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/18/vote-counting-the-blue-shift-and-electoral-delay/
Only electoral candidates have the right to challenge election results, so April Smith is teaching them how to mitigate electronic voting risks.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/14/candidates-must-protect-election-security-scrutineers-part-v/
The author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? tries to re-energize and redefine “populism” — which he sees as the most misunderstood movement of our time.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/11/whats-the-matter-with-populism/
A look at Fox News, its power and its stars, stripped of the usual anger and hyperbole. A conversation with Brian Stelter.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/04/fox-news-a-fair-and-balanced-look/
The 78 days between Election Day and inauguration may be the most trying in our nation's history. Will Trump accept the results, and even if he finally does, at what cost to the country?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/28/will-he-go/
E-poll books are used around the US to check in voters. Because they use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, they’re vulnerable to manipulation and malfunction.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/24/problems-with-electronic-poll-books-scrutineers-part-iv/
A case study of author Nicholson Baker’s obsession with trying to understand the dark side of Cold War history, while it’s shrouded in denials of FOIA requests.
Why the current COVID-19 testing method is wrong, and what we need in its place. And why, if used correctly, the right test could control or even end the pandemic.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/14/we-had-the-tool-to-prevent-lockdowns-and-death/
In a year when 50 percent of voters or more are expected to vote by mail in the general election, “the surrender rule” could require millions to vote by provisional ballots. Emily Levy interviews election protection activist Mimi Kennedy about what happens when voters who are listed as having been sent a mail ballot show up to the polls to vote in person. The answer could be suppression.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/10/how-one-simple-administrative-problem-could-impact-election-outcomes-scrutineers-part-iii/
Posthumous podcast: Talking tabloids, immigrant dreams, and Frank Sinatra.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/07/pete-hamill-in-his-own-words-and-voice/
The crazy but important story of what happens when the White House, the Pentagon, and the world’s greatest scientists are forced to work with Hollywood.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/07/hollywood-washington-and-the-bomb/
An in-depth look at why evangelicals are Trump's most unwavering supporters, and their plans for making Christianity great again.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/08/04/why-are-white-evangelicals-primed-for-trumps-fear-mongering/
How the history of CIA and KGB Cold War covert election interference led us to what we face today.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/07/31/a-democracys-ultimate-threat/
Bennie Smith discovered a high-risk tampering mechanism built into US election systems.
Smith explains what he found, its implications, and how election officials and members of the public can detect this “feature” of our voting systems that belies the principle of “one person, one vote.”
Joe McCarthy may have been America’s most vicious demagogue. But he passed all his “skills” onto Donald Trump. To understand McCarthy is to understand what we are living through.
The founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition talks about efforts to stop your vote from being counted — and what you can do about it.
A former US senator looks at how Trump might lose the election — and still remain in power.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/07/10/trump-loses-remains-president/
Investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton looks at the untold, human, and complex story of Vladimir Putin.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/07/03/putin-putin-putin/
A look at the cutting-edge technology that may enable us to actually confront climate change.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/07/01/can-geoengineering-save-the-planet/
Co-creator of S.W.A.T. talks about how 50 years of police shows on television have shaped and undermined our views of policing and race.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/06/26/hollywood-has-sold-us-copaganda/
A police lieutenant with more than 30 years on the force, who is the president of his Black Police Officers Association, gives a personal and inside look at policing.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/06/19/what-it-means-to-be-black-while-blue/
Is there a common link between all the dark things that are happening? Is it hiding in plain sight?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/06/12/police-wall-street-pentagon-and-white-house-crime-whats-the-connection/
The riots of 1967 and 1968 over racial injustice resulted in over 70 dead and many injured. How do they compare with what we are witnessing today?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/06/05/is-it-1968-all-over-again/
Saudi Arabia has poured billions of dollars into promoting Wahhabism around the world, engendering violence from behind the cover of NGOs and government agencies.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/29/the-terrorist-threat-concealed-by-saudi-soft-power/
Election watchdog Emily Levy provides an overview of what to fear in the next election and what you can do about it.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/22/election-day-is-165-days-away-be-afraid/
Gabriella Novello, WhoWhatWhy’s election integrity reporter, discusses what it’s like to cover efforts to protect the right to vote during a pandemic.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/19/from-the-front-lines-of-the-fight-for-fair-elections/
A look at the corrosive culture caused by rigid hierarchies and unquestioning loyalty in the US military.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/15/not-all-it-can-be-the-us-military-is-failing/
Some Christian nationalists are contesting the coronavirus lockdown to further their own Bible-based, authoritarian agenda.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/08/religious-nationalism-and-the-reopening-of-america/
To mark World Press Freedom Day, we look at how COVID-19 has impacted the free press around the world. It’s not a pretty picture.
A look inside the current oil market meltdown and how it will impact climate change and global energy markets for years to come.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/04/24/how-many-barrels-of-oil-are-you-willing-to-take/
On its 50th anniversary, one of Earth Day’s co-founders tells the fascinating story of how the movement began, the changes it triggered, and why it is still relevant half a century later.
People with underlying physical conditions are particularly at risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19. But what about people with underlying psychological conditions? Here is an important look at how the crisis is affecting those with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
A look at the role of billionaires in the COVID-19 crisis. Is their philanthropy a symptom of a bigger problem that ails the US?
A look at how rural America, already devastated by opioids, is about to get hammered by COVID-19.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/04/03/covid-19-opioids-and-unseen-america-its-not-just-about-big-cities/
Why do so many deadly viruses originate in bats?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/03/27/bats-breeding-ground-for-killer-viruses/
A look at the role that the immune system is playing in the fight against COVID-19.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/03/20/the-anti-virus-program-you-dont-have-to-buy/
A look at how the novel coronavirus will forever impact China’s Belt and Road project and the geopolitics of Asia.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/03/16/the-eerie-parallels-between-covid-19-and-the-plague/
A law professor and senior policy advisor to Elizabeth Warren explains why economic inequality really matters to the health of our democracy.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/03/06/will-economic-inequality-bring-down-our-entire-system-of-government/
Not only was Michael Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” policy wrong when he was mayor of New York City, his justification of it was just as bad.
A look at what happens when politics becomes entertainment at worst and a hobby at best.
Iowa radio host Jeff Stein explains what went wrong in the Iowa caucuses and why Nevada may suffer the same fate.
A deep dive into the violence and terrorism of the 1970s and 80s and the bombing of the US Capitol.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/02/14/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/
What does your choice of news outlet say about you? Rand Corporation takes a good look.
Former Chicago Sun-Times photo editor Richard Cahan shares powerful images and comments of formerly enslaved African Americans.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/02/04/jarring-eyewitness-accounts-shed-light-on-the-cruelty-of-slavery/
Elite institutions — from government to academia to media — are losing their authority and monopoly all over the world. Why?
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/01/31/why-is-everybody-so-damn-angry/
GOP gerrymandering guru Thomas Hofeller died in 2018. His daughter Stephanie just released 70,000 files that detail his successful voter suppression efforts. Here is what these disclosures show and what they mean for US democracy.
Iran has been stuck in the craw of US foreign policy for 40 years. Longtime Iran expert Gary Sick looks at how we got to where we are today.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/01/24/why-iran-is-the-uss-go-to-enemy-in-the-middle-east/
A very emotional conversation about Australia’s devastating wildfires with somebody who is living the nightmare.
A surprising conversation about Iran with prominent Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/01/17/to-the-brink-of-war-with-no-upside/
A DOJ investigation into the Ferguson, MO, police department revealed how municipal fines and fees trap low-income people in a cycle of poverty and punishment. It’s happening across the US — but now San Francisco is leading major reforms.
Dylan Howard, a high-profile tabloid journalist with a record of big scoops, puts forth never-before-told aspects of the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Artificial intelligence is all the rage nowadays, but it actually has been with us for decades. A leading expert wonders if this is the year when it will change the world.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/01/03/is-2020-the-year-that-ai-finally-exerts-its-promised-power/
Want a visa to the US? Then you have to be prepared to disclose your social media activity -- even though there is no evidence that type of screening can identify threats.
A look at how charts and graphs are creating a new visual language and changing the way we interpret data.
A look at merging science and the knowledge of indigenous peoples to deal with today’s environmental crises.
As millions of Americans are bargaining hunting for the latest fashion on Black Friday, we take a look at the social and environmental damage that our clothes are doing to the planet.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/11/29/clothing-is-the-new-plastic/
Former Navy officer, intelligence analyst, and author Malcolm Nance talks about the Trump/Putin master plan.
Read More:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/11/22/from-useful-idiot-to-working-asset/
How the trade war, corporate tax cuts, and fossil fuel subsidies have hurt many small businesses.
Renowned author, professor, and psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton exposes the similarities between today’s ideological polarization, Chinese communist thought reform, and cults.
A look at a form of protest that has, up until now, kept democracy and business sustainable.
Cartoonist Ted Rall talks about the state of journalism, the death of irony, and the effort to save the once-powerful political cartoon.
A distinguished MIT economist looks at how today’s events line up with how liberty dies.
In a bastion of America’s progressivism, authorities are secretly spying on the public.
The GOP has waged a losing battle against social modernity for decades. Next year Republicans will start paying for it, renowned pollster Stanley Greenberg predicts.
Big carbon and mass apathy are the existential double whammy, warns veteran climate campaigner Bill McKibben.
One of the leading experts on cults gives a new perspective on today’s politics -- and some of its frightening implications.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) shares insights from his early visits to detention facilities and his legislative proposals to address the horrors he witnessed.
President Donald Trump’s tweets often violate Twitter’s standards, but the company has taken no action to restrict or block them. A conversation with Mark Karlin and Russ Baker.
An examination of why we should be outraged that justice is not being served in the Epstein case.
Questioning accepted narratives is a healthy feature of an open society. But today’s conspiracists come without any evidence or sources — only a motive.
A look at how things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, eugenics, and white America’s desire for racial purity have historically been far worse than what we are seeing today — at least so far.
The stunning results of a 20-year investigation into Charles Manson, the CIA, corrupt prosecutors, and the secret history of the Sixties.
The current reality may be far more dangerous than past nuclear threats: Richard Clarke, the first White House official placed in charge of US cybersecurity policy, looks at the dangers of cyber warfare today.
Former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak has jumped into the Democratic presidential primaries and is making a strong case against war with Iran.
Upon the death of Paul Krassner this week, we are sharing part of a conversation WhoWhatWhy podcaster Jeff Schechtman had with him back in 2009.
Gerrymandering expert David Daley explains the connection between partisan redistricting and Trump administration efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The leader of an LA based nonprofit talks about the trafficking of children -- a growing scourge.
A conversation with the author of RAND’s new follow-up report on the diminishing role of facts and data in the news.
A conversation with the author of RAND’s new follow-up report on the diminishing role of facts and data in the news.
If the Democratic debates told us anything, it’s that some of our would-be leaders don’t see the proverbial forest for the trees.
So many signs indicate that our democracy is not working. The infrastructure of our electoral system is failing, the Supreme Court just Ok’d gerrymandering for political gain, Russians keep interfering in our elections, climate change is an existential threat, kids are afraid to go to school for fear of being shot, China is on the verge of controlling the next generation of our communications, and the global world order that held things together since the end of World War II is tottering.
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Larry Diamond, a Princeton professor and author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. A longtime student of democratic processes around the world, he says that nothing short of a radical transformation can save our system.
Diamond rejects the notion, put forth last month by our podcast guest, Yale professor Ian Shapiro, that we need to revitalize political parties. He says it’s unrealistic to think we will ever return to the era of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms.
Indeed, he believes that the old standard of simple “majority rule” elections is an antiquated model which is being abandoned by most progressive democracies around the world. In its place, he argues that ranked-choice voting — where voters list multiple candidates in order of preference — can reenergize democracy.
Putting our problems in a larger context, Diamond talks about the impact of climate change and global migration, as well as the escalating conflicts with Russia and China — and how any solutions to these problems must involve the US.
If we are to contribute to this effort, we must first put our own house in order, says Diamond. In other words, reforming the American political system is an indispensable first step toward saving the world.
Why and how algorithms are taking over our lives, why we should care and what we can do about it.
There are few First Amendment issues more pressing today than how online speech should be governed. It impacts our interpersonal relationships, our views of almost every aspect of society and of course our politics. Now, absent an easy solution, Congress wants to dive in and claim that they actually have a clue.
The internet was supposed to set a million voices free...It didn't work out quite that way. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk to David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor and the United Nations’ leading voice on freedom of expression and human rights. He serves as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right of freedom of opinion and expression.
In our conversation, we examine the balance between free speech and the regulation of the internet and its leading companies, the impact that these companies have on public life, and the question of who should decide whom gets censored.
Facebook’s refusal to take down the recent doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) “slurred” speech shows how social media companies have set their own rules and how the rest of us have no clue what those rules are.
The goals and standards of these profit-making companies, Kaye says, are going to be almost impossible to reconcile with the wide variety of international and global rules
Kaye expands on the idea that these companies can never have enough people to moderate all their content, and why, contrary to hopes, artificial intelligence is not the answer.
While there has been a lot of talk recently about breaking up these companies, Kaye explains that, in fact, they may just need to be “broken down” — by which he means brought even closer to their end-users. He says that, only if there is a sense of a close and common community among users and the companies can speech be self policed.
As Democratic leaders offer their “Green New Deal” modeled on FDR’s “New Deal,” veteran environmental leader Randy Hayes has drafted the “New Green Deal,” a seven-point plan to address what he calls “a deep planetary emergency.”
While Hayes supports all the goals of the Democrats’ proposal, he focuses more intently on the essential requirements to sustain human life on the planet.
Hayes wants to shift to 100 percent renewable energy and ecological farming with a plant-food focus. He wants to end subsidies for carbon-based energy to reach a “true cost economy.” And he calls for a plan to restore healthy ecosystems to half the earth, to offset the impact of humans on the other half.
We discuss the recent “eco-spasms” that have flooded large parts of the Midwest and produced more than 500 tornadoes over a 13-day period in May.
We talk about the recent launch of a misleading “astroturf” campaign funded by Big Oil. Its front organization, Americans for Carbon Dividends, dangles a carbon tax and dividend scheme as bait for an indemnification of the very industries that have profited from environmentally disastrous resource extraction.
When asked about the practicality of his plan, Hayes says that, given the grave threat facing the planet, he intends to at least “go down swinging.”
Randy Hayes, the founder of Rainforest Action Network, is an author, filmmaker and environmentalist. He is executive director of Foundation Earth and a consultant to the World Future Council, based in Washington, DC.
As the new chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) is being showered with campaign contributions — more than a half million dollars in the first quarter of 2019.
Journalist David Daley, who lives in Neal’s district, reviewed the fundraising and spending reports in a recent column in the Boston Globe (see link below). He found contributions from lobbyists and the corporate interests they work for, like Amazon, GE, Deloitte, Eastman Chemical — and most of those corporations paid no federal taxes last year.
One donor, H&R Block, saw progress on a longtime legislative goal: banning the IRS from providing its own online tax preparation system.
Federal Election Commission filings show that Neal spent over $467,000 in the first quarter, much of it for big-dollar fundraising events at five-star restaurants, extravagant hotels — including a Ritz-Carlton — and on luxury suites at sporting events and concerts.
Neal is leading the Democrats’ effort to get the Internal Revenue Service to deliver President Donald Trump’s tax returns to him, as required by law. A recent news report also notes that Neal has declined to release his own tax returns.
David Daley is the former editor of Salon.com, the author of Ratfucked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and the forthcomingUnrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed the Gerrymander and Reinvented Democracy. Access his Boston Globecolumn hereand a second report here.
Technical note: Skype produced some uneven levels that produced distortion in the last few minutes of this podcast, and we apologize to your ears.
We keep trying to reform our political system to make it more “democratic.” Grassroots organizations across the world are pushing reforms, trying to bring politics closer to the people. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates. Ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly.
Many democracies now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more issue-focussed parties, rather than two dominant,“big tent” ones. At the same time, voters keep getting angrier.
It appears that popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide. What if we are going in the totally wrong direction?
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk to Ian Shapiro, a professor of political science and the director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is the co-author of Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself.
Shapiro argues that the devolving power of political parties — and the evolving power of grassroots — is at the core of the problem. To revive confidence in governance, he says, we must restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.
Shapiro explains that when voters have too much control, it often sets the system up for failure and disappointment. Instead, we should look at political parties as teams that bundle lots of issues and put many programs in front of voters that are not based on single-issue constituencies.
Voters need to understand, Shapiro tells Jeff Schechtman, that there is an opportunity-cost to everything, and that we have to approach all issues with moderation.
Comparing the political process to “last best offer arbitration,” he explains why moderation is even more important than compromise, which often leads to extreme positions as a starting point.
In the end, Shapiro shows how and why political parties have gotten weaker — and that many of our problems of governance stem from exactly that.
Martin Sheil, a former IRS investigator, walks us through what we know about Trump’s taxes.
It seems that every time we experience a “gilded age,” the rich, perhaps worried that the pitchforks will soon be at the gates, increase their giving.
According to David Callahan, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast and the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, political polarization has divided the world of large-scale giving as never before.
Each side looks askance at the philanthropists on the other side. For those on the left, the Koch brothers are evil in their giving. For those on the right, George Soros is a symbol of all that is wrong with giving.
Callahan, also the author of The Cheating Culture, explains how the billionaire class, which, over the past 40 years has led the charge to shrink the size of government, now seeks to privatize public good. The super-rich aim to mobilize their wealth and their “I alone can fix it” philosophy to determine where dollars are needed in the public sphere.
Callahan reminds us that this has led to the delusion that the wealthy, no matter how that wealth is acquired, wield some special powers to determine what’s best. The delusion has been amplified by the current occupant of the White House.
All of this, Callahan says, has led to the virtual institutionalization of the wealth gap. What we need now, he argues, is less accumulated wealth dispensed by private individuals, and more redistribution of wealth under public auspices — allowing people to democratically select what goals and values they want to advance.
Given the ongoing standoff between Congress and the White House, it’s becoming clearer each day that the “tiebreaker” will be the 2020 election.
So it’s encouraging to learn that the prospects for voting reform are not as bleak as some stories might lead us to believe. Amid voter apathy and voter suppression efforts, there are leaders and activists in some states and local communities across the country who are successfully working to bring more people to the polls.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and an expert on state constitutions and election law procedure. He is also the co-author of an election-law case book and co-editor of Election Law Stories.
Douglas argues that change best happens locality by locality and that, in spite of all the bad news, he is seeing many new efforts at voter expansion. Promising local experiments, mostly in blue states but some bipartisan efforts as well, include felon re-enfranchisement and lowering the voting age.
Douglas views voting reform as a two-pronged approach. Herculean efforts are necessary to fight back against the harsh tactics of voter suppression. At the same time, uncompromising resistance has to go hand-in-hand with proactive efforts to extend the franchise. If we are only engaged in the fight against suppression, he says “we are only doing half of what’s possible.”
Some examples: lowering the voting age to 16 — coupled with different kinds of civics education —and the availability of modern voting systems that still provide paper back-up. Citing the positive results of automatic and same-day voter registration, he shows why these efforts are increasing turnout.
