In the midst of global apocalyptic collapse, the so-called solutions on offer from the imperial core are miles away from even marginal forms of dignity. The disdainful refusal to muster anything more than symbolic misdirects buried under bureaucratic mazes of means testing illuminate how deeply incapable the neoliberal boot-strap ideology is of addressing basic human needs. An anxious capitalist class and its corrupt, craven supplicants are waging an all-out war against any measure of “socialist” “entitlements” that might help build the social infrastructure desperately needed in this age of climate chaos and psychic despair. To acknowledge that everyone deserves The Golden Square—the unconditional and universal provisions of Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education—should be as common sense as sunshine. As Peter Kropotkin detailed in The Conquest of Bread at the end of the nineteenth century, if society was organized around first meeting human needs, we could easily be living in a world of abundance and leisure for all, all while working much less. But instead of cooperatively creating a rational and egalitarian world of post-scarcity, the cult of propertarians and their armies of indoctrinated worshipers & wage-slaves have foisted upon us polluted cities and poisoned water, expecting us to be grateful for fast fashion and fast food, the complimentary side-dishes of batshit construction and bullshit jobs. What we need, instead, are walkable cities, shorter work weeks, balanced job complexes, and a post-scarcity economy based on care and freedom. Imagining such a future involves asking a series of questions that must be fully explored . . . How would our lives be different? How would work get done, and who would do it? Would meeting The Golden Square require a focus toward centralization or decentralization? In this second of a three-part series envisioning The World of The Golden Square, Jesse and Matt investigate the experiences and methods of a world re-made to meet human needs in a rightful relationship with the planet. We live in capitalism – a patriarchal social order forever insisting that there is no alternative – a system that has been violently curtailing ideal innovation for more than two centuries, just as feudalism and the divine right of kings did for so many centuries prior. The heartless handmaidens of this system are tyrannical mega-corporations living as “para-states,” floating above the world’s so-called democracies, leeching every available drop of use-value from the earth and its inhabitants in a callous competition for monopolies of power & profit. These corporate parasites will continue to destroy everything in sight as long as the deeply irrational market-logic myths about “Supply & Demand” and “The Rationality Economic Man” are the organizing basis of our shared reality. This Age of Techno-feudalism – to borrow Yanis Varoufakis’ neologism – is a bullshit system that makes batshit products, based on horseshit ideas. The urgent existential responsibility that we now face – to heal our scars and secure a livable future – will require nothing less than birthing a real global utopia as quickly as humanity can muster – an open-source world designed around The Golden Square.
Mentioned In This Episode:
EXPERIENCES
FOOD
Water.org: “The Water Crisis”
WHO (World Health Organization): Drinking-water Key Facts
NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council): “Turning on the Tap in America: Stories From the Front Lines of the Nation’s Drinking Water Crisis.”
Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.): Food Deserts
Kate Taylor in Business Insider: “These 10 Companies Control Everything You Buy”
Dan Myers for The Daily Meal: “10 Companies That Own Your Favorite Chain Restaurants”
Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova and Alvin Chang in The Guardian: “Revealed: The True Extent of America's Food Monopolies, and Who Pays The Price.”
Liz Scheltens and Gina Barton for Vox: “How Big Government Helps Big Dairy Sell Milk”
Sigal Samuel in Vox: “It’s Not Just Big Oil. Big Meat Also Spends Millions to Crush Good Climate Policy.”
Jennifer Jacquet in The Washington Post: “The Meat Industry is Doing Exactly What Big Oil Does to Fight Climate Action”
Camila Domonoske for NPR: “50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat”
“Farm to Table”: A Wikipedia History
Antonia Noori Farzan in The Washington Post: “The Latest Right-Wing Attack on Democrats: ‘They Want to Take Away Your Hamburgers’”
Andrea Thompson in Scientific American: “Here’s How Much Food Contributes to Climate Change: Animal-based Foods Produce About Twice the Emissions of Plant-based ones, a New Comprehensive Study Finds”
GRAIN: “Emissions Impossible: How Big Meat and Dairy are Heating Up the Planet”
Where to Invade Next (2015). Directed by Michael Moore.
Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, Collaborators and Co-Founders of Participatory Economics (Parecon), on Balanced Job Complexes on ZNet: “ParEcon Questions & Answers: Balanced Job Complexes”
Food Chain Workers Alliance: “The Hands That Feed Us: Challenges and Opportunities for Workers Along the Food Chain”
Human Rights Watch: “When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting”: Workers’ Rights Under Threat in US Meat and Poultry Plants
David Graeber: “To Save the World, We’re Going to Have to Stop Working”
In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Peter Kropotkin estimated that if society was organized based on needs first, people working 5hr/day, from the ages of 20 to 45 or 50 would be more than enough for a society of abundance & leisure.
“Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation, transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work we guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will produce.”
John Maynard Keynes: “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930)
Joshua Krook in The Conversation: “Whatever Happened to the 15-hour Workweek?”
SHELTER
Missing Middle Housing: A Wikipedia Definition
Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today's Housing Crisis by Daniel G. Parolek. Published in 2020 by Island Press.
About Here on YouTube: “Vancouver’s Missing Middle Mystery”
Lucinda Shen in Fortune: “Here’s How Many Homes the Average Billionaire Now Owns” (2016)
“There’s a new bar for wealth in America: Nine homes and 19 cars owned by the average “ultra-high net worth” individual.”
A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
Nicole A. Murray in Streets Blog NYC: “Opinion: To Ban Cars, Socialize Them”
Greater LA on KCRW hosted by Steve Chiotakis: “LA Freeways: The Infrastructure of Racism”
Matthew Fleischer in Los Angeles Times: “Opinion: Want to Tear Down Insidious Monuments to Racism and Segregation? Bulldoze L.A. Freeways”
Ailsa Chang, Christopher Intagliata and Jonaki Mehta for NPR’s Code Switch: “Black Americans And The Racist Architecture Of Homeownership”
Nathan Masters for KCET: “Why Isn't There a Freeway to Beverly Hills?”
Joe Bousquin in Industry Dive: “Report: Nearly Half of America's Deadliest Jobs are in Construction”
Charles V. Bagli in The New York Times: “Trump Paid Over $1 Million in Labor Settlement, Documents Reveal”
Renegade Inc interviews David Graeber: “Batshit Construction”
Scott Davis in Business Insider: “What Abandoned Olympic Venues and Stadiums from Around the World Look Like Today”
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE): 2021 Infrastructure Report Card: Bridges
Max Plenke for Mic: “This Is Your Body in an Office Job vs. Your Body in a Physical Job”
HEALTHCARE
Sandro Galea and Nason Maani in The Lancet Public Health: “The Cost of Preventable Disease in the USA”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): The Prevention Status Reports
Kate Morgan for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in USA Today: “These are the Top 10 Health Conditions Affecting Americans”
World Health Organization (WHO): “Urgent Health Challenges for the Next Decade”
The National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS): “2020 Career Interest Survey”
Amy Norton in U.S. News & World Report: “Shortage of Primary Care Doctors Is Costing American Lives”
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC): “AAMC Report Reinforces Mounting Physician Shortage”
Kristen Moon in Forbes: “The Real Reason Why It’s Harder Than Ever To Get Into Medical School — And What Aspiring Physicians Can Do To Improve Their Chances”
Stacy Weiner for Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC): “Applications to Medical School are at an All-Time High. What Does This Mean for Applicants and Schools?”
Melanie Hanson for Education Data Initiative: “Average Medical School Debt”
Heidi Rivera in Money: “Why Medical Students Graduate With So Much Debt”
Dean Baker in Politico: “The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries”
Benjamin Purper for The USC Center for Health Journalism on KVCR News: “Doctor Shortage: How the Inland Empire Came To Have So Few Physicians”
Nancy Krieger in Annual Review of Public Health: “Measures of Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Gender Binarism for Health Equity Research: From Structural Injustice to Embodied Harm—An Ecosocial Analysis”
Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care: “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care” (2003). Editors: Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, and Alan R. Nelson.
Martha Hostetter and Sarah Klein for The Commonwealth Fund: “In Focus: Reducing Racial Disparities in Health Care by Confronting Racism”
Vanessa Romo for NPR: “California Kaiser Mental Health Workers Launch Strike; Problems 'Keep Getting Worse'”
Theo Wayt for NBC News: “Medical First Responders Say They're Underpaid and Overworked. Will Anything Change?”
Kristen Bahler in Money: “'The Pay Is Just Not Enough.' EMTs Are Working Multiple Jobs Just to Make Ends Meet”
John Csiszar in Yahoo! Finance: “Notoriously Underpaid Jobs”
Molly Kinder for The Brookings Institution: “Essential But Undervalued: Millions of Health Care Workers Aren’t Getting the Pay or Respect They Deserve in the Covid-19 Pandemic”
Iris Palmer for New America: “We Need to Fix the Broken Nursing Career Pathway—Here’s How”
EDUCATION
Abigail Johnson Hess for CNBC: “How Student Debt Became a $1.6 Trillion Crisis”
Astra Taylor in The New York Times: “Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear”
Sean Illing Interviews Astra Taylor for Vox: “The Case for Canceling Student Debt — All of it”
Steven Mintz in Inside Higher Ed: “The Tyranny of the Market: The Impact of the Higher Education Marketplace on Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.”
