Like a lot of people in my generation, I hardly ever buy a newspaper. I get some news from the radio, and a lot online. It can be hard to keep up with the more serious articles that the capitalist class writes for its own information that appear in publications like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. You often find coverage of some events in the business newspapers that you won't find in a local newspaper; the capitalists need to know about the world, but they don't think ordinary working people do. Recently, I have been checking out the podcasts that the publications of the capitalist class offer for free.

The Economist offers a few podcasts for free on iTunes each week. This week's was a fascinating explanation of what happened with the Russian lawyer who died suspiciously in jail in Russia. He was an accounting attorney who had been hired by an American investor doing business in Russia. The lawyer was arrested after testifying against corrupt police in a court case and appears to have died of a treatable illness while in prison; he was refused medical care. One interesting aspect of the piece is the degree of corruption in Russia that has accompanied the establishment of capitalism there, the other is the indignation with which the American investor describes the state of Russian capitalism. To listen to him, you would think that "fair" capitalism has already solved social problems here in the US.

Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. He reads his column in a free podcast available on iTunes or here. His most recent podcast was very interesting as he begins the article by almost apologizing for arguing for higher taxes, and then lays out his reasoning for supporting "windfall taxes" on the earnings of banks. Wolf acknowledges a lot of facts about the crisis and bailout of banks, some of which you don't routinely read in the popular press: that the banks are getting free money from the taxpayers, that the banks take big financial risks and reap all the rewards while the taxpayers pick up anything they happen to lose, and that people are pretty angry about this state of affairs. Obviously, the CEOs of the world are forced to pay some attention to the massive anger in society about the trillions of dollars that have been transferred from government treasuries to the tiny class of people who reap the profit of the banks. Hopefully, students and workers everywhere will continue to make the Martin Wolfs of the world worry.