Whowhatwhy's Podcasts

No one ever said it was easy to be a cop, and the gig only gets tougher. On the one hand, community organizers and local leaders are calling for more personal policing; more positive interactions between law enforcement and civilians. On the other hand, we're handing out riot gear and war weaponry as if the police were another branch of the military.    Terminator-style SWAT equipment and armored carriers are now ubiquitous in precincts nationwide. One needs only to look at the images of Baltimore earlier this year, or Boston after the Marathon bombing, to see how this equipment can result in police ability to lockdown a city as if it were an occupying force.   Washington Post reporter and author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop Radley Balko talks with WhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman about the perfect storm that led to the militarization of America's police forces and what it means for our liberty.

It’s been 23 years since the 1992 race riots in LA sparked by the beating of Rodney King. With Baltimore burning, what’s really changed?  

RaidioWhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman sits down with Russian-American writer and activist Masha Gessen. 

WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker is interviewed by Boston-based syndicated radio host Chuck Morse about the Boston Marathon Bombing trial and the FBI.

American medicine, we are told, is among the best in the world. Yet treating sickness is only one measure of quality, and whether or not the system itself is healthy is up for debate. A system that treats sickness but doesn’t offer preventative measures to assure continued health is broken.   From after-the-fact health care to our love affair with pharmaceuticals, we are on the road to disaster, as crusading reformer Raymond Francis of MIT explains to our host, Jeff Schechtman. Francis has some ideas on how we can do much, much, better and end the Great American Health Hoax.  

A random walk through what the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights are really all about. A talk with the former national legal director of the ACLU and the founder of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.    

Warren Zevon's great song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money,”was about a kid getting out of trouble in various Latin American countries. Today, however, as we approach the 2016 presidential election, it might very well be a description of our election process. It seems that lawyers, money and enforcement are an ever-growing part of American elections. A new set of rules seems to prevail. Issues such as campaign finance, voting rights, voter ID, electronic voting and ballot access itself are now debatable parts of voting in America.   How did we get here, how did democracy become so complex, and what’s the historical context? Just how deeply is fraud really built into the system? WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman talks with David Schultz, Hamline University professor in the School of Business, senior fellow at the Institute of Law and Politics at the University of Minnesota Law School, and professor of election law.  

The War on Drugs has caused just as much damage, destruction, and loss of life as any war in the traditional sense. University of San Francisco professor and author of the book Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States Rebecca Gordon joins us to discuss. 

It has been 62 years since the Cuban Revolution began. Fifty-four years since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fifty-three years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Twenty-six years since the end of the Cold War, and 15 years since the Elian Gonzalez incident. And it is just now that we are beginning a new relationship with our neighbor 90 miles away. A significant part of our population has come of age with absolutely no knowledge of the history of the US / Cuba relationship, what the revolution was about, or what all the hostility has been about. And yet the history of that relationship with Cuba has been a kind of Rosetta Stone for understating the bias, the mistakes, and domestic politics behind so much of American foreign policy, from the mid-20th century until today. Few have had the access to Cuba to provide the kind of clear and present perspective that Tom Hayden has. Tom Hayden, a leader in the student, antiwar, and civil rights protests throughout the 1960s talks toWhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about what this

Technological change and creative destruction are everywhere. They have changed the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the foundation of education and now, the nature of warfare. We’ve all seen the media images of drones supplying us with perfect images; the perfect eye in the sky for perfectly targeted air strikes.  At least that’s how it’s looks on Homeland, and 24 and the images from Abbottabad. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Less-than-clear images; imperfect targeting that kills civilians; increasingly complex and overpriced equipment and--on the other hand--lower barriers to entry with respect to deploying certain drones which will soon make them available to nations, groups or individuals everywhere. Before long, surveillance--and even death from above--will be on a par with package delivery.   It’s a scary future, one that Washington keeps well hidden... and one that Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper's, talks to me about in our latest RadioWHO podcast on WhoWhat