EP 1013 Fighting to Stop Corporate Bad Practices
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 in return and further environmental degradation. If corporate interests, particularly in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision in 2010, bankroll so much of our politics who is left to stand up and fight for social justice, environmental and health standards? In many cases it’s been left to corporate campaign movements to stop bad practices as whistleblowers, non-profits and non- governmental organizations do battle for what is right. Michael Marx, once a corporate insider, has been fighting the good fight more recently as an internationally respected environmental corporate campaign director and founder of Corporate Ethics International. In his book “Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed,” he lays out the strategies that he employed in taking on companies like Mitsubishi, Home Depot, Walmart and Exxon/Mobil.
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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, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, among others. While we closed down many large facilities housing people with mental illness our community-based approaches have been spotty and often lacking a critical component–connecting people dealing with these conditions with others who have similar lived experiences. Hundreds of thousands of individuals with mental illness live in jails and prisons when they would be better served by working with peer respites, stand-alone crisis centers and other innovative efforts now underway in various communities. Our guest, University of Alabama Law professor, Fredrick Vars, is the author of “Through the Fire: How People with Mental Illness are Empowering Each Other.” He speaks from his own experience as one who suffered a hallucinogenic break. It’s an important discussion of a topic often left in the shadows.
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 onrushing development ‘could spell the end of the human race.’ Now let’s be clear, there are responsible players in the AI space who see the dystopian possibilities and are trying to warn us, but the question is are we listening? Can policymakers put guardrails on this out- of -control technological development unlike any other? Our guest, Peter Solomon, a scientist, author and entrepreneur is trying to get to the younger generation to consider the potential outcomes with his novel, “12 Years to AI Singularity: A Harmonious Future with Artificial Intelligence of War.” It’s up to us. He will provoke you into thinking about this technology in a way that few others have.
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 and lobbyists make a living representing special interests, have we done all we could to engage the public in an ongoing effort to plug them in to have a say between elections on a host of issues? Constant polling and town halls with elected officials may make us feel as if we’re being heard, but an objective look would say we’re not really a big part of the lawmaking process. So how do we re-engage in a way that is genuine and that averts the backsliding that we now see in democracies? Our guest, Peter Macleod, and co-author, along with Richard Johnson, of the book, “Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public,” joins us to discuss.
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 Government,” thinks in contrast to the ascendant position of Super PACS since the Citizens’ United decision back in 2010, where the money and transparency are truly dark, this may prove to be a better, more sunlit, method of campaign finance. He’s assuming in his analysis that Congress has no appetite for true campaign finance reform. It all gets a bit complicated so try to focus on this podcast without distraction.
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. Dealing with the physical side of the medical community is difficult enough. Imagine being in emotional distress and the crisis building up to a point where an emergency exists or the stigma you feel is traumatizing. On top of that having to tell your story six different times to get to the right person. Such is often the case in the provision of mental health services. We are talking about issues involving mental health counselors, psychiatrists, addiction professionals and others. To discuss what she’s hoping can be done, and the signs that progress is being made, is Mohini Venkatesh, chief of staff for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (TheNationalCouncil.org). It’s an extremely challenging and crucial topic is a moment of great anxiety in our country.
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 can go from the beatnik era of the 1950’s to the hippies of the 1960’s and to the punks of the 1980’s to find the Kerouac’s, Dylan’s, Ginsberg’s, Garcia’s and others who have left an indelible imprint on society. In his book, Alan Bisbort, a scholar of bohemian history, takes us from Paris in the 1830’s tracing the evolution and stages of the movement in his new book, “Hip, Bohemian, and Counterculture: History and Legacies from 1830 to the Present.” The book is worth reading for its history, context and vivid illustrations of the major forces in the movement over time and certainly for his comparison of Socrates, who in his day must have seemed ‘hip’, to Wavy Gravy. It’s great stuff.
There has been an association between cats and women throughout history. It’s not always been a positive one as so many histories have been dominated by the male perspective. Even in our era, as cats have taken their place alongside dogs, as popular home companions, they were derisively referenced in the 2024 campaign, as their guardians were referred to as ‘childless cats ladies.’ It has been a long and difficult history for the cats that we now embrace in our society. This phenomenon is only about a half century old and still the behavior of what are referred to as street or feral cats, two different categories, are maligned for the environmental damage they do to birds, small mammals and reptiles. Yet, the evolution of the cat itself, from the wildcat, can be directly traced to their value in protecting granaries from vermin, like mice and rats. It’s a fascinating story told brilliantly by Professor Rod Phillips, of Carleton University, in Canada, in his new book, “Cats: A History.” He is our guest today.
What comes to mind if I say San Francisco–the hippies and Grateful Dead of the 1960’s, the locus of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, the Internet revolution of the 1990’s, the urban decay of the pandemic era or the AI revolution that is clearly upon us? Well, I think the best answer is all of the above. The city is a complicated mix of culture, technology, business and a growing class divide. There may be no better chronicler of the city than Jonathan Weber who has been covering this beat for different media outlets since the early 1990’s. All of his knowledge and sense of place are married in his great new book, “City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco.” He dispels the notion that many of us have had that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are interchangeable. They are very different places. Both have been crucial to modern-day America. When you think San Francisco remember that e-publishing, social media, video streaming, cloud software and the sharing economy really came to life there. Enjoy this fascinating conversation.