Leaked audio reveals how chemicals hazardous to human health and the environment are fast-tracked and approved at the Environmental Protection Agency. This week on Intercepted, investigative journalist Sharon Lerner reports on how the chemical industry pressures the EPA to approve chemicals and pesticides that are dangerous to public health. Lerner speaks with whistleblowers from the agency, scientists who say their research has been manipulated by EPA managers to downplay the dangers of chemicals, including extreme cases that fall under the category of "hair on fire." Lerner also discusses how the agency has approved chemicals and pesticides — at the behest of companies — without proper research into their toxicity, or worse, even though scientists point to the chemicals’ dangers. But this is not new; it follows the long, historical trajectory of the EPA, including the “revolving door” between the agency and the chemical industry.
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss how the US government laid the groundwork for unrest in Cuba, the Biden administration's escalation of the economic war, and how CIA cutouts like USAID and the NED have cultivated a counter-revolutionary cultural network of rappers, artists, and social media influencers to push propaganda.
We had planned on speaking with Havana-based journalist Cristina Escobar, but at the last minute when we started recording she unfortunately was unable to join us.
great pullquote: > PATCO was dominated by Vietnam War-era veterans who’d learned air traffic control in the military and were one of a vanishingly small number of unions to endorse Reagan in 1980, thereby scoring one of the greatest own goals in political history.
Members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union. All strikers were fired on the order of President Ronald Reagan on Aug. 5, 1981.
Photo: Bettmann Archive
Forty years ago, on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again for the federal government. By October of that year, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration.
PATCO was dominated by Vietnam War-era veterans who’d learned air traffic control in the military and were one of a vanishingly small number of unions to endorse Reagan in 1980, thereby scoring one of the greatest own goals in political history. It’s easy to imagine strikers expressing the same sentiments as a Trump voter who famously lamented, “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
The PATCO saga began in February 1981, when negotiations began between the union and the FAA on a new contract. PATCO proposed changes including a 32-hour workweek and a big increase in pay. The FAA came back with counterproposals the union deemed insufficient, and on August 3, with bargaining at an impasse, most of the air traffic controllers walked out.
It was unquestionably illegal for PATCO, as a union of government workers, to strike. However, which laws are enforced is always and everywhere a political decision: Wall Street firms broke countless laws in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, yet almost no executives suffered any consequences. Reagan & Co. wanted to send a message that mere workers could expect no such forbearance. Just two days after the strike began, the air traffic controllers were gone.
The significance of Reagan’s actions is rarely discussed today in the mainstream, and for understandable reasons: It was the first huge offensive in a war that corporate America has been waging on this country’s middle class ever since. As Warren Buffett — current estimated net worth $101 billion — has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
The stunning victory of the wealthy over everyone else can been measured in several straightforward ways. During a speech last May at a community college in Cleveland, Joe Biden explained one of them:
From 1948 after the war to 1979, productivity in America grew by 100 percent. We made more things with productivity. You know what the workers’ pay grew? By 100 percent. Since 1979, all of that changed. Productivity has grown four times faster than pay has grown. The basic bargain in this country has been broken.
Productivity is a simple but extremely important economic concept. Over time, as technology advances and society learns how to use it, each worker can produce more. One person with a bulldozer can move a lot more dirt than one person with a shovel. One person with the latest version of Microsoft Excel can do a lot more math than one person with Napier’s bones.
The meaning of Biden’s statistics is that for decades after World War II, America got much richer overall, and average worker pay went up at the same rate. Then the link between productivity and pay was severed: The U.S. overall continued to get much richer, but most of the increased wealth went to the top, not to normal people. Corporate CEOs, partners at corporate law firms, orthopedic surgeons — they make three, five, 10 times what they did in 1981. Nurses, firefighters, janitors, almost anyone without a college degree — their pay has barely budged.
The situation is especially egregious at the bottom of the pay scale. Until 1968, Congress increased the federal minimum wage in line with productivity. That year, it reached its highest level: Adjusted for inflation, it was the equivalent of $12 per hour today. It has since fallen to $7.25. Yet the whole story is far worse. Even as low-wage workers have battled fruitlessly to get the federal minimum wage raised to $15, no one realizes that if it had continued increasing along with productivity since 1968, it would now be over $24 per hour. At that level, a couple working full-time minimum wage jobs would take home $96,000 a year. This seems incredible, yet there are no economic reasons it couldn’t happen; we have simply made a political decision that it should not.
