Support KPFA! Get Best of Behind the News, vers 6.0!
As I’ve said many times before, I wouldn’t be doing my radio show were it not on KPFA. So if you like Behind the News, support KPFA. And there’s a lot of great stuff on the station during the other 167 hours of the week, too. You can get a collection of 77 interviews I call the Best of Behind the News, vers 6.0. It includes all 16 of the interviews I’ve done with Yanis Varoufakis. Yeah, of course these are all on the web, but here they are collected in one… Read More
Varoufakis: “be prepared to blow the whole thing up”
The radio show I just posted consists of excerpts from five interviews I’ve done since 2008 with the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, who is now the country’s finance minister. Anyone interested in the strategy that Greece might pursue in negotiations with its creditors should listen. The show concludes with Varoufakis describing an aggressive negotiating strategy: [T]o negotiate, to be taken seriously, you have to have a credible threat. You have to be prepared to blow the whole thing up, simply by being intransigent if you’re not taken seriously. So this is my recommendation…. Read More
Fresh audio product
Freshly posted to my radio archive, after too long an interval: January 29, 2015 Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist who’s appeared on this show 16 times since 2008 discussing mainly the Eurocrisis, is now the finance minister of Greece. Here are excerpts from 5 of those interviews. At the very end of this episode, he discusses what Greece’s strategy towards its creditors should be. Tough words, worth checking out. [See next post for an incendiary excerpt.] January 22, 2015 Priyamvada Gopal, author of this article, on the curious relationship of freedom and unfreedom in Western… Read More
Yanis Varoufakis: on BtN 16 times!
The new Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has appeared on my radio show 16 times since 2008. Here are links to those appearances, in reverse chronological order: November 20, 2014 Yanis Varoufakis on the eurocrisis • Howie Hawkins, Green candidate for NYS governor, on the party’s future May 29, 2014 Yanis Varoufakis on the European elections • Mohamad Elmasry on Egypt March 21, 2013 Yanis Varoufakis on the economies of Australia, Cyprus, and Greece • Jonathan Westin of Fast Food Forward on organizing fast food workers in NYC December 27, 2012 Michael Dorsey on the Doha climate conference • Yanis Varoufakison the perpetual Eurocrisis, with an emphasis on… Read More
A reader writes…
From the mailbag: a reader reacts to my last post on unions: I have some feedback for you on your article,”Why Bosses Hate Unions.” I found it just a really poor piece of journalism. It was incredibly one-sided, pandering, and missed several key issues. Yes, union workers make more money than their counterparts, but that is not the only reason bosses (or more accurately shareholders) hate unions. Unions also: – Decrease innovation – Increase Administration cost – Force non-related political issues into the workplace – Increase costs of employment – union wages… Read More
Union density erodes again—and why bosses hate unions
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is just out with its figures on union membership in 2014. Overall membership, aka density, fell to 11.1% of the workforce, from 11.3% in 2013. The decline was more than entirely the result of slippage in the private sector, down from 6.7% to 6.6%. Public sector density, perhaps surprisingly, rose, from 35.3% to 35.7%. Since private sector employment is more than five times that of the public sector, the private sector decline dominated the public sector’s rise, producing the overall drop. Here’s a graph of union density… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 