Christopher Marquis is Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the Judge Business School of The University of Cambridge.
He and his co-author, Kunyaun Qiao, have written the book, MAO AND MARKETS: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise, published by Yale University Press. It explores the seeming contradiction of capitalism under Chinese Communist Party rule. Part history, part economics, it uses the tools of academic data analysis to assess how China’s economic success is being shaped by the ideology and philosophy of Chairman Mao Zedong.
Professor Marquis’s interest in China began while he was in high school, when he did an independent research project on the role of Confucianism in contemporary China. He first traveled there in 1996, and he has marveled at the speed with which the mudflats across the Huangpu River from Shanghai’s waterfront became the city of Pudong, the financial capital of China, where three of the tallest buildings in the world now stand encircled by 20 miles of high rises. He spoke with entrepreneurs from many regions of China and brings their very human stories to his narrative.
His earlier book, BETTER BUSINESS: HOW THE B CORP MOVEMENT IS REMAKING CAPITALISM, focused on the ways companies can effectively shift from a shareholder to stake holder orientation.
We spoke with Christopher Marquis on November 21, 2022.
After learning of President Xi’s early life experiences – his being “sent down” from Beijing to manual labor in a remote, rural area for 7 years after the purging and arrest of his father, Xi Zhongxun, during the Cultural Revolution, made me think of his contemporary, Ai Weiwei, and his early life experiences. Born in 1957 in Beijing, he was exiled in 1958 when his father, poet Ai Qing, was accused of “rightism”. How differently the two men influence the world today. One, a ruthless authoritarian consolidating close to absolute control over the lives of 1.4 billion people, and the other undaunted, despite brutal state repression, in his artistic expression of beauty, creativity and human rights.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio with excerpts from an interview with Ai Weiwei from Oct. 9, 2017 on Democracy Now! You can link to the full interview here: World-Renowned Artist Ai Weiwei on His Childhood in a Labor Camp, Art, Activism, Prison & Freedomhttps://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/9/world_renowned_artist_ai_weiwei_on
This Forthright Radio is devoted to digesting the results of the 2022 mid-term elections. Days after the election, there are still many crucial races that are too close to call, and it is too early to know which parties will control either chamber of congress. However the predicted Red Wave – or what some were projecting as a Red Tsunami – has not occurred. So, we were delighted to welcome back two distinguished guests, David Daley and Paul Pierson.
Dave Daley was our guest in June of 2020, when his book, UNRIGGED: HOW AMERICANS ARE BATTLING BACK TO SAVE DEMOCRACY, came out. His earlier book, RATF**KED: THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE SECRET PLAN TO STEAL AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY, did much to educate us about the nationally organized, anti-democracy efforts to seize political control from the majority of voters via gerrymandering, and what citizens across the country are doing to wrestle majoritarian democracy back. His articles appear in many outlets, including The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, among others.
Paul Pierson was our guest in July of 2020, when his book, co-written with Jacob Hacker, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a Political Science Professor at Yale University, LET THEM EAT TWEETS: HOW THE RIGHT RULES IN AN AGE OF EXTREME INEQUALITY, came out. Paul is is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at U. C. Berkeley. They have many earlier books, including, WINNER-TAKE-ALL-POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class; and Off Center: The Republican Revolution and The Erosion of American Democracy.
Award winning author and journalist, Adam Hochschild, is the author of eleven books. He returned to Forthright Radio to discuss his latest book, AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, published by Mariner Books.
While a college student in the early 1960s, Adam Hochschild worked on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa, and he was also a civil rights worker in Mississippi. He was a writer and editor for Ramparts magazine, and a co-founder of Mother Jones. He has been a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism for many years. In 2014, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In our earlier interviews, he discussed his books, BURY THE CHAINS: PROPHETS AND REBELS IN THE FIGHT TO FREE AN EMPIRE’S SLAVES, and KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA.
Military Intelligence Chief for NYC and virulent anti-immigrant proponent, John B. Trevor’s, “ethnic battle map” of upper Manhattan. Red for Jews, brown for Italians, grey for Blacks, blue for Irish. Circles are meeting halls. Stars are publication offices.
We spoke with him via telephone from his home in the Bay Area on October 25, 2022.
