Get the 'Wealth Hoarders' To Pay For the Biden Infrastructure Bill

This interview is a special KGNU pre-publication interview (the book comes out in February 2021 from The authors, Joanne Samuel Goldblum, (@jgoldblum), founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and journalist Colleen Shaddox who argue that the systems that should protect our citizens are broken and that poverty results from flawed policies—compounded by racism, sexism, and other ills—rather than people’s “bad choices.” Federal programs for the poor often fall far short of their aims: The U.S. has only 36 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income families; roughly 1 in 3 households on Navajo reservations lack plumbing; and inadequate counsel by public defenders can lead to harsher penalties for crimes or time in “debtors’ prisons” for those unable to pay fines or court fees. An overarching problem is that the U.S. determines eligibility for government benefits with an outdated and “irrationally low” federal poverty level of $21,720 for a family of three, which doesn’t take into account necessities such as child care when women work outside the home. The authors credibly assert that it makes more sense to define poverty as an inability to afford basic needs in seven areas—“water, food, housing, energy, transportation, hygiene, and health”—each of which gets a chapter that draws on academic or other studies and interviews with people like a Baltimore resident who had to flush his toilet with bottled water after the city shut it off due to an unpaid bill. This plainspoken primer in the spirit of recent books like Anne Kim’s Abandoned and Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Tightrope, Goldblum and Shaddox interweave macro analyses with examples of micro interventions that might work in any community. A Head Start teacher in Lytle, Texas, says her program saw benefits just from giving toothbrushes (and a chance to use them at a classroom sink) to children who had none at home: “They come here, and they scrub like there’s no tomorrow.”

10 Dec 202054min

We can only hope, going forward from increasingly alarming climate change horrors of the past few years, that the Biden-Harris administration will make climate change a top policy concern after COVID19. The appointment of John Kerry as The Special Presidential Envoy for Climate certainly suggests this intention. And, just in time, since this past August saw the US facing unprecedented climate emergencies, . And for climate at the world at large, for the first time on record, This interview is a reprise of a conversation we had for @KGNU with Dr Todd Sanford during his time at The Union of Concerned Scientists.  UCS is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. The organization "strives for independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices."   What began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at the  in 1969 is now an alliance of more than 400,000 citizens and scientists. UCS members are people from all walks of life: parents and businesspeople, biologists and physicists, teachers and students.  over the decades show that thoughtful action based on the best available science can help safeguard our future and the future of our planet.

26 Nov 202021min

Five years on from this interview, it should NOT be necessary to remind people that with #COVID19, poverty and inequality are at record levels. Through the roof, they are, as foodbanks around the country increasingly bear witness. As Scott Myers-Lipton, , showed us @KGNU in his book, ": an Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty", there are possibilities for real and long-lasting solutions.  Conditions have renewed demands for a new , an American idea proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The new Economic Bill of Rights has a coherent plan and proclaims that all Americans have the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home, adequate medical care, a good education, and adequate protection from economic fears of unemployment, sickness, and old age. Integrating the latest economic and social data, his book explores each of these rights. Each chapter includes an analysis of the social problems surrounding each right, a historical overview of the attempts to implement these rights, and assessments of current solutions offered by citizens, community groups, and politicians. These contemporary, real-life solutions to inequality can inspire students and citizens to become involved and open pathways toward a more just society.

19 Nov 202028min

On Election eve, Claudia Cragg speaks for @KGNU with k about Joe Biden, 2020 Presidential Candidate for The Democratic Party. Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.” His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship—an essential quality as he addresses Americans in the nation’s most dire hour in decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on his work for The New Yorker to capture the characters and meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members. This portrayal illuminates Biden’s long and eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama’s vice president, his sojourn in the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden will face if elected and weighs how political circumstances, and changes in the candidate’s thinking, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy—a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.

