Current Affairs

Latest Episodes:

How Do We Overcome Capitalism? May 31, 2022

Show notes

Tom Wetzel's forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century (AK Press) is both a primer on the basic left critiques of capitalism and a handbook for creating a new economic system. Wetzel explains in clear, accessible language why exploitation, waste, and environmental destruction are built into the capitalist model and then explores possible alternative economic structures and shows how we might get there. He probes important questions like "What is the role of electoral politics?" "What kinds of unions do we need?" and "What cautions does the history of Marxism-Leninism offer us?"

In the best libertarian socialist tradition, Wetzel is a critic not only of domination and hierarchy in the contemporary capitalist economy, but of attempts to bring about socialism through authoritarian institutions. He explains the importance of democracy and why it must guide everything we do. Overcoming Capitalism is an important contribution to the literature of the left, the product of over a decade of research and writing, and today Tom Wetzel joins us to explain the basics of his ideas.

How Corporations Get Away With Criminality—And How to Stop Them May 31, 2022

Show notes

Jennifer Taub is a law professor whose book Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay is about the double standard in American law that harshly punishes street crime while giving a free pass to corporate criminals. Taub tallies up the immense costs of corporate wrongdoing from fraud to wage theft and exposes how CEOs commit acts of destructive criminal wrongdoing with complete impunity.

But Taub isn't just bemoaning the corruption of the justice system—she also shows how we can change it, and her book is a manifesto for action as well as an indictment. As the San Francisco Chronicle writes, Taub "proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task." Prof. Taub joins Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson and online editor Lily Sánchez to talk about how corporate criminals get away with it and why we don't need to resign ourselves to a two-tiered justice system.

The Life and Crimes of Winston Churchill May 10, 2022

Show notes

Tariq Ali is the author of two dozen books and his career as a public intellectual and activist stretches back to the 1960s. His new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is an effort to demolish the "Churchill myth" that has been built up since the Thatcher years. Ali demonstrates that Churchill was:

- Not actually popular among the British public, who threw him out of office immediately at the end of World War II, and voted in the socialist Labour government instead

- A virulent white supremacist whose core political beliefs were the violent maintenance of the British empire abroad and the suppression of class struggle at home

- Not actually an opponent of fascism on principle, having highly praised Mussolini. Churchill saw the threat that Hitler posed to Europe but would happily tolerate far-right governments to stop the spread of Bolshevism

- Responsible for hideous colonial atrocities such as the Bengal famine

Ali's book is not just a myth-busting biography of Churchill, but a history of imperialism and the British working class movement, and a case study in how falsified myths are used to justify the maintenance of the existing social order. Today, everyone from Boris Johnson to Volodymyr Zelensky invokes the Churchill of legend, but we need to understand the Churchill of historical fact, and face up to the horrors of the British empire and the way that powerful countries rationalize their misdeeds with appealing self-righteous rhetoric and the turning of morally repugnant rulers into saintly icons.

A review of Ali's Winston Churchill has been published in Current Affairs here. Footage of the British public booing Churchill and chanting "We Want Labour!" can be found here.

A View of British Government From the Inside w/ former Labour MP Chris Mullin May 10, 2022

Show notes

Chris Mullin served from 1987 to 2010 as a Labour MP in the British parliament. During that time, he kept a daily diary of his observations, which has since been published in three acclaimed volumes. The diaries trace the rise and fall of Tony Blair's "New Labour." Mullin himself was associated with the party's left (he edited Tony Benn's book Arguments for Socialism and was the only member of Blair's government to vote against the Iraq war) but found himself trying to tread carefully to use the powers of government effectively. His diaries raise valuable questions about how an ordinary person trying to do good in government can negotiate the thorny ethical dilemmas that come with being close to power.

Mullin is also the author of the novel A Very British Coup (adapted into a popular miniseries), about what happens when a socialist government takes power in the UK, and is known in Britain for his crusading journalistic effort to free the wrongly accused Birmingham Six, a case from the 70s that is still making headlines to this day.

In this conversation, we talk about the frustrations of navigating bureaucracy, the catastrophe of Blair's support for the Iraq war, and whether a socialist government would indeed face the kind of existential threats that Mullin has written about in his fiction.

Edited by Tim Gray.