Douglas points out that even in Kentucky and Iowa, two of the states aggressively engaged in voter suppression, some progress is being made. He details some inspiring stories of voting reforms that give hope for the future of democracy in the US.
French Canadian journalist Hugo Meunier specializes in “immersion reporting.” He spent three months working at a Walmart store and offers an insider’s account of the plight of low-paid worker bees who stock the shelves and endure abuse from bargain-hunting shoppers.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast interview, Meunier explains the training and indoctrination he received, as well as the company’s attempts to motivate workers with daily reports on store sales and repeated dangling of a $2,000 annual performance bonus. Employees are required to watch training videos and attend morning meetings that include a ritual Walmart cheer.
Meunier offers some amusing stories from his Walmart experience, and details the sinister side of the world’s biggest retailer. For instance, during the peak sales month of December, he and his fellow “associates” saw their hours cut in an effort to improve the corporate bottom line. The workers’ loss of income was especially painful during the holidays.
Hugo Meunier’s book, Walmart: Diary of an Associate (Fernwood Publishing), has just been released in English.
Starting in 2007, Ecuador reformed its police and decriminalized gang membership. A study in 2017 showed the murder rate dropped by over 400 percent.
Bowe Bergdahl’s story exemplifies government dysfunction, political posturing, and a failed American policy.
Contrary to popular and long held assumptions, global population is declining. The environmental consequences are good, the economic consequences are bad, says this podcast guest.
The controversial Keystone XL pipeline is not dead yet.
On March 15 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court injunction that blocks construction of the proposed pipeline. This important decision, which has received little media coverage, is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
Our podcast guest today is Stephan Volker, the veteran environmental lawyer who represents the lead plaintiffs in the case: the North Coast Rivers Alliance and the Indigenous Environmental Network. The injunction was issued by a federal judge in Montana last November, and the appeals court found that TransCanada is “not likely to prevail on the merits.”
At this stage, construction of the pipeline is completely halted. Volker expects TransCanada, in its appeal to the Supreme Court, to argue that the “presidential permit” issued by Donald Trump is not reviewable by the courts, effectively placing an act of the president above the law.
Volker, based in Berkeley, CA, served for many years at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and EarthJustice. He’s litigated over 300 environmental cases in his career.
The FAA’s decision allowing Boeing to do its own safety assessments — while the company president told President Trump that all was fine with the 737 Max — raises serious questions about the effectiveness of regulatory agencies charged with protecting our health and safety.
In another critical public health area, the government has virtually partnered with the pharmaceutical industry to deal with the opioid crisis. It’s a lot like asking the arsonist to help put out the fire he started.
According to Jonathan Marks, a bioethicist at the Penn State University, and our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, this is a troubling and dangerous trend that’s become more pronounced in recent years.
He reminds us of how and why the government was so slow to respond to the faulty ignition switches in many GM cars, why exploding gas tanks went unrepaired, why tobacco deaths went unchecked for so long, and why government fails to take climate change seriously.
The reason in each case: The government’s regulatory agencies felt the need to work with business in public-private partnerships. This has cost the lives of thousands.
Marks says much of this was based on the misguided idea that we needed less conflict between the public and private sectors, and that by working together, more could be accomplished. Marks contends nothing could be further from the truth.
He argues that, even in the face of campaign donations and lobbying efforts, conflict between government and corporations needs to be maximized, and that only when companies are profoundly unhappy with the regulators, is it clear that regulators are doing their job. It’s something to think about before getting on a plane, or taking that next prescription.
Victor Wallis is a professor at the Berklee College of Music and was for 20 years the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. Several months ago he joined us to talk about the radical intervention he saw as necessary to deal with the threat from climate change. He outlined this in his book Red-Green Revolution.
Now Victor Wallis returns to WhoWhatWhy to talk about his broad alternative framework of America, which he lays out in his new work, Democracy Denied.
This project began as a series of lectures he was to give in China, to an audience that didn’t understand America. As he worked on it, he realized that many of the ideas he was presenting were also not known by most Americans.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, he talks first about what he sees as the flawed notion of “American exceptionalism:” the supposed moral authority by which we proselytize for freedom while having the highest incarceration rate in the world and increasing levels of inequality.
He explains how our moralizing leads to and perpetuates the kind of police state necessary to take on a war on drugs, encourage law and order, and plan for potential rebellion.
Wallis talks about US imperialism— 800 bases around the world, the projection of American power directly on to the regimes of other countries, and our constant need to pass judgment on those regimes. This is one of the hallmarks of imperialism, as he sees it.
He combines all of this with a sharp critique of the long history of racism in America and shows how it has, from our very beginnings, defined how we see, judge, and sometimes look down upon, people around the world who are not just like us.
Wallis provides us with his alternative view of the world in a kind of economic and geopolitical tour de force.
Some have decried the Green New Deal because it touches on numerous areas outside of climate change, including universal health care, a universal basic income, job guarantees and worker rights. The assumption has been that climate change exists in some kind of a vacuum.
Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher, writer on greenhouse gases, professor at Lancaster University, and our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, argues that the critics have it all wrong — because everything is connected.
We cannot even begin to address climate change without also looking at food, biodiversity, income inequality, population, plastics, and more.
Berners-Lee says that the challenges facing humanity today are inescapably global and interconnected. It no longer works, he tells Jeff Schechtman, to tackle environmental issues one at a time or to keep science, economics, sociology, politics, and psychology separate from one another. All parts of our complex global system must be addressed simultaneously if we are to have any positive impact.
Despite all our individual and collective efforts with alternative energy and conservation, we have not made even the slightest improvement in the global “carbon curve,” Berners-Lee says. Moreover, in a kind of environmental Catch-22, it turns out that greater energy efficiency can sometimes increase carbon output.
Nevertheless, Berners-Lee is slightly optimistic that we can solve some of these problems and improve our global quality of life.
After all, he reminds us, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos notwithstanding, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to find another planet to move to anytime soon. As Berners-Lee says, “there is no planet B.”
A headline in the Economist shouted recently that “socialism is storming back.” Certainly, with the wealth gap, declining social mobility, and climate change, it’s easy to see why some are losing faith in a capitalist society.
But should the debate really be about capitalism vs. socialism — or is it a question of too much of a good thing that needs rebalancing?. After all, we once couldn’t get enough of the cars, antibiotics, and entertainment technology that capitalism produced in abundance. Today, that very abundance threatens to overwhelm us.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, journalist and Fast Company founder Bill Taylor talks to Jeff Schechtman about the language of our current political debate, and why rebuilding the public square is so essential to the survival of capitalism.
Taylor talks about the commodification of just about everything these days, arguing that we have “drifted from a “market economy” to a “market society.” The resulting lack of a common civic life, he says, works against the common good.
Schechtman and Taylor examine why it’s so essential for business, and leaders in the “commanding heights” of the economy, to take heed before the social, political, and economic consequences become dire.
Rather than getting caught up in the polarized debate of the moment, this is a conversation that looks at the things we can actually do to make a change for the better.
A great deal remains to be discovered about the disgraced lawyer’s Russia ties and the nature of his nearly two-decade dalliance with Trump. Will Congress ask?
Spoiler Alert! This podcast features a detailed discussion of the story portrayed in the film Green Book. If you haven’t seen it yet, and plan to, please save this podcast for later.
The movie Green Book has earned accolades and attacks since it was released in December. The controversies are sure to be rekindled by 91st Academy Awards Sunday, Feb. 24 — Green Book received five Oscar nominations, including “best picture.” Earlier it garnered three Golden Globe awards, including “best supporting actor” for Mahershala Ali for his portrayal of acclaimed classical and jazz pianist Dr. Donald Shirley. And as a Hollywood biopic that’s “based on a true story,” it has drawn sharp criticism from Shirley’s family members, who say the film distorts and fabricates key elements of the musician’s “true story,” while ignoring powerful parts of his real story.
Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III is an author and national radio host who interviewed Shirley’s brother, sister-in-law, and niece before the film was released. They say they were not contacted or consulted by producer/director Peter Farrelly or his screenplay co-writer, Nick Vallelonga.
The story, fictionalized but inspired by actual characters, is based on the perspective of Vallelonga’s father, also known as “Tony Lip,” portrayed as a racist, Italian-American nightclub bouncer who was Shirley’s driver on a 1962 concert tour that took them deep into the Jim Crow south.
In this podcast interview, Leon details a long list of what he thinks are inaccuracies in the film, from Shirley’s early life to his family relationships to the film’s insinuations that he was gay, a boozer, and a black man who’d never had fried chicken or listened to the music of Little Richard.
While we don’t expect Hollywood versions of people’s lives to be accurate or literal portrayals, Leon feels that the wholesale changes to Shirley’s story — while purporting to tell his story using his name — are remarkable.
Leon and, he argues, other African American observers see this as part of an all-too-familiar Hollywood pattern: using racial stereotypes to entertain white audiences with feel-good stories at the expense of black narratives. As Leon puts it, “There are all these tropes and stereotypes that they play to in the film, which make their story so much more plausible and acceptable to an audience, but just go against some of the fundamental elements and premises of who the guy really was.”
Wilmer Leon is the host of Inside the Issues with Leon on Sirius/XM channel 126. You can read his commentary on Green Book here. The detailed critique we refer to, written by Brooke C. Obie, is here.
The number of candidates vying for the Democratic nomination next year could smash all records. But such a large field also means that most voters will likely end up disappointed because their preferred candidate is eliminated. Is an election where most people’s preferred candidate loses a good thing?
Ranked choice voting (RCV) could help fix that problem.
San Francisco has used RCV — also known as instant runoff voting — in local elections since 2006, and the system decided a 2018 congressional election in Maine. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig’s group, Equal Citizens, is proposing the use of RCV in presidential primaries in 2020.
Adam Eichen, a self-described democracy wonk, is a communications strategist for Equal Citizens. In this podcast, Eichen and Peter B. Collins discuss the strengths and weaknesses of RCV, and the steps required to implement it — starting in New Hampshire, traditionally the first primary state.
With a roster featuring as many as 20 candidates, voters whose first-choice candidate is eliminated would still influence the outcome with their second and third selections.
One benefit of RCV is that it encourages candidates — aware that they might need second- and third-choice votes — to refrain from using negative ads or personal attacks against their opponents.
Deciding the winner of an RCV election can take weeks, a reality that might frustrate TV watchers, online influencers, and media executives eager for conclusive results on election night. Eichen and Collins also discuss the pros and cons of eliminating one-on-one runoffs, which usually attract lower voter turnout.
Adam Eichen is co-author, with Frances Moore Lappé, of Daring Democracy. You can read the opinion piece about RCV that he co-wrote here. A crowded 2020 presidential primary field calls for ranked choice voting.
The recent charges of “anti-Semitism” leveled against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have reignited the debate about the power and influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. They have been looking at this issue for years and co-authored the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
In this week’s conversation, Mearsheimer and Walt examine the efforts of AIPAC, one of the most powerful political lobbies in the United States, and those of other Israeli interest groups. The duo note that even though these groups claim their advocacy is based not on religion but rather on what they characterize as a shared “strategic interest,” any disagreement with them is immediately met with accusations of anti-Semitism.
Mearsheimer and Walt talk about the difference between US interests and those promoted by right-wing Israeli elements and their backers.
It’s an unfiltered look into one of today’s most controversial issues.
By scouring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report and some declassified CIA documents, reporter Jeff Kaye has confirmed that there were two separate rendition, detention and interrogation programs run by separate branches of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.
The first, which we refer to as “Program A” in this podcast, is already known. Consultants James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were paid over $80 million , we are told, to reverse-engineer torture techniques from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program designed to train troops and spies to resist torture.
Kaye builds a strong case that this effort amounted to human experimentation — for the purpose of designed to identifying the most effective torture techniques.
“Program B” relied on “standard” interrogation tactics that included some forms of coercive interrogation, and it was not subject to the management and monitoring systems of the first one.
Kaye says the separate programs were “stovepiped” so that front-line personnel assigned to one program didn’t know about the other. But top CIA management, —including current director Gina Haspel, former director George Tenet, and top lieutenants Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez —, had to have known about both programs., Kaye argues.
Dr. Jeff Kaye is a retired psychologist who has been practicing journalism for 15 years. His report on the two programs is here, and the article on Gina Haspel’s role at three CIA“black” sites is here.
This week, the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing in over eight years on any kind of gun legislation. In that intervening period, names like Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Parkland have been seared into our collective consciousness.
However, the hearings this week focused only on HR 8, a piece of legislation that would institute universal background checks. We learn in this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast with Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), the chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, that while this particular legislation may have a chance of becoming law, it seems to be the beginning and the end of what’s possible.
In response to questions about legislation banning assault weapons and bump stocks, the congressman feels the chances for passage are slight, at best. Although a lot of gun-control bills may be proposed in the coming year, and there may be public support for many of them, this week’s podcast makes clear that very little beyond background checks can be expected to become law.
Related: What Gun Background Checks Can’t Detect: Stupidity
No matter how unseasonably cold or hot it gets or how powerful the storms are, there will be those who still don’t accept the urgency of climate change. For the rest of us, who believe we humans are destroying life as know it on earth, the group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has a message: We must change our behavior now, or die.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Rory Varrato, a US spokesperson for the group, explains that XR was formed last fall amid one of the the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades. He notes that, unlike other climate-change activist groups, XR seeks not just to bring attention to the issue but to force action on several non-negotiable demands.
At the top of the list, according to Varrato, are: 1) getting government, corporations, and the media to address the emergency of global climate change head-on; 2) bringing about nothing short of net-zero carbon output by 2025; and 3) reorganizing society to include direct democracy, citizen assemblies, and “climate justice.”
Varrato takes direct aim at global capitalism as we know it. He lays out a radical agenda that includes a slower, more sustainable way of life for all and a more local approach to even the most complex issues.
While acknowledging that there is not always a straight line between policy reform and civil disobedience, he and his colleagues see the latter as a starting point.
A penetrating look into the transformative influence of black feminist political strategy and principles in mainstream US politics, especially since the 2016 election.
Sixty prominent Americans have signed a letter calling on Congress to reopen the investigations into the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The letter, signed by historians, journalists, lawyers, and other experts on the four political murders, is an effort to create a national truth and reconciliation commission to begin a reversal of disastrous social and cultural divisions fueled by decades of government sanctioned lies.
Longtime journalist and author David Talbot, who's written several books about the assassinations and the deep state, is a leader of this effort. He talks to Jeff Schechtman about what he hopes this effort will accomplish, about the corrosive impact that the lack of truth about these killings has had on the fragile US democracy, and why now is the ideal time for the nation to handle the truth.
Related: JFK Assassination Triggered More Than Kennedy’s Death
Related: A Close Look at Allen Dulles — a Father of the Deep State
Everyday we look at unfolding news and events through the lens of politics. Suppose we tried to understand it all instead through the lens of psychology? Suppose we got beyond the zero-sum political construct, and into how we have been and are still being manipulated.
What if we realized that President Donald Trump is just a symptom of the deeper crumbling psychological infrastructure of our country? One that makes us so vulnerable to divisive political tactics?
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is psychologist and attorney, Dr. Bryant Welch. In his book State of Confusion, he argues that these are questions not of politics, but about the health of the American mind.
Welch talks to Jeff Schechtman about the long-term impact of today’s sophisticated forms of political manipulation, all of which undercut our ability to seriously deal with modern problems. In an era of change and the onslaught of technology, Welch explains how we are particularly susceptible to paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy — and how they can easily be used to undermine our ability to function rationally.
In Welch’s theories, we can see the root cause of the power of religious groups, and why long-accepted rational scientific ideas are suddenly now under siege. According to Welch, half of Americans today are “suggestive and regressed,” and he says that we are now also suffering from a kind of collective trauma.
President Donald Trump will probably never build one foot of his wall. Still, today there are 650 miles of border wall already dividing the US and Mexico. It’s almost one-third of the entire border. It divides cities, families, private property, and even impacts wildlife and habitats.
We journey to the border in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, as Jeff Schechtman is joined by Ronald Rael, associate professor in the department of architecture at UC Berkeley.
According to Rael, the borderlands are like a third nation, combining some of the best of language, food, and culture of the US and Mexico. More profoundly, the existing wall is just as much a place of connectivity as it is of division.
Rael explains that the current wall is actually a form of architecture. As such it defines space and in so doing defines places. It keeps people apart, but he details how it also encourages the coming together of people in unique ways.
Since we are putting them up, the current walls are structures that are always built on the US side of the border. The result are vast borderlands between the wall and Mexico. With no viable uses, this creates an otherworldliness in the areas that are sequestered behind it.
Rael points out that over the next 25 years, it will cost $49 billion just to maintain the existing structures. He speculates on what else could be built along the border with that money: things like massive solar fields or water treatment plants that would have a far greater and more positive impact on both the US and Mexico.
The recent UN report on climate change indicated that we could be facing existential risks — ever more extreme weather events and rising sea levels — within 20 years. So what is the world to do?
Jeff Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, joins Jeff Schechtman for this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. Goodell, the author of The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, takes us deep into the grim reality we’re already facing: By century’s end, hundreds of millions of people will be retreating from the world’s shores. From island nations to the world’s major cities, inundated coastal regions will disappear. Bold engineering projects to hold back the water may buy some time, but despite international efforts and tireless research, no permanent solution is in sight. No barriers or walls will protect us in the end from the drowning of the world as we know it.
Goodell has stated, “We’ve spent 40 years denying the risks of climate change, thinking that if we can just get everyone to buy a Prius and recycle their plastic, everything will be OK. The message of recent fires and hurricanes is that it will not be OK.”
We’re living, according to Goodell, “in a new world now, and we had better get ready.” He reminds us that it’s not too late — if we rethink almost every aspect of how we live in the world.
Two weeks ago Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made a splash when tweeting about what she thought to be $21 trillion in misappropriated Pentagon money that she claimed was enough to pay for Medicare for all. She based her conclusions on misreading a complex article in the Nation, “The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed,” by investigative journalist Dave Lindorff. It’s too bad since her misreading took the focus away from the real story, which revealed the Department of Defense’s (DOD) hugely corrupt budgeting practices.
The author of that article, Dave Lindorff, is Jeff Schechtman’s guest in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. According to Lindorff, more than 25 years ago, Congress ordered DOD to submit to an independent audit. After decades of stalling, the department finally failed its first ever audit this month. Lindorf shows how they are not just cooking the books, but literally making numbers up and, in so doing, are perpetuating a massive accounting fraud on the American people.
Lindorff's investigation reveals not only why the Pentagon failed the audit, but why it resisted for so long. He explains how $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions, on both sides of the ledger, between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained.
In this conversation, Lindorff details how the fraud worked to inflate an already huge budget, the accounting tricks being used to fund secret programs, and how clueless Congress and the American people have been about the biggest single line item in the US federal budget.
While Ocasio-Cortez got it wrong about the $21 trillion, there is no question that the Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs.
President Ronald Reagan introduced a range of myths about America’s social safety net, led by his images of “welfare queens” and the implication that most recipients of public aid were African American. President Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” and over the objections of many progressives, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996.
