Charles Derber, DYING FOR CAPITALISM & Andy Lee Roth, STATE OF THE FREE PRESS 2024

We talk with Charles Derber about the book he co-wrote with Suren Moodliar, Dying For Capitalism, How Big Money Fuels Extinction And What We Can Do About It.

Then we talk with Andy Lee Roth about Project Censored’s yearbook, State of the Free Press 2024: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2022–23.

And finally, we read a poem from Mosab Abu Toha’s book Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear.

Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.

Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram and Threads @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.

Read The Transcript

Key Words: Charles Derber, Andy Lee Roth, author interview, book podcast, democracy, press freedom, podcast, Project Censored, nonfiction

Podcast Show Notes: Interview with Charles Derber

Introduction

Charles Derber, a co-author of the book “Dying for Capitalism,” discusses critical issues surrounding capitalism, technology, and climate change with Francesca on Writer’s Voice.
Suren Moodliar is Co-author of the book, a South African with ties to the Mandela household and an ANC activist.

Key Points from the Interview

Capitalism and Growth: The conversation emphasizes how capitalism’s inherent drive for infinite growth poses challenges for sustainability on a finite planet.
Fetishism of Commodities: Drawing from Marx’s concept, the interview touches on how consumerism and material production under capitalism contribute to resource depletion.
Triangle of Extinction: Gerber introduces the concept linking capitalism, environmental destruction, and militarism as interconnected forces driving global crises.

Insights from the Interview

Challenging Green Capitalism: The interview delves into the limitations of green technology within capitalism in addressing climate change.
Technology and Capitalism: Gerber highlights the misconception that technology alone can solve deep-rooted social, environmental, and political issues.
Historical Context: The discussion explores how capitalism’s evolution from water to coal to oil was influenced by social and political factors rather than just technological efficiency.

Podcast Show Notes: State of the Free Press 2024

Introduction

In this segment, Andy Lee Roth, the associate director of Project Censored, discusses key trends in the State of the Free Press in the United States.

Roth highlights significant changes in the media landscape since Project Censored’s establishment in 1976, emphasizing the impact of media deregulation, increasing concentration of ownership in major corporations, and the rise of the internet.

Trust in Journalism and Partisan Bias

Roth delves into the complexities surrounding trust in journalism, attributing low trust levels to corporate media reflecting specific worldviews that may not align with public interests. He distinguishes between corporate and independent news sources, emphasizing the need for critical evaluation of media content.

Influence of Intelligence Agencies in Big Tech

The discussion shifts to the influence of former U.S. and Israeli intelligence agency employees in tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Roth raises concerns about potential government influence on these platforms and its implications for information regulation and individual rights.

Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board

The conversation touches on the Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, highlighting its impact on progressive media outlets. Internal documents revealed discussions around governing information, sparking public outcry and raising questions about freedom of expression.

Conclusion

The episode underscores the critical role of media literacy, challenges posed by partisan bias, and the need to safeguard independent journalism amidst evolving media landscapes. Roth’s insights shed light on pressing issues shaping the contemporary state of the free press.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Charles Gerber, welcome to Writer’s Voice.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Good to be here, Francesca.

Speaker 1: Dying for Capitalism, you wrote this book with Surin Modliar. Tell us about him.

Speaker 2: He’s an interesting guy.
He’s a South African who grew up in a family very close to the Mandela household.

His father was an ANC activist.

And we have a chapter in the book about abolitionism and the lessons of abolitionism for the struggles we’re talking about against extinction and the subject of dying for capitalism.

We have the tools today to get to zero emissions by 2030.

Speaker 1: I recently spoke with the climate scientist Michael Mann, and he reiterated that point actually by 2030, not even by 2050.

But dying for capitalism challenges the idea that green technology within capitalism, that is a kind of green capitalism, can prevent disaster.

Why?

Speaker 2: Francesca, I’m really glad you highlighted that question because it just is really an important question, and it’s a question that is important because technology and faith in technology has always been a kind of guiding spirit of American leadership, mainstream American conversation.

That is, Americans have learned from their corporate leaders and their political leaders that the solution to all of our social, deep social, environmental, political problems rest with technology.

