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 floor vote ever happens. Now Manchin appears to be doing the same old dance with Biden’s budget plan. W...
Sep 10, 2021•35 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast 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 egregious example at the moment is energy company Enbridge’s Line 3 project. Intercept reporter All...
Sep 04, 2021•41 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast 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 situation confronting refugees from Afghanistan looking to come to the U.S. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...
Aug 28, 2021•32 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast 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, and why the Afghanistan exit is long overdue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informa...
Aug 21, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast 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 from the new report. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Aug 13, 2021•48 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast 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 informed her understanding of poverty and eviction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...
Aug 06, 2021•25 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast 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. As in Haiti, the plot would have seen foreign mercenaries deployed against an elected leader. Ryan G...
Jul 23, 2021•43 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Jul 16, 2021•41 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Cleveland Trust bank, and even the mob. Kucinich tells the story of the fight to save Municipal Light i...
Jul 02, 2021•47 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast 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 about prison, prospects for whistleblowers in the Biden era, and what she’s been up to since her rele...
Jun 25, 2021•49 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jun 16, 2021•58 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Jun 11, 2021•39 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast 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. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jun 04, 2021•36 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast 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 for the party? Activist Lauren Windsor and former Senate staffer Eli Zupnick join Ryan Grim to disc...
May 28, 2021•47 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast 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 flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict and what US media are missing. The video referenced at the end o...
May 21, 2021•41 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast 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 project would have occupied Lenca land and interfered with waterways sacred to their community. Cáce...
May 14, 2021•43 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast 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 and Allied Trades joins Ryan Grim to discuss the PRO Act, a labor reform bill currently before Cong...
May 07, 2021•44 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Bruenig founded the progressive think tank People's Policy Project , which relies largely on s...
Apr 29, 2021•39 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Apr 23, 2021•33 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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 information....
Apr 16, 2021•34 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Apr 08, 2021•25 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Central American immigrants are getting a different sort of welcome at the southern border. John Washingt...
Apr 03, 2021•37 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Billie Winner Davis, mother of Reality Winner, who was prosecuted and imprisoned for leaking confide...
Mar 26, 2021•53 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast This week New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone, the chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, gave the legislative push for single-payer healthcare a major boost by announcing that he would be co-sponsoring the proposed Medicare for All bill and holding a hearing on it sometime in the current term. Pramila Jayapal, Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and physician Abdul El-Sayed join Ryan Grim to discuss the prospects for universal healthcare in the United States. Hosted...
Mar 19, 2021•46 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast On Saturday, a year after Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses, a slate of progressive candidates swept elections for leadership positions in the state Party. Ryan Grim talks to activist Keenan Korth and to Judith Whitmer, Nevada State Democratic Party Chair, about how they out organized establishment Democrats. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 09, 2021•28 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast This week the House of Representatives passed a $1.9 trillion Covid relief package by a 220-210 vote. It now moves to the Senate, where it will have to make it past a Republican filibuster. Huffpost reporter Arthur Delaney and Elizabeth Pancotti, Policy Director at Employ America, join Ryan Grim to discuss what’s actually in the bill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 05, 2021•40 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast After a series of high-profile terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in France, the country finds itself in a heated debate over some of its most cherished values: laïcité, or secularism, and the principle of race-neutrality, or color-blindness, in public policy. A controversial new bill proposed by President Emmanuel Macron targeting "Islamic separatism" is meeting with fierce opposition. French author, journalist, and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo joins guest host Vanessa A. Bee to discuss. Hoste...
Feb 26, 2021•40 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast In the early 2000s, after gaining control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time in modern history, Republicans undertook a gerrymandering scheme that solidified their control of the state even further. What followed was a multi-decade experiment in deregulation that has now left millions of Texas residents freezing and without power. Ryan Grim talks to former congressional candidate Mike Siegel and University of Austin professor Varun Rai about how it happened—and how it could...
Feb 19, 2021•34 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast In his first significant foreign policy announcement since taking office, President Biden broke with both former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama and declared an end to U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. But it will take more than U.S. withdrawal to end the violence there. Rep. Ro Khanna, activist Shireen Al-Adeimi, and reporter Akbar Ahmed join Ryan Grim to discuss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Feb 12, 2021•43 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast If President Joe Biden is going to be able to pass any part of his agenda, he'll need to get it past the Senate filibuster. That's likely impossible given the chamber's 50-50 split. Is it time to finally change the Senate rules and allow the body to operate on a simple majority basis? Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and author Adam Jentleson join Ryan Grim to discuss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Feb 05, 2021•53 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 