3 Nov 202024min

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks with about her new book, . Schroedel is professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University and in this work she weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as they related particularly to Native Peoples. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, South Dakota encouraged voters to use absentee ballots in the June 3 presidential primary election. Although the state received almost 89,000 absentee ballots in the primaries — five times the number of absentee ballots cast in the June 2016 primaries — and voting increased across the state, voter turnout on the Pine Ridge Reservation remained low, at approximately 10%. As Schroedel explains in her book, barriers to Indigenous voting are nothing new. Absentee ballots may only make them worse. Though the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Indigenous people born within the United States, voting can still be difficult for tribal communities. During South Dakota’s 2020 primary election, any voter who used an absentee ballot was required to mail in a ballot application accompanied by a photocopy of an acceptable photo ID card, or else have a public officer notarize the application. For people on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where businesses are often few and far between, producing a photocopy, or even finding a notary public, can pose significant barriers to applying for absentee ballots.   In many cases, this is deliberate. Strategies designed to suppress the Indigenous vote, range from having too few polling stations on reservations to gerrymandering to dilute the impact of tribal votes to failing to adhere to the minority language requirement of the Voting Rights Act. Indigenous voters sometimes have to travel up to 200 miles to even reach a voter registration site or polling location.  Indigenous voters also face blatant voter discrimination from local governments; many have had to engage in costly and burdensome lawsuits and court battles simply to gain access to the ballot box. In 2014 in South Dakota, the Jackson County Commission refused to place a satellite polling station in Wanblee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in time for the 2014 midterms. The county eventually installed the station, but only after four enrolled members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe sued. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, a surge of laws has made it even more difficult to vote in Indian Country. In 2016, for example, Arizona passed a so-called “ballot harvesting” law that made it a felony for third parties to mail in or drop off another person’s ballot. But many rural Indigenous voters rely on other people, including workers from voter assistance organizations, to collect and turn in their absentee ballots.

21 Okt 202036min

Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) talks here to Heather Lende, (@HeatherLende) a New York Times bestselling author who writes about her hometown  -- Haines, Alaska, She has been discussing what community means since she published If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name in 2006 (selling more than 125,000 copies).  After the 2016 elections, Lende was inspired to take a more active role in politics and decided to run for office in Haines.And…She won! In  (Algonquin Books), Lende uses her trademark humor, wit, and compassion to tell the funny and entertaining story of her first term on her small-town assembly, where we learn that the political, social, and environmental issues her community faces are not so different from the issues that are being played out on the national stage.  The book is a "how to guide" for anyone thinking of beginning a career in local politics.  She explains how the local government makes decisions on things that impact us everyday -- roads, schools, zoning for housing and stores, libraries, and the list goes on and on.  “I think that social justice and public health are very much in the realm of local governments, and so much of what happens going forward will fall on the shoulders of people like me— elected to local councils and commissions— and how we interact with the community and the pressure from different interest groups, and I think my experience might help make that work out better than it has previously.” Writes Lende.  “All politics is local, and now more than ever— so why not learn about it from a citizen lawmaker who.. did okay, but was not perfect?” Heather Lende has contributed essays and commentary to NPR, the New York Times, and National Geographic Traveler, among other newspapers and magazines, and is a former contributing editor at Woman’s Day. A columnist for the Alaska Dispatch News, she is the obituary writer for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines and the recipient of the Suzan Nightingale McKay Best Columnist Award from the Alaska Press Club. Her previous bestselling books are Find the Good, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name. Lende was voted Citizen of the Year, Haines Chamber of Commerce, in 2004. Her website is

15 Okt 202032min

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Samuel Myers of the . In a recent  with his colleague, Howard Frumkin, Myers states that, of course, elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. His new book with Frumkin is .  Elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. Here we examine these contrasts through the lens of planetary health. A hallmark of the current US administration, say Myers and Frumkin, has been its hostility to environmental stewardship and its embrace of an antiregulatory agenda. President Donald Trump has appointed administration officials from the ranks of polluting industries and their lobbying firms; eviscerated some key government agencies; and diluted or overturned environmental regulations. Notably, Trump has called climate change a hoax and has cast doubt on established science. The Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, has stronger pro-environmental positions as evidenced by the actions of the Obama administration in which he served and by his published 2020 election platform on a clean energy revolution and environmental justice

9 Okt 202033min

Claudia Cragg speaking for @KGNU to on and and her new book is the former deputy director and chief operating officer of the Massachusetts Health Connector—the model for the Affordable Care Act. She is the director and chief operating officer of the Massachusetts Health Connector—the model for the Affordable Care Act.  Medical insurance is complicated and, like virtually everything in American public life these days, has been politicized and in the process made still more confusing. Yet the present collection of crises—a pandemic, the challenge of accessing quality medical care, unemployment and its attendant loss of health insurance—has made clear more than any other moment in modern memory the importance of universal coverage. Add to this the fact that women are responsible for up to 80% of healthcare decisions for their families. Day has written a primer specifically for women on the ins and outs of medical insurance, with the objective of transforming our healthcare system using feminism as the lens and women as the drivers.

8 Okt 202030min