Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
101 episodes - English - Latest episode: 17 days ago - ★★★★★ - 108 ratingsWho Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast is a monthly program devoted to bringing you quality, engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. We interview historians and social and cultural critics about capitalism’s past, highlighting the political and economic changes that have created the present. Each episode gives voice to the people who have shaped capitalism – by making the rules or by breaking them, by creating economic structures or by resisting them.
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Episodes
Ben Waterhouse on the Dream and Reality of Self Employment
April 02, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutes - 54.8 MBOne recent study found that 81% of businesses in the United States have zero employees. That is, they are run by sole proprietors, working for and by themselves, The ideal of self-employment has become dominant in our culture, too. More Americans than ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur, an independent owner, a founder. But for all of its prevalence in our economy and in our imaginations, the origins of this impulse are a bit hazy. When did so many of us begin to idolize self-employment...
Brent Cebul on Business, Inequality, and American Liberalism
March 05, 2024 20:18 - 45 minutes - 85.4 MBMost scholars would date the origins of neoliberalism to the 1970s, when a range of crises gave rise to new forms of market-oriented governance. But Brent Cebul, our guest on this month's episode, argues that liberalism’s sharp turn towards neoliberalism wasn’t so sharp after all. In fact, as early as the New Deal, liberals tried to realize their policy goals through market means. And officials in Washington worked hand-in-hand with otherwise conservative business and municipal elites on t...
Tim Keogh on Suburban Poverty and the Roots of Postwar Inequality
February 06, 2024 19:23 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MBIn 2022, roughly one in 10 suburban residents lived in poverty (9.6%), compared to about one in six in primary cities (16.2%), according to a recent study by the Brookings Institute. The issue of suburban poverty has garnered significant attention, prompting more than a bit of nostalgia for the good ole days of when suburbs were prosperous, living proof of the American dream. This narrative of postwar suburbia as prosperous, if also exclusive places, has been reinforced by historians and oth...
Premilla Nadasen on the Care Economy and the Potential for Radical Care
January 08, 2024 16:46 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBToday, discussions of care are ubiquitous. From employer-programs promoting self-care to the $800 billion healthcare industry, care forms a central part of our lives and the economy. But, are the systems and structures currently in place to care serving those who need it the most? This month's episode, featuring historian and activist Premilla Nadasen, takes a close look at the care economy and its relationship to racial capitalism and the reconfiguration of the welfare state. Along the way,...
Hannah Forsyth on the Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World
November 07, 2023 03:08 - 46 minutes - 64.1 MBAre you a professional living and working in an English-speaking country? If so, this episode is for you. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, engineers, lawyers, social workers, the list goes on, professionals play an important role in our society. This wasn't always the case. This episode explores the rise of the professional class in the Anglophone world, including engaging in a decades-old question of whether or not professionals constitute a class. Topics covered include the ro...
Bart Elmore on Southern Companies Remaking our Economy and the Planet
September 04, 2023 01:03 - 36 minutes - 50.6 MBAn iced cold Coca-Cola. A cross-country flight on Delta to visit friends. A much-needed medication overnighted via Fed-Ex. Bulk toilet paper purchased at Wal-Mart. What do these items have in common? In today’s modern economy, each of these can be purchased from the comfort of the couch, frequently with a credit card pioneered by Bank of America. They are all also from companies headquartered in the American South. In this month's episode, historian Bart Elmore explains how corporations f...
Mark Erlich on the Way We Build and Restoring Dignity to Construction Work
August 02, 2023 19:03 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBThis month's episode gives a nod to one of the figures in our logo: the construction worker. Our guest, Mark Erlich has worked in the construction industry as a carpenter and union leader for a half century. In this episode, he shares his insights on the industry's past, present, and future, paying particular attention to the politics and material conditions surrounding construction work. In response to those who argue that today's labor shortages in the construction industry are the result ...
