The Chatterbox

Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran joins Nick and Goldy to reveal how neoliberalism wasn’t just a misguided economic theory—it was a “quiet coup” that rewired our laws, courts, and institutions to elevate capital above democracy. Drawing from her new book The Quiet Coup, Professor Baradaran explains how this ideology became like the air we breathe: a pervasive worldview that shapes our politics, our markets, and even the way we understand ourselves. They explore how elite power captured the machinery of government, why the market has become a runaway algorithm fueling inequality, and what it will take to break free from an ideology so deeply embedded we mistake it for common sense.

Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the nation’s leading experts on banking law, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. She is the author of The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, The Color of Money, and How the Other Half Banks. Her research traces how financial policy, legal structures, and political power shape inequality in the United States.

Social Media:

@mehrsab.bsky.social

Mehrsabaradaran

@MehrsaBaradaran

Further reading: 

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

The Color of Money

How the Other Half Banks

Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com

Facebook: Pitchfork Economics Podcast

Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Threads: pitchforkeconomics

TikTok: @pitchfork_econ

YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics

LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer

Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

In lieu of a typical Tuesday episode this week, we are releasing the first episode of our new miniseries Chinese Prestige. Annual subscribers already have access, while everyone else can get the 8 episodes for a whopping $5 for two weeks only. Enjoy!

In this first episode of Chinese Prestige, Yidi, Danny, and Derek trace the origins of the Chinese Communist Party from the May Fourth Movement to the civil war with the Nationalists. They explore the party’s strategic shift from cities to the countryside, the role of land reform and mass mobilization, the impact of the Japanese invasion and World War II, and the rise of Mao Zedong. The episode follows the party through its victory in 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, early state-building, and China’s entry into the Korean War. The group concludes in 1953 with the launch of the first five-year plan and its push for rapid industrial development.

Theme music by Jake Aron, based on the song “The East is Red.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we're featuring three segments.

• Transcript
  • Peter Gelderloos
  • Gah Te Iracema
  • Mask Off-Maersk
• PDF (Unimposed)
  • Voices from Brazil
  • Mask Off-Maersk
• Zine (Imposed PDF)
  • Voices from Brazil
  • Mask Off-Maersk

First up, you'll hear from anarchist and author Peter Gelderloos speaking about his ongoing trip to Brazil as a member of Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution to listen to and network with indigenous, anarchist, autonomous, ecological and land reclamation projects in that country, coinciding with the COP30 UN climate conference.

• Article about Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution: https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2025/10/27/further-weavings-international/
• Article about Peters time so far in Brazil: https://inthesetimes.com/article/cop30-brazil-farce-not-failure-indigenous-territory-struggles
• Antimidia: https://antimidia.org/
• Its Revolution Or Death: https://sub.media/its-revolution-or-death-a-three-part-series-from-submedia-and-peter-gelderloos/

Then, we hear an interview with Gah Te Iracema of the Kaingang people from southern Brazil, speaking about their land reclamation, reforestation, their post-flood water distribution mutual aid in 2024 and other topics.

• ANMIGA: https://anmiga.org/en/home-english/
• Teia Dos Povos: https://teiadospovos.org/the-web-of-the-peoples/

Finally, Črna luknja from the November 2025 episode of B(A)D News spoke a Danish activist about the February 2025 Cut Ties With Genocide action camp in Copenhagen which included an action against Maersk, a Danish shipping and logistics company facilitating arms transfers from the US to Israel. You can hear the rest of this interview in the upcoming B(A)D News, Angry Voices from Around The World, episode 96 for November of 2025 from the A-Radio Network.

• Cut Ties With Genocide Action Camp: https://cuttheties.ukrudt.net/
• Mask Off Maersk: https://www.maskoffmaersk.com/
• B(A)D News: https://www.a-radio-network.org/bad-news-angry-voices-from-around-the-world/
• Crna Luknja: http://radiostudent.si/druzba/crna-luknja

Collective members of Prisoners for Palestine (PrisonersForPalestine.Org), a prisoner-led collective in Britain representing all those detained under charges related to Palestinian liberation, have entered their fourth week of their hunger strike as of the day of this podcast, with participation of Qesser, Amu, Heba, Jon, T, and Kamran. This week, the first of the Filton 24 trials began as well. From a press release of the collective's website:

While suffering physically due to the effects of the hunger-strike, the six prisoners currently taking part in the protest remain strong, defiant, and committed to winning their... demands:

1. An end to the censorship of letters and books, and freedom of expression.
2. Immediate bail.
3. The right to a fair trial.
4. The deproscription of Palestine Action.
5. The closure of all Elbit weapons factories in Britain.

We hope to conduct an interview soon with members of the Prisoners for Palestine on the proscription of Palestine Action, Elbit Systems, the conditions of confinement case and the hunger strikes.

. ... . ..

• Radiation Ruling The Nation (Protection) by Massive Attack v Mad Professor from No Protection off Wild Bunch Records

Paris Marx is joined by Ketan Joshi to discuss how hyperscale data centers are fueling the consumption of more oil and gas, what that means for climate targets, and the insidious relationship between the tech and fossil fuel industries.

Ketan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo working with climate and environmental groups.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Exclusive $45-off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/PARIS. Promo Code  PARIS

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Ketan has a page on his website sharing fascinating data sets.
• The International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook report was just released for this year.
• xAI was caught using enough illegal methane generators to power a city at a facility that powers Grok.
• Here is an in-depth look behind the scenes at the construction of the new data center from xAI, including the purchasing of a power plant just across the state line.
• Google's Chief of Investment loves Doug Burgum’s (Trump’s Secretary of the Interior) commitments to power AI growth with fossil fuels.
• Microsoft has been investing in nuclear energy.
• Learn more about the Enabled Emissions Campaign.
• Shout-out to the book Empire of AI by Karen Hao.

