A Public Affair

In response to a caller request in January, today’s show focuses on issues that older adults face in Dane County and beyond. According to the Dane County Area Agency on Aging, the number of folks 65 years and older is forecast to grow by more than 30,000 in the next fifteen years. Statewide, the senior population is growing rapidly, especially in urban areas. Yet the number of licensed nursing beds and the available workforce for nursing homes is declining. 

To talk about these issues, we’re joined by two guests, Jodie Castaneda and Addie Costello. They discuss issues like transportation, isolation, changes to local funding and Medicare, and the racial and ethnic inequalities in our area. 

Castaneda works at NewBridge, a non-profit agency which supports older adults living in their own homes or apartments in Madison and Monona. NewBridge provides case management to help their clients access benefits like Medicare/Medicaid, decrease isolation, find transportation, and more. 

Local journalist Addie Costello, started reporting on long-term health facilities after getting a tip from a community member about a long-term care facility. For the past year she’s been reporting on county-owned nursing homes, some of which are being bought by private companies as county boards are selling them saying they can’t afford to keep them up. 

She says that Wisconsin has some of the most publicly run, county operated nursing homes in the country and that these facilities have better services and better compensation for staff than privately-owned ones, according to Care Compare.

Jodie Castaneda is the NewBridge Case Manager Supervisor, and she has been in this role since the four Madison area senior coalitions merged in January 2019. She has been an older adult social worker/case manager in Madison/Dane County for almost 20 years and prior to that worked with the elderly in nursing homes and with home health care. 

Addie Costello is WPR’s Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow embedded in the Wisconsin Watch newsroom. For the last year, she’s covered Wisconsin’s long-term care Medicaid programs, assisted living, and nursing homes.

Featured image courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On today’s show host Esty Dinur is joined by Professor Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. They talk about Mahmud Muna, the Palestinian book shop owner who, along with his nephew Amad Muna, was arrested by Israeli police and charged with “inciting and supporting terrorism” because they carried books by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and others.

Pappé describes how Palestinians inside Israel are daily being harassed and terrorized by Israeli gangs. He says that the death tolls from these attacks are rising and the Israeli police seem to be encouraging these attacks. Meanwhile Donald Trump promotes turning Gaza into a resort. They also discuss whether the ceasefire will hold, the role of AIPAC, Zionism, and what Pappé predicts for the future of Israel. 

Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, serving as the Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He has written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including his critically acclaimed works such as The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel. His latest book is Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic.

Remix of Ilan Pappé via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). 

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Our guest today, Howard Schewber, says we aren’t yet in a constitutional crisis, but we are in the middle of a constitutional revolution. Trump’s barrage of executive orders is radical, according to Schweber, because it denies Congress the authority of its power over the president. He’s in conversation with Chali Pittman about the separation of powers, the courts, the administrative state, and all the changes that the Trump Administration is making, including a call to end birthright citizenship.

Schweber compares the Trump presidency to the Nixon years, and even to the changes in Wisconsin politics in the last two decades. He puts what’s happening now in the context of the New Deal era when the courts established the principle that presidents couldn’t seize control of government agencies because this was the purview of Congress. But this norm was upended just a few years ago by the Supreme Court. 

We also hear from callers with questions about the power of Elon Musk, a non-elected official, what could happen in 2028, and how democrats in Congress can or should block Trump.

Howard Schweber is emeritus professor of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of several books including The Creation of American Common Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Featured image of the US Constitution via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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Host Patty Peltekos starts today’s conversation by sharing all the ways people can have a miserable time traveling by air. From cancellations, delays, ever higher prices, cities losing air service, baggage fees, harrowing connections, and more, everyone has their own frustration with the airline industry. Our guest Ganesh Sitaraman, situates all these issues in the context of Congress’s bailout of the industry, economic policy, and US history to explain how we got here, and how we can fix it. 

Sitaraman shares insights from his book, Why Flying is Miserable, including the reasons why the airline industry is in a cycle of boom and bust. He lays out what he says are three phases of the airline industry: the early era of the industry from the birth of the airplane to the 1930s; the era of competitive regulation from the 1930s to the 1970s; and the current era of deregulation. Though the industry isn’t likely to support deregulation, Sitaraman says people are starting to question what forms of regulation can stabilize the industry. For people who want to make the industry better, Sitaraman says our actions as citizens will be more influential than our actions as consumers.

