America Trends Podcast

 President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground.  After a year of on again, off again tariffs and testy interplay with allies on many of the levies, is it having the desired effect of creating new investment and employment in the manufacturing sector?  Our guest...

Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources.  While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these.  One proposed in the state of Utah is larger than Manhattan.  Really!  The objection to these data centers has formed in red and blue states.  The concerns relate to the impact on water supplies needed to cool them, particularly in the S...

 Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty.  Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues are paramount, he believes that the outdated policies that focus on one of these issues alone worsens the trade-offs between each of them.  He is calling for a bold new vision of globalization, one in which we accelerate the green transit...

If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation.  It is a malaise, of sorts.  You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about.  These are high order issues that people are struggling to address.  They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products and yet often the answers are elusive.  Our guest, University of Chicago professor, J. Eric Oliver, has taught a legendary course–The Intelligible Self–that students describe as life-changi...

Secretary of Defense (or ‘War’, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth is a poster child for the way military education likes to inculcate recruits and students into a macho culture of masculinity.  The Pentagon has a vast educational network through which to teach these lessons.  It includes basic training, service academies like West Point, JROTC, ROTC and dozens of military schools and war colleges.  This has given the military brass outsized power in shaping our young men and, by extension, society at large.  In “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood,” in...

 America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe.  Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024.  And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally.  While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem to proliferate daily so are attempts to monitor, filter and block content. Or at least encouraging people with large platforms to give their audiences over to purveyors to speech which is objectionable to many.  Our guest, Jeff Kosseff, and his...

The host of America Trends, Larry Rifkin, has in the later stages of life taken up keyboards and songwriting.  He is putting out his third album of originals, in collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, as part of the music project he calls Rockaway.  The album, titled “Wrong Side of Love”, contains 16 songs that still offer political and social messaging, as in the first two albums, but redirects much of its focus toward love–its textures, complications and quiet endurance.  Jon Krofssik, the technical director behind the podcast, steps out of the shadows to conduct the interview with his long-time friend and broad...

The pardon power that the President has is, as Constitutional prerogatives go, about as absolute as it can be.  Coupled with the friendly majority Donald Trump has on the United States Supreme Court, which gave him immunity from prosecution for many crimes charged in connection with his pardons, and you have what some call a pardon-palooza going on in his second term.  Most egregious to some, like this observer, was the blanket pardon of all those involved in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol (not to mention the ‘stupid on stilts’ weaponization fund.) Remember when his former Attorn...

 Deborah Schwartz, a healthcare attorney, saw how medical insurance companies put profit over patient and the impacts it had.  While inside the health insurance industry, she tried to change the practices she saw which were antithetical to better health outcomes, but since leaving the field, she’s writing about in her new novel, “EmmaCare” and sounding the alarm about what she saw.  By whatever measure, claim denials, coupled with prior authorizations and other practices, are growing and put the onus on the patient to fight for and appeal judgments from the insurers even when their doctor prescribes various drugs and proce...

 Most families require two incomes these days to survive.  Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace.  And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so?  Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments?  And why should they?  Our guest Mason Donovan, along with Mark Kaplan, have written a book titled ” The Parenthood Advantage:  Building Corporate Cultures that Valu...

 Have you ever heard the word gerontocracy?  Well, according to our guest, you’re living in one.  The point may be best illustrated by the last two presidential campaigns where we elected an elderly man, Joe Biden, to be our president in 2020 and when feeling that he was too old to serve another term, we replaced him with another old man, Donald Trump.  It’s not only happening in our politics among the candidates, funders and voters (oh it’s true that older Americans outvote and other demographic groups), but also in business and other endeavors.  Many of them, baby boomer...