Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Why is health care in the United States so expensive? Why does the United States find it so difficult to provide quality, affordable health care to most of its citizens? What is the relationship among the government, doctors, and insurance companies? Christy Chapin explains how insurance companies became so central to the provision of health care in the United States.

Direct download: ChristyChapin.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 10:29pm EDT

The recent years since the 2008 recession have seen a growth of protest movements. Sarah Jaffe’s book, Necessary Trouble, describes how people have been fighting back against bank bailouts, budget cuts, police brutality, and much more. Today, we reflect on this recent history of capitalism and what it might indicate about the future.

Sarah Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, the Week, the American Prospect, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as an editorial board member at Dissent and a columnist at New Labor Forum. Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt is her first book.

Direct download: Sarah_Jaffe_on_Social_Movements.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 4:22pm EDT

LaShawn Harris discusses how black women in the early twentieth century engaged in the informal economy - performing work that wasn't entirely legal - to get by and get ahead.

Direct download: LaShawnHarris.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am EDT

Who owns the U.S. public debt? Why is it such an important commodity in global capitalism? Why does public debt provoke such intense political debate? And how can the quantitative data on the ownership structure of public debt provide insights into these topics? Our guest today, Sandy Hager reveals answers to all of these questions and more.

Sandy Brian Hager is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He is author of Public Debt, Inequality, and Power: The Making of a Modern Debt State.

Direct download: Sandy_Hager_on_Public_Debt_and_Inequality.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 11:20am EDT

Direct download: Amsterdam.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 9:39pm EDT

Neoliberalism. It is a vexing term, especially for many in the United States. But it means to call attention to the policies that emphasized so-called free markets as well as the increased market regulation of society since the 1970s. Few texts have been as important for popularizing the analysis of the politics and economics of neoliberalism as David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Published a little more than decade ago, we decided to speak with him about his important book and his reflections about the past decade’s political economy, and what has changed and what has not since the great recession.

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and the Director of Research at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

Direct download: David_Harvey_on_a_Brief_History_of_Neoliberalism.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 5:04pm EDT

The history of nursing is inextricable from the history of capitalism and imperialism. Our guest today, Sujani Reddy, helps us understand the history of nursing through the lives and experiences nurses who migrated to the U.S. from India, and what this reveals about gender, religion, and corporate philanthropy.

 

Sujani Reddy is Associate Professor of American Studies at SUNY Old Westbury. She is author of Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States.

Direct download: Sujani_Reddy_Nursing_and_Empire.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 4:21pm EDT

Historian Sherene Seikaly uncovered a group of elite Palestinian men in 1930s and 1940s who articulated a national economic vision for Palestine before the founding of Israel. Listen to learn more about how debates about Palestinian independence from British rule hinged on pan-Arab ideas about class, trade, and profit during these decades in a story that moves beyond our contemporary understanding of Israel and Palestine.

Direct download: SeikalyFinal.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 11:10pm EDT

Few social justice struggles have captivated recent political history like the broad Black Lives Matter movement. From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to campaign rally interruptions of leading politicians, we have seen people speak up in outrage about injustices of policing, racist violence, wealth inequality and much more. What does this cycle of struggle have to do with the history of capitalism?

In addition to these questions, our guest today, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, asks "Can the conditions created by institutional racism be transformed within the existing capitalist order?”.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, was recently published by Haymarket Books.

Direct download: Keeanga-Yamahtta_Taylor_on_Black_Lives_Matter_and_Black_Liberation.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 1:18pm EDT

We've been hearing a lot about economist John Maynard Keynes' midcentury economic plans for the U.S. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Are the measures that Keynes and FDR took to combat the Depression in 2008 relevant to the present? What is the difference between fiscal and monetary policy, and how might changing our national approach to the monetary supply help our economic circumstances? Listen to find out!

Direct download: Rauchway.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00pm EDT

What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance—that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated—took hold in this era.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at BMCC CUNY. Her book Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s was recently published by Oxford University Press. You can read more about her work here.

Direct download: 18_Episode_Leigh_Claire_La_Berge.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 5:04pm EDT

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