Another way to understand this is to look at the other end of American society. In 1995, Bill Gates had a net worth of $10 billion, worth about $18 billion in today’s dollars. That was enough to make him the richest person in America. If that were all Gates had today, there would be 25 or so billionaires ahead of him in line. Jeff Bezos, currently in first place, possesses 10 times Gates’s 1995 net worth.
Then there’s the number of significant strikes in the U.S. each year. A confident, powerful labor movement will generate large numbers of strikes; one terrorized and cowed into submission will not. According to the Labor Department, there were generally 200-400 large-scale strikes each year from 1947 to 1979. There were 187 in 1980. Then after the PATCO firing, the numbers fell off a cliff. In 1988, the last full year of Reagan’s second term, there were just 40 strikes. By 2017, there were seven.
The direct causal relationship between the firing of the air traffic controllers and the crushing of labor is widely noted and celebrated on the right. In a 2003 speech at the Reagan Library in California, then-Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan spoke glowingly of the “flexibility” of U.S. labor markets, by which he meant “the freedom to fire.” Greenspan said that “perhaps the most important” contribution to these flexible markets “was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981. … [Reagan’s] action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.”
Donald Devine, the head of Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management at the time, later wrote, “American business leaders were given a lesson in managerial leadership [by Reagan] that they could not and did not ignore. Many private sector executives have told me that they were able to cut the fat from their organizations and adopt more competitive work practices because of what the government did in those days.”
The question today is whether the U.S. will ever go back to being the middle-class society it once was. Many Americans have long believed and hoped that that was the norm, and we will naturally return to it without much effort on our part. But as the past 40 years have gone by, it appears more and more that Gilded Age brutality is the U.S. norm, and the years of an American middle class were a brief exception. That means recreating it will require the same titanic struggle needed to create it in the first place.
Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels join The Jacobin Show to discuss the limitations of focusing on racial disparities, why the notion that Black Lives Matter was co-opted is misleading, and how socialists today should approach history.
Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from August 4, 2021 with Paul Prescod and Jen Pan hosting.
The drive to persuade President Joe Biden to cancel student debt took a major hit last week when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stunned Congress with a surprise statement in opposition. The move may put her at odds with much of the public and the Democratic Party, but it aligns her with Democratic megadonors Steven and Mary Swig, the billionaire scions of the Bay Area’s oldest real estate dynasty who have deep ties to the California representative. Steven Swig has also long served as a treasurer for Pelosi in her fundraising efforts.
In November, after Biden’s election, and amid increased pressure to cancel student debt, the Swigs quietly circulated a memo among key Capitol Hill figures, making the dubious case that debt cancellation at the executive level is illegal. The argument in the memo gets much of its weight by virtue of the wealthy couple who produced it, as the Swigs are not just major funders of progressive nonprofits, but also have significantly bankrolled Pelosi and her House Democratic caucus.
The memo, obtained by The Intercept, was distributed to members of Congress by Freedom to Prosper, an organization founded by and for the Swigs. The couple has in the past directly lobbied Pelosi, according to two sources with knowledge of the meetings, in which the Swigs would suggest rhetoric or policy proposals that Pelosi would agree to adopt in some form. The source, like several others interviewed by The Intercept for this story, would only speak on condition of anonymity, citing the Swigs’ financial sway in progressive circles. (They have also contributed millions of dollars to the Democratic Party over the years.)
The couple have for many years given the maximum amount permitted in campaign contributions to Pelosi, who represents California’s 12th District which encompasses San Francisco, and Steven Swig has served as treasurer for Pelosi’s reelection campaigns since 2012. The Swigs also enjoy extended family ties to the Pelosis. Their niece worked for Pelosi from 2018 until March of this year, serving as a staff assistant, legislative correspondent, and policy associate. (The Swigs, according to a report in Mother Jones, even own mugs with a photograph of Pelosi on them, which they said they had gotten from a nephew who worked for her.)
