"COVAX and World Bank to Accelerate Vaccine Access for Developing Countries," trumpets a World Bank press release. "How AI Is Making Healthcare More Affordable And Accessible," announces Forbes magazine. "How technology is helping improve financial inclusion around the world," reports CNBC.

It's a linguistic frame that appears regularly in media, PR, and policymaking. Those who can't afford the top-tier forms of basic necessities like housing or physical and mental healthcare, we're told, can have "access" to less expensive, lower-quality versions. Enter bottom-rung ACA marketplace plans, less effective COVID vaccines, homeless people living in train containers, scammy cryptocurrency apps, and clunky chatbot "therapists." After all, they're better than the alternative: having no healthcare, housing, or income at all.

But why must having nothing at all be the only alternative? Why isn't it possible to ensure high-quality essentials for everyone? And how does media's repackaging of substandard necessities as "increasing access" and fostering "inclusion" serve to make the barbarism of austerity politics seem palatable, even benevolent?

On this episode, our season seven premiere, we'll examine the trope of framing subpar material essentials as forms of "inclusion" for the poor or "increasing access" to important life saving and sustaining needs, exploring how media simply accept, rather than challenge, the manufactured austerity that allows this cruel stratification in the first place.

Our guest is writer, artist and pod host Beatrice Adler-Bolton.

Ep 188: How Capital Repackages Substandard Products for the Poor as "Increasing Access"

In this public News Brief, we break down recent attempts by Politico, Axios, New York Times and faux populist Republicans to pit autoworkers against climate mandates.

Our guest is Sydney Ghazarian.

News Brief: GOP, Corporate Media Attempt to Manufacture Conflict Between Autoworkers and Climate

Matt Christman goes off live on http://www.twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Topics: Schizophrenic bourgeois mind, life, death

Grill Stream

262 - Hyperborean Chamber II: In Through the Out Door 09.18.23

"Hitler was a product of his time," historian Kent Gardner told us in 1975, just thirty years after the end of World War II. "Was Frank Rizzo racist, or just a product of his time?" The Philadelphia Inquirer pondered in 2017 about the city's notoriously racist former police commissioner and mayor just 26 years after his death. "Christopher Columbus, no saint, was product of his time," explained a 2013 commentary in the Staten Island Advance.

We often hear this sentiment in reference to historical atrocities. Slaveowners, colonizers, genocidal tyrants, and right-wing bigots from decades or centuries past didn't know any better. They were simply responding to the time and place in which they lived — a different time, marked by different social mores, moral standards, and laws.

While it's perhaps fair to cite this cliche to explain, rather than justify, awkward song lyrics or offensive language and stereotypes used in movies from decades ago. But it's an entirely different issue with respect to how we venerate and remember the past. Especially since, in the most popular cases, famous people’s bad actions were roundly criticized, at the time.

Long popular as a catch-all to hand-wave away the misdeeds of slaveowners, colonizers and war mongers, Increasingly educational movements on the American right––from Ron DeSantis trying to remake history education to conservative propaganda targeting kids like PragerU — this "product of its time" cliché and its close cousin "don't judge the past by the standards of today" is making a bit of comeback, if it ever went away at all.

The defensive, superficially appealing cliche is a popular go-to for those who think we shouldn't criticize the supposedly sacrosanct secular deities of our past — from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. But the whole concept operates under a glaring double standard: how can we take pride in and venerate the supposedly good things Americans in history did but ignore and dismiss the bad things? How can we pick and choose our moral inheritance at will? How does the need for us to downplay slavery, colonization, and Jim Crow continue to be such a strong political force? And whose interests does this down-playing serve in 2023?

On this episode, we dissect the notion that the reactionary forces of history have just been "products of their time." We'll explore the ways in which this and related concepts are not only inaccurate, but also convenient instruments of right-wing historical revisionism, and how the need to make people feel good about our civic mythology makes for bad history, and even worse politics.

Our guest is historian and museum educator Erin Bartram.

Ep 189: PragerU, the 'Product Of His Time' Defense & the White Guilt Amelioration Industrial Complex

Will & Hesse bring you Horrotober Ghoulvie Screamset, a selection of Horror film bangers for this October. We start with two all-time classics of the genre: George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974). Both films redefined the genre into heightened levels of gruesome nihilism, creating vivid reflections of charnel-house America while serving up ghouls galore for your puerile titillation. 

As always, the first episode of this miniseries is free for all to listen, all subsequent episodes will be for subscribers only at: www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse

Movie Mindset

Movie Mindset 12 - Road Trip! Horrifying Rides of Romero & Hooper

"Realities have forced us to remain on diplomatic terms with several dictators," the Pampa Daily News stated in 1958. "U.S. ambassador to the U.N Samantha Power has been forced to look the other way as Saudi Arabia does as it pleases in Yemen," Politico told us in 2016. Biden is being forced to accept the flaws of America's friends," claimed The New York Times  earlier this year, 2023.

For decades, we've heard the same excuse regarding US foreign policy: 'Our leaders might not agree with the world’s dictatorial, reactionary governments, but they’re forced –– by some unknown geopolitical dark matter of realpolitik –– to support them for some broader, more noble goal.'

Strengthening ties with the governments of Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Israel, The Philippines, and other countries under right-wing, human-rights-abusing governance might be a bit unpleasant, but it’s the pragmatic thing to do and, therefore, the morally acceptable thing to do.

But countries that are not the United States or its allies are never said to be "forced" into carrying out human rights abuses or supporting those that do. They back bombings, ethnic cleansings, the oppression of women for the sport, because they are existentially evil. No outside mysterious entity ever "forces" them to have to make compromises on the altar of "reality."

But there is nothing, of course, "forcing" these decisions on our own Western leaders, and in nearly every case, they're simply extensions of preexisting geopolitical relationships, imperialist policies, and arbitrary might-makes-right governance.

On this episode, we discuss the media narrative that the U.S. is "forced" to maintain long-beneficial alliances with right-wing regimes, looking at how this suggestion falsely presents the U.S. as an unwilling, but ultimately helpless, participant in repression of human rights around the world.

Our guest is author and NYU professor James Peck.

Ep 190: Why Media Insists the US is "Forced" to Commit Human Rights Abuses

First we confer with our friends over at Compact Mag about how leftists should be more interested in ancient Rome. Then we talk about how the rest of the world is laffin at us. Finally we take a look at a rural community in Michigan who is apparently fighting the red tide.

Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 311: Scaring The Bros

In light of the current situation in Palestine, we are unlocking this episode, recorded in 2020 with Noah Kulwin, with a brief new introduction. You can check out the other episodes mentioned here: 

Episode 131: Norman Finkelstein Part 1 
patreon.com/posts/episode-131-pt-1-46466625

Episode 132: Norman Finkelstein Part 2
patreon.com/posts/46617424

Episode 281: Next Year in Jerusalem 
patreon.com/posts/episode-281-next-81129240

__________

We welcome back Noah Kulwin to discuss the explosive yet basically unseen Al-Jazeera documentary The Lobby detailing illegal lobbying efforts by the Israeli government and just why you literally have not seen this film

The Lobby UK: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzGHKb8i9vTzCgnbENCKuz7fqU12xNBce

The Lobby USA:

* Episode 1 — youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE
* Episode 2 — youtube.com/watch?v=XytkI7afHcQ
* Episode 3 — youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-Dm4pO0xY
* Episode 4 — youtube.com/watch?v=_1OgxfCT044

UNLOCKED: Episode 75: The Lobby

In this impromptu live show from Oct 30 2023, we break down the four main arguments against a ceasefire in Gaza and why they make no sense. 

Based on this article by Adam
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/those-who-say-cease-fire-wont-work-are-wrong-heres-why/

Live Show 10/30/23: 4 Arguments Against a Gaza Ceasefire and Why They're Bullshit

Recorded 11/3/23. More discussion of Israel/Palestine, this time with a specific article from NBC about "growing concern" within the White House regarding Israel's atrocities against Palestinians

Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 315: Atavist's Anonymous

Recorded 11/22/23. Clips used in this week's ep (content warning): Annihilation Choir, State Department employee Stuart Seldowitz, and NSC spokesman John Kirby. 

Listen to Part 2 of this episode at Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 318: Cop City On A Hill

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Ep 190: Why Media Insists the US is "Forced" to Commit Human Rights Abuses

Citations Needed Podcast

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