Ganesh Sitaraman is a law professor and the director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation. He is the author of numerous books including The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution and The Great Democracy. He was previously a senior advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren on her presidential campaign and is a member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. He lives in Nashville, TN.

Featured image: remix of the cover of Why Flying is Miserable.

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Last Week a Time Magazine poll of about 100 university presidents revealed that almost all of them believe that the Trump Administration is “at war with higher education.” From the attacks on DEI, student activism, and free speech, it’s easy to see why. All of this is also happening in the context of the increasing corporatization of higher education, in which administrators and politicians exert control through bureaucratizing higher education. 

To talk about the corporate university under Trump, Douglas Haynes is joined by Becky Dolhinow, Mike Gavin, and David Schultz. They discuss the history of public higher education in the US, ponzi austerity, the unrealized dream of inclusion for women, people of color, and other marginalized groups within the academy, and the flurry of institutional neutrality statements that came out of student-led pro-Palestine protests on college campuses last year.

Schultz lays out what he calls the two models of higher education: the Dewey model in which universities exist to educate the next generation of citizens to the Horace Mann model in which schools exist to produce the next generation of workers. And the Mann model has been in ascendance since the ‘70s. 

Dolhinow says that in the age of the corporate university, schools work very hard to protect their image by marketing themselves on “top 10” lists and promoting their ROI to potential students. She says colleges find student activism a threat to their image and so they track and crack down on student protest.

We haven’t fully addressed the reality that white supremacy undergirds higher education and that the decades-long challenge to DEI has only become full-fledged under Trump. He says we need to reimagine higher education so that colleges and universities provide education and equity to their students.

Dr. Rebecca Dolhinow is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Cal State University-Fullerton and the author of the article, “Activism on the Corporate Campus.” 

Dr. Michael Gavin is the President of Delta College and the leader of a national coalition of college presidents and higher education leaders called Education for All that is resisting anti-DEI legislation.

Dr. David Schultz is Hamline University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in St. Paul Minnesota. He is the author of more than 45 books on various aspects of American politics and law. He has also written on the rise of corporate universities for more than twenty years. 

Remix of a George Mason University building (CC BY 2.0), a student protest sign (CC BY 2.0), and a graph of student loan debt (CC BY-SA 4.0). 

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In his first two weeks in office, Trump withdrew Biden’s “forever chemical reform plan,” sought to keep lead in Americans’ drinking water, and froze already allocated Inflation Reduction Act funds. Trump has also appointed chemical and oil industry insiders to the EPA, fired every scientist on two of the EPA’s most influential science advisory panels, and seems poised to attempt mass firings of EPA staff. And we just learned that 2024 was the hottest year on record, hotter than the previous record set in 2023.

To make sense of all these changes, we’re joined by Rebecca John. Her reporting has uncovered how Big Oil denied that burning fossil fuel contributed to the climate crisis. She says that this time around the Trump administration is much more organized in its approach to energy and fossil fuels. In response to Trump declaring an “energy emergency,” John says that our energy crisis is the crisis created by the burning of fossil fuels. 

Host Esty Dinur asks John about Big Oil’s dirty history including the industry’s fight against air pollution regulation, the Western States Petroleum Association, and the Los Angeles smog crisis. They also discuss how Trump greenlighted drilling off US coasts and in the Arctic Refuge and the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. 

Rebecca John is a research fellow at the Climate Investigations Center and a freelance investigative climate reporter. Her work has been published by DeSmog, Air Mail, and UnHerd; and featured in the Guardian and NPR. Before working on climate, Rebecca was an award-winning documentary film-maker and has produced films for PBS and the BBC.

Remix of CO2 emissions graph (CC BY-SA 4.0) and a fossil fuel plant (CC BY 3.0).

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Among the executive actions carried out on his first day in office, Donald Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo from her post as General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Two days prior to Abruzzo’s dismissal from her influential position, journalist Dan Kaufman wrote an article about her and the NLRB for the New York Review of Books.