The memo, which was designated for “INTERESTED PARTIES” and wasn’t disseminated to the general public, asserts that student debt cancellation via executive order is unlawful. “No, the President Cannot Cancel Student Loan Debt with a Pen Stroke,” a boldface title reads. The memo continues: “Recently, there has been heightened fervor around Senators Warren and Schumer’s proposal that President-elect Joe Biden could cancel student debt ‘with the pen as opposed to legislation.’ Unfortunately, that cannot happen. Attorneys on Capitol Hill say that the Executive Branch does not have congressional authority to cancel student debt.”
Despite the memo’s certainty, it’s far from clear that such an executive order is unlawful, experts say. When asked about the debate over the executive order, Marshall Steinbaum, a senior fellow of higher education finance at the Jain Family Institute and economics professor at the University of Utah, said via email, “The executive absolutely has the power to cancel student debt and there’s no excuse for not exercising it. A generation or more of students and workers have had their lives ruined by the failed experiment shifting the cost of higher ed onto individuals while corralling more and more students into the system. The failure is in the false assumption that a college degree or a masters would automatically cause earnings to increase more than sufficiently to pay off the debt. That hasn’t happened, and now it’s the victims of the policy failure who are carrying the burden while every year the government and higher ed institutions originate $100 billion more in student loans that everyone knows won’t be repaid.”
A student debt cancellation advocate who works closely with Congress added that their concession amounts to a cop-out given the near impossibility of a bill passing in the evenly split Senate. Why not, the advocate asked, just try an executive order and see what happens?
The idea of simply passing the executive order and letting the Supreme Court decide is hardly an abstraction; Biden did just that with his recent executive order imposing a moratorium on evictions. And the current pause in student debt collection at the federal level suggests that the executive has significant authority. Biden issued the eviction moratorium order following pressure from progressive members of Congress, led by Rep. Cori Bush, who chose not to return home on vacation and instead took to protesting outside the Capitol in hopes of addressing the looming eviction crisis.
Though Pelosi says she supports student debt cancellation via congressional legislation — a position shared by the Swigs — her statement last week represents a departure from her previous silence on the issue. “The president can’t do it — so that’s not even a discussion,” Pelosi said during a news conference, referring to a presidential executive order to cancel student debt. She continued: “Suppose … your child just decided they, at this time, [do] not want to go to college, but you’re paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations. You may not be happy about that.”
Pelosi’s statement came as a shock to many in Congress, with some wondering if perhaps she had misspoken, as one staffer told The Intercept. But student debt relief advocates are more cynical. “The only reason she was for it [legislatively] was because Steve and Mary asked her to,” said one prominent member of the student debt cancellation activist community with direct knowledge of discussions between Pelosi and the Swigs on the subject. (A second source confirmed the discussions.)
Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in an email, “The Swigs have been family friends for decades” — but denied that the Swigs directed her position on student debt cancellation. “The statement the Speaker made was in response to a question from a reporter, not a proactive announcement.” He also stressed that Pelosi’s policy staff has not corresponded with the Swigs on this issue but did not comment on whether Pelosi herself had. “Our policy staff that work on this issue have had no conversations or correspondence with the Swigs on this issue.”
“The Speaker’s response to a reporter’s question was based on her staff’s analysis of the President’s authorities,” Hammill said. “We understand that the Department of Justice is reviewing what authorities the President may have in this regard and the Speaker would support the President using any authority he believes he has to address the crisis of student debt in our country. The Speaker very much wants to have as much forgiveness as possible because she believes it is holding back so many in our country. It must, however, be done in a way that is upheld in the courts.”
Political operatives familiar with the Swigs describe an often well-meaning couple who have donated to worthy causes but are rendered almost comically out of touch by their extraordinary wealth. A source pointed to the Swigs’ own account, published in Salon in 2018, of how they only ever learned that student debt existed recently, after their daughter told them about the plight of an artist friend saddled with crushing debt: “It began with a story. It wasn’t an unusual one. … But it was new to two of us when we first heard it from our daughter, four years ago. It was the story of a gifted young artist, a single mother who was forced to set aside her dreams and her gifts to work a retail job so that she could pay back her student loans.”
Steven and Mary Swig did not respond to a request for comment.
