Deconstructed

In December, Congresswoman Marcia Fudge was nominated to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development by president-elect Biden. Former Ohio state senator and surrogate for both the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns Nina Turner quickly emerged as the candidate to beat in the race to fill her seat. Yet when the dust of the primary had cleared on August 3rd, Shontel Brown, the favored ca...

The next few weeks will be crucial for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which is central to Joe Biden’s agenda. Pennsylvania congressman Brendan Boyle of the House Ways and Means Committee joins Ryan Grim to discuss how the bill could reshape the American economy. https://join.theintercept.com/donate/now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s become a familiar pattern for West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin: first, announce your opposition to a Biden legislative priority. Second, extract some concessions on the theory that this will attract Republican support. Finally, announce that you’ve had a change of heart and can support the bill, which is of course meaningless since the longed for Republican votes never materialize and no flo...

More than 45 dead after remnants of Hurricane Ida slammed the Northeast. In Louisiana, where the hurricane hit days before, hundreds of thousands remain without electricity. Meanwhile, massive fires in the West have burned for weeks. Amid all this catastrophe, we continue building new infrastructure to prop up a fossil fuel industry, barreling us toward one climate disaster after another. The most...

A suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul on Thursday struck crowds that had gathered in hope of escaping the country. ISIS-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the attacks. Journalist Andrew Quilty joins Ryan Grim to talk about the history of ISIS-K and the aftermath of the attacks. Then, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar discusses the situat...

A media consensus has quickly emerged around the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, and it goes like this: whatever its merits in the abstract, in its execution the whole thing has been a chaotic debacle. On this week’s Deconstructed, Ryan Grim talks to journalist and author Anand Gopal and to politician and former US army major Richard Ojeda. They discuss what the media are missing, a...

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released the first part of its latest report on the state of the Earth’s climate. It details with greater certainty than ever before the links between human activity and extreme weather patterns: fires, floods, and rising sea levels. Journalist David Wallace-Wells and sociologist Dana Fisher join Ryan Grim to discuss the takeaways f...

Last week, congress failed to pass an extension to the COVID-19 eviction moratorium. In response several members of the house, including congresswomen Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, camped out on the steps of the capitol in an effort to pressure the Biden administration into executive action. Congresswoman Bush joins Ryan Grim to discuss this week’s action and how her own life story has i...

The assasination earlier this month of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse is raising new questions about the threat posed by international mercenaries. It also casts a new light on a story The Intercept published last month that revealed the existence of a 2020 coup plot against the newly elected president of Bolivia, Luis Arcé — successor to the country’s long-serving leftist president Evo Morales....

Last Friday President Biden announced a sweeping executive order aimed at ending what he called a 40-year “experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power.” Attorney and law professor Zephyr Teachout joins Ryan Grim to discuss the resurgence of antitrust under the Biden presidency. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Cle...

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 a...

The Intercept's Lee Fang obtained audio of the powerful West Virginia senator on a call with the centrist political group No Labels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. Se...

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...

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 flare...

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...

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...

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. ...

If you were reading the news back in 2008, then you probably remember how residential mortgage backed securities fuelled by subprime mortgages tanked the global economy. Well now John Flynn, a veteran of the mortgage securities market, says it’s happening all over again — this time in the commercial real estate market. Flynn joins Ryan Grim and The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz to discuss. Hosted on Aca...

When Michelle Lujan Grisham defeated Eric Griego in the race for New Mexico’s 1st congressional district in 2012, it put the left wing of the state’s Democratic Party on the backfoot. 9 years later, the state’s legislature is routinely passing some of the most progressive legislation in the country. What happened? Griego joins Ryan Grim to discuss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...

Earlier this week Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware led a congressional delegation to a Texas immigration detention facility housing children who arrived unaccompanied at the border. Also on the trip was Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who joins Ryan Grim to talk about the present and future of U.S. immigration policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If Joe Biden is looking for inspiration on immigration policy, he might look to a speech he gave in 2013 when he was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame. The then-Vice President talked of how his own ancestors found refuge in the US and how the immigration policies of the time made it possible for their entire family to join them and escape the ongoing famine in Ireland. Today, many Centr...

In his first press conference as president, Joe Biden decided not to address his decision to continue to seek the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the United Kingdom. The outcome of the Assange case could set a major new precedent on press freedom, yet the press largely seems uninterested in it. Ryan Grim talks to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and to...