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A podcast about music, and politics as told by musicians who sing about politics
Episodes
Friday Sep 29, 2023
Friday Sep 29, 2023
Thursday Sep 28, 2023
Thursday Sep 28, 2023
Wednesday Sep 27, 2023
Wednesday Sep 27, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
One of the most groundbreaking shows in the last 20 years that did a masterful job of telling stories of race and class was Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks from 2005. The show opens with one of it’s main characters, Huey Freeman, a young Black 10 year old boy who’s just been transplanted from his South Side Chicago home to live with his 8 year old brother with their grandfather in the fictional suburban town of Woodcrest. Huey is telling a captive older rich white audience that “Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan is the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11” the white audience erupts into chaotic violence from the words spoken by Huey Freeman. These words, to Huey, are the truth, and white people are never to hear the truth because according to his grandfather, “you never tell white people the truth”. The scene is just a dream, but later in the episode Huey gets a chance to utter the words again, hoping they will be the spark to start the revolution, but he is shocked to find that nothing happens. The captive audience of rich white people simply clap. They patronizingly compliment him on how well he speaks and don’t seem to fear his condemnation of the system, or his utterance of “truth”.
Friday Sep 22, 2023
Friday Sep 22, 2023
Harm Reduction is still looked at as taboo in the drug rehabilitation community. It’s not about making someone abstain from use and shaming them into treatment. But what is it about? The numbers say harm reduction keeps people alive and is cutting down on overdoses, but at what cost? What does that quality of life look like?
I have some people that have worked in the field with first hand experience to discuss.
Wednesday Sep 20, 2023
Wednesday Sep 20, 2023
Another Black female mayor is facing her own massive challenge in the statewide unhoused crisis; embattled San Francisco mayor London Breed, promised to clean up San Francisco, but she does face some progressive challenges. Former socialist district attorney Chesa Boudin was antithetical to Breed’s tough on crime rhetoric, so before he could complete his first term in office he was ousted in a recall election allowing Breed’s appointee Brooke Jenkins to come in and continue a tough on crime agenda.
Boudin was elected after the rise of Bernie Sanders where social democracy gained much popularity. After the election of Trump, many Americans felt, to fight an imagined fascist in the White House, we simply needed to vote for progressives and everything would be fixed. An overly simplistic technocratic strategy that begins and ends with putting the right people in positions of power. Politics as consumerism, buy progressive, and they alone will fix social ills.
Peak COVID’s shelter in place orders, coupled with a 24/7 newscycle, mainstream and independent laser focused on the racism and ineptitude of then president Trump, a barrage of public police killings of unarmed Black citizens and vigilante violence also aimed at people of color and it culminates with the televised police murder of George Floyd and the country erupts.
The solution to the racial reckoning was simple as a line item on a spreadsheet. Just allocate funds for law enforcement elsewhere. The amount of money spent on police was causing all this senseless violence, so move those funds over where they can be better suited and we’ll not only put an end to extra judicial police killings, but we’ll end poverty, crime, etc. I know many of you listening have heard this before, but we can’t even begin to discuss a city like San Francisco without putting into context the feeling of the nation, because it can be that feeling that shapes policy. We need to understand how public opinion can be manipulated and shaped and changed overnight.
In San Francisco, demands were made to defund the police, and maybe the city’s biggest ally to actually hold law enforcement accountable, then district attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted. The progressive love affair was over in SF. Property crime was on the rise and people didn’t care about aversion programs and high incarceration rates anymore. That’s abstract thinking, they wanted solutions NOW! Chesa wasn’t the only leftist/socialist in city government, there were others, and London Breed and her new D.A. went on the attack to call them out as a hindrance to law and order in San Francisco as they were idealists who weren’t from the city, and didn’t have an appreciation for the people of SF. Breed and Jenkins are Black women, it was easy for them to use that and call out the white progressives in office for not understanding the plight of Black and Brown citizens facing rising post peak COVID crime and the daily blight of the large homeless encampments affecting small business owned by many people of color throughout the city.
Just like that, the news went from following any case of police misconduct to showing an endless stream of smash and grab robberies. Some in high end downtown shopping districts. Nordstrom, the long-time staple of the Westfield Mall in downtown SF, left. Their rationale for leaving for many in SF was simple, it was all the robberies. People were scared to go to SF for fear of having their car broke into, or being robbed leaving a store. On top of all of this, any attempt at building any sort of solution for housing the homeless population was running into issues with people in the community. As I’ve said many times on this show, we can all talk crap about “NIMBYs” but who wants to have an encampment next to their child’s school? A tiny home community in your community? A shelter in the heart of your neighborhood?
Breed vowed to clean up SF and she, like many mayors in the country facing similar challenges, was going to do large sweeps of the larger encampments that were literally blocking sidewalks. Some of these encampments were massive, and yes, sometimes violent. Open air drug markets and public drug use, and many cases in SF, deaths. In the 80s and 90s crack was the big bad and it had to be eliminated and the people that sold it were compared to demons praying on the innocent in their community. The same can be said for opioids in 2023. To date, there have been 473 deaths from opioids in SF and the year isn’t even over. The big bad for Breed is opioids and fentanyl, so the crackdown has begun.
But sweeping the encampments has hit a snag for Breed as homeless people and their advocates have filed suit against the city for not holding to their own laws about how to handle the sweeps. A federal judge has put a halt on the sweeps, because if you’re going to sweep an encampment, the city has to provide housing solutions for the people caught up in the sweep. According to the SF Chronicle, of the 165 days SF cleared a site, only about 18% of those days did the city actually have beds for everyone caught up. Advocates and homeless citizens claim law enforcement threw away IDs, important documents and records, you know pertinent documents needed to obtain housing. So now the city and advocates are in a fight. The city feels they can’t do what they need to do to reach people in need without clearing an encampment, and the advocates say the sweeps are criminalizing poverty. The one thing both sides seem to mildly agree on is that people shouldn’t have to sleep on the streets. Crue, what do you say about what’s going on in SF?
Monday Sep 18, 2023
Monday Sep 18, 2023
This year marked 60 years since the March on Washington, and there is a bipartisan acceptance of the event as a monumental step forward for Black Americans for the struggle for civil rights. While Martin Luther King’s iconic speech for many is understood as a call for collective understanding to get beyond racial differences and come together as one united nation, that wasn’t the ultimate goal of the march. It's organizers had a Socialist Democratic vision of massive economic redistribution of wealth. The March on Washington for jobs and freedom became a victory for the Civil Rights movement and its leaders, but was it truly a success?
Read Paul's piece in Jacobin Magazine here: https://jacobin.com/2023/08/march-on-washington-anniversary-civil-rights-economic-inequality
Sunday Sep 17, 2023
Sunday Sep 17, 2023
While the 80s produced a lot of unwanted straight to cable and video movies, the 1983 sequel to the Hitchcock's classic genre defining film might be one of the best sequels of the genre. We discuss what inspired Hollywood to bring back the Oedipal son Norman Bates and more..
Friday Sep 15, 2023
Friday Sep 15, 2023