Our guests in this WhoWhatWhy podcast were centrally involved in the policy debates and political battles that signaled the end of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and reduced the Democratic Party’s focus on America’s poor. Former Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a one-time welfare mother elected to the House in 1992, shares insights and anecdotes, and laments that Clinton’s framing of the issues continues to this day with little change. While she has great affection for President Barack Obama, Woolsey says he never focused much on the poor and the social safety net.
Felicia Kornbluh has studied the issues for decades, and offers informed criticism from a feminist perspective. She reveals the collaboration between Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose “Contract with America” allowed Republicans to take control of the House in 1994. She makes a strong case that Clinton’s vision of the “New Democrats” was driven by a desire to attract wealthy and corporate donors to fund his center/right makeover of the party.
Woolsey, who represented a northern California district for 20 years starting in 1993, speaks candidly about raising three children as a single mom and relying on welfare for several years. Kornbluh is associate professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont — and co-author of the new book Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective. Her co-author is Gwendolyn Mink, who served as an adviser to her mother, Rep. Patsy Mink, who was a forceful opponent of Clinton’s reforms.
While President Donald Trump has used truculence, bluster, populism, and manufactured division to hide the true nature of his agenda, George Herbert Walker Bush used manners, civility, and grace to hide the truth of his and his family’s agenda.
Both are very similar in their objectives. Both have enabled the continued transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society. Both have sought to protect the interests of corporations and rich friends. But as we witnessed this week, Bush and the Bush family were far more effective with honey than with vinegar.
To wrap up this week of seemingly non-stop hagiographic coverage of George H.W. Bush, Jeff Schechtman talks with Russ Baker about the Bush family and Baker’s blockbuster book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.
Baker notes that the job of journalism is to ask questions and present facts — NOT to be co-opted by the fawning of sycophants that today turn funerals into a form of entertainment.
Amid the pomp and pageantry of a state funeral, Baker tells us of little-known and little-publicized aspects of Bush’s life and career: how he got a covert early start as an intelligence operative decades before becoming CIA director; how his father, on behalf of Wall Street, chose an unknown Richard Nixon to run for Congress; how he couldn’t remember where he was when John F. Kennedy was shot (Baker knows); and how he played a deep role in the illegal Iran-Contra affair while keeping his fingerprints off the official record.
Baker shows us that — from the most elite prep schools to the secret sanctum of Skull and Bones to the reinvention of this well-connected New England clan as Texas oilmen — for over a hundred years the Bush family has been about the protection, extension, and cohesion of America’s ruling class.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has made lots of money peddling slanted news as “fair and balanced” on his Fox News Channel. The man who built it, Roger Ailes, retired in disgrace in 2016 and died a year later. He changed American media in many ways, and used fear as a driving force at Fox — and earlier in campaigns for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes is a new documentary that debuts on December 7 in theaters and online. We talk with producer/director Alexis Bloom about Ailes’s early work as producer of The Mike Douglas Show, where he met Richard Nixon. When he worked for George H.W. Bush’s campaign in 1988, Ailes deployed the infamous Willie Horton ad in one of his early assaults on the liberals he saw as the enemies of his cause.
Bloom shares several interesting anecdotes, including how Ailes started Fox News to spite his former employers at NBC, how he gave fishing lessons to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a TV ad, and his exploitation of women on screen and off.
Alexis Bloom is producer and director of Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes. Bloom also produced Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
With the news cycle of late nearly engulfed by the questions — and spy games — swirling around “Russiagate,” taking a fresh look at Watergate could be an especially worthwhile endeavor. Luckily, revisiting the rise and fall of President Richard Nixon is exactly what Shane O'Sullivan does for us in his new book, Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA.
O’Sullivan — Jeff Schechtman’s guest in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, and an author/filmmaker whose previous work has dug into the Kennedy assassinations — takes us beyond the popular Woodward-and-Bernstein Hollywood scenario, revealing instead the deepest workings of Nixon’s cronies. From the Anna Chennault affair and the Ellsberg break-in to Watergate and the CIA, the author provides new information in a number of areas.
O’Sullivan examines what President Lyndon B. Johnson and the CIA knew about then-GOP nominee Nixon’s back channel to Chennault — allegedly used in order to scuttle the Paris peace talks and thereby gain an advantage in the final days before the 1968 election — and why they did nothing about it.
He examines the distinction between what the CIA as an agency may have known, and what individual CIA operatives knew. He probes the deep relationship between Howard Hunt and CIA Director Richard Helms. And he seeks to further understand the role — and the missteps — of James McCord, and his possible role in a possible hidden CIA agenda.
An author argues that, love it or hate it, capitalism is making planetary crises worse.
Fifty-five years ago President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. The widely accepted narrative for all these many decades is that he was murdered by lone-wolf gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Yet the evidence is overwhelming that there was at least one other shooter present in Dealey Plaza. Skeptical? There’s really only one piece of evidence you need to see in order to overcome your doubts.
Do yourself a favor: watch the Zapruder film. This was taken by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, who captured the assassination on his handheld 8mm camera. See that horrific headshot, with the president being thrown backwards and to the left? Where do you surmise that shot came from?
If you guessed somewhere to the front-right of the president (where numerous eyewitnesses said they heard a shot or shots coming from), congratulations — you’re using your common sense and the reasonable presumption that Newtonian mechanics are still applicable.
But the defenders of the lone-gunman narrative would have us believe that in this case we need to suspend our common-sense notions, to press “pause” on the basic laws of motion. They tell us that all the shots actually came from behind the president — fired by Oswald alone.
Of course, you can dig further — not only into the voluminous evidence from Dealey Plaza, but about Oswald himself. What was he doing in Dallas? What about his connections to US intelligence? Was he pro-Castro? Anti-Castro? Who was he connected with in New Orleans? What about Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, and his connections to the mob? You can work your way outward from Dallas until you find yourself knocking on the door of the halls of power.
A much easier approach — almost as easy as watching the Zapruder film — is to examine the well-documented, unambiguous evidence of government deception in this case — simple evidence that does not depend on the words of eyewitnesses, or interpretation. A few of our own brief reports on this are here, here, and here. And please go here to see exposed some amazing tricks performed by scientists to support the government narrative.
In order to really take on the JFK assassination, you have to be willing to face the fact that powerful interests in high places have no qualms about overturning the will of the people for their own benefit.
And they’re confident enough to do it in broad daylight.
Which brings us to the conversation below, hosted by The Ripple Effect Podcast. It features a lively back-and-forth with WhoWhatWhy’s Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker, and researchers Jeff Morley and James DiEugenio, each a well-respected JFK assassination expert.
Want to hear what actually happened to change the course of world history on November 22, 1963? Click below.
California forests have long been a disaster waiting to happen. Forest density, antiquated forest practices, stressed and dead trees as a result of bug infestation, conflicts between state and federal government, and private property owners wanting to live close to the “wildland-urban interface” are just a few of the problems.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with longtime California environmental reporter, Julie Cart, about just how bad the problem is and what is being done to prevent more death and destruction.
She explains that a full 30 percent of California is forested. Of this total, 60 percent is owned by the federal government, 2 percent by the state of California, and the rest is owned either privately or by local governments. Each has a different approach to dealing with the problem.
California has an estimated 129 million dead trees, an acknowledged factor in spreading wildfires, Cart says. The cost for removing a single dead tree is approximately $1,000, and the optics of cutting down trees, even dead ones, in a state with strong environmental rules make remediation even more difficult.
The impact of climate change on forest fires involves a deadly feedback loop. So many of the fires are a direct result of extended drought related to climate change. But in torching so many dead trees, a severe fire season of one or two months can release enormous amounts of carbon into the air — more than that emitted by all the cars in California each year — which significantly adds to the buildup of greenhouse gases fueling climate change.
Last year’s fires cost over $9 billion; this year the toll will be even higher. In both dollars and lives lost. Cart points out that while Cal Fire and the US Forest Service have vast resources, so much of those resources are diverted to firefighting, leaving little time or money to do the necessary work of prevention.
Cart suggests that perhaps the real solution is simply to tell people, as they do in Australia, that if they choose to live in certain areas, they cannot expect a fire truck to roll up the driveway during the next disaster. They will have to learn how to fend for themselves.
Every election cycle brings with it one state that comes to represent the zeitgeist of that election. We all remember Florida during the 2000 election. In years past, as Nixon used to say, it was all about Ohio. In 2016, Pennsylvania was the tipping point.
This midterm, all eyes were on the Peachtree state, as Georgia came to define not only Democratic energy but the issues of election integrity and voter suppression that were infused with so much political concern in 2018.
This is, in part, why WhoWhatWhy made election integrity and Georgia the centerpiece of its coverage of this election. With reporters and videographers on the ground — with more resources deployed than many news organizations two and three times its size — WhoWhatWhy “owned” this issue.
But as Russ Baker and Klaus Marre point out in this week’s podcast, it was about more than the candidates and the partisan politics. The focus was on how voter suppression impacted real people: citizens who wanted to vote, who took their obligation seriously, who cared and thought deeply about the issues, but were thwarted or unconscionably delayed in the exercise of their franchise.
Unlike Russia or Facebook or hacking, these problems were homegrown in Georgia, and only by being there — on the front lines — could WhoWhatWhy do the kind of reporting that our readers and listeners have come to expect.
Listen to WhoWhatWhy founder and editor-in-chief Russ Baker and senior editor Klaus Marre talk about what this all means, why voter suppression anywhere matters to all of us, and what WhoWhatWhy’s ongoing coverage will look like.
As a regular reader of WhoWhyWhy, you know that we have focused like a laser on election integrity and uncovered story after story about voter suppression in Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere. But important as all of this is, it’s only part of the bigger story.
It was Joseph Stalin who said that “it's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.” The 2000 presidential election was a fantastic example of why that matters.
You all remember chads, hanging chads, punch cards, Votomatic machines, and how 540 votes and five Supreme Court justices changed America. What if those hanging chads had not been an accident? What if it wasn’t the fault — as was claimed at the time — of incompetent voters who didn’t know how to completely punch out a chad? What if the cards themselves had been engineered to fail?
In a never-before-told story that reads like a detective novel, investigative journalist Stephen Singular finds himself on the floor of the factory that made the infamous punch cards, in negotiations with 60 Minutes trying to get their help, and being given hundreds of unused punch cards to test as he tries to unravel the first great electoral mystery of the 21st century.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Singular talks to Jeff Schechtman about his just-published ebook Stolen Future: The Untold Story of the 2000 Election.
Singular takes us inside the machines that manufacture the perforated cards, whose precision, down to 1/5,000th of an inch, shaped the fate of the republic. Imagine that the war in Iraq could have been caused by a dull blade in one high-speed perforating machine in one factory, or maybe engendered by foul play.
Singular examines how the failure of punch cards not only impacted the 2000 election, but became the reason for states to place orders for hundreds of millions of dollars in new electronic voting systems — made by the very same private companies responsible for the 2000 mishap.
He tells Schechtman about ES&S, an Omaha-based company with close Republican ties and far-right roots, that manufactures most of the systems to which we entrust our vote.
Singular takes us inside 60 Minutes and their failure to pursue a story that may have been too hot for them to handle.
In the best tradition of investigative journalism, Singular’s journey goes from working with an old friend to test an idea, to having door after door slammed in his face. It’s a story that should add a sober new dimension to the efforts to preserve our democracy next week.
This week feels like the culmination of two years of attacks on journalism — including President Donald Trump’s ongoing denunciations of the press as “the enemy of the people,” the bombs sent to CNN along with other targets of Trump’s verbal venom, and more revelations about the horrifying murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi, who feared for his life in the months leading up to his killing, spoke about much of this with international journalist Rula Jebreal in one of his last interviews. She is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Jebreal talks about Khashoggi’s views on the Saudi regime of Mohammed bin Salman — views that were, by any objective standard, nuanced and measured. He told Jebreal, in that last interview, that he was not seeking the overthrow of the bin Salman regime, but its reform. Jebreal explains how mournful Khashoggi was that he had tried, in vain, to foster the reformist impulses of the young crown prince.
Khashoggi saw the crown prince as a deeply divided figure: While bin Salman sought to win accolades as a reformer, he also wanted to rule as his grandfather and great-grandfather had — as a tribal leader of unquestioned authority.
It was Khashoggi’s exposure of bin Salman as a ruler trying to have it both ways that Jebreal thinks most angered him. She says that Khashoggi was murdered “for the crime of having an opinion.”
Jebreal shares with Schechtman what else she learned from Khashoggi, who was her friend. She talks passionately of Khashoggi’s views on the Saudi-led, US-supported war in Yemen; the role of journalism in how Americans view the Saudis; and how shocking it is that defense of the Saudi regime is still permissible in polite society.
She tells Schechtman that Khashoggi thought it would probably take a major crisis to change US policy toward Saudi Arabia. What he didn’t know was that his murder might be the trigger for that crisis.
While the congressional midterm elections and some statewide races dominate mainstream media coverage, there’s a lot of action at the local, grassroots level. As minority communities grow and the dominance of the white majority wanes, immigrants and first generation Americans are running for office — and winning.
Sayu Bhojwani served as Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York City, and eight years ago she founded the nonprofit New American Leaders. Her new book is People Like Us: The New Wave of Candidates Knocking on Democracy’s Door. She profiles a new generation of candidates of color across the country, and their paths to election. Bhojwani explains that the ACLU has sued local governments to enforce a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to establish district elections. Compared to running “at large” in an entire jurisdiction, district elections lower the barrier to entry for new candidates, allowing community-based campaigns with smaller budgets and more personal contact with voters.
Bhojwani also notes that, in states like Arizona, public campaign financing has empowered people with limited resources to challenge powerful incumbents, and win. We also touch on Michigan’s ballot initiative 18-2, which would establish a citizens’ redistricting commission to draw the district lines following the 2020 Census. And Bhojwani closes with some advice for listeners who are considering running for local office.
WhoWhatWhy continues to expose voter suppression across the country. With reporters on the ground in Georgia and Florida, and ongoing reports from North Carolina, North Dakota, and other places, readers are getting to witness first hand the impact on minority voters of rejection of absentee ballots, the extremes of “exact match,” the consolidation of polling places, photo ID laws, poor voting machine security, and other methods, all designed to devalue the vote.
Our stories, however, are only a first step. We can point out the problems but others have to take the next step and do something about them. That is why groups like the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law are so important. They are fighting the legal battles in court on behalf of disenfranchised voters. Where once the US Justice Department might have stepped in to enforce the right of American citizens to cast their vote, now it has been left to outside lawyers — many working pro bono — to fend off ever more sophisticated voter suppression efforts.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. In many cases, after courts have intervened in favor of voters’ rights, legislatures have come back to tweak their suppression laws in an attempt to place further obstacles in the path of minority voters trying to exercise their franchise.
Still, there have been numerous successes — many of them based on reporters exposing suppression problems and groups like the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights fighting in court for fair elections.
It’s always scary to hear a Wall Streeter utter the hackneyed phrase, “this time it’s different.” And yet today it really is. Especially the economic conditions that make up the operating system for today’s world.
As markets ride a roller coaster this week, as the political environment is heavily focused on international trade and tariffs on manufactured objects like cars and jeans, the reality is that all of this is yesterday's way of looking at the economy. This, according to Jonathan Haskel, who is a member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (the equivalent of the US Federal Reserve), a professor of economics at Imperial College London, and the director of the school’s doctoral program. He has also taught economics at the London Business School, the Tuck School at Dartmouth, and the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Haskel explains in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast that, while people once invested in things that grow (in the agrarian age) or in things that could be made with steel and sweat (in the manufacturing age), today, no matter how hard politicians try and take us back, the investments are made in human capital, in ideas, in imagination, and in zeros and ones. The problem for economists, according to Haskel, is that things like R&D, marketing, design, and software are much harder to measure and value.
The idea, Haskel tells Jeff Schechtman, is that intangible assets are created, distributed, and often valued differently than traditionally manufactured items. “Products you can’t touch have a very different set of dynamics in terms of competition and risk and how you value the companies that make them.”
Trying to determine the impact of all of this on the economy — when much of what is produced is abstract, symbolic, and speculative — has been difficult, Haskel explains, because so much has eluded traditional description, measurement, and accounting.
For example, he laments that we lack the ability to measure a company, even one as big as Microsoft, whose market value a decade ago was $250 billion, while its physical basis — the value of its properties and equipment — was only about one percent of that.
Finally, Haskel explains that the “shift to intangible investment” has widespread consequences that affect long-term inequality, infrastructure development, taxation, and other areas. It also leads to what Haskel calls “secular stagnation,” by allowing firms to scale quickly after they emerge, then engulf and overpower competitors, as opposed to enhancing an economy based on the rising tide that lifts all boats. It’s clear that we can’t watch the current daily gyrations in the stock market without understanding this evolving dynamic.
Jonathan Haskel is the author of Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton University Press, November 18, 2017).
When we talk about fracking, thoughts usually turn to the environment. But that’s only a small part of the story. Fracking is changing the geopolitics of the world. It’s creating the illusion of moving America towards energy independence. This is impacting Saudi Arabia and Russia; influencing politics in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania; and, counterintuitively, it may be making the US a loser nation.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, bestselling financial journalist Bethany McLean, the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room (a book about the Enron scandal) talks to Jeff Schechtman about the real consequences of fracking.
The discovery of fracking, a way to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock, has turned America into the world's top producer of both. This may upend global politics, destabilize Saudi Arabia, and loosen Russia’s stranglehold over Europe. Surprisingly, the outcome may not be so good for America.
McLean tells Jeff Schechtman that the fragility of the economics of fracking, along with the disregard for renewables, is what may turn a temporary boom into a long-term bust.
She reminds us that while Texas alone may be poised to become the #3 oil producer in the world, the future of oil has more to do with Wall Street than with geology. Because fracking rests on a flimsy financial foundation, its future is far less secure than people realize.
The most important ingredient in fracking isn’t chemicals, McLean says, but capital. She explains how the financial crash of 10 years ago actually made fracking viable in the first place. However, many on Wall Street are now dialing down their investment in gas and oil in favor of renewables. It appears that a collision is fast approaching between Wall Street and the White House over energy policy.
Is California ready for a “Bear Flag” party? Former Congressman Tom Campbell wants Californians to have more choice in statewide elections, and is pushing a plan to create a third party for the state.
In this conversation with Peter B. Collins, who has known Campbell for more than 25 years, the former lawmaker talks about the need for a new party and the benefits it would offer to voters and candidates.
The creation of a viable third party in California might also inspire a national movement to shake up the two-party system that now dominates US politics.
In recent years, California voters approved initiatives to end gerrymandering and limit the role of political parties in primary elections: An independent redistricting commission draws the lines for legislative and congressional districts, and the nonpartisan blanket primary — also known as the “jungle primary” or “top two primary”— has reduced the control of party leaders in selecting primary candidates.
Campbell served five terms in the House of Representatives, and was the last Republican elected from Silicon Valley since 1998. He twice ran for the US Senate, served in the state senate and was finance director to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is also a well-known academic who taught law at Stanford, served as dean of the business school at UC Berkeley, and presently teaches law and economics at Chapman University.
