The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today, this is just a political conversation that we’ll be having about fascism, but more importantly, talking about the works of Antonio Gramsci. Joining me today is Alberto Toscano. Welcome to Rattling the Bars Alberto.

Alberto Toscano:

Thanks for having me.

Mansa Musa:

First, explain to our audience who Antonio Gramsci was.

Alberto Toscano:

So Gramsci is best known as former secretary of the Italian Communist Party and one of the most significant Marxist and communist theorists of the 20th century. And most of his theorizing, such as we know today, was done in prison in a series of no books, his prison notebooks that were published after his death and after the end of World War II. It’s actually this year is the 100th anniversary of his arrest, which took place on the 8th of November, 1926. He was arrested while a member of parliament for Italy by the fascist state under direct orders of the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in fact breaching his parliamentary immunity, which he still had at the time. Before that, Gramsci had been a communist militant, but had also been a journalist. That was his trade and also that was one of the principle ways in which he engaged in political organizing first in the Italian Socialist Party and then in 1921 in the Communist Party, when there was a split from the Socialist Party to the left.

And so he only became a member of Parliament in 1924. So he was only in Parliament for a year and a half. And of course this was a very anomalous parliament because fascism had already

Come to power in 1922, but had become increasingly more repressive. And by the time of Gramsci’s arrest, then you essentially have in the wake of that, the formation of a one party state and the abolition of any kind of multiparty system.

Mansa Musa:

So to respond to him was predict based on not only so much of his being in the parliament, but based on his writing and his journalist and what he was reporting on is that what caused him to ultimately be arrested because in a parliamentary setting, you don’t have but so much power or you don’t have so much control over information. You either going to articulate your party position. I’m a communist or you going to advocate for policy change. But in a journalist capacity, you’re hitting home with information, educating people about repression and the disconnect between the government and people. Is that what led to his ultimate aggress?

Alberto Toscano:

Well, I think both those elements at once. So on the one hand, Gramsci was the leader of the most significant and most combative group among anti-fascist forces in Italy. He was very well known internationally, of course, in the context of the communist movement. He was the head of the party. And what fascism did from before it came to power until it really fully came to control Italy was to try to destroy and neutralize all forms of working class and popular opposition and resistance. So of course the papers, whether public or indeed clandestine, all forms of education, all forms of working class organizing. And so Gramsci in many ways brought together all of those figures. The journalist, the educator, the party leader, the organizer. And so the idea was that really to arrest them was to decapitate the

Mansa Musa:

Communist

Alberto Toscano:

Movement and the anti-fascist movement. And the famous sentence I believe voiced by Mussolini, but I think also spoken by the judge at his final trial, which was in 1928, was that we’re going to stop this brain from thinking. So the idea was not just the problem of organization, not just a problem of the political and even militant power of the communist movement. The idea was that their very ideas, their ideology, their capacity to organize the worldviews of the working and popular classes in Italy had to be quashed. And so that was key. And so along with a whole number of communist party leaders and militants, Gramsci was arrested on the basis that he was leading an insurrection. I think this was the crime, let’s say, for which he was convicted was the attempt to overthrow the Italian state because shortly before his arrest, there had been a botched assassination attempt on Mussolini.

So that was kind of used as a pretext.

Mansa Musa:

And let’s unpack the stop his brain from thinking because when you look at that particular sentiment, this is what Corntell Pro was designed for in the United States specifically to stop any, who would say the rise of a Black Messiah as it related to Black people. But his overall goal was to stop brains from thinking, stop people from organizing. Talk about how Gramsky, in terms of the abolition, mirrors what we see today, a lot of the theory and a lot of the perspective about abolishing prison come out of prison, come out of the thinking and what it looked like and what it will look like, come out of the space where people are incarcerated or people are in prison. Can you make a connection between the two?

Alberto Toscano:

Yeah. I think the connection is a connection we can make, but it’s also a tricky connection to the extent that certainly in the 1920s and ’30s, the communist movement or the socialist movement, or even the anti-fascist movement more broadly, did not in any straightforward way ascribe to an abolitionist position as part of its program. And in the case of Gramsci, of course, we do have this very strong parallel that imprisoned intellectuals have played an enormous role in political education and political organization

Mansa Musa:

Across

Alberto Toscano:

Anti-colonial, across anarchists, across communists, across black liberation movements, and of course into contemporary abolitionist thought. Just the other day I was looking at the list of the books in George Jackson’s prison cell, right? I think number 82 was a collection by Gramsci, the modern prince. So amongst other things, he was also reading Gramsci. And in fact, if we look at Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, there’s a remarkable amount of detailed writing in the chapters on fascism about the emergence of Italian fascism

Mansa Musa:

In

Alberto Toscano:

The early 1920s. So I think there’s really important links and also Gramsci, I think among Marxist theorists, even though I wouldn’t go as far as calling him an abolitionist, he certainly had a very complex and developed thinking around the nature of the police and policing, right?

