WFHB

Our opening song is "I’ve Grown So Ugly" by Robert Pete Williams, who was imprisoned in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the mid 1950s.

The rest of our music is by women prisoners and will come from field recordings taken in the 1930s and 40s from such plantation prisons as Parchman in Mississippi and Angola in Louisiana.

In 1935, Parchman prisoner, Mary Carter, changed the lyrics of the blues classic, "Catfish Blues," to highlight how women’s blues differed from men’s.

If I were a catfish swimming deep dawn in the see I could have all these Parchman men fishing after me. ….

When a woman takes the blues she goes to her room and hides. And when a man takes the blues he catches a train and rides.

The female population at Parchman was small. Out of nearly 3,500 prisoners in 1935, just 26 were women. During the Depression years, the women prisoners numbered between 20 and 60, a fraction of the total, which rose from about 3,000 to as many as 6,000. But, females in the convict labor system were generally young and literate, and their crimes, as recorded, were generally violent.

I was prompted to begin this way because of what today’s guest Shane Bauer wrote in his investigative piece, “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard” which was published in Mother Jones in the summer of 2016: "Like the prisoners, the majority of the COs at Winn are African American. More than half are women, many of them single moms."

In the book that grew out of that Mother Jones article, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment, Bauer weaves a deep reckoning of his experience as a guard in a for-profit prison together with a thoroughly researched history of prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. We can’t understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding that history. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery. But perhaps a more important lesson here is that what is private is also public--there can be no private, for-profit prisons, without the support of and funding by the state.

American Prison takes us through Bauer’s hiring and employment at Winn Correctional Center, a private prison ten miles southeast of Winnfield, Louisiana, operated at the time by CCA, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA has since changed its name to CoreCivic, moving from the shadow of an acronym to the fake sunshine of an innocuous-sounding name--think of the private mercenary corporation Blackwater becoming Xe only to change its name a third time, or tobacco giant Philip Morris becoming the Altria Group.

But perhaps there is truth in this name. The penal colony might be the best description of what’s at the core of capitalism: the abusive economic system we blindly praise, as well as the so-called justice system we revere for its purported blindness. CoreCivic sounds about right.

GUEST

Shane Bauer is a senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine. In 2015, Shane took a job as a prison guard in Louisiana to investigate corporate-run prisons, the subject of the award-wining piece, “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard.” In 2016, he went undercover again to investigate America’s resurgent right-wing paramilitary movement. Earlier in his career, Shane focused on the Middle East, reporting from locations such as Iraq, Sudan, Chad, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Israel/Palestine. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Salon, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications.

We begin with the theme song from the wildly popular 1953 television program, Dragnet; I’m sure most of you recognized it. I’ve chosen to begin with it because what we’ll hear today about policing in America (and as an import/export business) reveals the still prevalent attitudes borne of the Cold War and that challenges any …

We begin with the theme song from the wildly popular 1953 television program, Dragnet; I’m sure most of you recognized it. I’ve chosen to begin with it because what we’ll hear today about policing in America (and as an import/export business) reveals the still prevalent attitudes borne of the Cold War and that challenges any distinction we might make between military intervention and police assistance.

But the bulk of what we’ll look at today centers on the era of the Vietnam War. We turn to the police crime dramas from the 1970s and start with the theme from the television show Mannix composed by "Lalo" Schifrin, an Argentine-born American pianist and composer probably best known for the "Theme from Mission: Impossible” and for his collaborations with Clint Eastwood particularly the Dirty Harry films.

Mannix aired from 1967 to 1975 on CBS and ran for eight seasons. The character Joe Mannix works for a large Los Angeles detective agency called Intertect. He also has a working relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department, often exchanging information with his contacts. Mannix is a regular guy but one fighting demons from his time with the U.S. Army during the Korean War. During the series, Mannix is also revealed to have worked as a mercenary in Latin America. The theme songs today come from programs that illustrate the plastic role of policing, or what today’s guest, Micol Seigel, calls violence work.

