WFHB

Today we’re joined by two of the four hosts of the Black Myths Podcast which is produced in Indianapolis: Too Black, a spoken word poet and teaching artist, and elle roberts, a writer and facilitator.

As described on the show’s website,

“The Black Myths Podcast is an informative conversational show analyzing popular myths about Black culture of a sociopolitical nature. Translation: We debunk the bs said about Black People.”

Its two other hosts are Shelle Danielle, a professional piercer and creative director, and Ryan Mills, a writer and activist.

“Black Don’t Crack” is the title of the first season of the podcast which focused on myths concerning the health and physical characteristics of Black people. The group started with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the Black community and then discussed myths surrounding melanin (“a superpower”), the pigment found in varying degrees in skin, and concluded the six part season with shows on myths about Black women’s health, particularly the belief that Black women are responsible for their alarmingly high maternal death rate – 57% of all maternal deaths in the US.

The season also included a special on lynching, an unceasing threat to Black Americans as evidenced in Bloomington, Indiana over the 4th of July weekend when resident Vauhxx Booker was attacked by a group of white men at Lake Monroe. That show actually took issue with labeling police aggression and murder of Black people as lynching, which is more precisely an act perpetrated by non-state actors, like the men who attacked Booker.

The group has opened a new season with the myth that the police are a necessary institution in our society. Here’s a link to a promo clip for that show.

We’ll also discuss the liberal premise of Hate Crimes Legislation and the ways it empowers the carceral state rather than protects citizens against hate crimes.

And our two breaks today will feature performances by Too Black titled “Black Card” and “Blood Spatter.”

RELATED

The Black Myths Podcast

Too Black’s YouTube Channel

Against Hate Crimes Legislation (elle roberts)

Debunking “Black-on-Black crime” by elle roberts (NUVO)

MUSIC

“Black Woman” Sonny Sharrock (featuring Linda Sharrock)

“Black Card” Too Black & “The Blacks”

“Blood Splatter” Too Black & “The Blacks”

“Running” Gil Scott-Heron/Makaya McCraven

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we’re joined by two of the four hosts of the Black Myths Podcast which is produced in Indianapolis: Too Black, a spoken word poet and teaching artist, and elle roberts, a writer and facilitator.

As described on the show’s website,

"The Black Myths Podcast is an informative conversational show analyzing popular myths about Black culture of a sociopolitical nature. Translation: We debunk the bs said about Black People."

Its two other hosts are Shelle Danielle, a professional piercer and creative director, and Ryan Mills, a writer and activist.

"Black Don’t Crack" is the title of the first season of the podcast which focused on myths concerning the health and physical characteristics of Black people. The group started with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the Black community and then discussed myths surrounding melanin ("a superpower"), the pigment found in varying degrees in skin, and concluded the six part season with shows on myths about Black women’s health, particularly the belief that Black women are responsible for their alarmingly high maternal death rate - 57% of all maternal deaths in the US.

The season also included a special on lynching, an unceasing threat to Black Americans as evidenced in Bloomington, Indiana over the 4th of July weekend when resident Vauhxx Booker was attacked by a group of white men at Lake Monroe. That show actually took issue with labeling police aggression and murder of Black people as lynching, which is more precisely an act perpetrated by non-state actors, like the men who attacked Booker.

The group has opened a new season with the myth that the police are a necessary institution in our society. Here’s a link to a promo clip for that show.

We’ll also discuss the liberal premise of Hate Crimes Legislation and the ways it empowers the carceral state rather than protects citizens against hate crimes.

And our two breaks today will feature performances by Too Black titled “Black Card” and “Blood Spatter.”

