The Dig

Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It's also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the case, it received little attention. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She talks with The Dig about prisons in American life.

All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump—aside, of course, from the shadowy national security state— at the federal level. The courts have the power to stop and strike down laws and actions that violate the law or the Constitution. Recent rulings by a federal district judge in Washington and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear after they blocked Trump’s Muslim and refugee bans. But the judiciary, despite pretenses to the contrary, is fundamentally political. It can shred civil rights and economic protections as efficiently as it can protect them. Ultimately, major judicial conflicts get decided by the Supreme Court, which has been split 4-4 since Republicans blocked President Obama’s effort to nominate Merrick Garland to take the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Today, Dan Denvir speaks to Jed Purdy about the judiciary and other matters. Purdy is a professor at Duke Law and the author of three books on American political identity including The Meaning of Property. His most recent book is After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene and he has published articles in many, many publications.

Mark Blyth wasn't surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all.  Blyth, the author of "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea," explains how economic crisis has led to upheaval in a political establishment that worked obsessively to eliminate inflation and maximize profits at the expense of general wellbeing. This crisis has produced horrific peril, as the Trump administration's first weeks have made clear. But for the Left, it also provides historic opportunities. Blyth recently spoke with Daniel Denvir during a live taping of the Dig in front of a crowd of 150 in Providence, Rhode Island.

George Cicariello-Maher is professor of political science at Drexel University and author of several books, including Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, published by Verso as part of the Jacobin Series. He recently drew the ire of white supremacist, "alt-right" trolls after a mocking tweet about "white genocide," including death threats to his family. Perhaps more concerning was the response from Drexel Administration, which almost immediately released a statement calling his tweets “utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing,” and stating that they “do not in any way reflect the values of the University.” Drexel eventually backed off after a public campaign in defense of Cicariello-Maher. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px; line-height: 16.0px; font: 12.0px Geneva; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} He discusses the incident as well as issues of violence and free speech in the United States.

Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a free-market, far-right Christian billionaire dedicated to privatizing public schools, to be his Secretary of Education. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos made it painfully clear that she has little understanding of public education aside from her dedication to destroying it. She is the heir to an auto parts fortune and her husband, Dick, is the heir to a fortune derived from the direct sales company Amway, which the FTC at one point decided was not a pyramid scheme. Interestingly, she is also the brother of Erik Prince, who founded the infamous mercenary army Blackwater has now, according to The Intercept, been quietly advising the Trump Administration. The couple, thanks to their money and relentless ideological drive, are heavy-duty power players in Michigan politics, where they have wreaked havoc on Detroit public schools. In many ways, this oligarch’s nomination is the extreme and cartoonesque outcome of decades of bipartisan corporate-aligned policy that pushed charters and high stakes testing, and attacked the teachers unions that stood in their way. Today, we’re joined by historian Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s leading scholars of education policy and a vocal critic of corporate reform efforts that promote privatization and high-stakes testing as the solution to problems largely created by segregation, poverty and funding inequity. Amongst many other books, Ravitch is the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”

This week we re-broadcast Jacobin Magazine (https://www.jacobinmag.com), Verso (https://www.versobooks.com/), and Haymarket Books (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/)' anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Start times: Naomi Klein (6:03) Anand Gopal (26:14) Jeremy Scahill (46:19) Owen Jones (1:05:00) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1:23:18) Please consider supporting The Dig! Even a donation of just $2 or $3 dollars per month will make a huge difference. Your money goes towards studio space, production costs, and, of course, Dan's intensive research and preparations for each episode. Your financial support will help us make this a sustainable endeavor. Support us here (patreon.com/user?u=4839800).

Building a diverse working class movement to transform America

Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of American politics—an immutable feature of everyday life rather than outrageous abuses to be resisted or, at least, debated. Soon, Donald Trump will become president, meaning that a man brazenly indifferent to the rule of law will be in charge of a killing and surveillance machinery that is already quite lawless. Today we are joined by Glenn Greenwald, a co-founding editor of The Intercept and one of the reporters who Edward Snowden entrusted with secret NSA documents exposing mass surveillance. Glenn is one of the country's leading critics of the national security state—and the establishment media and political figures who helped pave the way to Trump's win.  

Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It's no surprise that Trump's message struck a chord: right-wing nativism has been rising for decades and hardcore xenophobes had long since taken over the Republican Party. Worse yet, so-called immigration moderates on both sides of the aisle—including Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—have sought to placate those reactionary forces by militarizing the border and orchestrating mass deportations. Now that Trump has won the presidency, undocumented immigrants are rightly worried and mobilizing to defend their communities. Today, we are joined by two guests who can help us understand where immigration politics are heading in the months to come and how we got here. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law and the author of the blog “Crimmigration.” Chris Newman, Legal Director at the National Day Labor Organizing Network.  

Journalist Sarah Jaffe's new book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt chronicles the movements for economic and racial justice that will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump. Daniel interviewed Sarah before a live audience at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Donald Trump's election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian orthodoxy, America-first isolationism and War on Terror extremism. It has also prompted us to relaunch this podcast. Today, we'll be discussing why Trump won and what that says about the political moment in the United States. Many apologies for the crappy quality of some of the audio. We had some technical difficulties that have been figured out for future episodes. Our guests are: Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College, and is the author of books including “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” and “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard and the author “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Matt Karp is an historian at Princeton University, contributing editor at Jacobin, and the author of “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy." Thanks for listening. Please subscribe, leave a review and spread the word.  

This was the pilot episode for The Dig, a podcast exploring the politics of American class warfare. This month features a discussion about ending the drug war with Sharda Sekaran of the Drug Policy Alliance and Jacob Sullum from Reason magazine. Drug legalization looks a lot different depending on where you stand politically. But socialists and libertarians mostly agree that to end the drug war we must put a complete end to drug prohibition. We relaunched in November 2016. Subscribe and tune in for new episodes every two weeks or so.