Current Affairs

Dean Preston represents District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A tenants' rights attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he was the first democratic socialist elected to the board in 40 years. Recently, a campaign by a group called the "YIMBYs" has accused Preston of denying housing to thousands of people. In this episode, we talk about why San Francisco has a housing crisis and how to solve it. We also talk about how pro-developer groups produce propaganda that portrays affordable housing activists as "opposed to affordable housing." Dean responds to the YIMBY charges and shows how corporate disinformation against socialists works. We discuss:- Why rent control is actually a very good thing - How the hypocrisy of San Francisco rich people has driven inequality spiraling out of control in the city- How the "YIMBY movement" paints anyone who opposes developers' interests as an anti-housing "NIMBY"- The things cities need to actually be affordable - How elected officials can use their positions to exact concessions from developers (and why this shouldn't be considered "opposing the development of housing")- How disinformation campaigns try to massage the facts to manipulate voters (and why voters are often too smart to be fooled) Nathan's article on YIMBYism is here. '

Aziz Huq is an expert in constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. He is the author of the book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, available from Oxford University Press. Prof. Huq's book focuses on the fact that constitutional rights are meaningless unless there are remedies for violations of those rights, and that while we ostensibly have the same rights as always, courts have steadily eroded our ability to get anything if the government chooses to violate our rights. We discuss:- Why cops get away with brutality and lying- How the US court system is not set up to protect people's rights, but we still did have some once- How the right-wing turn of the courts has meant strong protections for corporate rights and few protections for personal rights against state violence - How we can perhaps one day have some rights that are more than just words on a piece of paper Our "cynical know-your-rights poster," mentioned in the episode, is here. 

Today's guest is Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University. Prof. Loury has had a distinguished career—he was the youngest-ever tenured Black economics professor at Harvard and is known for coining the term "social capital." Prof. Loury is generally associated with political conservatism, but his books The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values actually offer a rebuke to conservative "color blindness" rhetoric and sketch precise explanations for why contemporary racial inequality can only be understood in the context of historical racism. In this interview, Nathan tries to get at some of the seeming contradictions between Prof. Loury's written work on systemic racial inequality and his public statements heavily emphasizing the role of "culture." It is a contentious and challenging conversation. The Anatomy of Racial Inequality was recently reissued with a new preface. Prof. Loury's 2012 lecture "Race, Incarceration, and American Values," can be found here. 

Today's guest is Stephen Bright, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the United States. Prof. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and Georgetown Law, but has spent most of his life working as an advocate for poor people accused of serious crimes. During his decades in charge of the Southern Center For Human Rights, he argued multiple times in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and represented defendants some of the most difficult death penalty cases. Today we discuss the status of the right to a lawyer in the United States. Constitutionally, everyone is guaranteed an adequate defense, but in practice, the amount of representation one gets is based on the amount of money one can spend, and public defenders offices vary wildly across the country. Nobody is better familiar with the situation than Prof. Bright, whose writings include:Counsel for the Poor: The Death Penalty Not for the Worst Crime But for the Worst Lawyer (1994)Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance After Gideon v. Wainwright (2013) (w/ Sia Sanneh)Prof. Bright has produced an entire 40-part online course on issues of race and class as they apply to capital punishment, which is available for free on YouTube:Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and DisadvantageMore of his work defending capital cases can be seen in the 2005 documentary film Fighting For Life In The Death Belt, which can be viewed free online. His lecture to Stanford law students on the ethical responsibilities of lawyers can be viewed here. 

