Imagine if you will, a great nation of promise filled with anxiety about its future. The world is erupting in chaos and corporate interests are balking at the thought of implementing huge social programs to relieve the strain on average citizens. Impossible! Well, of all the unlikely characters to flap their weird butterfly wings, we celebrate the contributions of one Smedley Butler and his untangling of The Business Plot or The Wall Street Putsch.

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Do you have a firm understanding of the differences between a wealth tax and a marginal tax? Could you let us know? This week, we diligently try to plow through the different tax solutions brought forth by the democratic candidates and compare it to the solutions that are in place currently.  We then compare it to the conservative tax policies over the last 40 years that have contributed to growing income inequality. Warning in advance, we did have a couple of glasses of wine in order to take the edge off our discomfort with the material, we then became what I can only describe as overly comfortable, but I only hope it can be a learning experience for everyone. 

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This week on the pod we take it all the way back to the 1500s to provide an overview on how the legislation of child support developed here in the States and offer a comparison to how other countries addressed similar issues. 

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We're taking it back to Lovelace and Babbage to try and trace the history of women in technology. From human computers, to ENIAC programmers, women have been around since the infancy of the technology. Their relative sparseness now in the industry could have several perfectly rational explanations and we take a look at a few of those as well as a few irrational explanations as well. 

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If it wasn't so evil it might be hilarious. Right around the time Nixon was affirming that he was not a crook, a small cabal of Nixon loyalists were busy sabotaging Democratic campaigns. In this episode, we cover the dirty tricks employed by Nixon against his competitors and trace the lineage of these techniques to the most current presidential election. Anne also includes a beautiful tribute to two White House dogs that the world has been so desperate to hear. 

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This week we cover the Tennessee trial of John Scopes who was indicted for teaching evolution in the classroom in 1925. We trace the beginnings of the long feud between fundamental religious belief straining against oncoming modernity and how those trends continue in the present day. 

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In this week's episode we give a brief history of voter suppression techniques used in American history from the exclusive original requirements for voting, to voter ID laws. While the 15th amendment provided the legal protection for voters, those protections were not enforced until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Stay tuned for the inventive methods used to discourage voting from different populations that included robocalls, threatening billboards, pamphlets dropped from planes, exact match, purging of voter's rolls and so much more! Hopefully the fight for the vote will inspire you to exercise your right. 

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The Southeastern voting block, or the solid South, was not always republican. Around the 1950s, right about the time Brown V Board of Education was decided, the republicans began to woo back the Southern vote. In this episode, we'll map out the seduction of the Southern voter and point out some historical dog whistle campaigns that have been in use for nearly 60 years. 

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On this very special Halloween episode of Acts of Pod, we cover the Salem Witch Trials. We take a deep dive into the economic and political conditions that made this possible and how this story has been used in political discourse over the years. Could we make the devil more boring? You shall soon see. Happy Halloween!

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Have you read the UN report on climate change? Well, you're gonna want to sit down. Or better yet, why don't you just get the news from your buddies at Acts of Pod who are handling the news with grace. Totally unrelated, does anyone have access to a bomb shelter and/or a fresh water source? Hit us up on twitter.

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