Another triple reading series ep, we’re spoiling you listeners. We start off with a profile of Data For Progress’s new found clout with Dems in the drivers’ seat, but who’s data? And what progress? Then it’s on to the Federalist, for an author who’s simply furious that a living wage for fast food workers might make their precious burritos cost a few cents more. Finally, a doozy of a Slate piece about killing your dog.

Chapo Trap House

532 - The Power of the Dog (6/15/21)

Chris complained about his cable company on Twitter. He was surprised to get a phone call demanding he delete the tweets or else be banned from the service. PJ looks into the story, and things get much stranger. Plus, a new Yes Yes No.

Duck Army (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHc288IPFzk)

#37 Taking Power

In this Special Episode, we sit down with Maria Farmer, the first Epstein victim to go to the police, and discuss her experiences working as Jeffrey’s doorman and art procurer, her time at Leslie Wexners estate, and her struggle for justice afterwards.

Maria's GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/63k6c-help-maria-farmer-beat-cancer-teammariafarmer

Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/david-kratz-eileen-guggenheim-must-be-removed-for-harm-she-caused-to-maria-farmer-by-jeffrey-epstein?recruiter=30424804

Episode 67: Maria Farmer

Adam says some words about what Michael Brooks means to the DPS family. 

Love you all and be good to each other. 


*** Become a member of the Dead Pundits Society to support this political project and get access to weekly subscriber-only episodes: http://www.patreon.com/deadpundits ***

Michael Brooks, Presente!

Another Summer

One point brought up in Episode 116, highlighting the connection between real estate interests and over-policing, solicited a lot of feedback from listeners. In this News Brief, we wanted to expand upon this topic by interviewing an academic source we cited in the episode: assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver Brenden Beck, whose work focuses on the intersection between "urban development" projects and the targeted, sustain harassment of communities of color.

News Brief: Detailing the Connection Between Gentrification and Racist Police Harassment

Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.

But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers. 

In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.

In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction. 

Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

Ep. 118 - The Snitch Economy: How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other

Historian Fabian Scheidler on his book "The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization" via Zero Books.

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/end-megamachine-brief-history-failing-civilization#synopsis

1236: System Crash / Fabian Scheidler

In this post-election News Brief we discuss the various modes of cope and responsibility skirting.

News Brief - Post Election Spin: Trump Blames CIA for Loss, Corporate House Dems Blame BLM

A CNN headline from this past summer read: “Mental health during coronavirus: Tips for processing your feelings.” Psychology Today gave us an article on “Coping With Loneliness During a Pandemic,” while the Washington Post presents, “A guide to taking care of yourself during the pandemic.” Everywhere we’ve turned over the past 9 months, American media has been covering the mental health downside of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown and economic crash on one of these two settings: Awareness Mode or Self-Help Mode.

The first setting — “Awareness Mode” — is merely witnessing mass suffering; that is, reporting on the topic with no prescriptions offered. Second is “Self-Help Mode,” which is, to the extent these articles do put forth prescriptions for wellness and mental health, it is entirely individualistic in nature. Your well-being during this once-in-a-century pandemic is up to you — but don’t fret, here are some “guides,” ”plans,” “hacks,” and “tricks” to help you out.

Missing from the vast bulk of coverage is the glaringly obvious third option: actionable, proven, political solutions to mental health crises that operate under the radical assumption that  social problems may require social solutions. Nowhere in any of these articles is the idea that socialized medicine, guaranteed income, free childcare, student debt relief or rent and mortgage cancellations may be the best and most rational “hacks” or “tricks” to actually improve mental health of people at scale.

Obviously, a robust social safety net wouldn’t solve all mental health problems — after all, countries with universal healthcare and generous unemployment and childcare benefits still have depression and suicides — but we have decades of data showing basic social welfare clearly improves mental welfare. But because mental health crises are seen as moral failings rather than diseases thrust upon innocent people, we are conditioned to view those suffering from their effects as inevitable, losses simply factored into the moral framework of the world.

It basically goes like this: If a giant blood-sucking monster were ravaging the country killing thousands of people and terrorizing millions more, the media would never provide us “hacks” or “plans” or “tricks” to cope with the giant blood-sucking monster. It would ask the obvious question: What are those in power doing to stop the monster from killing and terrorizing in the first place?

Unfortunately, such an approach is sacrilege in U.S. media when it comes to mental health. The solution is never to lobby for a specific candidate or policy that would provide immediate relief to the masses because neoliberal hyper-atomization, unlike appeals to social solutions, is not seen as political. It’s simply the objective reporter voice mode of journalism U.S. media has uncritically adopted. But collectivist solutions, marked by the political choice to redistribute resources to the less well-off, is a proven technique to help those suffering mental health issues, doubly so during a pandemic that has cut people off from socialization, radially increased substance abuse, and has left millions unemployed.

Our guest is writer Colette Shade.

Ep124 - Mental Health & Covid: How US Media Spins Societal Failures Into Personal Self-Help Journeys

"Sen. Mark Warner said progressives' calls to 'defund the police' were in part to blame for Democratic losses in the House in a cycle when the party was expected to gain seats," The Hill tells us. "How ’defund the police' sabotaged Democrats on Election Day," Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune writes."'Defund the police’ is killing our party, and we’ve got to stop it," said South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn. In the wake of the Democrats’ disappointing Congressional showing in last month’s elections, centrist Democrats and their media mouthpieces were quick to blame Black Lives Matter and the "defund the police" movement for their subpar results.

There’s only one problem: there is no empirical basis for this claim in any of the above comments or reports. No studies, no evidence––not even anecdotally––is provided. Before the printer ink was dry on the ballots, centrist Democrats who lost or underperformed––or made a career out of defending those that do––rushed to blame the so-called "defund the police" movement, highlighting rightwing attack ads featuring the label. After some initial goodwill immediately following the global outpouring of protests after the horrific police murder of George Floyd, mainstream democratic party line has reverted back to it’s old playbook of blaming the Left and Black activists for offending or alienating a nebulous cohort of moderate white voters.

As the economy crashed and the world was turned upside down in the Spring of 2020, Democratic leaders had a chance to lobby for robust social welfare programs, guaranteed income, mortgage and rent cancellation and single payer healthcare to get us through this ongoing crisis, whose disastrous implications will extend well beyond the introduction of a vaccine. Instead, however, they lowered expectations, blamed Trump for their own unforced ideological limitations and almost never publicly took credit for the extension of unemployment benefits––the one good thing Democrats actually did achieve, albeit fleeting.

The result was a once in a generation opportunity blown, a possible leftwing shock doctrine that was crippled by unmovable austerity ideology. So when the elections came around and the Democrats underperformed, who was to blame? It can’t be party leadership blowing the COVID-19 response and it can’t be the security state-curated centrist tofu candidates who lost or barely won. It has to––once again––be those pesky far left activists. Because Democratic party leadership cannot fail they can only be failed, a scapegoat was needed.

On this week’s episode we discuss why "defund the police" and the broader abolitionist movement was that scapegoat, the long history of concern trolling Black activism and perennially blaming movements for justice for right-wing, white backlash from bad faith actors. We also detail how activists are now on the defensive as Democrats, having successfully exploited the broad sentiment of the George Floyd protests for Get Out The Vote fodder, now seek to lower expectations, purge Black Lives Matter of its truly radical elements, and go back to business as usual.

Our guest is human rights lawyer and abolitionist Derecka Purnell.

Episode 127: Democratic Leadership's Predictable Scapegoating of 'Defund the Police'

A show about the internet, hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman.  From Gimlet.

#37 Taking Power

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