Chelsea Schields on Oil, Intimacy, and the Offshore
July 03, 2023 18:53 - 49 minutes - 67.4 MBIn this month's episode, guest Chelsea Schields discusses oil refining and intimacy, illuminating the social ties and affective attachments engendered by oil in the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao. Known today for their gorgeous beaches and sunny weather that attract tourists year-round, during the mid-twentieth century these islands were home to some of the largest oil refineries in the world. Along the way, we cover topics such as the role of race and gender in structuring labor rela...
Joan Flores-Villalobos on How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal
May 04, 2023 11:04 - 49 minutes - 67.8 MBWhen it was completed in 1914, the Panama Canal nearly halved the travel time between the U.S. West Coast and Europe and revolutionized trade and travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It’s construction, overseen by the U.S. government-Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), has long been hailed as a marvel of American ingenuity. Less well-known was the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. In this episode, Joan Flores-Villalobos demonstrates how Black West Indian wome...
Christy Thornton on Mexico, Development, and Governing the Global Economy
April 05, 2023 20:44 - 42 minutes - 58.2 MBIn this month's episode, Christy Thornton discusses the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on some of the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Triangulating between archives in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Thornton traces how Mexican officials repeatedly led the charge among Third World nations campaigning for greater representation within and redistribution throu...
Special Episode on the Military and the Market
March 07, 2023 20:36 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MBThis month, we welcomed Jennifer Mittelstadt back to the show, joined by Mark Wilson, to discuss their new edited volume, The Military and the Market. Moving beyond familiar topics like defense spending, the volume takes an expansive approach to examining military-market relations in a wide range of contexts--from family business in the Civil War to managing post-World War II housing construction for U.S. soldiers and their families, and much more. Alongside Jennifer and Mark, listeners will...
Allan Lumba on Monetary Authorities in the American Colonial Philippines
February 02, 2023 02:46 - 38 minutes - 52.6 MBIn this episode, historian Allan Lumba explores how the United States wielded monetary authority in the colonial Philippines, including the role of money as a tool for countering decolonization, entrenching racial and class hierarchies, and directing the profits of colonialism towards the U.S. and Wall Street, in particular, with long-lasting consequences for Filipinos and Americans still dealing with the aftermath of what Lumba calls conditional decolonization.
Chad Pearson on Klansmen, Employer Vigilantes, and Labor Suppression in the Long Nineteenth Century
December 05, 2022 01:57 - 35 minutes - 48.7 MBThis month’s episode takes listeners back in time to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of significant labor unrest. At the time, employers, often with government support, went to great lengths to put down dissent, including employing violent tactics such as whippings, kidnappings, shootings, and imprisonment. Among those that helped to spear-head this violent suppression of workers and their allies were groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Law & Order Leagues, and Citizens Alliances. T...
Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and the Making of Modern China
October 03, 2022 00:40 - 33 minutes - 45.9 MBThis month’s episode picks up on a theme previously explored on the podcast: international finance. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Ghassan Moazzin traces the rise of foreign banking in China during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that saw a dramatic increase in international trade and investment in the country. Particular attention is paid to the role of foreign banks in integrating China into global financial markets, including ...
Claire Dunning on Nonprofit Neighborhoods and Urban Inequality
August 02, 2022 14:58 - 49 minutes - 68.6 MBIn this month's episode, Claire Dunning explains how and why non-profits came to play such an important role in U.S. cities after World War II. In doing so, she explores the emergence of non-profit neighborhoods amid various changes in urban policy, starting with urban renewal and continuing through the War on Poverty and the rise of community development corporations. While acknowledging all of the important work done by non-profits, the book also draws attention to a central paradox of our...