Mansa Musa:

And

Alberto Toscano:

About thinking about the relationship between policing, repression, the modern state and fascism. And one thing I think we have to keep in mind is that the prison notebooks, which incidentally, Gramsci only started writing when he was allowed to have a pen and a notebook in his cell, which was, I think, three years into his imprisonment. So for the first two and a half, three years, these were thoughts that he could only sketch out in letters to his family. He was only allowed to write to his family, not to comrades. And only after a lot of work mainly by his sister-in-law, Tanya, was he allowed finally to have notebooks? He couldn’t keep the notebooks all in his cell. So he had to have a complex way of organizing his thoughts because then they would be stored by the prison warden. So he had this very, aside from having extremely difficult health conditions that eventually led to his very early death, of course, worsened by the fascist prison system, he was also working against all odds as most imprisoned intellectuals and most imprisoned people have in terms of writing, reading.

The most basic things become huge struggles. But Gramsci’s notebooks were there in many ways to try to figure out the nature and the causes of the defeat, at least partial or temporary defeat of the anti-fascist movement. And that’s, I think, partly the reason why he was so interested in thinking in this expansive and complex way about the police as something that reproduced the social order, but also, and this is key for Gramsci, the police as that which disorganizes or neutralizes the opposition to a dominant or hegemonic power. And in many ways, fascism’s success as well as a result of the weakness perhaps or the failures of anti-fascist forces was also a result of its ability in disorganizing the working class and disorganizing the parties of the left and disorganizing the anti-fascist front. There was a contemporary of Gramsci who started out in the fascist movement, ended up much later in the Communist Party.

Kutzio Malapalta wrote a famous book called The Technique of the Cudita, and he talks about the fascist march on Rome in 1922. And he says that fascism’s singular ability is, as he put it, to make a void around itself. So to disorganize and in that sense, going back to what you were mentioning before about Kointel Pro, this idea of stopping thought, of stopping the relationship between intellectuals, organizations and resistance is absolutely key to fascism, which is after all a counter-revolutionary movement. And so as a counter-revolutionary movement or a counter-revolutionary regime, it’s also always a form of counterinsurgency or Angela Davis and Marcusek borrowing from an Italian anarchist from the 1920s use this term, preventive counter-revolution. So that in many ways is what policing is, right? Including for Gramsci, the police in one of its aspects is this complex practice of preventing the possibilities for successful social transformation or revolutionary change.

And Gramsci, because he had this very expansive notion of the state, also argued that the work of policing is not necessarily just done by the police, like by the uniformed police,

Mansa Musa:

By police as

Alberto Toscano:

A branch of the state. It can also be done by all kinds of private, commercial, paramilitary, NGO, all sorts of different bodies can fulfill this function of reproducing a dominant order and preventing the emergence of its challenger.

Mansa Musa:

And to show you how study was, when you look at today, we talk about creating a disorganizing, we look at today, everything you just outlined, you got private police, you got private prison industries, you got everything that’s designed around this organized or keeping people disorganized is being perpetuated today through this system as we see it. A lot of misinformation, a lot of heavy-handed policing when we see what’s going on with ICE. So his perspective as it relates to this being a wing or armor of fascism is very astute. And I like the fact that how he look at the police because Hoover and that administration, they use every level of the police in this country to eradicate any opposition. They completely destroyed the Black Panther Party as a result of infiltration or just like what they did with Fred Hampton coming to kill you or send information, misinformation, create beefs between opposing parties, individuals, right?

But talk about Grumpy wrote on Foudism, viewing it not just as a factory system, but as a project to create a new type of man through disciplined labor and regulated private lives as that industrial mold collapse, how did the transition away from Foudism help pave the way for the castle system as we see it today?

Alberto Toscano:

Yeah, that’s a really complex question. I wanted to take a step back first just to make a quick comment about what you just said regarding the dismantling by Hoover and the FBI and the infiltration of the Panthers and of course of other movements as well. Actually, Gramsci’s arrest, and there’s still a lot of debate by historians about this, was seen by Gramsci himself and by many of his comrades as a result precisely of forms of infiltration. And we now know that high level members of the Italian Communist Party, including somebody who then became a very famous anti-communist writer in Yazosilone, were paid informants,

Mansa Musa:

Right?

