Sirota

A major American city is once again under water after a huge tropical storm: this time it’s Houston, Texas, the oil industry capital of America. One climate scientist has already said human-caused climate change may have amplified the unprecedented weather event. But is it appropriate to mention climate change amid these kinds of natural disasters? We explore that question on this first of two special episodes with journalist Naomi Klein. She says the attempt to shut down a discussion of climate change amid a natural disaster is a destructive political effort to avoid an urgently needed conversation about how to reduce carbon emissions. She also warns that Republicans may try to turn the disaster into a rationale to further expand fossil fuel development.

Here are some scary questions: How worried should we all be that our increasingly isolated and erratic president will wake up one day and launch a nuclear war? Are there any systems in place to prevent Donald Trump from doing that? Does he need to get signoff from anyone? On this episode, we explore those questions with Garrett Graff, the author of the new book "Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die." Graff has answers to all those questions about whether and how fast Trump can launch a nuclear weapon -- and whether or not Trump needs signoff from anyone else. Warning: Graff's answers to those questions may terrify you.

This past weekend, a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia spotlighted what many say is the rising power of white supremacists, who feel newly emboldened under President Donald Trump. The rally came as civil rights activists have mounted an increasingly effective campaign asserting that America’s criminal justice system has become an inhumane instrument of racial oppression. On this episode, I talk to James Forman, Jr. -- the author of a new book that explores the roots of that criminal justice system. He says the system emerged from both white conservative demagogues looking to stoke racial resentment -- and also from African American leaders who were desperate to protect the gains of the civil rights movement.

This month, former Vice President Al Gore has a new film out about climate change -- and the effort to fight it. His film is well timed -- it follows New York magazine’s July article asserting that “absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” That's a terrifying message -- but is it necessary and is it accurate? Is our planet on an irreversible path to apolcalypse? On this episode, I talk to Michael Mann, the renowned climatologist who is the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He has been sounding the alarm about climate change for years, but he also has also argued that there is "a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.”

Imagine a time when a Native American tribe was one of the richest groups of people in the United States, all thanks to oil. It actually wasn't that long ago -- but then came a spree of murders in a state whose law enforcement apparatus and political system was so corrupt, it did almost nothing to stop the crimes. On this episode, I talk to New Yorker author David Grann about this terrifying tale, recounted in his new book called "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI."

The term “economic anxiety” is one we’ve heard a lot since Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The theory is that Trump stoked Americans anger at rising economic inequality and rode that populist anger to the presidency. But what does that term “economic anxiety” really mean? On this episode, I talk to William Darity - a Duke University scholar who says it may be a euphemism for more insidious racial anxieties from white Americans who fear that people of color are gaining too much ground. Darity says the whole story of Trump as a great economic populist papers over how race and bigotry play into economic anxiety. He argues that Donald Trump did not just tap into general economic anxiety, but also white Americans’ more specific fear that they are losing their economic advantage over people of color. He also says that fear isn’t actually true -- in a recent Atlantic magazine article entitled “How Barack Obama Failed Black America,” he recounted how African Americans have not gained much economic ground over the last decade.

In 2008, Wall Street banks created a financial crisis that incinerated the economy. It was only a few years after the Justice Department aggressively prosecuted Enron and Arthur Anderson, and so many folks expected there would be similar prosecutions of financial executives, especially because Democratic presdiential candidate Barack Obama promised to “bring a new era of responsibility and accountability to Wall Street.” But it never happened. On this episode, I talk to a Pulitzer Prize winning ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger about why he says this failure to prosecute Wall Street reflects the rise of the Chickenshit Club. That's the name of his new book, which details how the federal government has reduced its efforts to seriously prosecute corporate executives.

In 2012, the Russian punk band Pussy Riot made international headlines, when they staged a protest against Vladimir Putin and were then thrown in jail. They spent 21 months in prison. As speculation has since swirled about alleged ties between Putin and Donald Trump, I met up with one of the founders of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova, to get her take on the situation. She was joined in our interview by actor John Cusack, who as part of his work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation has traveled to Russia to meet with whistleblower Edward Snowden. Cusack recently co-authored a book about that experience called “Things That Can And Cannot Be Said.”

As record amounts of money have flooded into politics in recent years, polls have shown that the public sees Congress as out of touch with America – and wildly corrupt. On this episode, you'll hear Republican Congressman Ken Buck agreeing with that view. He is sounding an alarm with a new book called “Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption Is Worse Than You Think.” Of course, Buck may look like the epitome of what he is now lamenting: he is a former staffer for Dick Cheney, and has raised millions of dollars for his campaigns and has consistently voted to support legislation that helps his donors’ industries. But he argues that there is a difference between “ideological fundraising” and “transactional fundraising.” He also says that President Trump's promise to “drain the swamp” is consistent with him appointing billionaires to government positions that regulate those billionaires’ industries.

Last week on this podcast, we dove into the huge fight over a California bill to create a single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare system in that state. California Democrats twice in the past passed single-payer legislation and this year they passed a single-payer bill through the state senate. However, the latest bill was blocked by Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. On this episode, I talk do David Dayen, who recently wrote an article for The Intercept asserting that the legislative fight is misleading. He argues that even if the bill moves forward, there remain huge state constitutional hurdles and other obstacles to actually creating a single-payer system in California. Proponents of the bill have pushed back, saying Dayen and others who are making process arguments against the bill are actually making it harder to pass critical legislation.