After a long hiatus from The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt return to a more battered and broken world, whose lungs throb with phlegm while a new world is breathing hard and fast, demanding to be born. For this episode, our co-hosts discuss how the Old World Tragedy of Police Brutality is ripping into the New World Tragedy of COVID-19, and why these clashing tragedies have made the Old World no longer tolerable among an increasingly young, queer, multiracial, working class populace who have “nothing left to lose but their chains.” While student debt, climate chaos, unemployment and the profit-seeking predations of private healthcare savage human solidarity, we hide in our homes, we question, dream, yearn, and now Americans are taking to the streets in the greatest uprising since 1968. What then must be done? In order to fully embrace a future of the Utopian Sphere, we must dismantle the twin seduction-myths that the police “protect us” and “prevent crime” (when they appear largely after the crime). Further still, we must realize that an institution designed for slave patrols and anti-union thuggery can no longer live in our New World of the Mixtape. As the Jim Crow adage goes, this “blue by day, white by night” institution has been—and will always be—a racist vector of domination, making any glorious and glowing future or radical liberation impossible. So this loaded gun of Patriarchy must lose its bullets and be melted by fire. Matt & Jesse chart a path on how we might best do that, while more importantly stepping back and listening in, as the Movement for Black Lives traces the first etchings of Police Abolishment.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Jeb Su in Forbes: “Amazon Owns Nearly Half Of The Public-Cloud Infrastructure Market Worth Over $32 Billion: Report”
Russell Brandom in Verge: “Mapping Out Amazon’s Invisible Server Empire”
Mario Vasquez in Truthout: “$1 of Every $2 Spent Online Goes to Amazon. Can We Break the Company’s Stranglehold?”
Slavoj Žižek In These Times: “Freedom in the Cloud”
Scott Neuman in NPR: “Essential Workers Plan May Day Strikes; Others Demand End To COVID-19 Lockdowns”
Lauren Steiner Interviews a Former Amazon Employee, Chris Smalls, and His Colleague Derrick Palmer (who are both African American) on The Robust Opposition: “Amazon Endangers Workers During a Crisis” {YouTube}
Kari Paul in The Guardian: “Amazon Says 'Black Lives Matter.' But the Company Has Deep Ties to Policing”
Amy Harmon and Sabrina Tavernise in The New York Times: “One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New York Times: “The End of Black Politics: Our Best Leaders Are Organizers and Workers — Not Elected Officials.”
Glen Ford in the Black Agenda Report: “MLK and The Black Misleadership Class”
Zach Carter & Ryan Grim in The New Republic: “The Congressional Black Caucus Is at War With Itself Over Wall Street”
Glen Ford in the Black Agenda Report: “Black Caucus Blasted for Turning Its Back on Rep. Omar”
Stephan A. Crockett Jr. in The Root: “Nancy Pelosi and 'Nem Just Introduced Sweeping Police Reform Bill While Wearing Kente Cloth”
Caitlin Johnstone in Caitlinjohstone.com: “The Democratic Party Exists to Co-Opt and Kill Authentic Change Movements”
The Onion: “Controversial Photos Of Dem Leaders Wearing Kente Cloth Resurface From 3 Days Ago”
Sarah Ricard in Rotten Tomatoes: “D.C Insiders Call VEEP the Most Realistic Show About Politics”
Rachel Schnalzer in The Los Angeles Times: “Is Time Flying by Oddly Quickly During COVID-19? Here’s Why You May Feel That Way.”
James M. Broadway and Britteney Sandoval in Scientific American: “Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?”
Suevon Lee in ProPublica: “Big Bird Debate: How Much Does Federal Funding Matter to Public Broadcasting?”
Thom Hartmann in Truthout: “The Corporate Dictatorship of PBS and NPR”
Trevor Hughes in USA Today: “In Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Protest Zone, Some Black Leaders Express Doubt About White Allies”
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) also known as “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHOP): Newer Information Updated on Its Wikipedia Page
Statues of Colonialists, Racists & Slave Holders Being Pulled Down:
Al Jazeera: “In Pictures: Confederate Symbols Torn Down Amid US Protests”
Theresa Machemer in the Smithsonian Magazine: “Christopher Columbus Statues Beheaded, Pulled Down Across America”
BBC: “Confederate and Columbus Statues Toppled by US Protesters”
Dionne Searcey and John Eligon in The New York Times: “Minneapolis Will Dismantle Its Police Force, Council Members Pledge”
Jordan Rose in Complex: “Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti Cutting Roughly $150 Million From LAPD Budget”
Aliki Seferou in CultureTrip: “Christiania: 11 Things to Know About Copenhagen’s Hippie ‘Free Town’”
Matthew Rozsa in Salon: “In Defense of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone: The Noble History of a Utopian Idea”
The History of the Paris Commune of 1871 by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray
“The Paris Commune - From the Archive, 1871” - Compiled by Richard Nelsson from the Archives of The Guardian
Liz Jones and Isolde Raftery for KUOW: “This Woman 'Died Three Times' After Seattle Police Hit Her with a Blast Ball”
Equal Justice Initiative: “Police Killings Against Native Americans Are Off the Charts and Off the Radar”
From Wikipedia: 1999 Seattle WTO Protests
“Ten Years Ago: Battle in Seattle” by Eric Jaccard (An Actual Participant of the WTO Protests and Re-Views the Film of the Same Namesake.}
Amy Goodman from Democracy Now: “20 Years After the Battle of Seattle: Vandana Shiva & Lori Wallach on Historic 1999 WTO Protests”
Tucker Carlson and the Mind-Mold of FOX News: “Fox News Busted for Altering Protest Images and Video Again” from Peter Wade in the Rolling Stone.