Alberto Toscano:

And the problem already was a similar experience as that of other movements and parties that have been subjected to counterinsurgency practices and infiltration is that if you read biographies of Gramsci, you can see that for good reason he’d become extremely suspicious

Mansa Musa:

Of

Alberto Toscano:

A number of his comrades and the fascist infiltration had led to a lot of bad blood. Some of it, it’s like fed jacketing, right? Some of it was people who actually weren’t infiltrators, but who their comrades thought were. So that dynamic was something that the fascist secret police had very much implemented already in the 1920s and 30s and it was part and parcel even of the process that led to Gramsci’s arrest.

Now, to answer your question, even though Gramsci had never been to the United States and was writing all of this material with a trickle of books and newspaper, he was reconstructing the nature of what was to become the capitalist hegemon in the United States from the confines of his prison cell under these extremely trying conditions, but he became convinced in many ways in a fairly prescient or kind of prophetic way that the reorganization of labor, capital and society in the States around the time of course of the Great Crash of 29 and then of the beginning of the New Deal under Roosevelt was a kind of pioneering transformation. So he used this terminology of Americanism and then of course used the term Fordism after Henry Ford and after the forms of labor organization, but also the efforts by Ford to really transform the private, moral, social, even sexual lives of workers in Ford factories.

And this is what Gramsci’s getting at when he’s talking about the way in which capitalism is also tandentially creating a kind of new man or a new worker or a new person and so on.

Mansa Musa:

And so

Alberto Toscano:

Many people after World War II developed these insights to talk about the regime of accumulation and the regime of labor organization pioneered by the United States as a form of fortism often linked to relatively high wages for workers in exchange for their abstention from excessive forms of class struggle, the idea that workers could also become consumers rights, so the two car nuclear family and so on and so forth. So that whole kind of norm and also kind of vision of consumer society linked to mass production

And what people have been arguing since the crises of the 1970s has been that that arrangement which was just being formed around the time that Gramsci was writing his notebooks and then becomes really pervasive and dominant in the United States, but also in the so- called global north in the post-war period comes into a kind of crisis in the 1970s, a crisis that now people talk about in terms of the emergence of neoliberalism and so on and that the norm of fortism, which had to do with mass production, mass consumption, and what the geographer, Marxist geographer, David Harvey, called a kind of almost a pact or truce between big labor, big unions, big capital in the state, this kind of phrase and you have high inflation, unemployment, and then this move to withdraw the state from social welfare, social reproduction, to limit people’s social and civic rights and so on and so forth and to give much more liberty to capital,

Mansa Musa:

To

Alberto Toscano:

Accumulation, to markets and so on and so forth. And so many people read Gramsci’s analysis of fortism as a way by contrast to think about the crisis of fortism in the 1970s, which is of course in the United States, not just in the United States, but in the United States in particular, then sets the conditions, it’s not immediate, but sets the conditions for what will become the question of mass incarceration as a form

Mansa Musa:

Of

Alberto Toscano:

Class warfare against surplus and racialized populations. And that’s what’s interesting is that when Gramsci’s writing in the 1930s, late 20s, 1930s, he’s saying, “Well, Europe can’t really do fortism properly because we have this demographic issue

Mansa Musa:

And the

Alberto Toscano:

Demographic issue in Europe is that there’s large peasantry, but there’s also old classes of landowners and there’s a kind of like- Landmarks. Yeah. And then the United States from a European standpoint, a more modern country doesn’t have those issues, right? But in fact, when you look at the crisis of fortism, then the problem of surplus populations, unemployment as linked to these questions that we’re just talking about, like mass movements for emancipation, black liberation and left wing movements, that kind of comes together. And so on can see the emergence of what then comes to be called the prison industrial complex as a kind of confluence and articulation of a counterinsurgency project on the one hand to break the back of movements, challenging capitalism, white supremacy, so on. But then on the other hand, also as a question of political economy and labor, as a question of what to do with increasing deindustrialization with the desire by the capitalist class to break that postwar arrangement because it’s no longer attractive or feasible for them and therefore to shrink manufacturing labor to reduce social rights and so on.

So I think we can use Gramsci. Of course, he’s talking about a very different moment. He’s talking about the emergence, the moment of emergence of something

That then enters into crisis in the 1970s and creates the conditions, the social and political conditions for what will become the prison industrial complex, what people call mass incarceration and so on

Mansa Musa:

And so forth. And that’s the natural outcome of that contradiction, forwardism, industrialization, but the means of production versus how do you treat people that’s producing? And you create this illusion that they had what they call Leavitown where they create these massive housing projects, they call Leavitown for World War II and when they was coming back from the war, but at the same token, your income or what you’re getting to live this lifestyle cease to exist because to your point, greed is dominant. Capitalism, they’re not trying to share the wealth. They not sitting back saying,” Well, we’re going to give you equal pay for equal labor.

