All Ears with Abigail Disney

This week on All Ears Abby welcomes Professor Rebecca Henderson, who teaches about innovation, corporate culture change, and ethics at Harvard Business School. Her class,  “Reimagining Capitalism”, is one of HBS’s most popular classes, and she says that the majority of her students tend to believe that capitalism is broken.  But Professor Henderson tells Abby that capitalism is a fundamentally moral enterprise, albeit one that needs to be held in delicate balance with a strong society and a democratically accountable government. They discuss the dramatic pivot point created by the charismatic economist Milton Friedman in the early 1970s. According to Professor Henderson, Friedman’s fervent free market beliefs created the moral, political, and legal arguments for abolishing ethical boundaries in business practices in the name of maximizing profits. Then, using their political clout, unchecked business leaders spend the next decades undermining protections for workers, healthcare, infrastructure and the environment. Professor Henderson urges listeners to lean into their power as consumers and voters as the engine of business cultural change.

Find Professor Rebecca Henderson on Twitter: @RebeccaReCap

EPISODE LINKS
Reimagining Capitalism In A World On Fire (Rebecca Henderson)
“The Business Case For Saving Democracy: Why Free Markets Need Free Politics” (Rebecca Henderson)
“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (New York Times, 9/13/70)
“The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations” (Moyers On Democracy)

This week on All Ears Abby talks to author and commentator Heather McGhee. Heather is a distinguished senior fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, where she also served as president for four years. Heather argues that the economic, intellectual, and societal costs of racism affect not only its victims but also its perpetrators. She tells Abby that America’s White middle class grew after WW2, with help from Federal housing subsidies, education grants and other benefits that were largely denied to Black Americans. Once Black Americans began demanding equal treatment, many of those programs were simply dismantled. This kind of racism, McGee tells Abby, cost everyone. Abby and Heather also delve into the political theft of Reconstruction, whether American racism is unique, the misogyny of libertarianism, and if the Karen memes are a harbinger of a backlash on feminism.

Heather’s heavily anticipated book, The Sum of Us, is due out in early 2021.

EPISODE LINKS:
“A White Man Asked C-Span How to Stop Being Racist. Here’s the Fascinating Answer” (Fortune)
“Racism Has A Cost For Everyone” (TED Talk)
“Facebook Fails to Appease Organizers of Ad Boycott” (NY Times)
Color of Change
Demos

Heather on Twitter: @hmcghee
Heather on Instagram: @HeatherCMcGhee

In this week’s episode, Abby talks to one of Joe Biden’s shortlisted VP candidates, Stacey Abrams. Recounting her upbringing in Mississippi, the former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader describes  the powerful example her parents set for their children as activists and citizens, even as they had struggled their whole lives for fair access to education, employment opportunities, and the voting booth. “Every election they would take us with them [to vote],” Abrams tells Abby. “And there's six of us. So we looked like Make Way For Ducklings as we followed them into the voting booth and we trailed out.”  Additionally, Abrams talks to Abby about her missions to create awareness about voting, the value of the census, and the authoritarian playbook that closely resembles President Trump’s reelection strategy. Oh, and when Abrams isn’t saving the world, she has a romance novel-writing side gig.

EPISODE LINKS
Stacey’s book: Our Time Is Now
Fair Fight 2020 
FairCount.org
The Cut On Tuesdays: Family Money (The Cut/Gimlet)
Make Way For Ducklings: The Art of Robert McCloskey (MFA Boston)
Stacey Abrams: I Know Voting Feels Inadequate Right Now (NY Times)
1,285 Proven Cases of Voter Fraud in America (Heritage Foundation)

Stacey Abrams on Twitter and Instagram: @staceyabrams

This week is a deep dive into how we can shed ingrained ideologies, question our identities, and form our intellectual selves. Abby is joined by UCLA and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw for a lively conversation about critical race theory, the pitfalls of meritocracy, and how Kimberlé’s created the theoretical framework we call intersectionality. Having grown up in the same era, Abby and Kimberlé talk about how they internalized the same political touchstones, processed similar clues from their mothers about the importance of propping up the male ego, and how they both failed at absorbing patriarchal messaging.

Take a listen!

EPISODE LINKS:
Song Of The South: The Difficult Legacy Of Disney's Most Shocking Movie (The Guardian)
The African American Policy Forum
INTERSECTIONALITY MATTERS! (Podcast)
Under The Black Light (Web Series)
50 Years After Watts: The Causes of a Riot (Time Magazine)
Harvard Law School Torn by Race Issue (NY Times)
Higher Education and the Illusion of Meritocracy (Chronicle of Higher Education)
When Black Women Reclaimed Their Bodies (Slate)

Kimberlé Crenshaw on Twitter:
@SandyLocks
@AAPolicyForum

This week on All Ears Abby welcomes CNN host and New York Times’ best-selling author Van Jones. Van talks about being a young civil rights lawyer in Oakland at the time of the Rodney King trial, and how it directly influenced his progressive activism of the last 30 years. Van says that having children made him come around to the belief that fixing the system is more productive than tearing it down, and that finding common ground is the key to systemic change. Van and Abby also discuss white fragility, Democrats’ past willingness to support “tough on crime” laws and mass incarceration, and the fact that Van is a 9th generation American, but the first person in his family to have all his rights fully recognized by the government. Learn more about Van’s extensive body of work in criminal justice reform though his organization REFORM Alliance.