In this, the second part of our look into the realities of abortion in the contemporary United States, Nathan talks to Prof. Diana Greene Foster, Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) collaborative research group at UC-San Francisco. Prof. Foster is the author of the new book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having―or Being Denied―an Abortion. The book is based on a remarkable study that followed a thousand women over a decade, some of whom had abortions and some of whom were denied abortions. The study compared life outcomes for the two groups and found that not only does having an abortion not cause lasting regret or harm, but not having a desired abortion creates a host of negative life outcomes. We also discuss: - How those who are denied abortions accurately predict the negative life consequences they will face from the denial - Why access to contraception is still a long way from being universal - How the need to quickly gather enough money to pay for a procedure can mean the difference between having an abortion and not having one - Why, regardless of debates over the moral status of the fetus, we need to acknowledge that allowing people choice objectively makes them better off

Carol Joffe is one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in the United States. A professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, she has been studying and writing about the battle over abortion rights for decades and received lifetime achievement awards from the Abortion Care Network and the Society of Family Planning. She is the co-author of the book Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion In America, and joined Nathan to discuss the various ways that the anti-abortion movement has already succeeded in creating obstacles to having abortions, as well as: - What a post-Roe America will actually look like: why it may not be quite as bleak as the pre-Roe era thanks to abortion pills, but will be worse if criminal punishments are widely deployed - The sneaky tactics that anti-abortion campaigners often use, including placing fake clinics next to real ones - Why the volunteer actions of ordinary people are essential to ensuring the protection of the right to choose Edited by Tim Gray

Andrew Cockburn is a veteran journalist who serves as the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine. His new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, available from Verso collects his reporting on the military-industrial complex and the way the public coffers are looted by profiteers. He joined Nathan to discuss why he thinks the ever-bloating military has become an out-of-control "virus," as well as: - The bureaucratic waste that means the US military isn't even good at defense - Why profit, rather than war, is what the military is built for - The defense companies that depend on constantly manufacturing new threats, which conveniently pop up just when it looks like the military budget might be scaled back - Why the new stories about Chinese hypersonic missiles are exactly this kind of self-interested threat inflation - The alarming situation with nuclear weapons, which are far too close to being used for anyone's comfort - Why defense spending isn't even a good way to "create jobs" - Why progressives should not just focus on critiquing "militarism" and disastrous wars but on scaling back the giant institution that channels so many of our social resources into manufacturing "weapons that don't work for threats that don't exist"

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. She joined Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson to discuss changing religious practices in the United States. Traditional organized religion has been on the decline for years, as more and more young people are identifying as nonreligious. But are we really? Tara's book looks at the way that new communities and spiritual practices, from SoulCycle to astrology to online political communities, have arisen in the place of churches. We discuss: - To what extent these are identities versus beliefs - What a "religion" is and whether the term should apply to these other kinds of beliefs and practices - How charlatans sell people the promise of spiritual fulfillment - The pluses and minuses of having "bespoke" religions for everyone. On the one hand, everyone gets the faith that suits them best. On the other, we may lose our sense of belonging in the broader human community Edited by Tim Gray Nathan's audio is absolutely horrible for reasons unknown. Many apologies for this. Figuring out the problem so it can be fixed in future.

Today Nathan is joined by Oxford University philosophy professor Henry Shue, author of Climate Justice and most recently The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now. Prof. Shue's new book is about the moral obligations conferred on people by the historical circumstances they find themselves in. The actions of living people have huge consequences for those born to subsequent generations. What responsibilities do we have to those who come after us? We discuss: - The important questions of justice that need to be central to the climate discussion - Why people living in the future are just as morally important as people living now - What elementary principles of moral philosophy can tell us about the political action we need to take on climate - Why individual lifestyle choices are insufficient to fulfill our moral responsibilities - What those countries most responsible for the climate crisis owe to those who will suffer the most from it Edited by Tim Gray

Ross Barkan, author of The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York, joins Nathan to discuss the career of the infamous ex-New York governor. We talk about: - How an un-charismatic and unpleasant bully made his inspiring journey from humble beginnings as the son of the governor of New York to become the governor of New York - How Cuomo managed to keep a blue state from actually passing progressive legislation - How his Machiavellian ruthlessness, and New York's broken election system, kept him in power for so long - How the media allows politicians like Cuomo to portray themselves as heroes when their actual policies are disastrous Ross' book is an important document of the lies and manipulation of one of our time's shadiest state leaders. It offers an important case study in how centrists govern and the kind of politics we need to overthrow. Edited by Tim Gray