Writer Rich Woodall on the financialization of music catalogues and the future of the music economy - for listeners and artists and profiteers, and his new article Mass Hipgnosis for The Baffler.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mass-hipgnosis-woodall

IP Tunes: On the financialization of the music economy.

The entire internet decides to look at one famous butt at the same time. One man has to ensure that the website hosting Kardashian butt pictures doesn't crash. The sheer terror and joy of solving that problem. (Plus, a new Yes/Yes/No.) 

#12 Back End Trouble

Amber, Will and Chris talk to A. Savage, vocalist and guitarist for the rock and roll band Parquet Courts. 

Pick up their new album, Wide Awake!, here: https://www.roughtrade.com/us/music/parquet-courts-wide-awake

Chapo Trap House

Bonus: Interview with Parquet Courts' A. Savage

“Building a wall won't save America's crumbling middle class,” Elizabeth Warren tells us. “Sanders healthcare will raise taxes on the middle class,” a CNN headline reads. “There’ war on the middle class,” a Boston Globe editorial laments.   

The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.

But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty.

This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center.

Episode 91: It's Time to Retire the Term "Middle Class"

As COVID-19 continues to endanger the health of people throughout the world, it also magnifies a long-existent global humanitarian crisis: The use of sanctions by the United States and other powers as a weapon of war. In Iran, one of the countries most devastated by the contagion, sanctions have strangulated the supply of medical equipment crucial to testing the population and treating those who are infected, inspiring some members of the political establishment to call for sanctions to be eased.

While these pleas are necessary, they’re woefully inadequate and long overdue. Sanctions aren’t just a problem when there’s a pandemic. Iran had been subjected to U.S. and UN-imposed sanctions long before the appearance of the contagion—as had Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and far too many other countries deemed Official Enemies of the United States and its allies, resulting in economic destabilization, vulnerability to U.S. militarism, starvation, illness, and mass deaths. 
Amid these life-or-death stakes, media and think tanks’ responses to sanctions range from mere handwringing to outright bloodlust. Rather than decisively condemning sanctions as ruthless acts of economic warfare, American media largely perpetuates the narrative that sanctions are a necessity, and often a force for good, in the effort to punish and “change the behavior” of some perceived “rogue” government. Meanwhile, little criticism is offered outside of tepid suggestions that those sanctions should be tweaked. 

On today’s show, we’ll examine how the U.S. levies sanctions to undermine countries opposed to U.S. hegemony, how sanctions are laundered as benign in the media, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the preexisting, decades-long barbarism of U.S. foreign policy. 

We are joined by guests Keyvan Shafiei and Hoda Katebi.

Episode 106: The Sanitization of Sanctions

A lot of you have some body pillows to throw away that's all I'm saying SMDH

Z 023 - The Claspers of Fate

Another Summer

This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.

Reply All

#166 Country of Liars

Z 038 - Frieza's Juicing w/ Chad Vigorous

Alex Goldman tackles his newest job: prophet of doom.

#170 A Song of Impotent Rage

Welcome to the Nazbol Vortex, where Breadtubers, Boogaloo Boys, and Q-Anon battle it out for engagement. In this episode, we talk about streamers and podcasters, Twitter posters, pseudonyms, Jacobin's "irony" and the DSA/CIA activism trap. Honorable mention to Sam Seder and the Majority Report and their old friends at the Daily Kos. Thanks to Jason Selvig of The Good Liars for the intro!

Socialism Train Episode 003: The Nazbol Vortex (Part 1)

A show about the internet, hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman.  From Gimlet.