RELATED

The Black Myths Podcast

Too Black's YouTube Channel

Against Hate Crimes Legislation (elle roberts)

Debunking "Black-on-Black crime" by elle roberts (NUVO)

MUSIC

"Black Woman" Sonny Sharrock (featuring Linda Sharrock)

"Black Card" Too Black & "The Blacks"

"Blood Splatter" Too Black & "The Blacks"

"Running" Gil Scott-Heron/Makaya McCraven

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today, workers in the United States are out of work. After the market free fall this spring, crowded lines at food banks replace crowded sports arenas. All industries contracted. Businesses of all sizes floundered. More than 20 million people lost their jobs in April alone, and 6.6 million unemployment claims were filed. In three months, we lost all of the jobs added to the labor market since 2008. The anticipated second wave of coronavirus will determine whether we retain the unexpected addition of 2.5 million jobs in May. The threat of another Great Depression looms.

We know the coronavirus shutdown saved lives. According to one study, the quarantine measures prevented about 60 million infections in the United States. Another estimate states that, if we kept up social-distancing measures and economic shutdown until the peak infection rate, we could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. That said, all 50 states have begun easing quarantine restrictions. Emergency rooms are bracing for a spike in cases.

The economic shutdown was successful in blunting the spread of the coronavirus, but it brought along the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a decade defined by the major global economic trauma of the 20th century and the benchmark against which all other recessions are measured. The unemployment rate remains historically high. A second stimulus bill may or may not pass. For many Americans, the New Deal, launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1939, is the gold standard for how the government should respond to a national emergency. The New Deal funded immediate relief and jobs, and constructed a social safety net, which included a national retirement system, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, public housing, mortgage protection, and the right to collective bargaining. These programs, though rife with limitations, were the direct results of political protest and agitation by those deprived of basic necessities by a contracted and fundamentally unequal economy.

We focus this week on the resistance movements of the underclass during the Great Depression, a historical era of economic crisis that increasingly resembles the present.

For today’s show, episode producer Bella Bravo speaks with GUEST Cody St. Clair, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University, about the political imaginary of the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. St. Clair recently completed their dissertation titled “Homeless Modernisms: Aesthetics and Politics of the Underclass.” Cody St. Clair has studied how those squeezed out of the labor market–and out of their homes–gathered collective strength and pushed back.

As protests over the killing of George Floyd have taken over the streets of every major city, have converted hotels to homeless shelters and best friends into bail fund organizers, we must consider how the lessons of the Great Depression apply to our own moment. We must learn from the political imagination of the underclass.

RELATED

Lesbian Hoboes by JR Roberts

H.T. Tsiang’s self-published “American epic” The Hanging on Union Square (book review)

Langston Hughes’s Scottsboro Limited

MUSIC

“Rolling Log Blues” by Lottie Kimbrough

“Pick Poor Robin Clean” by Elvie Thomas & Geeshie Wiley

“Out in the Cold” by Memphis Minnie

Today, workers in the United States are out of work. After the market free fall this spring, crowded lines at food banks replace crowded sports arenas. All industries contracted. Businesses of all sizes floundered. More than 20 million people lost their jobs in April alone, and 6.6 million unemployment claims were filed. In three months, we lost all of the jobs added to the labor market since 2008. The anticipated second wave of coronavirus will determine whether we retain the unexpected addition of 2.5 million jobs in May. The threat of another Great Depression looms.

We know the coronavirus shutdown saved lives. According to one study, the quarantine measures prevented about 60 million infections in the United States. Another estimate states that, if we kept up social-distancing measures and economic shutdown until the peak infection rate, we could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. That said, all 50 states have begun easing quarantine restrictions. Emergency rooms are bracing for a spike in cases.

The economic shutdown was successful in blunting the spread of the coronavirus, but it brought along the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a decade defined by the major global economic trauma of the 20th century and the benchmark against which all other recessions are measured. The unemployment rate remains historically high. A second stimulus bill may or may not pass. For many Americans, the New Deal, launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1939, is the gold standard for how the government should respond to a national emergency. The New Deal funded immediate relief and jobs, and constructed a social safety net, which included a national retirement system, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, public housing, mortgage protection, and the right to collective bargaining. These programs, though rife with limitations, were the direct results of political protest and agitation by those deprived of basic necessities by a contracted and fundamentally unequal economy.