Philip G. Altbach in Forbes: “Competition's Impact on Higher Education”
Lucy Clark in The Guardian: “So Who Says Competition in the Classroom is Inevitable?”
Student Affairs – A Wikipedia Definition
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act – A Wikipedia History
Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative – A Wikipedia Account
Daniel Markovits in The Atlantic: “How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning”
U.S. News & World Report: “2022 Best Global Universities Rankings”
“Town and Gown” – A Wikipedia Definition
The Future Is A Mixtape: Episode 049 - “Every Neighborhood A University”
Karl Marx’s Distinction Between Abstract Labour and Concrete Labour – A Wikipedia Summary
Invesopedia’s definitions of Skilled Labor and Unskilled Labor
METHODS
FOOD
Democracy At Work Institute: “What Is a Worker Cooperative?”
Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei for Nonprofit Quarterly: “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy”
The Worker-Owned Recovery California (WORC) Coalition
Tami Luhby for CNN: “Jobless Americans Left Scrambling After Pandemic Unemployment Benefits End”
Zack Friedman in Forbes: “Unemployment Benefits End Today For Millions of Americans”
Alex N. Press in Jacobin: “It’s Time to End the Subminimum Wage for Tipped Workers”
Saru Jayaraman and Mark Bittman in The Guardian: “The US Restaurant Industry is Lacking in Wages, Not Workers”
Sylvia Allegretto, Marc Doussard, Dave Graham-Squire, Ken Jacobs, Dan Thompson and Jeremy Thompson for UC Berkeley Labor Center: “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry”
Megan Molteni in Wired: “Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots”
Polly Mosendz, Peter Waldman, and Lydia Mulvany in Bloomberg Businessweek: “U.S. Meat Plants Are Deadly as Ever, With No Incentive to Change”
Abolish Restaurants – zine from prole.info
Katy Wong for CNN: “Paris to Turn a Third of its Green Space Into Urban Farms”
Greens Grow: “What Is Urban Farming?”
Andrew Coppolino for CBC: “Greens Grown in a Warehouse? Vertical Farming a Growing Trend in Ontario”
Brian Barth in Modern Farmer: “How Does Aeroponics Work?”
Victoria Balfour for Sustainable Food Trust: “Bringing Biodiversity Back Into Farming”
U.S. Department Of Agriculture Economic Research Service: “Crop Production is Concentrated in California and the Midwest”
Rob Cook on Beef2Live.com: “Ranking of States That Produce The Most Food”
California had the highest agricultural receipts in the United States in 2019 followed by Iowa, Nebraska, Texas and Minnesota.
Ezra Klein and Susannah Locke in Vox: “40 Maps That Explain Food in America”
Ezra David Romero on NPR’s Morning Edition: “Drought Conditions Force California Wineries to Change How They Grow Grapes”
The California Walnut Board: “More than 99% of the walnuts in the U.S. are grown in the fertile soils of California’s Central Valley.”
Kimberly M. S. Cartier in Eos: “Climate Change Uproots Global Agriculture”
Dom Phillips, Daniel Camargos, Andre Campos, Andrew Wasley, and Alexandra Heal in The Guardian: “Revealed: Rampant Deforestation of Amazon Driven by Global Greed for Meat”
Glenn Hurowitz, Mat Jacobson, Etelle Higonnet, and Lucia von Reusner in Mighty Earth: “The Companies Behind the Burning of the Amazon”
Amazon Watch: “Complicity in Destruction II: How Northern Consumers and Financiers Enable Bolsonaro’s Assault on the Brazilian Amazon”
Hannah Ritchie for Our World in Data: “How Much of Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Come From Food?”
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): “Fast Facts on Transportation Greenhouse Gas Emissions”
Ruth Hopkins in Teen Vogue: “What Is the Land Back Movement? A Call for Native Sovereignty and Reclamation”
David Suzuki Foundation: “What is Land Back?”
True Nature Foundation: “What is Rewilding?”
The Guardian on YouTube: “Rewilding Made Simple: an Animated Guide.” Narrated by George Monbiot.
BizVibe: “Global Machinery Industry Factsheet 2020: Top 10 Largest Machinery Manufacturers in the World”
Hadas Thier in Jacobin: “Release the Vaccines”
Elizabeth Melimopoulos in Aljazeera: “Explainer: What are Patent Waivers for COVID Vaccines?”
Against Intellectual Monopoly by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin. Published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press.
Kyle Wiens and Elizabeth Chamberlain in Wired: “John Deere Just Swindled Farmers out of Their Right to Repair”
Cory Doctorow on Medium: “Monopolists Are Winning the Repair Wars. Again.”
David Graeber: “Communism” – from The Human Economy. Edited by Antonio David Cattani, Keith Hart, and Jean-Louis Laville. Published in 2010 by Polity Press.
