Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments:
Copaganda: News media, public officials, and the police themselves keep telling us that public safety requires ever more policing, despite all evidence to the contrary. In Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (New Press, 2025), civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis analyzes centrist-liberal news reporting from 2020-2024 to show how media and police narrow our understanding of threats, manufacture fear, and promote punishment as a solution.
Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the US legal system. He has also written widely on this topic, including the 2019 book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System; and a 2024 article in the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation on how the body camera movement has further entrenched the police state. Since 2022 he's been writing Alec's Copaganda Newsletter, "about how police and the media distract us from what matters," from which his new book draws. He's on BlueSky at https://bsky.app/profile/equalityalec.bsky.social. Royalties from Copaganda are being donated to the charity Stop LAPD Spying, at the Los Angeles Community Action Network. He talks here with Frann Michel about police budgets, body cameras, the punishment bureaucracy, and his new book.
Alec Karakatsanis will be appearing at Powell's City of Books
1005 W Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209
Sunday, May 18th
7:00 PM PDT
Bad Air: According to the 2025 Annual Report of the American Lung Association, fifty-five years after the passage of the landmark Clean Air Act, nearly half of US residents breathe unhealthy air. One significant contribution to this problem is the inadequacy of the regulatory apparatus. Jan Haaken and Patricia Kullberg talk about how the rules and regulations governing industrial emissions of airborne toxics are structured more to facilitate industrial operations than to protect the public health. Jan Haaken is a local film-maker and director of the documentary Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line, which takes up the jury trial against activists who staged an act of civil disobedience at Zenith in 2019. Patricia Kullberg is a board member of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and is active around air quality issues in Portland.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is currently considering a new Air Contaminant Discharge Permit for Zenith Energy in Portland. Despite Zenith’s significant contribution to air pollution in North/Northwest Portland, what we may hear from DEQ is that their hands are tied. DEQ is holding an in person public hearing for people to comment on Zenith’s air quality permit tonight, May 12 at the Buckley Center Auditorium, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd at 6:30 PM, preceded by a rally at 6 PM. People may also join the event via zoom. A virtual hearing via zoom will also be held on May 15, 6-8:30 PM. Zoom links to join either event can be found on the DEQ Public Involvement webpage. The deadline for submission of written comments about the permit is 5 PM, May 30. Comments may be submitted online at https://ordeq-edms-public.govonlinesaas.com/pub/pub-rcd/submittals/review/7/56698;tab=cmt or can be emailed to NWRAQPermits@deq.oregon.gov.