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For decades, the US economy has been deeply intertwined with war-making — from Cold War-era aerospace and nuclear weapons to today’s AI-driven military technologies. But this wasn’t always seen as inevitable.

In the 1970s and ’80s, organizers built unlikely coalitions across the peace, labor, civil rights, and faith movements to challenge military spending and push for an economy that served people instead of perpetual war. Their work helped popularize the idea of economic conversion: redirecting public resources away from weapons production and toward jobs that meet human needs.

In this episode, we revisit that history — and ask what it can teach us now. As communities organize against new defense-tech projects and local governments continue to subsidize weapons manufacturers, activists are once again grappling with how to confront the war economy — and what a more just, peaceful alternative could look like.

This is the final episode of our season, MIC Drop, reporting on how the military-industrial complex shapes local economies — and how communities are organizing in response.

Guests:

Dr. David Cortright, former Executive Director of SANE; Larry Frank, former Development Director for Jobs with Peace LA; Nathan Kim, Graduate Research Associate at DAIR

Additional Resources:

Cortright v. Resor Reenactment and details about the Waging Peace event at George Washington University

UCLA: Memory Work Los Angeles project on Jobs with Peace

Recording of the 1982 Central Park Rally

Brown University Costs of War Project

As violence continues in Gaza, a new strategy inside the Palestine solidarity movement is taking shape — one aimed not at city streets or college campuses, but at the arteries of the global economy.

Around the world, dockworkers have refused to unload ships tied to Israel’s military supply chain. In Italy, Morocco, India, and Sweden, those refusals have sparked national strikes and port shutdowns. But in the United States — where 70% of Israel’s weapons originate — things look very different.

This episode dives into the complicated reality facing American activists trying to “block the boat”: a divided labor movement, powerful unions with clashing politics, and a military-industrial complex that shields its most sensitive logistics behind military bases and Air Force cargo planes.

We meet East Coast organizers struggling to reach conservative longshore workers, West Coast veterans who once helped stop South African apartheid cargo, and the researchers studying how social-movement unionism succeeds — and fails.

What power do workers really have to stop the flow of war? And what happens when activists push that power to its limits?

Guests:

Tova Fry, organizer and activist with Port Workers & Communities for Palestine
Katy Fox-Hodess, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield
Rafeef Ziadah, Senior Lecturer at Kings College
Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center
Clarence Thomas, retired dock worker at ILWU Local 10
Charmaine Chua, Acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley

Additional Resources:

Community picket lines and social movement unionism on the US docks, 2014–2021: Organizing lessons from the Block the Boat campaign for Palestine, Katy Fox-Hodess and Rafeef Ziadah, Critical Sociology

Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront, Howard Kimeldorf

This Union Is Famous for Opposing South African Apartheid. Now It’s Standing With Gaza., Sarah Lazare, The Nation

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, Peter Cole

For a century, the weapons industry has helped shape St. Louis — from the McDonnell Douglas fighters that once symbolized American air power to Boeing’s sprawling factories today. But when thousands of machinists walked off the job this year, something cracked in “Fighterland, USA.”

In this episode, we head to the picket line to hear from the workers who build America’s bombs and jets — those struggling to afford rent, groceries, and daycare while assembling weapons worth more than their annual salaries. Reporter Sophie Hurwitz takes us inside a city reckoning with its identity: Can St. Louis really become the “Silicon Valley of defense” when the jobs it’s banking on are shrinking? What happens when an economy built on war no longer guarantees stability? And what does labor power look like in an industry whose products help shape conflicts worldwide?

While some in town are fighting to keep defense dollars flowing, others want St. Louis to imagine a different future. This is the story of a strike, a city, and a century-long relationship with the military-industrial complex now reaching its breaking point.

Guests:

Sophie Hurwitz, Reporting Fellow, Inkstick Media; Breanna Donnell, Rick Perdue, Mason, and other Boeing Machinists; Stephen Quackenbush, Professor and Director of Defense and Strategic Studies, University of Missouri; Maxi Glamour, 3rd Ward Committeeperson, St. Louis

Additional Resources:

“How One Dissenter Left Boeing,” Sophie Hurwitz, Inkstick Media

“The Year Arms Contractors Stopped Supporting Pride,” Sophie Hurwitz, Inkstick Media