Morgan Lewin and Tyler Alderson discuss the popular urban legend that classical music composer Ludwig van Beethoven was actually Black. While the answer is a definitive "no," the reasons for this myth's enduring popularity say a lot about race, class, and the prestige attached to classical music. 39 mins.
VERY EXCELLENT: includes information about early efforts at detente by Kissinger et al, and how Cuba's efforts in Africa were not only successful and world-historically moral, but have led to great costs to Cuba by inciting the undying wrath of the US foreign-military-policy Deep State.
Cuba's anti-imperial foreign policy helped end apartheid in South Africa and sustain liberation movements worldwide. Historian Piero Gleijeses says that's one of the main reasons why the US has terrorized the island nation through today.
"There are very few examples [in history] of the idealism demonstrated by the Cuban government in its foreign policy in Africa," Gleijeses says.
Guest: Piero Gleijeses. Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Author of "Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976" and "Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991."
Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate
VERY EXCELLENT: and not just as information--Hutton "speaks in prose," almost as if scripted. Truly astonishing.
Historian Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector and explaining how he rose from obscurity to become one of the dominant figures of the age.
(Ad) Ronald Hutton is the author of The Making of Oliver Cromwell (Yale, due to be published 10 August). Preorder on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Oliver-Cromwell-Ronald-Hutton/dp/0300257457/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-hexpod
the FOS are Mike Lindell and Chasten Buttigieg: the Anne Appelbaum attack on Lindell esp gets the CTH treatment
We start today looking at Democrats’ feckless failure to extend the eviction moratorium. That being a fairly dismal topic, we try to lighten things up with two reading series checking in with how some old friends of the show are handling their new post-election lives in DC.
VERY EXCELLENT, detailed, see the Rootclaim study linked above
Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate
A new open-source study concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the Ghouta sarin chemical attack in August 2013 -- not the Syrian government, as the White House, U.S. intelligence, and other Western sources publicly alleged.
Rockets carrying sarin killed hundreds of people and left thousands wounded. Based on their trajectories, the study traces all seven missile impact locations back to the most likely launch spot where they all intersected: a small area within insurgent-controlled territory.
In their first joint interview, the study's authors lay out their explosive findings.
Guests:
Michael Kobs and Adam Larson, co-authors of a new study on the 2013 chemical attack in Ghouta.
Saar Wilf: Founder of Root Claim, which published the Ghouta study.
Read the Ghouta study:
https://rootclaim-media.s3.amazonaws.com/syria2013evidence.pdf
Read a summary of the findings:
https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/#
Adam Larson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CL4Syr
Michael Kobs on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaKobs
Saar Wilf: https://twitter.com/saarwilf
Childhood: everyone of us has had one, yet for many it was completely unfathomable. In this episode, Jordan Brookes hopes to explain what his childhood meant to him, so that others might learn from it. He brings a special object with sentimental value into the studio, and also lifts the lid on the special bond he shared with his grandmother. Sunil Patel provides audio description to illustrate any physical bits and pieces Jordan does.
Starring Jordan Brookes and Sunil Patel.
Written by Jordan Brookes.
Produced by Sam Michell for BBC Studios
Long Reads is joined by Peter Shirlow, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, and the author of several books on politics and society in Northern Ireland. 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.
The video covers Org-roam V2 and except for mentioning how to get rid of the warning message for V1 users, doesn’t mention V1 at all. By the end of the video you’ll know how to set up a working Org-roam installation and start taking notes. Later videos will cover more advanced topics but this one will end with you being productive with the package.
The video shows you how to create new nodes and link one node to another. The heart of a Zettelkasten is the idea that you can not only follow forward links from a parent node to a child but also back links from a child to its parents. The plural “parents” is important: the whole point of the Zettelkasten method is to discover hidden relationships between the individual notes so the backlinks buffer will show every reference to the current note. This is a realization of the idea that the Zettelkasten method produces a graph of the notes and their connections rather than just a hierarchy.
The video covers a couple of other topics like creating aliases for nodes and linking to a subtree of a note. These are interesting but not really that important to the effective use of Org-roam as a Zettelkasten.
If you’ve been wanting to try out the Zettelkasten method, this video will get you up and running with a minimum of fuss. The video is 34 minutes, 18 seconds so you’ll need to schedule some time but it moves quickly and is easy to get through.