Once you unionize, we going to bust that, we’re going to subjugate you. We’re going to create factories that dehumanize you, which ultimately the contradiction will become so antagonicity that the work is going to respond and respond to that repression and respond to the repression is the prison industrial complex. Some way to contain that is going to be kill you or imprison you, and that’s the natural outcome of capitalism and imperialism. But Grumsky also talked about the contradiction between, or as far as in how rural produces and then the urban consumes, can you make a comparison between that and what we see today in this country as far as how that move into that particular part of the narrative goes into the prison industrial complex or how is it that is it a relationship between the two?

Alberto Toscano:

Well, Gramsci in the Italian context of the 1920s and ’30s, he’s also somebody who comes from, even though it’s an island, Saldania, what was considered part of the South. So an area that was viewed as underdeveloped and also Sardinians themselves in a way that’s of course different from Black and Brown folk in the United States, but they were certainly in the 19th century, kind of racialized as semi-savage, partly barbarian, backward,

Mansa Musa:

Same thing

Alberto Toscano:

With Sicilians and Southerners and so on. So for Gramsci, but also for the whole socialist and communist and workers movement, there was this issue which took the name of the Southern question. It was very common in the 19th century and 20th century in the workers movement to talk about, you would have the women question, the southern

Mansa Musa:

Question,

Alberto Toscano:

All these questions. But the southern question was a way for Gramsci to think both about this geographical differentiation in Italian capitalism, but also about the fact that there were forms of so to speak internal colonialism. And Gramsci does use this language, right? He says the relationship of northern capitalists to southern peasants is like a semicolonial relationship. He talks about the role of the police and of police violence in managing and reproducing this internal colonial relationship so much so that recently an American theorist, Michael Denning has made really interesting parallels between the prison notebooks and actually what Du Bois was writing about northern capital and southern black labor and black reconstruction, which is a text written at the same time, like pretty much contemporaneous with Gramshi. As a political analyst, as a journalist and as an organizer, the question for Gramsci who was based in Italy’s the center of Italy’s car industry, like Italy’s Detroit, so to speak, which is Turin, where the Fiat Factory was, was to think about how could the industrial workers movement and the proletarian movement make links to a peasantry that was much less politically organized, but of course was being massively exploited

Mansa Musa:

Through this form

Alberto Toscano:

Of internal colonism. So part of his issue, which was it’s like the issue of all communists and socialist movements that start out like the Russian Revolution in situations where you have high proportion of workers are still tied to the soil or tied to rural forms of life, was how to make this alliance, this like worker peasant alliance.

Now, if we fast forward to the 1970s, and I’m thinking here of the work on the emergence of the prison industrial complex in California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we can think how the rural and the urban in moments of crisis enter into a particular articulation that creates this kind of racialized prison fix. So in the case of 1970s to 1980s California as mapped out by Gilmore, this is the situation where you have surplus capital, you have surplus land because there is a There’s a crisis or partial crisis of agribusiness and certainly of rural employment because of mechanization. And then of course you also have this through the crises of the ’70s, this expansion in surplus labor, which is also racialized and criminalized in the kind of last hired first fired situation of racialized workers. And so it’s in that context that then prison building is presented and advanced as a way of linking what to do with the surplus labor, which is to say incarcerated or incarcerate some of it and threaten the rest surplus capital to then invest in these projects of prison building that are largely taking place in kind of rural context.

So I mean, that’s just one very sketchy presentation of what is a very complicated geographic and political and political economic argument by Gilmore. But I do think that that geographical dimension is really significant for thinking about the dynamics of domination, exploitation and resistance. And that’s also why Gramsci’s own kind of form of geographical thinking was significant to so many ant-colonial scholars. So the Gramsci’s writings in the Southern question are very significant for radical Indian historians. They’re very significant for the Palestinian American

Mansa Musa:

Critic,

Alberto Toscano:

Edward Said when he writes about culture and imperialism. So that geographic dimension I think is a really unique aspect of Gramsci’s thinking, but also comes from his personal experience as somebody who comes from this semi-internal colony, but who then moves as a very young man to become a journalist and a militant in the most industrial and most advanced center of Italian capitalism. So he experiences these multiple worlds and these juxtapositions in his own person. So I think that’s also significant. And I imagine one can also make links to all of the debates that took place in the history of US Black liberation movements around this theme of internal colonialism, going back to arguments about the Black Belt and the communist movement and so on.

