With a hot war raging in Ukraine, it is easy to lose sight of a zone of growing tension in the cold ice terrain of the Arctic. American military planners have taken notice of the growing Russian military presence building land bases and launching a string of provocative aerial missions. America is playing catch-up in a climate where it has little experience and capabilities, knowing that the threats of climate change and the Russian dominance of the Arctic demands a more comprehensive strategy. Our guest, journalist Kenneth Rosen explored the activity in the region in a lengthy article online in Politico Magazine. We discussed with him the various challenges for America as it builds its fleet of nuclear-capable icebreakers, ships and submarines, in a region where experts agree any battles in the future will be fought in the air or on water. More importantly, he discusses the need for America to have a more comprehensive strategy, with its Allies, in order to address the growing importance of the Arctic.
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Tik Tok. Huawei. Tencent. Giant Chinese companies have become controversial players in the United States as we try to determine their motives and whether they are just another arm of the Chinese government as they vacuum up incredible amounts of data on American citizens. Data which we willingly provide as we ignore terms of service so we can post another picture or video or interact with our friends. And given the lax regulation of social media companies in America, allowing them to sell our information as a key part of their revenue stream, our data flows like a faucet to China at a moment in time when they are severely restricting the information coming back to us. In her book, “Trafficking Data”, author Aynne Kokas explains how, in her view, China is winning the battle for digital sovereignty as it more broadly defines information that is important to its national security. Beijing is collecting data on people nearly everywhere. Their platforms track people’s preferences and whereabouts, while also giving the Chinese government control over a powerful tool for shaping people’s worldview.
Cryptocurrency has been in the news recently and not in a good way. The chicanery of Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX Exchange now stands in league with other great financial swindles, like Bernie Madoff’s. There are large questions that need to be addressed both about the economic utility of this relatively new asset class and the role that government oversight should play in the regulation of it. To address those issues and all things cryptocurrency is Lee Reiners, the Policy Director of the Duke Financial Economic Center and a lecturing fellow at Duke University. He explains what cryptocurrency is and why in his mind it has a murky future given that it does not perform the common functions of money, as we know it, and its volatility makes it, indeed, risky business.
The conventional criticism of the current make up of the U.S. Supreme Court is that it is populated by a majority of rabid right wing partisans, overturning precedents in order to achieve political objectives. And that its decisions are out of step with a majority of Americans. Our guest, Mark Lemley, Professor of Law at Stanford University, has an even more searing critique as he argues that the Supreme Court is making an unprecedented power grab as it takes decision-making away from both other government institutions and individuals and retains authority never before envisioned for itself. Of all the trampling he sees to Congressional authority, administrative agencies of the federal government, and state legislatures, his clearest red flag is the impact this Court is having on lower federal courts and their role in our delicate republic. It’s such an important topic not getting the attention it deserves.
The American public education system, K-12, is plagued with problems at this moment. On the heels of a pandemic that turned teaching from one of the most impactful, personal professions into one in which remote exchanges were dominant, this just begins to scratch the surface. We find an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession, stagnant compensation, which certainly contributes to the former, heavier workloads and declining prestige for those who enter the field. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 85,058 in 2019-2020. And wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Matthew Kraft of Brown University and, our guest, Melissa Arnold Lyon of the University at Albany, State University of New York, in their 2022 paper “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction Over the Last Half Century,” tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry and job satisfaction” over 50 years. She has a conversation with me about their findings.
While the community’s shock over what happened in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School can never be erased, the new school built nearby is meant to refocus thoughts to the future and designed to make it less susceptible to anything like it ever happening again. There is no way to harden a school beyond the possibility for an attack, but there are many approaches you can take to minimize the risk, according to Jay Brotman, Managing Partner of Svigals and Partners, the architectural firm in New Haven, Connecticut chosen to rebuild the school. In the podcast, he describes the approaches taken to both secure the facility, but still make it warm and inviting for students and teachers. The philosophy employed, and substantial input gathered from the community incorporated into the new design, is contained in the firm’s paper entitled “Building Safer Schools That Don’t Look Like Prisons”. This is an important conversation as communities address this issue nationwide.
Some Congressional leaders say that all we have to do to get control of our raging national debt is to cut out waste, fraud and abuse. Scour the voluminous federal budget and you will not find line items with those designations. Were it so easy. Mind you we’re over $31 trillion in the hole now and add a trillion or more to it each year(except much more during, say, a pandemic). The hard truth is that much of the federal budget is on autopilot–like Social Security and Medicare–and few in Congress have the desire to even begin to give a hard look at these programs and determine if structural changes need to be made. This is occurring as the ticking clock tells us there’s trouble ahead when current benefits to seniors in these programs will not be met by projected revenues within a decade. There are revenue increases, benefit cuts or changes in eligibility standards available, but is there political will to manage this problem? The looming debt ceiling debate has brought the issue to the fore but President Biden is demanding that the default on US debt obligations not be a condition of any negotiation on the long term debt problem. Robert Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition(concordcoalition.org), a non- partisan organization that encourages fiscal responsibility in Washington, joins us to discuss.
It was only a few years ago when mention of mental health concerns was done in whispered tones. Today, perhaps owing to the pandemic and its after effects, people openly share their anxiety, sleeplessness and other manifestations of mental anguish in these uncertain times. All this has been exacerbated by economic and political worries. Chuck Ingoglia, CEO of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (www.thenationalcouncil.org ) joins us to discuss a range of issues explaining the growing awareness and interest in mental health as well as the concerns about access to treatment, its expense and the role the federal government is playing in attempting to realize the goal of giving our mental health needs parity with our physical health concerns.
We put up signs and cheered and serenaded from rooftops and labelled “heroes,” healthcare workers, teachers, grocery clerks. delivery drivers, food processors, and we gave them a new label “essential”, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept across America. Before this event, we had spent the better part of forty years ignoring the worsening plight of working class people, often doing thankless jobs, here in America. “Essential” before this, they were not, by any measure. We did not pay them enough, protect their health enough or even thank them enough. The question is as the pandemic ebbs, has their status in our society really changed? You would think that in the face of a worker shortage (though our guest says it can be more aptly described as a “surplus of bad jobs”)we would bestow more value and benefits as a society and as companies. In his book, “Essential” How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice,” Jamie McCallum makes the argument that some progress is being made, but it’s not nearly enough. We will give you a framework for discussing this important topic in your community and workplace on this podcast.