Doug Henwood's Blog, page 10

Fresh audio product: Yanis Varoufakis on being banned in Germany, and on the rise of technofeudalism

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

April 18, 2024 Yanis Varoufakis talks about being banned in Germany for supporting the Palestinian cause, and then about the transformation he analyzes in his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Fresh audio product: the World Court, the secret history of Jelly Roll Morton

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

April 11, 2024 Heidi Matthews on the World Court and the cases against Israel pending there • Elijah Wald, author of Jelly Roll Blues, on Jelly Roll Morton and the hidden history of early blues

Fresh audio product: Israel expands its war, Zionists appropriate “safety” discourse, the shipping industry and the Baltimore bridge disaster

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April 4, 2024 Trita Parsi explains why Israel is trying to expand its war to Iran and Hezbollah • Natasha Lennard analyzes the Zionist appropriation of leftish “safe space” discourse • Stefan Yong explores the structure of the global shipping industry in light of the Baltimore bridge disaster

Fresh audio product: Shoah after Gaza, valuing care work

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March 28, 2024 Pankaj Mishra, author of this article, on the propaganda-induced debasement of the Holocaust • Nancy Folbre, one of four authors of this report, on assigning a monetary value to care work

Fresh audio product: AIPAC, Schumer and ICJ in Israel, why are the youth troubled?

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March 21, 2024 David Moore on how AIPAC is using GOP contributors’ money to go after progressive Dems • Meron Rapoport on how Schumer and the ICJ are being received in Israel • Jamieson Webster on the social aspects of mental disorder among the young

NYC is not a killing field

I have a weakness for the New York Post. Their politics are odious, but damn, they’re very skilled practitioners of the tabloid arts. Right now, though, they’re trying to convince New Yorkers—with some success, alas—that we’re in the midst of a horrid crime wave. Just as I was typing that, I got a notification from the Post on my phone reporting that four students were slashed in a fight inside a high school. The paper is tireless in its fearmongering.

In this campaign, they’re assisted by Donald Trump, who bellowed on his Truth Social platform a few months ago that “MURDERS & VIOLENT CRIME HIT UNIMAGINABLE RECORDS!” (caps in original, of course) in the city.

Fact-checking Trump and the Post are thankless tasks, but it seems worth setting the record straight. Crime is not at record levels—nowhere near it.

Let’s look at murders, the best measure to look at according to criminal justice connoisseurs for getting a sense of overall trends. Murder isn’t only the most serious crime around, the stats on homicide are also the most reliable of all, because few murders are missed and other types of crime are subject to reporting and classification errors. Here’s the history in a graph:

Last year, there were 391 murders in the city, down 11% from 2022, 20% from 2021, and 83% from the all-time peak in 1990. So far this year, murders are down 25% from the same period last year. If that rate is sustained through 2024, we’ll be back to the pre-covid lows. There is just no crime wave, but reactionaries like Trump and the Post want you to think so.

Since the city’s population has changed over the years (though not by as much as you might think), it’s worth looking at the murder rate, the number of homicides per 100,000 people. Here’s what that looks like. At just under 5 per 100,000, it’s down by 85% since the 1990 peak. It’s exceeded by cities that Trump and the Post editorialists no doubt imagine are safer, like Miami (11 per 100,000), Dallas (12), and Houston (also 12). Sad to say, NYC’s peak rate of 31 per 100,000.

Our terrible mayor, Eric Adams, could be making these points, but he doesn’t want to—he’d rather blame migrants for our problems. Besides, doing something about important things like the cost of housing or adapting to climate change might annoy the landlord class that runs the city. Better to stoke fears of our neighbors and of refugees.

Fresh audio product: chaos in Haiti, death of the future

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

March 14, 2024 Robert Fatton explains Haiti’s further descent into poverty and chaos • Steve Fraser, author of this article, analyzes and mourns the death of any sense of a better future

Fresh audio product: empty Northern elites, Ukraine during and after the USSR

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March 7, 2024 Vijay Prashad on how the North American and European bourgeoisies are a spent force, with nothing to offer the world (article here) • Volodymyr Ishchenko, author of Toward the Abyss, on Ukraine during and after the USSR

Fresh audio product: Black Panthers, Pakistan

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

February 29, 2024 historian Donna Murch, author of Living for the City, takes on some myths about the Black Panther Party • Saadia Toor and Rabia Mehmood on Pakistan

Fresh audio product: the Desi diaspora, finance capital today

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

February 22, 2024 Jeet Heer on Indian Americans in politics and society (article here) • Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, authors of The Fall and Rise of American Finance, on the new finance capital