Morgan Artyukhina, writer and news editor at Sputnik Washington, talks to us about how since 2008, troops trained by AFRICOM have been directly responsible for at least seven successful coups d’etat in Africa, with the most recent one taking place in Mali, how it original mission, which was ostensibly to fight terrorism, has now become just another way to project power through proxies, and how this practice could allow the U.S. to shift more resources towards its escalating tensions with China.
Luis Garate, journalist and director of Comunicambio, an independent news media organization based in Perú, talks to us about the political climate in Perú ahead of the presidential election in June, how the country has become extremely polarized, and how conservative media in the country has been invoking the ghosts of Shining Path to discredit the leftist candidate Pedro Castillo, who currently leads in polls against conservative candidate Keiko Fujimori. We also talk about the recent victories of the left in Chile, which has resulted in a constitutional reform that could pave the way for significant social change in the country.
Yolandra Hancock, board-certified pediatrician and obesity medicine specialist, talks to us about how suicide, alcohol-related diseases, and accidental drug overdoses were the main factors driving a year-to-year drop in average life expectancy between 2015 and 2017 in the United States, and how deaths in all of those categories have soared over the past decade. We also talk about how these “diseases of despair” are connected to economic systems in which precarity and insecurity drive people to self-medicate out of desperation due to a lack of support and resources, and what we could do to solve this crisis.
Linwood Tauheed, professor of economics at University of Missouri - Kansas City, and former president of the National Economic Association, talks to us about the Biden administration’s infrastructure spending plan, which could be significantly trimmed down from the original two trillion dollar proposal, what could be excluded from the plan, the plans to increase the corporate tax rate to 28%, and its chances in light of strong resistance in Congress.
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