The Progressive

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• Episode graphic: Ben Fletcher in 1918, enhanced by WCH. Courtesy US National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons.
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• Edited by Louise Barry

EPISODE: The Country is Not for Sale-Economic Development & Employment Zones (ZEDEs) versus National Sovereignty

GUESTS: Beth Geglia, anthropology PhD, and Melinda St. Louis, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch

BACKGROUND:

On May 3, Democratic U.S. lawmakers urged the U.S. Trade Representative and State Department to eliminate investor-state dispute settlement provisions from current and future trade deals and to intervene on behalf of Honduras against a U.S. company's nearly $11 billion claim against the country.

In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Trade Representative Katherine Tai, 33 lawmakers said that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems in trade deals constitute a "problematic corporate handout" that violates countries' sovereignty and democratic rights.

ISDS mechanisms enable multinational corporations to sue the governments of foreign trading partners for profits they claim have been forfeited as a result of domestic policies designed to protect workers, consumers, and ecosystems. Such lawsuits challenge meaningful labor, product safety, and environmental standards, and the mere threat of them can even preempt the enactment of robust regulations, placing ISDS at the heart of what critics have called neoliberal globalization's "race to the bottom."

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

Senator Warren, Representative Doggett Call for Elimination of Investor-State Dispute Settlement System, Action on Behalf of Honduran Government

Warren Leads Call to End Dispute System “Weaponized” by Corporations Amid Honduras Case

Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR)

Honduras Solidarity Network

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)

 Latin America Working Group (LAWG)

Public Citizen/Global Trade Watch

OUR BROADCAST PARTNERS:

WTF is Going on in Latin America & the Caribbean is a Popular Resistance broadcast in partnership with Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team, CODEPINK, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, InterReligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action and Task Force on the Americas.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, between the 16th and 18th centuries, Europe was dominated by an economic way of thinking called mercantilism. The key idea was that exports should be as high as possible and imports minimised.

For more than 300 years, almost every ruler and political thinker was a mercantilist. Eventually, economists including Adam Smith, in his ground-breaking work of 1776 The Wealth of Nations, declared that mercantilism was a flawed concept and it became discredited. However, a mercantilist economic approach can still be found in modern times and today’s politicians sometimes still use rhetoric related to mercantilism.

With

D’Maris Coffman

and

Helen Paul, Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton.

Producer Luke Mulhall

Subscribe to the Belabored RSS feed here. Support the podcast on Patreon. Subscribe and rate on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Tweet at @DissentMag with #Belabored to share your thoughts, or join the conversation on Facebook. Check out the full archive here. Belabored is produced by Casey Stone.

The wave of unionization continues apace across the United States and elsewhere in the world, but there’s often much less attention paid to the part of the process that comes after the winning of a union election: the bargaining of a contract. It can seem like the hard part is over when the votes are counted, but our guest this week reminds us that the hard part is just beginning. If that sounds daunting, well, Jane McAlevey is here to share her knowledge of how to make that hard part, if not easier, at least to help you succeed. McAlevey is a longtime organizer and organizing theorist,  the founder of the massively popular online trainings, Organizing for Power, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and the author and co-author of several books and many reports and articles on the art of worker organizing. Her newest book, with Abby Lawlor, is titled Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, and she joins us to talk about using big, open, democratic bargaining tactics to win major gains at the table and in the contract. 

We also check in with Donna Murch of Rutgers AAUP-AFT on the multi-union, 9,000-worker strike at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and hear from Katie Wells on a new report on the conditions of Doordash drivers. And we hear about the firing of a union leader (and former Belabored guest) at Planned Parenthood North Central States, and the junior doctors and nurses’ strikes fighting to save the British National Health Service.

Thank you for listening to our 264th episode! If you like the show, you can support us on Patreon with a monthly contribution, at the level that best suits you.

If you’re interested in advertising on the show, please email [email protected]. And as always, if you have any questions, comments, or tips, email us at [email protected].

