Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

It will come as little surprise to most listeners that America’s metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. While the suburbs surrounding American cities tend to be relatively affluent and white, many urban areas, especially those with large non-white populations, remain under-resourced and under-served in comparison to their white suburban counterparts. Even as gentrification and other forces have increasingly forced poorer non-white residents to seek housing on the city’s periphery, suburbs continue to be associated with wealth and whiteness. Existing explanations for this political geography tend to focus on governmental policies and consumer behavior during the time period spanning the New Deal through World War II and the immediate post-war period. Once considered obscure academic parlance, terms like red-lining, white flight, and government-backed mortgages now regularly appear as part of popular discussions of housing inequality. While not refuting the importance of these events, Paige Glotzer situates American suburbs in a longer history of exclusionary practices dating back to the 19th century. In doing so, she also ties the American suburb to a broader history of racial capitalism and white settler colonialism. Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor & John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing 1890-1960

We’ve all heard the statistics regarding Americans and fast food. According to the National Health and Nutrition Survey, one third of Americans consumed fast food on any given day. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the fast food industry employed nearly 3.8 million Americans, many in minimum wage jobs. Not everyone has the same relationship with fast food. In this episode, we speak with Marcia Chatelain about  the dramatic impact one fast food company, McDonald’s, has had on black communities and black politics over the last half century. In doing so, she provides us with fresh insight on the relationship between fast food, race, and American capitalism. Marcia Chatelain is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.

David and Alex are retiring from the show! But a new host is joining to take the reins. Listen to hear the founding co-hosts reflect on the past six years of the show and to meet our new host, Jessica Levy.

Today, we have a special episode. We speak to Zach Carter about COVID-19 and Keyesnianism. Zach is the author of the upcoming book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.  On Wednesday March 18th, he published an op-ed on Keynes's ideas for today. If you like this episode, please donate to Mariame Kaba's redistribution, mutual aid fund: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8npOgwIczH Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Dara Orenstein on the Economic Geography of Warehouses If you’re like many people throughout the country and world, you’ve purchased something on Amazon. As a result, you’ve been incorporated into a set of supply chain relationships that inevitably pass through warehouses. On this episode, we return to topic we’ve discussed in past episodes—how logistics shapes capitalism. We speak to Dara Orenstein about the history of bonded warehouses specifically and foreign trade zones. We consider how taxes, tariffs, and legal locations have been a critical component in many of the products we buy and make. Dara Orenstein is an Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She is author of Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism 

Often, analyses of the intersections between race and capitalism consider how capitalism harms dispossessed communities of color because excluding or neglecting them is profitable. But what if serving those communities could be both very profitable and very damaging to the people in them? We speak with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about what she calls “predatory inclusion,” in which financial institutions and real estate interests sought to build black homeownership. In the process, they reaped tremendous profits and devastated the lives of black homeowners.

Eileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker What is work? Who are workers? Which activities are considered work, and which ones are excluded? These questions are some of the most critical questions in political and economic analysis. And how they are answered—both personally and by political institutions—is vital to how people spend their time and thus their lives. On this episode, we investigate this question specifically through the international debates about the “woman worker” as a unique kind of worker. To do this, Eileen Boris looks at the International Labor Organization—the international body, now housed in the United Nations—that sets global labor standards. She investigates how the ILO has considered this issue across their 100 year history. Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Making the Woman Worker Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019.

Students in U.S. history surveys come away from their lessons on World War I with one conflict fresh in their minds: How could Woodrow Wilson, a president who advocated segregation and famously screened the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, also have been an architect of the League of Nations and a champion of the self-determination of colonized people in Africa and Asia? In this episode, we speak with Adom Getachew, who casts Wilson in a different light. She argues that the people who developed ideas of self-determination were instead anti-colonial elites from colonized nations. Wilson worked against their aims and tried to reestablish racial hierarchies and white dominance. These anti-colonial thinkers fought for decolonization as a means to fight global white supremacy and capitalist exploitation of the global South  

Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism   The multinational corporation is a pervasive institution. For example, it’s nearly impossible to listen to this show without interacting with one. But what is the history of this thing we call the multinational corporation? And who gets to count as its constituents?   Today, we investigate this topic and how it has been shaped by cigarettes—from the workers who grew the tobacco to those who governed the tobacco companies. And we discuss what this history can tell us about race, gender, region and geography.   Our guest is Nan Enstad. Nan is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, an affiliate of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Afro-American Studies Department, and the current Director of the UW Food Studies Network. She is. the author of Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism.

When we talk about the 1973 energy crisis, we tend to cast it as a moment when Americans questioned assumptions about how the domestic economy worked and the U.S. role in the global economy. We don’t always spend as much time thinking about why the crisis happened, or what it represented in the Global South. OPEC’s decision to cut production and raise prices stemmed from a longer history of anti-colonial activists demanding a fundamental change in how the global economy operated. As countries with oil reserves pushed out colonial powers, local elites demanded sovereignty over their new nation’s political life but also over their natural resources. Today we speak with Chris Dietrich, who tells us about the longer history of anti-colonial elite thinking about oil, which culminated in what we in the U.S. tend to call the 1973 “energy crisis.”