The most important point! Representation of “exceptional” individuals does not tell us anything about actual inequalities. Symbolic “victories” are never enough.  Great listen so far 💦💦

This was great but I thought they might have discussed Trump fairly explicitly calling on his followers to “monitor” vote counting

Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Operators stops by to discuss some of the darker parts of Canadian history, including Mountie Gladio, Nazi connections in Ottawa, and Vancouver Island’s noted concentration of Satanists.

Support Dan’s content over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/operators

Chapo Trap House

UNLOCKED 439 - Maple Gladio feat. Dan Boeckner (7/23/20)

WE ARE BACK -- and laden with information about Ghislaine Maxwell's post-arrest machinations, and new terrible details about her pre-arrest sprees

Episode 90: Docudump

We take a look at the recent hubbub surrounding the USPS, what motivates the drive toward privatization, and the larger ideological underpinnings of the Libertarian revolution.

Episode 94: Koch'd Up (Part I)

Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.

But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers. 

In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.

In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction. 

Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

Ep. 118 - The Snitch Economy: How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other

This week we figure out why everyone thinks antifa trying to kill smoky the bear. We also talk about a haunted statue of Melania.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/world/europe/melania-trump-sculpture-slovenia.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/18/scapegoating-antifa-starting-wildfires-distracts-real-causes/

MERCH:
PodDamnAmerica.BigCartel.com

PATREON:
Patreon.com/PodDamnAmerica

West Coast... You're Fired

By now, it's largely taken for granted that country music is a racialized signifier, interchangeable with right-wing politics. And it’s not such an unreasonable generalization: the political currents of twanged and drawled patriotic paeans like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)," and Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" leave little to the imagination.

But how, exactly, did this come to be? After all, country music, a descendant of the blues, folk, Tejano, and other genres, with connections to labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World and social-justice movements, has historically attracted musicians spanning the political spectrum, and didn’t necessarily emerge from such a staunchly right-wing political tradition.

Rather, popular conceptions of country music have long been deliberately shaped by a series of broader ideological projects. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, conservative politicians and other right-wing forces have exploited the genre to promote illiberalism, racism, revanchist politics, and runaway anti-intellectualism where not giving a shit about the world beyond one’s own cold beer, pickup truck, old lady is not only acceptable, but actively encouraged and flaunted. 

On this episode, we examine how the genre of country music has been wielded as a tool of reactionary politicking in the US, from the machinations of Henry Ford in the 1920s to the Nixon administration’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s and ‘70s to the heady Shock and Y’all days of the Bush years, and how a once working-class tradition became a cultural cul de sac of worn-out tropes and middle-class, white grievance politics.  

Our guest is writer, editor and artist Alexander Billet.

Episode 119: How the Right Shaped Pop Country Music

Every year, a series of highly anticipated listicles of "successful" and "influential" people hailed for their accomplishments surface in corporate media. Forbes reveals the most successful 30 people under the age of 30, and Fortune hails the most successful 40 Under 40. Meanwhile, other business outlets like TechCrunch, Fast Company and CNBC seek a taste of the hype with their own spinoffs. 

Each time one of these lists is published, a flurry of meta-press ensues. CNN, BBC, and The Los Angeles Times run pieces fawning over these high-profile lists, cementing their status as career launchers within the worlds of tech, politics, finance, venture capital, and other pockets of industry prized in capitalist economies. To the extent left types are chosen, it’s almost always due to their ability to mimic capitalist brand-building or channel activist energy into billionaire-backed nonprofits. Thematically similar stories of “success” are just as ubiquitous: headlines such as Business Insider’s "What 31 highly successful people were doing at age 25" or Oprah's "20 Things Everyone Should Master by Age 40" all create a ticking time bomb notion of "achievement" and success operating under a very specific capitalist framework of human worth. 

But why are these outlets entrusted with determining whose "success" or "influence" matters? How do these concepts punish – or at least – disappear the poor, disabled and people of color who don’t have the institutional resources to “achieve” capitalist success at such a young age? And above all, how does American media’s constant fetishization of "youth" and "accomplishment" create psychological wear and tear for the 99 percent of the population who cannot – or don’t want to – meet this definition of "success" by their 30s or 40s. 