As a moderate Republican, Campbell lost to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) in the general election of 2000; in 2010 he lost the GOP Senate primary to Carly Fiorina. In 2016, he resigned from the Republican Party after it nominated Donald Trump. These combined experiences have led him to call for a new, third party in California.
Registered voters in California include about 8 million Democrats, 5.2 million Republicans, and 4.9 million who are tagged “No Party Preference” or NPP. Campbell wants to create a new party from the last group as well as the dominant two parties, and says the law allows a new party to be recognized if about 60,000 people statewide register for it. Campbell thinks he can achieve that number with a budget of about $100,000 to educate voters.
Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing gave the world a glimpse at the lives of privileged American boys in high school and college in the 1980s. The culture of parties, drinking, and sexual abuse is — to this day — very much a part of fraternity life on colleges and university campuses across America. And while many successful businessmen, lawyers, and politicians consider the day they joined their fraternity to be one of the most important days of their lives, fraternities are often just safe spaces for excessive drinking, class privilege, and sometimes criminal behavior.
That’s the view of journalist John Hechinger. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, he talks with Jeff Schechtman about what goes on inside today’s fraternities. He exposes the sexism, rape, and general sadism among young men happy to pay annual dues of $7,000 or more to be part of these exclusive groups.
Hechinger takes a deep dive into the fraternity SAE, which some have said stands for “Sexual Assault Expected.” He recounts stories of women having been raped at SAE parties in Georgia — and explains why such behavior has been tolerated by both administrators and alumni. All in all, he says, the dehumanizing hazing rituals enforced at some fraternities place them among the most anachronistic institutions operating in America.
Hechinger is the author of True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities(PublicAffairs, September 26, 2017).
“We don’t have an immigration crisis,” contends Harvard professor Jacqueline Bhabha: We have a “hospitality crisis.”
Under President Donald Trump, the United States’ limit for refugee admissions has reached a record low. Last week, the administration proposed to again sharply reduce the limit for refugee admissions — from an already anemic 45,000 in 2018 to 30,000 in 2019. Under this year’s cap, the US is on track to admit only 22,000 refugees, less than half of the projected maximum.
Bhabha joins Peter B. Collins for this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. Bhabha is professor of health and human rights at the School of Public Health, research director at the FXB Center, and lectures at Harvard Law and the Kennedy School. She is an expert on the global refugee crisis.
Natural and man-made disasters, such as wars, ethnic cleansing, and famines have displaced millions of people throughout the world, but Bhabha maintains that the international community has the resources to handle the “challenges” that these migrations cause. She points out that migration is “200,000 years old,” a fact of life as long as humans have populated the Earth.
The problem, she adds, is not that there are too few resources and too little space to handle migrants; it’s that world leaders, including the president of the United States, perceive immigrants as “evils” to be driven back, rather than a new, young potential workforce to be assimilated.
The administration’s stated goal is to reduce immigration — both illegal and legal — in order to keep out undesirables whom it sees as a threat to national security. The president frequently has cited the violent acts of the infamous MS-13 gang, and isolated incidents of illegal Mexican immigrants committing violent crimes, as grounds for building a wall on the US-Mexico border.
At the same time, the president has faced push-back for his “Muslim ban,” an executive order which restricts travel from several Muslim majority countries. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court recently delivered his administration a victory by upholding the ban’s constitutionality.
The irony is that the migration crisis facing both the US and Europe — exemplified most recently by the Syrian and Libyan refugees — has its origins in policy decisions made by these same Western countries.
As the author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, Bhabha deplores the “barbarity” of family separation under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. She notes that the US has never signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that its bad record regarding treatment of migrant children precedes the current administration. While also critical of some of President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, she says that Trump has further polarized discourse on immigration while criminalizing it in many ways.
But the migration crisis is not confined to the Western world, nor is it always just about crossing international borders.
Bhabha describes the brutal displacement of Rohingya Muslims by the Buddhist majority in Myanmar. The UN report released on September 18 strongly rebukes Myanmar and its military leaders for acts amounting to ethnic cleansing.
Bhabha notes that the UN will be addressing the “final draft[s]” of two global compacts on migration and refugees at the upcoming General Assembly. Both documents attempt to spell out the “universal human rights and fundamental freedoms” that should be accorded to migrants of all kinds.
Bhabha’s latest book is Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? (Global Futures, May 3, 2018).
A country does not have to be fascist or have a fascist government in order to be riddled with fascist politics. This is the scary premise Jason Stanley argues in his recent book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Stanley reminds us that while 63 million Americans voted for President Donald Trump, a man who taps into America’s worst impulses, historically there is nothing new about the kind of politics he exploits. The attacks on immigrants, the media, cities, elites, and minorities, and the promise to weed out corruption, are all straight out of the fascist playbook.
Stanley talks to Schechtman about what he believes are the ten pillars of fascist politics: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, and appeals to the heartland. He explains how fascists have consistently used these elements to sow division and gain power.
We are reminded in this conversation that the US is just as susceptible to fascist politics as Europe or anywhere else. Fascism, Stanley explains, is rooted in the struggle for “the national state” — a struggle fueled by a sense of loss for an idyllic past, which all but demands scapegoating of those “responsible” for that loss. It’s about, as Stanley puts it, weaponizing nostalgia.
Another key to fascism, as detailed by Stanley, is that it almost always wins by means of democratic elections. He points out that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels observed that the great joke on democracy is that its very freedoms lead to the victory of its worst enemy.
As Stanley speculates on the future, his greatest fear is that the US is evolving into a one-party state through a perversion of democracy. He singles out candidates like Brian Kemp in Georgia and Kris Kobach in Kansas, who are stoking fear of “others” to create an anti-democratic backlash — and who are masters of voter suppression of non-white voters. He then explains the path that runs from voter suppression to the public's feeling of hopelessness for democracy, and eventually to the collapse of democracy itself.
Stanley’s is a cautionary tale, taken straight from today’s headlines.
The holy grail of physics is a unified field theory that somehow explains both the micro and macro aspects of how the world works. The same holds true for what Thomas Carlyle called the “dismal science” of economics, as we seek to understand the causes and consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with economic historian Adam Tooze, professor of history at Columbia University and award-winning author, about a reinterpretation of the 2008 financial crisis through the lens of what came before and what followed in its wake.
On this tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Tooze explains how, contrary to popular mythology, this was not just a problem that started in the US and rippled outward, but a global problem: the first real crisis of the global age.
He explains how decades of not fully understanding financial entanglement helped set in motion the shock waves that were felt around the world and that are still reverberating today in the economics of Europe and the developing world and in politics in the US.
In his conversation with Schechtman, Tooze shows how financial globalization engaged the entire world, how China ended up owning America’s public debt, and how Europe’s megabanks helped funnel trillions of dollars into the riskiest American mortgages.
Tooze points out that the threat of financial instability in European and American banking is still with us, although invisible. And how the 2008 crisis not only changed the financial landscape, but gave rise to a new regime of global governance in response. He reminds us that China is, without question, the most important factor in the world economy: 30 percent of all global economic growth now comes from China. That's more than the US and Europe combined. GM today sells more cars in China than in the US.
While we may not have realized it, at the height of crisis the Federal Reserve stuffed Europe’s banks with trillions of dollars of liquidity and outsourced $4.5 trillion in credit to European and Asian central banks.
Tooze also talks about the near-miss economic crisis in China in 2015-2016, and why this is a harbinger of just how dangerous things might become in the near future.
Adam Tooze is the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking, August 7, 2018).
It is an accepted axiom of modern life that disruptive change is all around us. Almost every aspect of our lives has been altered irrevocably in recent years.
In this process there have been winners and losers, just as in every other great social upheaval. This time, however, the consequences have been even more profound, leading in large measure to the social dislocation, anger, and fear we see today.
Part of the reason is that the disrupters, who created so much of the change, and got rich doing it, now claim to be the only ones able to solve the problems they created. This, says Anand Giridharadas in his attention-grabbing new book, Winners Take All, is a little like the arsonist insisting on heading the fire brigade.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Giridharadas explains to Jeff Schechtman the damage that has been caused over the past 30 to 40 years of citizens construing government as their enemy. In so doing, they have unwittingly undermined the very public institutions that have traditionally moderated and sometimes even democratized change.
What that means in practical terms, Giridharadas says, is that innovators are doing things in private that publicly we don't know how to police.
Using cryptocurrency as an example, Giridharadas says, “We have no idea how to tax that stuff, we have no idea how to find that stuff. Look at all the ways in which wealthy people use tax havens and tax shelters…”
Giridharadas maintains that, for most of US history, democratic government and capitalism have worked together relatively successfully to create a thriving mixed economy built on a foundation of a strong democracy.
That collaboration has gone off the rails over the last few decades, he says. Now, in his words, we need to pivot from an age of “fake change” to an age of genuine reform, in which we rebuild our vital public institutions to be able to keep step with a changing world.
While widespread voter fraud may be a figment of President Donald Trump’s imagination, it should never be confused with voter suppression, which is very real. Two months out from the midterm elections, the basic rights of millions of Americans are under threat.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman is joined by Carol Anderson, the Chair of African American studies at Emory University and an authority on voter suppression — especially of the efforts to disenfranchise African American voters in the South.
She talks about how individuals within state governments are relentlessly fighting to deprive citizens of their fundamental rights. She explains how this is part of the long legacy of structural racism, which has become even more pernicious since the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling eviscerated, in her opinion, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by allowing states and communities with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.
Anderson shares with Schechtman several case histories about states that have adopted voter suppression tactics, including photo ID requirements, poll closures, and voter-roll purging. She explains how they all work and how they can be combated.
Citing the recent victory of Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), she details how dedicated organizations and individuals were able to overcome almost every tactic of voter suppression and she talks about how this could be a template for the 2018 midterms.
This conversation with Carol Anderson — in which she draws from her book One Person, No Vote — is Voter Suppression 101: a fundamental primer on its reasons, its techniques, and the ways that it can and should be fought.
For the US, Afghanistan is a little like Alice in Wonderland: it takes all the running we can do, just to stay in the same place.
In a little over a month, it will be 17 years since the US led an invasion of Afghanistan. It’s the country's longest war, but only one phase in the 40 years of war that have been a part of contemporary Afghanistan.
Many Americans, especially with the amount of news being generated lately, have forgotten why their country went there, what role the US still might have there, and what has been the cost, in terms of both lives and treasure.
In this week's WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman speaks with Laurel E. Miller, a senior foreign policy expert at RAND and former acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department.
Miller talks first about the impact that war fatigue might have on any attempt to find a diplomatic solution, and how the US and Afghanistan still see almost everything through very different sets of lenses.
One result is that, according to Miller, the conflict has been essentially stalemated for a decade and there is no indication on the ground or behind the scenes that the impasse is going to be broken.
Miller explains the ways in which the US has been both a stabilizing and a destructive force. Despite the grim history of military intervention, she believes Washington still has a role to play in Afghanistan, although not on the battlefield.
She brings some clarity to the discussion of how the Taliban might be brought into the political mainstream, and how ISIS — as the common enemy of the Taliban, the Afghan government, and the US — just might provide the impetus for a broad diplomatic solution.
Miller explains that while Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan may not be able to play a significant role in diplomacy, Pakistani buy-in is an absolute prerequisite to any peace in the region.
While acknowledging the difficulty of trying to make peace in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, she offers a fresh look at possible ways out of the 17-years-and-counting conflict.
In July, California’s legislature and governor faced an elegant — and legal — extortion threat. The American Beverage Association, funded by Coke and Pepsi, demanded immediate passage of legislation that preempts any soda taxes imposed by county or local governments for the next 12 years. If Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the Democratic-controlled legislature refused, Big Soda would go forward with a ballot initiative this November that would severely limit any future tax increases at local and county levels. Brown blinked and signed the preemption law, averting what he saw as a larger, long-term danger.
But the governor’s action opened the door to other extortion schemes cooked up by well-funded corporate interests; Silicon Valley tech firms successfully used similar tactics to press for the removal of an initiative to protect online privacy rights.
Our guest, Mark Pertschuk, is the founder and executive director of Grassrootschange.net, which advocates for healthier communities through grassroots action. He also manages Preemption Watch, which tracks legislation that prevents or invalidates local measures aimed at improving civil rights, health and safety. As president and executive director of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, he was instrumental in the passage of many laws regulating tobacco use.
Pertschuk explains how preemption works, and details the California soda tax case. We also discuss the 13 states that ban most or all regulation of factory farms and agribusiness, and a similar number of states that undermine smoking bans in public places.
And we talk about “good preemption” that sets a floor for regulations, compared to “bad preemption” that puts a ceiling on local laws and regulations.
The financial insecurity facing so many Americans in today’s gig economy is not the result of startups and their new apps, or even of technology in general. Temp work is the result of four decades of deliberate decisions by executives in corporate America — decisions that changed the nature of work and of capitalism itself. So explains Louis Hyman — a professor of economic history at Cornell, and Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Hyman takes us back to the 1960s and 70s, when the rise of conglomerates and management consultants brought about a reorganization of the American corporation and a profound change in the relationship of employees to their workplace.
Hyman shows how corporate America traded stability for short-term profits. At the same time, he challenges the myth of the idyllic post–World War II workplace, arguing that it was only “idyllic” for successful white men and basically repressive for everyone else.
He reminds Schechtman that the office and factory of that time offered stable paychecks, but not much self-determination. Today's economy may be volatile, but it offers the possibility of a new kind of individual freedom and a new kind of individualized capitalism. In fact, Hyman says, the corporation may no longer even be necessary to capitalism.
According to Hyman, over the last ten years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment, and approximately one-third of the workforce now depends on this alternative world of work, either as a primary or supplementary source of income.
He also points out that today’s corporations, like Starbucks and Walmart, are really the drivers of the gig economy, as a direct result of their failure to meet employees’ need for a “living wage.”
He refers to Uber and other gig economy players as the “waste product of the service economy,” because people drive for ride-hailing services or take temp jobs to provide the income that their full-time jobs don’t.
Despite the downside of the gig economy, Hyman argues that the burgeoning expansion of temporary work holds the promise of a complete reinvention of capitalism and economic freedom. If we can get it right, he says, it can be an exciting new world.
Louis Hyman is the author of Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (Viking, August 21, 2018).
We live in an age of paradox. According to study after study, almost everything we can measure is moving in a positive direction. Worldwide, there is less violence, less pollution (except for greenhouse gases), less war, greater longevity, and most diseases are declining. From the perspective of material living standards, in every part of the world, things are getting better.
But there is another side.
Diseases that were once a death sentence are now manageable, but health care costs are escalating, and the divide between those that can and cannot afford quality healthcare is widening.
Millions of people in the developing world are experiencing a standard of living never imagined possible, yet how people feel about the world is increasingly negative, especially in the United States. Technology has made life easier in so many ways, yet Silicon Valley is becoming the boogeyman.
In spite of all the positive trends, tribalism divides us, social media, politics, and economics reinforce the divide, and the 24/7 always-on culture makes it happen even faster.
So where are the reasons for optimism?
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with prolific author and longtime Atlantic journalist Gregg Easterbrook about why he believes things are much better than they look.
Easterbrook reminds us that pessimism was in our national psyche long before social media. He argues against the common claim that the good old days were so good. In his view, it is this false pessimism that in large measure gave us Donald Trump.
His goal is to make optimism intellectually respectable. While he agrees there is plenty to worry about, Easterbrook insists that a change in national attitude could go a long way toward making positive change. In fact, he says that history shows that optimism is the best argument for reform: only optimism could have lifted 1.8 billion people, in China and India, out of extreme poverty in a single generation.
In discussing the broader consequences of negative thinking, Easterbrook explains why we have to take a more global view, and why we should not be so quick to discard the mechanisms for reform we already have.
And while it might be OK, as someone once said, to be a pessimist about tomorrow, Easterbrook exhorts us to at least be optimistic about the day after tomorrow.
Gregg Easterbrook is the author of It’s Better Than it Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear (PublicAffairs, February 20, 2018), and The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House Trade Paperbacks, November 9, 2004).
Some days it seems, at least from reading the mainstream news or cable television, that all millennials are voting for Democrats, or that college-educated kids are all going to be part of the “blue wave.”
In fact, there is a whole cadre of young Republicans and conservatives populating college campuses, who see themselves as the post-Trump future of the Republican Party.
Journalist Eliza Gray recently went looking for the heart and soul of young conservatism as part of a story for the Washington Post Magazine. She shares some of her findings, in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, with Jeff Schechtman.
Gray interviewed over 50 young conservative leaders. She started with College Republicans, and her search took her to groups that ranged from William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, to organizations founded in the Reagan era, to libertarian offshoots of the Ron Paul campaign, as well as some Christian groups.
While Trump is certainly not the model all of them want to emulate, and they are hardly falling in line behind his approach of being “light on policy and heavy on combat,” some still see him as a means to implementing their own policy preferences.
According to Gray, the libertarian streak is perhaps the most prominent feature of these young conservatives, some of whom have taken to calling themselves Conservatarians. But even with their libertarian leanings on issues like sexual preferences and foreign policy, the vast majority are strongly pro-life. And many agree with Trump in his attacks on both the media and popular culture.
As for young, moderate Republicans, they have, says Gray, become an endangered species; according to her research, many were turned off by the rise of Trump.
Gray explains why the biggest heroes of many young conservatives are commentator Ben Shapiro and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Most are not fans of Sean Hannity.
There is also very little hero worship for what some see as a mean, frequently crude, ideologically fickle 72-year-old man. Many realize they will have to fight to rebuild the party and conservatism in their own image.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton. A former Iranian ambassador to Germany, he was the chief spokesman for Iran during its nuclear negotiations with the international community. Several years ago, he parted ways with the Iranian government. This week he joins Jeff Schechtman for our WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Mousavian sets the stage with a look at Iran’s reaction to the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA). He talks about the debate that took place inside Iran on whether or not Iran should even enter into negotiations with the US. He reminds Schechtman that 40 years of distrust is a very high hurdle to overcome.
Mousavian details the 10 years of negotiations that took place between Iran and the Europeans, beginning in 2003, long before the US was ever brought into the talks. In fact, he reminds us that this effort with the US was the first time there had been any high-level negotiations or even just talks between Iran and the US in more than four decades.
Mousavian strenuously argues that Iran has been complying with all aspects of the agreement, as attested by 11 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections.
According to Mousavian, the Iranians see this deal as something worth saving, and that it should be a model for other non-proliferation deals around the world. In an obvious reference to Israel, he argues that if other nations, particularly in the Middle East, were to agree to the same deal, it could make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.
From a diplomatic perspective, Iran is clearly making every effort to paint the US as the bad guy for pulling out of the deal, and Iran, which says it has been fully complying with the deal, as the good guy.
Mousavian says that the US’s rejection of the JCPOA is increasing tensions in the region. From Iran’s perspective, if the US had abided by the deal, the trust generated might have formed the basis for further negotiations on a whole range of complex issues in the region, including Yemen, Syria, Iraq, etc. Now that the trust is broken, he says, there is very little chance for US and Iranian diplomacy on these, or any other issues. The net result makes the world less safe.