Mansa Musa:

And you see the Southern question when he talks about, as you articulated, how the industrialization and then the decline of the industry in rural America, you see a good example here in Maryland. In Maryland they had in the western part of Maryland, they had the upper western part of Maryland, they had industry. When all their industry closed down, prior to their industry closing down, they was talking about building prisons in that part of the state and everybody in Western Maryland was opposed to it because they had a number of prisons in different parts already. So they was like, “Nah, we’re not having that. ” But a year or two later when the industry closed down, they were begging for them to build a prison. They literally begged for them to build a prison. And now when you get to western part of Maryland, as far as your eye can see, it’s nothing but prisons.

And this come out of the analysis you just made was like how at one point you had industry, you had this industrialization, you had money, but now the shift is you shift from agribusiness to concrete and steel that becomes your product and your product is human beings and you ain’t picking cotton there, you picking up human beings and that’s your product in that narrative, right?

The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Could President Trump and his MAGA Congress be planning to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections? Well, we have some evidence that might surprise you, which we will unpack on this episode of the Capitol Hill React Report. Hello, this is Taya Graham, myself, along with my reporting partner, Steven Janice, our Capitol Hill correspondence for the Real News Network. We report regularly on what’s happening in the nation’s Capitol, but with a twist. We examine the process of governance through the prism of the most powerful force in today’s politics, economic inequality. Now, before you say, tell you that seems sort of limited. Just let me explain a little bit before we get to the first video. Economic inequality is at its highest point in recent history. Just take a look at the latest report that showed American workers’ share of the economy has fallen to its lowest level since 1947.

That’s right. In 2025, the share of the economy that went to the people who actually make it run was 54% a historic low. Okay. So why is this context essential for reporting on politics? Well, because all that wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands translates into concentrated power and that power now flows into our elections in the form of cash. Cash, which translates into victories at the ballot box for the purveyors of an increasingly extractive economy, insulating it from ballot box accountability, which ultimately means that you can’t understand politics on Capitol Hill unless you comprehend what currently defines it, namely the rich getting richer. Stephen, how am I doing?

Stephen Janis:

So you’re doing great. I mean, one of the things we have to think about is we got to look at democracy as a whole here functioning through this prism of inequality. The idea of democracy that delivers a certain amount of freedom to the people who are part of it. Now, freedom is a limited resource. So as people get richer and richer, they hoard that freedom. And so there’s less freedom to go around. Freedom to do what you want, freedom to educate yourself, freedom to live where you want. All those things sort of translate into the affordability crisis we’re seeing now, which means that there’s less freedom for the working people and more and more freedom for the richest 1% and more and more freedom to control how we live. And that’s why we have this sort of crisis on Capitol Hill and that’s how we have to view what goes on on Capitol Hill.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, that is such a great point and brings us right back to the topic at hand. The incredibly tense state of American elections and why wealth inequality will play a key role in that autocratic calculus. So first, let’s be honest, Steven, the mainstream media has, in my opinion, been misreading Trump, specifically his pronouncements that he doesn’t care about gas prices or the quagmire in Iran. Let’s listen to him talk about it and then discuss. When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make it?

Donald Trump:

Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about American financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivated.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So the interpretation from the TV pundits has been that President Trump is just inexplicably tone deaf or detached or just disinterested, but we think Trump is telegraphing something much more insidious. So Steven, let me ask you a question after watching this video. Is Trump just really disengaged as the mainstream media says, or as they say he’s unhinged, or is there something else a little more troubling going on here?

Stephen Janis:

Well, Ted, this is one of many clips where Trump has kind of downplayed midterm elections or voters concerns or gas prices or whatever. He does it consistently. And of course it would be suicide for a politician in a functioning democracy to say something like that, right? Because this would directly affect how people vote. I really think for some reason gas prices, well, I kind of understand that gas prices are one of the biggest motivators for people when it comes to elections. And so it would be suicide, but what he’s really trying to say is, “I’m not worried about the midterms because I got this locked out. ” And look at what happened in the last presidential election. He tried to overturn it with a lost, but he wasn’t really prepared. He has been preparing for two years now to be able to interfere with the elections.

