The Global Police State w/ William I. Robinson

On this edition of Parallax Views, how did we get to this moment of social uprisings and the repressive states, represented by ICE immigration detention centers and rising authoritarianism around the globe, that color the present? Sociologist William I. Robinson provides a theoretical framework for understanding how 21st century tumult came to be in his new book The Global Police State. Robinson argues that we are living in a world in which rapidly accelerating economic inequality have led the transnational capitalist class to create systems of control and repression that will quell dissent. Additionally, he argues that this unstable situation, in which the masses are angry and the power elites divided, has led to an encroaching, creeping, 21st century fascism that threatens to engulf the world. He joins us on this edition of the program to lay out what The Global Police State is, the green zones and gray zones that separate the "haves" from the "have nots", the three factions of the global power elite and how the third factions (reformists) can be pressured by the masses, how Trump and the movement of Trumpism is not a populist movement and is in fact backed by elements of the transnational capitalist class, technologies of repression and the modern surveillance society, the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) and why the transnational capitalist class are directly threatened by anti-police sentiments, the cooptation of social movements by the transnational capitalist class, the militarization of policing and security organizations, the capitalist and corporate elements that benefit from private military firms (ie: mercenary) and private policing, the major difference between the 20th century and 21st century crises (hint: there is no longer a strong left/labor movement), and much, much more!

This Episode Brought to You By:

The War State:
The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963
by
Michael Swanson
of
The Wall Street Window