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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 8, 2021 Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, on teachers’ unions and school reopenings • Helen Yaffe on Cuba’s handling of COVID-19 and their impressive vaccine development (Counterpunch article here)
Pandemic boosts union density
Union density—the share of employed workers belonging to unions—rose in 2020 for the first time since 2007 and 2008. Before that, you have to go back to 1979 to find another uptick. Those four years are the only increases in density since the modern BLS series begins in 1964. Sadly, though, the rise wasn’t the result of any organizing victories. Union membership declined by 2.2% last year—but the pandemic drove down employment even more, 6.7%. As a result, density rose from 10.3% to 10.8%, bringing it back to where it was in… Read More
Employment report
As the job market loses steam, and Congress dithers over a new bailout package, Americans are having a harder time paying their bills. First the job market. Employers added 245,000 jobs in November, the least since the recovery from the March–April crash. As the graph below shows, that recovery has been losing momentum since June, when employment rose by 4.8 million. What looks to be happening is that the easy recalls after the initial shutdown have happened, and with the giant stimulus of the CARES Act receding, there’s not much fuel for… Read More
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): December 3, 2020 Thomas Sugrue, author of this essay, on COVID-19’s impact on cities • Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, on gender, especially the masculine kind, in evangelical Christianity
Reflections on the current disorder
[This is the edited text of a talk I gave via Zoom, like everything else these days, sponsored by the North Brooklyn chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. It reprises and updates several things I’ve written recently, but it’s hard to be original these days. Video will be posted, but who wants to look at me? The Q&A was quite good though.] Before I get into the body of my talk, I want to celebrate our electoral victories and say how proud I am to be a member of DSA. If… Read More
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): July 23, 2020 Jason Wilson on the protests and storm troopers in Portland • Forrest Hylton on COVID-19, repression, corruption, and drug gangs in Latin America
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): July 16, 2020 Claire Potter, author of Political Junkies, on how our politics got so divided • Sonia Shah, author of this article, thinks about the pandemic in more than biomedical terms
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): June 18, 2020 Eric Reinhart on jails as COVID-19 spreaders (article here, AER article on pretrial detention here) • Erin Hatton on “coerced” workers, from prisoners to grad students [back after vacation break]
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): May 21, 2020 Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method, on the US-sponsored strategy of mass murder during the Cold War • Kyle Beckham, lecturer in education at the University of San Francisco, on schooling during the pandemic
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 16, 2020 Yanis Varoufakis talks about life under COVID-19, the economic crisis, vultures stripping Greece, and democratizing the EU (includes bonus audio clip of Jim Cramer recalling his Trotskyist past)
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 9, 2020 Jeb Sprague on CV19 in Haiti and the DR • Rossana Rodríguez- Sánchez on CV19 in Chicago and Puerto Rico • Josh White on the new leader of the UK Labour Party, Kier Starmer
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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): March 26, 2020 James Meadway on the economic dimensions of the coronacrisis (article here) • David Quammen on zoonotic diseases like covid-19, which leap from animal to human and wreak havoc
