Beekeepers are sounding the alarm about the latest developments in genetically modified pollinators • Read the text version here

Democracy Now! 2019-01-01 Tuesday

• Four Days in Occupied Western Sahara—A Rare Look Inside Africa's Last Colony

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Speaker(s): Dr Rebecca Elliott, Professor Ian Gough, Dr Rodolfo Leyva | Welcome to LSE IQ, the monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. For this LSE IQ we have something slightly different for you – an 'live' episode recorded in front of an audience at LSE at the beginning of November 2018. Economic growth has helped millions out of poverty. The jobs it creates mean rising incomes and consumers who buy more. This drives further growth and higher living standards, including better health and education. Yet WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, has recently warned that exploding human consumption is the driving force behind unprecedented planetary change, through increased demand for energy, land and water. Plastics and microplastics are filling our oceans and rivers and entering the food chain. The production of goods and services for household use is the most important cause of greenhouse gas emissions. The textile industry is responsible for depleting and polluting water resources and committing human rights abuses against its workers. It is also a major source of greenhouse gases, and three fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being made. For this episode of LSE IQ Jo Bale and Sue Windebank ask, 'Can we afford our consumer society?'. This episode features: Dr Rebecca Elliott, Assistant Professor, LSE’s Department of Sociology; Professor Ian Gough, Visiting Professor at LSE’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion and an Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment; and Dr Rodolfo Leyva, LSE Fellow in LSE’s Department of Media Communications. For further information about the podcast visit lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: Mumia Abu Jamal wins a victory in court, and celebrates a legal win for sick inmates in Pennsylvania’s prisons; and a police reform group wants to safeguard mentally ill people from police violence.

a New Year is dawning, and it’s been two years since investigations began into the so-called Russiagate scandal. But Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley says, the main charge against President Trump, Wikileaks and the Russian government remains unproven.

If there is an anti-war faction in the Democratic Party, it’s been very quiet in the wake of President Trump’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria. We spoke with longtime peace activist Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center. Flounders is also active in the Hands Off Syria Campaign. The Democrats are screaming to high heaven with outrage at Trumps plans for a Syria pullout..

A Philadelphia judge has ruled that the nation’s best known political prisoner has the right to present another appeal of his 1982 conviction in the death of a police officer.  Mumia Abu Jamal proved his contention that a prosecutor in his case, who went on to become a judge, unconstitutionally influenced Abu Jamal’s previous appeal, which was turned down. Meanwhile, Abu Jamal continues to turn out award-winning journalism for Prison Radio. This week, he reports on another victory for Pennsylvania prison inmates.

Millions of white people live in New York City, but you wouldn’t know that if you visited the courts and jails of the city’s five boroughs. The Police Reform Organizing Project, or PROP, reports that close to 9 out of 10 people facing arraignment in local courts on any given day, are Black or Latino.  PROP executive director Robert Gangi says his group’s new project is to change the way mentally ill people are treated in New York.

Democracy Now! 2018-12-31 Monday

• A Disaster for Brazil: Noam Chomsky on Brazil's New Far-Right President Jair Bolsonaro
• Noam Chomsky: Members of Migrant Caravan Are Fleeing from Misery & Horrors Created by the U.S.
• A March to Disaster: Noam Chomsky Condemns Trump for Pulling Out of Landmark Nuclear Arms Treaty
• Noam Chomsky: The Future of Organized Human Life Is At Risk Thanks to GOP's Climate Change Denial
• Noam Chomsky on Pittsburgh Attack: Revival of Hate Is Encouraged by Trump's Rhetoric

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The media continue to be in a panic over the drop in the stock market over the last few weeks. Fortunately for political pundits, there is no expectation that they have any clue about the subjects on which they opine.  For those more interested in economics than hysterics, the drop in the market is not a big deal.

The market is at best very loosely related to the economy. It generally rises in recoveries and falls in recessions, but it also has all sorts of movements that are not obviously related to anything in the real economy.

The most famous example of such an erratic movement was the crash in October of 1987. The market fell by more than 20 percent in a single day. There was no obvious event in the economy or politics that explained this fall, which hit markets around the world. Nor did the decline presage a recession. The economy continued to grow at a healthy pace through 1988 and 1989. It didn’t fall into a recession until June of 1990, more than two years later.

There is little reason to believe the recent decline will have any larger impact on the economy than the 1987 crash. As a practical matter, stock prices have almost no impact on investment. The bubble of the late 1990s was the major exception when companies were directly issuing stock to finance investment.

Stock prices do affect consumption through the wealth effect, but the recent decline is not large enough to have all that much impact. Also, since it was just reversing a sharp run-up in the prior 18 months, it essentially means that we will not see some of the positive wealth effect that the economy would have felt otherwise.

Basically, the hysteria over the drop in the stock market is either people in the media displaying their ignorance or a political swipe at Donald Trump by people who apparently don’t think there are substantive reasons to criticize him. This drop is not the sort of thing that serious people should concern themselves with.

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Another chance to hear an Essay by the Nobel prize-winner the late Seamus Heaney, recorded before he died in 2013. This is his portrait of the great Beowulf bard and of the court poet in general - known as the "scop" in old English - a man skilled in song and the pure art of story telling. Producer: Beaty Rubens

We’re all familiar with cases where one attributes certain psychological states or capacities to creatures and systems that are not human persons.  For example, your cat might prefer a certain variety of cat food, and maybe your houseplants enjoy a certain corner of the room they’re in.  In many cases,...

