Current Affairs

Ryan Cooper is the managing editor of The American Prospect and co-host of the Left Anchor podcast. He is the author of the new book How Are You Going to Pay For That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics (St. Martin's Press), which exposes the faulty economic assumptions that are used to convince Americans that they can't afford generous social democratic programs. In the book—and in this episode—Ryan shows how to argue with libertarians and neoliberals who believe that the private sector drives the economy and that government is necessarily wasteful, inefficient, and parasitic. Ryan exposes the fallacious ideas underlying the prioritization of private property rights over the common good, and provides a blueprint for sensible policies on climate, labor, health care, and welfare. He shows that when it comes to funding collective social needs, we can absolutely "pay for that." Ryan's book is insightful and thorough and demolishes many of the bad ideas that prevent us from solving urgent problems. (It is also blurbed by Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson," who calls Cooper "one of the most reliably well-informed and thoughtful political commentators in the country.") An episode should have come out Tuesday but it was Mardi Gras and Current Affairs is based in New Orleans. As is well-known, all attempts to do work on Mardi Gras are destined to fail. We apologize for letting the debauchery of Carnival interfere with the regular production of quality podcasts. A previous episode with Ryan Cooper in which he talked about huge deadly trucks is here. The article Nathan wrote about climate change as a giant act of theft and pillage is here.  

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years, filled with the perspectives of the ordinary people trying to survive these conflicts. When Foreign Affairs awarded Cockburn its Journalist of the Year award, the contest judges said of his work:“Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.”In this episode, we discuss what Cockburn has learned during his decades as a foreign correspondent about how to sift through competing narratives and arrive at something approximating the truth. We talk about how propaganda works, what Americans still don't understand about the Middle East, and why the quality of reporting on regional conflicts has declined over the last decades as news organizations have stopped providing necessary support for deep critical journalism. We also discuss the reissue of Cockburn's memoir The Broken Boy (OR Books), about his childhood during the Cork polio epidemic of 1956, which like his other work is a story of everyday people who find themselves caught up in the tides of history and having to struggle through as best they can. (The title of this episode refers to a 1976 essay by Cockburn's late brother Alexander, "How To Be a Foreign Correspondent," which skewered the kinds of hack war reporters that Patrick Cockburn has spent a career trying to be different from.) 

Bill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For many years, the Gates Foundation was rarely criticized at all in the mainstream press, its work considered unambiguously good. The shine has come off Gates a bit recently, thanks to the negative publicity surrounding both his divorce and his staunch defense of corporate intellectual property rights over vaccines during the pandemic. Prof. Linsey McGoey of the University of Essex was one of the earliest major critics of the Gates Foundation's work, and her 2015 book No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy is a stinging criticism of "philanthrocapitalism." McGoey's book goes through the history of business tycoons trying to save the world through charity, beginning with Andrew Carnegie in the 19th century. McGoey explains clearly why charitable giving, though it may look like an unambiguous positive, has a number of major downsides including:- The lack of democratic accountability for what private foundations choose to fund (see the Gates foundation's funding of school privatization schemes)- The refusal to consider solutions that threaten the sources of the foundation's wealth or call into question the broader hierarchy of wealth and power- The funding of things that look good on paper and flatter the billionaire donor but aren't actually what people in need are asking forThese criticisms have been made by the left since the time of Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," but McGoey brings them up to date by showing clearly how even an organization like the Gates Foundation, that presents itself as having a benign commitment to health and education, is actually insidious.In this conversation, Prof. McGoey and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the career of Gates, the problems with billionaire charity, and the reasons philanthrocapitalists often escape serious criticism. They also discuss Prof. McGoey's work in the field of "ignorance studies." In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, Prof. McGoey studies the way institutions carefully exclude ideologically inconvenient information, creating a kind of useful ignorance. The article that Nathan and Rob Larson wrote about Bill Gates is here. The piece on billionaires' memoirs is here."Charity creates a multitude of sins." — Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" 

Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, and member of the Greek Parliament. The Guardian describes him as "a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class." He calls himself an "erratic Marxist," and has written economics textbooks, a memoir, and popular explainers of economic ideas. But now he has produced a novel: Another Now: Dispatches From an Alternative Present. Another Now is not a typical work of fiction. It is a novel of ideas, more like one of Plato's dialogues than an airport potboiler. Varoufakis draws on the tradition of leftist utopian fiction seen in 19th century works like William Morris' News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Those books tried to show readers a plausible depiction of what a socialist society might look like. In Another Now, Varoufakis is doing something similar: he shows us what our existing 21st century world might look like if the economy operated very differently and capitalism was done away with. He imagines a different timeline in which Occupy Wall Street had won and Wall Street itself had been consigned to the dustbin of history.But it's not quite right to describe this work as "utopian." Varoufakis is trying to do something extremely pragmatic: to show, using his academic training in finance and economics, that things that seem impossible are actually quite technically feasible. The attack on socialists generally is that their schemes are unworkable, and that without big banks and a class of wealthy capitalists, there could not be a dynamic, innovative economy. Varoufakis uses this story to show that this isn't true, and to explain in detail the concrete workings of a possible post-capitalist economy.If you're not used to novels that contain long descriptions of alternative banking systems, Another Now may be a challenging read. But it's exciting because it tries to seriously answer the question: "What would a realistic alternative to the capitalist economy look like?" In Varoufakis' "other now," the fruits of society's labor are not owned by capitalists, but by the people who do the work. There is some inequality, but there is a "democratic economy" in which corporate tyranny has been eradicated. Banks are public, not private, and poverty is eliminated. It is said that these days, the cramping of our imaginations has meant that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Varoufakis invites us to imagine the end of capitalism in our own time. The medium of fiction has allowed Varoufakis to include characters who are highly skeptical about whether this economy is possible, and who have to be convinced over time to believe in it. Another Now wants to speak to critics of the socialist project, and to show that the seemingly most insurmountable obstacles to eliminating capitalism (maintaining innovation and incentives, financing new projects, etc.) are actually easily solved problems. The most substantial difficulty is the creation of a political movement with the power to bring the necessary changes about.Another Now poses a serious challenge to capitalist dogma and offers an inspiring vision that should energize the left. In this conversation, Varoufakis and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the novel and why a well-functioning socialist economy is more feasible than people assume. Warning: it gets a little bit heavy on the economics and it may be useful to read up on the history of the socialist calculation debate before diving in. The phrase "Astonishingly, There Is An Alternative!" is taken from Another Now, where it is a counterpoint to Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum "There Is No Alternative."The interview Nathan did with the authors of People's Republic of Walmart is available here. 

Victor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society is about the problem of misinformation: people not knowing what's going on in the world, or thinking they know what's going on but actually believing in propaganda or bullshit (see, e.g., Joe Rogan). There has been a lot of chatter about the problem of "fake news" and how it can be stopped, with many proposing that social media companies need to do more regulation of the internet and "content moderation." Victor thinks that this conversation misses something crucial: the need for well-funded public interest journalism. He believes that we cannot escape the "misinformation society" without changing the way that journalism is produced, since (regulated or not) the private market is incapable of fulfilling the public need for truthful information about topics that matter. In a democracy, where the citizens themselves are in charge of making important decisions, it's vital that we find a way to fund the production and dissemination of quality journalism.In this conversation, we discuss:- The catastrophic collapse of public interest journalism, and the "news deserts" across the country where there is no local journalism - Why, even as we recognize the effects of that collapse, we shouldn't romanticize the newspapers of old, because the profit motive has always corrupted journalism- How the need for for-profit media organizations to constantly and obsessively "chase clicks" makes it impossible for them to produce quality work - The alarming consequences of having news organizations that ignore climate and international news in favor of cheap, entertaining political "horse race" coverage- The distortions in public understanding that result from a situation where the truth is paywalled but the lies are free- Why Victor thinks we're "doomed" if we rely on commercial media for the news, and why you don't need to be a "conspiracy theorist" to see how the profit motive makes corporate media less likely to accurately depict the state of the world- What a public model for journalism might look like, and why city governments should fund publicly owned municipal newspapers

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and the sources of dysfunction in the system. In this episode we discuss:- How police officers are trained to fear the populations they police- The limits of police training: what police are taught (e.g., how to handcuff suspects) and what they're not (e.g., anything about racism)- How police officers are often called on to perform "social work" responsibilities that they are ill-equipped to handle, and why arresting and jailing people becomes an all-purpose tool- What it means to say that the problems with policing are "systemic" and why individual good-hearted officers cannot hope to change the fundamental nature of the institutions they work within- Explanations of polling that indicates that poor communities want more policing: they're offered a false binary where the only choice is more police or nothing- How many problems do not necessarily originate within the institution of policing itself but with lawmakers and with the United States itself- The problem of militarized institutions more broadly, which Prof. Brooks has explored in her previous book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything- Why it's going to be more difficult than just "defunding" police: we need institutions that actually care for people properly, and we haven't built them yet"Much of what the average patrol officer does [every day] doesn't need to be done—and really should not be done—by a person with a gun and a badge and a uniform."  — Rosa Brooks

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of many bestselling nonfiction books. He began his career as a war correspondent, and was a reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years, reporting from over 50 countries. He has written books on religion, culture, poverty, and war. For the last ten years, Hedges has been teaching a class in a New Jersey state prison. His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in An American Prison, is about his experiences as an educator among the incarcerated. It is a searing indictment of the way the humanity of prisoners is denied, but it is also a moving testament to the way that culture and curiosity can flourish even in conditions of extreme deprivation. Hedges' class, all of whom were serious offenders, studied drama and wrote a play together. His book chronicles the development of that play, Caged, which was eventually performed to sold-out audiences in Trenton. In this episode, we discuss both Hedges' time reporting on war and his experiences as an educator in prisons. There are connections here: both the battlefield and the prisons are places of terrible human deprivation and suffering—suffering that is imposed by violent institutions based on stories about why it is justified and necessary. Hedges has dedicated his journalistic career to going to the places that most people prefer not to go, seeing the things we prefer not to see, and forcing us to confront them. We talk about:- The petty cruelties of prison officials and the thirst for knowledge among the incarcerated- How evil institutions are created by perfectly normal people who think they are doing good- How those we think of as killers and criminals, whether in battle or in the criminal punishment system, are often more similar to ourselves than we might like to admit- How even in a seemingly morally simple case, World War II (the "good war"), America' s actions were more morally ambiguous than it is comfortable to think about- How the realities of violence and suffering are kept carefully hidden from a population that  would rather not question simple stories about who the world's evildoers areOur Class is available from Simon & Schuster. War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning is available from PublicAffairs. Caged is available from Haymarket Books. 

