Behind the News – August 10, 2023
Host Doug Henwood covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.
Behind the News
12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Time: Thursdays
Host Doug Henwood covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.
Hunger on campus, whitewashing Meloni
Sara Goldrick-Rab on rampant food and housing insecurity among undergraduates and graduate students • David Broder, author of Mussolini’s Grandchildren, on the whitewashing of far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni (NYT article here)
Tensions mounting on the Korean peninsula, and the evil uses to which the drug industry puts intellectual property restrictions
Tim Shorrock marks the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean war as tensions mount across the region • Christopher Morten on how the drug industry uses patents and secrecy to fatten its profits at the expense of patients and the broader public
Fundraising special: austerity and fascism revisited
Fundraising reprise of an interview with economist Clara Mattei, author of The Capital Order.
French riots, US social collapse
Harrison Stetler on the riots in France • Peter Turchin, complexity theorist and author of End Times, on why the US is heading for a smashup
Austerity, economics, and fascism • AMLO’s presidency in Mexico
Clara Mattei, author of The Capital Order, explores the links among neoclassical economics, austerity, and fascism • Edwin Ackerman, author of this article, looks at AMLO’s presidency in Mexico
The Wagner uprising, the Confederate diaspora
Anatol Lieven, Eurasia director of the Quincy Institute, on Prigozhin’s aborted uprising in Russia and Putin’s status • Samuel Bazzi, co-author of this paper, on the effects of the white migration out of the South after the Civil War on the recipient areas
Family abolition, the cult of homeownership
Slaying sacred cows: M.E. O’Brien, author of Family Abolition, on doing that and “communizing care” • Jane Chung, author of this article, on what’s wrong with our cult of homeownership
Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas
While other shows are getting applause for interviewing Corey Robin about his excellent book on Clarence Thomas (who is very much in the news these days), Behind the News was there first, as it so often is. This is a rebroadcast of a show that first ran in 2019.
Why are we in Ukraine?, and using art to stimulate consciousness about slavery
Christopher Layne, co-author of the Harper’s magazine article “Why are we in Ukraine?” • Marcus Brown on his augmented reality exhibit that evokes the eighteenth-century Wall Street slave market