hey all, this will be a carnival barking thread so feel free to ignore. A month ago I started a substack with contributions from @sarahlazare. In that month we have published 14 articles that I think are pretty good. I'll be posting a few here for you to read (or ignore)
We kicked it off with a breakdown of NYT reporter Peter Baker relying on an (undisclosed) Raytheon board member to criticize Biden's Afghanistan military withdrawal. thecolumn.substack.com/p/on-afghanist…
Other topics included EU's media double game of announcing large vaccine donations whole opposing vaccine manufacturing in the global south, dehumanizing coverage of migrants and homeless people, Mike Rowe's horrible new TV show, and more.
Anyway, sign up if you can! We hope to do it for a while and make is sustainable. I missed writing very much and am glad to be back doing it. Thanks all, sorry for the self-promotion. Won't happen again for a while. thecolumn.substack.com
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These metrics are totally meaningless bordering on made up. These figures are prearranged or pre-announced “charity” provided by the global north & major drivers of poverty—IMF, World Bank, EU & Bill Gates—they were going to “give away” anyway (see here: devex.com/news/donors-qu…)
Once again, Global Citizen has little to say about exploitive IMF loans, environmental destruction & anti-labor “trade deals” pushed by multinational corporations, blocking TRIPS waiver by EU & a host of other forces afflicting the global poor—Just more vapid PR for the powerful
A major donor to this program is Amazon, one of the most environmentally destructive forces on earth. What does any of this mean? What does it mean to “pledge” to grow a tree? How are these pledges enforceable?
"immigration crisis" news cycle gave us all the useless liberal tropes
1. Witness suffering and feeling bad about it while carrying out mass deportation anyway. 2. all the right humanitarian, anti-racist rhetoric front-loading... carrying out mass deportation anyway. 3. Optics!
when your ideology starts from a position of "what looks bad" rather than what is actually bad, your policy output will necessary be a meta one, focusing on what shows up on the evening news and NYT editorial board, irrespective of how your policies impact vulnerable populations.
the runaway bourgeois morality of schmaltzy underdog sports movies is such a potent ideological drug. Watching the Kurt Warner grocery-bagger-to-Super Bowl champion trailer I'm reminded of 'Sugar' (2008) which brilliantly subverted the genre and no one ever saw it.
growing up my father would constantly reference Rudy (1993), without irony, as some type of moral guide. A deeply reactionary movie that is also extremely moving and good at convincing poor whites the highest moral order is getting your head bashed in nonstop and not complaining
the big lesson at the end is Charles S Dutton regretting he complained too much about racism in the 1930s!
Dem leadership & WH put up zero fight to defend the greatest of transfer of wealth to the poor in 50yrs, proven to reduce poverty & hunger. This explains why they never talked about it. They end up 100% on the side of big business & it’ll cost them in 2022 nytimes.com/2021/09/06/bus…
Program existed, was working and was more popular than Jesus and democratic leadership basically never mentioned it and have acted embarrassed about it since day one
Biden and many dem governors are still living in May 2021 when everyone thought we were about to “go back to normal,” but reality didn’t bear this out so the plan is just to stick to the ra ra “we’re back” narrative despite all that’s happening with delta.
yeah one thing we should've touched on in the piece is the contemporary stakes at work: erasing radicals from labor history and retconning liberal reformers as the primary drivers of progress serves to reinforce a similar framework on how people perceive how change happens today
This isn't to say radical elements––then or now––are beyond criticism but the left-punching, vote-shaming, respectability politics that makes up a great deal of contemporary liberal conventional wisdom is largely informed by a warped view of how progress was made, historically.
specifically the stripping of political labels in many pop histories is of interest to me. The removal of anarchism from our histories of turn-of-the-century radical unionism; the erasure of communism from histories of the BPP. We are uniquely scared of -isms which I find curious