On this episode, we analyze the ways in which corporate media’s narratives of "success" peddle neoliberalism, undermine labor solidarity, reinforce unrealistic expectations that degrade collective mental health, and overwhelmingly center the interests of the white professional class.

We are joined by Edward Ongweso Jr. and Sarah Jaffe.

Episode 120: 30 Under 30 Lists and The Problem with Our Youth-Obsessed 'Success' Narratives

“Climate change is real.” “Three words — science, science, and science.” “From coastal towns to rural farms to urban centers, climate change poses an existential threat.” “Now it is time to put our coalition to work and pass bold climate solutions.”

These are just some of the many statements — all of them true — that the U.S. public routinely hears from its Democratic Party leaders, expressing their unbridled commitment to acting on the ever-urgent issue of climate change.

But there is a tremendous gulf between Democratic leaders’ claims to believe climate change is an existential threat and their actual actions, which are the actions of people who do not believe climate change must be urgently and robustly tackled. Since climate change has ascended from thoroughly ignored to occasionally acknowledged issue in US political discourse and elections, Democratic leaders have for the most part only been willing to push for small-scale policy solutions — a carbon-capture tax credit here, a fossil-fuel subsidy cut there.

These solutions are almost always incremental and market-based, and these same Democrats refuse to embrace what’s actually needed: keep fossil fuels in the ground, and mobilize public resources so that we can make the broad social changes we need to address the climate crisis. The most powerful Democrats, people like Nancy Pelosi, have not only steered clear of more far-reaching policies, but have actively undermined them, as seen most clearly with her opposition to the Green New Deal — often under the guise of debt scolding.

When Democratic Party claims about the dire consequences of climate change are not matched by robust and necessary policy proposals, one can only assume one of three realities is true: (1) they do not care about the disastrous inevitably of environmental collapse, (2) they don’t truly believe the science on climate change in general, or (3) they’re simply hopeless and spineless. In any case, the resultant inertia amounts to an insidious form of climate denialism in its own right.

On this episode, part one of two tackling climate change, we discuss the net effect of this chasm - what we’re calling “the Climate Rhetoric-Policy Gap” - and how, from a messaging standpoint, it reads false and leads many to believe that climate change may be real in some abstract sense, but mostly not a matter of urgent moral importance.

Our guest is Basav Sen, Cli­mate Jus­tice Project Direc­tor at the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies.

Ep. 121 - Climate Chaos (Part I):  How the Gap Between Liberal Rhetoric & Policy Promotes Denialism

We take the 2020 election cycle in for one final tune-up at the Beltway Garage. Featuring Virgil and Matt’s official final predictions for Presidential and Senate races, plus predictions of how an indecisive election night might pan out.

466 - Beltway Garage: Endgame (10/27/20)

Comedian James Austin Johnson joins us to do expert reporting and analysis on the election that's still happening or is over or is still happening I can't tell. Then Donald Trump calls us to announce his resignation sort of.

JAMES AUSTIN JOHNSON
@ShrimpJAJ on Twitter and IG
@WTAWTPod

ATLANTA SOLIDARITY FUND
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/contribute-to-the-atlanta-solidarity-fund
@ATLSolFund

PHONE BANK FOR RAPHAEL WARNOCK
https://www.mobilize.us/warnockforgeorgia/event/331688/

MERCH
PodDamnAmerica.BigCartel.Com

PATREON
Patreon.com/PodDamnAmerica

2020 ELECTION ANALYSIS BREAKDOWN w/ James Austin Johnson & Donald Trump

In this News Brief, we talk with journalist Ashoka Jegroo about Giuliani's long history of racism, white liberal New Yorkers providing cover for his carceral sociopathy because they liked the results, and the pathetic, inevitable final chapter of the former New York mayor.

News Brief: It's Not a "Fall From Grace", This Has Always Been Who Giuliani Was

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.

Episode 120: 30 Under 30 Lists and The Problem with Our Youth-Obsessed 'Success' Narratives

Citations Needed Podcast

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