Diagnosing and repairing a malfunctioning democracy, with hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren.
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The latest podcast from writer and activist Mia Birdsong and The Nation explores how a Guaranteed Income might actually transform people's lives. Mia Birdsong first heard about the concept of Guaranteed Income in the mid-90s through the 1967 writings of Martin Luther King Jr. King. He asserted that “the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by providing a basic level of material well-being to allow all Americans to truly flourish. ...
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10: Political Violence Is No Anomaly in American History
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Georgia made history this week: The state elected a Black Senator on Tuesday for the first time ever. Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Morehouse graduate who serves as senior pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church once pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be representing Georgia in the Senate as soon as the results are certified. Along with …
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This week on System Check we are saying farewell to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our first System Check Book Club. Your hosts Melissa and Dorian first aired this Book Club as a Live Event on YouTube and Facebook just in time for holiday reading. While the original show was over two hours long, for our podcast this week we decided to share with you s…
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8: Could This Pandemic End Up Making Our Healthcare System Stronger?
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President-elect Joe Biden has made history: This week, he announced that Rep. Deb Haaland would be his pick for head of the Interior Department, the first Native American person ever to a Cabinet-level position, making Biden’s Cabinet the most diverse in history. This kind of representation is important, but it’s not enough, because far from Washin…
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7: The Pandemic Didn’t Have to Be This Bad
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Defund. That one word has motivated thousands across the country to take to the streets this year to end police violence against Black Americans, and it has also become the punching bag for some Democratic politicians to explain their electoral misfortunes this cycle. But that word, defund, also explains why the United States surpassed 3,000 deaths…
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6: There Is No Room to Mess Up This Presidential Transition
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Seventy-eight: That’s the number of days between the Presidential election and the Presidential inauguration. Much needs to be accomplished in those days for the peaceful transition of power. The stakes are higher than you think, and there are life-and-death implications for the lives of millions of Americans affected by our system of the transfer …
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There are a lot of jobs we as a country don’t value. Think farm work, child care, service jobs—these low-wage, often racialized and gendered jobs form the backbone of our economy, but if you’ve worked in any of these fields, you know how hard it can be to make ends meet on these jobs. Three of Dorian Warren’s grandparents were janitors, another job…
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This week, your co-hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren get personal. Melissa’s Grandma Rosa lived and worked in poverty in the Jim Crow south. She was a seamstress who suffered from arthritis, and she made tremendous personal sacrifices to ensure her twin sons, William and Wesley, could go to college and create a legacy of achievement and …
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When Stacey Abrams won the Democratic primary in Georgia’s gubernatorial election two years ago, System Check hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren wrote an article for Time Magazine, saying, “If Abrams can win the general election and become the first black woman governor in U.S. history, in a Southern state that sits in the heart of the ol…
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2: White Supremacy Is Baked Into Our Electoral System
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How did we get here? How did we get to the end of a week in which Americans cast 160 million votes, the highest number ever in a general election and the highest voter turnout among eligible citizens in over a hundred years, a week in which one candidate received almost 4 million votes more than the other one, and we still don’t know who our next p…
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Welcome to System Check. On this podcast, we’re going to break down the big, unwieldy, seemingly immovable systems that structure our politics and our lives. In the ten episodes in this season, we will delve into the history of these systems, and along with our guests, we will seek ways to move beyond or redesign these systems. In our first episode…
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Lights are blinking. Alarms are blaring. The dashboard of our democracy is warning us that it is time to check our systems. On System Check, the latest podcast from The Nation, hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren turn down the frenzy and tune into some remarkable folk with the wit and wisdom to diagnose what ails us. Dorian and Melissa tal…
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4: We All Deserve An Income Floor: Why the Bold Policy of Guaranteed Income Works
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If guaranteed income is an attempt to provide people with more resources—resources that come with very few restrictions—it demands a conversation with the people who would most benefit from it. It also demands a conversation about deservedness. When we ask “How much would it be?” “Who would get it?” And “How would we pay for it?” what we are really…
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3: Poverty Makes the Pursuit of Happiness a False Promise
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When I travelled across the country to report out this podcast, I found myself doing a lot of thinking about “the good life.” As I talked with folks who are struggling to make ends meet about guaranteed income, it became clear to me very quickly that what is on people’s minds isn’t captured by a conversation about one specific economic policy. As s…
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2: Poverty Can Be Solved. Just Trust Poor People.
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If you’ve never been poor, you don’t know how soul-crushingly hard it is to always be struggling to make ends meet. The grinding challenge of not knowing how you are gonna pay for this bill or that fee takes a real toll. But on top of that, our current poverty alleviation programs—things like food stamps, welfare payments, disability assistance—the…
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1: ‘Let’s Give Them Money’: Could Guaranteed Income Be a Solution To Wealth Inequality?
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This is the first episode in a new podcast mini-series from me, Mia Birdsong, and The Nation. More Than Enough is about guaranteed income, deservedness, dignity, and the country America can and should be. We hope you’ll subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. New episodes will premiere each Wednesday. Bu…
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1: America Has More Than Enough Wealth For Us All
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Launching January 15. Mia Birdsong first heard about the concept of Guaranteed Income in the mid-90s through the 1967 writings of Martin Luther King Jr. King. He asserted that “the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by providing a basic level of material well-being to allow all Americ…
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