Never demand.
Matt Bruenig already wrote about this (now deleted) tweet from Paul Waldman, which was a response to one from Bernie Sanders… …and before typing any more, I must confess to feeling guilty about writing a second blog post (god knows there are probably more) about a tweet. But, onwards. As Bruenig writes, “The difference between Obamacare and AHCA is 24 million uninsured people while the difference between single-payer and Obamacare is 28 million uninsured people.” Obamacare, with all its omissions and cost-shifting, isn’t innocent of monstrousness. There’s a point about political strategy… Read More
How unpopular is Trump?
Trump’s low approval ratings have gotten notice, but the closer you look the worse they are. At the risk of engaging in wild psychoanalysis, this must be very hard on a pathological narcissist, assuming he’s been fully briefed on the issue. Here’s a graph of the history of Gallup’s presidential approval question. They started asking the question—“Do you approve or disapprove of the way X is handling his job as president?”—in 1942. But timing was patchy at first, and didn’t approach a monthly schedule until around 1950. Polling has been daily since Obama… Read More
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Just posted to my radio archive: March 16, 2017 Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program on Ryancare, Obamacare, and the prospects for single-payer • Cinzia Arruzza on the women’s strike
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Just added to my radio archive: March 9, 2017 Yanis Varoufakis back on BtN for the first time in over two years! He discusses the interminable eurocrisis, austerity, Brexit, the nationalist international (Trump, Le Pen, etc.), and DiEM25, among other things. The full Varoufakis–Ali–et al. debate is here. The version of this show that ran on KPFA was truncated because the station is fundraising. Please donate and keep this worthy enterprise going. If you do, please mention Behind the News!
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Just added to my radio archive: March 2, 2017 Mark Blyth on neoliberalism and global Trumpism (the Guardian/Observer article on Mercer and Cambridge Analytica he talks about is here) The version of this show that ran on KPFA was truncated because the station is fundraising. Please donate and keep this worthy enterprise going. If you do, please mention Behind the News!
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Just added to my radio archive: February 23, 2017 Angela Nagle, author of this and the forthcoming Kill All Normies, on the alt-right • Laleh Khalili on Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security advisor This show didn’t run on KPFA because the station is fundraising. Please donate and keep this worthy enterprise going. If you do, please mention Behind the News!
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Just added to my radio archive: February 16, 2017 Sean Guillory (author of this) on the rich history of Western Russophobia • Larry Bartels, co-author of Democracy for Realists, on the prospects for democracy with a detached, ill-informed electorate
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Just added to my radio archive: February 9, 2017 John Ackerman on Trump and Mexico • Art Goldhammer surveys the French political landscape as a presidential election approaches
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Just added to my radio archive: February 2, 2017 Mae Ngai and Avi Chomsky(separately) on Trump’s immigration decree • Joel Whitney, author of Finks, on the CIA, the cultural Cold War, and particularly the Paris Review
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Just added to my radio archive (date is link to show): January 26, 2017 Asad Haider, author of this, on the problems of “white privilege” discourse • Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of the new novel Class, on race and class in the world of Brooklyn public schools
Federal employment is already frozen
This morning, chief bloviator Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing federal hiring. Such a move probably appeals to those who think that the growth of government is “out of control.” That might be true in some senses—surveillance and the warfare state certainly qualify, but Trump only wants accelerate their growth. But one thing that doesn’t qualify is the subject of the order: federal employment. Graphed below are federal employment in thousands and as a percentage of total employment, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly survey of employers. The absolute number of federal employees at the end of… Read More
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Just added to my radio archive (date is link to shows): January 19, 2017 Yasha Levine on the politics of encryption • Elayne Tobin on celebrity (bibliography here)
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Just added to my radio archive (dates are links to shows): January 12, 2017 Nancy Fraser on “progressive neoliberalism,” feminism, Trump, and a way out of all this (see here, here, here, and here for more) December 29, 2016 Zahra Billoo on Donald Trump, the Muslim registry, and how to resist it • Andrew Cockburn on Russophobia December 22, 2016 Rania Khalek on Syria (new material) • George Joseph, author of this article, on Teach for America going global (rebroadcast of an interview that first ran in July)
On “working with” Julian Assange
A tendentious hack named Casey Michel slimes me in The Daily Beast for “maintain[ing] a professional relationship” with Julian Assange: Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches – Henwood annotating, Assange writing the forward—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 