Good episode, but Buller (near end) misses a major point: "pension-fund socialism" did not happen in the US *because it was outlawed* by Taft-Hartley et al. See, e.g., p4-5 of Fogdall 2001 @ https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104&context=jbl (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law).
This week, Grace speaks to Adrienne Buller and Ben Braun. Adrienne is a senior research fellow at the think tank Common Wealth, and Ben is a political scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. They recently co-authored a paper entitled ‘Under new management: Share ownership and the rise of UK asset manager capitalism‘.
With Grace, Adrienne and Ben discuss the rise of the big three asset managers, who really makes the big decisions in today’s corporations, and whether workers can ever hope to use their power as shareholders to change capitalism.
You can support our work on the show by becoming a Patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.
Unfortunately this episode is one of the weakest UIs I can remember. I've never been fond of the banter (4 Food Groups of News, et al) but this weak's (pun intended) was uniformly dull. And while I very much support Nina Turner over Shontel Brown, the Turner surrogate interviewed (Jennifer R. Farmer) was similarly uninteresting--Farmer basically just did standard surrogate shpiel.
Even just days before the election in Ohio’s 11th district, Nina Turner is pulling voters to her side. Just this week, an influential city councilman announced he switched his support from opponent Shontel Brown to Turner because on one side he saw angry attack ads, while on the other he saw policy.
And this race is centered on policy: Brown, backed by corporate dems like Hillary Clinton and Right Wing “pro-Israel” PACs, represents the moderate side of democrats, while Turner, supported by Bernie Sanders and AOC, is part of the progressive swing led by the Squad.
Jennifer R. Farmer, a social publicist and campaign surrogate for Turner, joins the Useful Idiots to share what Nina believes in:
This is Medicare for all and “ensuring that a health event does not derail a person’s future.” This is affordable college and equal pay for equal work. This is creating “a future that we’re leaving behind for future generations that ensures climate justice.”
And on Tuesday, we have an election. Will Nina Turner use her #UsefulIdiotsBump to become the next member of the Squad? Or does the national Democratic Party still have power to reach voters? Watch along with us.
Plus, we watch Biden yell at reporters, Republicans pretend America isn’t racist, and Brian Stelter lose his pants.
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.
this is the kinda piece that makes me wish TOR had NOT named the button 'Like' but instead, e.g., 'Recommend'
Enlarge / A pathologist examines brain tissue of a diseased deer. The white circular shapes are the sponge-like holes found with prion-related diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). (credit: Getty | Star Tribune)
If the case is found to be linked to a laboratory exposure, it would be the second such case identified in France. In 2019, another lab worker in the country died of a prion disease at the age of 33. Her death came around nine years after she accidentally jabbed herself in the thumb with forceps used to handle frozen slices of humanized mouse brains infected with prions.
Prions and disease
Prions are misfolded, misshapen forms of normal proteins, called prion proteins, that are commonly found in human and other animal cells. What prion proteins do normally is still unclear, but they're readily found in the human brain. When a misfolded prion enters the mix, it can corrupt the normal prion proteins around them, prompting them to misfold as well, clump together, and corrupt others. As the corruption ripples through the brain, it leads to brain tissue damage, eventually causing little holes to form. This gives the brain a sponge-like appearance and is the reason prion diseases are also called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs).
VERY EXCELLENT, mostly about US financialization after c1980 (less about working class and labor markets)
Umass Lowell Economics professor William Lazonick, outlines the history of how government policy and economic conditions contributed to the rise and fall of a Black blue-collar middle class. Part 2 takes a closer look at the role of finance and stock buybacks and what can be done to reverse the trend towards growing inequality.
VERY EXCELLENT, lots about US labor markets and economics c1945-c2021
Umass Lowell Economics professor William Lazonick, outlines the history of how government and economic conditions favored the rise of a Black blue-collar middle class from the 1960''s to the 1970's, and how shifts in policy and in the economy caused its unmaking from the 1980's onwards.
Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad |
In this series of four lectures, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, discusses the concept of empire and why it is still relevant today.