We focus this week on the resistance movements of the underclass during the Great Depression, a historical era of economic crisis that increasingly resembles the present.

For today’s show, episode producer Bella Bravo speaks with GUEST Cody St. Clair, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University, about the political imaginary of the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. St. Clair recently completed their dissertation titled “Homeless Modernisms: Aesthetics and Politics of the Underclass.” Cody St. Clair has studied how those squeezed out of the labor market--and out of their homes--gathered collective strength and pushed back.

As protests over the killing of George Floyd have taken over the streets of every major city, have converted hotels to homeless shelters and best friends into bail fund organizers, we must consider how the lessons of the Great Depression apply to our own moment. We must learn from the political imagination of the underclass.

RELATED

Lesbian Hoboes by JR Roberts

H.T. Tsiang’s self-published “American epic” The Hanging on Union Square (book review)

Langston Hughes’s Scottsboro Limited

MUSIC

“Rolling Log Blues” by Lottie Kimbrough

“Pick Poor Robin Clean” by Elvie Thomas & Geeshie Wiley

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25th has quickly become the catalyst which has given rise to mass uprisings in every major city in the United States. In the days following Floyd’s murder, thousands upon thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets in a massive display of anger and protest against the structural, racialized violence that operates in the name of the US police system. The uprisings have raised with them demands for the defunding of police departments across the US, the abolition of the prison system, the indictment of murderous police officers, and the immediate release from jail of arrested protesters, among other things. Calls for Justice for George Floyd and the insistence that Black Lives Matter has provided in this moment the potential for massive fundamental change to the system of racialized violence that has plagued the United States since its inception.

While this immense degree of mass uprising is certainly unprecedented in the history of the US, this is not a moment that stands in isolation. The protests and the demands they inhabit share a common legacy with the Civil Rights Movement, a legacy that is firmly rooted in the struggles and organizations of Black revolutionaries. Here to help us better understand that legacy and its importance in the current moment is author and historian Asad Haider. Haider is a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, an online Marxist research collective, and author of the 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump.

In Mistaken Identity, Haider engages with the history of revolutionary struggles in the United States that center on racial and particularly Black oppression with the aim for emancipation. Haider recognizes the origins of identity politics in these emancipatory struggles of the 20th century, and opposes its current usage as a practice of exclusion and neutralization to the collective necessity of insurgent universality. In so doing, Haider insists on the interconnected relationship between racial oppression and class oppression, asserting that “not only is socialism an indispensable component of the black struggle against white supremacy, the anticapitalist struggle has to incorporate the struggle for black self-determination.” A survey of antiracist, anticapitalist struggles then allows Haider to offer lessons of coalition building and revolutionary organizing in the living struggles of today.

Episode producers Bella Bravo and Cole Nelson begin by asking Haider about his claim that ‘politics happens under conditions’, a claim that suggests emancipatory politics can only arise under very precise moments of rupture from the status quo. Haider then considers what the conditions are in the present that may give rise to a thoroughly emancipatory politics.

GUEST

Asad Haider is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and an editor of Viewpoint and author of Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018).

RELATED

Passing for Politics by Asad Haider

Mistaking Identity Politics: A Conversation with Asad Haider (Part I)

The 2020 rebellion has deep roots — and it can’t be resolved by electing Joe Biden by Asad Haider

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25th has quickly become the catalyst which has given rise to mass uprisings in every major city in the United States. In the days following Floyd’s murder, thousands upon thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets in a massive display of anger and protest against the structural, racialized violence that operates in the name of the US police system. The uprisings have raised with them demands for the defunding of police departments across the US, the abolition of the prison system, the indictment of murderous police officers, and the immediate release from jail of arrested protesters, among other things. Calls for Justice for George Floyd and the insistence that Black Lives Matter has provided in this moment the potential for massive fundamental change to the system of racialized violence that has plagued the United States since its inception.