“Sharing food is indeed still considered to be the foundation of morality, but of course it’s also one of the chief forms of pleasure (who would really want to eat a delicious meal by themselves?). Feasts are in most places seen as the apex of sociability.”
SHELTER
Irish Examiner (Jan 30, 2008): “Radiohead Star Worked on Building Site During Summer.”
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Jan 22, 2021): Union Members Summary
“In 2020, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--the union membership rate--was 10.8 percent, up by 0.5 percentage point from 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.”
Jeffrey Selingo in The Atlantic: “The False Promises of Worker Retraining”
David Harvey: “Video: Developmentalism, Growth and Socialism”
Margaret Thatcher: “There is No Alternative”
Milton Friedman: “I, Pencil”
Ordoliberalism – A Wikipedia Definition
Friedrich Hayek – A Wikipedia Biography
The School of Life on YouTube: “POLITICAL THEORY – Friedrich Hayek”
David Graeber at 36C3: “Managerial Feudalism and the Revolt of the Caring Classes”
“I would propose that we just rip up the discipline of economics as it exists and start over. So this is my proposal in this regard. I think that we should take the ideas of production and consumption, throw them away, and substitute for them the idea of care and freedom.”
HEALTHCARE
Health Equity – A Wikipedia Primer
Emmanuel Felton in BuzzFeed: “They’re Working In Healthcare During A Pandemic. They Don’t Get Health Insurance.”
Kate Gibson for CBS News: “Many Who Care For the Sick and Old Lack Health Insurance”
Robert Pear in The New York Times: “Nursing Homes Seek Exemptions From Health Law”
RegisteredNursing.org: Nursing Careers & Specialties for RNs
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Median Wages in Healthcare Occupations
Elise Gould, Marokey Sawo, and Asha Banerjee for Economic Policy Institute: “Care Workers are Deeply Undervalued and Underpaid”
Jennifer Gollan in Reveal: “Investigating Labor Abuse of Caregivers”
Sunrise Movement: “What is A Federal Jobs Guarantee?”
Paul Prescod in Jacobin: “We Need a Jobs Guarantee Now More Than Ever”
Arthur Allen in Scientific American: “For Billion-Dollar COVID Vaccines, Basic Government-Funded Science Laid the Groundwork”
Luke Savage interviews Stephen Buranyi in Jacobin: “Drug Companies Took None of the Risks to Develop the COVID-19 Vaccine. They’re Getting All of the Profits.”
EDUCATION
The Chair (2021). Created by Amanda Peet. Starring Sandra Oh.
Karen Tongson in Slate: “A Chair Reviews The Chair: Sandra Oh’s Netflix series gets academia uncomfortably, hilariously right.”
American Federation of Teachers: “Report Shows Alarming Poverty Among Adjunct Faculty”
Caroline Fredrickson in The Atlantic: “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts”
University Council-American Federation of Teachers: “Survey Results on Contingent Faculty in Higher Education”
“According to a 2009 government study, 75.5 percent of all faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are contingent: that is, they hold part-time or adjunct positions, have full-time non-tenure-track jobs, or serve as graduate-student teaching assistants. Part-timers alone make up nearly half the total professoriate.”
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): University Staffing Data
Katie Reilly in Time: “This Is What It's Like to Be a Teacher During the Coronavirus Pandemic”
Kavitha Cardoza on NPR’s All Things Considered: “'We Need To Be Nurtured, Too': Many Teachers Say They're Reaching A Breaking Point”
Niraj Chokshi in The New York Times: “94 Percent of U.S. Teachers Spend Their Own Money on School Supplies, Survey Finds”
Stephie Grob Plante in Vox: “The True Cost of Being a Teacher: 7 teachers tell us what they buy for their classrooms, and how.”
A.P. Bio (2018). Created by Michael Patrick O'Brien. Starring Glenn Howerton.
University Village in Riverside, California
Mikhail Zinshteyn in Cal Matters: “California Lawmakers Tout Big College Spending, But Key Items Get Zero Dollars This Year.”
Michael Burke in EdSource: “Annual Tuition Increases Coming to University of California”
University of California: Accountability Report 2021 – Chapter 12: Institutional Performance
Joi Ito in Wired: “The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls”
Jason Schmitt in The Guardian: “Paywalls Block Scientific Progress. Research Should Be Open to Everyone”
Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz in Vox: “The War to Free Science: How Librarians, Pirates, and Funders Are Liberating the World’s Academic Research From Paywalls.”
Jeffrey Brainard in Science: “The $450 Question: Should Journals Pay Peer Reviewers?”
Devon Haynie in U.S. News & World Report: “The Great Game for International Students”
Tracey Samuelson on Marketplace: “U.S. Colleges and Universities are Increasingly Competing for International Students”