Episode 1225
Prosecuting protesters / Carolijn Terwindt
Sep 9 2020
I think we have to just really be laser focused on the pro-democratic project. That doesn't mean that we ignore the harms that this authoritarian incursion has put upon our society, our government, et cetera. I think there are many things that probably need to be unwound, right? Either fully or partially in terms of autocratic state capacity. But I also think that it is not going to be just enough to undo because the systems and the structures that we've been living in have not delivered for people for decades. We've been in a sort of cost of living crisis for decades. People have been struggling with healthcare, the cost of education, the cost of housing for decades. And so simply undoing what Trump has done is not going to be enough to actually create the society, the democracy, and the economy that we need and we deserve. And frankly, in my opinion, it's not going to be enough to win an election, right? I don't think people are looking for just the opposite of what we're experiencing right now. I think people are looking for policy makers who truly listen. Who truly understand and who truly are putting forth their best effort to address the concerns of regular people and put power back in the hands of regular people. So just as the administration and its allies have really kind of laced our political institutions with an authoritarian administration, such as retooling the IRS to be used for surveillance as opposed to in tax enforcement. A pro-democracy coalition has to do the same thing. And so a big question I think for all of us and all of your listeners is what are the different ways in which we can kind of weave in a pro-democracy bias into our state institutions? This is not to be clear about partisanship. This is about democracy. How do we make sure that our democratic institutions are sort of fundamentally oriented towards helping people, helping society, and building that trust back in the public sector?
Rakeem Mabud speaks with This Is Hell! about her new essay for Common Wealth that she co-wrote with Melanie Brusseler titled “The Power Grab: The Authoritarian Coalition’s Strategy of Power Consolidation”.
Rakeen is an expert on how economic trends impact people’s everyday lives. She was most recently the Chief Economist at Groundwork Collaborative, and has also held roles in the US Treasury Department, Roosevelt Institute and Time’s Up. She holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and a BA from Wellesley College.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will... read more
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Aug 27 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is also, paradoxically, the drink.
There’s a funny thing that happens when tyrannical rulers train their populations to accept untimely and unnecessary death as an everyday occurrence: the populace becomes ever more likely to rise up en masse and put their lives on the line battling those hired to police them and, eventually, making their way to the throats of the rulers. The same mistake the French and then the US military and its civilian chess-masters made throughout their colonial misadventures in Indochina are being made on the streets of every major and minor city in the world.
The people will win. Even against the other people, because the other people are worshipful tools of the tyrants. Against the cops, because we vastly outnumber the cops, and they seem to be nothing more than a subset of the worshipful tool people anyway. Against the military because, in the last analysis, even the military is divided between worshipful tools and real people. And once we get past all these tools, we’ll win against the rulers, because the only thing protecting them will be their technology, and they need people to make that technology work. And, being the people, we have those people on our side.
In short, the more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.
The evil idiots who presume to be in charge of everything crossed the line ages ago. This week in Milwaukee they shot another unarmed, entirely innocent black man in front of his children, partially paralyzing him. In Glasgow, Scotland, a Ugandan refugee starved to death. The Greeks have been dumping refugees alive into the sea. Oh, and the death count from Covid-19 under Donald Dump’s distracted negligence is over 175,000. They’re coercing people to choose to work during the plague or be forced out onto the street. They’re dumping refugees in the desert to die. They’re putting as many poor people as they can into prisons and jails. They’re cutting down the few forests that aren’t on fire, depriving indigenous peoples of homes and livelihoods. They’re letting the food supply decay in the ruins of Iowa, as farmers go without aid, a policy of massacre-by-negligence which seems to have begun with the Dick Cheney administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Crops are failing, empires are... read more