elections in Britain and Iran, in memory of Jane McAlevey
Richard Seymour discusses the British election (Sidecar article here) • Trita Parsi, the Iranian election • remembering Jane McAlevey with a 2017 BtN interview (catalog of interviews here)
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.
Israel is killing a lot of people but losing its war, and the latest on the US carceral state
Robert Pape on how, despite Israel’s murderous onslaught on Gaza, Hamas is winning (article here) • Wanda Bertram on how US incarceration rates stack up against the rest of the world (massively), and other news on crime & punishment (report here)
Haiti and the death of the future
Robert Fatton explains Haiti’s further descent into poverty and chaos • Steve Fraser, author of this article, analyzes and mourns the death of any sense of a better future [holiday-induced reprise of a show first broadcast on March 14, 2024]
Israel and the Arab states and the latest on the education wars
Steven Simon on Israel and the Arab states’ relations with it • Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of The Education Wars, on the right-wing’s latest educational ploys. (And here’s Marcus Brown’s website that I mentioned in the intro.)
Mexican elections and radicals on the run
Sociologist Edwin Ackerman on the Mexican elections, and the reasons for AMLO’s immense popularity (Sidecar piece here) • Joel Whitney, author of Flights, on radical and revolutionaries’ battles with the CIA
Ruling parties take a hit in India and South Africa
Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners, on the Hindu right and its poor showing in India’s elections • Sean Jacobs, New School prof and publisher of Africa Is a Country, on the ANC’s poor showing in South Africa’s elections
The Constitutional fetish
Aziz Rana, author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them, on how our founding document constrains democracy
Fundraising special: Mouin Rabbani on Israel–Palestine
Mouin Rabbani on the war on Gaza, and the broader context of the Israel–Palestine conflict
Fundraising special: a rare resignation on principle
Annelle Sheline, who’d been on BtN three times before, on her resignation from the State Department as a protest against the war on Gaza (her statement is here).
Fundraising special: the Alabama ruling class confronts the UAW, the white supremacist wing of neoliberalism
Derek Seidman looks into the Alabama corporate elite and its terror at the incursion of the UAW (articles here and here) • Quinn Slobodian on Peter Brimelow and the white supremacist wing of neoliberalism