The only hope now appears to be that all those years of direct negotiations between the Europeans and Iran will pay off and that China will assume a bigger role as an honest broker in this region and provide economic relief from the US sanctions. The problem is that in order to keep the agreement alive, all remaining countries may need to violate the secondary sanctions provisions of the deal. These secondary sanctions put pressure on third parties to stop their activities with the sanctioned country, i.e. Iran, by threatening to cut-off the third party's access to the sanctioning country.
On a more encouraging note: Mousavian says that, in spite of all the mistrust, Iran might still be willing to enter into new negotiations with the Trump administration. After all, he says, the US and Iran are the two biggest powers in the region and it makes sense for them to find a way to talk.
For now, however, nothing further will happen if the US president and members of his administration keep spouting about regime change. Mousavian reminds us that such efforts have failed for 40 years, and that President Trump needs to learn from the lessons of history.
From long before the rise of Fox News, talk radio has been the essential medium through which millions and millions of hard-core conservatives comprehend the world.
From its inception, talk radio has been built around codes of tribal identity, grievances, and scorn. Originally tapped as entertainers, talk show hosts soon learned to mobilize public anger in ways that boosted their listenership enormously. Talk radio’s modern era began 30 years ago this month, with the national launch of Rush Limbaugh’s show.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with Michael Harrison, founder and longtime editor and publisher of Talkers Magazine, often referred to as “the bible of the talk radio industry.”
Schechtman and Harrison discuss how talk became big business by giving us an unparalleled group of personalities who thrived in an atmosphere — that they helped drive — of personal and political divisiveness. In a way, Limbaugh begat Fox News, MSNBC, the Tea Party, and, finally, Trump. All without ever losing his own audience or identity, which was overwhelmingly conservative. The Economist said last year: “[T]o understand the Republican party, get in a car, turn on the radio and drive.”
With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 — the FCC policy that had required the holders of broadcast licenses to present matters of public importance in a fair and equitable way — all aspects of politics became fair game. And in 1988, a little-known Sacramento, CA, sports host moved into politics.
The way he caught on was dramatic. Love him or hate him, it became clear, as Harrison points out, that Rush was a once-in-a-generation talent.
Harrison and Schechtman chat about the early days of talk radio, and how Rush changed it. About the difference, initially, between Rush’s idea of entertainment and how his audience often took him very seriously. Harrison speculated that, in the early days, Limbaugh was a kind of right-wing Jon Stewart.
He combined everything that had come before in talk radio. He was conservative, he was angry, he was well-informed, and he had humor. In his early years, before he began to take himself too seriously, you never knew if his vitriolic flights of rhetoric were real or shtick.
Starting with just 56 stations in 1988, he was heard on 800+ stations only three years later. In 2008, he signed a $400 million eight-year deal and his success inspired many imitators.
The roll call of clones he spawned includes Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Dennis Prager, Michael Savage, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin. To say that Limbaugh and his emulators made possible Trump’s election may be hyperbole. Or maybe not.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” Those words have become ingrained into our politics. But seldom have we seen such a disconnect between raw data, the kind that President Donald Trump bragged about on Friday, and the economy people are actually living in.
Journalist Alissa Quart, in her new book Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, went looking for the real America. In this WhoWhatWhy podcast she talks to Jeff Schechtman about what she found.
She discovered an America that is a far cry from one where anyone is jumping up and down over a 4.1 percent GDP increase in a single quarter. In fact, after ten years of steady growth, which began during the Obama presidency, the overhang of the Great Recession as well as some negative employment and economic trends that started before the recession are still with us.
Wages have been stagnant, housing costs continue to go up, health care costs continue to rise, education requires more and more debt, and self employment and the gig economy have not helped. All of this is before we are even really feeling the full impact of automation and AI.
Quart argues that we have to reassess what we value in society. Instead of being so happy at the lower cost of consumer goods — like our phones, computers, and TVs — we need to be far more concerned that the cost of basic necessities like healthcare, child care, senior care, education, and housing have skyrocketed.
Quart reminds us that this is not a problem limited to the uneducated. She talks to Schechtman about the plight of professors, school teachers, health professionals, and journalists.
According to statistics, kids today have only a 50/50 chance of doing better than their parents.
Equally striking is how few of these would-be members of the middle class are politically engaged. They’re exhausted from just getting from bind to bind.
Many are cobbling together patchwork solutions, like co-living arrangements and shared child care. But, Quart explains, for those struggling, a lot of time is often spent watching the 1 percent on television — viewing a kind of “aspirational porn.”
Maybe that’s also how Trump got a toehold with so many of these same people.
Before you hear the next boastful presidential report on the economy, this is a must listen.
Alissa Quart is the author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (Ecco Press, June 26, 2018).
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin singled out 12 Americans he’d like to see the US hand over to Russia for interrogation in exchange for allowing special counsel Robert Mueller to question the 12 Russian GRU agents he recently indicted. Of those, much attention focused on former US Ambassador Michael McFaul. (WhoWhatWhy also interviewed McFaul just a few days ago.)
But Putin singled out, even more prominently, international businessman Bill Browder, a major force behind the passage in 2012 of a particularly powerful piece of legislation, the so-called Magnitsky Act. Browder is Jeff Schechtman’s guest in this WhoWhatWhy podcast.
The Magnitsky Act, initiated and lobbied for by Browder, was named after his murdered lawyer, who uncovered Russian government corruption. It created visa and banking sanctions for Russian officials violating human rights. The Magnitsky Act has long been a major point of contention for Putin, and he’s actively worked to get the law overturned.
The legislation — which passed the US Senate 92 to 4 — has since, according to Browder, gone viral. It’s been copied and passed into law by seven countries, including Canada, and eight more countries are on deck to put it into law.
Browder explains to Schechtman that Putin’s hatred of the legislation has nothing to do with ideology. It’s about narrowing the range of countries in which Putin and his oligarchs are allowed to park their ill-gotten fortunes — and therefore puts their money at risk.
What surprised Browder most about Helsinki was not Putin’s talking about him, or even offering an exchange to get Browder back to Russia, since the Russian president has long been chasing Browder. Rather, he was shocked that Trump had labeled Putin’s proposal an “incredible offer.” Putin had suggested that McFaul, Browder, and a group of legislative staffers who had worked on the Magnitsky legislation be sent to Russia for “interrogation.”
Browder reminds us that he is a British citizen and therefore not even subject to Trump’s wishes. Similar requests made to the British government of Theresa May, and David Cameron before her, were turned down immediately.
Browder also sheds some new light on the role of Natasha Veselnitskaya — the convener of the famous Trump Tower meeting — and her role as Putin’s point person within the US to work toward a repeal of the Magnitsky Act.
Browder, who has long known Putin, talks about the Russian leader’s clear understanding of the “Deep State” and how America works, and how the former KGB agent benefits by being a “long-term player.”
As Browder sees it, “If Putin can’t bring Russia to the level of the West, he's determined to bring the rest of the world down to the level of Russia.”
Bill Browder is the author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (Simon & Schuster, paperback version, October 20, 2015).
As Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, visits London, reports indicate he is about to withdraw asylum for Julian Assange, exposing the WikiLeaks founder to eventual extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act.
State Department veteran Peter van Buren joins Peter B. Collins for this Radio WhoWhatWhy interview. Acknowledging the imperfections of Assange, van Buren makes the case that Americans, and especially journalists, should support Assange’s right to publish.
And he warns that if Assange is prosecuted, some reporters may go to jail, and others will likely self-censor to avoid that risk; the result will be more government secrecy, and denial to the public of access to important government information.
Van Buren thumbnails the history of the Pentagon Papers, characterizing the Supreme Court rulings as protection for publishers, but not leakers. He notes that the New York Times, which defied Nixon in publishing Dan Ellsberg’s leaks, has made wide use of WikiLeaks documents but doesn’t advocate strongly for the rights of Assange and his organization.
The discussion also touches on the current case of Times reporter Ali Watkins, whose emails and phone records were seized by FBI investigators earlier this year.
Peter van Buren served 24 years at the State Department. His first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (Metropolitan Books, August 21, 2012) , covered his one year tour in Iraq working on reconstruction projects. His most recent book is a novel about World War II Japan, Hooper’s War (Luminis Books, Inc., May 1, 2017). You can read his commentary about Assange here.
Russia, Russia, Russia. Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has our gaze been so resolutely focused on the land of the Czars. And yet with all of that focus, it’s amazing how much we don’t understand about the country and its people.
Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, is suddenly front and center in the latest Trump/Putin controversy. At their recent summit, Putin is said to have made Trump an offer: The US could pose questions to Russian military intelligence figures named in Mueller indictments as alleged participants in email hacking — if Putin’s people can do the same with McFaul and Bill Browder, two well-known critics of the Russian president.
We may never know precisely what Trump and Putin discussed on the issue. On July 19, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said, “It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it.” But this may change.
What we do know is that McFaul understands a great deal about Putin and Russia -- and he shares these insights with Jeff Schechtman in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
In this interview, recorded just before he became the latest mini-star in the ongoing Russiagate saga, McFaul reminds us that, though hard to imagine these days, Russia is more than just Putin. There is a far greater diversity of thought than US media give the Russians credit for: While many may be forced to go along to get along, there are many who don’t support Putin or his approach to the world.
McFaul emphasizes the fragility of Russian society today. He explains how Putin consolidated his power while the economy was working well. But with its recent slippage, he has come to rely more on jingoistic Russian nationalism, as exemplified by his military forays into Crimea and eastern Ukraine. According to McFaul, even that's now wearing thin with the Russian people.
McFaul talks to Schechtman about Putin’s ideology — what he really believes. About his conservative approach to governing, his genuine dislike for what he sees as the decadent liberal ideas of the West, and how he has given money to political organizations and NGOs around the world that support and embrace his ideology.
McFaul says that Putin expects his struggle against the West to go on for years. At the same time, the former ambassador believes we can still engage the Russian leader on topics like arms control and even trade, as long as we always understand his motives and develop specific strategies to push back.
Finally, McFaul reminds us how much Putin’s personal philosophy has in common with the nationalist, nativist, anti-globalist desire for ethnic purity that has driven the American alt-right.
At a time when it seems that all our news about Russia is accompanied by noise and confusion, this is a calmer, more nuanced look at Putin and Russia today.
Michael McFaul is the author of From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 8, 2018).
You may remember that back in May of 2015, senior FIFA officials were arrested on corruption charges in Zurich. Those arrests rocked the foundations of the world's most popular sport. But little did we know at the time that the case was so wide-ranging and complex that its reverberation involved the FBI, the IRS, Donald Trump, Christopher Steele, Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Vladimir Putin.
As the final of the World Cup is played in Russia this weekend, the WhoWhatWhy podcast features a conversation with investigative journalist Ken Bensinger, who spells out the 40-year history of bribery, corruption, and money laundering that has been at the heart of world-wide professional soccer.
Ken Bensinger was part of the team at BuzzFeed that uncovered the Christopher Steele dossier. He’s also become the go-to authority on the complexity of the world’s biggest sports scandal.
This week, Bensinger tells Jeff Schechtman how corruption ran unchecked for decades, until a team of investigators from the one country that cared the least about soccer stepped in to try to stop it.
He takes us up close and personal with American FIFA executive Chuck Blazer, considered the most corrupt soccer official in history. He was a friend of Donald Trump and lived on the 49th floor of Trump tower. When the IRS discovered and confronted him about not having paid taxes for 17 years, Blazer turned state's evidence against other FIFA officials.
We learn about the FBI and IRS soccer task forces. The multinational crimes unit overseen by the FBI director, at the time — Robert Mueller. When the arrests were made in May 2015, it was announced by then-FBI Director James Comey.
Bensinger also tells Schechtman about how Putin became interested in wanting the 2018 World Cup, and how he enlisted oligarchs in the process. And finally how Putin’s corrupt efforts were uncovered by the British, who’d had a competing bid, and hired none other than Christopher Steele to find out what the Russians were up to.
There is a lot more to this complex global story — including heads of state, like the president of Argentina who felt soccer was more important than his government; an illegal sports book that was busted at Trump Tower; and the role of Russian organized crime. Listening to this week’s podcast is a great prelude to the World Cup final.
Ken Bensinger is the author of Red Card: How the US Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal (Simon & Schuster, June 12, 2018).
It sounds like it should be the beginning of a joke: A virus walks onto a plane… Only it’s not a joke. It’s how a global pandemic can start. One that could be far more immediate and deadly than our twin fears of climate change or nuclear proliferation.
The recent outbreak of Ebola in the Congo is a grim reminder not only of the 2014 West African outbreak, but of the much wider dangers of the global spread of infectious diseases — diseases that know no walls, no travel bans, and respond only to medical and political competence.
The Hill’s national correspondent Reid Wilson, in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, talks to Jeff Schechtman about the very real dangers we face and how the incompetent handling of such a crisis could lead to loss of life on an unimaginable scale.
Wilson, the author of Epidemic: Ebola and the Global Scramble to Prevent the Next Killer Outbreak, takes us through the slowness of the global mobilization in 2014 and what we have since learned. It was a time when — as Wilson says — in parts of West Africa, it was easier to count survivors than count the dead.
Wilson explains how the World Health Organization (WHO) has learned how to better navigate global politics and local customs. As an example, 70 percent of those that had contact with dead bodies in 2014 contracted the disease; WHO learned that, in dealing with the dead, anthropology was as important as biology. In navigating behavior around the dead, respect had its own rules and customs in the developing world.
Wilson singles out Doctors Without Borders as the most heroic of the organizations that have been called upon in these global outbreaks.
We learn about the role of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the previous outbreak. It was an event that precipitated a major transformation of the CDC — one that resulted in the CDC sending about 1,400 people to Liberia during this recent outbreak. This was a drastic improvement over past efforts where only a few CDC field operatives were mobilized. Additionally, in 2014 the CDC only had four US facilities prepared to triage highly infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Today there are over 50, at least one in every state.
Even with all the progress and lessons of the the past four years, Wilson reminds us that a strategy for dealing with a rapidly spreading and deadly disease is only as good as the weakest link in the global public health system. That no matter how much the US may want to withdraw from the world, the public health systems in countries like Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone matter to us all.
Wilson reports that what keeps public health professionals up at night is the fear of a disease with the lethality of Ebola, the prevalence and transmissibility of something like Zika — and one that develops enhancements for human-to-human transmission capability.
Some bird flu cases in China have already hinted at the possibility of these properties. These are diseases that could easily exceed the Ebola mortality rate of over 40 percent.
All of this is against the backdrop in the US of the Trump administration trying to claw back $250 million out of the Ebola supplemental funding bill, which was passed in 2014 and has been critical to the CDC efforts. Clearly we ignore global partnerships at our peril, especially as they involve the arena of public health. All the while the Chinese seem to be taking on greater and greater responsibility as part of their efforts to sit atop the world stage.
What happens when prosecutors break the law? Almost nothing. Nina Morrison is a senior attorney with the Innocence Project in New York, and in this podcast she explains how homicide prosecutors like Glenn Kurtzrock face few consequences when caught concealing exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys. Kurtzrock — who was fired by the district attorney in Suffolk County, NY, after his misconduct was exposed — has never been charged with a crime, and has not faced any disciplinary action from the New York Bar Association.
Morrison explains the legal precedent of the Brady v. Maryland decision, which requires the prosecution to share all evidence in a timely manner, and how there is almost zero accountability. Morrison can claim the only known conviction of a wayward prosecutor, in a Texas case where her client spent 25 years in prison on a wrongful conviction because prosecutor Ken Anderson withheld critical evidence of the innocence of Michael Morton.
Anderson had become a judge, and was bounced from the bench and disbarred, but only served six days of an eight-day sentence in county jail.
Morrison notes that about half of 2,200 exonerations are attributed to “official misconduct,” and that many of the 28 exonerations she has won were the result of prosecutorial violations of the law.
We also discuss a powerful commentary by Frederic Block, a federal judge in Brooklyn, who is outraged not only by misconduct, but by a Supreme Court ruling in Taylor v. Kavanaugh that explicitly grants immunity to prosecutors — even for “the falsification of evidence and the coercion of witnesses.”
Recently, both houses of the New York State Legislature have passed bills creating a new commission to investigate misconduct by prosecutors; it awaits Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) signature.
Read Nina Morrison’s New York Times op-ed here.
Read Judge Frederic Block’s commentary here.
Millennials are on the rise, both on the left and the right. But their trajectories have been very different.
The young left has had unquestioned triumphs, including Tuesday’s New York primary, where a 28-year-old Latina and Democratic Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defeated a 20-year Democratic incumbent congressman and supposed heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). The activism of the anti-gun-violence Parkland students is another example of young people on the left being energized.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the right has been far more successful in recruiting millennials than the left.
This trend is discussed by this week's Radio WhoWhatWhy guest, journalist Michael Hobbes. Hobbes is the author of a couple of compelling recent stories about these issues, including “The Right-Wing Millennial Machine,” and “Generation Screwed.” They are important touchstones for understanding today’s youth politics.
While the number of millennials who identify with the right is a small percentage of the population, the number of young people within Republican politics is disproportionately large. It’s no accident that the three youngest US senators are all Republicans and that Republican members of Congress are, on average, much younger than Democrats.
Donors on the right have been funding a resilient leadership pipeline, while the left has focused on individual causes. As Hobbes points out, the right is building a monolithic political infrastructure, while the left is busy supporting existing institutions.
Hobbes tells Jeff Schechtman that 20-something voters should not be seen as political outliers but rather as people who care about the same pocketbook issues everyone else cares about: the cost of housing, the price of education, wages, and healthcare. These are all issues that have directly impeded the social mobility of young people.
Hobbes, an important new millennial voice, shatters the myth that our debates today are a war of ideas. We are long past the point where anyone is being persuaded, he says. The right understands this, the left does not. The electorate is simply too bifurcated, and information is too siloed. Success for both sides will come from expanding their base, building organizations, and motivating and turning out voters. The endless 12-point plans laid out, for example by Hillary Clinton, no longer have value in today’s political environment. It’s not about trying to convince people, it's about advocacy.
What the right has learned so well about recruitment is that if you grab them by the wallet, it’s a lot easier for their hearts and minds to follow.
We always hear that the US is “a nation of immigrants.” But, according to immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky, this hides the real truth about America’s immigration history.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Chomsky, a professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, places the current debate about immigration in America in a broader historical context.
Chomsky outlines the 20th century policies that changed traditional patterns of migration and labor, and replaced them with prejudicial and, she argues, often arbitrary quotas and restrictions that favored Europeans over Mexicans and Central Americans. She explains how the idea of an “illegal immigrant” is a fairly recent one, and that the racialization of illegal immigration is what someone once described as the new Jim Crow.
Chomsky tells Jeff Schechtman how laws in the United States restricted citizenship to white people until the Civil War. Afterwards, thanks to the 14th Amendment, citizenship was extended to people of African descent. Indeed, the whole concept of citizenship by birth was essentially created by the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in 1868.
New arrivals to the US who were not white were not even considered immigrants, a designation applied only to people from Europe.
