WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts - TopPodcast.com

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RadioWhoWhatWhy: Climate Change, Civil Disobedience, and Extinction Rebellion Feb 01, 2019

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: Black Women Are Claiming the Political Stage Jan 24, 2019

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A penetrating look into the transformative influence of black feminist political strategy and principles in mainstream US politics, especially since the 2016 election.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Deep State vs. Democracy: Can We Now Handle the Truth? Jan 22, 2019

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: Have We All Lost Touch With Reality? Jan 18, 2019

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: A Border Wall as Architecture Jan 11, 2019

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: We All Have a Role to Play in What Will Be the Biggest Story of 2019 Jan 04, 2019

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Real Story of the Pentagon's $21 Trillion Con Game Dec 17, 2018

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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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: President Clinton's Welfare Reform Is Still 'Ensuring Poverty' Dec 12, 2018

Show notes

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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: Bush 41: The Triumph of Manners Over Truth Dec 07, 2018

Show notes

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.

RadioWhoWhatWhy: How Roger Ailes Broke the News Dec 05, 2018

Show notes

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.

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