He subpoenaed ballots all over the country, including Fulton County and Georgia. He has set up this election integrity system run by a person who actually denied the 2020 election. He has increased the funding for ICE and Border Patrol, which we’ll talk about later. He has just simply put people in place who will be able to do what he needs to do. The Justice Department itself does whatever he wants. They’ll prosecute anybody. Very true. So they will certainly be willing to weigh in on this. He is prepared. He’s declared emergencies in so many situations. He is prepared and he is trying to say, “I’m not worried about it because no matter what happens, I’m going to make sure that I come out on top.” And I think that’s what we’re missing here. When he says he’s disinterested, what he’s saying is, “I’ve got this in the bag.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, I think you put your finger right on it here. The real danger here isn’t just what Trump is saying, but the fact that everyone keeps dismissing it. And you know what Trump hasn’t even ruled out paying the people who stormed the Capitol and those who tried to halt the counting of the electoral votes in 2020, despite the fact that his administration said the fund is dead, he was literally just quoted as saying, “I think they should be reimbursed by a crooked government.” Now, his remarks regarding the controversial $1.7 billion weaponization fund bolster, I think the case that he believes he can alter the midterm outcome. It would’ve set aside money for people who believe they were unjustly prosecuted, namely the Jan six insurrectionists. I mean, critics say if Trump has his way, he will literally be able to assemble a pratorian guard to disrupt the elections.

And I’m alluding to the elite core of Roman military officers who guarded the emperor, but who eventually just took power themselves. Steven, what does it mean if he gets his way?

Stephen Janis:

Well, what it means is because ways he has what you need the first … The most important element of any sort of autocratic takeover is having the money to pay people and having the freedom to pay people any way you want. Now this $1.7 billion fund would be an easy way just to dole out cash to people who had done his bidding before. Now he has other ways of doing this that we’ll talk about. But the main thing is it gives them the power of the purse in a way that’s totally up to his discretion and the Justice Department, which is an extension of him. Now what’s interesting about it is I don’t really think they need a fund. Those J6 is going to just sue and then Trump can approve the payouts. That’s right. So he’ll get it one way or another. But the point is he wants to signal to the people, “Hey, if you help interfere with an election, I will pay for it and I’ll reward you because these settlements could be huge.

$1.7 billion is a lot of money.” Sure is. So I think that’s what he’s trying to telegraph is saying, “Help me out with this and you’ll get paid.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, that is not only spot on, but it’s actually really scary. But what’s even more concerning to me is how much this election interference plan is hiding in plain sight with little or no pushback because he can’t do this alone. He needs help from his ever loyal contingent in Congress. And for the most part, they are in lockstep with Trump. And that was more than evident when the MAGA Congress started to plot a strategy to get more money to ice customs and border patrol for purposes that we’re going to touch on a litle bit later. Now their plan was to use a tactic called reconciliation, which allows legislation to bypass the filibuster provided it has significant fiscal impact on federal spending. Now, this was an unprecedented power grab because the funding bill was intended to provide routine annual appropriations and that’s a measure that is usually passed with bipartisan support, which brings me to an interesting encounter we had on Capitol Hill with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, who didn’t seem to want to answer our question when we asked why ICE and CBP needed an additional $70 billion in funding, but his reluctance is also revealing.

Let’s take a listen to what happened.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Fuck that up.

Stephen Janis:

Congressman, why does ICE need an additional $75 billion? Why is that funding? How do you justify that to the American people who now are suffering with high gas prices and things like that? Why is that even more money?

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, that’s the cost of funding the department. Are you for abolishing ICE?

Stephen Janis:

I’m just asking the question. They already have $14.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, you understand that that is the- I’m not

Stephen Janis:

For against anything.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

You understand that’s the appropriated amount, right? Yes. That’s been appropriated.

Stephen Janis:

Of course, but I’m asking

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Questions. So the reason additional funds, that’s the base budget for ICE and CBP, right? You understand that?

Stephen Janis:

I do.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Okay. So the additional funds that came through the Working Family’s tax cut bill were to increase border security. Why? Because Joe Biden let in 10 and a half million people into the country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, just for the record, are you for abolishing ICE? Because you didn’t answer the congressman’s question.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I’m for abolishing politicians to be able to answer a question with a question and evade answering the question I ask. I’m for abolishing that. But one thing I want to just say before we move on is that his sort of argument that that’s the appropriate amount for ICE is actually wildly inaccurate. I look back into the ICE funding and what ICE and CPB have been spending roughly eight to $10 billion a year. They already have $140 billion. This is not an appropriate amount for anything. That’s an absolute freaking lie. ICE and CBT do not need that much money. This is excess cash. Taxpayer cash, your taxpayer dollars that are simply being spent without accountability. I think there’s a reason for that we’ll talk about in a second, but really he was just FOS on that. And I just want to point that out because it really was infuriating.

I was trying to get his answer, but I couldn’t sit there and get into an argument with him about what he was saying was actually patently false.

