Current Affairs

Chris Mullin served from 1987 to 2010 as a Labour MP in the British parliament. During that time, he kept a daily diary of his observations, which has since been published in three acclaimed volumes. The diaries trace the rise and fall of Tony Blair's "New Labour." Mullin himself was associated with the party's left (he edited Tony Benn's book Arguments for Socialism and was the only member of Blair's government to vote against the Iraq war) but found himself trying to tread carefully to use the powers of government effectively. His diaries raise valuable questions about how an ordinary person trying to do good in government can negotiate the thorny ethical dilemmas that come with being close to power.Mullin is also the author of the novel A Very British Coup (adapted into a popular miniseries), about what happens when a socialist government takes power in the UK, and is known in Britain for his crusading journalistic effort to free the wrongly accused Birmingham Six, a case from the 70s that is still making headlines to this day.In this conversation, we talk about the frustrations of navigating bureaucracy, the catastrophe of Blair's support for the Iraq war, and whether a socialist government would indeed face the kind of existential threats that Mullin has written about in his fiction.Edited by Tim Gray.

Mark Vonnegut MD has been a pediatrician for over 30 years. He is the author of the books The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, and most recently The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics. His new book is a collection of observations from his life treating children in the American healthcare system. In it, he shows how the for-profit private insurance industry has destroyed doctors' ability to provide effective care for patients, and he explains what he sees as necessary for doctors to treat patients well. His book is both an aggressive indictment of a profit-driven system and a vision for compassionate, empathetic care. Dr. Vonnegut shows that to reconstruct our healthcare system, we will need single-payer financing, but we will also need a form of medicine that centers the needs and feelings of patients, and in which medical care is administered free of meddlesome bureaucracy and out of a genuine desire to help people get better. In this conversation, Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson and online editor Lily Sánchez (who herself happens to be a pediatrician) discuss Dr. Vonnegut's hopes for a humane alternative to the contemporary practice of medicine. Edited by Tim Gray. 

Justine Medina is a member of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union and a packer at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The ALU recently won a historic victory, defeating Amazon's multi-million dollar union-busting campaign to make JFK8 the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. It was a victory many thought impossible. But Amazon underestimated the ALU and through persistent organizing work, the union pulled off an astonishing victory that is expected to be a game-changer for Amazon workers around the country. Justine's commentary "How We Did It" can be read in Labor Notes. In this conversation, we discuss how a group of dedicated Amazon workers, organizing independently of any major union, managed to pull off a stunning triumph for the labor movement. We talk about the lessons that others can take from the ALU's example.Find out how you can support the Amazon Labor Union here. Special thanks to Micheal "Airlift Mike" Ziants of Airlift Productions for narrating the trailer. Trailer edited by Tim Gray. Music: "The Descent" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: by Attribution 3.0Justine is the one in the glasses. 

Angie Schmitt is a transportation writer and planner whose book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America examines the shocking and disturbing growth in pedestrian deaths on the streets of the United States. After declining for 20 years, pedestrian deaths began climbing drastically again around 2010: These gruesome tragedies are preventable—in Europe, deaths are declining rather than increasing—and in Angie's book, she discusses all of the factors contributing to the problem. These include:The proliferation of big trucks and SUVs with huge blind spots and killer front endsGentrification pushing poor people into the suburbs, where not having a car means having to walk to work across busy six-lane roads and take your life in your handsThe lack of any serious US national investment in making our roads safe and laws written by the oil industry (for instance, many state constitutions prohibit using gas tax money to build sidewalks)A lack of good public transitA culture of "blaming the pedestrian" that sees accidents as a result of walkers' foolishness rather than bad planningThe fact that the victims of these accidents tend to be poor people, old people, and people of color, whose lives are less valued and who navigate worse infrastructureAngie's book is filled with important information about an overlooked crisis. It's a serious issue of racial justice and shows the American class divide at its ugliest: rich people in giant trucks mow down poor people of color who have no choice but to dodge traffic. It's a dystopian tragedy, made all the worst by how avoidable it is. Instead of ensuring that everyone could navigate the built environment safely, America has shifted blame onto victims (as we can see in the concept of "jaywalking," which punishes pedestrians for crossing streets even when there are no crosswalks nearby). Angie lays out why we need to care more about this injustice and how we can address it at relatively little expense. Nathan accidentally used the wrong microphone so his audio is worse than usual. Apologies. 

