© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

Stephen Gottlieb

  • To get Social Security through Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt thought about the language. He didn’t package it as a benefit for any class of people – it was for everyone. It wasn’t a benefit; it was insurance. And it didn’t require going to some welfare office; it went through the Post Office. Roosevelt understood that language matters. President Johnson’s War on Poverty was about poverty, and Appalachia, not race. But the Erie Canal, one of the most important projects in the history of America, got held up for forty years by what’s-in-it-for-me objections.
  • Listen and I’ll tell you a Christmas story. Let me tell you what Dickens was really trying to tell us. This is not a story the greedy Grinches want you to know. But it is an American story. And it is a story that rang throughout the world until greedy politicians tried to tell you it wasn’t good for you and me.
  • Bill Mckibben, distinguished climate activist and founder of 350.org and Third Act, wrote, in The Crucial Years, that the recently concluded UN international climate summit in Dubai, may have handed activists “a new tool,” because the agreement included one sentence calling for “‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.’"
  • Listening to the Roundtable a few days ago I heard Vera Eccarius-Kelly explain that dictatorship is much worse than people understand. She couldn’t be more right, but I don’t know how many got her point, so I want to repeat and reinforce it.
  • Justice Sandra Day O’Connor just died. It seems poor form to criticize the departed. But she might as well have participated in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the worst decision the Supreme Court ever handed down and one of the triggers for the Civil War, because her vote was crucial to another decision just as bad. O’Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy all voted to substitute their presidential preferences for the election results in 2000. It has been standard and proper for courts to conduct recounts when elections are challenged and enough votes are at issue to change the result. The Florida Court was doing that. And they were doing it the right way – recounting the whole Florida vote by a single set of rules. But this group of so-called justices decided it was OK to take the election into their own hands lest Mr. Bush be embarrassed by the results – Scalia was quite explicit about it but there was no other real explanation.
  • Our daughter, who lives in Cincinnati, is recovering from an accident. So we, our son and his family, went there for Thanksgiving this year. We had Thanksgiving dinner at a wonderful old Cincinnati hotel. At an appropriate point I had us focus on what we’re thankful for and started by saying that I’m grateful for the intelligence to have proposed to Jeanette fifty-six years ago. It’s a biological truism that none of us would’ve been the same without Jeanette, but she’s has been a great blessing to us all.
  • I share many people’s concern about the survival of the state of Israel. The threat of its demise would be tragic, not only to Israel but to the survivors and refugees of the Holocaust and their descendants. Loss of Israel would expose world Jewry to intensification of antisemitism. These are serious issues that go way beyond ordinary international politics.
  • Like most of you, we will be gathering soon for Thanksgiving. Like many of you I will be giving thanks for a very loving, decent family. All good things in my life have sprung from my wife’s decision to tie our lives together. I have been enormously blessed.
  • Discussion over Israel and Palestine is largely about blame. There’s plenty to go around – for cruelty, murder, mayhem and stupidity, for refusal to come to the table and refusal to accept the rights and the very existence of others.
  • Years ago I observed a minor traffic accident in Manhattan. One of the drivers jumped out of his car yelling “You Iranian” at the other. Of course he had no idea where the other driver was from but Iran was the villain of the day.