And that kind of technophilia, let’s call it, love of technology and the view that problems arise from technology and can be solved by technology, is particularly dangerous politically because it leads people to feel that it’s not the social, economic, political, cultural systems that are driving our problems.

It’s that we’re just not using the right technology to organize our society.

So in the climate, an example you give, I think this has become a kind of really dangerous myth enshrined in much of the, even among the groups of people who are aware of climate change and want to see it stop as soon as possible.

And that’s the idea that if we simply could do anything from buy electric cars or shift the grid over toward green energy, toward non-fossil fuels, that this is going not only to stop climate change, but stop it quickly and solve this problem.

And so let me just say a couple of things about this.

One is that I’m not dismissing the importance of technology.

Technology is important.

I’m all for intensified technological shifts away from fossil fuel.

In the book, in fact, there’s an interesting historical dialogue about how capitalism came to be linked to fossil fuels.

When early British industrialists in the 19th century, period when Charles Dickens was writing about epidemics and had bad health, part of this book is also about epidemics and other kinds of public health catastrophes.

But capitalism emerged originally with the possibility in London and the early factories in England with water power.

And the steam engines powered by water were efficient, but the industrialists came to believe that water would be too easily seen as a public good and therefore might not be subject to their control as the public mobilized to sort of maintain supplies of water at reasonable prices for themselves.

So they shifted over to coal.

And then by the mid 19th century in Britain and Europe, coal was becoming a dominant force.

But then two things happened.

One is that coal proved to be dangerous for industrialists, not technologically, but for organizing reasons.

When you put a bunch of people in coal mines, they work under difficult, long conditions close together.

And so coal miners have a long history of organizing against their work problems.

And the early industrialists began to worry that reliance on coal would build a labor force that would be rebellious.

And so that combined in the United States and then later in Europe, particularly in World War I, with a second factor, which was the rise of military, of wars, like particularly World War I, where the demand for oil became very intense because there were the first aviation and much of the nature of technology that was required in World War I required large amounts of oil.

And this was after Rockefeller in the 1890s had sort of begun the oil revolution.

So capitalism moved from water to coal to oil and gas.

And there were a combination of factors that were not technological, but more social and political that led to these changes in energy and technology.

All of which to say is that, you know, the technology and the particular kind of energy that we use is heavily mediated by and determined by political and power issues as much as by technical efficiency.

Even if you were able to move with electric cars and make a great amount of movement toward non-fossil fuels, we would still have a massive, that would be, of course, incredibly great and powerful to have a drastic revolutionary shift toward non-fossil fuel energies.

But in a capitalist society, let’s say we do this and we embrace what people like Bill Gates will call green capitalism and you know, people like Gates argue this is the solution: Capitalism is not the problem.. It’s the solution because capitalism is the most presumably technologically innovative system and therefore it can more quickly shift the technology toward a sustainable kind of technology.

The other thing is that even if you had a highly activist climate Democrat pushing toward massive amounts of green energy, you know, solar and wind technology and so forth, all of which would be good, it wouldn’t solve the problem altogether because capitalism creates, capitalism is a system of basically selling everything on the market for profit.

That’s what capitalism is. It’s a system that says everything is for sale and small numbers of people have the power and the money that are driving this system.

So even if you’re moving toward a much stronger mix of green energy, non-fossil fuel, there’s never been a stable model of capitalism that is a material non-growth model of capitalism that’s been proved to be possible.

So one of the natures that we discuss in the book is simply that capitalism is a system basically pursuing infinite growth, infinite production for sale on the market on a finite planet.

You know, there’s only one planet there, a finite number of resources, a finite amount of land and the resources, even if you’re using green energy for a lot more of production, the nature of the economic and social system that we’re living under would, in our judgment, lead to a level of material production and expansion into more and more and more areas of uninhabitable, currently uninhabitable land.

About half the world, I think right now, is uninhabitable because industry has chosen not to try to pursue this, whether we’re talking about large amounts of the Amazon.

Capitalism is not happy, you know, living in a system of limited growth.

It always wants to take off the braid, to sort of put the pedal to the metal and speed production as far and as fast as it can.

And if it does that, it’s going to consume too much of the planet.

Over the longer term, the demands of infinite production, you know, capitalism is a system that makes people kind of addicted to consumption and mass consumerism.