Dr. Mark Vonnegut on the Soullessness of Modern Medicine May 10, 2022

Show notes

Mark Vonnegut MD has been a pediatrician for over 30 years. He is the author of the books The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, and most recently The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics. His new book is a collection of observations from his life treating children in the American healthcare system. In it, he shows how the for-profit private insurance industry has destroyed doctors' ability to provide effective care for patients, and he explains what he sees as necessary for doctors to treat patients well. His book is both an aggressive indictment of a profit-driven system and a vision for compassionate, empathetic care.

Dr. Vonnegut shows that to reconstruct our healthcare system, we will need single-payer financing, but we will also need a form of medicine that centers the needs and feelings of patients, and in which medical care is administered free of meddlesome bureaucracy and out of a genuine desire to help people get better. In this conversation, Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson and online editor Lily Sánchez (who herself happens to be a pediatrician) discuss Dr. Vonnegut's hopes for a humane alternative to the contemporary practice of medicine.

Edited by Tim Gray.

**How the Amazon Labor Union Defeated the Bezos Behemoth** May 10, 2022
Show notes

Justine Medina is a member of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union and a packer at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The ALU recently won a historic victory, defeating Amazon's multi-million dollar union-busting campaign to make JFK8 the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. It was a victory many thought impossible. But Amazon underestimated the ALU and through persistent organizing work, the union pulled off an astonishing victory that is expected to be a game-changer for Amazon workers around the country. Justine's commentary "How We Did It" can be read in Labor Notes. In this conversation, we discuss how a group of dedicated Amazon workers, organizing independently of any major union, managed to pull off a stunning triumph for the labor movement. We talk about the lessons that others can take from the ALU's example.
Find out how you can support the Amazon Labor Union here.
Special thanks to Micheal "Airlift Mike" Ziants of Airlift Productions for narrating the trailer. Trailer edited by Tim Gray.
Music: "The Descent" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: by Attribution 3.0
Justine is the one in the glasses.

**Why Are So Many Pedestrians Getting Killed in America?** May 10, 2022
Show notes

Angie Schmitt is a transportation writer and planner whose book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America examines the shocking and disturbing growth in pedestrian deaths on the streets of the United States. After declining for 20 years, pedestrian deaths began climbing drastically again around 2010:

These gruesome tragedies are preventable—in Europe, deaths are declining rather than increasing—and in Angie's book, she discusses all of the factors contributing to the problem. These include:
The proliferation of big trucks and SUVs with huge blind spots and killer front ends
Gentrification pushing poor people into the suburbs, where not having a car means having to walk to work across busy six-lane roads and take your life in your hands
The lack of any serious US national investment in making our roads safe and laws written by the oil industry (for instance, many state constitutions prohibit using gas tax money to build sidewalks)
A lack of good public transit
A culture of "blaming the pedestrian" that sees accidents as a result of walkers' foolishness rather than bad planning
The fact that the victims of these accidents tend to be poor people, old people, and people of color, whose lives are less valued and who navigate worse infrastructure
Angie's book is filled with important information about an overlooked crisis. It's a serious issue of racial justice and shows the American class divide at its ugliest: rich people in giant trucks mow down poor people of color who have no choice but to dodge traffic. It's a dystopian tragedy, made all the worst by how avoidable it is. Instead of ensuring that everyone could navigate the built environment safely, America has shifted blame onto victims (as we can see in the concept of "jaywalking," which punishes pedestrians for crossing streets even when there are no crosswalks nearby). Angie lays out why we need to care more about this injustice and how we can address it at relatively little expense.
Nathan accidentally used the wrong microphone so his audio is worse than usual. Apologies.

How Finance Ate The Economy - w/ Grace Blakeley Apr 21, 2022

Show notes

Finance expert Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune magazine. She has served as economics commentator for the New Statesman and as a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Economic Justice. She is the author of two books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism, and editor of the book Futures of Socialism.

Blakeley's writings argue that the finance sector has taken on an outsized role in the economy, with terrible results for working people. She shows how the profits of financiers have become more important than satisfying human needs, and analyzes the history of capitalism to expose the forces driving the increase in inequalities of wealth and power. In her latest book, she shows how the pandemic has worsened these tendencies. Importantly, Blakeley also provides solutions, showing what it would mean to "democratize the financial sector" and why we should be confident that it's possible.

In this conversation, Blakeley explains for non-finance experts how the "financialization" of an economy works and why it causes crises.