Chomsky says that in the early to mid-20th century, people crossing the Mexican border faced no restrictions because Mexican laborers were so desperately needed in the Southwest. Since Mexicans were considered workers and not immigrants, depriving them the opportunity to become citizens was perfectly legal.
The cumulative effect, Chomsky argues, is today’s inefficient immigration system, which ensnares so many victims, including thousands of young children.
During the Cold War the United States fought to defend its political system against the threat of Communism. But times have changed. Does the US now have to defend its republic and its democracy against the threat of a new Gilded Age, of oligarchs — and the dangerous consequences of deep income inequality?
Vanderbilt law professor and former Senate staffer Ganesh Sitaraman argues that, in a political system like that of the US, which was designed to be class-blind, widening the economic divide can actually bring down the system. He tells WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman in this week's podcast that political democracy cannot survive amid economic inequality.
Sitaraman explains how the founding generation thought about the role of the middle class in keeping democracy healthy. He says the constitutional system devised by the founders, while devoid of overt checks and balances on class, had enough flexibility to help counter inequality — until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The excesses of the Gilded Age gave rise to the Progressive Era as a corrective.
He further argues that the period after the Great Depression of the 1930s led to additional government actions and programs that helped to temper further economic disparity, and as a result reflected the true benefits of workers, government, and business acting collectively. He contrasts all of this to what’s going on today, and argues that economics, more than anything else, explains the US’s current political dysfunction.
Ganesh Sitaraman is the author of The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (Knopf, March 14, 2017).
Google’s contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven — a controversial drone imaging program that uses artificial intelligence — prompted over 4,000 Google employees to sign a petition opposing the project, and about a dozen workers resigned in protest. In response, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced that the contract will not be extended, and that “there will be no follow-on to Maven.”
Yasha Levine has covered Silicon Valley for years, and his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (PublicAffairs, February 6, 2018) details Google’s fifteen-year history of selling search, mapping, and satellite imagery services to the Defense Department and a number of intelligence agencies.
Levine notes that the complete name of Maven is “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-functional Team: Project Maven” and its purpose is to improve object identification for use in drone warfare. He also wonders how so many Google employees could have been unaware of their company’s deep involvement in military contracting through a subsidiary called Google Federal.
He explains that Google Federal, based near the CIA in Reston, VA, originated in 2004 with Google’s acquisition of a startup called Keyhole. Keyhole was midwifed by the CIA’s venture capital operation, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole’s CEO, Rob Painter, had deep connections to military and intelligence agencies, as well as to the vendors that compete for intel contracts worth an estimated $42 billion annually; Painter now runs Google Federal.
While Levine allows that some Google employees might be unaware of the military and intel work of the company, it’s widely known in Silicon Valley that most tech giants are deeply involved in these kinds of government contracts.
When the Chernobyl nuclear accident rattled the world and destroyed the myth of safe nuclear power in 1986, Serhii Plokhy was a young history professor who lived downwind from the power plant. Soviet leaders reflexively covered up the deadly incident but were forced to reveal some information because Sweden and other countries detected radiation from the releases at Chernobyl.
Today, Plokhy is professor of Ukrainian history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. His new book, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, is a gripping account of the people responsible for the construction and operation of the nuclear power plant, and the fatal errors that occurred during a planned shutdown of Reactor 3 on April 25, 1986.
He introduces readers to all the key players in Moscow, in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and in the Soviet Union’s nuclear power establishment. A central figure is Viktor Bryukhanov, who built the Chernobyl complex, managed the emergency response, and was imprisoned after being blamed for the incident.
The powerful takeaway from Plokhy’s book, and this interview with Peter B. Collins, is that the Chernobyl disaster gave rise to what Plokhy calls “eco-nationalism” in Ukraine. This was a political movement that challenged Gorbachev and the central government in Moscow, and produced the first episode of glasnost, or openness, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the USSR.
In 1967, Robert Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi, watching a toddler pick rice and beans off a dirt floor. It had been three years since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his war on poverty. What Kennedy saw on that trip would, in part, drive his run for the presidency one year later.
In this special WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to longtime journalist and University of Mississippi professor Ellen Meacham about the profound impact that Kennedy’s 1967 trip to the Mississippi Delta had on his renewed commitment to social justice in the last 14 months of his life.
While Vietnam was the most contentious issue of the day, poverty and its nexus with the civil rights movement were very much on Kennedy’s mind. RFK went to the Delta as part of a Senate fact-finding group. Some key players in the civil rights movement also took part.
According to Meacham, Kennedy had long felt that the poverty programs of the day were inadequately funded and failed to address real needs. What he discovered in Mississippi was not just the kind of poverty he had already seen in Harlem, the Bronx, and Bedford Stuyvesant. This was abject hunger, particularly in children.
What frustrated him the most was how so many local officials, including Mississippi's two US senators, refused to acknowledge how bad things were.
Meacham also reminds us how Kennedy saw so many of the nation’s resources, which might have been deployed to fight poverty, going instead to the war in Vietnam.
The experience brought him closer to Dr. Martin Luther King, who saw his own efforts for social justice and workers’ rights as the logical extension of the civil rights movement.
As King said, and Kennedy came to acknowledge: it does a man no good to be able to sit at a lunch counter if he cannot afford to eat.
Ellen B. Meacham is the author of Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, April 2, 2018).
Many people doubt the official story of what happened when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel exactly 50 years ago. Their doubts are fuelled by painstaking research, solid reporting, and even cutting-edge science. But nothing compares to talking with people who were there when Kennedy was struck down.
Paul Schrade, a long-time friend and political ally of Kennedy’s, was shot in the head that night, but he recovered from his wounds. Two years ago, when Schrade was 91, WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman spoke to him about Kennedy, the assassination, and about his theory of the case.
This 48-minute conversation offers indispensable insights into the life and legacy of Bobby Kennedy, his murder, and how that tragedy changed history.
In this special WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman speaks with author and host of MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews. During a long career in Washington he rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys — whom he has been talking and writing about for years — and now he turns his full attention to Bobby.
Matthews argues that Bobby’s politics were rooted in bringing people together. Of course, there’s no way of knowing what his presidency might have been like. But Matthews reminds us of the crowds that gathered to salute the funeral train carrying RFK’s body from New York to Washington after his assassination in 1968. The mourners lining the tracks were black and white, waitstaff, firemen, and cops, who believed that Kennedy cared about them all. One relevant detail: Bobby was known as the only senator who would personally say hello to the Capitol police each day.
Matthews also tells Schechtman about Bobby’s penchant for making enemies, how he was once described as “a romantic, disguised as a streetfighter.” Some of it came from his upbringing as the younger brother to Joseph Jr. and John F. Kennedy. The runt of the family, as his father would call him, he always had to fight for attention.
We also learn about his relationship with Roy Cohn, which was a far cry from Cohn’s relationship with then-businessman Donald Trump.
Matthews explains the goals of Bobby’s 1968 presidential campaign. Besides wanting to end the war in Vietnam, he hoped to bring back Jack Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” but with many more working-class whites and minorities participating. He was, in Matthews’s words, “a streetfighter for moral justice.”
Chris Matthews is the author of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit (Simon & Schuster, October 31, 2017).
Just how bad are things today? Let’s compare. Exactly 50 years ago, the Vietnam War was raging — the Tet offensive had begun and 30,000 more troops went to Vietnam while the war dead were returning home in body bags.
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, race riots broke out in almost every large city in America, and one political party’s convention became a domestic war zone. In Europe, Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring was crushed by a bellicose Soviet Union.
Even before being elected, Richard Nixon was interfering with foreign policy in his own interests. President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven from office, and he was succeeded by a man who would end up resigning in disgrace.
Imagine if all of this had been covered by cable news 24/7? We would have had a national breakdown.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with Arizona State University professor Kyle Longley, who has written extensively about Johnson and 1968.
Longley reminds us how angry and frustrated the American people were throughout that decade. During the 1966 midterms, the Democrats lost 47 House seats. Johnson, who had sought power and the presidency his entire life, was watching the world spin out of his control. We learn much about the inability of even so well prepared a leader as LBJ to handle so many crises simultaneously.
By the end, Johnson had clearly lost his political grip, and his manic behavior, as seen through today’s lens, was troubling. What’s most striking, Longley tells Jeff Schechtman, is how many of the same themes and issues of race, class, political corruption, nuclear disarmament, Russia, and the limits of American power once again unsettle the US this year.
Kyle Longley is the author of LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press, February 22, 2018).
“What would you want if you could have any wish?” asked the photojournalist of the haggard, bloodied Marine before him. The Marine gaped at his interviewer. The photographer snapped his picture, which became the iconic Korean War image.
Finally, the soldier revealed his wish: “Give me tomorrow,” he said at last.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with military historian Patrick O’Donnell, who wrote a book about the war almost a decade ago, entitled “Give Me Tomorrow,” a deeply personal look at those who served amid the extreme brutality of the Korean War. That war, fought almost 70 years ago, still echoes today.
O'Donnell tells Schechtman about the war, particularly of the horrors suffered by George Company — a group of men untrained for what they would face in the bloody Chosin Reservoir campaign. O’Donnell explains how the battle went right up to the Chinese border, and how aggressive and brutal the Chinese were in fighting alongside North Korea. He further explains how the North Korean army was in tatters, and that the Americans underestimated the possibility of a Chinese intervention. Eventually, the Chinese massed over 150,000 men near the Chosin Reservoir.
O’Donnell touches on the other epic battles of the war, and why those who came home have always been reluctant to talk about their experiences, which felt so small in the shadow of the Greatest Generation.
He explains how unprepared the US was to fight this war. How budget cuts and demilitarization after WWII left the soldiers with inferior equipment that cost many lives.
O’Donnell makes it clear that the soldiers of George Company, and particularly their performance at Chosin Reservoir, define the very essence of what we honor on Memorial Day.
Patrick O’Donnell is the author of The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home (Atlantic Monthly Press, May 22, 2018).
The recent Chinese investment in Donald Trump's hotel project in Indonesia is just one in a long string of Chinese ventures across the globe. This deal, between a Chinese state-owned company and an Indonesian developer, falls under the umbrella of China’s One Belt One Road initiative.
One Belt One Road is an ambitious effort to spread the country’s money and influence around the world. The Chinese see it as an extension of their foreign policy: projecting soft power through the financing and construction of infrastructure and other projects.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with journalist Will Doig, who covers urban development, transportation, and infrastructure, was international editor at Next City, and wrote the weekly "Dream City" column for Salon. Doig talks in detail about China’s attempt to pull half the world into its orbit through One Belt One Road.
According to Doig, this is a kind of Chinese Marshall Plan. By lending money to other nations for once-in-a lifetime infrastructure projects, China makes these indebted nations more beholden to its wishes.
One example is the massive Southeast Asia railway project currently underway. Building the railroad through rural areas in Southeast Asia fosters urbanization along the route. The growth of these new communities creates more building and selling opportunities for China. Moreover, these are projects whose complexity requires Chinese labor, technology, and supply chains.
Doig tells Schechtman that the government of President Xi Jinping works on a very long time scale. The Chinese are happy to build cities today that may not fill up for 20 or 30 years — a time when they see themselves as the dominant power in the world.
Doig is the author of High-Speed Empire: Chinese Expansion and the Future of Southeast Asia (Columbia Global Reports, May 1, 2018).
In spite of a Senate hearing in which Gina Haspel repeatedly evaded tough questions about her views on torture, it appears that she will be confirmed as the new CIA director. Enough senators were apparently mollified by her qualified assurances that there will be no more “enhanced interrogation” at the spy agency on her watch.
But John Kiriakou, who as a CIA insider exposed the original torture program in — and ironically was the only government official who went to prison over the issue — thinks that Haspel is actually a true believer in torture.
In his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, he reminds us of all the opportunities she has had to renounce torture and the torture regime she presided over. Had she done so, Haspel could have changed her legacy, as well as the legacy of those who supported her in her efforts. But time and again she chose not to.
Kiriakou is still surprised by how few people have come forward to speak out against what happened. He believes that there are still many in the agency who want to recapture its vaunted “cowboy authority.”
Even as director of the CIA, Kiriakou says, Haspel may not be able to turn the clock back to 2001. But with Trump egging her on, anything can happen. And if the CIA does resume torture of any kind, the senators who voted for Haspel will shoulder part of the blame and should be held to account.
In 1952, in the early stages of the Korean War, North Korea accused the United States of using biological weapons — a claim the US has always denied. Journalist and retired psychologist Jeffrey Kaye found a copy of a report by the International Scientific Commission on the issue, originally released in 1952. Its investigation concluded that the US used a number of biological weapons, including anthrax, plague, and cholera, and that the confessions of many captured American airmen provided confirmation.
Those confessions were characterized by the US as the result of torture and brainwashing, which Kaye now believes were exaggerated to discredit the biowarfare claims. He describes the events of March 25, 1952, when a swarm of fleas — later found to be infected with bubonic plague — was dropped from aircraft on the North Korean village of Kang-Sou.
Jeffrey Kaye is a retired psychologist and the author of Coverup at Guantánamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri (publisher: Jeffrey S. Kaye, PhD, 2nd edition: September 10, 2016). He has written widely about torture, asylum, and many other issues related to the US military.
Related: JFK Files Reveal US Biological War Plans Against Cuba
Globalization has created a true global middle class, brought millions out of poverty, reduced the price of goods, and created remarkable economic benefits. As an economic system, it has worked exactly as promised. On the other hand, globalism, as a political idea, has been a dismal failure. This is according to Eurasian Group CEO and global analyst Ian Bremmer.
In his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about what connects so many of the global problems we face today, Bremmer makes the case that democracy, plus technology, plus political globalism simply can't work. The West’s existing institutions cannot cope with huge amounts of wealth concentration, technology, big data, and artificial intelligence. According to Bremmer we need look no further than Trump, Brexit, and recent European elections for proof.
As counterexamples, he cites Japan and Israel. Each has, in different ways, walled itself off, maintained homogeneity, and either rejected or blocked immigrants. As a result, each has been far more successful than Western democracies in negotiating the perils of the global age. Japan, he points out, made a conscious decision to trade slower growth for more “us” and no “them.”
Adding to the global unease is the rise of China. An authoritarian capitalist state, China is thriving in the global age — so much so that its leaders are offering its economic success as a model to the world. Bremmer notes that with all these challenges, the US could not have picked a worse time to precipitate an “America First” crisis of confidence.
Ian Bremmer is the author of Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalization (Penguin Audio, April 24, 2018); Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World (Penguin Audio, May 19, 2015); Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (Co-authored with Willis Sparks) (Gildan Media, LLC, May 1, 2012).
The Middle East has been a seething cauldron of conflict since 1918. Twice in the 20th century, in 1967 and 1973, it almost became a flashpoint for nuclear war. The region has always been a chessboard where great powers play out their strategies.
In today’s Syria, it’s the US vs. Russia vs. Jihadists plus Saudi Arabia vs. Israel plus Turkey vs. the Kurds, not to mention Iran and Syria vs. the rebels. No wonder the country has been devastated, leaving behind an almost unimaginable humanitarian crisis.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to longtime Middle East journalist Charles Glass, who has traveled extensively in the region covering conflict after conflict, and once spent 62 days as a prisoner of Shi’a militants during the Lebanon war.
He explains how the Syrian economy is shattered: agriculture barely functions, the medical system is nonexistent, and education is spotty at best. The rebuilding effort will be long and costly, and it’s not clear how many of the five million refugees who have left the country will ever come back.
For those that have returned, says Glass, the situation is often bleak. In some areas of Aleppo, returnees have pitched tents in the rubble, just to avoid losing their property rights.
As for chemical weapons, Glass is unsure whether the recent missile attack by the US, France, and Great Britain was justified. Since the action was launched without waiting for an on-site report from weapons inspectors, it was “like having an execution before a trial,” Glass tells Schechtman.
Another topic of concern is the current role of the 2,000 US troops in the area, now that ISIS is no longer the main objective. As Glass tells it, the US focus is now on containing Iran: US troops have become part of Washington’s long game against Iran, particularly since President Bashar al-Assad has grown increasingly dependent on Iranian troops.
Glass emphasizes that the solution to the ongoing disaster does not lie with the Syrian groups that started the civil war, but rather with the US and Russia, which control the money and weapons that alone can determine the outcome.
Charles Glass is the author of Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe (Verso March 22, 2016); The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (Penguin Press, June 13, 2013); Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation (Penguin Press, February 22, 2011).
Some people may know where bodies are buried; Rex Bradford knows where all the papers are buried. The leading archivist and historian of the records of the JFK assassination has a lot to say in his talk with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman.
According to Bradford, the recently released 19,000+ pages are interesting, but in no way dispositive. What they reveal, more than anything else, is further evidence of how so many cover-ups — for so many reasons, by so many groups, agencies, and individuals — have hopelessly muddied the waters.
Bradford believes that from President Lyndon Johnson’s recruitment of Earl Warren to President Donald Trump’s holding back the release of still more documents, layer upon layer of self-serving lies have made the truth now impossible to uncover. Moreover, he argues that kicking the can down the road really does work as a way to hide what Peter Dale Scott once called “the bleak path to the truth.”
Bradford points out how ironic it is that there are now over five million pages of documents of a story in which the popular narrative was once that one man acted alone.
He talks about who’s been making the decisions about what is and isn’t redacted, missing transcripts from the Church commission, some new documents on Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico seven weeks before the assassination ... but also about how no new document is a smoking gun.
Much like our politics today — or maybe because of those politics — Bradford doesn't think we will ever agree on a common set of facts about the assassination.
During the Cold War, our elite universities were a breeding ground for future spies. Schools like Yale and Harvard provided some of the “best and the brightest” to America's intelligence agencies.
Today, the CIA and FBI are using college campuses once again to gain new recruits in the global war for clandestine information and technology. These government agencies, in many instances, are working with the full support and blessing of professors and often top university administrators, who rely on both government contracts and the maximum revenue that comes from over one million international students in US universities.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Daniel Golden, the efforts range from small colleges to large state universities to Ivy League institutions. In fact, Golden tells Jeff Schechtman in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast that Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is one of the places where spies are most actively recruited.
In addition, foreign governments see US universities as an almost unlimited reservoir for obtaining intelligence and for recruiting vulnerable students who are in need of money, filled with innocence, and/or ideologically confused.
Today, creative destruction has moved campus recruitment from just US efforts in the binary conflict of the Cold War to a world of high technology and spycraft that involves multiple global players, millions of foreign students and professors, and is drawing from the world’s most prestigious classrooms and research centers.
Daniel Golden is the author of Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities (Henry Colt and Co., October 10, 2017) and The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (Broadway Books, September 25, 2007).
It may very well be that Donald Trump is president because, in the last few years, four million jobs were automated out of existence in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In Michigan alone, 40 percent of workers who lost manufacturing jobs ended up on disability.
According to tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, labor force participation remains low and the glowing unemployment statistics we hear are woefully out of line with what’s really going on. Every day more and more repetitive jobs, both cognitive and physical, are being eliminated. Everywhere from the factory floor to truck fleets, from radiology labs to some parts of the legal profession, human beings are being replaced by automation and AI.
According to Yang, all the talk about technology creating new jobs is misleading, as only a few new jobs are created for the thousands that are eliminated. In his opinion, this is a conversation that we have been unwilling to have.
