Just added to my radio archive: September 11, 2014 Dana Goldstein, author of Teacher Wars, on the history of education politics in the U.S. • Christian Parenti, author of this article, reclaims Hamilton for the left (and for climate politics)

Newly added to my radio archive: September 4, 2014 Rebecca Tiger, sociologist and author of Judging Addicts, on the history of punishment in the U.S., drug courts, and the marriage of the therapeutic culture to the carceral state

Between vacation and KPFA’s fundraising, I’ve been delinquent at both producing new radio shows and updating the archive. Here’s some catch-up, freshly posted to my radio archive. The dates are links and will take you to the show’s page.   July 10, 2014 Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute discusses the flabby, unsatisfying state of the job market • Sean Jacobs (one of the founders of Africa Is A Country) talks about the political economy of soccer. August 14, 2014 Mark Ames on Silicon Valley wage-fixing and their selective libertarianism • Alex Vitale on broken windows and the militarization of… Read More

Catching up with a backlog…just posted to my radio archives: July 3, 2014 Esther Kaplan, author of this article, on a plant closure in Tennessee and the dubious economic logic of offshoring • Alex Kane on what Israel is up to in the wake of the West Bank kidnappings June 26, 2014 Sarah Stillman, author of this article, on the for-profit probation racket and “offender-funded justice” •Bruce Bartlett on the state of the Republican party after the Tea Party’s series of electoral defeats June 19, 2014 Jennifer Taub, author of Other People’s Houses, on the deep history of the mortgage crisis • Margaret… Read More

Just added to my radio archives: June 12, 2014 Suzanna Danuta Walters, author of The Tolerance Trap, argues against queer embourgeoisement • Tony Samara, lead author of The Rise of Renter Nation, on the affordability crisis for people who rent their dwellings June 5, 2014 Art Goldhammer on European politics, with an accent on France • Nikil Saval, author of Cubed, on the history and sociology of the office

Second Amendment fetishism aside, there’s an old saying that the working class’s ultimate weapon is withholding labor through slowdowns and strikes. By that measure, the U.S. working class has been effectively disarmed since the 1980s. Here’s a graph of the annual number of work stoppages since 1950 (which includes lockouts as well as strikes—unfortunately, there’s no way of distinguishing between the two). They’re up from the recession low of 5—yes, 5—in 2009, but not by much: there were 15 in all of 2013. Between 1947 and 1979, the average was 303. (The… Read More

Speaking of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Ryan Cooper points to anxiety on the right about its considerable splash, and its rigorous argument for the tendency of wealth to concentrate over time. He quotes James Pethokoukis of National Review, who worries that a New Marxism is afoot: John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek famously squared off in the 1930s, Left versus Right. But when Keynes published his revolutionary General Theory in 1936, Hayek went silent. It was a de facto retreat that helped give free rein to anti-market forces — even if that was not… Read More

Bookforum has unleashed my review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The opening: The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries… Read More

I forgot to change the year directory on the radio archive to /2014/, so the links I initially posted didn’t work. Now they do: January 9, 2014 (back after holiday reruns) two interviews recorded on a visit to Lisbon: economist Ricardo Paes Mamede and labor historian Raquel Varela on Portugal and the eurocrisis

Just added to my radio archives: December 5, 2013 Mark Fisher, author of “Exiting the Vampire Castle” and Capitalist Realism, on Russell Brand, identitarianism, and depressive hedonia • George Scialabba, author of For The Republic, on democracy & plutocracy

Just posted to my radio archives: November 21, 2013 Jennifer Silva, author of Coming Up Short, on the consciousness of younger working-class adults • Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute on what has and hasn’t been driving wage inequality (paper here) November 14, 2013 Richard Seymour on the politics of austerity in the UK (here’s the pic of David Cameron preaching austerity from a gold lectern) • Arun Gupta looks behind the fast food workers organizing campagin (article here)

I’m going to be in Sydney, Australia, to speak at a conference on financial market dysfunctionality (!) at the University of Technology’s business school. Arriving early Oct 16, feeling like crap I’m sure, and leaving the afternoon of the 20th. Conference is on Thursday and Friday – my bit is on Friday. Any suggestions of things to do, people to meet, etc.?