Hey guys, you are watching the Jacobin Show. I'm your host Jen Pan. We air live every Wednesday at 6 p.m. Eastern. So if you're tuning in, thank you. Good to see you.

Please subscribe to the channel and hit like if you haven't already. Before we start today, I also want to especially thank our YouTube members. I'm very excited about today's show because we have an interview with Adolf Reed and it's actually not the usual Zoom interview.

Ariela and Kale were able to sit down with Adolf in person in New York and the interview is filmed and edited professionally. And the reason why I bring up the YouTube members is obviously because of your support. We're now able to start to move toward doing bigger and better videos like that.

I hope Kale doesn't mind if I just share a teaser that we actually have quite a few hours of footage of Adolf Reed and some of that is going to be for a different video project that is to come. We have a lot of other great videos that are kind of in the works. So again, thank you for your support. Thank you for bearing with us as we try to figure out our video channel on, you know, as the shoestring operation that we are. We really appreciate you guys.

And yeah, like I said, it's a great interview. I think you guys will really like it. It's, it's, Ariela has has, you know, talked to Adolf Reed about his new book, The South, which if you guys haven't, haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet, it's really great. It's out now from Berso and you'll hear more about that.

Now, for my part, I also have some comments coming up about some new polling that has come out about Biden's approval ratings and also looking at what voters think about the Democrats and the Republicans and how, how both of those parties handle the economy.

You guys have probably or you may be familiar with the kind of old chestnut that Republicans do a better job on the economy. Lots of people say that it's a myth that's been I think floating around for several decades.

And, you know, in light of the past four decades of failed trickle down policy, I want to look at why people still believe this to be true.

So that said, obviously the thing at the top of the news this week and last week has been the situation in Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So to that end, I actually wanted to bring on a guest from the Jacobin circle, Bronco Marcheteach, he is a staff writer at Jacobin and he's been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He is also the author of the book yesterday's man, the case against Joe Biden, if you guys watched the state of the union last night and his recent article in Jacobin, which I'm going to be talking to him about today is four ways to counter Russian aggression that don't risk nuclear war.

So first of all, Bronco, your article, of course, lays out a couple different solutions for countering Russian aggression that don't risk escalating the nuclear threat.

And before we get into those solutions proper, I want to ask you about sanctions because obviously the US, Canada, European nations, the UK, plenty of nations so far, the kind of front first first response to Russia has been economic and financial sanctions.

And this is kind of interesting because I feel like the expressed motivation behind these sanctions was to punish Putin, punish the Russian elite.

But of course, over the last week, we've seen that the value of the rubble has plummeted. The Russian economy appears to be heading into a depression.

So let's talk about sanctions for a minute. Is this the right tactic or what does this achieve and does this actually help deescalate the situation?

Well, I think for those of us on the left and people who care about the Ukrainian people, people who want to end war, I think that the point of sanctions should be to put pressure along with political pressure, diplomatic pressure, whatever other kind of pressure you can that doesn't escalate the conflict on Putin, on the Russian leadership to end the war or to agree some sort of ceasefire with Ukraine.

I think the way the sanctions started out, which was to target some of the oligarchs, to target the Russian leadership, that was the right way to go.

I think obviously the west or the international community, whatever words or euphemisms you want to use, we want to express this approval towards this and we want to deter this from happening.

Again, with the hands of Russia or another country. The question is, are these sanctions that has now have enlarged and broadened and are now really not just specifically targeting the Russian elite but are very much turning into a formal collective punishment, is that really the way we want to go?

The European leaders have spoken about collapsing the Russian economy essentially, which sort of moves us beyond just punishment to something akin to economic warfare.

But my worry is that if you end up taking such an indiscriminate approach to punish Russia by essentially making ordinary Russians lives miserable, it could be on the moral aspect.

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