Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: April 27, 2017 Sebastian Budgen on the French election: the neoliberal vs. the neofascist • Sofia Japaridze on how foreign NGOs turned Georgia (the country) into a broke libertarian paradise
Fresh audio product
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!
Dems in a pickle
I’ve written before about how the Hillary Democrats are running against hope, and how the Sanders campaign have outed them as frank corporate shills and enemies of even mild social democracy. But now even nominal liberals, or progressives, or whatever we’re calling them these days have gotten in on the act. Not content with merely saying “No!” to new programs like single-payer health insurance and free college, they’re highlighting the worst aspects of the New Deal in an effort to…well, what exactly? Promote Hillary? Fight Trump? It’s hard to tell. A few… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: March 24, 2016 Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba, on the art scene in that country as Obama visits • Sam Stein, author of this article, on neoliberal housing programs, de Blasio style March 17, 2016 Ben Zachariah on the activities of India’s fascist BJP government at home and abroad • David Rieff, author of The Reproach of Hunger, on the economic development racket
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: March 10, 2016 Anne Balay, co-author of this article, on the tough but romantic life of the truck driver • Lester Spence, author of Knocking the Hustle, on neoliberalism and black politics [Back after KPFA fundraising break. If you like these shows and want to keep them coming, please support KPFA. If you do, be sure to mention Behind the News.]
Fresh audio product
Now up in my radio archive: March 12, 2015 Gene Nichol on North Carolina’s war on poor people and on academic freedom • Eilyanna Kaiser and Brendan Michael Conner, respectively co-editor and contributor to $pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution, on the perils and delights of running a magazine by and for sex workers March 5, 2015 Mark Ames, author of this article, tells us who Boris Nemtsov, the dissident shot on the streets of Moscow last week, was • David Kotz, author of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal… Read More
On Panitch & Gindin and American decline
These are comments I delivered at a panel on The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, at the Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, on September 20, 2013. I interviewed them about the book here. I want to start by saying that I greatly admire this book, and pretty much everything these two guys have done over the years. Unusually for the genre, I meant every word of the blurb I supplied for it. A while back, I was on a panel with Radikha Desai, on which she… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archives: August 22, 2013 Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights on the NYPD’s odious stop & frisk strategy • Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste, on the durable ideology of neoliberalism
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archives: July 11, 2013 Gilbert Achcar of SOAS on the uprising and coup in Egypt • Adolph Reed on the new generation of (neoliberal) black politicians (with a coda on how poverty came dominate American discourse on inequality)
Ezra Klein thinks constructively about Walmart
Neoliberal über-dweeb Ezra Klein just unleashed one of those “balanced” efforts on the controversies of the day that are so characteristic of his species: “Has Wal-Mart been good or bad?” The conclusion, it might not surprise you to learn: it’s “a complicated question to frame and a devilishly tough one to answer.” Drawing on—I’m not kidding—Reason editor “Peter Suderman’s 17-part Twitter defense of Wal-Mart,” Klein asserts that Walmart’s low prices are a gift to low-income consumers. (They’ve dropped the hyphen/star, folks; here’s the official timeline.) The Bentonville behemoth’s wages may be low, but not “when compared… Read More
Austerity & bankers’ coups: the NYC precedent
With the displacement of Greece’s elected government by Eurocrats acting in the interest of the country’s creditors, I thought this would be a good time to reprise the section of my 1997 book Wall Street that covers the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, which was something of a dress rehearsal for the neoliberal austerity agenda that would go global in the 1980s. Certain celebrity academics are constantly cited for making this argument, but I was there first. You can download Wall Street for free by clicking here: Wall Street. This chapter, and this book, has… Read More
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives: July 23, 2011 James Galbraith on deficit hysteria and the single-volume collection of four books by his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, published by the Library of Amerca July 16, 2011 Amber Hollibaugh, interim director of Queers for Economic Justice, on the limits of same-sex marriage (see here for more) • Jeff Madrick, author of The Age of Greed, on the emergence of today’s icky economic order July 2, 2011 Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos, talks about the effects of climate change amidst state collapse, plentiful weaponry, and neoliberalism
The Economist, a “newspaper,” weighs in
Although for some reason I still subscribe to the thing, I’ve mostly stopped reading The Economist. If you read a good daily newspaper or three—I know, so old-fashioned—who needs all that attitude? I was reminded of why I don’t read the thing by reading a post from one “W.W.,” responding to the great Yglesias-Henwood debate, as excellently amended by Henry Farrell. It includes this remarkable observation: [F]rom my point of view the problem with jobs programmes, as compared to textbook monetary policy, is not that they increase the power of labour relative… Read More
Yglesias & neoliberalism
Matthew Yglesias regrets that his original commentary on monetary policy, and my disagreement with it, got hijacked by Henry Farrell and turned into an analysis of the limits of neoliberalism. (I also stand corrected that Yglesias hasn’t written in favor of a jobs program in the past—apparently he has, though there was no evidence of it in the piece I responded to.) I like what Farrell has to say, and agree with him: there’s a kind of liberal, or neoliberal technocratic approach to politics that boils down to, as Adolph Reed once put it,… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on October 24, 2014 by Doug Henwood
On Hillary
[I said this on my radio show yesterday as a Hillary teaser. Jane McAlevey urged me to circulate it, and I do what Jane says.] A little self-promotion. I have a cover story in this month’s Harper’s on Hillary Rodham Clinton, which the editors gave the tabloidish headline, “Stop Hillary!” (And I do mean tabloidish—it caught the attention of a New York Post reporter, who wrote it up for the paper’s Page Six gossip feature.) In it, I review Hillary’s life in a very non-friendly way, in hope of derailing her unannounced yet… Read More