The very first chapter of Karl Marx’s famous book on capitalism called Das Kapital was called the fetishism of commodities.

You know, he was saying that in capitalism, commodities, things we buy, the stuff that fills our closets and our homes becomes essentially eroticized, you know, fetishism is a kind of like a sexual addiction in which people simply can’t be happy unless they’re consuming more and more.

If you’re consuming more and more as sort of your dominant cultural value and the dominant economic fuel of the system, even if you’re using green energy, you’re going to exhaust the resources of the planet.

And we also know from electric cars already and from wind turbines and so forth, that there’s a lot of carbon emissions that can emerge as you’re trying to use these non-carbon forces.

It just takes a lot of other kinds of rare minerals and production and transportation to get, you know, these wind turbines and these electric cars or solar panels, you know, going on a massive scale.

Speaker 1: Yes, and I think I completely agree with your larger point.

I have to say Capital is probably my favorite book.

And fetishism, the fetishism of commodities is an absolutely central concept and I want to circle back to that.

But I do want to point out, because there has been a lot of, I think, manipulation of the left on the issue of, you know, the carbon emissions embodied in clean energy.

It’s a lot less, number one, and number two, there are real drives for recycling of all of these materials so that the actual consumption will be far less, which is different than fossil fuels, which is something you have to burn continuously in order to have the machinery operate.

But let’s get back to the fetishism of commodities.

I mean, we have it on steroids, of course, social media drives it.

I was just listening to something the other day about how bad furniture has gotten because people are just, it’s kind of fast fashion of furniture because people want to have the latest styles they see on Instagram.

So how do you re-educate people in a way that doesn’t incite their resistance and their rage?

Speaker 2: Well, just before I talk that, let me just recycle back, if we could, to the basic argument of the book.

If we had a picture, it would be the picture that you’ve seen, Francesca, of what I call the triangle of extinction, which is like a triangle with capitalism at the top and then arrows of causation going down toward environmental death and destruction on one side and down toward military death and destruction on the other side.

And then linking at the bottom, causal arrows, war and militarism are major forces driving climate change and climate change is a major force driving militarism.

In fact, the Pentagon, which is legally required to tell the American people what are major national security threats for the last few years, has written that climate change is the number one threat to national security in the United States.

What they don’t say is that the biggest emitter of carbon in the world, the biggest institutional emitter of carbon in the world, is the Pentagon, which emits more carbon every year than any other institution in the world.

So much of this book is an attempt to basically make as clear and simple and historically grounded as possible the nature of this triangle, which sort of shows the interlinkage between capitalism, which is a sacred, you know, it’s very hard in the mainstream to raise any question about capitalism.

And here we have, if you buy even a quarter of our argument, you’re saying you’re playing with a system, which is the most dangerous system people have ever created.

And we’re showing why when, and the book goes into some historical and analytical detail to say why there is this intrinsic connection between capitalism and climate change and not just climate change, but other forms, biodiversity crises that, you know, every day different species are dying.

I’m an animal lover.

I have a dog.

I lost a dog recently, which is one of the most grievous things that’s happened to me.

We’re collectively losing our dogs, you know, our animals.

When I was talking about expanding, you know, into all areas, what we’re doing is expanding into areas, which animals have typically have been able to live in without being assaulted by humans.

This is of course, part of the pandemic risk as well.

But these connections between capitalism, climate change, and militarism are really, really important for people to understand, because once you think about these issues, it changes the way you think about the kinds of movements that we need to stop this whole madness from continuing, because you have to be able to intertwine.

It’s not just a matter of stopping the insatiability of or the fetishism of commodities.

It’s a broader set of issues.

Speaker 1: Absolutely.
And I’m so glad that you did put it in that context.

The part of the book that I think certainly excited my interest the most, not that the other didn’t, but how we do actually build movements to get out of this.

And the fascist movement is strengthening in America. And this is truly, truly terrifying.

What is the way, both in the long term and the short term, that we can begin to overcome this, you know, the use of divide and conquer to promote fascism in this country and build solidarity, a true working class movement?

Speaker 2: Well, I wish I had a hundred percent answer for you and everybody.

Everybody is thinking about this question.

And I should say, the issue of fascism, I explore at great length.

I have a new book coming out on democracy called Who Owns Democracy, and it goes into great depth on fascism.

