Tom Roche

Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Prasanth Radhakrishnan, a New Delhi based journalist with Newclick.in and People's Dispatch, about the historic farmer strike currently sweeping India. Radhakrishnan explains why farmers are rising up, how they are organized, and how the neoliberal government of Narendra Modi has responded to the movement. Just one day after this interview, the Modi government raided the offices of Newsclick.in and detained its editors in what has been denounced as an act of intimidation against critical media. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3pgo69y​

Journalist Aaron Maté joins the show to talk about the start of Biden's foreign policy, and his reporting on Syria and the OPCW

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Padraic X Scanlan discusses his book Slave Empire: How Slavery Built modern Britain, which examines how slavery fuelled the British empire and explores the complicated, often contradictory, motivations of abolitionists.

 

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Dr Hugh Willmott responds to listener questions on Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries in the 16th century

 

In this special live edition of our ‘everything you wanted to know’ series, Dr Hugh Willmott responds to listener questions about the suppression of the monasteries in the 16th century, exploring why Henry VIII targeted religious houses, how they were repurposed, and what happened to the monks and nuns that lived in them.

 

 

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Laura Tingle discusses the lack of accountability of the Federal government as ministers continue to defy department advice over funding allocation decisions.

I just read Nicholas Kristof’s column about his childhood friend Mike Stepp. The piece is actually very moving.

Mr. Stepp grew up next door to Kristof. As he explains in the column, he grew up with an abusive father. Their family didn’t value education, so neither Mike or his brother ever finished high school. While previous generations of workers (white male workers) could work in a factory job without a high school degree and still enjoy a middle class standard of living, this was no longer a possibility for Mike. As a result, he struggled with periods of unemployment, low-paying jobs, drug addiction, mental health problems, and homelessness. He ended up dying last year at age 55.

Kristof tells us that Mike was a decent intelligent person who was let down by society. As he explains, we took away the opportunities that had existed for a large segment of the workforce, and did nothing to fill in the gaps:

“Witnessing the torment of people I grew up with, like Mike, has led me to conclude that I was wrong in many of my own views. Like many liberals with a university education and a reliable paycheck, I was too scornful of labor unions, too unreservedly enthusiastic about international trade, too glib about “creative destruction,” too heartless about its toll.”

I would strongly agree with the basic thrust of Kristof’s argument, but I want to ask about what happens to all the people like Kristof who now admits, “I was wrong in many of my own views.”

Just to be clear, I’m not looking for a jihad against Kristof who is both honest enough to admit his error and appears to have genuine compassion for the people who have been victimized by our policies of the last four decades. But Kristof is just one of a very long list of public intellectuals who made this same mistake. They openly, and often belligerently, pushed policies that had very serious negative effects for large segments of the population. While others have also come to recognize their mistake, many still don’t, and continue to blame the victims of their policies for the difficulties they face in life.

I am not going to rehash the arguments about the policies here (see my book Rigged [it’s free], if you want my account), rather I want to make a different point about accountability. Failing to recognize that the devastating impact of the economic policies promoted in the last four decades was a very serious mistake. But is anyone anywhere losing their job for it?

There is no shortage of economists, policy types, and columnists (e.g. Kristof’s colleague at the NYT, Thomas Friedman) who have made this mistake. However, the idea that any of them would face serious career consequences for this sort of massive failure is viewed as absurd. Even to suggest it is seen as mean-spirited vindictiveness.

So, we live in a society where the dishwasher can get fired in a minute for breaking the dishes. The same is the case for the custodian that doesn’t clean the toilet. But the highly paid workers at the top of their profession face no career risk from making huge mistakes with massive consequences for society.

Can I hear the story about meritocracy again?

 

 

The post Being Wrong in Elite Jobs Doesn’t Have Any Consequences appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

In this episode, Naama Cohen joins us to discuss the British mandate in Palestine from 1922 to 1932, when memoirist and children's author Douglas Duff served as a policeman there. How did British servicemen view Palestine, their role in it, and the local populations? Find out this and more.

Guest: Ronald Suny on Stalin: Passage to Revolution published by Princeton University Press.

The post From Soso to Stalin appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Glenn Greenwald rejoins the show to discuss recent journalism news, content moderation, and more on GameStop/Wall Street. Hosts Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi trade off takes related to the contentious confirmation hearing of Neera Tanden.

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Max Blumenthal speaks with Ben Norton, who is reporting from Ecuador, on the historic February 7 election, and how the US government, regime-change networks, and wealthy oligarchs are trying to prevent the return of the socialist Citizens' Revolution movement of former President Rafael Correa.

We discuss the fake NGO "left," represented by coup-supporting pseudo-environmentalist candidate Yaku Pérez, and how a victory of leftist Andrés Arauz could help bring back the progressive, anti-imperialist Pink Tide in Latin America.

