Jacobin Radio

What is a quickly-made, low-effort documentary like ONE NATION UNDER TRUMP (2016) good for? Not a lot. But one thing that this ridiculous pro-Trump hagiography provided us with was a chance to marinate for long, unbroken stretches of time in the 45th president's rhetorical style. We made some unexpected discoveries about how his distinctive way of speaking led him to the presidency.Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

Historian, urban theorist and activist Mike Davis is writing a new book called Star Spangled Leviathan: An Economic History of American Nationalism. On May Day he read from the chapter "13 Jealous Republics: The Myth of American Genesis" sponsored by Trinity College's Social Justice Initiative, organized by Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton. A selected discussion follows. The talk was dedicated to Fred Pfeil, Trinity Professor, public intellectual on the street and the page, troublemaker and beloved collaborator with Mike on the Verso/Haymarket series called The Year Left. Fred Pfeil died in 2005. Check out his writings, including Another Tale to Tell and White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference.

Doug interviews Heather Berg, author of Porn Work, on relations of production in sex work. Plus: Kevin Young and Leonard Seabrooke, co-authors of a paper in the Socio-Economic Review, on the contrasting collegial styles of the Chicago and Charles River schools of economics.Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

What role does mass incarceration play in American political economy? What does that reveal about what sort of politics are required to overcome it? Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar, who edited the new collection Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation.Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDigBuy Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me

Maya Goodfellow joins Long Reads for a discussion about racism in Britain's "hostile environment" and resistance to the repressive migration policies put forth by both Tory and Labour governments. Maya is an academic and the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats.For more, see Maya's book as well as her article for Jacobin, "Borders Are the Problem, Not the People Crossing Them."Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.

This week, Grace talks to Nick Taylor and Sahil Dutta, two of the co-authors behind Unprecedented?: How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy. They discuss the politics behind the economics of COVID—from debt to care to the labor market—and how the pandemic and current cost-of-living crises are likely to reshape the world going forward.A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and Tribune bringing you a weekly dose of socialist news, theory, and action with guests from around the world. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.

Suzi talks to longtime labor reporter and author Steven Greenhouse about the exciting new moment for labor in the US. Steven says the unionizing victories at Amazon and now 81 Starbucks stores—as well as the spread of union drives to many other workplaces in retail, higher education, the media, and healthcare—signify a moment so promising for labor that we’d have to go back to the organizing in the 1930s to see anything comparable. Suzi and Ilya Matveev, of Openleft.ru and the Russian research group Public Sociology Laboratory, discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine twelve weeks in. We get Ilya’s analysis of the domestic situation at home, politically and economically, for the regime and for the population. While polls show widespread support for Putin’s “military operation,” reports note that support for the war is tepid, not enthusiastic. Most analysts say the country is evenly divided between support and dissent regarding the war, though propaganda and penalties for speaking out influence that figure, as Putin has taken an increasingly hard line against dissent. Ilya Matveev unpacks what the polling does or doesn’t show, and we get details of the impact of economic sanctions on the population, the state of industry and the economy, the divisions in the population and among the elite – and what losing the war might mean for Putin’s hold on power.

Doug speaks with Molly White, keeper of the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" blog, on the pointless and scam-ridden world of cryptocurrencies. Also on the pod: Kathleen Belew, a scholar of white power, discusses that movement’s obsessions and unusual organization.Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

Historian Margarita Fajardo on her book The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era. Fajardo discusses the Latin American economists at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) who conceptualized the division of the global economy between center and periphery, and how that later gave rise to dependency theory and world systems theory. Plus Cuban Revolution and the Alliance for Progress, Allende's democratic road to socialism and right-wing coups in Chile and Brazil—and more. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dinesh D'Souza believes he has uncovered shocking proof that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election in 2000 MULES (2022), a documentary so shoddy that even right-wing media is hesitant to publicize it. We follow the trail of Dinesh's conspiracy theory to its inevitable endpoint: a contempt for democracy itself. PLUS: we discuss the billionaire whose name is on everyone's lips, Elon Musk.Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.