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
“Van Jones on a Trump win: This was a white lash” (CNN)
How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis (ACLU)
The Redemption Project With Van Jones (CNN Original Series)

IG: @vanjones68
Twitter: @VanJones68

Continuing our focus on activism around the murder of George Floyd by police on May 25th, Abby welcomes Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, Co-Chair of The Poor People’s Campaign, and President of Repairers of the Breach. Both organizations focus on organizing and uplifting communities across the country using a moral framework of public concerns such as how society treats the poor, women, LGBTQ people, children, workers, immigrants, communities of color, and the sick. Abby, who calls herself a “militant agnostic” who has “faith in people of faith” discusses with Rev. Barber how politics and morality not only overlap, but also that a moral movement can be rooted in the deepest principles of our constitution. Rev. Barber talks about the brutal and arrogant indifference of George Floyd’s killer, and how racism is a form of violence that infiltrates healthcare, public policy, and employment opportunities, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in the current environment of protest and civil disobedience.

6/20 & 6/21: Mass Poor People’s Assembly & Moral March On Washington: A Digital Justice Gathering (Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival)
Repairers of the Breach
We Are Called To Be A Movement, by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II
Amos 5 (King James Bible)
“The interlocking evils of systemic racism” (The Poor People’s Campaign)

Rev. Barber on Twitter:
@RevDrBarber
@BRepairers
@UniteThePoor

All Ears is stepping back this week from our COVID-19 focus to turn our attention to the national anguish resulting from the murder of George Floyd by police on May 25th. At the forefront of Abby’s mind is sharing her platform with movement leaders, both as an opportunity to listen and learn. This week Abby talks to Rajasvini Bhansali, the Executive Director of Solidaire Network (a community of donors mobilizing resources to social justice movements), about why it’s hard to fund social movements, how white people need to sit with their own discomfort when confronting their own racism, and why profound personal transformation is impossible to do alone. 

This week on All Ears Abby is joined by Supermajority co-founder and former President of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards. Cecile and Abby discuss their shared experiences of having a famous parent, and how being middle school activists landed them in the principal’s office. Cecile also talks to Abby about why she’s never run for political office, how Planned Parent animated the Christian Right, the need right now for a women’s stimulus package, and how to organize a diverse coalition of  women to push for childcare- and healthcare-focused policies in response to COVID-19. 


EPISODE LINKS:

• Join Supermajority.com
• Supermajority: A New Home For Women's Activism (NPR)
• Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards dies at 73 (Houston Chronicle)
• Ann Richards’ 1988 Democratic National Convention Speech (YouTube)
• What a $15 Minimum Wage Means for Women and Workers of Color (National Employment Law Project)
• Cecile's book, "Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead" (Bookshop.org)

This week on All Ears, Abby talks to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren about the loss of her eldest brother to COVID-19, one of over 93,000 loved ones lost to the pandemic in this country (as of this episode’s release). As they dig deeper into the origins of the political divide raging between blue and red states, Senator Warren talks about her conservative upbringing and how to maintain relationships even as political viewpoints within families diverge. Both speaking from their own life experiences, Abby and Senator Warren share how family dynamics, work/life balance, and the act of listening can shift perspective across a lifetime.   

EPISODE LINKS

• Elizabeth Warren's Brother, Donald Reed Herring, Has Died From Coronavirus (CBS News)
• Margaret Thatcher: There’s No Such Thing As Society (Margaret Thatcher Foundation)
• Ronald Reagan, 8/12/86: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. " (Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation)
• 1984 Political Ad for Ronald Reagan “Morning in America” (aka “Prouder, Stronger, Better”) (YouTube)
• Why Fewer Americans Outearn Their Parents (The Atlantic)
• The Personal Is Political: The Journey Of A Feminist Slogan (openDemocracy)
• Elizabeth Warren Wants a Wealth Tax. How Would That Even Work? (New York Times)

Join Abby and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker (@darrenwalker), as they discuss modern philanthropy: how it has evolved, how its success is measured, and who it benefits, on both sides of the ledger.

Links from this episode's conversation:

Darren Walker’s book, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel Of Wealth
The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie
The Highlander Folk School
Monticello Is Done Avoiding Jefferson’s Relationship With Sally Hemings (New York Times)
NAACP Legal Defense Fund