030: A Green New Deal to Build The Golden Square

The Future Is A Mixtape

In the most famous scene from the legendary film, Network (1976), populist news anchor, Howard Beale, creates a viral sensation before the internet became a thing: he tells his viewers, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” And thousands of people across the country yell from their windows and rooftops repeating the mantra, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” More than 40 years on, in our neoliberal wasteland, we have every right to be mad as hell as we huddle in our unpaid Covid-abodes with no more Bernie Bucks or stimulus, while microbes attack us relentlessly. With the Siberian forests on fire, the Great Barrier Reef deforming into black bones & ash and the oceans gasping for oxygen while record temperatures make Death Valley feel like Venus, we must become mad – with a rage that runs on love for what’s been lost and for what we might still win. This week, Jesse & Matt celebrate the multi-authored manifesto, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, published in 2019 by Verso Books. Our co-hosts will talk about the vitality and importance of this book and how the beating heart of any radical Green New Deal must include The Golden Square: the decommodification and universal provision of Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education for All. We live in the worst version of a Cyberpunk world that doesn’t even offer up androids or flying cars, while we gloat over our miniature technology & its secret surveillance as politicians offer up empty platitudes and technocratic masturbations. As the Social Ecologist, Murray Bookchin, once told us, the enemy isn’t us; the enemy is the fossil fuel industry; the enemy lives inside McMansions and billionaire castles made by myths of perpetual market growth, peddled by the celebrity worshiping pyramid scheme of an influencer class clawing onto the old carcass of illegitimate hierarchies. We are in revolutionary times and collective actions require collective designs; so we must continue to draw the contours of what lies just beyond the horizon. We have a planet to win.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places:

[e-mail]

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram