Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archives: September 19, 2013 Daniel Denvir on the crisis in Philadelphia public schools • Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7, on the ill effects of always-on culture September 12, 2013 Sanjay Reddy on the Indian economy • Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia, on conspiracism No new shows for a few weeks while KPFA fundraises. If you like these shows and want to keep them coming, please contribute to KPFA. Be sure to mention Behind the News.
Situating finance
I’ve long been bothered by activists’ habit of focusing on debt both as a political target and analytical center. This came to the fore during the Occupy moment, and continues today in, well, should we call it the post-Occupy era? Yes, debt is a problem, no doubt about it. Given the age of many Occupy activists, student debt is understandably very much on their minds (as are crappy job prospects, which don’t always get as much attention). Before that, mortgage debt and exotic variations on it were major contributors to the financial… Read More
Matt Yglesias just wants to believe…
…that Census data showing real median household income is slightly below 1989 levels is wrong, so he went searching for another data source to support his hunch. (Real means adjusted for inflation; median means right at the middle of the income distribution, with half of all households above, and half below.) In his first post on the topic, “Median family income since 1989: Is the stagnation real?,” Yglesias drew on an assortment of feelings to make his Slate-ish contrary case: bigger better cars, bigger better TVs, MP3 players, and, of course, the… Read More
On Panitch & Gindin and American decline
These are comments I delivered at a panel on The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, at the Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, on September 20, 2013. I interviewed them about the book here. I want to start by saying that I greatly admire this book, and pretty much everything these two guys have done over the years. Unusually for the genre, I meant every word of the blurb I supplied for it. A while back, I was on a panel with Radikha Desai, on which she… Read More
Fresh audio content
Just posted to my radio archives: Sepember 5, 2013 Greg Shupak, author of this article, on the bad effects of NATO’s Libyan adventure • Monica Potts on the declining life expectancy of poor white women • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Gramsci (excerpts from an August 24 talk at the Gramsci Monument) August 29, 2013 Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State, on the vastly unacknowledged role of the state in supporting technological breakthroughs • Anna Allanbrook, principal of the Brooklyn New School, on education, progressive and otherwise
LBO News from Doug Henwood 