While this immense degree of mass uprising is certainly unprecedented in the history of the US, this is not a moment that stands in isolation. The protests and the demands they inhabit share a common legacy with the Civil Rights Movement, a legacy that is firmly rooted in the struggles and organizations of Black revolutionaries. Here to help us better understand that legacy and its importance in the current moment is author and historian Asad Haider. Haider is a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, an online Marxist research collective, and author of the 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump.

In Mistaken Identity, Haider engages with the history of revolutionary struggles in the United States that center on racial and particularly Black oppression with the aim for emancipation. Haider recognizes the origins of identity politics in these emancipatory struggles of the 20th century, and opposes its current usage as a practice of exclusion and neutralization to the collective necessity of insurgent universality. In so doing, Haider insists on the interconnected relationship between racial oppression and class oppression, asserting that “not only is socialism an indispensable component of the black struggle against white supremacy, the anticapitalist struggle has to incorporate the struggle for black self-determination.” A survey of antiracist, anticapitalist struggles then allows Haider to offer lessons of coalition building and revolutionary organizing in the living struggles of today.

Episode producers Bella Bravo and Cole Nelson begin by asking Haider about his claim that ‘politics happens under conditions’, a claim that suggests emancipatory politics can only arise under very precise moments of rupture from the status quo. Haider then considers what the conditions are in the present that may give rise to a thoroughly emancipatory politics.

GUEST

Asad Haider is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and an editor of Viewpoint and author of Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018).

RELATED

Passing for Politics by Asad Haider

Mistaking Identity Politics: A Conversation with Asad Haider (Part I)

The 2020 rebellion has deep roots — and it can't be resolved by electing Joe Biden by Asad Haider

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the Virus demands our attention. Elizabeth Povinelli’s conceptual work on the Virus feels prescient. Povinelli is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of what she calls, “the otherwise,” meaning something other than the late liberalism and settler colonialism we know as capitalism.

This potential theory has unfolded across her five books, numerous essays, and thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Karrabing means “tide out” in the Emmiyengal language, which evokes the northwest coastline of Australia, a region to which most of the members are indigenous.

Episode producer Bella Bravo begins the interview asking about Povinelli’s most recent academic work, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. In 2017, Geontologies retheorized biopower and necropolitics in the age of climate change, and Povinelli’s theses about the shifting phases of capitalism are drawn from the observations of her indigenous collaborators in Northern Australia. The fact that the Virus is a symptom of capitalism seems like a simple conclusion, but Povinelli explains that the Virus reveals how historic modes of governance that regulate the distinction between Life and Nonlife don’t actually work. The Virus is both Life and Non-life, and the rhetorics of war and health don’t fix the danger of the structures that mark some people as worthy of health care, steady income and life, and others not so.

The novel coronavirus is “a virus pulled out of its habit and habitats by routes and worlds that hold and enhance extractive capitalism, she says in an essay accompanying excerpts from her forthcoming book. Tentatively entitled The Inheritance, this more personal work brings visuals to print in a new form for Povinelli. The book juxtaposes hand-drawn and montage images with memoir to investigate the social infrastructures that differentially define our individual and collective experience, past and future. The book follows Povinelli’s ancestral story beginning at the turn of the century on the violent frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italian peninsula in the midst of national unification, up to her childhood in Louisiana during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of renewed struggle against white supremacy. But the effects of late liberalism and its twin late capitalism threaten once again to overwhelm as Louisiana has the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and black people in Louisiana make up 70 percent of the deaths.

GUEST

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, published by Duke University Press.

RELATED

Geontologies of the Otherwise by Elizabeth Povinelli

Inheritance, Part 1 by Elizabeth Povinelli

The Infrastructures of Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli

Karrabing Film Collective Tackles the Cultural and Environmental Devastation of Settler Colonialism
...

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the Virus demands our attention. Elizabeth Povinelli’s conceptual work on the Virus feels prescient. Povinelli is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of what she calls, “the otherwise,” meaning something other than the late liberalism and settler colonialism we know as capitalism.

