Robert Reich at Inequality Media has developed a knack for laying out important issues in ways that can be grasped simply while getting to the heart of them. This particular video is titled Reimagining Public Safety, but it looks at the larger problem facing us:
What kind of society do we want to live in? One where all our resources and money go into controlling people to preserve the status quo at the cost of systemic racism and inequality, or one that invests in people to raise standards of living and share power and wealth equitably?
In less than 8 minutes, Reich uses simple graphics and numbers to spell out what the difference is, how we got here, where the money is going, and what we can choose to do.
Defunding the Police (horrible framing) has been turned into a threat by Trump and the GOP. They portray it as getting rid of the police entirely, turning the country over to roving bands of looters and anarchists. That is the Big Lie they are promoting.
It’s actually about diverting the increasing amounts of money going to control people reacting to a society coming apart, and instead using it to address the root problems behind the need for police. Putting money into Social Investment, instead of Social Control in other words.
Reich puts it plainly. The reason the rich and powerful push for control is because it’s cheaper for them; investing in society would require them to share their wealth and power. They sell it to the people hurt most by this by playing to fear, anger, and racism. It’s only cheaper until the lid blows off; we’re getting to that point.
Watch the whole thing — it’s less than 8 minutes long. The choice between Republicans and Democrats has never been clearer. Trump and the GOP want to double down on control; Democrats are ready to invest in America.
Short Takes
For those who don’t have 8 minutes available, I’ve lifted some of the graphics out of the video to give you some idea of what Reich is talking about.
Social Control society, aka a Police State, versus…
A society that invests in things like healthcare, education, the environment, children and overall quality of life and social justice.
You can’t really appreciate why defunding the police is reasonable until you look at how, in constant dollars, they have been getting more and more money for decades.
Here’s the gap between money put into policing versus public investment in housing.
Here’s how spending on prisons stacks up agains spending on education. It seem like we are investing more in making people prisoners than we are in making them educated.
This shows how social control has a bias against the poor and the powerless; it’s institutional racism. The Three Strikes Law in California, before reform, had a huge affect on black people versus white. The problem hasn’t gone away.
We’ve invested hugely against potential military threats — and dropped our guard against biological certainties. Some problems can’t be solved by throwing force against them.
In a Social Control Society, public resources do not go into solving problems — they are devoted to suppressing the consequences of those problems. Sooner or later the lid either comes off, society goes bankrupt/collapses from the ever-increasing costs of control, both, or worse.
So here’s the choice. We can have this:
Or we can have this:
Watch the video Reimagining Public Safety for the full context. Check out Inequality Media for more videos and other resources. If you have friends on social media freaking out over defunding the police, be sure to share this latest video with them.