Tag Archives: economics

Dean Baker

Dean Baker co-founded The Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999. His areas of expertise include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. Before that, he worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and was an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), the Huffington Post, TruthOut, and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting.

He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People; The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. He was last our guest on Nov. 15, 2017.

Publications mentioned in this edition of Forthright Radio include:

Frontline: The Warning https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/warning/

U.S. consumers to be hurt by tariffs by Doug Palmer https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/18/consumers-tariffs-trump-china-795159

Lehman anniversary: The five most surprising consequences by Kim Gittleson https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45478670

Ten years on from the financial crash, we need to get ready for another one by Robert Skidelsky https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/12/crash-2008-financial-crisis-austerity-inequality

Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself by Zach Carter https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/financial-crisis-10-years-later-ben-bernanke-hank-paulson-timothy-geithner_us_5b9d7dc8e4b04d32ebf92396

Four Reasons Why Los Angeles’s Upcoming Public Banking Ballot Initiative is a Huge Deal by Pheonix Goodman https://truthout.org/articles/why-los-angeles-upcoming-public-banking-ballot-initiative-is-a-huge-deal/

To Stop the Next Financial Crisis, We Need Public Ownership of Banks—Now by Thomas Hanna https://truthout.org/articles/to-stop-the-next-financial-crisis-we-need-public-ownership-of-banks-now/

Donald Trump’s currency confusion continues by Jeffrey Frankel https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/21/donald-trump-currency-confusion-continues

Henry Giroux: America At War With Itself

In this interview, we welcome back Henry Giroux, public intellectual, prolific writer, cultural critic, scholar and one of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy. He has spent a lifetime asking & analyzing important, hard, even scary questions such as these, which I quote from his essay, Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times (http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41058-thinking-dangerously-the-role-of-higher-education-in-authoritarian-times):

“What happens to democracy when the president of the United States labels critical media outlets as ‘enemies of the people,’ and disparages the search for truth with the blanket term ‘fake news’? What happens to democracy, when individuals and groups are demonized on the basis of their religion? What happens to a society, when critical thinking becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled by an economics of contempt, that blames the poor for their condition, and subjects them to a culture of shaming? What happens to a polity, when it retreats into private silos, and becomes indifferent to the use of language deployed in the service of a panicked rage — language that stokes anger, but ignores issues that matter? What happens to a social order, when it treats millions of undocumented immigrants as disposable, potential terrorists and “criminals”? What happens to a country, when the presiding principles of its society are violence and ignorance?”
We discuss these and other questions, and it may surprise you to learn that Henry Giroux’s analysis, although clear-sighted in the face of the forces of dystopia, leads to an energized, engaged vision of collective agency and action.

Henry Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest. He is the author of more than 65 books, has published more than 400 papers, in addition to hundreds of chapters in the books of others, as well as many essays and articles in such journals as Truthout, Truthdig, and CounterPunch. His works have been translated into numerous languages.
He is particularly interested in what he calls the war on youth, the corporatization of higher education, the politics of neo-liberalism, the assault on civic literacy and the collapse of public memory, public pedagogy, the educative nature of politics, and the rise of various youth movements across the globe.

His latest book is America at War With Itself, published by City Lights Books. His forthcoming book, The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism, is to be published in 2018 by Routledge.

Learn more at https://www.henryagiroux.com/

Dean Baker – Sensible Economics

Dean Baker co-founded The Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. Before that, he worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and was an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), the Huffington Post, TruthOut, and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting.

He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People; The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.

“I have suggested that economists who prescribe policies that turn out badly, or who can’t see multitrillion dollar housing bubbles coming whose collapse sinks the economy, ought to pay a price in terms of their careers. Invariably people think I am joking. When they realize I am serious, they think I am crazy or vindictive.” Dean Baker

Nancy MacLean DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS

Our guest is Professor Nancy MacLean. We discuss her latest book, DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT’S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA, published by Viking Press. It is a thoroughly researched, to my mind shocking, exposé of the man and the ideas behind the billionaire-funded, relentless campaign to suppress voting, privatize everything from education, prisons, social security and Medicare, eliminate unions, curb democratic majority rule and change the US Constitution in order to make democracy safe for capitalism and plutocracy. Most reporting of the rise of the extreme right focuses on the Koch brothers and their money – but who created the blue print for their decades long, stealth campaign that has been all too successful – at least so far? Our guest, Nancy MacLean, has spent a decade investigating the origins, tactics, strategies and goals, of that campaign, that have brought us to this crisis point in our history.

Nancy MacLean is the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. She is the award winning author of BEHIND THE MASK OF CHIVALRY: THE MAKING OF THE SECOND KU KLUX KLAN and FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH: THE OPENING OF THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE. Professor MacLean’s scholarship has received more than a dozen prizes and awards. In 2010, she was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians.