Childhood's Endstage
How debt is financing Wall Street's class war against the American people.
Economist Michael Hudson explains how finance became capitalism's driving force and why an increasing amount of American life is being dedicated to sustaining unsustainable debt values, then gives a radical history lesson in debt economics - from ancient Sumer to the University of Chicago - that suggests the only way to end a debt crisis is to end the debt itself.
Michael is author of the new book Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy from CounterPunch.
Selling childhood in an age of austerity and division.
Educator Megan Erickson examines the ways inequality works its way into the modern American education system - where children are treated as pre-workers, teachers and parents are pitted against each other and billionaires play with policy decisions - and explains why she's optimistic that a coalition of teachers, parents and students can resist the corporate takeover of education and reclaim school as a public good.
Megan's new book is Class War: The Privatization of Childhood from the Jacobin series of Verso Books.
A new understanding of urban violence, from the margins of Buenos Aires.
Sociologist Javier Auyero talks about exploring the links between acts of interpersonal violence in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Arquitecto Tucci, how rising inequality and state participation cause more violence than poverty itself, and why violence spreads outwards not like a disease, but an oil spill.
Javier is co-author (along with María Fernanda Berti) of In Harm's Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence from Princeton University Press.
Startup solidarity: The present and future of digital labor organizing.
Writer Michelle Chen explores the growth of organized labor in digital newsrooms, where new media journalists pursue the same old goals of all workers - better pay, managment transparency - and collective bargaining challenges progressive publishers to become progressive workplaces, while setting a template for future workers in an online gig economy doing everything it can to avoid creating employees.
Michelle wrote the recent articles The Unionization of Digital Media and Is Gawker’s Unionization a Sign That Creative Workers Are Finally Realizing Their Worth? for The Nation.
A series of left turns on the whole Kim Davis thing.
Jeff Dorchen just wants to eat his cucumber and fight with whatever passes for fascists these days on the internet, but then he gets dragged into a whole Facebook thing about Kim Davis, what you can say about Kim Davis, what you can't say about Kim Davis, leftists pile-ons, Onion articles, high hats, church dumps, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Rosh Hashana.
[Rough audio quality - but listenable. We just bought Jeff a special mic after this one!]
