Going Deep on Foreign Policy

The Deep Focus Podcast is Essential Listening

I think of myself as reasonably well informed about where to get solid progressive analysis on foreign policy and related issues, but every once in a while I find a new source that bowls me over with the quality of its analysis and the clarity of its presentation.

Yesterday I found just such a source, the Deep Focus podcast. It must have been on my radar at some level, but yesterday I taped an interview for the podcast with my friend Matt Hoh of the Eisenhower Media Network, who is guest hosting on the podcast for a month. We spoke about the full costs of U.S. militarism – not just the Pentagon budget, but spending on veterans affairs, ICE, military aid, nuclear weapons, interest on the debt related to war spending, and more. As noted in a recent report issued by the Project on Government Oversight, taken together these costs push the annual bill for wars, preparation for wars, and the war against us at home to over $2 trillion. I summarize the new report and reflect on its implications in this recent piece at Inkstick Media.

As I often do in preparation for appearing on a podcast, I looked at some prior episodes of Deep Focus. There is an excellent interview with Matt Hoh himself by Richard Wolff, a prior guest host of the podcast, on “Iran, China, and the Crisis of American Power.” And I was schooled in the true agenda and broad implications of Elon Musk’s business and political agenda in Matt’s interview with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, authors of Muskism: A Guide to the Perplexed. I can’t do the interview justice in summary form – you need to listen to it, and buy their book. It’s the best analysis I’ve seen of how Musk wants not just to enrich himself at our expense, but change how capitalism operates. His weakness, as the authors point out, is that he and his tech mogul friends have not really come up with a strategy to get buy-in from the people who will produce and consume the products and the system of organizing our society and our economy that they are pushing for. And it is resistance at that level – from the workers and communities they want to exploit to build their new techno-state – that is our best hope of stopping them.

So, you should add Deep Focus to your media routine. I’ll circulate the interview Matt did with me when it goes up.