Kaufman joins guest host Chali Pittman today to discuss Abruzzo’s legacy, Elon Musk, and the future of the NLRB. They dive into the creation of this important entity with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that Kaufman says kept the US from becoming more of a socialist democracy. In the face of so many threats to labor organizing, Kaufman reminds listeners that nothing is static in politics. Reflecting on the ongoing litigation of Act 10, Kaufman stresses that Act 10 is still being contested because it’s outside the will of the people of the state. 

Dan Kaufman is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics.

Remix of the seal of the NLRB via Wikipedia.

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The last few weeks have been harrowing for immigrants in the US. People in our community and across the country are worried about being detained or deported as Donald Trump tries to make good on his campaign promise of “mass deportations.” Although today a federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. 

Host Ali Muldrow is joined by two guests today to talk about the threats that immigrants face right now and how people are organizing in opposition to ICE raids and more. Melissa Sanchez has been reporting on Nicaraguan communities in Wisconsin for ProPublica. She says the people she works with are scared and are staying home but that local organizing can make a difference for immigrants. 

Our second guest, Karma Chavez, says that the point of all the “shock and awe” we’re seeing is to throw the population into a state of dismay and inaction. She connects the barrage of issues from cutting DEI initiatives, to Gaza, and reproductive rights with immigration policies and says that we must stay focused and prioritize our local impact. 

Karma Chavez is a longtime friend of WORT and a Professor and Chair of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. 

Melissa Sanchez is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She writes about immigrants and labor and is based out of Chicago. She spent much of the past two years reporting on labor conditions for immigrant workers on Wisconsin dairy farms.

Featured image of a 2017 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstration in Washington, DC via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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In Wisconsin’s February 18 primary, voters will get to choose from three candidates for State Superintendent: Jeff Wright, Jill Underly, and Brittany Kinser. The two candidates who receive the most votes will be on the ballot for the general election on April 1. 

The State Superintendent runs the Department of Public Instruction, or DPI, a massive organization in charge of assessing, licensing, and distributing funds for Wisconsin’s 421 public school districts, running parental choice programs, the Wisconsin Educational Services Program for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and provides assistance for the development of public and school libraries. 

Guest host Christina Lieffring asks the candidates about why Wisconsin students test poorly in basic skills, the achievement gap between white and Black students, the 100 school districts that had referendums on the November 5 ballot, the Trump administration’s directives to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and teacher turnover. 

Jeff Wright is the Superintendent of the Sauk Prairie School District. He says we need to take concrete steps to address the gaps in reading skills for white and Black learners, like with the Science of Reading approach. Wright says that there’s a broken relationship between DPI and the state legislature, and he wants to improve that relationship so more funds can make it into schools. 

Current DPI Superintendent Jill Underly says that we need to put money where there is need, not base our school funding on property taxes. She says that many of the problems Wisconsin schools face remain due to the pandemic, including the lack of state-disbursed COVID relief funds. She adds that under her leadership the bipartisan Act 20 legislation passed. 

Brittany Kinser was unexpectedly unable to be on the show today. To learn more about her campaign you can visit her website, kinserforwikids.com. 

Remixed image via myvote.wi.gov.

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It’s been a crazy week for the roughly 2.4 million civil servants of the nation’s largest employer: the federal government. From the Trump Administration’s so-called “deferred resignation” gambit to get federal workers to resign, to a lockout of all USAID staff, to a purge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion workers, the Trump Administration is wreaking havoc among federal employees.

To make sense of all that’s happening, host Douglas Haynes is joined by Bob Hennelly, who says that neither is Elon Musk an elected official and nor is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) a legitimate governmental agency. 

Hennelly shares his insight into the role of Inspectors General, the DOJ, air traffic controllers, and how Trump undermines public trust in institutions while elevating himself. Labor unions and federal workers have been swift to respond to Trump’s executive orders. The American Federation of Government Employees Union President Everett Kelly wrote, “Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government.” 

Bob Hennelly is a print and broadcast investigative journalist specializing in labor issues both in the public and private sector. He writes frequently for Salon and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and  in dozens of other news outlets. He is the interim general manager at Pacifica’s WBAI in New York City. He is also the co-executive producer of We Decide: America at the Crossroads, which is supported by the sustaining contributions from American labor unions representing two million households.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

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