Emily Reynolds in Huck: “The Joy of Protest: How Modern Activists Are Beating Burnout”
Jeffrey Rosen (Another Liberal) in The Atlantic Going Full Meltdown-Mode About “Mob Rule” & the Unruly Masses: “America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare”
Ethan Millman in the Rolling Stone: “Public Enemy Radio – Minus Flavor Flav – Rallies Bernie Sanders Supporters at Benefit Show”
Paula Mejia in Newsweek: “Police in Norway Haven't Killed Anyone in Nearly 10 Years”
Mark Memmot in NPR: “For First Time In Memory, Icelandic Police Shoot And Kill”
What Must Be Done? Take Their Guns Away - #8ToAbolition 2020 - Demilitarize Communities
The Interrupters (2011): A Documentary by Steve James - The Trailer of Which Can Be Found on IMDB.com & Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes & Metacritic
Simon Sinek – “We can make demands of our leaders, and have a desire to change systems, but we are only responsible for ourselves and our own actions. The change has to start within each of us.” {AKA The Tim Wise Liberal Self-Flagellation Industry}Connor Woodman on Verso Books: “How British police and intelligence are a product of the Imperial Boomerang Effect”
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
More on The Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World: It’s First One Hundred Years (2006) by Fred W. Thompson in AK Press.
America’s Twin Sin: Native Genocide & Black Enslavement as seen in Jonathan Ostler’s Article in The Atlantic: “The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence” - The revolution wasn’t only an effort to establish independence from the British—it was also a push to preserve slavery and suppress Native American resistance.
Dylan Rodriguez’s 2018 Speech Given to 150th Anniversary Symposium of the UC Academic Senate Republished in Remaking the University: “Fiat Lux, Free Speech and Police Violence” (Focuses on the History of the UC System as a Colonial Project and the More Recent Student Debt Protests in 2011 at UC Riverside)
Former UC Riverside Chancellor (and now Chancellor of the Cal State System) Timothy White & Democratic Nominee Joe Biden Are One in the Same: Juice-Box Liberals: “Just Shoot Them in The Leg!”
More Dumb-Dumb “Uncle Joe” Comments: “People Want Results, Not a Revolution”
The Demand of 2020: “Defund The Police” as Defined Sam Levin in The Guardian: “What Does 'Defund the Police' Mean? The Rallying Cry Sweeping the US – Explained”
Mariame Kaba in The New York Times: “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
Richard Luscombe in The Guardian on the backlash following Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed in The New York Times: “New York Times senior editor resigns amid backlash over controversial op-ed”
Defund The Police! – An Abolitionist Demand - #8ToAbolition
Did you really think all of those police reforms after the Eric Garner tragedy during the Obama-era were effective? Well, Minneapolis Police had adopted all of the reforms, and it failed miserably: Alice Speri, Alleen Brown and Mara Hvistendahl in The Intercept: “The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failure of Police Reform”
More Context on The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)
The End of Policing (2017) by Alex S. Vitale from Verso Books
Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (2018) by Leigh Goodmark
Sexual Violence Is the Second Most Frequent Crime Comitted by Cops
Case in Point: Alex Samanha in Buzzfeed: “An 18-Year-Old Said She Was Raped
While In Police Custody. The Officers Say She Consented”
Cops Are Biggest Purveyors of Domestic Violence in US.
Supporters Upset at Bernie Sanders Recent Claims That Police Need More Training & Better Pay.
Short Film: Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Tre Johnson’s Op-Ed in The Washington Post: “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs”
Angela Davis on Democracy Now!: "We can't eradicate racism without eradicating racial capitalism"
Marc Lamont Hill interviewed on WBUR: "Understand Protests As 'Acts Of Rebellion' Instead Of Riots, Marc Lamont Hill Says"
The Words of William C. Anderson in Roar Magazine: “We Defend Ourselves So We Can All Breathe in Peace”
Also William C. Anderson in Truthout: “Forget “Looting.” Capitalism Is the Real Robbery.”
William C. Anderson Interviewed on This Is Hell: “These are uprisings. These are rebellions. These are revolts. These are necessary.”
Cooperation Jackson endorses People’s Strike!
IPCC Report - We Have Only 10 Years to Cut Carbon Emissions by 50%
Correctional Facility & Police Unions Political Influence Runs Dark & Deep: As Seen in Frida Garza’s Piece in The Guardian: “'They Don't Belong': Calls Grow to Oust Police from US Labor Movement”
Shawn Gude in Jacobin: “Why We Can’t Support Police Unions”
Here Are Statistics About Police Budgets as a Portion of City Budgets in America
Hysterically Unnoticed During the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Was Andrew Yang’s Democracy Vouchers The Earlier Iteration of This Comes from Lawrence Lessig’s book Republic, Lost (2nd Edition: 2015), which he called “Benjamin Franklin” Vouchers: As Discussed in Harvard Magazine: “A Radical Fix for the Republic”