Mircea Raianu on Tata and Global Capitalism in India
July 07, 2022 16:10 - 49 minutes - 68.3 MBIn this episode, Mircea Raianu traces the rise of the Tata Group, one of India's largest and oldest companies, from its early days involved in cotton and opium trading to multinational conglomerate invested in everything from salt to software, and, notably, steel. Among the topics discussed, include Tata’s involvement with colonial and anti-colonial developments; international networks of finance capital and scientific management; and Cold War geopolitics. Ultimately, Raianu offers a model f...
Holger Droessler on Coconut Colonialism, Labor, and Globalization in Samoa
May 27, 2022 15:47 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MBThis month's episode centers Samoa, including the Pacific islands comprising the present-day independent country of Samoa and American Samoa, examining capitalism, globalization, and coconut colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. In doing so, it pays close attention to the lives of workers, including plantation laborers, ethnographic edutainers, and service workers, revealing how Samoans navigated colonialism and capitalism, contesting exploitative labor conditions, while, at the same ...
Keith Wailoo on Racial Marketing and the Rise of Menthol Cigarettes
April 05, 2022 00:26 - 47 minutes - 64.7 MBIn 2020, George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Of Black Americans who smoke, eighty-percent smoke menthol cigarettes. In this episode, Keith Wailoo explores the history of menthol cigarettes and their marketing to Black Americans. In doing so, he ties together the history of tobacco companies and the disproportionate number of Black deaths at the hands of police violence, COVID-19, and other forms of racial violence and ex...
Jason Resnikoff on the Automation Discourse and the Meaning of Work
March 07, 2022 12:01 - 45 minutes - 63 MBThis month's episode takes a deep dive into the history of work and automation in the post-World War II era. It traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. Countering automation's proponents, who prophesize that robots will soon replace human labor, Jason Resnikoff reveals how the automation discourse has tended to obscure the human beings who continue to labor, often in sped up and intensified manners,...
Gregg Mitman on Firestone's Rubber Empire in Liberia
February 04, 2022 03:00 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBThis month's episode focuses on a popular commodity, namely rubber. Despite consuming a large share of the world's rubber supply, the United States has long relied on the global market to meet American demand for rubber. During the early twentieth-century, this dependence on foreign rubber led the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to the West African nation of Liberia, where the company built one of the largest rubber plantations in the world. What follows is a tale of land expropriation, me...
Destin Jenkins on Municipal Debt and Bondholder Power
January 04, 2022 17:10 - 57 minutes - 26.5 MBIndebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in and beyond the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt. Focusing on San Francisco, this month's guest, Destin Jenkins, traces the evolving relationship between cities, bondholders, banks, and municipal debt from the Great Depression to the 1980s. In doing so, he sheds new light on the power arrangement at the center of municipal finance, and offers some suggestions on how to contest it.
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on Student Loans and Higher Education
October 04, 2021 15:54 - 47 minutes - 43.3 MBIt is no secret that the United States is facing a crisis with regards to higher education. In this month's episode, historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer explains the long history that gave rise to the current situation in which many institutions are struggling financially, while students and their parents are often the ones left to pay the bill with the help of loans.
Justene Hill Edwards on the Slaves Economy and the Limits of Black Capitalism
August 04, 2021 16:52 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBBuilding on and complicating recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism, Justene Hill Edwards takes listeners on a journey through the slaves' economy. From bustling urban marketplaces to back-country roads, she highlights the myriad ways enslaved people participated in South Carolina's economy from colonialism to the Civil War. In doing so, she never loses sight of the limitations of the slaves’ economy, revealing how enslaved peoples’ investments in capitalism, while providing temporary ...
Joshua Greenberg on the Rage for Paper Money and Monetary Knowledge in Early America
July 06, 2021 17:05 - 51 minutes - 46.8 MBFor many Americans, the question--What is a dollar worth?--may sound bizarre, if not redundant. Fluctuating international exchange rates, highly volatile crypto-currencies, counterfeit money, these are all things the average American hears about on the news, but rarely thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Even the most enthusiastic Bitcoin supporters will likely readily admit they prefer to conduct the majority of their daily transactions in a currency whose value is relatively stable, and ba...