Support the show

Episode 93 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press). Battistoni joins BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Nafis Hasan to discuss how capitalism, as a logic of seemingly relentless commodification, has nevertheless failed to assign value to vital aspects of the nonhuman world, from natural agents in industry to environmental pollution, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. Along the way, the three consider the similarities between labor exploitation and ecological exploitation; the Green Revolution in agriculture; the romanticization of nature; the place of reproductive labor in ecofeminist thought; and the case for understanding capitalism as a "planet-making system." What would it mean, they ask, to live freely while valuing nature's gifts?

The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its director general and drawn threats of a defamation lawsuit from the White House. Yet many at the corporation point to the dossier’s culture war slant as evidence of a right-wing plot against the BBC. Defensive and stolid, Britain’s main news and media organisation now flinches from any real conflict. Is the BBC capable of surviving in the digital era? Joining James is the former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall, now a prominent face of digital political journalism as part of the News Agents, and Dan Hind, publisher and author of The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform.

Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠

More from the LRB

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I’m joined by Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020), to discuss the incredibly important but often-overlooked role of international shipping and logistics in the capitalist-imperialist world system. We discuss how the global shipping industry relates to everything from transnational labor exploitation to environmental devastation to the genocide in Palestine, as well as the power of organized labor in this crucial industry to bring the capitalist system to a grinding halt.

About the show:

Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.

Support Return to Bandung:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! If you’re able, please also consider supporting my work—which encompasses both my writing and this podcast, as well as various other political education projects by signing up as a paid subscriber to my Substack or making a one-off contribution:

• Become a paid Substack subscriber

• Buy Me a Coffee

Sources and helpful links:

• Laleh Khalili — Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020)

• Deborah Cohen — The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

• Johan Mathew — Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016)

• Jatin Dua — Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019)

• Laleh Khalili — The Suez Canal Is a Lifeline for Global Capitalism (interview with Jacobin, March 2021)

• Peter Cole — Building Worker Power on the Docks (interview with Jacobin, December 2019)

• Ashok Kumar — How Yemen’s Houthis Brought Maritime Capitalism to a Halt (Jacobin, May 2025)

• Laura Montanari — We Said “We Will Block Everything” and We Did: Inside Italy’s Strike for Gaza (Truthout, September 2025)

• Peter Cole — Dockworker strikes in solidarity with Gaza have a long legacy (Waging Nonviolence, October 2025)

• Katie Fox-Hodess — Global Solidarity on the Docks (New Labor Forum, January 2022)

• Mask off Maersk campaign website

• Photograph of Walter Rodney

• Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972)

Social links:

Return to Bandung:

• Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/returntobandung⁠

• Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/returntobandung/⁠

Pranay Somayajula:

• Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/p_somayajula⁠

• Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/pranay.somayajula/⁠

• Website: ⁠https://www.pranaysomayajula.com/⁠

• Substack: ⁠https://www.culture-shock.xyz/⁠

Laleh Khalili:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/LalehKhalili

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Sven Beckert about a global history of capitalism. They discuss how capitalism has always been global, positive and negative aspects of capitalism, origins and trading from a distance, capitalism within the state and in the countryside, slavery, working class, wealth and income inequality, capitalism in the 21st century, and many more topics.

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. His research and teaching center on the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and global dimensions. He is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University , co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) and co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World.” His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Humboldt Foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, among others. He is the author of the latest book, Capitalism: A Global History.

Randy: “We’re supposed to believe the central bank manages inflation by using interest rates?" 

Steve: “It’s ridiculous.” 

L. Randall Wray, one of the original MMT economists, recently wrote a paper with Yeva Nersisyan entitled, No, the Fed is NOT Independent – It is a Creature of Congress.  Steve invited Randy for a conversation about how the Federal Reserve is, and always has been, a "creature of Congress," and its supposed independence is a smokescreen that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

The Fed has a dual mandate of full employment and price stability, yet it consistently prioritizes the stability of Wall Street over the well-being of Main Street, bailing out banks while leaving workers to face the fallout of manufactured recessions. 

Randy describes how raising interest rates – the Fed’s so-called tool – works to suppress wages by slowing the economy and killing job growth. Federal Reserve transcripts explicitly state that they fear “wage inflation” but see “profit inflation” as desirable.

Randy wants Congress to take control of the central bank. (Some of us don’t see Congress as independent either.) But whatever our belief in the role of the state and who it serves, the episode contains valuable information on central bank operations, how interest rate hikes discipline labor, the truth about “fighting” inflation, and the difference between monetary and fiscal policy. We need to understand the mechanics of power if we’re going to build the future we deserve.

L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and Emeritus Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his newest book on the topic is Understanding Modern Money Theory: Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar, 2025).

On today’s show host Allen Ruff speaks with brian bean about their timely new book, Their End is our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition. As police forces act with impunity against civilians and immigrants, bean’s book is an argument for getting rid of the institution of police and replacing it with community-focused services.

bean argues that the police can’t be reformed because they are a violent institution that serves the class interests of the elite. bean wants people to understand the connection between the police and the system of capitalism. They describe how crime is both defined and enforced based on elite interests. For instance, world-threatening pollution, internment camps, and war are legal, whereas vagrancy and informal economies are considered illegal. 

Finding better, more effective, and safe solutions to social problems will help us arrive at a more just world in which democracy and equality are valued, says bean. They envision a classless, stateless society, where people have democratic control over their lives instead of society’s resources going to a few.

bean will give a reading at A Room of One’s Own on Tuesday, November 18.

brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. They coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and wrote Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, both from Haymarket Books.

Featured image of brian bean’s book, Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition by Haymarket Books.

The post How the Police Uphold Capitalism appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.