CHUTZPAH and SOUL: Season Two Episode Eight: FRANKLY SPEAKING: BARNEY FRANK

Johnny interviews Barney Frank, member of Congress from Massachusetts 1980-2012,
now retired in Maine, but as vibrant and opinionated as ever. He's writing a book on the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who rescued the world and the U.S. from The Great Depression by stimulating economic growth via government intervention.
Barney argues that Keynes' economic mantra is now counterproductive because the emphasis on growth is accelerating economic inequality worldwide. He advocates that addressing economic fairness is as critical as growth.
And in a bow in the direction of new economic measurements, he concurs with Johnny that the World Happiness Index, in which the U.S. scores a pathetic 39th, is relevant.

Barney is truly an eminence grise of the Democratic Party as well as of progressive and gay politics, and a prominent informal Jewish leader, with an international reputation.
But this frank discussion is not an echo chamber as Johnny advances the prophetic warnings of Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom (2018), a leading expert of fascism. These NY Times bestsellers, were the intellectual opening shot in the Resistance to Trumpism, but Barney has not read them and doesn't feel that Trump's  frontal assaults on democracy, attacks on the press, and destruction of the English language, including the famous quote "alternative truth" does not equal 1984 (George Orwell, 1949),  because Kelly Anne Conway was totally ridiculed for that. Johnny counters, citing Professor Snyder, that the institutions of democracy are extremely vulnerable and many professionals have already been compromised, as they were on the road to Nazism in Germany.
But Barney is particularly convinced by the 2018 mid-term elections which flipped the House back to the Democrats, that Americans have successfully resisted fascism and authoritarianism. As for Trump's demagoguery against the press, he feels that our press has been comprehensive and unafraid in revealing Trump's doings.
Johnny cites some of the most blatant fascist actions of Trump in real time, live on TV, during the House Impeachment Trial, as evidence that we're not safe by any means.
And so on.

On a more positive note, the famous Boston legend, told and retold countless times, is the 1968 story of how the City of Boston averted the African American riots post MLK assassination partly by arranging a scheduled JAMES BROWN concert at Boston Garden to be broadcast on WGBH-TV. Then community leaders and the Mayor urged Boston's youth to stay home and watch the free concert. Barney, who was chief of staff for then Mayor Kevin White, reveals some details never heard before by Johnny or Steve Folsom, both of whom have heard this story many times.
Finally, despite the fact that famous local Cambridge legend, Tip O'Neill, House Speaker (1977-1987), wanted him to become the first Jewish Speaker of the House, and it never happened, Barney has no regrets and feels the glass is half full...that he achieved much more success than he could ever have imagined.
We end the episode with No Regrets, by Tom Rush, singer-songwriter.

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