Taya Graham:

Personally, when a politician answers a question with a question, in my opinion, that is a sign they don’t have an answer or they have an answer, they don’t want the public to know. And he

Stephen Janis:

Definitely didn’t have an answer in this point. So good point, Teo.

Taya Graham:

Thank you. But I mean, the question you were asking was not insignificant. I mean, in fact, it was a really big piece of the puzzle, led us to think that the threats to the midterm elections are widely underestimated. Now, the crux of the matter is funding. Now what you asked is why Republicans want to give ICE, customs, and Border Patrol another $70 billion. And what makes this so unusual is that the big beautiful bill dropped roughly $140 billion on both agencies just last year. But with ICE and CBP spending at best $20 billion annually, it begs the question, why so much? What is it really for? And Steven, you have a theory about this. Tell me about it.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I think the thing you have to think about is that they’re moving towards a more autocratic form of government. Autocracies and democracies have different incentives, basically, different incentive systems. Technically speaking, a democracy wants to award beneficial policy for constituents. So to get elected, you got to do stuff that people like. Autocracies don’t work that way. They need to punish people who might push back. They need to crush dissent and that’s through a system of incentivization of punishment. And so in my opinion, this money, which can, I guess when you add up $210 billion for a law enforcement agency is about constructing a great American punishment regime to prepare Americans for a more autocratic government.

When I looked into the records and tried to figure out how much money does ICE and CPP still have on the books, it’s really hard to figure out because the federal government really isn’t oriented towards reporting on multifiscal year cycles about how much money they have. But I looked, I found at least $73 billion that had been unallocated so far. And that’s after they’ve already built all these warehouses, these prisons where they’re incarcerating people. So they literally have what would be for those agencies unlimited funding. And unlimited funding for law enforcement gives you a way to institute punishment throughout all levels of governance. I mean, those detention centers can be used to detain people for a variety of reasons. They’ve already detained Americans. They’ll detain more. Having an unlimited amount of money to swarm CPB and swarm ICE into cities gives you this ability to do what Trump did in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago.

And when these elections come and when Trump is trying to say, Hey, they weren’t fair, they’re going to need these guys and women to come into cities and to try to disrupt the people who will be pushing back or to seize ballot box. I really think this excess money is insulating both institutions and that’s for a reason to create a punishment regime that will be reflective of the autocratic values that the Trump administration is espousing through their policy choices.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you did the classic thing every reporter should do and actually anyone watching should do, which is follow the money. You follow the money, you figure out what’s really going on. So let me just ask you a question about this. I was thinking back to the first time it really hit home with us that something was afoot with regard to democracy during the shutdown last year. So last year, Democrats wanted to extend the Obamacare tax credits and Republicans refused. But what struck me at the time was how the majority party approached the entire conflict. They simply shut down Congress. They simply stopped town halls and talking to their constituents. No debate, no work, just silence. And of course, all of that was just to deny people healthcare. And that seems like a pretty anti-Democratic strategy. So how does it play into that theme you’re talking about, about the punishment regime theme?

What do you think?

Stephen Janis:

Well, the thing is if you shut it down, you’re kind of punishing people because you’re taking away the deliberative legislative body that’s supposed to represent their interests where you are supposed to hash these things out and figure out how to get people healthcare. So what you’re saying is, we don’t care. You don’t have healthcare, you’re being punished. We’re going to punish you by not doing anything and showing you that we don’t have to do anything and disengaging from our constituents. And so I think it’s a big part of that. I mean, a functioning legislative body should be an accountability mechanism to make sure things like ICE and CBP don’t get out of control. But now when they shut it down and turn it into this absolute desert of democracy, well, then you don’t have a limited legislative body to represent you. Without representation, you’re done.

I mean, what people don’t understand, and I think you’ve talked about this really, really well, is that democracy is a culture that infiltrates all levels of government governance. When you change that to a punishment regime, to an autocratic culture, everything changes.Your ability as a constituent and to vote and to have some impact and some say in how you live diminishes quite quickly. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

Taya Graham:

Steven, that’s a really, really good point. And you touched on constituents actually having a voice and this is something we caught at a press conference where that idea that you’re touching on right there was absolutely front and center. Now it was an announcement by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Summer Lee to announce a bill that would shut down super PACS. Now Super PACS are of course the campaign behemoths that can spend unlimited amounts of money basically to buy elections. Super PACS are like the corporate love child of Citizens United, that famous decision that allowed corporations to also spend unlimited amounts on electing people to subject us the working class to the extractive tendencies of our current economy. Now this union between them was so fruitful that it gave birth to political organizations with unlimited spending power and an insatiable appetite for television ads, digital marketing, robocalls, and anyone who’s willing to rent out a swing state’s airwaves.

