Left Anchor

Just Ryan today with a quick pre-New Hampshire episode going through Reed Hundt's excellent book A Crisis Wasted about the presidential transition in 2007-8 and Obama's consequential early decisions as president. We go through how Obama allowed Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to set the priorities for the bank bailout (thus ensuring Wall Street would not be cut down to size), how Obama allowed his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to turn homeowner assistance policy into a quiet backdoor bailout of the banks, and how the Obama administration definitely could have gotten a bigger stimulus but chose not to. Having the right person in the presidential chair matters a great deal. Links to the episodes and articles mentioned: Eric Rauchway on the Hoover-FDR transition, Carolyn Sissoko on the bailout disaster, and David Dayen on what the next president could do without passing any new laws.

Ryan is back from vacation so we return with a discussion of the Iowa clusterfuck: How Bernie edged out Pete Buttigieg in the popular vote and tied in pleged delegates, how Biden collapsed, how and why the caucus was bungled so horribly, and what it maybe means for the next few primaries. Enjoy!

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Today we have the Brothers Alvarez -- Maximillian and Zak -- of the Working People Podcast on with a crossover episode. We discuss what Zak learned from his time in the University of Chicago economics department, how they were both radicalized by the financial crisis, and more. Enjoy!

With New Hampshire coming up, we've unlocked our episode on the Bernie-Warren competition.

Bit of a different episode today: Ryan reads a very long 1997 essay about the Second World War by the late Lee Sandlin called "Losing the War" (with permission from Nina Sandlin). Though it takes three hours to finish, it's a remarkable piece about the way the nature of the war was obscured from public view, why wars happen, and what we should remember about it today. Enjoy!

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Today we've got UC Davis Professor of History Eric Rauchway on to talk the history of the New Deal, particularly the transition period in the winter of 1932-33 covered in his book Winter War. We take apart the common false belief, held by both Republicans and Democrats (including Barack Obama) that FDR deliberately refused to help Herbert Hoover fix the Great Depression so he could get the New Deal passed, when in fact it was Hoover who refused to help in an effort to get Roosevelt to abandon all his campaign promises. We then take down the liberal idea expressed by Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Alter that FDR was really a secret moderate, and talk about how ideological the 1932 campaign really was. Enjoy! Rauchway's other book The Money Makers can be found here, and his essay in The Presidency of Barack Obama can be found here.

Today we've got two professional union organizers on to talk about the state of labor organizing in 2019 -- the tactics of the union busters, the hostility of the Trump administration, and the brushfire labor militancy that has sprung up across the country.  Read more about Google's union-busting tactics here, and find the essay about progressive union-busters here. 

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