Jacobin Radio Folgen

Episode 2 of Stockton to Malone. No interview here, just RL and Micah discussing RL's performance of the socialist equivalent of Kendrick Lamar's "Control" at the Young Democratic Socialists conference, Micah's years speaking with extreme vocal fry to atone for his white male privilege, that time Obama took the bowling alley out of the White House and replaced it with a basketball court, and RL's cousin who was in Kriss Kross.Follow us on Twitter at @RLisDead and @micahuetricht.Thanks to Tanner Howard for producing the show.

Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It's also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the case, it received little attention. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She talks with The Dig about prisons in American life. You can read Gottschalk's recent piece for Jacobin "Conservatives Against Incarceration?" here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/carceral-state-mass-incarceration-conservatives-koch-trump/

American slaveholders before the Civil War oversaw an incredibly brutal economic system that generated enormous wealth for a tiny elite while denying enslaved Africans the most basic rights. But they also presided over American foreign policy, overseeing US territorial and economic expansion. As historian Matt Karp explains in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, they didn't just want an independent slaveholding south — they wanted to spread their empire of slavery to the entire United States and beyond. In November 2016, Karp spoke at the New School in New York City with historian Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author of many books on the Civil War including Reconstruction and The Fiery Trial. Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and a contributing editor at Jacobin. Follow him on Twitter at @karpmj.Produced by Tanner Howard.