Whether you love him or hate him, it is indisputable that few, if any, other 20th-century American presidents were as historically consequential as Woodrow Wilson. Historian Patricia O’Toole explores the many complexities and ramifications of the Wilson presidency in her book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made...

Bestselling historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore describes some of history’s most fascinating and important letters, from Mark Antony’s thoughts on Cleopatra to a message Gandhi sent to Hitler

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Historian Adam Tooze, the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, explains how crisis in an unprecedentedly powerful and interconnected global banking system coursed through American homes and European sovereign debt markets, exploding into the Tea Party and the European politics of austerity — and, ultimately, leading to today's legitimation crisis of the reigning political establishment and economic order.

Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com!

Please support The Dig with your money at patreon.com/TheDig.

Was World War II really the ‘Good War’? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer...

The credibility of establishment figures has been demolished by technological change and political upheavals. But it’s too late to turn back the clock • Read the text version here

Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and the X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men with tinfoil hats decrying the deep state from the heights of power, and the possibilities of stitching socialism and queer politics together into a robust movement for human liberation.

Thank you to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com.

Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

Amazing travels of the first Englishman in India & a hunt for a lost poetic masterpiece.

A special Christmas episode with no mention of Christmas

They fought for the Iranian revolution – and then for Saddam Hussein. The US and UK once condemned them. But now their opposition to Tehran has made them favourites of Trump White House hardliners • Read the text version here

''Master storyteller'' (Christian Science Monitor) H. W. Brands was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin (The First American) and Franklin Roosevelt (Traitor to His Class). Exploring such diverse subjects as Aaron Burr, Ronald Reagan, the California gold rush, Andrew Jackson, the Vietnam War, and Bill Gates, his more than two dozen books ''weave together keen political history with anecdote and marvelous sense of place'' (The Boston Globe). Brands returns with the story of the early 19th--century political giants who took up the daunting challenge of completing the constitutional work begun by the Founding Fathers. Watch the video here. (recorded 11/13/2018)

This is one of the most important episodes we've done! Nathan Robinson goes through why Sanders is the best person to run against Donald Trump. He goes through the weaknesses of every other potential candidate like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, & Joe Biden. I challenge anyone who doesn't think Sanders is the best option to respond to this.

Behind the News 11/29/18 - guests: Adam Kotsko on the theology of neoliberalism; Kristin Ghodsee on why women have better sex under socialism - Doug Henwood

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The economically important Silk Road was blocked from Europe by the Ottoman Empire in c. 1453 with the fall of the Byzantine Empire. This spurred exploration, and a new sea route around Africa was found, triggering the Age of Discovery.

 Wholeworld-landandoceans12000.jpg: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center derivative work: Splette (talk) and one more author - Wholeworld-landandoceans12000.jpg

Extent of Silk Route/Silk Road. Red is land route and the blue is the sea/water route.

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Created: 27 May 2010

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The Ancient Maritime Silk Road.  Andrew Lawler @ScienceMagazine

https://www.andrewlawler.com/sailing-sinbads-seas/

We speak to The Intercept's Jon Schwarz about his latest piece "This Thanksgiving, I’m Grateful for Donald Trump, America’s Most Honest President." Jon also goes over why Thanksgiving is the second most important day every year, after Columbus Day, and how Hitler drew inspiration from the slaughter of Native Americans.

(This piece originally appeared on my Patreon page.)

A friend recently sent me a piece by Jason Hickel, arguing that growth can’t be green and that we need to move away from growth-oriented economics. I am not convinced. It strikes me both that the piece misrepresents what growth means and also confuses political obstacles with logical ones. The result is an attack on a concept that makes neither logical nor political sense.

In the piece, Hickel points out the enormous leaps that will be required to keep our greenhouse gas emissions at levels that will prevent irreversible environmental damage. He then hands us the possibility, that even if through some miracle we can manage to meet these targets with the rapid deployment of clean energy, we still have the problem of the use of other resources that is wiping out species and wrecking the environment.

Hickel’s points about the imminent dangers to the environment are very much on the mark, but it is not clear that has anything to do with the logic of growth. Suppose the Sustainable World Party (SWP) sweeps to power in the next election. They immediately impose a massive tax on greenhouse gas emissions, which will rise even further over time. They also inventory all the resources that are in limited supply and impose large and rising taxes on them.

Furthermore, they pay developing countries large sums to protect regions that are important for sustaining species facing extinction and for the global environment. The new administration also hugely increases spending on research on clean technologies and has massive subsidies for zero-emission vehicles and even more importantly for mass transit. As the SWP implements this policy, it has very stimulative fiscal and monetary policies.

Will the economy continue to grow through this transition? That’s hard to say. If the price of gas quadrupled people would obviously drive less and buy fewer cars. On the other hand, since the government is throwing money at them with its fiscal and monetary policy, they may choose to spend more money on things that are not inherently research. They may spend more money on education, seeing movies and plays, gym memberships, eating at restaurants, better software for their computer and other types of spending that don’t either directly involve the use of resources or at least not obviously more than the alternative. (Eating at a restaurant obviously involves consuming food, but it doesn’t necessarily mean consuming more food than eating at home.)

But whatever happens in the transition period, what would keep the economy from growing in subsequent years? We have locked down all the resources in short supply and preserved large chunks of the world from encroachments by roads and settlements, but it is hard to see why we would not be developing better health care technology, better software, more types of cultural output, better housing (in the sense of being more pleasant — not necessarily larger) and other improvements in living standards, all of which count as growth in GDP.[1] Where is the war with growth?

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