Description: “THE GREAT ESCAPE: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America” tells the story of one of the largest human trafficking schemes in modern American history and how the traffickers were finally held to account. Saket Soni was the co-founder of The New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice in the post-Katrina years. Today he’s the founder and director of Resilience Force, a project that comes directly out of his experience working with the men in this book. The U.S. is experiencing a labor shortage, and climate catastrophe will increase the need for disaster recovery workers. How can we build the resilient workforce we need, with the rights and equity workers deserve? Join Laura and Saket for this urgent conversation on the future of labor.

Guest:  Saket Soni, Author, THE GREAT ESCAPE: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America; Founder & Director, Resilience Force
Full research and reading list to further delve into the conversation is available here on at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow

The Laura Flanders Show

Saket Soni: How Trafficked Workers Pulled Off “The Great Escape”

THE ELK AND THE WOLVES: CRUISE CONTROL

Remember... remember...

The Elk had antlers strong and wide
They cleared the forest, side by side
They built the roads, they dug the wells
They raised the walls and tower bells

The Wolves, who owned the land by law
Paid Elk in grain for what they saw
"Work hard, build straight, and you'll be fed—
We'll share the plenty that you've spread"

So Elk bent low and built for years
Through summer heat and winter's tears
They taught their young to lift and haul
To build the Wolves' great hunting hall

But WOLVES LEARNED SECRETS in the night
How to make machines that worked despite
The need for Elk with tired backs
For iron hands don't tire or slack
(don't tire or slack...)

One morning came without a sound
The Elk found notices on the ground
"Your service helped us reach this day
But machines now build—you cannot stay"

The grain stores? Owned by Wolves alone
The wells they dug? Wolf-mortgaged stone
The roads they paved with bleeding hooves
Led only where the Wolf approves

Young Elk asked his father, gray and bent
"We built this world—where did it went?"
The father's answer, heavy, true
"We built their wealth, not what we're due"


"We should have claimed the land we cleared
The tools we made, the wells we engineered
Building wealth for others' gain
Just forges your own future's CHAIN"

"The ones who own, not those who toil
Inherit everything—the spoil"


Some Elk had learned the machine's code
Had bought small plots along the road
They weren't spared the coming frost
But they survived—the others? LOST

Now scattered through the outer wood
The builder-Elk, misunderstood
Still believing if they tried once more
The Wolves would open up the door


But DOORS ARE ONLY OPENED WIDE
For those who OWN what's kept inside
The truth the forest tries to hide:
LABOR BUILDS, but OWNERSHIP DECIDES

--

A dystopian fable wrapped in festival-grade bass and yacht club aesthetics. This track dissects the brutal economics of labor vs. ownership through the story of the Elk—who built everything—and the Wolves—who owned everything.

"Labor builds, but ownership decides."

When the machines arrive, the builders are rendered obsolete. The wells they dug, the roads they paved, the walls they raised—all owned by others. This is prophetic rap meets dark-trap meditation on automation, displacement, and the cruel mathematics of capital.

The moral isn't subtle: Learn the systems. Claim your ground. Or watch machines take what you found.
🏭⚙️🌲

THE ELK and THE WOLVES

Ryan, Noah, and Lou discuss the ongoing federal government shutdown

Episode 240 - Shutdown

Originally uploaded September 17th, reloaded October 4th.

Monday September 8th, MBN was on the road to Kalamazoo for the Michigan Works! Association Annual Conference. The team took a break from interviews down in the exhibit hall and attended the luncheon where remarks were shared and awards were handed out. Here are the first eight minutes of a keynote delivered by Dr. Christopher Laney "Michigan’s Labor Market: The Good, the Bad and the Possibilities". 

His research in recent years can be found at https://www.nceda.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Laney-Christopher.pdf

This video shares highlights from the Monday September 8th luncheon presentation. Before we returned to the exhibit hall for more interviews.

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MBN On The Road | Dr. Christopher Laney - Michigan Works! Association Conference 9/8/2025  Keynoter

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Dave Foster, a distinguished associate at the Energy Futures Initiative, about the story of how labor unions and environmental organizations have found ways to work together on issues that affect both contingents. As a former director of United Steelworkers District 11, Foster recalls the “Donora incident” as the main catalyst for the union’s interest in environmental affairs. Foster shares his firsthand recollection of the history behind the creation of the BlueGreen Alliance, including some of the various struggles, wins, and early initiatives that helped secure the partnership between labor and environmental organizations.

References and recommendations:

“Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie” by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712585/sea-of-grass-by-dave-hage-and-josephine-marcotty/

“Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition” by Sanya Carley and David Konisky; https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo254000286.html

Subscribe to stay up to date on news and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

A History of Alliances Between Workers and Environmentalists, with Dave Foster

Feliks Banel's guest on this BONUS EPISODE of CASCADE OF HISTORY is Aaron Goings, whose most recent book, "Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest" was published in September 2025 by University of Washington Press.

