Citations Needed

In this public News Brief, we break down recent attempts by Politico, Axios, New York Times and faux populist Republicans to pit autoworkers against climate mandates.

Our guest Sydney Ghazarian.

In this News Brief we discuss two recent "controversial" country hits, "Try That In A Small Town" by Jason Aldean and "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony––and their attendant partisan utility. Our guest, Citations' resident Country Music correspondent Alexander Billet.

"New Starbucks CEO plans to pull barista shifts in stores every month," CNN announces. "Uber's CEO moonlighted as a driver and it changed the way he operates the company," Fortune insists. "Your DoorDash driver? He's the company's co-founder," the Associated Press smirks.

Month after month or week after week, we seem to hear the same stories about bold corporate executives who've decided to roll up their sleeves—metaphorically or otherwise—and join their lowest-level employees as a delivery driver, barista, or retail worker. Their stated goal: to "stay connected" to and "better understand" the company, its customers, and its workers.

While these attempts to foster and express empathy may appear noble on the surface, they're anything but. In reality, the CEO-as-worker stunt is an entirely self-serving project, creating a pretext for worker surveillance and a distraction from labor abuses like poverty wages and union-busting, all the while seeking to convince the public that corporate executives are honest, hardworking folks, Just Like You.

Today, we will be dissecting the past and present of Undercover Boss-style corporate maneuvers, looking at the ways in which the C-suiter-in-the-trenches routine advances the squishy concept of "empathy" in order to obscure and undermine the material needs and demands of labor.

Our guest is Ligia Guallpa, Executive Director of the Worker's Justice Project, a community-based, workers' rights organization in New York City.

"The World Bank and its president have been doing an important, constructive job the past five years," announced The Southern Illinoisan in 1973. "IMF assistance [has] put Jamaica well on the road to recovery," reported The Winnipeg Sun in 1982. The Trans-Pacific Partnership "could be a legacy-making achievement" for Barack Obama, The New York Times suggested in 2015.

These are the dominant narratives surrounding so-called "development" initiatives, whether structural adjustment loans or "free trade" deals. Agreements like these, we're often told, have been and continue to be essential to the economic maturation and societal improvement of poor countries. Countries that shift from nationalized to privatized industry and land, so called liberalize trade policies, and institute a host of other free-market reforms are destined for greater efficiency, reduced poverty, and that much-coveted "Seat At The Table" in the global economy.

But, all too often, this isn't the effect of these initiatives. What we don't tend to hear about is how economic development "agreements" engineered by wealthy countries like the US — e.g., IMF loans, NAFTA, or the TPP — don't promote, but rather reverse, the development of exploited countries. Media minimize not only these initiatives' destructive effects on economies, labor, and social programs in service of U.S. corporations, but also their relationship to the punitive U.S. immigration system, and their extensive role in mass global displacement.

This episode – the last installment of our three-part series on media narratives about immigration (listen to Part I here and Part II here!) – explores the displacing effects of "development" and "free trade" deals, as well as their connection to an increasingly militarized immigration "deterrence" machine, asking why capital is allowed to move freely, but people aren't.

Our guest is Dylan Sullivan.

Immigration law should "stop punishing innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents," the Obama White House stated in 2013. "Migrant Caravan Continues North, Defying Mexico and U.S.," The New York Times warned in 2018. "Biden Administration Invites Ordinary Americans to Help Settle Refugees," NPR announced in early 2023.

For over a century, U.S. policy and media have distinguished between supposedly different types of immigrants. There are refugees, who are fleeing political persecution, and migrants, who are crossing a border for reasons that aren't necessarily so noble. There are deserving immigrants, who are upwardly mobile and law-abiding. And there are undeserving immigrants, who are tax-dodging gang members.

It may be easy to take this hierarchy of displaced people for granted, as it's become so commonplace in U.S. immigration discourse. But there's nothing natural or organic about it. These distinctions––between, for example, "refugee" and "migrant" –– are historically informed by racism, gendered notions of labor and a superficial, ideological distinction between negative and positive rights. The plight of certain immigrants is instrumentalized and prioritized over others, depending on their proximity to contemporary notions of whiteness, their ability to create cheap labor, and their utility to combating the spread of dangerous leftwing ideologies like anarchism and socialism.

This episode – Part 2 of our three-part series on media narratives about immigration (listen to Part I here!) – examines the U.S. government's pattern of arbitrarily categorizing displaced people as some version of "good" or "bad." We'll look at how these distinctions are informed by, and often obfuscate, the U.S.'s global relations and imperialist expansion, and how the policies behind these categories turn people seeking safety and stability into geopolitical pawns.

Our guest is writer, historian and professor, Dr. Rachel Ida Buff.

"What one photo from the border tells us about the evolving migrant crisis," The Washington Post reveals. "The U.S. immigration crisis through the eyes of a border town mayor," reports Boston's NPR station. "Everyone can now agree – the US has a border crisis," proclaims CNN.

There's a seemingly endless stream of warnings in news media that the US is being met with a "crisis" at the US-Mexico border. This crisis, according to the press—whether it's called a "border crisis," "migrant crisis," "immigration crisis," or some variant thereof—is the movement of people away from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, toward the United States. This phenomenon will supposedly distort, strain, and burden the US labor market, social services, housing, and economy in general.

But, contrary to media framings, the movement of people isn't per se a "crisis." Nothing is inherently harmful about the movement of human beings from one place to another. The "crisis," instead, is the militarized and inhumane response to the movement of surplus and unwanted populations; it's US policy toward the people, especially from the Global South, who seek refuge here. It's the history of imperialist violence, the existence and enforcement of the border, and the deflection of responsibility away from the US, and onto the dehumanized and demonized asylum seekers.

On this episode, part one of a three-part episode on immigration, we explore media's World War Z-conjuring "border crisis" narrative, looking at how it obscures the US's role in creating the conditions so many people have no choice but to flee; how it reinforces false notions about immigrants and asylum seekers; and how it retcons the wealthiest, most powerful country in world history into an innocent victim, too fragile to support the people in dire need of escaping the wanton violence that very country helped unleash.

Our guest is Boston University assistant professor Dr. Heba Gowayed.

In this public News Brief, we break down media coverage of the potential UPS strike––and the trend more broadly in labor coverage––that paints a strike as something that harms "the consumer" or "the economy" rather than what it is: the only thing that gives workers any power.

Our guest is writer and media analyst Teddy Ostrow, host of The Upsurge podcast.

In this News Brief, we review the former President's new docuseries and his attempt to paper over class conflict in favor of a Simply Asking CEOs To Be Nicer brand of politics. With guest Maximillian Alvarez of The Real News.

In this Live Interview with Nell McShane Wulfhart, we discuss the hidden labor and humiliation of the Airline Industry's "Swingin' 60's" image and how the "pretty faces" behind the tawdry ads fought back.