Megan Tobias Neely is a sociologist whose book Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street takes a deep look inside the world of hedge funds, those small boutique investment banks that play with a sizable chunk of the world's wealth. Neely's book draws on her observations from time working in a hedge fund as well as from dozens of interviews with professionals in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss:- How hedge fund managers justify their value to society and why there are reasons to doubt them- The internal culture of firms and how they resemble feudal kingdoms- Popular myths, such as the idea that the "only thing that matters is whether you make money for investors" and "the firm is horizontal and non-hierarchical" - How people with degrees in astrophysics and artificial intelligence find themselves using their skills to make money for rich people rather than doing what they love- How super-wealthy men convince themselves that their decisions are based on objective reason when they are often based in stereotypes and prejudice- How a savvy actor with access to capital can actually take advantage of these blind spots through "perception arbitrage"The Bloomberg article by Matt Levine that Nathan cites is here. The review of Ray Dalio's Principles is here. 

Phil Torres is a scholar of "global catastrophic risk," meaning that he studies the various ways in which terrible things could happen to humanity: nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, killer robots, pandemics, etc. His books include The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse and Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks. Both are available free on his website. His upcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of Thinking About the End of the World.On today's episode, Phil joins to talk about how we can think rationally about the risks we face as a species, and figure out what to prioritize. Over the last decade or so, many more scholars have turned to thinking seriously about global catastrophic risks, trying to determine what threats we need to address. As Phil discusses, it's in many ways a good thing that more people are taking catastrophe seriously. As we can see from the COVID-19 pandemic, often we overlook these things until it's too late, and failures of preparation lead to millions of avoidable deaths.But Phil has also become critical of some of the popular ways of thinking about "existential risk." Institutions like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge have sprung up, and and many in Silicon Valley have started taking an interest in these questions. Certain tendencies associated with the "rationalist" or "effective altruist" movements claim to be interested in "existential risk," but Phil argues that they end up drifting into a kind of techno-utopianism rather than thinking seriously about how to stop the real harms that we face in the near future. Phil has argued, including in an article for Current Affairs, that while you may often hear people like Elon Musk talking about "existential risks to humanity" and about our "long term future," when you closely examine what they mean by this, it turns out to be a bizarre and dangerous secular theology. Phil, who was previously aligned with the effective altruist and rationalist movements himself, has become stingingly critical of those he sees as misusing rationalism and thereby taking the study of catastrophe in a deeply concerning direction. (He wrote a popular article last year for Salon about the New Atheists, in which he documented the ways in which many of them present right-wing prejudices as mere "reason.")In this conversation, Phil explains why he became interested in "global catastrophic risk," how he came to reject some of the mainstream approaches to studying it, and what he thinks the most important threats facing humanity are. There could not be a more important subject, and Phil Torres is one of its most serious and reflective scholars.The song at the beginning is "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" from the 1972 Evangelical Christian horror film A Thief In The Night (about which you can read a Current Affairs article here.) Edited by Tim Gray. 

George Monbiot has been working on issues of climate and environmental justice for three decades. A columnist for The Guardian, George's books include Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis and How Did We Get into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature. His latest essay collection This Can't Be Happening "calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced." As a public communicator on climate change, George has experienced deep frustration in trying to convey the urgency of the crisis to a media and and political establishment that refuse to confront reality or accept the need for drastic changes to the status quo. That frustration was captured well, he says, by the recent Netflix satire Don't Look Up, which is about scientists who are unable to convey the importance of stopping a planet-destroying comet from crashing into Earth. In fact, the film is such an accurate allegory for the climate crisis that one scene in directly parallels a recent incident in his own life: the scientist played by Jennifer Lawrence, trying to get the hosts of a celebrity-obsessed TV morning show to take the problem seriously, breaks down in frustration. George has been on a very similar morning show himself to discuss climate change, with very similar results. Watching Don't Look Up, George writes in a column for The Guardian, "made me see my whole life of campaigning flash before me." On today's episode, George joins Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson for a discussion of why it's so difficult for climate scientists and activists to get their message across, and what we need to face up to when it comes to the climate crisis. George's work is not hopeless or apocalyptic, and is built around solutions and the determination to work for a better world. But to reach that world, we need to first look up, and start talking and behaving differently, demanding a political response that is proportionate to the magnitude of the problem. We can deal with this crisis but it requires willpower and focus.