In this book, I’m looking at capitalism.

There’s a very important relationship between capitalism and fascism, which maybe we can talk a little bit about.

I actually argue that American fascism, America was formed as a marriage between a neo-fascist confederate slave state and a neo-capitalist northern merchant capitalist state.

It was like a somewhat troubled marriage between two deep states in a sense of neo-fascist southern deep states.

And the reason I call that state fascist was that it was based primarily on slavery, which was based on a caste model of power.

And that is what fascism is.

It’s a system that tries to sort of organize around the notion of biologically based power based on racial purity and racial power and so forth.

Whereas capitalism looks at class and organizes power based on class.

And this marriage between the South and the North lasted for about 75 years before it was like a troubled marriage that became very troubled.

And we look at that in this book, we look at this period, because I think the one way to answer your question of what do you do is you look at periods of history where people were able to do what appeared impossible, like when we have a chapter on the lessons of abolitionism.

And during the period of this troubled marriage that was the fascist deep state and the corporate deep state, the North and the South, there was just a sense that, well, you’re crazy if you’re an abolitionist, because human history has always had slavery.

It’s impossible to ever stop this kind of caste system.

And abolitionism was a very small movement, and it built a fairly large constituency over 75 years.

So we look at how that happened.

And it’s an interesting story, and it’s relevant to our movements today.

So what are the key ways in which the abolition movement, what are some of the critical lessons that we can learn from the abolition movement and apply today?

Well, one is it takes a lot of perseverance in the face of what seemed to be overwhelming odds against you.

I mean, you know, when William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass escaped, it started as a very small, and people said it was impossible.

And what happened was that you had a kind of, first of all, you sustained hope in the face of what appeared to be a hopeless situation, which is what a lot of people, the young people are feeling today.

And that happened partly by virtue of the openness to very different kinds of groups with very different kinds of politics, finding ways to find common ground.

I mean, for example, William Lloyd Garrison, who was a radical revolutionary socialist leader, very, very abolitionist, a New Englander, found common ground with, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who was in the middle class, very middle class, very moderate.

And she was bringing a kind of cultural sort of approach to change.

And Uncle Tom’s Cabin became kind of a manifesto of the abolitionist movement.

And it was very, very different than the politics of, say, either Frederick Douglass or probably the leading black abolitionist who, and, you know, Frederick Douglass was interesting because he, he spent a lot of his time as an ex-slave, he went to England, he, he, he recognized the relation between the labor movement and the anti-slave movement.

And he recognized the importance of joining together cultural strategies, for example, Frederick Douglass became the most widely photographed person of the 19th century.

And he did that partly because he was realizing that images, cultural images, swayed people’s politics and moved people’s movements.

And it got him into connection with a very wide range of constituencies.

So I mean, one of the lessons of abolitionism is that, and there wasn’t a single party, there were some people who were totally against joining the major power system, there were other abolitionists who joined, created their own parties or joined in with other parties.

So there was a, what, what I take away from this is that there was a, a very open approach that encouraged solidarity across many different kinds of both people, groups, and strategies of change from economic change to cultural change, from revolutionaries like John Brown who were going to burn things down to very pacifist, you know, nonviolent people.

Somehow this movement came together around a kind of sense of emergency and moral urgency that is not irrelevant to what we’re facing today.

And it brought together, you know, people who did not become locked into fragmented single-issue kind of things, they brought together people from many, many different frameworks who found a kind of common moral community around the horrors of slavery and the sense of emergency that was coming into play as the civil war became closer.

And I just think that, yeah, that’s, it’s a very fertile period and people now who are terrified of fascism coming full tilt with Trump are spending a lot of time looking at that period of history and trying to understand how the civil war happened, how it might happen again and how we can take action to do, you know, to try to change this.

This is the fascism election issue, since we’re talking in election year, is really important because the dangers of fascism and of Trumpism as a political force are happening over and above in a sense, these existential terrors that we’re facing.

I mean, in other words, climate change, even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have an emergency around climate change in this country, in the world.

Even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have an emergency around nuclear war and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.

Even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have massive emergencies around the economic system, the extreme inequality, the pathology of billionaires seeking to exploit and plunder the planet for their own wealth and the political power that they’ve been able to accumulate with the incredible concentration of money that they have.

