In case you missed it, last week we launched what we hope will be a series of interviews with Queensland Greens figures about the party’s policies ahead of the October 2020 state election. For the first instalment, we spoke to the Greens candidate for South Brisbane, Amy MacMahon, about the party’s plan for a publicly-owned pharmaceutical company. (You may recognise Amy from her appearances on Floodcast, and she has also written several essays for us on the aged care crisis, the CPRS, changes to the media ownership landscape, and futuristic climate-change fiction. This has been Amy MacMahon corner.)
I saw this article about a vegan meat company’s anti-union activity last week, and bookmarked it because I love hate-reading about the fucked up behaviour of so-called ‘ethical companies’. Especially ones called No Evil Foods! This quote from the company spokesperson was engineered in a lab to make me angry: “The employees voted the union down by close to 70 percent in a fair and free election. The employees did this because they trust the vegan founders, who provide a progressive culture, verified living wages, excellent benefits and a mission to provide consumers with tasty plant-based options to improve their health and help end corporate cruelty to animals.”
In the New York Review of Books, Samuel Moyn muses on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of making historical comparisons, especially when it comes to fascism. This is the article to read if you - like me - have always been irritated by the ‘Trump as Hitler’ trope that’s been circulating ever since 2016.
“Abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes. A response to what he represents hardly requires a restoration of “normalcy” but a questioning of the status quo ante Trump that produced him. Comparison to Nazism and fascism imminently threatening to topple democracy distracts us from how we made Trump over decades, and implies that the coexistence of our democracy with long histories of killing, subjugation, and terror—including its most recent, if somewhat sanitized, forms of mass incarceration and rising inequality at home, and its tenuous empire and regular war-making abroad—was somehow less worth the alarm and opprobrium.”
In Current Affairs, Briahna Joy Gray unpicks the narrow, essentialist “representation as racial justice framework”, of which Biden’s ‘you ain’t black’ comment is only a symptom. Related: this tweet.
Friend of Flood Deccas brought this one to my attention weeks ago, and because I’m a bad person I kept forgetting to include it in link roundups. But today I finally remembered! This is a meaty piece on ‘COVID Life and the Asset Economy’ - about how the crisis has given birth to a particular ‘politics of life’, which takes place in the context of an ‘asset economy’ wherein “life chances … have come to be defined less by occupational positions and more by relationships to assets, especially to housing as a wealth-generating asset. This means that even if people have the same jobs or earn the same wages, there are deep rifts of inequality between those who own assets, and especially residential property, and those who do not.” Give it a read!