Today, we are joined by independent journalist, oral historian, and qualitative researcher Matthew Vernon Whalan to dissect his vital book out from Kersplebedeb: Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in the American Prison.

While mainstream political commentary frequently fixates on explicitly private, corporate-run prisons, Whalan shifts our focus to the state-run system. Drawing on my own professional background as a former corrections officer in Georgia, we expose a deeper, more pervasive truth: "public" state facilities are thoroughly privatized from within. From phone systems and medical care to food services and infrastructure construction, state facilities operate as a hyper-exploitative playground for private corporate contracts.

Alabama currently imprisons more of its population than any democratic nation on Earth, keeping its facilities jammed at 170% to 180% of maximum capacity. In this episode, we map out the horrific, hidden material realities of this carceral pandemic:

Guard-Run Drug Cartels: Why contraband and dangerous narcotics like "spice" and fentanyl don't arrive via visitors, but are systematically smuggled in by corrections staff. We analyze the staggering metric showing that prison overdose and homicide rates aggressively spiked during strict pandemic lockdowns when all outside visitation was completely barred.

The Inmate "Dorm Rep" System: How severe systemic understaffing has forced the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to rely on a shadow network of inmate dorm representatives. Lacking any institutional resources, these reps are forced to leverage violent threats just to manage basic custodial shifts and medical emergencies.

The Toxic Infrastructure Collapse: The literal breakdown of carceral facilities. We track the horrific plumbing failures across ADOC installations—including kitchen facilities built directly over faulty, backed-up septic systems that routinely flood living spaces with raw sewage.

The Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Recidivism: Why throwing non-violent drug offenders into hyper-violent maximum-security dorms creates textbook PTSD and entrenches illicit networks. We parse out how the post-release landscape completely blocks formal employment, leaving gig work or dangerous meatpacking lines as the only viable pathways left for former felons.

We also historicize this modern crisis, tracing Alabama's carceral trajectory directly back to post-Civil War convict leasing, debt bondage, and the economic dependency of rural towns on prison construction.
Matthew Vernon Whalan's books, Doing Time: American Mass Imprisonment Pandemic and Bullock, are available now via Left Wing Books.

Listen to the oral histories from below, confront the systemic failures, and protect your peace.

Link: https://substack.com/@matthewvernonwhalan

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Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
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Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

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twitter: @varnvlog
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Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian, Drea, Free Beer

Welcome back to the Vlog. Today, we are joined by acclaimed Egyptian journalist, activist, and labor historian Hossam el-Hamalawy to discuss his vital text out from Verso Books, Counter-Revolution in Egypt: State and Barracks.

A common mistake among Western commentators is to view the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a simple replication of the old Mubarak-Sadat dictatorship. El-Hamalawy lays bare why this historical framing is fundamentally wrong: counter-revolutions do not restore old orders. They construct entirely new, hyper-militarized legal and security systems designed explicitly to correct the structural vulnerabilities that allowed the original popular revolts to happen.

In this interview, we break down the explicit mechanics of Egypt’s Second Republic:

• The Transition from Coup-Proofing to Unified Repression: How the First Republic fragmented its intelligence agencies, police, and military to prevent top-down military coups. We explore why Sisi inverted this baseline, creating a hyper-centralized, coordinated security matrix designed entirely around the dominant perceived threat of popular working-class unrest.
• The Civilian Corporate Monopoly: How the Egyptian military has completely captured the domestic civilian economy. We analyze why military-owned firms—selling everything from honey and furniture to real estate—enjoy absolute immunity from taxes and tariffs while utilizing conscripted soldiers as a hyper-exploited, cheap labor pool to choke out private capital.
• The Gulf ATM and Sovereign Assets: How Sisi leveraged European fears of black and brown refugee migration to secure multi-billion-dollar western block grants and weapons contracts. We track how the UAE and Saudi Arabia acted as a financial backstop for counter-revolution, until shifting their strategy to aggressively eat up Egypt's core logistical assets, ports, and prime real estate in exchange for debt lifelines.
• The Imperial Boomerang: Why the highly militarized surveillance systems tested on Arab populations are inexorably boomeranging back into the domestic borders of the United States and Europe to crush civil liberties and local climate actions.

The lesson of the Arab Spring remains clear: you cannot conquer an imperial apparatus through localized, reformist abstractions.

Hossam el-Hamalawy's State and Barracks Substack is available now.

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian, Drea, Free Beer

Welcome back to the Vlog. Today, we are joined by Dr. Annie McClanahan (Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine) to discuss her groundbreaking book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work.

While some spaces on the internet are still stuck rehashing old 19th-century debates about whether service workers even count as part of the working class, our current economic reality shows that services account for 60% to 80% of the entire workforce. The standard, hourly guaranteed wage that we treat as a permanent fixture of capitalism was actually just a brief 20th-century historical anomaly tied to the rise of mechanized assembly lines.

In this episode, we trace how capital today is returning to sub-wage, piece-rate, and platform tasks to squeeze marginal productivity out of a stagnant economy. We lay bare the explicit mechanics of modern labor exploitation:

The Tipping Subversion: How tips function as an algorithmic tool for enforced self-management while systematically offloading the fixed and variable capital burdens of a business directly onto consumers.
Algorithmic Workplace Surveillance: Tracing the history of tracking from long-haul trucking to modern delivery apps. We expose how workers are disciplined, black-boxed, and deprioritized by digital parameters that mask raw domination as individual flexibility.

The Precariat Fallacy: Why insecure, independent contractor status isn't a uniquely modern phenomenon, but rather the default historical mode of proletarian employment dating back to 18th-century domestic service laws.

Bargaining for the Common Good: Why service stoppages among teachers, nurses, and hospitality workers carry immense regional leverage because they disrupt social reproduction, forcing a complete rethink of class consciousness.

We also explore the qualitative landscape of the service economy by looking at unique cultural texts, from trashy reality TV shows that expose the performative nature of emotional labor to underpaid Amazon Mechanical Turk workers writing poetry for conceptual art.

Dr. Annie McClanahan's book, Beneath the Wage, is out now from Zone Books.

Send us Fan Mail

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian, Drea, Free Beer