Yang tells Jeff Schechtman, in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, that the answer to the jobs crisis is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). He explains how it can work and be paid for. He argues that it is both a capitalist and a humanistic idea, which was once supported by both Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King.
Yang argues that UBI — despite some recent setbacks — will create a huge spike in entrepreneurship, eliminate significant psychological and medical problems plaguing the country, and allow citizens to embrace, rather than fear, all that technology has to offer.
Andrew Yang is the author of The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (Hachette Books, April 3, 2018); and Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America (HarperBusiness, April 2, 2004).
Charles Swift is director of the Dallas-based Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America. He led the defense team in the month-long Orlando trial of Noor Salman, the widow of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen.
Swift has an enviable record of success in securing justice for unpopular clients. As a Navy judge advocate general, Swift was a member of the defense bar at Guantánamo Bay, where his advocacy won freedom for a Yemeni detainee in a precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling.
Following the Pulse shooting, Salman was charged with aiding and abetting, and obstruction of justice. In his conversation about the trial with Peter B. Collins, Swift details major misconduct by the FBI and prosecutors, who introduced into the record Salman’s “confession” which they knew was riddled with falsehoods.
Swift says that the prosecution strategy was to put Mateen on trial posthumously, in the effort to prove that his wife helped him scope out targets for his deadly intentions. But this led to major revisions in the “official” narrative: contrary to reports published immediately after the shooting, Mateen was never a patron of Pulse; in fact, he had never been to that location until the night of June 12, 2016.
Swift explains how Salman’s cell phone data cast doubt on the government’s claim that she was at the club; this was one of many false claims included in the “confession” produced after hours of interrogation that the prosecution submitted at trial. Swift was able to disprove almost half of the statements in the prosecution document.
Just as the defense was about to rest, prosecutors notified the Swift team that Seddique Khan, father of the shooter, had been a paid FBI informant for over 11 years. Swift says that his investigation and trial tactics would’ve been different if the government had properly shared this information, and that it’s a likely “Brady” violation. (From Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland: “suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to a defendant who has requested it violates due process.”)
Swift deplores the obvious double standard: no penalties for egregious government misconduct, but when the defense was delayed in delivering a psychological evaluation of Salman, it faced sanctions from the court.
We have seen endless stories about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We have endured two days of Mark Zuckerberg explaining the Facebook business model. Social media and its role in politics is on everyone's mind. However, none of the current clamor speaks to the broader impact of the internet, or of big tech in general.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jamie Bartlett, director of the Center for Analysis of Social Media, reminds Jeff Schechtman that the internet was supposed to be a democratizing force. The widespread availability of digital technology was to allow freedom of information and communication on a scale never thought possible before.
The reality, Bartlett argues, is that every aspect of the internet and its culture is feeding the worst of humanity’s tribal instincts.
It’s becoming clear, says Bartlett, that internet technology is simply antithetical to democracy. Perhaps it's no coincidence that, as the internet grows, authoritarian regimes proliferate. As tech companies get bigger, the institutions of democracy come under greater pressure.
Bartlett talks about how monopolistic practices are built into the DNA of tech companies, and reveals the intended and unintended consequences of maintaining those monopolies. How hyper-targeted internet advertising is merely the most recent iteration in a long history of efforts to manipulate our decision-making. As those efforts advance in sophistication, the ability of a small minority to distract and ultimately control a technically naive majority poses a grave threat to the fundamental exercise of free choice.
This week’s podcast is a sobering look behind the headlines and noise about tech.
Jamie Bartlett is the author of The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) (Ebury Digital, April 5, 2018).
We are facing planet-wide extinction, a climate emergency — and our current course is suicidal.
That is the underlying belief of author and scientist Richard Smith, who is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Smith believes that our current model of capitalism, with virtually unlimited growth and consumption, cannot sustain a planetary population of nine billion people. He tells Schechtman that we do not need most of what we consume, and that our current behavior must stop. But Smith’s Jeremiad goes even further.
He talks about the need to stop building planes and cars, to ration air travel and fishing, to nationalize and take public control of the fossil fuel industry, to close down oil companies and many manufacturers of disposable consumer goods, and to make less stuff. He understands that this may mean putting whole industries out of business and people out of work, but he thinks it’s the only way to keep the planet habitable for humans.
As just one solution, Smith talks about the need for global agreements on everything. That nation-states should no longer make many of the decisions they do now. That we need global plebiscites, a contraction or elimination of capitalism, and more global equality. Anything short of this, he argues, will bring the collapse of civilization.
It’s a radical set of views, but powerful food for thought.
Smith is the author of Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (College Publications, 2016).
The evidence that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King is overwhelming. As the Washington Post recently pointed out, famed attorney William Pepper stands astride all of the information and work that has uncovered the truth.
Pepper was a friend of King in the last years of his life. Some years after King's death, Pepper went on to represent James Earl Ray in his guilty plea and subsequent conviction. But Pepper believes that Ray was framed by the FBI, the CIA, the military, the Memphis police, and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, William Pepper talks to Jeff Schechtman about the totality of the case. He tells of his initial interview with Ray, 40 years ago, and why it became clear to him right away that Ray was innocent. Pepper explains that Ray had no motive for the shooting, that he acted at the direction of his handler, a man named “Raoul,” with clear ties to Hoover and the FBI.
Pepper explains how, over the years, the evidence has mounted about Hoover’s hatred of King, which lay behind the FBI’s unending surveillance of King and the entire civil rights movement, and why Hoover sent his number two man, Clyde Tolson, to Memphis to help oversee the assassination of King and to help set up Ray as the patsy.
It’s a story that actually begins a half century ago today, in a hospital emergency room in Memphis. Pepper thinks it's possible that King did not die from the gunshot wound — but that he was actually murdered in that emergency room.
William F. Pepper is the author of The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Skyhorse Publishing, January 16, 2018).
RELATED: Classic Who: Martin Luther King Also Had a Nightmare
Longtime Memphis journalist Marc Perrusquia spent years investigating the story of how a famous African American photographer, with remarkable access, played a key role in the civil rights movement, all while being an informant for the FBI.
Ernest Withers’s photography captured some of the most stunning moments of the civil rights era: including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery, AL, and the blood flowing into King’s room from the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, where he was assassinated. Withers had a front row seat to history, as a man trusted and beloved by the movement’s inner circle. All the while he was reporting back to the FBI.
On this 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, Perrusquia talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about Withers and the impact that his information had on both the civil rights movement and the Bureau.
Perrusquia speculates that Withers, who was also a disgraced cop, may have actually been a double agent, informing both the FBI and some of the people he trusted in the movement about what he believed was a noble effort that had gone too far. Withers’s conservative views made him critical of King’s anti-war stance and of the dangers that he saw posed by radicals inside the movement.
In addition to the story of Withers, the FBI, and the civil rights struggle, Perrusquia tells Schechtman about his own battles to get all of this information from the FBI, and how hard the Bureau fought to protect its informant.
Marc Perrusquia is the author of A Spy in Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement (Melville House, March 27, 2018).
Be it privatizing the Veterans Administration, railing against “socialized medicine,” gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, or trying to starve public education, the proponents of these ideas all seem to be beholden to the work of Ayn Rand.
Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, was published 75 years ago this month, after being turned down by 12 publishers. Yet for people like Paul Ryan, Stephen Miller, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Peter Thiel, it might as well have been a briefing paper published this morning.
Even though Bill Buckley kicked Rand out of the conservative movement in the late 1950s, at a 2005 gathering to honor her memory, Paul Ryan declared, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
Yaron Brook, the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, thinks that The Fountainhead is the classic American novel and that Rand’s ideas are at the core of American and Western civilization.
Opposition to her is just as contemporary, as people like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman devote significant efforts to trying to discredit her.
In his conversation with Schechtman, Brook talks about Silicon Valley and how, in his view, it’s wrong for leaders and inventors to share credit. He argues that they need not apologize or share their success, but instead bask shamelessly in their accomplishments.
He criticizes Bill Gates for focusing on philanthropy and giving his money away, when he could still be doing more to achieve greater success and make more money.
Originally published in 1943, The Fountainhead, Brook claims, was intended not as a political manifesto, but to put forward a way of seeing the world devoid of what he says is today’s tribalism and groupthink.
Author and intelligence expert James Bamford says the reports of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which is being treated as one of the biggest stories out there right now, are overblown.
So far, Bamford argues, no evidence has been presented that this is anything other than the type of intelligence gathering or operation that countries are engaged in all the time.
Bamford is critical of the hyped, 24/7 coverage of Russiagate. Indeed, he sees widespread hacking by Russia, the United States, and other online spies as old news. He has special criticism for his colleagues in the media, who have “squandered their objectivity and precious resources on a single story.”
He points out that the best known use of cyberweapons is America’s insertion of the Stuxnet virus into the automated centrifuges at the heart of Iran’s nuclear program. Despite this, he notes, many American leaders present the US only as a victim of cyberattacks.
In this Radio WhoWhatWhy interview, Bamford also talks about the recent failures of the intelligence community, including the theft of NSA hacking tools and the CIA’s bungled efforts to retrieve them.
He calls the operatives of both agencies “Keystone spies,” and criticizes the extreme public responses that have compared hacking to Pearl Harbor.
James Bamford has written a number of books and articles about America’s intelligence community, with special focus on the National Security Agency. He has also produced Frontline documentaries for PBS on these subjects. His recent article in the New Republic offers his overview of Russiagate.
Bamford is the author of The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization (Penguin Books, September 1983); Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Anchor Books, April 2002); The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Anchor Books, July 2009); A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (Anchor Books, May 2005).
The Dow Jones plummeted Thursday over concerns that President Donald Trump is plunging the US in a trade war with China. Such a conflict is widely expected to harm US consumers. But what about the Asian superpower?
What if the Chinese Emperor has no clothes? Remember back in the 1970s when Americans were afraid of the Japanese economy taking over? When they bought great American assets and real estate? In fact, all that fear and anxiety were misplaced. The same may be true today with respect to China.
We hear breathtaking economic numbers coming out of Beijing. The consistent low unemployment rate and high GDP are often the envy of the world. But are those numbers real? And if not, does the Chinese government even know what the real numbers are?
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service journalist Dinny McMahon, who has spent more than a decade inside China, and who understands much about the mythology and challenges of the Chinese economy.
Many of these economic statistics from China are manufactured from the bottom up, as city and regional leaders puff up the numbers they send to Beijing to make themselves look good. All of this, according to McMahon creates an artificial impression of growth.
It’s the Chinese version of fake news.
These statistics encourage more borrowing by state-owned companies and local governments to build more factories, housing and public works, much of which are not needed. The overcapacity creates so-called investments that may never pay off.
McMahon also explains how China's continued emphasis on infrastructure and heavy industry could be a disaster. And that China has to make the turn to a more consumer- driven economy if it is to join the modern world economy.
Its once endless supply of cheap labor is drying up, the move from rural areas to the cities has slowed, the population is aging, manufacturing costs are increasing and it’s very possible that China might grow old, before it grows rich. If that happens, McMahon explains, the repercussions for the world economy could be substantial.
Dinny McMahon is the author of China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle (Little, Brown Book Group, March 13, 2018).
The recent revisionist history about Gina Haspel, Trump's nominee for CIA director, should make very little difference in examining the totality of her record on torture and its cover up.
According to John Kiriakou, a 15-year CIA veteran, and the whistleblower on the CIA covert torture operation, Gina Haspel is the “godmother of the torture program.”
Regarding ProPublica's correction of the record of her involvement, Kiriakou says that while she may not have actually overseen the torture of Abu Zubaydah, she did arrive at the secret CIA black-op site in Thailand in time for the waterboarding and torture of at least one other detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Kiriakou explains to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman how Haspel was also a key link in the destruction of the 92 tapes that contained the evidence of torture. She ordered the tapes destroyed, even though they had become federal records. They were shredded counter to the advice of White House and CIA counsel. Kiriakou reminds us that her defense of “just following orders” is far too reminiscent of Nazi apologia circa 1945.
On the basis of her “dark history,” Kiriakou argues that Haspel is clearly a poor choice for leadership of the CIA.
“Israel as a country should be appreciated and celebrated,” Avraham Burg says, but it should no longer be looked upon as the land of “oranges and equality.”
You might think those comments come from an anti-Israel professor at an elite US university. Instead, Avraham Burg is part of Israel’s history. His father was a member of the founding generation. Burg served as Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and in the Labor government of Shimon Peres before retiring from politics in 2004.
This personal history is why it’s so surprising to hear him declare that the Israel of 1948 is not there anymore.
Burg argues in his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, that the only guarantor of today motivations of sovereignty and security is a call for what he sees as a one-state solution. One central government and some kind of confederation of two regimes. He suggests that, in his view of the world, the Israeli-Palestinian issues are no longer at the center of global consciousness. Much of the world has moved on.
Further, he thinks that the Zionist experiment may have passed its sell-by date, and that Israeli politics is “hollowed out.” Zionism was a necessary “scaffolding” for building Israel's sovereignty, Burg says, but is it’s no longer relevant. The future may require a secular state that maintains a close, fruitful relationship with the Jewish and Israeli diaspora.
Reporter A.C. Thompson details his investigation of Atomwaffen, a growing neo-Nazi and murderous white supremacist group with heavily armed members in about 20 American cities.
Founded and run by young, white males, the group has expanded in the wake of the protests last year in Charlottesville, VA. One member, Samuel Woodward, is charged in Orange County, CA, with the January 2018 murder of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein — a gay, Jewish college student.
Related: What Five ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Cases Tell Us About FBI Tactics
Related: Spotlight on the FBI: The Bureau’s Checkered Past and Present
Thompson’s team at the website ProPublica obtained and reviewed some 250,000 chat messages exchanged by Atomwaffen (German for “nuclear weapons”) supporters, including hateful, anti-Semitic comments about Bernstein’s murder. Thompson notes that Atomwaffen is not aligned with Trump. The group’s guru is James Mason — who joined the American Nazi Party in the 1960s and wrote Siege, which is considered Atomwaffen’s manifesto.
In the space of a few months, people associated with the group have been charged in five murders; another member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives in a possible plot to blow up a nuclear facility near Miami.
Despite this — and threats by a Las Vegas member to target the power grid in the West — Thompson says the FBI shows little interest in Atomwaffen, and there’s no indication that the FBI is deploying undercover agents or using the techniques that have become commonplace in domestic terrorism investigations that target Muslim Americans.
You can read the ProPublica report here.
The media and the public focus on the school shootings that resulted in fatalities and casualties. However, many potential massacres are headed off by savvy interventions. What can we learn from those?
In this wide-ranging podcast, Barrett Brown and actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter talk about the complacency that ails so much of American society.
They also discuss how, instead of fixing the systemic problems that plague the US, people across the political spectrum are focusing on the sideshow that President Donald Trump provides. In the meantime, however, all the institutions that are in dire need of reform are neglected — making the job of fixing them in the future even more difficult.
Yet because we are now relying on some of those same institutions — like the FBI and the national security apparatus — to protect us, we might easily forget some of the institutional excesses and missteps that got us here. What we have, according to Brown and Winter, is a massive lack of appreciation for nuance, which may come to haunt us later.
Brown also takes a look at the role of the internet. It was supposed to be the great liberator of individual actions, yet it has become, at least for now, the most centralized institution in the world.
The US government is currently holding about 400,000 men and women in a patchwork of immigration prisons. Some are kept in corporate facilities that are guaranteed a minimum number of prisoners daily; others are in cells leased from county jails and other lockups.
Carlos Hidalgo has spent two stretches at California’s Adelanto Detention Facility, where he witnessed food with maggots, guards having sex with inmates, easy access to drugs, and difficult access to legal counsel and family members. It’s an eye-opening look at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons in America today.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Hidalgo also reports that ICE guards have little training, and says they are more like mall cops than professional prison guards. With a population ranging from serious felons to undocumented people with a DUI or minor violation, the guards are outnumbered and unable to break up fights between prisoners.
And he tells of the time he spent in solitary confinement for helping others with legal papers and organizing a hunger strike over food and other issues.
Related:The Hidden Truth About Mass Incarceration
Related:Youth Jailed at Age 16 for Years With No Trial, Kills Self — Who’s Responsible
Related: Radio Who: Many Prisoners Say They are Innocent. Some Truly Are
Related: TVWhoWhatWhy: Russ Baker Talks Private Prisons and Their Real Toll
The traditional American notion of almost absolute freedom of speech may have run its course.
Journalist and academic Damon Linker says some Americans may be having second thoughts about what we’ve come to accept as free speech. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, he talks to Jeff Schechtman about his recent analysis that found free speech is under siege from all sides.
Linker notes what’s happening on college campuses, where arguments over diversity are polarizing students and faculty, and, on the political right, where state power is being marshaled to suppress “unpatriotic” speech. The result, according to Linker, is a potential constriction of public dialogue and a clear decline in democratic values.
Civics classes once taught that untrammeled freedom of speech would allow the truth to triumph. But does this work when propaganda, multiplied many fold by social media, drowns out other voices in a blare of noise?
In his conversation with Schechtman, Linker digs deep into the many complexities of the issue and what the current situation portends for the future of democracy.
Coleen Rowley is a former FBI special agent whose bravery as a whistleblower exposed many of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She was named one of Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. This week she talks with Jeff Schechtman about the recent shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Rowley accentuates two problems with the FBI. One, that local threats — even in high schools — are not the province of the FBI. It would, however, have been the bureau’s job to make sure that local law enforcement was aware of the tips it received.
The second problem she identifies is that too much information is coming into the bureau. Ever since 9/11, and particularly since the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, we know that giant sweeps of “national security data” are producing more information than the government can process, no matter how many analysts are employed. She claims that, at this moment, there may be over one hundred million names on a government watch list.
Rowley’s biggest concern, though, is what she sees as the US culture of violence. More than 17 years of perpetual war has left Americans psychologically bruised, and this is putting their safety at risk.
In this week’s podcast she points out that military service is emerging as something that is significantly correlated with — if not a cause of — America’s dramatic increase in mass shootings. Nikolas Cruz’s ROTC experience may be related to this very idea.
To understand the plundering of Iraq’s oil wealth, we have to look first at the original sin of the invasion itself. Blueprints showing how oil could help rebuild the country were drawn up post Desert Storm in the 1990s and resurrected in 2003. It never happened.
Journalist Erin Banco explains why, as she talks to Jeff Schechtman in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. She laments the dashed hopes of the Kurds and the Iraqi people. She explains the hapless actions of the Bush and Obama administrations, the real role of big oil and the damage done by tribal rivalries in Iraq.
She tells the story of the Talibani and the Barzani families, and how they got rich — along with oil company executives, government staffers and political parties. Meanwhile, the Iraqi people, who knew very little about what was happening, ended up with virtually nothing.
Banco says that for years Iraqi journalists have been killed in Iraq for even trying to report this story. Today, with entirely different players, the corruption and mismanagement goes on, and may be the keys to the Iraq elections scheduled for May.
Erin Banco is the author of Pipe Dreams:The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth (Columbia Global Reports, January 2018).