Even if the Europeans had deemed the 19th century a “long peace”, the world had changed tremendously between 1800 and 1900. Of the 1800 powers only a few remained strong, and they were all European. But, at the same time, the concept of empire was changing, and new forms of anti-imperial resistance was starting to grow. This third lecture will discuss high imperialisms, their relationship to globalising capitalism, and how a destabilised European world initiated the tragedies of the 20th century.
Meet our speaker and chair
Odd Arne Westad is the Engelsberg Chair for 2020/21 at LSE IDEAS. He is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, and is a former director of LSE IDEAS.
Christopher Coker is Director of LSE IDEAS.
More about this event
A podcast of the first lecture can be found at Empires Past & Present: the idea of empire.
The second lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1800, took place on 26 January, a podcast is available.
LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it.
Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEEngelsberg
For example, his first command deals with inserting comments. It puts the comment in the proper place using a heuristic based on where the point is but also adds a prefix consisting of a keyword and the date or a keyword and a date/time stamp. It is, as Stavrou says, not a big deal but it does make it easier to add comments as you code.
Next he considers diffing the current buffer. If the buffer has been modified, it diffs the buffer with the underlying file. If the current buffer is clean (has not been modified) it diffs it with the version in version control (if any). Again, this is pretty simple but very useful. When called with the universal argument, the function will highlight word-wise changes.
His next bit of Elisp is concerned with narrowing. Stavrou says it’s a simplification of some code by Bozhidar Batsov but I find Artur Malabarba’s code more useful.
The next bit of code involves escaping URLs and email address for Markdown. They’re nice but we Org mode users probably won’t find much use for them.
Finally, he presents some code to ease grepping. It uses the built-in grep function but puts a wrapper around it so that you don’t have to input all the information the standard implementation requires.
He has a sort of coda to the video that mentions a few things that he doesn’t discuss at length but that he finds useful.
There’s a lot of material in the video but it’s only 31 minutes, 27 seconds long. That short enough that you can probably fit it in easily but long enough that you’ll still have to schedule some time for it.
Doug speaks with Robert Fatton, author of The Guise of Exceptionalism, on the assassination of Haiti’s president and the long history that led to this sorry pass.
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
We’re joined by Chapo foreign policy desk Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner to check in with America’s various “oopsies”, “uh-ohs” and “oh butterfingers” accidentally enforcing our hegemony around the world.
Derek and Danny have a new podcast, American Prestige, covering just this type of thing. If you like them on Chapo, be sure to go checkout their new show and, as always, Foreign Exchanges on substack. We’re putting the first episode of American Prestige in the Chapo feed so you can get a taste.
http://patreon.com/americanprestige
fx.substack.com
Yadm’s an amazing dotfile manager that’s basically
a thin wrapper around git and a bare repo. With it being a bare repo,
you’ll not be able to manage it directly with Magit so here’s a really
smart tip I found
that will let you access it via Tramp:
Miles Jupp is always great, but here *all* the characters work and the writing 's great too. Rest of the show to come (hopefully including outside the UK) @ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000y1g9
What happens when the Prime Minister suddenly stops being Prime Minister?
One day you're the most powerful person in the country, the next you're irrelevant, forced into retirement 30 years ahead of schedule and find yourself asking 'What do I do now?'
Miles Jupp stars as Henry Tobin - Britain's shortest serving and least popular post war PM (he managed 8 months).
We join Henry soon after his crushing election loss. He’s determined to not let his disastrous defeat be the end of him. Instead Henry's going to get back to the top - he's just not sure how and in what field..
In this first episode of the series, Henry is looking to repair his tattered reputation by getting a publishing deal for his memoirs to set the record straight on his premiership.
Written by Paul Doolan and Jon Hunter
Henry Tobin... Miles Jupp
Christine Tobin... Ingrid Oliver
Natalie... Emma Sidi
Drew... Kiell Smith-Bynoe
Jones... Justin Edwards
PJ... Rosie Cavaliero
Jack Steele & Tony... Adam Riches
Producer Simon Nicholls
A BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in August 2019.
Journalist, Simon Akam, investigates the failures of the British Army, including alleged war crimes, in his provocative book, The Changing of the Guard. He examines what has gone wrong with the British Army since 9/11, how it has changed, and what it has learnt from unsuccessful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
