Episode 1521
Abolish the Family / Sophie Lewis
Oct 4 2022
There's a lot of attention being paid to the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed, but the “leadership” of higher ed—the presidents, the boards of trustees—have been hollowing out higher ed for decades by following a neoliberal low road model. All the people on the board of trustees, not just here at Loyola, but at most colleges and universities, are not educators. They don't know anything about how education, or research for that matter. There are businesspeople. Once upon a time that made sense because their job was to raise money. But now with the rise of, “we need to run everything like a business,” they have imposed not just a business model on the school, but the McDonald's business model—the low road business model of “don't invest in people, hyper exploit them.”
Members of the leadership team of the SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union representing non-tenure-track faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago update us on their 14-month-old fight for a fair contract. NTT faculty Matt Williams, Paige Warren, Sarita Heer, and Deb Goodman discuss the precarity and exploitation facing faculty at Loyola and on campuses across the United States and the union's efforts to bargain collectively at a corporatized university. We will follow up with them next Tuesday after strike authorization votes have been tallied.
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SuperTruth®: The Capitalist Who Gave Birth to a Blue Whale Who Gave Birth to a Renunciate Capitalist
Sep 28 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
by Jeff Dorchen
The loudest, most obnoxious mass of Christians had come to the general agreement that, the more Jesus loved you, the wealthier and more powerful He would make you in this world. He did this to balance out all the Muslims, Confucians, and other heathens Satan in His nastiness rendered wealthy and powerful. The only explanation for the majority of wealthy, powerful people in the world not being Christian was that, even though Jesus could easily win against the Devil, sometimes He let the Devil win, by mistake or on purpose, just to keep everyone guessing. If the overall picture were simple to interpret, faith wouldn’t be the test it was known it to be. And so, even under the simplistic, dogmatic doctrines of Dominionist Evangelical Christianity, there was room for confused outcomes.
And thank God for that!
Tom Brokaw was a simple, millionaire news-whisperer and fly-fisherman who called the generation that profited most from the FDR public works program—in other words an entire generation of welfare leeches—the “Greatest Generation.” Once in late September of the year 2022 (by the old TV Guide calendar), he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In it he bragged about his friendship with – no, not post-modern Homer, David Letterman – Yvon Chouinard, son of a Froggy Canook mechanic who reluctantly became an outdoor apparel tycoon.
Brokaw, in an attempt to show how low he was slumming it by hanging out with a fellow millionaire, kept calling the guy a “dirtbag,” which was apparently some slang term rock-climbing skiers liked to call each other, and had not much to do with bags of dirt at all. He also referred to Chouinard’s early life as a leisure sportsman rock climber and skier as “hardscrabble,” a term usually used to describe the lives of poor farmers. Rocks are indeed hard, and Chouinard probably found Scrabble a challenging game as a child, but that did not qualify his life as “hardscrabble.” It’s no surprise that Tom Brokaw, who coined the incorrect moniker “Greatest Generation,” should describe the life of an avid outdoorsman who became an apparel capitalist as “hardscrabble.” Tom Brokaw didn’t really know what words meant. A survey of his coverage of US foreign policy during his years as propaganda parrot confirms this.
Brokaw wrote his... read more
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