A podcast where politics, history, and culture are examined from perspectives you may not have considered before. Call it a parallax view.
Episodes
Friday Dec 09, 2022
Friday Dec 09, 2022
On this edition of Parallax Views, Dr. Thomas Ferguson, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, returns to discuss the current social/economic/political situations in the U.S. and place it within the context of growing tumult across the globe. Among the issues discussed in this conversation:
- Disruption and the world economy; energy crises, inflation, growing economic pressures on people; strikes in the U.K., the recent far-right coup attempt in Germany, and the downfall of Peru's President Pedro Castillo (who attempted to dissolve the Peruvian Congress)
- Oil and gas prices
- The Georgia runoff election that saw Democrat Raphael Warnock vs. Republican Herschel Walker
- Incremental change in the balance of political power
- Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk, and the Twitter Files
- Is the global pandemic really over? Biden, student debt, and the pandemic
- Railroad workers and sick leave pay
- Nancy Pelosi, corporate Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the Squad, Bernie Sanders, and progressives
- Biden, the National Labor Relations Board, and the broader state of American labor
- Crypto, the FTX scandal, Sam Bankman-Fried, dark money, the politicians who received donations from SBF, and deregulation
- How a deep recession could lead to Donald Trump's comeback; Trump's survival is dependent on the economy
- Employment and unemployment
- The problem Democrats face leading up to 2024; the Democratic Party as a "Headless Horseman" right now
- Could the railroad strike issue come back to haunt Democrats?
- The polarizations of social blocs in America
- Rural areas and U.S. elections
- The American upper middle classes and Jan 6th
- The midterms were very close; the shift was minute
- Policy errors in addressing the pandemic
- Interests rates are up and U.S. debt costs are rising
- The multipolar world and the dangers of escalation; U.S. vs. China and de-escalation; the Ukraine/Russia War
- The Golden Rule: he makes the money makes the rules
- And much, much more!
In this second segment of the show, Dr. Jack Rasmus, author of The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump, returns to discuss his analysis of the bipartisan shutdown by the Biden administration and Congress of a potential railroad workers strike.
Among the topics covered in this conversation
- Previous times that Congress has intervened to break a strike: the Railway Labor Act in 1926 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947; government working on behalf of corporate interests; corporate power's attack on labor in the 1920s and after WWII; the history of rail strikes leading up to the 1920s
- How the labor movement has been tied down by a legal web designed to prevent strategic strikes from occurring
- Government intervention, bargaining power, the freezing of negotiations
- The issue of paid sick leave and the issue of scheduling; paid leave and the disciplining of labor; labor shortages and wage costs
- Nancy Pelosi, the 90 day "cooling off" period, unions, the AFL-CIO, and anti-labor legislation
- The corporate wing of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and progressives; left-liberals as constantly being slapped down and outmaneuvered by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party; the Democratic Leadership Council and the takeover of the Democratic Party; thinking in class terms rather than political terms
- Pelosi's legislative trick, anti-strike legislation, and the proposed sick leave legislation that had no chance of passing through the sent
- The 24% wage increase over 5 years for rail workers and the effect of inflation over the last 3 years
- Republicans, Democrats, and the labor movement
- The media, propaganda, and the economy; oil companies, price gouging, gas prices, sanctions on Russia, and inflation; the job market, full-time jobs, and part-time jobs; the ideological apparatus of the ruling class
- Neoliberalism, grassroots resistance, and the need for a workers party
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