Terrence Mcnally Podcast

This week we replay an interview recorded March 25 2017 in the early days of Trump with JONATHAN SMUCKER. Currently a grassroots organizer in his hometown of Lancaster PA, Jonathan was involved with Occupy Wall Street and has a lot to say about what worked and what we can learn from what didn't. I turn to him now because the grassroots will go a long way to determining turnout in November, and turnout will decide the mid-term election.

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind, once as high as #4 on the NYTimes best-seller list, currently #4 in LA, tells the story of the scientific research as well as his personal experience of guided sessions with psychedelics. Award-winning LA Weekly columnist, Seven McDonald, does the same in an article for Playboy on the therapeutic use of MDMA (ecstasy) to treat PTSD. I'm joined by McDonald and Cole Marta MD, the principal investigator at the Los Angeles site of FDA-sanctioned phase II and III trials with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.

Late summer 2004, I recorded conversations with Thomas Frank on What's the Matter With Kansas? and with George Lakoff on Don't Think of an Elephant. We were deep in two wars and three months from the Bush-Kerry election. Both Frank and Lakoff point to blind spots about the way we see the world, how we frame what we experience, and how powerful both can be. What do they have to tell us today three months from the 2018 midterms?

Want to spend less time online and more time in the real world? Brain science has learned a lot about habits. That has given corporations new power with which to manipulate us, but it also gives us greater power over our own behavior. Listen to my 2012 conversation with CHARLES DUHIGG about his book THE POWER OF HABIT, in which he tells us what a habit is, how they form, how they can be broken, and how we can put what science has learned about habits into practice.

Under John Roberts, Supreme Court decisions are consistently pro-business, recently based on corporate rights of free speech and freedom of religion. How did we get here? Will it only get worse with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh? Listen to my conversation with ADAM WINKLER, constitutional law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and his latest, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.

With the retirement of Justice Kennedy and the looming fight to hold back the confirmation of a replacement until after the mid-terms - which would increase voter turnout on both sides - let’s listen to my 2013 conversation with MARCIA COYLE re her book THE ROBERTS COURT: The Struggle for the Constitution. Coyle confirms my belief that the most crucial issue in considering the last few GOP-nominated justices is not abortion or gun control - but the rights and powers of corporations vs those of human beings.

As alarming as the news may be, we must not only oppose and alter the bad news, but we must also envision a possible future for the US that people deserve - as well as a path to get there. That is the mission of historian, political economist, activist, and writer, GAR ALPEROVITZ, co-chair of the Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative, and someone who’s thinking seriously about what replaces corporate capitalism. You can learn more at garalperovitz.com

Midterm elections take place November 7th – less than 20 weeks from the day we record this interview. Our democracy is under threat and the validity, accuracy, and reliability of our voting and vote-counting is as well. I talk about those threats and what we can do about them with BRAD FRIEDMAN, an independent investigative blogger, journalist, and muckraker who’s broken numerous stories over the past 15 years. You can learn more at BradBlog.com

On a national level and in many states, the GOP know that if politics and elections are played fair and square, they lose. So they turn to gerrymandering, voter suppression, the refusal to act on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, etc. I talk with DAVID FARIS about the ideas in his new book, IT’S TIME TO FIGHT DIRTY: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics.

Consider this a two-part episode. This week, my 2011 conversation with JACOB HACKER & PAUL PIERSON, authors of WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Next week, a NEW one w/ NANCY MacLEAN on her book DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS, which reveals the GOP’s strategy of Citizens United, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. to retain power no matter how unpopular their destructive policies.

Before the Powell Memo, before the Kochs. In DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, NANCY MacLEAN tells the story of a Nobel prize-winning economist whose ideas fuel the right’s relentless campaign to gerrymander districts, eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, change the Constitution, and curb democratic majority rule. According to MacLean, James McGill Buchanan created the blueprint that ultimately makes Koch money so effective.

If the service is free, you’re the product. How Facebook, Google and the rest use our data against us. My May 2nd 2018 conversation with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, producer of films including Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS. His book, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGs: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy comes out in paperback in June. (jontaplin.com)

This weekend as we celebrate Mothers Day, you’ll hear my 2013 conversation with HAZEL HENDERSON – who in the 70’s, as a mom who’d never been to college, got upset about pollution threatening her young child, became a local activist, and developed into a global expert on economics and sustainability. She’s creator of the television show and website Ethical Markets, and author of 10 books, including Building a Win-Win World. http://hazelhenderson.com/

Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie wrote a cover story at the Nation magazine: How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe. This is a big deal. 95 out of 100 American adults owns a cellphone. Big Wireless copied the playbook of Big Tobacco & Big Oil to hide the facts about their products - an example of the unethical abuse of science and the truth by power and wealth that is all too common and sadly pre-dates Trump. http://markhertsgaard.com

In The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, JEREMY LENT writes, “The right wing has not won on the issues, but by telling a grand story of America - a story that is false and based on a set of values that are driving civilization to a precipice. It’s been successful because there has been no coherent counter-narrative.” We look at that history and look ahead for a new story.

Donald Trump proudly admitted at a rally that he had made stuff up in his meeting with Canadian PM Trudeau. CHARLES LEWIS titled his 2014 book 935 Lies because that was the number of untruths the Bush-Cheney administration used to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Trump has taken lying to a unimaginable level (at least 2000 lies in his first year), but the book lays out the conditions that made Trump’s election possible. Lewis is a former 60 Minutes producer and founder of two Pulitzer Prize-winning organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD asks why residents of the nation's second poorest state vote for candidates who resist federal help? Why, when corporations devastate their lives and their land, do they most hate the government? After five years talking with folks in Southern Louisiana, she sensed that a particular “deep story” they share holds their political contradictions together. We’ll talk about that story and wrestle with the challenge: What story can we offer them of a future more inviting than the past? Transcript Link: http://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2018/04/qa-arlie-hochschild-strangers-in-their-own-land-anger-mourning-on-the-american-right-what-new-story-can-make-americans-yearn-for-the-future-more-than-the-past/

“We did not understand the country’s identity crisis…Consequently, we left in the hands of the opposition the hearts and minds of those we could have persuaded to support reform…Looking for an answer to their question of cultural identity, we gave them a political answer instead.” ALI NOORANI, Executive Director, National Immigration Forum, talks about successful responses to that challenge.

PETER SCHRAG, longtime editor of The Sacramento Bee, makes the case that “no party, no lobby, no organization has been as formidable an adversary to the Washington of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell as California has. None has both the will and the heft that California brings to this fight. None has been as determined.” And he reminds us that California has come a long way since 1994 and Prop 187.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and author of THE MAKING OF DONALD TRUMP, has been covering Trump since the late ‘80s. While most of the media focuses on tweets and White House intrigue, he co-founded DCReport.org to keep track of what they’re not telling you. Johnston joins me to talk about the revelations in his #2 NYTimes best-seller, IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.