Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Why are medications essential to survival so outrageously expensive? Why are vaccines for a global pandemic a source of huge profits and limited availability? Why does the government allow private companies to patent and monopolize drugs resulting from tax funded research? Here’s my conversation with ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK about the revelations in his book, OWNING THE SUN:A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines. You can learn more at zaitchik.com

Although Thomas Jefferson recommended we redraft our constitution every 19 years, the fact that we could actually face an Article 5 Constitutional Convention - if only a few more states vote for it - scares the hell out of me. It’s also a big problem that the Constitution has only been amended 17 times in 233 years, not once in the last 30. I talk with former Senator and current president of the American Constitution Society, RUSS FEINGOLD, and co-author, Peter Prindiville, about their new book, THE CONSTITUTION IN JEOPARDY: The Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It. This episode was recorded as a LiveTalksLA event October 24th in Santa Monica. 

I share election reflections with ROB JOHNSON, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (ineteconomics.org) and host of the podcast Economics and Beyond. What happened? Who made the difference? How could so many vote for the party of grievance and lies? Why does the “good news” feel so profoundly disappointing? How can we turn things around? Will we deal with the critical challenges we face?

I can’t get Plato’s Paradox out of my head: Democracy inevitably leads to tyranny. The rich always want to get richer and the poor will follow demagogues who promise to overthrow the rich.I first learned of Plato’s pessimistic prophesy  In ASTRA TAYLOR'S documentary WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? and her companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.  Here’s our 2020 conversation. We explore democracy’s early roots as well as its current embattled state. Next week I'll respond to the election with Rob Johnson of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

November 8th is the last day to vote in the current elections. Our democracy is under threat as is the availability, validity, accuracy, and reliability of voting and vote-counting. Between closing poll sites, purging voter rolls, and putting obstacles in the way of voting by mail, some states are going to great lengths to keep you from voting. I talk with DAVID DALEY, senior fellow at FairVote.org, author of RATF**KED (gerrymandering) and UNRIGGED (electoral reforms) re the good news and bad news regarding our upcoming mid—terms.

The final day to vote - what used to be Election Day - is just over a week away. Here’s my conversation with investigative journalist GREG PALAST recorded prior to election day 2020. He laid out voter suppression efforts - closing poll sites, purging voter rolls, manipulating voting machines, and putting obstacles in the way of voting by mail - that The Trump administration and many state governments used to keep Americans from voting. Yet turnout broke records. Sadly Republican tactics are the same this year and we assume they've learned from their mistakes. We won’t know how well till the votes are counted - and certified. 

In AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS, DAVID CORN reminds us that Trump and Trumpism is not a radical departure for the Grand Old Party. Picking up the story at the end of World War II, he traces a continuous, long, deep-rooted Republican practice of boosting and weaponizing the rage and derangement of the Right, nurturing and exploiting fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism. John Birch to The Big Lie, Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, The Religious Right to the Supreme Court. And a very real threat to democracy up and down the ballot in the mid-terms. We talk about that history as well as what’s at stake in these elections.

Recent headlines: Taiwan Politicians Dismiss Musk’s ‘ill-Informed and Belittling’ China Comments. In Global Slowdown, China Holds Sway Over Countries’ Fates. A Dilemma of US-Trained Chinese Scientists: Stay or Leave? US Tries to Hobble China Chip Industry with New Rules. How did we get here?  How do we navigate our relationship moving forward? I talk with JOANNA CHIU, a senior journalist for the Toronto Star, who served for years on the ground in China as a correspondent for European news agencies and the Associated Press, about her first book, CHINA UNBOUND: A New World Disorder. You can learn more at joannachiu.com

Here’s my 2019 conversation with GREG GRANDIN about his book, THE END OF THE MYTH: From the Frontier to the Border Wall. Grandin reminds us that patrolling the border has often brought out our worst, and writes, “The border wall is America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier…a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.”

STEVE LOPEZ, award-winning columnist at the LATimes and best-selling author (The Soloist), just won a prize from Harvard for political reporting, but I don’t think of him as a “Political Reporter”. He’s a story-teller and the leading characters in his stories are the unsung heroes of Los Angeles. We talk about how he sees his role at the Times and in the community, his current take on Southern California and the state of journalism, and his new book (out 11/1), INDEPENDENCE DAY: What I’ve Learned about Retirement from Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will