Belabored Podcast #15: Renegade Retailers and Education Ideologues
This week in Belabored: Special guest Lee Fang shares his insights into the resurgent right wing. Plus Chicago school closings, NLRB appointments, and strikes by low wage workers.
Spring 2025
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A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis
Because of its magnitude, the climate crisis can appear as the sum total of all environmental problems. But halting greenhouse gas emissions is a specific problem, the most pressing subset of the larger apocalyptic panorama. A radical approach to the crisis of climate change begins not with a long-term vision of an alternate society but with an honest engagement with the very compressed timeframe that current climate science implies. In the age of climate change, these are the real parameters of politics.
Nuclear Twins: Life in a Plutonium Town
Russian and American nuclear scientists perceived the remarkable similarity of the workings of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and the American Department of Energy. Now, as the opening of secret archives and closed cities has since set loose a flood of historical writing about atomic weapons programs, Kate Brown’s Plutopia offers a comparative study.
Green Energy Bust in Germany
Can an energy system move off carbon-based fuels and nuclear energy at the same time? Will Boisvert argues that the German Energiewende shows why not—with a response from Osha Gray Davidson and a reply by Boisvert.
Letter from Berlin: Utopia or Auschwitz?
The German new Left was too close to the history it so desperately wanted to negate; it could not develop a sane or truthful relationship to the crimes and the cruelty of the Nazi era. Haunted by visions of the gas chambers, it believed that the only alternatives were the creation of a utopia or the recreation of Auschwitz.
Sudan’s Third Civil War: In Medias Res
Violence has ebbed and flowed in Darfur for more than ten years now. Now, though the situation is almost totally absent from news coverage, the region teeters on the edge of a complete humanitarian collapse and uncontrollable violence.
Cheerleaders for Anarchism
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 inspired a shallow but significant revival of Marxist analysis in academic life. A violent upsurge in theory, however, has corresponded to no particular insurrection in practice. If any radical left tendency has been responsible for inspiring action, the palm should go to Marxism’s historic antagonist on the Left—anarchism.
Voting Rights: The Court Takes a Page from 1883
Legal precedent is against the recent Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. There is, however, a grim precedent for the Roberts Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which also turned the law on its head.
Belabored Podcast #13: Education Workers
This week in Belabored: insurgent teachers in Newark and Washington, DC, teacher evaluations in New York, benefit cuts in North Carolina, and a settlement between Hyatt and UNITE HERE. Plus special guest Michelle Chen.
Learning the Wrong Lessons in Xinjiang
The violence that occurred in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region in western China, on July 5, 2009 was both shocking and predictable. Four years later, what are the prospects for further unrest in Xinjiang?
Introduction: The Politics of Climate Change
How can we confront the challenge of climate change, especially when those hit first and hardest by climate change are poorer and more marginalized than those with the power to take large-scale action?
Belabored Podcast #12: Hold the Fort?
This week in Belabored: fighting hospital closures in Brooklyn, the firing of a dozen Walmart strikers, an end to the New York legal services strike, and a new bill to make managers pay for retaliation. With special guest Rich Yeselson, author of “Fortress Unionism.”
Is Philadelphia the Next Chicago?
Activists in Philadelphia have responded to an austere “doomsday budget” with civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and community outreach. The crisis has revealed the potential for a city-wide insurgency.
Unnatural Gas: How Government Made Fracking Profitable (and Left Renewables Behind)
In his much-anticipated speech on climate change, President Obama proposed smart, modest policies that would help decrease greenhouse gas emissions through support for renewable energy development and increased energy efficiency measures, prepare the country for the climate change that is …
Peak Oil and the New Carbon Boom
Political leaders and the news media have presented the sudden reversing of a thirty-five-year decline in the U.S. production of fossil fuels as a sign of the recovery of the country’s national independence. To others the bonanza threatens not a newfound independence but a deepening dependency.