On September 18, 1947, the National Security Act, a major restructuring of the US Military and intelligence agencies went into effect. It created The National Security Council and The Central Intelligence Agency, headed by the Director of Central Intelligence. Our guest today on Forthright Radio is Professor of American History, emeritus, at the University of Edinburgh, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. His latest book, A QUESTION OF STANDING: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA, published by Oxford University Press, examines how the influence of the CIA has shifted with its standing with different presidents, Congresses, and the US as well as international public over time.
His reputation as an intelligence authority has been long established with earlier books such as, THE CIA AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY; CLOAK AND DOLLAR: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SECRET INTELLIGENCE; IN SPIES WE TRUST: THE STORY OF WESTERN INTELLIGENCE; and THE FBI: A HISTORY. We spoke with Professor Jeffreys-Jones on October 11, 2022 via Skype from his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His latest book, NOBODY IS PROTECTED: HOW THE BORDER PATROL BECAME THE MOST DANGEROUS POLICE FORCE IN THE UNITED STATES, is published by Counterpoint Press.
He is the editor-in-chief of the journal, Geopolitics, and co-editor of the Routledge Geopolitics Book Series with Klaus Dodds. He is best know for his work on border walls, the militarization of borders, and the rise in migrant deaths. His earlier books include Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move ; Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement; and Placing the Border in Everyday Life . Among his numerous awards is a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In NOBODY IS PROTECTED: HOW THE BORDER PATROL BECAME THE MOST DANGEROUS POLICE FORCE IN THE UNITED STATES, he traces the history of the Border Patrol, from its creation, quietly tucked into The Labor Appropriation Act of 1924. He writes “Its sole mission was to enforce the new eugenics-derived rules about who could enter the United States.” For most of its existence it was a small, underfunded agency, a mere 1,500 agents in the 1970s, until the 21st century, when it has become “a modern, sophisticated paramilitary force of over19,000 agents that asserts the legal right to sweep people off the streets of an American city without a warrant or even probable cause that a crime was committed.” Citizens and noncitizen alike. As Justice Thurgood Marshall noted, NOBODY IS PROTECTED. We spoke with Reece Jones on September 20, 2022.
We end the program with the poem with which Amanda Gorman opened the 2022 United Nations General Assembly on September 19, 2022.
Broadcaster, journalist, author, and four time winner of the Project Censored Award, Thom Hartmann returned to Forthright Radio with his latest book in The Hidden History Series: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALSIM: HOW REAGANISM GUTTED AMERICA AND HOW TO RESTORE ITS GREATNESS.
This is number eight in the series, and it joins his more than thirty other books.
After the interview with Thom Hartmann, we share excerpts from a speech by Bernie Sanders at a rally of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in the UK on August 31, 2022.
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, Jacob M. Grumbach, is a Faculty Associate with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. His research focuses on the political economy of the United States, with an emphasis on public policy, racial and economic inequality, American Federalism, health policy, climate change and statistical methods.
His book, LABORATORIES AGAINST DEMOCRACY: HOW NATIONAL PARTIES TRANSFORMED STATE POLITICS, which investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics since the 1970s, is published by Princeton U. Press.
Jamie Susskind is a British barrister and the author of the multiple awards winning bestseller, FUTURE POLITICS: LIVING TOGETHER IN A WORLD TRANSFORMED BY TECH.
His latest book is THE DIGITAL REPUBLIC: ON FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE 21st CENTURY, published on July 5, 2022 by Pegasus Books.
In it he addresses questions like: Is it possible to “democratize” digital technology? What kinds of rules and standards should govern important algorithms? Should powerful figures in the tech industry be regulated, like doctors or lawyers, or even hair salon workers? Is anti-trust law fit for the purpose? What rules should govern the use and abuse of personal data? Can we regulate social media without stifling freedom of speech?
With more and more news reports of the damage that digital technology is doing to individuals as well as our democracy, Jamie Susskind’s insights into the problems and challenges to reforming this largely unregulated industry are helpful for citizens grappling with the many issues with which we are faced.
