Episode 1212
The exile of Rafael Correa / Guillaume Long
Aug 3 2020
Many of us don't realize that access to death records is not something protected by our constitution. It depends on what state you live in. If you look across the 50 states of the US, there are states that don't allow people to get access to death records unless you are the next of kin. Even if you get those records, it's not always the case that those records are going to reveal the truth of what happened. I think perhaps more nefarious and difficult is we in this nation hold terrible ideas about people on the wrong side of the law. We often don't want to admit it, but we often believe that when people get arrested or go to jail and they lose their lives or they become sick or ill, we feel they deserved it somehow.
Terence Keel returns to discuss his new book from Beacon Press, The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Jul 30 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Is that all there is? You march in a few marches, chant a few rhymes, grin and bear it while the usual rowdies torch and loot a few big box stores and police cars, and then the death squads come and disappear you? How come they get death squads and we don’t? How are we supposed to snatch their people off the streets, put them in unmarked vans, and take them away to oblivion, or to black sites for torture, maybe put them in little coffin-sized concrete cells in, say, Syria? We definitely have the manpower. And the womanpower, and the everything-in-between-and- beyond power. There should be a law, kind of like the fairness doctrine of olden times, where if one side gets to disappear people, the other side gets to do it, too. And if you can’t afford an unmarked van and various torture equipment, such will be provided to you by the fascist government’s equal rights department.
It doesn’t seem fair. How can fascism be so prima facie unfair? I mean, I get fascism being unfair in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, but this the USA. You’d think our fascism would have checks and balances. Some kind of built-in freedom and equality. At least an ombudsman. But no. It’s almost like they just don’t care.
And if anything makes people in the US angry, it’s the feeling that their feelings don’t matter. (Oh, and lots of white people hate when people who aren’t white get anything good, even if it’s equal to or worse than what those same white people have had forever. But that’s no excuse for fascism to be unfair.)
Fascism has become the national pastime. Fascism is the governing philosophy of the regime under which we live. Fascism should be a role model! What will the children think? Of course, the children killed at the border or in their schools don’t think anything. That’s part of fascism’s built-in efficiency.
If fascism is going to monopolize so much of the public’s time, energy, and material resources, I and others like me would suggest it ought to be made a public utility. Nationalize fascism! Who could argue against that? I’m sure no decent citizen would mind paying a small tax for free public fascism. They’ve paid for the military and police all this time, it’s more a name change than anything else. And those who want to be active fascists can pay... read more
Jul 21 2020