Pramila Jayapal on Going From Banker to Organizer, and Eric Foner on the Right to Vote

Pramila Jayapal on Going From Banker to Organizer, and Eric Foner on the Right to Vote

On this week’s episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, the representative and the historian join us to discuss politics and history.

Jon Wiener and Start Making Sense
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Pramila Jayapal is head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and represents Seattle in the House. She will explain how, as a young immigrant from India, she went from being an investment banker to a lifelong organizer. Her book Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change is out now.

Also on this week’s show, historian Eric Foner talks about about voting rights, voter suppression, who gets to be a citizen, the rights of undocumented immigrants, and about the roots of mass incarceration. They all relate to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments: part of the country’s attempt to redefine citizenship after the end of slavery. His book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution is out now in paperback.

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Jon Wiener Jon 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.


Start Making Sense Start 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.  


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