Norman Eisen is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and an internationally recognized expert on law, ethics, and anti-corruption. He served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including for the impeachment and trial of President Trump, which he wrote about in his 2020 book, A CASE FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: THE UNITED STATES VS. DONALD J. TRUMP. From January 2009 to January 2011, he worked in the White House as special counsel and special assistant to the president for ethics and government reform. Norman Eisen served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. In 2003, He co-founded Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog organization.
His most recent book, OVERCOMING TRUMPERY: HOW TO RESTORE ETHICS, THE RULE OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY, is published by The Brookings Institution Press. We spoke with him on June 21, 2022.
Unfortunately our interview was cut short due to technical issues, but this allowed us to share excerpts from the June 23, 2022 session of the House Jan. 6 Committee featuring former Acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, Deputy Attorney General, Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel. It is chillingly relevant to our discussion of overcoming Trumpery. In fact, their testimony recounting their united refusal to enable efforts by Donald Trump and his minions to orchestrate a coup d’état, using the Department of Justice to add credence to his baseless assertions of fraud in the 2020 presidential election was riveting. The hearing came one day after the FBI executed a warrant to search former DOJ employee, Jeffrey Clark’s, residence. The hearing revealed that he was the lone member of the DOJ who was willing, even eager, to serve Donald Trump instead of DOJ process or policy. Their testimony, illustrate how radically norms and policies were violated.
In response to news of Matt Gaetz’s 1st Tweet after his request for a general pardon was made public (see below), Norman Eisen responded:
In February of 2022, we interviewed John Leshy about his book, OUR COMMON GROUND: A HISTORY OF AMERICA’S PUBLIC LANDS. That interview can be heard on the forthright.media website. And in fact, the history of America’s public lands is an evolving story. It has always been a tale of competing interests and ideologies with tremendous consequences for not only American citizens, but all of Nature on this continent and as we learn more and more, the entire biosphere.
Our guest today on Forthright Radio, environmental writer, activist and psychoanalyst, Joseph Scalia, III, brought to our attention what’s at stake in the recent revision of a National Forest Service Plan that affects the area bordering the north of Yellowstone National Park.
Joseph Scalia writes, “The Gallatin Range is the last crucial, and wholly unprotected yet indispensable wild country in the northern reaches of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a vast wild land of some 20 million acres, a true rare find in today’s world of diminishing wild country. Here lives all of the fauna of its pre-1492 conditions.”
“In the Rocky Mountain West, in addition to the despoliation of wild lands by extractive industries as well as misguided efforts at “forest management” – which itself has become a hotly contested and too-often perverted concept, recreation has proved to be a major threat to both the ecological and the aesthetic or spiritual values of these lands. Over and over and over, we have carved up wilderness for another and yet another “use” that degrades its integrity. The policy that has dominated this unending subdivision that eschews rigorous reflections on both ecological science and conservation aesthetics and losses of opportunities for quietude has been known as “collaboration and compromise.” “This model has been promoted by neoliberal capitalist or, one could accurately say here, predatory capitalist corporate foundations on whose grants most Big Green environmental groups have grown dependent for their survival. This is Cornel West’s “the commodification of everybody and everything.” It’s not just that monetary reward drives decisions, but more that corporatization has been unfettered and ubiquitous in its social engineering that has us, as a collective, thinking we can go on indefinitely and with impunity in such acts as the unending subdivision of nature.”
He asks: “What if environmental leaders did not acquiesce to putatively dominant unfriendliness to Wilderness designation? What if they didn’t conform to the story that’s publicly delivered? What if, instead, they got out in front, and argued forcefully – with all the big-money resources they have to potentiate such efforts – what if they argued passionately, persuasively for broad Wilderness protections that are based upon ecosystem considerations, without succumbing to what Aldo Leopold called political and economic expediency? Expediency. A good word: “The quality of being convenient and practical despite possibly being improper or immoral; convenience.”
Journalist Todd Wilkinson, who has also been our guest, called it “industrial-strength outdoor recreation,” supported by “the outdoor recreation industrial complex” and its consumptive consumerism.
The program ends with excerpts from Judi Bari’s talk at an event recorded at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarians on April 23, 1993, and a poem by Dr. Ian McCallum, “Wilderness,” (links to both below). We recorded this interview on June 6, 2022.
Here are links to articles pertinent to this interview:
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