The Progressive

Sam and Emma host writer and filmmaker Rupert Russell to discuss his recent book Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World, on how the profits in Wall Street come from placing bets on the products most central to our society’s functioning. First, Rupert situates his studies over the past decade, originating with his work on the Arab Spring and studying the cascade of revolution in the wake of one of the biggest spikes in food prices, with millions becoming highly at risk for starvation worldwide at the start of the 2010s. Then, he, Emma, and Sam look to Friedmanomics to explain why we look at pricing the way we do, and dive into the role that finance plays between the seller and buyer binary, bringing in futures trading originally to provide a sense of stability and speculation for necessary production (e.g. food), before Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers came along under Clinton and worked aggressively to cover up the potential risks that had been growing behind the scenes as the math became more and more complicated. This drastically shifts the stage moving into the 2000s, as the finance world moves fully into Quantity Index Funds and derivatives, and cements themselves as the central player in setting future prices, ultimately pushing the profits away from the actual production and selling of commodities, and to the storage of such items with the knowledge of future price booms, thus pushing the prices of important goods higher and higher. Next, Sam, Rupert, and Emma move into how this was set up to compound with the Financial Crisis in 2007, as financiers had to move into a new asset class, looking to commodities in the wake of the collapse of the housing market, and taking the pre-existing price boom to an entirely new level. This, then, brings us back to the Arab Spring, as the broken food pricing wrought horror on the Authoritarian bargains set up by countless regimes in the Middle East, effectively meaning the only regimes that could provide for their people were those bolstered by massive oil reserves, like Saudi Arabia and Libya, setting the stage for the countless crisis of the decade, from ISIS’s rise to the Refugee Crisis to the boom of authoritarian populism. They wrap up the interview by looking at the lessons from the commodity de-stabilization of the 2010s, particularly around oil and drugs, and how we need to genuinely set up new systems that are funded by the banking world, without letting free reign for manipulation of those systems. Sam and Emma also touch on Biden’s frozen aid to Afghanistan, and the moderate position of refusing to support Afghani people.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma cover Lindsay Graham’s desire for drama, Seth from Portland explores electoralism and the two-party system, Emma walks through her Super Bowl experience, and Andrew Yang absolutely TEARS Democrats a new one for having the exact same goals on healthcare as he does (no public option, we will give you nothing). Candace Owens feels a wedge driven between her and her anti-Black fanbase after she enjoyed the halftime show, and then we get calls from John from San Antonio and Kenny from Berkeley. "Bret Weinstein" takes aim at Sam’s disrespect of THE Joe Rogan Experience, and explores the importance of his philosophical bro-downs, just like Thomas Jefferson’s before him, and Jesus’s before that. Hunter from Hampton Roads discusses challenging Rep. Bobby Scott for District 3 in VA, plus, your calls and IMs!

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The conventional narrative of American space exploration traces government efforts during the Cold War, with today's private efforts regarded as a recent phenomena riding on the coattails of NASA's achievements. But today's guest argues that private funding for space exploration goes back more than a century before Apollo. To get a better context for what's happening in space today, I've brought on Alex MacDonald.

Alex is the Chief Economist at NASA and author of "The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War."

In this episode of “Keen On”, Andrew is joined by William Dalrymple, the author of “The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire”.

William Dalrymple is the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world, including Return of a King, which won the Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, PEN Hessell-Tiltman, and Duff Cooper Prizes. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian and is one of the founders and a codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

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In this episode:

This dialogue transitions from establishing shared understandings of inequality to evaluating the ascent of finance in contemporary life. Specifically, the role that assets and debts play in shaping the contours of who is at risk of experiencing inequality. We ask what is new about contemporary inequality and what has changed in the configuration of the economy itself to worsen inequality. To answer these questions the discussion shifts from the domestic national economies to global finance and interrogates the ways in which global financial markets connect to everyday life.  We talk to the authors of the book “The Asset Economy,” and learn income levels are just one among many significant factors, like family wealth or inherited wealth, plus age, race, gender, and where you live.  These are the key elements that configure intergroup inequality.