General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executes Nguyễn Văn Lém. Wikipedia

A key theme of our program today is “border crossing”--the way that the so-called municipal, public, police departments have always been much more than local institutions dedicated to the public safety of a town or city in a US state. "Local" officers would become part of a government agency, The Office of Public Safety (OPS), established in August of 1962 by President Kennedy. This agency offered "counterinsurgency," or police-training, teams for U.S. "allies" and were sent to South Vietnam, Iran, Taiwan, Brazil, Uruguay and Greece. In the very famous photo to the right, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnam Chief of National Police executes a handcuffed member of the Viet Cong. Loan would soon become the owner a pizzeria in Virginia where former OPS agents would often meet and talk (Seigel, 171).

In Violence Work, Seigel shows how the police put violence to work for the state; policing being the quintessential translation of state power. She highlights a number of fallacies or myths, about policing: that it is civilian and distinguishable from the military; that it is a public service rather than a private endeavor; and that it is locally based and municipally controlled. Policing is in fact the human-scale expression of the state. A key issue in all of this is the way the police serve to clear the way for the operations of the so-called free market making it clear that what we call private and what we call public are useful fictions for the operations of Empire and Capital. And now, Police Story, with Micol Seigel, on Interchange on WFHB.

GUEST

Micol Seigel is a Professor in the American Studies & History Departments at Indiana University in Bloomington, whose new book is Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police, published by Duke University Press.

RELATED

On Police Force (Interchange)

Police Training, “Nation-Building,” and Political Repression in Postcolonial South Korea by Jeremy Kuzmarov (Asia-Pacific Journal-Japan Focus, July 1, 2012.)

Police Aid and Political Will,

The view that capitalism is an inherently flawed, exploitative, crisis-prone, oppressive system is not new. But the dangers we face due to its operating procedures are increasing daily as corporations enjoy greater influence over governments and the endless pursuit of profits pushes our climate to the breaking point. Today we try to understand those operating …

The view that capitalism is an inherently flawed, exploitative, crisis-prone, oppressive system is not new. But the dangers we face due to its operating procedures are increasing daily as corporations enjoy greater influence over governments and the endless pursuit of profits pushes our climate to the breaking point.

Today we try to understand those operating procedures and why we ignore studying and critiquing capitalism as if it’s a stoning offense; which indicates the near-religious fervor so many people display when defending this system. "There is no alternative!," is screamed at us from the steps of the Capitol, and shouted down at us from the high-rises on Wall Street. Excuse me, there are alternatives, there always have been.

Our GUEST today is David Camfield. He’s the author of We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society put out by Fernwood Publishing. Camfield is an associate professor in labor studies and sociology at The University of Manitoba.

SEGMENT ONE

We begin with the simple fact that we have to contend with our organizing economic system being assumed as just the way life is, a natural fact of existence. It IS the economy, stupid, to quote someone we don’t need to name, but that means we should always talk about how it makes meaning in our lives...and how it restricts our possible ways of living.

SEGMENT TWO

We try to clear the decks of pseudo explanations for the conditions of our lives--such as the power of positive thinking, evolutionary psychology, and neoliberal market ideology, and so on. These are “just-so” stories designed to evade the sneaky fact that your surplus labor or profit, that’s EXTRA money, friends, never really makes the world a better place for you and your laboring brothers and sisters, but only for a small handful of people in particular countries.

SEGMENT THREE

Capitalism has subverted, for the sake of profit, our understanding of looming existential threat of climate change.

SEGMENT FOUR

We try to find our way back into working class solidarity even though this particular organizing structure has, under capitalism’s neoliberal regime, been decomposed and fractured, making solidarity more and more difficult.

RELATED

David Camfield's Blog

MUSIC

Proletariat, "Voodoo Economics"

The Pop Group, "We Are All Prostitutes"

The Dils, "Class War"

Subhumans, "Businessman"

Gang of Four, "Capital (It Fails Us Now)"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

We open with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock with “The Star Spangled Banner.” While there are any number of powerful songs we might use tonight, especially from the late 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, this one seems to me most necessary. A black man, a trained paratrooper of the US Army, on a right-handed …

We open with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock with "The Star Spangled Banner."

While there are any number of powerful songs we might use tonight, especially from the late 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, this one seems to me most necessary. A black man, a trained paratrooper of the US Army, on a right-handed electric guitar, playing it upside down and left-handed, interpreting a National Anthem that is pro-war in intent, and yet pro-revolution; that is an anthem of a slave nation written by a supporter of slavery. And its full lyrics are never sung as part of public events because there is a more complete and honest history there that would be exposed.

