A live recording from a beautiful night with Luke Mandala , Phaeleh, and Rob Noble at The High Dive in Seattle, WA ~ hope you dig it

Rob Noble live 8/15/23 (Opening for Phaeleh @ High Dive Seattle)

We take a look at the strange story of Sara Bronfman and the self-help-sex-crime-cult NXIVM’s odd forays into civil-war-torn Libya, seemingly in search of Muammar's missing riches. Featuring: the Dalai Lama, Israeli spies, the oats futures market, Ayn Rand, and Steven Spielberg.

Episode 346: Gaddafi's Gold

Abby and Robbie discuss the frustrations of wading through media disinformation and hasbarists' desperate attempt to flip reality, the implications of the bombshell Israeli intelligence document that gave explicit advance detail on Operation Al Aqsa Flood, and the general psychopathic nature of the IDF during their genocidal onslaught.

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Hasbarists Invert Reality, Israel Knew About Oct 7

"How Railroaders Are Killed; Train Crews Grow Careless," read a 1906 syndicated article. "There is a kind of personality who is accident-prone," reported the Kansas City Star in 1944. Amazon's safety programs are "designed to keep its nearly one million warehouse workers worldwide fit and limber," The Seattle Times claimed in 2021. 

For well over a century, it’s been standard practice for corporations, and the media more generally– echoing these "information campaigns" – to skirt, defy, or prevent regulations by shifting the burdens of protection and wellness onto relatively powerless workers. Just as corporations have historically shifted blame onto "consumers," as we discussed last week, so too have they shifted blame, and punishment, onto their own workers, at great social cost and much private profit.

Of course, workers anywhere must bear some level of personal responsibility in matters of health and safety. But, as regulations have threatened their bottom lines, industries from railroads to retail, bolstered by US media, have seized upon this notion in order to render their workers the ones who bear ultimate responsibility for whether they’re healthy or sick, safe or injured, and in the most extreme cases, whether they live or die.

This is the second episode in a two-part series on what we're calling "The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift." Part I discussed how this burden shift harms consumers. On this episode, Part II, we examine this anti-regulatory PR strategy, looking at the past and present of corporate deflection of responsibility, how media enable this subtle – but effective – practice, and discuss how media campaigns and media coverage have let us internalize the pro-corporate effort to off-load responsibility for workplace health and safety from the bosses on to the workers. 

This episode was produced in collaboration with Workday Magazine.

Our guest is the National Employment Law Project's Anastaia Christman.

The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift (Part II)- How Corporate America Offset Liability Onto Its Workers

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.

The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift (Part II)- How Corporate America Offset Liability Onto Its Workers

Citations Needed Podcast

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