With well publicized concern that a spike in the coronavirus might result in a possible buckling of our health care system in America, many are imagining the changes to get better systems in place to protect public health and insure access and quality to clinical services for more Americans. As a podcast focused on the future, we wanted to explore what this crisis may have taught us and what innovations tested in an emergency, like telemedicine and more coordination between different hospital systems, might become more commonplace going forward. And, of course, there’s always the issue of how do pay for the medicine Americans want. There is wide agreement by citizens that cost and service delivery are both in need of major overhaul. To discuss these issues with us is Arielle Kane, Director of Health Policy, for the Progressive Policy Institute.

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A recent headline in the New York Times indicates that the Trump Administration is reversing nearly one hundred environmental rules on issues relating to air pollution and emissions, drilling and extraction, water pollution, toxic substances and more. And this is after pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords and appointing a former coal industry lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency. And while all of this has happened and climate change has been swept from view by other more immediate crises, like COVID-19 and racial inequities, still certain signs are positive. State and local governments, major businesses, and consumers are adapting life to the changing, and threatened, planet. Harriet Shugarman, executive director of ClimateMama and author of ‘How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change’ is hopeful that progress can be made, but urges that we bring children to a greater awareness of the issue now. Through her book and activism she’s attempting to do just that. We had a conversation with her about the challenges getting adults and children to focus on the fact that what is happening is not normal and is within our control to address in the age of the Anthropocene, when humans are responsible for the general health of the flora and fauna on this one planet. It’s a wake-up call that while this issue has receded in some people’s minds, it has not gone away.

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The rules-based world order that developed after World War II was not an accident of history. It resulted from America’s vigorous leadership. So for our allies in Europe, Asia and around the globe is was so puzzling that President Donald Trump would walk away from treaties and organizations America designed. While he blustered about America’s being taken for granted by our friends during the 2016 election, many felt that his early picks for Cabinet positions demonstrated that the notion of America alone was all talk. That was until he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accords, the Iran nuclear deal and recently his disputes with allies regarding the World Health Organization and how to handle the pandemic. A recent Politico headline screamed ‘Trump’s Europe Strategy: Nothing’. Ivo Daalder, who served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Obama and co-author of ‘The Empty Throne’, along with James M. Lindsay, joins us to discuss what that vacuum means, who is trying to fill it and whether America can re-claim the mantle of the world’s most indispensable nation. And, if so, what lessons must we learn from overreach on America’s part after the end of the Cold War.

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It is constitutionally required that we do an ‘actual enumeration’ of the residents of the United States every ten years on the 00’s. Well, it’s that time. And in the middle of a pandemic and a presidential election, we are being reminded of how challenging that process can be and yet how important it is. After all it was the GOP’s Operation RedMap, in the wake of the 2010 census, that masterfully, though of dubious legality, re-drew Congressional districts in key states that swung to their advantage even while losing the popular vote statewide. The notion of gerrymandering is alive and well in America. In 2020 Democrats have set up their own approach to monitoring the process state by state in an attempt to blunt the advantage Republicans gained in the recent past. How that all plays out will take time, but of more immediate concern is how delays in doing the census, because of the pandemic, will affect states and redistricting. Many states are up against deadlines codified in their Constitutions and laws. To sort out as best we can what could result in a legal and political tangle, we talk to Christopher Lamar of the Campaign Legal Center and Jeff Zalesin, who at the time of the recording was an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center and has since left that position

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Before we engage in any war, Erik Edstrom asks us to imagine three visions: First, imagine your own death. Second, imagine war from ‘the other side’. Third, imagine what might have been if the war had never been fought. Through that lens and his own combat experience, Edstrom graphically depicts why in all his time in Afghanistan he never felt that he would possibly die for ‘something worth fighting for’. Provoking us to think whether America has gotten too comfortable venerating the military, without seriously examining its shortcomings and excesses, he suggests the Department of Defense may more aptly described as the Department of Offense. America’s indiscretions on the battlefield, and killing of non-combatants at a rate of 300 to 1 in response our losses on 9-11, begs in his view for a wholesale examination of our deployment of the military. In his book, ‘Un-American’, he describes his evolution from a young West Point graduate who didn’t think ‘our wars were self-perpetuating, self-defeating and immoral’ to a solider on the battlefield who came clearly to see the opposite. His descriptions of loss on all sides is graphic and disturbing, but highly revealing. We often only see war as something ‘over there’. He feels that the military’s greatest fear is that someone might do to us what we do to others. He strips away the Disneyification of the military and forces us to consider our recent choices to employ force around the world.