About the series:

This three-part series of dialogues is led by Dr. Johnna Montgomerie, Professor of International Political Economy, at Kings College London.  In this virtual symposium, we’ve called on experts from the politics of inequality working group at King's College, London, and sought out our colleagues at other universities to share their ideas, research, and proposals to help explain what it means to call inequality issue of our time. We wanted to examine who was unequal, what causes inequality and why it's an urgent area of study.

Key Contributors 

We’re an interdisciplinary team across King’s College London (@KCL), University of Sydney (@Sydney_Uni), London School of Economics (@LSEInequalities) and Progressive Economics Forum (@PEF_online).

Kings College London:

Progressive Economy Forum:

London School of Economics:

University of Sydney:

Key Texts: 

Sam and Emma host David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, to discuss the recent issue of the magazine, entitled "How We Broke the Supply Chain", walking through how the policies of the last forty years, from globalization and monopolization to financialization and deregulation, served to create a fragile supply line that maximizes profits while minimizing production. To begin, David, Sam, and Emma look at the actual structure of the supply chain, emphasizing its rejection of inventory and surplus in favor of just-in-time logistics, with China largely acting as the repository both for necessary components and finished goods, thus meaning any crisis in Chinese production results in a disruption of the entire chain, regardless of what kind of crisis it actually is (pandemic, extreme weather, etc). They then look to how monopolies on shipping have created forced bottlenecks, from providing shipping corporations a decade of profits in one year of the pandemic, to minimizing costs to the point that 40% of ocean imports come in through one US port, and giving mass retailers (Amazon, Walmart, etc) first say in shipping, all of which serve to undermine the capacity of the supply chain while boosting the profits of the corporations that run it. They wrap up by looking at the context of this problem within the last few decades, from Obama’s White House disseminating a 2015 report that a complete supply chain breakdown was imminent, to the central domestic changes that would be needed to give the US any sort of backup plan, before briefly touching on the California Single Payer bill falling through the cracks. Sam and Emma also reveal the newest upcoming live show, and walk through updates on replacing Justice Breyer’s SCOTUS seat.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma are joined by Nomiki as they cover Jen Psaki’s response to Bad Faith talking points as if anyone cares, rather than actually taking on the issue the right is dancing around (very Democrat of her), Joe Rogan’s continued pushback on the concept of misinformation, and why the fight for the right to life cannot just be fought by the oppressed. They also touch on the backlash to Amnesty International’s recognition of Israel’s apartheid state, plus, your IMs!

Purchase tickets for the live show in Boston on May 15th HERE:

https://thewilbur.com/artist/majority-report/

Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join

Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here:  https://madmimi.com/signups/170390/join

Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/

Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/

Support the St. Vincent Nurses today! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/

Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning

Subscribe to Matt’s other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/literaryhangover

Check out The Nomiki Show on YouTube. https://www.patreon.com/thenomikishow

Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder

Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse

Check out The Letterhack’s upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles

Check out Jamie’s podcast, The Antifada. https://www.patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at https://www.twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!)

Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/

Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein’s podcast News from Nowhere. https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere 

Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter:

@SamSeder

@EmmaVigeland

@MattBinder

@MattLech

@BF1nn

@BradKAlsop

The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

In this episode, we talk about subjects including meaningless jobs, precarity, the anxiety that results from self-branding, and how to overcome futility. Our guest is Neil Vallelly, a political and social theorist, and author of the recently-published book, Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness.

This week, Grace talks to Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, associate professor of sociology at UCL, about his book Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialised World. They talk about the formation of a new kind of subject – homo speculans – and how mutual cooperation in the context of the deep and pervasive uncertainty that characterises life under financial capitalism is building new communities and new forms of resistance to financialisation.

Find information about Aris's LRB event with Grace on January 17 here: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events

You can support our work on the show by becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/aworldtowinpod. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.