Andrew Keen is the Anthony Bourdain of technology. The author, entrepreneur and futurist has traveled the far corners of the world to see what works and what doesn't. He has seen the internet reflecting both the best and the worst of us, and concluded that we and our technology need to grow up.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Keen talks to Jeff Schechtman about the next chapters in the digital revolution.
Keen reminds us that we’ve been here before. The digital revolution is not that dissimilar from revolutions and changes that preceded it. But “history is not an algorithm.”
To shape technology — before it shapes us — will take human agency to make the kind of changes that will allow us to define ourselves in contrast to our machines.
Keen outlines five tools to fix our digital future. Among them, we need to address inequality, jobs and education, he says, and we need to bring humanity back into the sciences. He admonishes us that, while our technological future may be global, Silicon Valley is not the center of the world. Important trends are happening elsewhere.
He also talks extensively about how consumers have been turned into a digital product, in what he calls “Surveillance Capitalism.” He argues that this business model cannot continue to work: we need to stop thinking of the digital world as free, and start paying for everything from the internet itself — just as we pay for food, clothing and cars. We need to take responsibility for our digital future and not leave it to others. Finally, we’re left with the reminder that, as far as technology goes, the really important stuff is yet to come.
Andrew Keen is the author of How To Fix the Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2018), The Internet Is Not the Answer (Grove Press, January 2016), and The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (Doubleday, August 2008).
The shrinking role of facts and evidence-based analysis in American public life poses a threat to democracy, to policy making, and to the very notion of civic discourse.
This is the alarming conclusion spelled out in the RAND Corporation’s recently released 300+ page report provocatively titled “Truth Decay.” The co-author of this report, RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh, is Jeff Schechtman’s guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.
The report’s authors compare what’s happening now in the public arena to four other historical periods when truth was under siege: the era of “yellow journalism,” the rise of tabloids and talk radio, the impact of television on news media, and even the advent of so-called New Journalism.
What the authors found, Kavanaugh says, is that disagreements over objective facts have never been so wide and so deep.
The RAND report examines the growing lack of trust in institutions, the erosion of civil discourse, the ever-worsening political paralysis and lack of policy discussion, and the disengagement of citizens from the political process.
While “Truth Decay”makes many recommendations about how we might unwind all of this, the report also constitutes a warning about the possible end of democracy as we know it.
Are undercover FBI agents responsible for pushing some of the terrorism suspects it arrests toward acts of violence?
That is the question Peter B. Collins tackles in his brand new WhoWhatWhy podcast. In this premiere episode he talks with investigative journalist Darwin BondGraham of the East Bay Express in Oakland, CA, about his recent report “Terror or Entrapment?” (https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/terror-or-entrapment/Content?oid=12242075)
BondGraham looked into five recent cases of “domestic terrorism” in the San Francisco Bay Area that seem to follow a predictable script, involving social media surveillance, paid FBI informants and the “pre-crime” strategy used by the Bureau.
Collins says these five cases are among hundreds that represent a national trend. The investigations often seem to be tainted by undercover agents posing as terrorists, and by “recruitment” methods that verge on entrapment.
All of these cases appear driven by a deep-seated Islamophobia, and arguably siphon off FBI resources that might better be used for more worthwhile counterterrorism investigations.
At a time when the FBI is under the microscope, it’s a must-listen.
With the annual gathering of global financial elites taking place this week in Davos, and all the recent news focusing on money laundering, taxes and the .0001 percent, it seems an appropriate time to take another look at where so much of the wealth-that-dare-not-speak-its-name is being stashed.
Back in 2016 we learned that a Panamanian law firm had become a kind of digital safe-deposit box for tainted money and tax evaders. WhoWhatWhy has extensively covered this story, which laid bare something like an alternative global financial system — an incredibly complex web of offshore accounts, lawyers, guns and money.
In the wake of Davos and the ongoing revelations about Deutsche Bank, it seems important to take a fresh look at the “Panama Papers.” My guest for this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is journalist Jake Bernstein, who has devoted years to uncovering and explaining what is really going on behind the scenes of international finance.
One can’t help wondering: How many owners of the private jets at Davos have Panamanian accounts?
Martin Sheil, a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Division, discusses his WhoWhatWhy series on Deutsche Bank and how nearly all the main figures involved in Russiagate also have ties to the financial institution.
Popular author and journalist Sarah Kendzior looks at the many battles ahead to combat voter suppression in 2018.
A look at how social media’s “charisma of certainty” is changing the nature of warfare.
The artificial intelligence revolution is here. It’s already impacting the economy and the military. It needs to be discussed now in the arena of public policy.
Forty-six years after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg reveals another set of documents on how nuclear war might have been waged in the 1950s and 60s.
An overview of Guardian correspondent Luke Harding’s expose of the 40-year Trump/Russia collusion.
Bill Binney was an NSA analyst whose work was so effective it was shut down. It threatened to derail the gravy train fueled by the kinds of problems he might have solved — including preventing potential terrorist attacks. The contractors and executives riding that train had a motto: “keep the problem going, so the money keep flowing.”
As the Korean War broke out, Donald Nichols was a major American player for the CIA. He helped launch the South Korean Air Force and picked bombing targets in the North. He ended up a non-person, discredited in the eyes of the US government. This is his story.
With the world feeling like it's spinning out of control, with a new crisis happening every day at a speed beyond our ability to process, humor may be the only thing that can get us through. For this holiday weekend, WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman sits down with Chicago comic and professor Al Gini to talk about humor, satire and why we need both to fend off our fear of the world.
Certainly there is no algorithm for what’s funny. Time, place, context, language and audience all matter a lot. But what’s clear is that humor is an essential part of the human experience, and vital for coping with the daily onslaught of the unthinkable and unimaginable.
Gini and Schechtman talk about the evolution of humor. From the simple jokes of Henny Youngman and the early satire of Will Rogers to the more sophisticated satire of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and today, Jon Stewart. Gini reminds us that we need satire in order not to die of the truth. Also, when very little seems to bind us together anymore, even the right and left can sometimes bond over the same punchline.
At the very least, the primal aspect of humor might help get us through the holidays.
Worried about Russian hackers or other outsiders meddling in US elections? Arguably, the greatest threat to our democratic system comes not from the outside but from forces within our own two-party system that are trying, and often succeeding, to prevent American citizens from voting.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to journalist Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, about “caging” and “crosscheck” — two species of “dirty tricks” that are being used ever more frequently to suppress votes. While the primary practitioners have been Republicans, encouraged for years by Karl Rove, Palast explains that Democrats are using similar tricks to gain advantages in primary elections.
In “caging,” letters are sent out to voters who must spend time away from their primary addresses, such as minority soldiers stationed abroad or students during summer recess. When the letters come back as “undeliverable,” the senders can use this as a reason to get those voters taken off the rolls.
Over the years, caging has led to millions of eligible voters being purged from voting rolls, Palast says. He adds that this and other stratagems are very much in use today by operatives like Brett Doster, a onetime Rove operative who is now running Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign in Alabama.
The story that Palast tells is truly one of “birds of a feather” getting together to undermine what’s left of our electoral democracy.
In this nearly hour-long interview, WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker takes veteran podcaster Peter B. Collins through the details of Anthony Weiner’s fall — and the effect it had on Hillary Clinton’s presidential race.
They go deep into the shadows where political traps are constructed.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and particularly its aftermath, was the first in a series of high-profile events that triggered an increased level of distrust of government among Americans. The ripples from that day have now turned into a wave, author David Talbot argues.
Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis blows the whistle on a crisis that led to an international cover up directed by a circle of incompetent bureaucrats.
WhoWhatWhy’s founder Russ Baker recently sat down for an in-depth interview on a range of important topics, including propaganda, Russiagate, mass shootings, and more.
The Weinstein sexual harassment story is just an example of behavioral patterns that have long been playing out on college campuses.
A surprising link between US foreign policy and violence on America’s streets. Philosopher, cultural critic and author Laurie Calhoun explains what US behavior abroad has to do with domestic gun culture.
The US is protecting, funding and covering up for Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni -- under the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
How corporations and politicians are stimulating the dopamine and serotonin that drive our attitudes, reactions and votes.
No one ever said it was easy to be a cop, and the gig only gets tougher. On the one hand, community organizers and local leaders are calling for more personal policing; more positive interactions between law enforcement and civilians. On the other hand, we're handing out riot gear and war weaponry as if the police were another branch of the military. Terminator-style SWAT equipment and armored carriers are now ubiquitous in precincts nationwide. One needs only to look at the images of Baltimore earlier this year, or Boston after the Marathon bombing, to see how this equipment can result in police ability to lockdown a city as if it were an occupying force. Washington Postreporter and author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop Radley Balko talks with WhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman about the perfect storm that led to the militarization of America's police forces and what it means for our liberty.
It’s been 23 years since the 1992 race riots in LA sparked by the beating of Rodney King. With Baltimore burning, what’s really changed?
RaidioWhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman sits down with Russian-American writer and activist Masha Gessen.
WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker is interviewed by Boston-based syndicated radio host Chuck Morse about the Boston Marathon Bombing trial and the FBI.
American medicine, we are told, is among the best in the world. Yet treating sickness is only one measure of quality, and whether or not the system itself is healthy is up for debate. A system that treats sickness but doesn’t offer preventative measures to assure continued health is broken.
From after-the-fact health care to our love affair with pharmaceuticals, we are on the road to disaster, as crusading reformer Raymond Francis of MIT explains to our host, Jeff Schechtman. Francis has some ideas on how we can do much, much, better and end the Great American Health Hoax.
A random walk through what the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights are really all about. A talk with the former national legal director of the ACLU and the founder of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.
Warren Zevon's great song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money,”was about a kid getting out of trouble in various Latin American countries. Today, however, as we approach the 2016 presidential election, it might very well be a description of our election process.
It seems that lawyers, money and enforcement are an ever-growing part of American elections. A new set of rules seems to prevail. Issues such as campaign finance, voting rights, voter ID, electronic voting and ballot access itself are now debatable parts of voting in America.
How did we get here, how did democracy become so complex, and what’s the historical context? Just how deeply is fraud really built into the system? WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman talks with David Schultz, Hamline University professor in the School of Business, senior fellow at the Institute of Law and Politics at the University of Minnesota Law School, and professor of election law.
The War on Drugs has caused just as much damage, destruction, and loss of life as any war in the traditional sense. University of San Francisco professor and author of the book Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States Rebecca Gordon joins us to discuss.
It has been 62 years since the Cuban Revolution began. Fifty-four years since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fifty-three years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Twenty-six years since the end of the Cold War, and 15 years since the Elian Gonzalez incident. And it is just now that we are beginning a new relationship with our neighbor 90 miles away.
A significant part of our population has come of age with absolutely no knowledge of the history of the US / Cuba relationship, what the revolution was about, or what all the hostility has been about. And yet the history of that relationship with Cuba has been a kind of Rosetta Stone for understating the bias, the mistakes, and domestic politics behind so much of American foreign policy, from the mid-20th century until today.
Few have had the access to Cuba to provide the kind of clear and present perspective that Tom Hayden has.
Tom Hayden, a leader in the student, antiwar, and civil rights protests throughout the 1960s talks toWhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about what this new opening might mean.
Technological change and creative destruction are everywhere. They have changed the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the foundation of education and now, the nature of warfare.
We’ve all seen the media images of drones supplying us with perfect images; the perfect eye in the sky for perfectly targeted air strikes. At least that’s how it’s looks on Homeland, and 24 and the images from Abbottabad.
The reality, however, is somewhat different. Less-than-clear images; imperfect targeting that kills civilians; increasingly complex and overpriced equipment and--on the other hand--lower barriers to entry with respect to deploying certain drones which will soon make them available to nations, groups or individuals everywhere. Before long, surveillance--and even death from above--will be on a par with package delivery.
It’s a scary future, one that Washington keeps well hidden... and one that Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper's, talks to me about in our latest RadioWHO podcast on WhoWhatWhy:
Some people are just ahead of their time. Sometimes they are in science, or academia, or economics…but sometimes they’re in the media and they see what we all will see, long before it happens.
Pioneering author, filmmaker and media reform activist Danny Schechter was such a talent. He worked as a producer at ABC’s 20/20, where he won two Emmy Awards, and at CNN, when it was newly launched. He was part of the media when it still made a difference; before it morphed into entertainment and ridicule. He wrote 12 books, including “The More You Watch, the Less You Know.” He understood the potential of the Internet long before most of us.
He was a leading activist and journalist against apartheid in South Africa. That work led him to leave corporate journalism to make six documentaries about Nelson Mandela and produce the cutting-edge television series, “South Africa Now,” which aired on over 150 public television stations in the late 80’s and early 90’s .
Schechter died last week of pancreatic cancer at the age of 72. Back in 1998, I had the opportunity to talk to Schechter about television news and his book, The More You Know. While some of the conversation is dated, what’s amazing is how much is not and how much Schechter saw the dystopian future of corporate media.
Here is that conversation.
In spite of those words being echoed in court every day, criminal trials are often anything but a search for the truth. The court may be the trier of fact, but often facts are like Legos; they can be assembled in many ways to create different objects and stories.
Russ Baker and the team at WhoWhatWhy have been working for years to try and assemble those facts in a way that gives us some objective truth, in the story of the brothers Tsarnaev and the Boston Marathon bombing.
Russ Baker and Jim Henry talk to Jeff Schechtman in this week’s RadioWHO podcast, to provide some context with which to observe the balance of the trial and the process the facts and evidence.
The role of Vladimir Putin on the world’s stage, from Syria to Ukraine, is a complicated one, and some see him as an important moderating influence on the now virtually unchallenged Western imperial apparatus. But one thing is increasingly clear: his role within his country is a deeply troubling one. And the public is terrified. Why? Consider these names:
Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya and now Boris Nemtsov.
All opponents of Putin, all now dead. Murdered, in brutal and very public ways.
Our guest for this week’s RadioWHO podcast, Bill Browder, knows Russia. He’s an unusual figure—his grandfather Earl Browder was the head of the American Communist Party. Bill Browder, rejecting that legacy, became the consummate capitalist. Once Russia’s largest foreign investor, Browder was forced to leave the country when he became a vocal critic of Putin, and his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was jailed and murdered.
Browder talks to WhoWhatWhy about what he sees as Putin’s compulsion to steal and his ultimate goal of wanting to be one of the richest men in the world, and how he believes Putin has overreached.
Every prisoner says they are innocent, but some really are. Every year hundreds of men and women are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.
Our system is riddled with cases of perjury, mistaken identity, official misconduct and incompetents that have put innocents behind bars.
The criminal justice system and the state has been ambivalent, at best, to do the right thing for those that have been exonerated.
Tune in with RadioWHO host Jeff Schechtman for a look at the scope and substance of the problem with guests Nikki Pope and Courtney Lance. The two have spent years dedicated to the cause of the wrongly convicted, and wrote about it in their recently published book: "Pruno, Ramen, and a Side of Hope: Stories of Surviving Wrongful Conviction."
Since U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. has prohibited the media from filming or taping the proceedings in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial, the oral arguments made on Feb. 19 in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals offer a unique opportunity. You can hear both Tsarnaev's lawyers and the prosecutors talking, revealing their approaches, skill levels and strategy. A three-judge panel at the appeals court heard arguments on Tsarnaev's latest attempt to move his trial. The defense argues that there is too much of a presumption of guilt in Boston for him to get a fair trial there. The appellate court already turned down an earlier motion to move the trial by a vote of 2-1, in January. Their written ruling based on this hearing is forthcoming. Listen in for yourself to decide if Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch, Judge Jeffrey R. Howard and Judge Juan R. Toruella were persuaded.
No matter its shifting place in the wider world, the United States is still the only home of "The American Dream."
That's why millions of legal and illegal immigrants flock to its shores, the latter gambling against increasingly longer odds to reach a new home fraught with risks.
It's that reality that prompted filmmaker Diego Quemada-Díez to title his award-winning debut feature film"La Jaula De Oro”—“The Golden Cage."
The Spanish-born Mexican director garnered three awards at the Cannes Film Festival for his tale of four Latin American teenagers struggling to come to America. Through his film, Quemada-Díez raises powerful and timely issues dealing including the plight of child migrants, such as those which flooded the U.S. last year and sparked a political storm. The film is critical of U.S. government policy, particularly the circumstances created by its economic and political interventions in Latin America. It also examines the impact of prohibitive immigration and drug laws.
It is the most awarded film in Mexican history, winning more than 60 different accolades from around the world.
"The Golden Cage" will debut for American audiences this summer on HBO. Tellingly, Hollywood has rebranded it as "The Golden Dream."
Think we don’t have a shooting war on American soil?
Tune in for the premiere of the RadioWHO podcast, where you’ll learn all about that quiet war from WhoWhatWhy reporter Douglas Lucas.
Host Guillermo Jimenez and Lucas discuss how the drug war on the Mexican border has morphed into a counterinsurgency war that has Mexican and American forces crossing into each other’s territory with surprising frequency. Lucas walks through his reporting and how he discovered new information about the scope of this facet of the drug war.
Later, he describes what it felt like to be the subject of obvious—and suspicious—surveillance at a recent hacker conference, at which his phone was remotely hacked. As a journalist who has reported extensively on the case of Barrett Brown, Lucas is only too aware of the risks reporters face when their work is perceived as a challenge to the national security apparatus.
The expanding security state is also a specialty of Guillermo Jimenez, who’s producing and hosting the RadioWho podcast in addition to his Traces of Reality podcast. A new feature to our site, RadioWHO will appear twice a month with unique insight from Guillermo Jimenez and his guests.
Before "Freeway" Ricky Ross gained infamy as a $3 million-a-day Los Angeles crack dealer with hidden CIA support, he was headed to college on a tennis scholarship.
In the most explosive episode of RadioWHO yet, Ross gives host Guillermo Jimenez his definitive answer about the CIA's motives to sponsor drug dealing. Was it just to support the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, or a plot to harm black Americans?
Ross rose to national infamy in 1996 after he featured prominently in investigative journalist Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, which unearthed the CIA's involvement in drug dealing to help pay for Nicaragua's Contra rebels.
Webb's scoop would lead to his eventual professional undoing and suicide, now the subject of the movie "Kill the Messenger", starring Jeremy Renner.
Before that, Ross was an aspiring college tennis player with a scholarship - that fell through and returned him to the mean streetst of South Central L.A. the game had helped him avoid for so long.
Tune in now to RadioWHO to hear straight from the mouth of a man at the center of one of the CIA' murkiest operations yet.
Most people know what Hollywood agents do: but how Paul Alan Smith does it is unlike anyone else.
Smith left a lucrative job at one of Hollywood's most influential agencies to found his own: Equitable Stewardship for Artists. The idea, Smith tells RadioWHO host Guillermo Jimenez, was to build a model agency to fundamentally change how business is done in Tinsel Town.
Tune in to listen to Paul's wide-ranging and inspirational perspective on:
- How Hollywood can change to help American democracy
- Why the Occupy Movement couldn't sustain its push
- Why investigative journalism is patriotism in action
- The Establishment's last word on Hollywood productions
- And why the TV series is the art form with the potential to have the most powerful impact on the world.