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25 years before he first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, 31-year-old Dennis Kucinich was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio — at the time, that made him the youngest mayor of a major city in the country. His tenure would be dominated by the fight to prevent the privatization of the city’s public electrical utility, a fight that would pit Kucinich against powerful politicians, the Cleveland Trust bank, and even the mob. Kucinich tells the story of the fight to save Municipal Light in his new book, “The Division of Light and Power.”
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Since leaving prison in 2017, former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been busy. She ran unsuccessfully for senate in her home state of Maryland, became a Twitch streamer, and was jailed for contempt after refusing to testify in a US government case against Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning joins Ryan Grim and Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein to talk about prison, prospects for whistleblowers in the Biden era, and what she’s been up to since her release.
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The Intercept's Lee Fang obtained audio of the powerful West Virginia senator on a call with the centrist political group No Labels.
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For decades, economic policymakers have viewed full employment as a scourge to be avoided at all costs, betokening as it does the grim spectre of inflation. If his words are to be believed, Joe Biden wants to break with that consensus and aim for full employment. Economist James Galbraith joins Ryan Grim to discuss.
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As part of his “Build Back Better” plan, President Biden has promised to “advance racial equity across the American economy.” In her new book, “The Whiteness of Wealth,” Emory law professor Dorothy Brown argues that meaningfully addressing the racial wealth gap will require wide-ranging reform of the US tax code. Ryan Grim talks to professor Brown about what her research shows.
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Republicans in Arizona are hoping to overturn their state’s presidential election result, creating a template that they can apply in Georgia, Wisconsin, and beyond. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell (to no one’s surprise) is making it clear that no Democratic policy objective is going to make it past his filibuster. Does a strategy of legislative obstruction and retroactive electioneering hold any promise for the party? Activist Lauren Windsor and former Senate staffer Eli Zupnick join Ryan Grim to discuss.
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On May 7, Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem during the evening prayer. Hamas responded a few days later by launching rockets from Gaza into Israel. Israel retaliated with its own strikes, and the violence escalated. Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian-American journalist based in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She joins Ryan Grim to discuss this latest flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict and what US media are missing.
The video referenced at the end of the show is Mehdi Hasan’s Blowback: How Israel Helped Create Hamas.
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When Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016, she was the leading environmental activist in Honduras and, arguably, the world. A member of the indigenous Lenca people and the founder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Peoples of Honduras, or COPINH, Cáceres was the most formidable opponent of a powerful energy company called Desarrollos Energeticos Sociedad Anónima, or DESA. Their Agua Zarca dam project would have occupied Lenca land and interfered with waterways sacred to their community. Cáceres worked tirelessly to increase scrutiny of DESA and turn the people of Honduras against the dam, until the early hours of March 3, 2016, when someone had her killed. At the time, David Castillo sat atop DESA’s executive ranks as president and CEO. He is now on trial in the Honduran Supreme Court, charged with ordering Cáceres’s death. Whoever plotted her killing likely underestimated the amount of attention it would bring, drawing Honduras into the international spotlight to a degree unseen since the country’s 2009 coup—but the high-profile case is far from the only one of its kind. Reporters Chiara Eisner and Danielle Mackey join the Intercept’s Maia Hibbett to discuss.
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May Day is the biggest day of the year for the international labour movement, but it passes almost unmentioned each year in the United States. That’s in spite of the fact that the holiday commemorates the workers killed in the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886. As a corrective, Deconstructed offers a brief history of organized labor in the U.S. Jimmy Williams of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades joins Ryan Grim to discuss the PRO Act, a labor reform bill currently before Congress.
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On Wednesday night, Joe Biden gave his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress, though it was sparsely attended so that social distancing could be observed. Biden was there to pitch what he’s calling the American Families Plan, and as Deconstructed guest Matt Bruenig has long noted, support for families and children has been a blind spot in the United States. Bruenig founded the progressive think tank People's Policy Project, which relies largely on small donors. In early 2019, he put out what he called the Family Fun Pack, a sweeping set of policies aimed at making raising kids in the U.S. somewhat less impossible than it is today. He modeled the policies on the most effective programs in operation in Europe and Asia. Matt is also the co-host, with his wife Liz Bruenig, of the great podcast The Bruenigs.
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