Gabriel Winant on the Rusting of 'Steel City, USA' and the Rise of Healthcare
June 03, 2021 02:27 - 52 minutes - 48.6 MBToday, healthcare workers account for the largest percentage of U.S. workers. Yet, their power pales in comparison to the unionized industrial workforce that preceded them, and whom it is their job now to care for. In this episode, Gabriel Winant explains how these two worlds--the post-war industrial economy and the post-industrial service economy--came together in 'Steel City, USA,' where during the late twentieth century the healthcare economy emerged to take advantage of the social hierar...
Cristina Groeger on Education, Labor, and Inequality in Boston
May 03, 2021 03:57 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBDespite the rising cost of tuition and a recent slump in college enrollment, many Americans continue to look to education to improve their social and economic status. Yet, more and more degrees have not led to reduced levels of inequality. Rather, quite the opposite. Inequality remains the highest its been in decades. In this episode, Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deep...
Ronald Schatz on the Labor Board Vets and the Rise of Industrial-Labor Relations
March 27, 2021 21:38 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBIn this episode, labor historian Ronald Schatz speaks about the National War Labor Board. Recruited by the government to help resolve union-management conflicts during World War II, many of the labor board vets went on to have long and illustrious careers negotiating conflicts in a wide-range of sectors from the steel industry to public sector unionism. Some were recruited to mitigate unrest on college and university campuses in response to student unrest. While not a traditional labor histo...
Rebecca Marchiel on Redlining, Financial Deregulation, and the Urban Reinvestment Movement
February 14, 2021 18:17 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBThe history of red-lining is one increasingly well-known within and beyond the academy. In the 1930s, as part of an attempt to shore up the struggling economy by underwriting home mortgages, the government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), developed a series of guidelines and criteria for assessing the risk of lending in urban areas. HOLC criteria drew heavily on the racial logics employed by lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers. Thus, “A-rated” neighborhoods, those associat...
Katie Hindmarch-Watson on London's Telecommunications Work and Serving a Wired World
January 04, 2021 20:05 - 43 minutes - 39.5 MBIt is common these days to bemoan the amount of personal information companies like Amazon, Facebook, and other modern telecommunications goliaths collect about us. For many, this invasion of privacy exists as a necessary consequence of our growing dependence on the internet. With every click of the mouse—making it possible to have products manufactured half-way around the world delivered to our doorstep—there is a reluctant awareness of the risk that our private lives might be made public. ...
Shennette Garrett-Scott on Black Women in Finance
December 02, 2020 14:55 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBIn this episode, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including shedding light on the bureaucratic violence that targeted St. Luke's and other black banks. Through the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott gives black women in finance th...
Aaron Jakes on Colonial Economism and Egypt's Occupation
November 02, 2020 14:46 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBThe history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. In Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crisis of Capitalism, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism through revealing the country's role as a laboratory for colonial economism and financial innovation amid the turn of the twentieth-century boom and bust. In doing so, Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the ...
Casey Lurtz on Globalization from the Grounds Up
September 04, 2020 18:08 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBThe history of globalization is one that has often been told as a story of elites. There are a number of truths to this narrative. Yet, as Casey Lurtz shows, it also ignores some things. In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became Mexico’s leading coffee exporter. She does so not by focusing on the Mexican politicians and foreign capitalists who came to the Soconusco with dreams of grandeur. Rat...
Caleb McDaniel on Slavery and Restitution
August 03, 2020 14:36 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBThanks to the work of activists and intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie, Black peoples’ demand for reparations have garnered growing attention among politicians, business leaders, university officials, and journalists. For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, today’s guest has an important story to tell about a formerly enslaved woman named Henrietta Wood who sued for restitution in 1870 and won; paid $2,500, what is likely th...
Episode 68: Augustine Sedgewick on the Dark Empire of Coffee
July 02, 2020 03:21 - 42 minutes - 39.4 MBMany of us are familiar with the negative health effects of coffee, which include insomnia, nervousness, upset stomach, and increased heart rate. Yet, this hasn’t seemed to stop many Americans from reaching for a cup, or two or three, of coffee to help them make it through the day. One estimate puts coffee consumption in the United States at 400 million cups of coffee a day, or more than 140 billion cups a year, making the United States the world’s leading consumer of coffee. Yet, for all th...
Paige Glotzer on How the Suburbs Were Segregated
June 01, 2020 22:34 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBIt will come as little surprise to most listeners that America’s metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. While the suburbs surrounding American cities tend to be relatively affluent and white, many urban areas, especially those with large non-white populations, remain under-resourced and under-served in comparison to their white suburban counterparts. Even as gentrification and other forces have increasingly forced poorer non-white residents to seek housing on the city’s peri...
Marcia Chatelain on McDonalds and Black America
May 01, 2020 13:33 - 29 minutes - 27.5 MBWe’ve all heard the statistics regarding Americans and fast food. According to the National Health and Nutrition Survey, one third of Americans consumed fast food on any given day. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the fast food industry employed nearly 3.8 million Americans, many in minimum wage jobs. Not everyone has the same relationship with fast food. In this episode, we speak with Marcia Chatelain about the dramatic impact one fast food company, McDonald’s, has had on black communiti...
Big Changes at Who Makes Cents
April 03, 2020 17:50 - 36 minutes - 28.9 MBDavid and Alex are retiring from the show! But a new host is joining to take the reins. Listen to hear the founding co-hosts reflect on the past six years of the show and to meet our new host, Jessica Levy.
Zach Carter on Keynesianism and COVID-19
March 18, 2020 20:37 - 30 minutes - 14.4 MBToday, we have a special episode. We speak to Zach Carter about COVID-19 and Keyesnianism. Zach is the author of the upcoming book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. On Wednesday March 18th, he published an op-ed on Keynes's ideas for today. If you like this episode, please donate to Mariame Kaba's redistribution, mutual aid fund: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8npOgwIczH Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, ...
Dara Orenstein on the Economic Geography of Warehouses
March 02, 2020 23:46 - 58 minutes - 27 MBDara Orenstein on the Economic Geography of Warehouses If you’re like many people throughout the country and world, you’ve purchased something on Amazon. As a result, you’ve been incorporated into a set of supply chain relationships that inevitably pass through warehouses. On this episode, we return to topic we’ve discussed in past episodes—how logistics shapes capitalism. We speak to Dara Orenstein about the history of bonded warehouses specifically and foreign trade zones. We consider ho...
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Predatory Inclusion
January 10, 2020 20:58 - 40 minutes - 30.6 MBOften, analyses of the intersections between race and capitalism consider how capitalism harms dispossessed communities of color because excluding or neglecting them is profitable. But what if serving those communities could be both very profitable and very damaging to the people in them? We speak with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about what she calls “predatory inclusion,” in which financial institutions and real estate interests sought to build black homeownership. In the process, they reaped t...
Eileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker
December 03, 2019 20:23 - 59 minutes - 27.8 MBEileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker What is work? Who are workers? Which activities are considered work, and which ones are excluded? These questions are some of the most critical questions in political and economic analysis. And how they are answered—both personally and by political institutions—is vital to how people spend their time and thus their lives. On this episode, we investigate this question specifically through the international debates about the “woman worker” ...
Adom Getachew on Anti-colonial Worldmaking
October 09, 2019 01:04 - 53 minutes - 40.6 MBStudents in U.S. history surveys come away from their lessons on World War I with one conflict fresh in their minds: How could Woodrow Wilson, a president who advocated segregation and famously screened the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, also have been an architect of the League of Nations and a champion of the self-determination of colonized people in Africa and Asia? In this episode, we speak with Adom Getachew, who casts Wilson in a different light. She argues that th...
Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism
September 06, 2019 17:36 - 59 minutes - 27.8 MBNan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism The multinational corporation is a pervasive institution. For example, it’s nearly impossible to listen to this show without interacting with one. But what is the history of this thing we call the multinational corporation? And who gets to count as its constituents? Today, we investigate this topic and how it has been shaped by cigarettes—from the workers who grew the tobacco to those who governed the toba...
Episode 58: Chris Dietrich on the Energy Crisis and the Anticolonial Elite
August 01, 2019 14:58 - 39 minutes - 30.2 MBWhen we talk about the 1973 energy crisis, we tend to cast it as a moment when Americans questioned assumptions about how the domestic economy worked and the U.S. role in the global economy. We don’t always spend as much time thinking about why the crisis happened, or what it represented in the Global South. OPEC’s decision to cut production and raise prices stemmed from a longer history of anti-colonial activists demanding a fundamental change in how the global economy operated. As countrie...
Liz Montegary on the Political Economy of LGBT Families
July 03, 2019 21:06 - 58 minutes - 27.5 MBWe’ve just ended pride month and both the victories and limits of GLBT politics were on view. In San Francisco, protesters engaged in civil disobedience action against the growing corporatization of pride. Activists in San Francisco and elsewhere questioned the role of police in pride, emphasizing that “Stonewall was a riot.” Our guest today traverses these debates by emphasizing the politics of LGBT families. She documents the rapidly changing political landscape over the past two dec...
Peter Cole on the Power of Dockworkers
May 07, 2019 18:33 - 46 minutes - 35.5 MBWe talk a lot about logistics on this show – the industries, like Amazon or FedEx, that have made fortunes managing the movement of goods from one place to another. Logistics companies undergird the globalized economy, making it possible for companies to benefit from low wages and labor abuses in the global South by moving finished products quickly and cheaply to markets all over the world. Our guest today explains how dock workers have been another force enabling the global economy to funct...
Bernice Yeung on The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers
April 13, 2019 16:45 - 53 minutes - 49.9 MBThe Me Too movement has brought much needed attention to sexual violence and harassment both in and outside the workplace. It has challenged patriarchal norms and practices and illuminated entrenched power hierarchies. It also drew strength from longer struggles against the many manifestations of patriarchal power. On this month’s show, we speak to Bernice Yeung about how some of the U.S.’s most precarious workers experienced and have fought back against workplace sexual violence. She ...
Juan De Lara on Logistics and Urban Space
March 06, 2019 17:00 - 40 minutes - 30.8 MBAmazon's withdrawal from New York City has sparked big conversations about companies' impact on urban space, but less attention has been paid to the fact that, as logistics companies, corporations like Amazon have a particular spatial impact. Juan De Lara discusses how the logistics economy has remade urban regions and racial politics since the 1980s.
Randy Shaw on the Housing Affordability Crisis
January 06, 2019 17:28 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBIn major cities across the country, skyrocketing rents and housing prices have pushed out workers and everyday people who are no longer able to afford the cost of living. In Los Angeles, this has led to a spike in homelessness and the increased precarity that comes from living on the streets. Since 2017, at least 1200 homeless people in LA have died, many from treatable illnesses like cardiovascular disease, pneumonia, and diabetes. What are some of the causes and solutions to this housing ...
Gavin Benke on Enron and the Neoliberal Era
December 07, 2018 20:17 - 47 minutes - 44 MBGavin Benke on Enron and the Neoliberal Era Frauds. Grifts. Swindles. Scams. These are hardly new things when it comes to the history of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean they each one don't reflect its specific era of capitalism. Instead they both shape and are shaped by their unique historical moments. On today’s show, we speak to Gavin Benke about Enron—the energy company that collapsed in 2001 amidst a massive fraud. What does the story of Enron reveal about neoliberalism? Wa...