So we have a system that’s an extinction system, even on top of no fascism, we would still be facing an emergency and we’re just layering this on top.

Just one positive thing, I don’t know if you saw this, Sean Fain, UAW leader, just announced it on May 1st, 2028, that seems a ways away, there will be a general strike, all workers in the country will come together for a general strike, which has not happened in the United States.

So the summer of strikes is also sort of a sign that the amazing number of systemic perils we’re facing are not completely demobilizing the population.

Speaker 1: And he is such a hero to so many that I fear that if we wait till 2028, the moment will be over.

I mean, I’d like to say Sean Fain for president, actually.

Speaker 2: Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 1: And he is, I believe that the UAW is going to endorse Joe Biden.

You know, Biden has his good points, but unfortunately he has really weakened the kind of coalition that you’re talking about because of his stance on Palestine.

You teach in a college. What do you think?

Do you think that young people will come out and vote for Biden in spite of their anger at him for the stance he’s taken on Palestine?

Speaker 2: This is a super important question, Francesca.

As I told you before we started talking, I’m doing a podcast exactly because of that dilemma.

I think there’s a real risk that young people and many others, I mean, for me, I think it’s urgent to keep Trump out of power for the obvious reasons we started to talk about around fascism and so forth, which is not a joke.

It’s worth noting that people normalized Hitler before Hitler and the sort of powers that be in Germany, the conservative forces in Germany really felt he was just sort of a crazy, Hitler was a crazy joke.

He could be controlled quite easily by the conservative establishment and so forth.

And I think both liberals and conservatives in this country have taken a little bit of this attitude toward Trump.

Not everybody, I mean, obviously, but there are many people who need to be engaged in trying to stop Trump who feel, well, Biden is so bad because of the war.

And I understand this because I feel it myself.

I understand that Biden’s militarism is so terrible that it becomes hard to support him.

But if you look at the bigger picture and you recognize what a Trump administration would do in the Middle East and particularly in regard to, for example, Palestine, let alone Iran or China and so forth, you realize that that is just one of many ways in which Trump would raise the ante and so forth.

So I think the question of mobilizing, there is still a majority of people in this country that here’s a hopeful sign.

Despite the unquestioned moral kind of embrace of capitalism by all the dominant elites in the country, major polling agencies have been polling Americans about their emotional reaction to the word capitalism and the word socialism.

I don’t know if you’ve followed this polling, but it’s been going on for a number of years.

And what it’s showing is that there is a steadily growing plurality of Americans who are having a negative association to the word capitalism and a positive association with the word socialism.

And if you take young people and a variety of other Democratic sort of constituent bases, this is growing.

And that is the favorability of some kind of alternative to capitalism in the polls is growing.

And capitalism, I mean, even the far right has a long history of challenging Wall Street.

And you hear people like Ron DeSantos and many Trump is challenging corporatism and corporate power and so forth.

So there is a large majority of the country that is, in fact, about 80 to 90 percent of people in the United States say that big money, corporate power is the greatest threat to the world.

They talk about them as globalists, global companies.

But they recognize that there are a tiny number of people and companies that are making trillions, literally, of dollars where the great majority of people are, their livelihoods are in peril and their lives are in peril.

So I mean, it’s not utopian to feel that there is a way to navigate toward reaching people who feel this way.

And one of the problems I feel, and I’ve written about this in several books, is that the left has played a role in losing the ability to speak to, for example, much of the white working class or to rural folks.

And the reason is the way the left, the left since Clinton, basically the New Deal got abandoned after Reagan, basically, remember Bill Clinton made that famous phrase, the Democrat Party is no longer the party, a big government, they moved to globalization.

And white working class people moved like in an emergency toward the Republican Party because they correctly understood that the Democratic Party was abandoning class politics and sort of a critique of the economic system in favor of more siloed identity politics, whether it was anti-racism or gender politics, all of which of course are important.

But when they become the basis of political organization in this way that I call siloed, meaning they’re each in their own silo, this is the very opposite of what happened during the abolitionist movement.

You’re seeing, for example, Black movements moving in competition with Latinx movements or Asian American movements or women.