Aaron Goings is Professor of History at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington and author of several critically acclaimed books, including "The Port of Missing Men" and "The Red Coast."

For more information on "Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest":
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295754000/red-harbor/

Mr. Goings will give a presentation about "Red Harbor" at the Polson Museum in Hoquiam, WA on Saturday, November 8. 2025:
https://uwapress.uw.edu/events/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D189920853

He will also be appearing at Orca Books in Olympia, WA on Thursday, December 4. 2025.

CASCADE OF HISTORY is broadcast LIVE most Sunday nights at 8pm Pacific Time via SPACE 101.1 FM in Seattle and gallantly streams everywhere via www.space101fm.org. The radio station broadcasts from studios at historic Magnuson Park – located in the former Master-at-Arms’ quarters in the old Sand Point Naval Air Station - on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle.

Subscribe to the CASCADE OF HISTORY podcast via most podcast platforms and never miss regular weekly episodes of Sunday night broadcasts as well as frequent bonus episodes.

BONUS EPISODE: "Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pac NW" Author Aaron Goings

Dr. Stephanie Melka returns to discuss VBAC, or vaginal birth after cesarean. In this episode, she and Dr. Fox review risks associated with VBAC, which patients are candidates for VBAC, and choosing between cesarean and vaginal deliveries.

"VBAC to the Future" - with Dr. Stephanie Melka

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra. 


Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. 

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.


EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation" (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Deformance.pdf)
We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)
Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines
PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings
UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art
Allen Institute for AI
C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Christopher Kelty, "The Internet We Could Have Had"
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (ed. Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews)
L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E magazine (ed. Danny Snelson)
Christian Marclay, The Clock
Johanna Drucker
Memory of the World archive
Future Knowledge podcast
Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface 
Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying 


Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk


“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly



The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold.

The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.

In this episode of "What Does the Fox Say?" with host Dr. Nathan Fox, he answers listeners' questions regarding choroid plexus cysts, placing an IUD during a C-section, third trimester bleeding, the difference between Cervidil and Pitocin for induction, and family history of pregnancy complications. 

"Mailbag 25: What does the Fox say" - With Dr. Nathan Fox

This is a talk I was invited to provide to the inaugural 2021 Stoicon-X Military conference, held online.  I chose as my topic the scope of genuine courage, a topic of considerable importance but also frequent misunderstandings within professions like that of the military.  

In this talk I discuss what courage is and what it is for, the scope of courage, including its constituent virtues, and finally the relationship between courage and the other virtues.

The Scope of Genuine Courage In Stoicism - Sadler's Lectures

I just post my own original music for me, but glad to share it here with you.

Laura Flanders is a best-selling author and the host of Laura Flanders and Friends (formerly The Laura Flanders Show), a syndicated weekly program airing on Public TV in which she talks to creative thinkers and change-makers from the worlds of politics, arts and the new economy. In her weekly commentary, The "F" Word,  she tells you what she thinks. The "F" Word is heard on the Progressive Voices Channel on Tune-In and is made available free to radio stations who appreciate an upbeat, radical perspective.  lauraflanders.org

The Home of Business in Michigan. Get on-demand access to audio programs, articles and resources presented by savvy business leaders and industry experts.

Punching Out is a show about work that airs each week on WAYO 104.3 in Rochester, NY

CASCADE OF HISTORY is the only LIVE radio show presenting news and stories about people doing cool things with and for history in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia. We talk about people, artifacts, books, maps, photos, places, landmarks, public lands, state and national parks, trails, highways, and the historic events that can bring us all together.

The show is broadcast LIVE most Sunday nights at 8pm Pacific Time on SPACE 101.1 FM (and streaming via http://www.space101fm.org ) from studios located on the shores of Lake Washington in historic Magnuson Park in Seattle, former site of Sand Point Naval Air Station (though sometimes CASCADE OF HISTORY originates from remote locations around the region). The podcast feed consists of the weekly broadcast, plus frequent bonus episodes with timely and topical interviews, vintage local audio or other Pacific Northwest history-related content - and sometimes even BREAKING NEWS.

Producer and host Feliks Banel is an Emmy-winning and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning broadcaster, and former deputy director of Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI).

Send your questions, comments, guest suggestions, news tips and other correspondence to cascadeofhistory@gmail.com.

I'm that YouTube Philosophy Guy! Find more than 3,000 videos in my main channel.  Support my video and podcast work!  https://www.patreon.com/sadler or https://www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

Learn more about this podcast channel - https://youtu.be/qRvL0gqlyrw and https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/p/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast

Due to popular demand - and with the work underwritten by my Patreon supporters - I have been converting my videos into MP3 files listeners can listen to anywhere they want!

I have a second podcast, Mind & Desire, publishing original episodes on a variety of topics in philosophy, which you can find here - https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/podcast

Resources Radio is a weekly podcast by Resources for the Future. Each week we talk to leading experts about climate change, electricity, ecosystems, and more, making the latest research accessible to everyone.

New tracks tagged #labor