This potential theory has unfolded across her five books, numerous essays, and thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Karrabing means “tide out” in the Emmiyengal language, which evokes the northwest coastline of Australia, a region to which most of the members are indigenous.

Episode producer Bella Bravo begins the interview asking about Povinelli’s most recent academic work, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. In 2017, Geontologies retheorized biopower and necropolitics in the age of climate change, and Povinelli’s theses about the shifting phases of capitalism are drawn from the observations of her indigenous collaborators in Northern Australia. The fact that the Virus is a symptom of capitalism seems like a simple conclusion, but Povinelli explains that the Virus reveals how historic modes of governance that regulate the distinction between Life and Nonlife don’t actually work. The Virus is both Life and Non-life, and the rhetorics of war and health don’t fix the danger of the structures that mark some people as worthy of health care, steady income and life, and others not so.

The novel coronavirus is “a virus pulled out of its habit and habitats by routes and worlds that hold and enhance extractive capitalism, she says in an essay accompanying excerpts from her forthcoming book. Tentatively entitled The Inheritance, this more personal work brings visuals to print in a new form for Povinelli. The book juxtaposes hand-drawn and montage images with memoir to investigate the social infrastructures that differentially define our individual and collective experience, past and future. The book follows Povinelli’s ancestral story beginning at the turn of the century on the violent frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italian peninsula in the midst of national unification, up to her childhood in Louisiana during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of renewed struggle against white supremacy. But the effects of late liberalism and its twin late capitalism threaten once again to overwhelm as Louisiana has the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and black people in Louisiana make up 70 percent of the deaths.

GUEST

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, published by Duke University Press.

RELATED

Geontologies of the Otherwise by Elizabeth Povinelli

Inheritance, Part 1 by Elizabeth Povinelli

The Infrastructures of Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli

Karrabing Film Collective Tackles the Cultural and Environm...

Let’s begin with what prompted me to contact today’s guest – the opening paragraph from an article from April 30th in The Nation magazine.

In 1807, Heinrich von Kleist published a short story called “The Earthquake in Chile.” Its heroes are a man sitting in prison and a woman in a convent, each confined for the crime of conceiving their child out of wedlock. All of a sudden, an earthquake hits, the buildings that house them collapse, and the couple rediscover each other in the wreckage. Seeking shelter in the woods, they meet people who know of their sin but welcome rather than judge them. In the flush of the emergency, all is transformed: “Instead of the usual trivial tea-table gossip about the ways of the world, everyone was now telling stories of extraordinary heroic deeds.” Exhilarated, the couple follows the masses to the only remaining cathedral, where to their horror, the preacher rages against their transgressions. At the climax of the sermon, the crowd identifies the pair and clubs them to death. The inverted world is gone as soon as it came.

Earthquakes, pandemics, and economic collapse can bring much misery and suffering. But might they also be opportunities to see the world with fresh eyes (or as Slobodian says elsewhere, to get an X-ray view of governing structures). Is it a chance to practice living in different ways, to stand against the way that reductive systems use us? Or will it happen again that those in power and those with great wealth will rush in and capitalize upon disaster. That is the playbook after all.

The vultures are circling overhead as unemployment rises to levels last seen in The Great Depression and corporations declare bankruptcy. But while we’re seeing little government assistance to aid actual people, bankruptcy is actually a kind of safety net. “As financial challenges continue to escalate amid this crisis, bankruptcy is sure to offer a financial safe harbor from the economic storm,” according to the institute’s executive director, Amy Quackenboss.

Notable recent bankruptcies are Neiman Marcus, the luxury department store, the apparel company J. Crew, and Hertz. Here’s a little detail about the Hertz bankruptcy that illustrates how capitalism defends itself from “the people”: 16,000 employees were cut loose and former CEO Kathryn Marinello walked away with over 9 million dollars in total compensation comprised in part of $1.45m as salary, $5.5m in stock, and always my favorite, $1.4m as a bonus.