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  In 2017, research showed that 4.5 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 were neither in school nor working.  Falling into that gap is a far different experience than the one enjoyed by more affluent and socially connected people that age who can take a ‘gap year’ between high school and college and explore numerous opportunities afforded to them by their families,  Like so many yawning social issues in our society, it begs for attention just as the science suggests that this period from the late teens to the early 20’s is still a time of brain maturation.  And given our low birth rates in this society, we don’t have a young person to waste if we are going to have a strong society in the future.  According to Anne Kim, the author of ‘Abandoned’, policymakers haven’t caught up with this group who are aging out of programs, if their education ends in high school, and may be emancipated in the eyes of the law, to a very uncertain existence. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic these young people may fall further behind in terms of their life chances. These may be the same young people who live in opportunity deserts, urban and rural, where few jobs exist in their communities.  While much focus has been placed in the recent period on the importance of early childhood education, little attention has been paid to this age cohort and their difficulties as they face the challenges of emerging adulthood.  It’s an important conversation.  Please listen in.

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Sometimes riots come to define communities as you attach the name forever in your mind with the riots–like Watts, Attica, Detroit and others. And sometimes riots get lost in the long arc of American history. Few, however, are as little remembered and yet profoundly impactful as what occurred on May 8, 1970, in lower Manhattan. It was the day that David Paul Kuhn marks as the beginning of the end of the long relationship between America’s white working class and the Democratic Party. In his book, ‘The Hardhat Riot’, he describes the schism that tore liberalism apart and has had a mark on our politics to this day. In gripping detail, he takes us back to that harrowing day, when workers, in the shadow of the half-built Twin Towers, put down their tools and raised their voices signifying an emerging class conflict between two newly polarized Americas. In the wreckage was the Democratic Party’s electoral majorities, once so secure in the 20th century in America. What happened that day and in the electoral landslide for Richard Nixon in 1972 was a harbinger of the Reagan Revolution and Donald Trump’s surprising victory in 2016. Let’s delve into the history so we can understand the journey we are now part of, in another year of turmoil and conflict on our streets, in a presidential election year.

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While the number of religious nationalists may not be overwhelming their influence on American politics, and access to those in the White House, is a stunning political achievement. Some may envision evangelicals as fighting a culture war against modernity, but the movement described in Katherine Stewart’s book, ‘The Power Worshippers’, is so much more than that. Ignoring their aims, strategies and growing influence on the politics of our nation will inur to the detriment of those who understand the Constitution to be built on democratic values and not religious ones. They had, and still exercise, great influence on the Trump Administration and are focused on reconstituting the federal courts in such a way that will magnify their impact for decades to come. The Christian right employs a network of think tanks, advocacy groups, pastoral organizations and the fortunes of some very wealthy individuals in our society to re-imagine the principles upon which the Republic was first built. They are sophisticated and mobilized and barely towing the line separating church from state. It’s an important story that we describe on this podcast.

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It’s tough to accept hard truths, but it’s also deadly and bewildering to continue to accept that the most well financed military in the history of the world has not had a true victory, while being involved in many conflicts, in the last 75 years. Why is this? Where do we begin? The quality of the students and the teaching, for example, at West Point is not what is packaged to the American public and sold as world class. Thus, the leadership corps we have trained hasn’t yielded great generals since WWII. Just as we have seen how America’s political system had a difficult time demonstrating the supposed strengths available through our medical system during a pandemic, spending more on sophisticated weapons systems and generally unaudited trillions in defense expenditures has yielded poor results in conflicts from Korea to Afghanistan. You have to wonder if there were a major conflict whether our military would be exposed as a paper tiger. When we choose to fight, civilian and military leaders pick civil wars and counterinsurgency for which we are little prepared. In the process, we have hardened the resolve of our enemy combatants, made other adversaries stronger in the wake of our warmaking or created unintended consequences with profoundly negative effects. Tim Bakken who teaches civilian law at West Point lays out a case that not only is the military separate from the rest of society, but it has been granted extra Constitutional rights which were never intended by the framers. He explains in this podcast how he won a case against his treatment, as a civilian teacher, and why he’s still on the job today. And then he provides an unflinching critique of our military from his book, ‘The Cost of Loyalty’.

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There are so many unknowns when it comes to Russia and its relations with the United States.  Quick quiz: friend or foe? Democracy or dictatorship?  Who can tell from the glowing words that President Trump has spoken about Vladimir Putin.  He appreciates his strong leadership, while others equate his rule to a strongman approach to governing.  Two things are clearer every year–he controls all mechanisms of government in Russia and has a group of cronies with whom he is pillaging the wealth of the nation by setting up straw organizations and middlemen to move those resources around the world in very complex ways.  It’s also coming more into focus that he has a big chip on his shoulder about the West’s treatment of Russia and the eastward movement of NATO to his doorstep.  To counter that he has used Russian monies to poke a sharp stick at the West through election interference, as seen in the United States in 2016, and other means of influence peddling. While there’s much self aggrandizement in his rule, he also does want to restore Russia to a more prominent, and meddlesome, place on the world stage.  Catherine Belton, author of ‘Putin’s People’, breaks down his machinations in great detail and explores his regime’s goals.  And we also peel back President Trump’s relationship with Russia in this podcast.

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