But as we must find out for ourselves, descriptions and definitions of patriotism, in songs or in official histories, are written by the masters of war.

Today’s GUEST, H. Bruce Franklin, was once a tugboat mate and then an Air Force navigator and intelligence officer. He is now and has been for more than half a century a progressive activist and renowned historian and author. His nineteen books and hundreds of articles have won him top awards for lifetime achievement in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature, and marine ecology. He retired in 2016 from a 30 year career as a professor at Rutgers University in Newark.

His latest book is Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War published by Rutgers University Press. It is memoir, history, and analysis artfully woven together in the service of revelation.

Growing up during the Second World War, Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.

Franklin at Stanford

Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.

RELATED

“American Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16, 2014

“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and American Militarism; Or, How We Lost World War II,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 3, 2014.

“American Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War,” Keynote Address, A3M Reunion, Stanford/Palo Alto, May 17, 2014.

“Trump’s Space Force Is Insane,” Foreign Policy Journal.com, August 22, 2018

MUSIC

"The Star Spangled Banner" performed by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock

"I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" by Country Joe and the Fish performed at Woodstock

Today’s show is “Driving the Peace Train.” And perhaps unsurprisingly our opening song tonight is Richie Havens’ version of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train.” And while this song asks us to ride the peace train, our show today asserts the need for engineers of peace. Our GUEST today, Eric Dawson, is one of those engineers, and …

Today’s show is "Driving the Peace Train." And perhaps unsurprisingly our opening song tonight is Richie Havens’ version of Cat Stevens’ "Peace Train." And while this song asks us to ride the peace train, our show today asserts the need for engineers of peace.

Our GUEST today, Eric Dawson, is one of those engineers, and one who has spent twenty-five years training others to take up the burden of peace. He’s just published a book called Putting Peace First: 7 Commitments to Change the World that distills some of those decades of work and wisdom.

We live in a culture that celebrates the flamboyant leader, the great orator, the creative dynamo, the celebrity—some version of the Hero Myth--someone to follow and so relieve ourselves of the burden responsibility. But peace isn’t about leaders and followers, it’s about you and me making all our choices serve the very idea.

You might remember the words of A. J. Muste, radical labor leader and pacifist, who said of Organized Labor, that when it undertakes to write and produce its own movies, to do its own radio broadcasting, then it gives notice that it expects to do its own dreaming. And this is of great importance, for the dreams that people dream, the visions that they see….determine how they act.

Muste wanted labor unions to become holistic communities united in building the good society--not just at work, but at life. The same lesson applies for building a world without war and aggression; that is committing to building pathways to peace in our communities. It’s action (and the reaction it engenders) that brings us into being--that make possible new worlds. Do your thing and I shall know you, says Ralph Waldo Emerson.

SEGMENT ONE

We begin first with taking stock--how our “circles of concern” have been shrinking and our moral imaginations have atrophied...asking mostly, what do I get out of it if I do this?

SEGMENT TWO

We talk about the ways we disempower our youth and how often adults are obstacles to peacemaking activities. A Pink Floyd song comes to mind here; But also we hear of a great example of Commitment 6: Work with your enemies.

SEGMENT THREE

Dawson talks about “culture change” -- how can we adjust the cultural norms that tell us a gun in every hand is normal and that boys shouldn’t cry? Eric Dawson’s answer: Young people have an amazing sense of the possible.

SEGMENT FOUR

We hear about the distinction between Peacemaking and Community Service projects; and we hear about failure, the necessary fact of commitment...failure is a large part of the process--Commitment 7 is "Keep Trying." Finally Dawson reminds the adults in the room that the question we all need to ask of our children is “How Can I Help?”

RELATED

Peace First

A. J. Muste (Blessed Are the Peacemakers)

Fred Rogers (What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, and Mister Rogers?)

MUSIC

"Peace Train" - Richie Havens

"10,000 Years (Peace is Now)" - Live

"Peace Will Come" - Tom Paxton

"Peacekeeper" - Fleetwood Mac

"People Have the Power" - Patti Smith

CREDITS

Producer, Host, Editor: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Our opening song is “The Day After the Revolution” by Pulp…The Revolution begins and ends with you. Today we highlight four past programs on Revolution. This is our Fund Drive Show. Please support Interchange: call us at 812.323.1200 or make a secure online pledge. Thanks! SEGMENT ONE: France (The Terror and the Revolution) Our first …