Pundits Pub

Why do many conservatives refuse to admit that climate change is real and caused by human activity?  Why do many liberals refuse to admit that the world is a dangerous place?  Why does it seem that America is divided more than ever? We are joined by Professor John R. Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, co-author of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. Professor Hibbing contends that left and right orientations are not grounded in a person's upbringing or culture, but that whether a person is liberal or conservative grows from a set of psychological, cognitive, physiological and genetic interactions which produce a spectrum of predispositions.  

Going solo, Stephen Love riffs on Neoliberalism, using the Powell Memorandum as foundation. How is it that we have turned into a society that atomizes the individual---praising the cult of self over any sort of connection to community? Was there a slow-motion Neoliberal Coup?      

Bonnie Blodgett joins us to discuss the urgent need to transform our relationship to food.  Bonnie is an OpEd columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she writes about politics, and business and social issues.  She is also one of America's foremost writers on gardening.  She is the author of several books, including  Remembering Smell:  A Memoir of Losing--and Discovering--the Primal Sense, which Publisher's Weekly called thoughtful, richly nuanced and broadly researched.   She will help us trace the effects of the current corporate model of food production, and offer prescriptions to help us consider changing our ways.

Our special guest is Vincent Marano, a playwright and educator in New York City.  Vincent is a teacher and assistant principal in a South Bronx High School.  We trace the infiltration of the Economic Darwinism of Neoliberalism through all corners of Society, with special focus on the War on Public Education. We'll bring in our Contributing Editor Falcon, as well as Fitness Entrepreneur James Ford to discuss the transformation of education for the sake of knowledge into a training program to produce workers for the Neoliberal System.

Pundits Pub was embedded with the 200,000 marchers at the People's Climate March in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, April 29.  The urgent yet festive activists condemned the berzerk climate-denying Trump and his administration of gangsters. We'll look at the administration assault on Planet Earth so far, and examine the relationship between the Fossil-Fuel extractors, the Military-Industrial Complex, and government. James Barth is an anti-fracking activist who lives in frack-happy Pennsylvania, where the state government has enabled the shale-gas extractors to drill with abandon.    

Bill is a veteran newsman and investigative reporter.  He was an anchorman on Radio and TV around the country, and he was News Editor at CBS News for a couple of decades, where he won the Edward R Murrow Award for Best Coverage of a Major Breaking News Event for the coverage of the Yitzhak Rabin assassination.   Bill is the author of Smooth Criminal: A One-Man American Crime Wave, which exposes CIA-shenanigans running common thugs into Cuba during the Kennedy Years. We will discuss how the mainstream media, under corporate consolidation, has abandoned any pretense of providing a public service and instead peddles sensationalism in order to secure ratings and dollars.  The rise of Trump was guaranteed by the billions of dollars worth of free media granted to his traveling freak show.