Now, Sanders and Lee basically want to undo all that with a limit on how much Super PACS can raise. Their bill with limit contributions to $5,000 per individual or corporation, essentially disabling the Super PAC system that allowed Elon Musk to dump $280 million over a quarter of a billion dollars into President Trump’s campaign, which resulted in the mess that we’re currently living with. But I asked Senator Sanders a question and he had an interesting answer. Let’s take a listen and you can react on the other side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

I don’t want people to think this is just another issue. What somebody said is right. It is the most important issue. If we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare at all, why is that? You think it may have something to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies who spend zillions of dollars making sure we don’t move to a Medicare for all system? Do you think the fact that we have a starvation minimum wage has something to do with the fact that a lot of these corporations and business people don’t want to pay their workers a living wage, don’t want workers to join unions. The point here, this is not another issue. This is an issue that touches every bloody issue facing working people in this country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, I really want to hear your thoughts here. Is Senator Sanders connecting the right dots?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, absolutely. Because money, cash, power, adulterates, democracy. And the way you adulterate it is to be able to deliver, to allow people who have the concentrated wealth to throw it all into the election. Now the whole idea of campaign laws is to limit influence of one individual or corporation. You can only donate so much no matter how rich you are. Now with super PACS, you can put everything you have into it if you want and that gives you disproportionate power and that creates an inequality basis for elections. So absolutely. And I want to point out one thing. You were the one who asked the question that set off that answer and I think it’s really vitally important because Sanders is connecting the dots. You can’t afford housing. Look at the super PAC. You can’t afford healthcare super PACs. All these super PACs create disproportionate influence for the smallest number of people possible.

It turns an election into really a choice of the oligarchy to decide who’s going to be in power and what policies they will implement. So it was a great answer and it’s absolutely spot on.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I asked the question because I felt like sometimes we, meaning journalists, don’t really connect the dots. And as we’ve discussed, as you’ve said, the great American punishment regime is a product of President Trump’s desire to diminish democracy, but it’s a political transformation that wouldn’t be happening if the system itself hadn’t failed to deliver for the majority of people who live under it. So what Sanders did is make the connection between big money and bad economics palpable and easy to see. He cut through the noise and made the argument that the wealth imbalance and the cash hoarding that it enables is cycled back into elections and fines forms and things like the affordability crisis or the housing shortage and of course our unresponsive and overly expensive healthcare system. These connections are crucial if political mechanisms like super PACS are both to be understood and mitigated.

If you don’t connect the accumulation of obscene wealth with the fact that you can’t pay your monthly utility bill, then it will be nearly impossible to sustain a movement to reform all of this. So Steven, how does Sanders and Lee’s idea fit into your theory of a punishment regime?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I want to say one thing first though before I answer that question, because it’s a great question, but I want to say this, I want to be the boy who cried wolf here. I am not saying this to be some sort of paranoid conspiracy theorist. I just see the tea leaves sitting up on Capitol Hill, like we talked about how they shut down Congress, like we talk about how Republicans don’t show up on the triangle anymore where most press conferences are held. I want to be wrong in this case, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing. And when Senator Sanders talked about super PACs, there wasn’t that much media there and there really wasn’t that much media coverage of what he did and what Summer Lee was proposing, Congresswoman Summer League, excuse me. So I really think these elements are all connected.That’s why we did this show to connect them.

The super PACs fuel the oligarchy and the oligarchy fuels autocracy. You can’t have dissent when few people want to hold onto all the wealth. It’s not just and people are going to push back against it, but the only way you can stop it is to incentivize punishment to say, “You know what? You speak up, you’re in trouble.” And the way to use that mechanism is to diminish the value, the integrity, and of course just create uncertainty around elections. Trump has sort up a lot of uncertainty. He’s got unlimited amount of cash to spend to bolster it. I am extremely concerned. I just wish more people would listen to Senator Sanders and Congresswoman Lee on this issue. It’s critically important and you’re right.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I’m so glad you connected the dots for us in this way because once you see it like this, you can’t unsee it. So thank you so much, Steven.

Stephen Janis:

You’re welcome.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So that’s the end of this edition of the Capitol Hill Inequality Watch React. So thank you so much for joining us. We are going to keep reporting for you on Capitol Hill while discussing how wealth inequality influences our politics, our economy, and our lives. I’m Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Steve and Janice. People please keep fighting, keep voting, and most of all, please keep caring. Our democracy needs you.