Part One:
We welcome Bart Naylor, financial policy advocate at Congress Watch, a division of Public Citizen. It has been 10 years since Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In the wake of the financial meltdown and Great Recession of 2008, Dodd-Frank was intended to rein in the excesses of Wall Street bankers, mortgage securitizers, and profit-gaugers.
Despite Dodd-Frank, corporate executives are still freely enriching their own compensation packages through fraud, profiteering and cutting costs on safety, according to Public Citizen’s recent report. Meanwhile, the decades-long stagnation in worker wages and the decimation of unions is making wealth inequality untenable, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
Part Two:
We speak with Bea Lake, a citizen-journalist on the streets covering the Portland protests. She describes the toxic relationships – and the violent confrontations – between Portland police (the city’s officers) and local demonstrators, long before the current crop of militarized federal officers planted themselves in downtown Portland.
In the 1920s, the police acted as an arm of the city government which was tied in with the Ku Klux Klan. In the decades since, Portland police have squared off against protestors speaking out against excessive force and other injustices. In the 1990s, Portland saw open fights between two more extreme groups that had grown in the city: the anti-fascists and the white supremacist/skinhead groups. The local police repeatedly got into bloody confrontations with these groups, too.
In the months since George Floyd’s murder, protestors have demonstrated daily against systemic racism, police brutality and racial profiling. Now Trump’s military strike force has bumped up the levels of hostility, frustration, and violence, which have been so much in the news recently. (Could this have been the president’s intent?)
We also noted an ironic comparison: Trump is justifying his military show of force in Portland by arguing that the protesters are using tactics developed during the Hong Kong protests. Trump doesn’t seem to notice the distinction: In Hong Kong, the citizenry was struggling to resist a totalitarian takeover of their city.