Noam Chomsky is "arguably the most important intellectual alive," the founder of modern linguistics, one of the most cited scholars in history, and the author of over 100 books. He is currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He recently co-authored the book Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance and is soon to release The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.Prof. Chomsky is one of the foremost experts on U.S. foreign policy, and today we discuss one of the most serious imaginable topics: the threat of world war and the path to reducing the threat of nuclear weapons. We begin by discussing the Hiroshima bombing and the dawn of the nuclear age, before discussing the present escalating tension with Russia and the means by which the U.S. can maintain peace and avoid a catastrophic global conflict. We also discuss the ways that Americans avoid confronting the suffering inflicted by their country on others around the world, the stories that the powerful tell themselves to rationalize atrocities, and the common thread running through Chomsky's work on foreign policy: an insistence that the U.S. confront the truth about its actions and that our moral condemnation of our enemies' crimes be matched with an equally intense scrutiny of our own. No topic could be more important than the threat of global warfare, and nobody in the world is more knowledgable about it. It is a great privilege to welcome Prof. Chomsky back to the Current Affairs podcast for this vital conversation. The books on the British empire that Prof. Chomsky cites are Legacy of Violence by Caroline Elkins and Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor.The 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident is discussed here.The Daniel Ellsberg anecdote that Nathan cites at the beginning is from The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.The interview Prof. Chomsky cites with veteran diplomat Chas Freeman is here.The interview in which Carter national security advisor Zbignew Brzezinski discusses the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is here. In it, he says: "We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would [...] Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire." The war killed an estimated 1 million Afghan civilians.For more on how Biden administration policies are starving Afghanistan, see here and here.The John Stuart Mill essay that Prof. Chomsky refers to is 1859's "A Few Words on Non-Intervention."A helpful list of over 1000 books Prof. Chomsky has cited in his work can be found here.The previous Current Affairs interview with Noam Chomsky can be viewed here. 

Finance expert Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune magazine. She has served as economics commentator for the New Statesman and as a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Economic Justice. She is the author of two books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism, and editor of the book Futures of Socialism. Blakeley's writings argue that the finance sector has taken on an outsized role in the economy, with terrible results for working people. She shows how the profits of financiers have become more important than satisfying human needs, and analyzes the history of capitalism to expose the forces driving the increase in inequalities of wealth and power. In her latest book, she shows how the pandemic has worsened these tendencies. Importantly, Blakeley also provides solutions, showing what it would mean to "democratize the financial sector" and why we should be confident that it's possible. In this conversation, Blakeley explains for non-finance experts how the "financialization" of an economy works and why it causes crises. 

Prof. Aviva Chomsky teaches history and Latin American studies at Salem State University and has authored and edited numerous books including Central America’s Forgotten History, A History of the Cuban Revolution, and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.Her latest book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice tries to answer, in a clear and accessible way, the questions about what we ought to do to deal with the climate catastrophe. Prof. Chomsky takes the position that conversations about The Science often overlook important issues of justice, and the political and economic changes that will be necessary to prevent the worst suffering from climate change. She goes through proposed policy responses to the situation and shows what it will actually take to respond effectively and prevent the problem from spiraling out of control. Is Science Enough? is a useful primer for anyone who wants to go beyond the facts of IPCC reports and think seriously about the choices we now face. It's a book grounded in a desire to give people the practical knowledge they will need to take action. (It also answers the question of whether driving a Prius does anyone any good.) Edited by Tim Gray.

Jonathan Aldred is an economist at Cambridge University, but he is a fierce critic of the mainstream of his discipline. In his books The Skeptical Economist and License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us, Prof. Aldred argues that while economics poses as a value-free form of scientific inquiry, it contains many buried assumptions that have deeply pernicious implications. Aldred's books offer excellent, clearly-written explanations of what economics is and how many of its most popular concepts bias our thinking about the world and rationalize selfishness and amorality. 

Laurie Penny is a journalist and activist who has authored seven books including Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, and most recently Sexual Revolution : Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback. Penny has been a finalist for both the Orwell Prize and the National Magazine Award. In today's conversation, we discuss the "sexual revolution" of Penny's new book, which they call "an exercise in pointing out the obvious," namely that relations between the genders have changed rapidly over the past decade. Penny argues that from the MeToo movement to the decline in birthrates to the trans rights movement, we are seeing a wave of pushback to the dominance of traditional heterosexual masculinity. Women are demanding more of men, refusing to accept the inevitability of harassment and hierarchy, and Penny argues that this is an important fact in explaining the rise of the radical right, which is in part comprised of men who feel threatened by this loss of power. In our conversation, we talk about Penny's concept of "sexual neoliberalism," which they use to describe the way that sexual relations are treated as freely-made contracts, without any analysis of the underlying power dynamics. 

Eric Blanc's book Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics is about the remarkable 2018-2019 educators' strikes that began in red states. It shows how successful labor struggles can be waged even in the seemingly unlikeliest of places and is a useful case study of one of the most important fights of our time. In the time since these strikes, however, educators have struggled. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that fights over school funding were sidelined, as teachers had to fight just to keep their classrooms free of coronavirus, and try to keep up teaching in an impossible situation. With the pandemic's severity having subsided now, it may be the case that we once again start seeing the kind of labor activism among educators that we saw in 2018-19. Certainly, that is the case in Minneapolis, where public school teachers are currently in a major strike. Eric has written about this strike for the Nation magazine, and it forms the basis of our discussion in this episode. We talk about why the Minneapolis action is happening (and why it's happening in Minneapolis instead of another public school system), the history of educators' organizing, the possibility that what's going on in Minneapolis will spread, and the factors that determine whether striking educators will succeed or fail.