Description: I recently moderated a discussion titled ‘Democracy on the Edge: Election 2026 Key Issues Forum’ sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Waterbury campus of the University of Connecticut. This podcast is a reprise of that event featuring: Brody Mullins, former Wall Street Journal reporter addressing issues of campaign finance Dave Daley, …
The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, under the direction of Steven Kull, has been out surveying people in 11 competitive states and 28 competitive U.S. House districts in advance of the midterm elections. Perhaps, surprisingly, on key issues like fixing Social Security’s impending fiscal crisis, which would require recipients to accept up to …
Labor unions taught many activist groups how to organize to improve working conditions and how to push back against strong corporations. For the last fifty years or so, union strength has eroded and corporate America has had a stranglehold on the politics of this nation. We’ve seen the results–jobs shipped overseas, inferior quality coming back …
About one-fifth of the adult population in America experiences mental illness in any given year, yet less than half of them receive treatment. Often, our approach is to prevent disaster rather than foster positive outcomes for the patient. And media coverage exaggerates the danger involved in dealing with most people who experience serious mental illness, …
I know what you’re thinking, you don’t want one more podcast on AI. However, it’s developing at a breakneck speed, with the full encouragement of the federal government, to move fast and break things. Is it the human race that actually is in peril? Astrophysicists, like Stephen Hawking, have warned us that AI and its …
It might seem on paper that the world’s democracies, as part of their first act, have done a great job of building mechanisms and approaches to make the whole system work–voting and elections, safeguards for them, and ways to expand the franchise. Yet, particularly in the United States, where money plays such a key role …
In a recent decision, The United States Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties. While some see this as a win for Republicans, our guest, Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took over Big …
Fixing our fragmented mental health care system is a key priority in dealing with the crisis we have today regarding Americans’ mental well-being. The services are not uniformly available, often late in getting to the people who need them and all of this has a profoundly negative impact on both the patients and the providers. …
Underground movements and subcultures are not a recent phenomenon. Throughout modern history these bohemian movements, often marginalized in their time, have brought us our greatest creative minds by virtue of their unwillingness to accept the norms of the day. Great art, poetry music and thought have derived from these freethinkers. In recent American history, we …
You will find that out early in the discussion that awaits you just ahead. Our guest provides a thumbnail of modern Iranian history and in the process makes us realize that Western meddling in the mid-20th century, provides a throughline to where we are today. And where we are today in this American misadventure reminds …