This is a Twitter thread from a couple of months back. I thought I would post it here since there may be some interest.

Someone sent me a diatribe from some progressive about the evil of share buybacks. I have a few thoughts.

First the claims: they allow companies to inflate share prices, top management to manipulate share prices to maximize the value of options, divert money from long-term investment, and allow for tax avoidance. I’ll start with the tax story.

Buybacks, as opposed to dividends, do allow shareholders to avoid paying taxes as long as they hold their stock. This is a gift to rich people, but let’s not get carried away on the size of the gift.

First, as many progressives (including me) complain, shares typically turn over very quickly. That is one reason many of us support a financial transactions tax – to reduce the volume of pointless trading.

You don’t get to both complain about shares turning over all the time and that rich people never pay taxes because they hold their shares forever.

It’s true that some rich people do hold their shares until death, but even the Waltons must occasionally sell some shares to cover their living expenses. Anyhow, this is a real issue (could be addressed by taxing unrealized capital gains), but let’s not exaggerate its size.

On the question of long-term investment, I’m not at all impressed with the evidence. Do we think that companies would invest more if they paid out money to shareholders as dividends?

If the point is that the more money companies pay out to shareholders (as either dividends or buybacks), the less they invest, sure that is almost definitionally true. But this begs the question.

Are they paying out money to shareholders because they don’t see good investment opportunities or whether they aren’t taking advantage of good investment opportunities because they are paying out so much money to shareholders? I am strongly inclined to believe the former is the case.

Now let’s ask about inflating the share price. Suppose a stock sells for $100 and it is expected to earn $5 a share until the end of time. What happens if the company uses its full $5 in earnings to buy back stock.

The buyback critics tell us this would drive up the share price. In a limited sense, this will almost certainly be true. Suppose that we now have 5 percent fewer shares outstanding. This means that if we have the same price-to-earnings ratio, then the price per share will be 5 percent higher.

But how is this “inflating” the share price? The price to earnings ratio would be exactly the same after the buyback as before. What’s the problem?

We can tell a story that buybacks actually increase the price-to-earnings ratio. PEs have been unusually high in the last two decades, so this is not an implausible story on its face, even though believers in efficient market theory would say it’s impossible.

If buybacks do in fact drive up PEs, it would benefit top management, who will get more money for their options, and disadvantage future shareholders who will have to pay more money for each dollar of earnings, meaning that they will lower returns on the stock buy.

Current shareholders will be largely indifferent to a rise in PE since they have little reason (apart from tax considerations) to prefer money paid to them in higher share prices as opposed to dividends.

In this story, buybacks are effectively a tool used by top management to gain at the expense of future shareholders, with current shareholders being indifferent.

This raises the last point, top management using buybacks to manipulate stock prices to maximize the value of their options. This strikes me as a very plausible story, but it has important implications.

If top management is manipulating stock prices to increase the value of their options, it implies they are ripping off their companies. After all, if the shareholders wanted the CEO and other top executives to get more money, they could have just paid them more money.

The manipulation story implies that they are taking money that the shareholders, or their agent, the board of directors, did not intend them to have.

The manipulation story also means that the claim that the company is being run to maximize returns to shareholders is not true. In this case, the shareholders should be allies in efforts to rein in CEO pay.

To my view, reining in CEO pay is very important because of the distorting effect it has on pay structures throughout the economy. A world where CEOs get paid $2M (like in the good old days) is very different than today’s world where they get paid $20 M.

This leaves the moral of the evil buyback story as being that we need to crack down on CEOs ripping off their companies and bring their pay down to earth.

The post Quick Thoughts on the “Evils” of Share Buybacks appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Behind the News, 2/11/21 - guests: Noreena Hertz on loneliness; Rossana Rodríguez on mutual aid - Doug Henwood

For decades the most visible socialist in Britain, the late Labour Party MP Tony Benn is the rare instance of a left-wing politician who became even more radical as his political career progressed. The 1990 documentary TONY BENN: AGAINST THE TIDE, 1973-6 looks back at four years where radical change seemed possible and Benn was at the height of his power within Labour. We discuss his thwarted political vision, and how his politics remained consistent through the dark winters of Thatcher and Blair. PLUS: American media under Biden, and the death of Larry Flynt.

Watch the documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h9qv1HQ4…el=ModernLonelyTV

"Tony Benn Spent His Life Fighting for Democracy and Socialism" by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys - www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/tony-be…rty-uk-new-left

Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate​ The imprisoned Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny has been held up in the West as the poster child of the Russian opposition. Two Russian leftists, Katya Kazbek and Alexey Sakhnin discuss why they don't see Navalny as a genuine alternative to Vladimir Putin, and instead as a representative of a different faction of the ruling Russian elite -- one more willing to cater to Western counterparts. Guests: Katya Kazbek. Writer, translator and the editor-in-chief of arts and culture magazine Supamodu.com. Alexey Sakhnin. Russian activist and a member of the Left Front. He was one of the leaders of the anti-Putin protest movement from 2011 to 2013.

Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad | Around 1800 the world was dominated by a number of predominant empires at different stages of development: Britain, France, Austria, Russia, the Ottomans, Spain, and the Qing. This lecture will discuss each of these empires, the resistance against them, and how the future looked from the perspective of each. 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. Michael Cox was appointed to a Chair at LSE in 2002, having previously held positions in the UK at The Queen's University of Belfast and the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth. He helped establish the Cold War Studies Centre at LSE in 2004 and later co-founded LSE IDEAS in 2008 with Arne Westad. More about this event In this series of four lectures, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, will discuss the concept of empire and why it is still relevant today. This event is the second in the series. A podcast of the first lecture can be found at Empires Past & Present: the idea of empire. The third lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1900, will take place on Tuesday 30 March. 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

Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad | For most of the past five millennia, the world has been dominated by empires. These mega-states have set the agenda for much of human development, but their rule has never been uncontested. Anti-imperialism is as old as empires. Economic change and devastating wars have weakened some states and promoted others. This first lecture in the series discusses the concept of empire and resistance to empire in a long historical perspective. 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. Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE. 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

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Is free will an illusion? If so, it’s a very useful one. Belief in moral responsibility can keep us from behaving in ways that are anti-social or criminal. But if free will and moral responsibility can’t be justified philosophically, how should we deal with wrongdoers?

Elvis McGonagall performs the pick of a year’s biting and savagely funny satire in a blend of provocative verse and politically savvy stand-up comedy. It's imbued with his customary searing wit, wordplay and anarchic invective. Pulling no punches, Elvis directs his scurrilous diatribes at the powers-that-be from Westminster to Waitrose, taking aim at the injustices of our septic isle and beyond. Stockpiling and the pickiness of cats, celebrity branding, the nature of truth, some bloke called Trump, the Prime Minister and Mr Benn, Government rules, ecotricity, Samuel Pepys - it’s all there. There’s even a love poem. Full Tartan Jacket presents the prime cuts from the work of a comic poet at the top of his game – all current and bang on target. Join this World Poetry Slam Champion and Saturday Live alumnus as he bellows into the void in exasperation at the world, from the Gracelands Caravan Park somewhere near Dundee. Recorded remotely in front of a virtual audience. Written and performed by Elvis McGonagall Produced by Frank Stirling A 7digital production for BBC Radio 4

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world. Hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

The story of two men competing for the world Donkey Kong championship becomes a metaphor for so much in society, from celebrity culture to institutional power. We revisit THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS (2007) and celebrate two universal archetypes: Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell. PLUS: fiery hot takes on the Golden Globes, the Democrats' impending midterm strategy, and the lingering discourse on the Bernie mittens meme.

"PIXEL BURN - A King, Konquered: The Fall of Billy Mitchell" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNLqrOqUtEM

We're continuing a limited run of the new Jacobin Sports Show. If you'd like to keep listening, please subscribe! You can find links to Apple, Spotify, and other podcast apps here: https://anchor.fm/jacobinsports/

In this News Brief we break down L'Affaire GameStop and what lessons can be gleaned from about psychological gamesmanship of the stock market and finance media's goofy, reverse-engineered moral pretext for being outraged by #GME. With guest Jacob Silverman.

Max Adams discusses his book The First Kingdom, Britain in the Age of Arthur, which pieces together the evidence to uncover what happened after the fall of Roman Britain. He speaks about some of the current theories about the era 400-600 AD, and why Arthurian myths have proven so popular.

 

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Congressman Ro Khanna makes another appearance to discuss the state of Covid relief, his experience during the January 6 riot and more. Hosts Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi discuss other recent news, including an inspired metaphor from Thomas Friedman on the Gamestop story.

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Behind the News, 2/4/21 - guests: Katya Kazbek on Alexi Navalny; Marianela d'Aprile on mutual aid - Doug Henwood

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss F Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, published in 1925, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It is told by Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. In the age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, in the hope she’ll attend one of them and they can be reunited. They were lovers as teenagers but she had given him up for a richer man who she soon married, and Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back. The image above is of Robert Redford as Gatsby in a scene from the film 'The Great Gatsby', 1974. With Sarah Churchwell Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London Philip McGowan Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast And William Blazek Associate Professor and Reader in American Literature at Liverpool Hope University Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

From the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Bobby Warrener and Leonard Chan talk about the love they've reluctantly given their cats...and their parents. Cassie Cao teaches the socially distanced Winnipeg audience about how safe a safe word can be. No comics were harmed in the taping of this show.

Guest: Eric Lee on Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge – April-May 1945 published by Greenhill Books.

The post The Texel Uprising appeared first on SRB Podcast.