I mean, this identity model has basically opened the door wide open for corporatism and for the Republican Party moving in and saying, oh, these lefties just think you’re privileged white people because the left is no longer offering a conversation about capitalism and about the economic system, which is brutally abandoning large numbers, both economically and culturally, you know, white working class people have very good reason to feel angry and to feel this is where I think a lot of the critique of Trump’s personality, as crazy as he is, is missing the underlying forces, which we talk about in this book about the capitalism itself, which are giving ordinary working people very good reason for abandoning the Democratic Party and for abandoning Biden, for example, right now.

And so the book gets into that to some degree.

And so in a funny way, it’s not funny, it’s tragic that the left or liberalism in many ways is fueling right wing growth, fueling the Trumpist kind of movement and fueling the fascism that it hates.

And this happened to some degree in Germany in the 30s.

Speaker 1: And contrast that, I think, with the huge popularity of Bernie Sanders campaign, which actually brought together all those disparate points and talked about a multi ethnic, a multicultural working class movement based on solidarity.

It’s not difficult to actually bring all those things together.

And Marianne Williamson, I heard her the other day on Democracy Now!, you know, her message is very much like Bernie’s in that sense.

She says, we really have to base this on a politics of love, by which she means solidarity, and that the only way to counter the hate is with love.

I wonder what you think of that.

Speaker 2: Well, I agree with the way you framed it just before you mentioned Marianne Williamson. In 2016, you may remember that Bernie Sanders did very well.

He was brought back in the primary elections in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the effects of outsourcing and globalization among steelworkers and autoworkers and all that was greatest.

Bernie ran up big margins in those states.

The corporate Democrats pushed him out.

And it’s very similar in a way, it’s always interesting to imagine what would have happened if corporate Democrats, when Roosevelt was running for the fourth time, people knew he was going to die.

And Henry Wallace, a socialist, was a logical choice, Eleanor Roosevelt wanted him to be president.

The corporate Democrats mobilized.

They were afraid of Wallace, and for good reason at the time, because Wallace would have run a very different country then, and probably would have might have avoided the Cold War.

And Truman was much more of a militarist and much more willing to sort of, you know, live with the corporate system than the New Deal.

And so I think that’s the thing that’s happening.

The danger today is that the corporate, you know, that money plays such a central role in the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party.

And, you know, liberals are so tied to foreign policy ideals and to capitalism in a very general sense, even though they want reforms.

And as you say, Biden did some good things in his first two years that I didn’t anticipate.

He moved a little bit away from the kind of neoliberal push for that the Democrats have been embracing since Reagan and since Clinton, and Obama also.

And it’s important to remember that under the Obama administration, the racial gap between blacks and whites grew, and the gap between rich black people and poor black people grew under Obama.

This is not to try to desecrate Obama, but to say that neither Clinton nor Obama, the two Democrats after Reagan, who really pulled America away from the New Deal in a kind of a class economically oriented politics, neither of those two Democratic presidents did much to try to move it in the opposite direction.

And that’s why so many workers, the most important, in my view, the most important political phenomena driving the possibility of fascism and of extinction, is the movement of so many working class people away from the Democratic Party, because they don’t feel the Democratic Party is speaking to their needs, and they’re right about that.

Biden was a little bit better.

He began to use a more massive public goods approach.

In the book, Dying for Capitalism, we argue at the very heart of capitalism is the idea that everything is for sale.

So it’s all commodities.

Everything is produced as a commodity society.

And we introduced the idea of saying, the alternative to that is a public goods society.

In other words, that’s a language that’s not very familiar to people, but public goods are things that are produced not for profit, but for public well-being.

And the New Deal, Roosevelt during the Depression, was able to essentially use that as a message to encourage a lot of public spending on both on the environment, on jobs, on social welfare programs and so forth.

And so I think part of the problem is the need to move back away from this siloed identity politics toward a kind of economic politics that looks at public goods.

Climate change is a public catastrophe, nuclear war, that once you start using the conversation of not just a profit for the market, but for public goods, you can have a conversation about all these issues.

So a lot of this book is about what it would mean and look like to create a society based on public goods.

Well, that’s a great place to end. The book is Dying for Capitalism, How Big Money Fuels Extinction, and What We Can Do About It. Charles Berber, thank you so much for talking with us here about this very absolutely crucial

Writer's Voice

Talking to writers about matters that move us