Bankruptcy, it turns out, and as Donald Trump typifies, is a best practice, and best supported by government. From that same Nation article Slobodian writes

A pioneer in vulture investing and now the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross praised bankruptcy in 2003 as “the corporate form of Darwinism.” Howard Marks, director of investment fund Oaktree Capital Management, was even more graphic in a recent letter to shareholders quoted in The Wall Street Journal. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Catholicism without hell,” he wrote, suggesting that federal bailouts shouldn’t shield market actors from “a healthy fear of loss.” He failed to add that people like himself have learned how to monetize the flames.

This is a part of statecraft as conceived by neoliberal thinkers. Specifically how institutions are designed to sit between the rulers and the ruled – from law courts and insurance companies to investment law and the World Trade Organization. According to Slobodian this is how capitalism is defended from mass democracy.

GUEST

Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern German and international history, and the intellectual history of neoliberalism. His most recent book is Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press) and he’s the co-editor (with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski) of Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (Verso Books). He’s an assistant professor of History at Wellesley Coll...

Let’s begin with what prompted me to contact today’s guest - the opening paragraph from an article from April 30th in The Nation magazine.

In 1807, Heinrich von Kleist published a short story called "The Earthquake in Chile." Its heroes are a man sitting in prison and a woman in a convent, each confined for the crime of conceiving their child out of wedlock. All of a sudden, an earthquake hits, the buildings that house them collapse, and the couple rediscover each other in the wreckage. Seeking shelter in the woods, they meet people who know of their sin but welcome rather than judge them. In the flush of the emergency, all is transformed: “Instead of the usual trivial tea-table gossip about the ways of the world, everyone was now telling stories of extraordinary heroic deeds.” Exhilarated, the couple follows the masses to the only remaining cathedral, where to their horror, the preacher rages against their transgressions. At the climax of the sermon, the crowd identifies the pair and clubs them to death. The inverted world is gone as soon as it came.

Earthquakes, pandemics, and economic collapse can bring much misery and suffering. But might they also be opportunities to see the world with fresh eyes (or as Slobodian says elsewhere, to get an X-ray view of governing structures). Is it a chance to practice living in different ways, to stand against the way that reductive systems use us? Or will it happen again that those in power and those with great wealth will rush in and capitalize upon disaster. That is the playbook after all.

President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Thursday, July 11, 2019 in the Rose Garden.

The vultures are circling overhead as unemployment rises to levels last seen in The Great Depression and corporations declare bankruptcy. But while we’re seeing little government assistance to aid actual people, bankruptcy is actually a kind of safety net. “As financial challenges continue to escalate amid this crisis, bankruptcy is sure to offer a financial safe harbor from the economic storm,” according to the institute’s executive director, Amy Quackenboss.

Notable recent bankruptcies are Neiman Marcus, the luxury department store, the apparel company J. Crew, and Hertz. Here’s a little detail about the Hertz bankruptcy that illustrates how capitalism defends itself from “the people”: 16,000 employees were cut loose and former CEO Kathryn Marinello walked away with over 9 million dollars in total compensation comprised in part of $1.45m as salary, $5.5m in stock, and always my favorite, $1.4m as a bonus.

Bankruptcy, it turns out, and as Donald Trump typifies, is a best practice, and best supported by government. From that same Nation article Slobodian writes

A pioneer in vulture investing and now the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross praised bankruptcy in 2003 as “the corporate form of Darwinism.” Howard Marks, director of investment fund Oaktree Capital Management, was even more graphic in a recent letter to shareholders quoted in The Wall Street Journal. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Catholicism without hell,” he wrote, suggesting that federal bailouts shouldn’t shield market actors from “a healthy fear of loss.” He failed to add that people like himself have learned how to monetize the flames.

This is a part of statecraft as conceived by neoliberal thinkers. Specifically how institutions are designed to sit between the rulers and the ruled - from law courts and insurance companies to investment law and the World Trade Organization. According to Slobodian this is how capitalism is defended from mass democracy.

GUEST

Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern German and international history, and the intellectual history of neoliberalism. His most recent book is Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press) and he’s the co-editor (w...