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Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage and Julian Assange

Plus Robert Pollin on Medicare for All and Alyssa Battistoni on climate politics.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

May 30, 2019

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the Westminster Magistrates Court after he was arrested in London on April 11, 2019.(Reuters / Hannah McKay)

The indictment of Julian Assange on espionage charges is an attack on freedom of the press—that’s what Daniel Ellsberg argues. Ellsberg too was indicted under the Espionage Act—and put on trial by the Nixon administration in 1972, because he leaked a top secret history of American involvement in Viet Nam to The New York Times and other publications. They called it the Pentagon Papers.

Also: Medicare for All—opponents say it would be impossibly expensive. Exactly how are we going to pay for it? Robert Pollin of U Mass Amherst explains; he’s one of 219 economists who just signed an open letter to Congress urging passage of Medicare for All.

Plus: the politics of climate change. We know the world is getting hotter and the storms are getting bigger and the seas are rising. What we need to know now is not what climate change will do, but rather what we should do—because, for us, climate change is a political problemAlyssa Battistoni comments.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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