This season of Belabored is supported in part by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

News

Daniel Han, ‘Pissed off’: Rutgers unions mull resuming strike amid mounting frustration over finalizing contract, Politico

Noah Lanard, Why Rutgers Faculty Are Striking for the First Time in 257 Years, Mother Jones

Sarah, “Injury to All” at Rutgers University, Dissent

Katie Wells and Isabella Stratta, The Instant Delivery Workplace in D.C., Beeck Center

Michelle, Transcript: Courier Class War, with Antonio Solis, Dissent

Anne Rumberger, Abortion Rights Are Workers’ Rights, Jacobin  

Sarah and Michelle, Belabored: Game Workers Unite and Win, with Emma Kinema, Dissent

Sarah and Michelle, Belabored: Reproductive Justice Is Labor Justice, Dissent

Dan Zahedi, Junior Doctors Will Fight as Long as It Takes, Tribune

George Walker, Nurses Tell of Disappointment With Latest NHS Pay Offer, Novara

Aubrey Allegretti, Denis Campbell, Kiran Stacey, and Jamie Grierson, Nurses will strike again in England after voting to reject government pay deal, Guardian

Conversation

Jane McAlevey

Organizing for Power

Jane McAlevey, Getting to Contract: Negotiating and Winning Against the Odds, The Nation

Sarah, After a Union Election Victory Comes the Hard Part, The Progressive

The post Belabored: How to Bargain for Power, with Jane McAlevey appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

It's Hump Day! Emma hosts Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, associate professor of sociology at University College London (UCL), to discuss his recent book Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Then, Emma is joined by economist Nathan Tankus, proprietor of the Notes on the Crises newsletter, to discuss recent developments at the Federal Reserve and Silicon Valley Bank. First, Emma runs through updates on an impending recession, Memphis reinstating Justin Pearson to the Tennessee Statehouse, the identity of the Louisville shooter, Dianne Feinstein’s retirement, the drying of the Colorado River, and Alvin Bragg’s response to the attacks on him from the right, before diving into the recent letter from Rashida Tlaib and other progressive congressional members calling for the release of Julian Assange. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou then dives right into defining “speculative communities,” as a community defined and united by its uncertain future, resigned to collective contemplation and anxiety with no solid structural support, before stepping back to explore “speculation” as a deterministic economic concept – an individual taking an unwanted risk for future gains – versus looking at it from a community perspective, as an open-ended engagement with our uncertain futures. This brings Professor Komporozos-Athanasiou to the topic of “political speculation,” which he defines as the weaponization of instability to capitalize on the confusion and anxiety it creates, as seen in the rise of right-wing populism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Wrapping up, he and Emma tackle the role of enclosure in cutting off other community outlets for anxiety and structures for stability. Nathan Tankus and Emma then walk through what’s wrong with the Federal Reserve, from the absurdity of putting one agency in charge of the economy, to its obvious obsession with one side of its dual mandate. They conclude the interview by addressing the Fed’s response to the recent Silicon Valley bank run, and why the legislative deregulation of banking encourages administrative inaction.

And in the Fun Half: Hua from Raleigh dives into the role of gentrification in community displacement, Emma addresses yesterday’s Twitter drama, and the failures of popularism (especially in an electoral sense). Mitch from Glendale discusses Marianne Williamson’s candidacy, Emma and Bradley tackle the disappearance of Dianne Feinstein, watch Tucker Carlson quiver at the feet of his forgiving lord (Donald Trump), Elon Musk argues that he HAD to fire most of Twitter’s staff in order to waste money losing advertisers, and Jordan Peterson’s guest offers some of the most disgusting anti-trans arguments yet, plus, your calls and IMs!

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We take the existence of the all-powerful stock market for granted, but we should engage with it because it affects us as individuals and wider society in very deep ways.

Philip Roscoe's new book 'How to Build a Stock Exchange' enables us to do this. In the episode, he speaks to Jess Miles about this darkly comedic secret world, prompting us to demand better.

Find out more about the book: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/how-to-build-a-stock-exchange

Intro music: Cold by yoitrax | @yoitrax

Music promoted by www.free-stock-music.com

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm joined by Zambian Economist Grieve Chelwa for a wide-ranging discussion on the IMF's one-size fits all approach to countries, and the complicity of so-called civil society in furthering the agenda of Western-dominated multilateral institutions. We also discuss the iterative process of industrialization in the post-independence era, the colonial origins of mainstream economics, and the emerging multipolar world which provides opportunities and alternatives for developing countries like Zambia and Sri Lanka. Grieve is the Director of Research at the Institute of Race, Power & Political Economy at The New School, New York.

Music:

Intro: Walakulin Basa by Sunil Santha

Outro: Tiyende Pamodzi by Kenneth Kaunda

What does the big libertarian idea of "zones of exception" mean for the nation state? Award-winning author and professor of history Quinn Slobodian joins contributing editor Tom Clark to discuss his new book Crack-up Capitalism, Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

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We continue our conversation with Professer Thomas Uebel to the show to talk all about Otto Neurath and his impact on economic theory, the socialist calculation debate, and socialist planning.

Planning Book Website:

https://theclasslesssocietyinmotion.com/

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/FromAlpha2Omega