Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): July 9, 2020 Erin Thompson on art crime and the history of toppling statues • Jennifer Cohen on gendering the health and economic crises [back after another brief vacation break]
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): March 19, 2020 David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program and CUNY on how US health policy got us to this desperate pass • Helen Yaffe on Cuban interferon and COVID-19, and the country’s biotech industry and health system (YUP article here)
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): June 7, 2018 Adam Gaffney (see link for articles) on how to get prescription drug prices down • Barry Eichengreen, author of The Populist Temptation, on the nationalist/xenophobic turn (Trump, Brexit, etc.), and on the future of the U.S. dollar
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
Chomsky cites LBO
In a recent talk he gave in Canada (Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault), Noam Chomsky cites my LBO piece on the costs of college, and how easy it would be to make higher ed free in the USA: Now that’s one important way to implement the policy of indoctrination of the young. People who are in a debt trap have very few options. Now that is true of social control generally; that is also a regular feature of international policy — those of you who study the IMF and the World Bank and… Read More
Health lunacy: Adorno helps out
[This was originally part of this radio commentary, but I’ve posted it separately here.] And now a bit more Pacifica arcana, though that’s only the taking-off point. WBAI, the New York station where this program ran for 15 years until the interim program director decided to cut its frequency, has brought back health guru Gary Null to do a daily noontime show. Null was fired several years ago because of a personality conflict with an earlier program director. He really made the phones ring at pledging time, and his departure was financially damaging… Read More
Radio commentary, September 10, 2009
Thursday morning brought the release of the annual income, poverty, and health insurance numbers from the Census Bureau for 2008. As you might have guessed, the first year of the recession was pretty bad news for just about everyone. Median household income—the income right at the middle of the income distribution, with half of all households having higher incomes, and half lower—fell by 3.6%, the biggest yearly decline since these figures begin in 1967. All racial and ethnic groups took a hit: non-Hispanic whites were off 2.6%; blacks, off 2.8%; Asians, 4.4%;… Read More
Ciao, public option
So it’s looking like Obama’s not only dropping the public option, he may be using the rejection as a way of distancing himself from the “left.” As Politico reports: On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done. It’s all… Read More
Tongue-tied liberals
Every passing day reveals the toxic side-effects of the Obama presidency more clearly. The activist liberal left has largely either gone silent or cast itself in the role of apologist for power. Let’s look at two sad examples. First, the war in Afghanistan. The other day, the New York Times reported that the antiwar movement plans a nationwide campaign this fall against the administration’s escalation of the war in what we’re now calling AfPak. Among the challenges facing the campaign, aside from the usual public indifference when it’s mostly other people being… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on September 18, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, September 17, 2009
Mixed news on the economic front, as has been the case for weeks going on months. Which is better than what went before, meaning unmixed negatives, but is still a sign of how weak and tentative the economic stabilization has been so far. Thursday morning we learned that first-time claims for unemployment insurance declined last week by 12,000, exending the previous week’s decline of 19,000. But over the last couple of months, the decline that began in March and ran through July, seems to have stalled. And so-called continuing claims, that is… Read More