Citations Needed

In this News Brief, we breakdown the entirely predictable cycle of media coverage, liberal handwringing, vague "progressive" outrage, and why the most recent "clashes" should compel nominal progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to formally support BDS.

In this public News Brief, we dissect recent news that the Biden admin backs a TRIPS waiver at the WTO and why the ultimate terms of the agreement matter more than splashy headlines.

In this News Brief, we breakdown the anti-TRIPS waiver corporate and ideological forces behind the seemingly good-hearted #VaxLive concert on May 8th. Namely, the Gates Foundation, Johnson and Johnson and a who's who of global leaders working to prevent the production of cheap generic vaccines for the global south.

"Trucking Shortage: Drivers Aren't Always In It For The Long Haul," NPR tells us. "The U.S. Is Running Out of Nurses," reports The Atlantic. "There's A Nationwide STEM Teacher Shortage. Will It Cost Us The Next Einstein?" Forbes laments. '"'The Future Depends on Teachers,' PSA launched targeting teachers amid shortage," notes a local FOX affiliate. Every few weeks, we hear about an essential industry suffering from a critical "labor shortage" –– nurses, truck drivers, software engineers, teachers, construction. According to corporate trade groups and their media mouthpieces, these industries simply can’t find trained workers to fill their ranks. But a closer examination of "worker shortage" claims reveals that there’s very rarely an actual worker shortage –– what there is, time and again, is more accurately described as a "pay shortage": industries not wanting to provide adequate compensation or safe work conditions for the available labor market that is perfectly willing and ready to work. Instead of a "worker shortage," there's a “"not hyper liquidity in the labor market" problem for capital –– the perfectly capable and trained workers industries do have are not easily replaceable, potentially or already unionized, and making demands of capital those industries simply don't like. In an effort to increase recruiting of new potential employees, promote legislation that loosens licensing or health and safety standards, and reinforce media-ready memes that American workers are lazy and greedy, industry lobbying groups constantly whine about "labor shortages," knowing the media will mindlessly repeat these claims without any skepticism or curiosity as to why they're reporting on the exact same "labor shortages" every year for 40 years. Our guest is CEPR's Kevin Cashman.

Almost every wealthy country in the world has some type of universal healthcare system--except for the United States. With over 170 million of its citizens left to fend for themselves in a sprawling and complex maze of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, tax credits, child care subsidies, co-pays, deductibles and cost-sharing, the U.S. has not only the largest uninsured population, but also the most expensive system on Earth per capita. Why America doesn’t have a universal healthcare system has historically been explained away with a reductionist mix of pathologizing and circular reasoning. "America hates big government," "we love choice," "Americans distrust anything that reeks of socialism." And while this is true in some limited sense, it avoids the bigger question of why has American so-called "democracy" rejected the numerous proposals to enact a single payer or other forms of universal healthcare? While there may be some innate Protestant work ethic or rugged individual mentality at work here, there’s also been a decades-long multimillion dollar campaign funded by big business, doctor, pharmaceutical and hospital industry interests, and the insurance industry to convince the public to reject universal public healthcare. Indeed, if Americans were somehow intractably opposed to the notion––if they were hardwired to reject socialized medicine––these forces would never have had to spend so much money in the first place. On this episode, we explore the 80-year long campaign by capital to convince you to not support universal health programs, how these campaigns have historically fear-mongered against Communists, immigrants and African Americans, who benefits from a precarious, employer-controlled healthcare insurance system, and how this propaganda war on the American mind is anything but over. Our guest is Ben Palmquist, Director of the Health Care and Economic Democracy Program at Partners for Dignity and Rights.

