Emma hosts Indi Dutta-Gupta, President and Executive Director of The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) to discuss recent polling showing that 2/3rds of parents who stopped receiving the Child Tax Credit in late 2021 reported difficulties obtaining enough food for their children. Then, Emma is joined by Danielle Carr, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, to discuss her recent Op-Ed piece for the New York Times “Mental Health Is Political”. First, Emma dives into updates on the White House’s response to the leaked racist LA City Council audio and the return of legal (for now) abortions in Arizona, before diving deeper into Biden’s response to OPEC’s price gauging and criticisms of his relationship to Saudi Arabia (particularly in the wake of his campaigning on making them a “Pariah” state). Then, Indi Dutta-Gupta joins as he gets right into the work that he does with the Center for Law and Social Policy, exploring how child poverty is largely a choice made by policy-makers when they ignore the already demonstrated social policy that can reduce it, with the Child Tax Credit and American Rescue plan more than proving the impact they can have both on poverty, and in flushing the economy with money (seeing a 9:1 return on the investment of the tax credit). Next, they tackle the greater cultural and political elements that reject these policies, with the bootstraps mentality leading to Manchin becoming the one vote that prevented the CTC from becoming a permanent policy, and how we see similar elements embedded in pre-existing policies such as SNAP. Dutta-Gupta wraps up the interview by parsing through the work CLASP has done to tackle a more anti-racist and community-driven SNAP,  and exploring how we can support the center from the outside. Danielle Carr then walks through the problem of medicalizing our view of mental health without also understanding the greater systemic and political intersections that can often be underlying causes. Next, they explore the rise of telepsychotherapy as an exploitative gig-economy institution that works to further medicalize the issue and detach it from social issues, before wrapping up the interview by exploring what kind of diseases mental health issues really are, and the failure of the DSM-type medical perspective in actually understanding how to approach them.

And in the Fun Half: Emma and Bradley discuss the recent bipartisan hit pieces against John Fetterman in the wake of his return to the campaign trail after his stroke earlier this year, watching NBC’s Dasha Burns and Lester Holt frame a recent interview around auditory and vocal issues making him a poor fit for office. They also dive into greater issues of mental health, as they tackle the exploitation of Kanye West and Hershel Walker by Tucker Carlson and the Georgia GOP, respectively, and Ben Shapiro responds with some real nuance on anti-Semitic threats. Ben from Virginia discusses the invasion of Ukraine and the importance of Katie Halper, Lucas from Minneapolis talks Dr. Oz’s puppy murdering, and Emma tackled Tulsi Gabbard officially lefting the left plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out CLASP’s polling here: https://www.clasp.org/publications/report/brief/child-tax-credit-poll-3/

Check out Danielle’s piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

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Check out Aziz Rana’s “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire” here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/left-internationalism-in-the-heart-of-empire