Episode 30: Maintaining Business As Usual

Play Now!

I'm back! Well, at least for a bit. While I'm back, for Episode 30: Maintaining Business As Usual, I'm taking a yak at how business is not only done, but how many would prefer it continues to be done, no matter how many existing alternatives could be explored. And most of that maintenance is done through commercially sponsored media, paid for by the commercials placed by those businesses that would like this maintained.

In this episode, we hear from a commercial produced in the late 1970s by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They produced several of these; I chose the one with the best sound quality. Ah, the seventies! We also hear another version of the union song recorded in 1975.

We hear from Planet Money once again, this time from episode #142, "Tax Me Please," and Counterspin's Jeanine Jackson introducing an interview she aired with Laura Flanders. I read from Thomas Geoghegan, "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life" (The New Press, 2010).

And finally, the intro. I play the song on every episode, but seldom mention it. I should. It is KMFDM's "Attak/Reload" from their album "Attak." Dmitri Orlov backs the intro tuneage with comments he made on Episode 86 of the Extraenvironmentalist podcast, "Days of Destruction."

[NB: In the credits, I mention the episode of Planet Money was #104, when it is in fact #142. Long and slightly humorous story as to why that happened, but I do regret the error.]