Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York and author of Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder (Verso, 2020), returns to the show with a searing analysis of the US political scene and various international theatres. Kicking off with an evaluation of the Trump v2.0 administration, Parenti reviews some of Trump’s pre-presidential promises, from the Jeffrey Epstein file dump that was vastly redacted to Trump’s enthralment with the Israeli lobby. Delving into the Israeli lobby, deeply entrenched within the US government, Parenti notes that this “lobby” is much more than simply monetary, and suggests that it is much more entrenched within the US political system. Parenti also develops a deeper examination of the war in Ukraine and the “demonology” of Russia within legacy media that has taken up the Cold War era model of anti-Communism by eliding the fact that some of Ukraine’s oblasts (Donetsk and Luhansk) are still occupied by Ukrainian Nazis. Observing how the domestic pressure upon Putin is coming from the Communists and the far-right parties, both highly critical of Putn’s longstanding abandonment of the Russian people who have been militarily occupied by Ukrainian forces wearing swastikas, Parentis evidences the machinations within the US proxy war against Russia from its provisions of munitions to Ukraine to the Ukrainian government’s banning the Russian language in 2019 and Law 5371 which denies unionisation, exempting workers in companies with fewer than 250 employees from the coverage of collective agreements. Parenti also discusses the situation of free speech in the United States that is currently being eroded, specifically regarding any criticism of both the Israeli government and Zionism, as he explores the broader questions of academic freedom and anti-war sentiment within American universities where today the managerial class of university administrators within these institutions outnumbers faculty while itinerant workers with PhDs, the adjunct class, provide approximately 78% of all university teaching.

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Christian Parenti

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