"Yemen war: Joe Biden ends support for operations in foreign policy reset," reports the BBC. "Trump: US will be out of Afghanistan by Christmas 2020," cheered Military Times. "Trump Orders Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Northern Syria," the New York Times told us.   For decades, the United States has very often appeared to have "ended" wars that do not, in fact, end at all. Open-ended jargon like "residual counter terror forces," "Vietnamization," "military advisors," along with deliberately ambiguous timetables, process criticisms––all are used to confuse the average media consumer.   America's politicians know the American public broadly dislikes war and empire––and thus wants to see it restrained––but these same politicians don't really want to end wars so they have a frequent PR problem: How do you make it look like you’re ending a war or occupation without really doing so?   To solve this conundrum, American political leaders have perfected the art of fake-ending a war. Which is to say, announcing a war is going to end, typically around election time, only to––once the headlines make a big splash––backtrack, obfuscate, claim the "situation on the ground has changed" or the military involvement will only be in a "limited" or "defensive" capacity, shuffle troops around or find other thin pretexts to continue the war or occupation.   In this episode, we discuss the United States' history of fake-ending wars, who these pronouncements are meant to please, why troops levels are often impossible to know, and why so many of our so-called "wars" are not really wars at all, but military occupations that are never really meant to end.   Our guest is Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor at Michigan State University.

In this public News Brief, we break down the PR campaign against activists who want intellectual property rules suspended so that poor countries can manufacture their own generic vaccines. With guest Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen.

In this public News Brief, we catch up with Austin activists Seneca Savoie and Chris Harris as they fight far right demagoguery, rich liberal NIMBY fence-sitting, and stigmatizing local media coverage of Travis County's unhoused population.

"It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law," blares a Washington Monthly headline. "Tucson Police Helping Homeless with New Outreach Program," reports Tucson, Arizona’s ABC affiliate KGUN9. "Programs that monitor students' social media are seen as a means of heading off the next tragic shooting," says an article in GovTech. "How the Department of Defense could help win the war on climate change," explains Politico.   In the United States, it seems no matter what crisis emerges - the planet warming due to fossil extraction, QAnon white nationalists storm Capitol, mass shooting, substance abuse crisis, a surge in homelessness - the response from our pundit, think tank, and political classes is always, almost without exception, to frame the response in terms that empower, embolden and - most importantly - fund preexisting carceral and militaristic responses.   To fight the scourge of white nationalism under Trump and show we are serious about our anti-racism, the solution is apparently to give more money and surveillance powers to the FBI, an organization itself drenched in white supremacy and anti-Muslim violence. To show we are serious about climate change, we must give the reins of crisis management to the Pentagon. To show we care deeply about ending homelessness and poverty or addressing mental health crises and drug abuse, we must always ensure the police remain equipped, resourced and well-funded in order to monitor and target vulnerable populations.   This "House Always Wins" ecosystem is no coincidence; it is fueled by a patchwork of perverse incentives: security state and weapons contractor-funded “bipartisan” think tanks and media outlets ready with turn-key "solutions" to every social problem that further pad the budgets of those already in power: the FBI, Pentagon, ICE, NSA, police forces, large corporations all with their own power-serving "security" and "extremist" experts ready to jump on every crises to explain why those already in power deserve even more of it.   If the most basic environmental protections are to pass, they must relate to US military preparedness." If Mars is to be explored, it's to ensure the United States’s primacy over China and Russia. If there's an outcry for mental health services for unhoused people, police budgets surge to cover "training" and community outreach.   On this episode, we explore how, under our regime of austerity, the house always wins; namely, how the security state is, by design, enriched at the expense of much needed programs and infrastructure like education, housing, and healthcare - with media all too eager to convince us the solution is to instead simply further bloat the budgets of police departments, border patrol, federal surveillance and law enforcement.   Our guest is University of Illinois-Chicago professor Nicole Nguyen.

On this News Brief, we discuss the ubiquitous weaponization of the term "taxpayer" in media and politics and how it deliberately smuggles right-wing, transactional and deeply racialized notions of people's relationship with their government into our cultural understanding of taxation, public spending and social services.   Our guest is the Law and Political Economy Project's Raúl Carrillo.