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Delete Your Account Podcast

Delete Your Account is a new podcast hosted by journalist Roqayah Chamseddine and her plucky sidekick Kumars Salehi. Every week they will talk about important stories from the worlds of politics and pop culture, both on and off-line, in a way that will never bore you.
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Now displaying: March, 2018
Mar 29, 2018

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Emily Ozment. Emily was born and raised in Lawton, Oklahoma. She is a special education teacher and lead teacher in her department for Biology and Physical Science at Eisenhower High School. Emily is participating in a grassroots effort by teachers across the state to bring funding back to the Oklahoma classroom and win a fair salary for Oklahoma teachers and education support staff. We talk to Emily about the statewide teacher walkout planned for April 2nd, placing it in the context of more than three years of political mobilization aimed at addressing the public education crisis in Oklahoma. Emily describes the dire conditions for both teachers and students, even as massive oil profits in the state are taxed at an absurdly low rate. With low wages forcing many teachers to work additional jobs, experienced teachers are fleeing the state and inadequately trained substitutes are being relied on more and more. Teachers are struggling to do their best in crumbling facilities with outdated and disintegrating textbooks, as the GOP-controlled state government has significantly decreased classroom funding. We talk about planning and preparation for April 2nd, as well as the support teachers are receiving from students, parents, and the broader community. We discuss the recent success of striking West Virginia teachers and the influence that this has had on teachers in Oklahoma, as well as teachers in other "red" states that are considering striking. Emily also talks about growing up in a deeply conservative state, and how her politics have shifted dramatically to the left as a result of what she has experienced teaching in Oklahoma.

A transcript for this episode will be provided upon request. Please send an email to deleteuracct @ gmail to get a copy sent to you when it is completed.

Mar 15, 2018

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

 

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Matthew Kenner, author of Geohell: Imagining History in the Contemporary World, and Chris Oestereich, researcher and writer on economics and ecology, for a discussion of the left’s greatest unaddressed challenge in the 21st century: the problem of the contradiction between economic productivity and ecological sustainability. They begin with an explanation of the true meaning of “Geohell,” the much memed concept that has its origin in Matt’s reading of Dante’s Inferno. Matt and Chris give a rundown of the dependence of human civilization on the exploitation of the environment since the advent of agriculture millennia ago, emphasizing the increasing complexity and exploitation inherent in that process. They explain how even left-wing paradigms for development rely on notions of economic productivity that are in conflict with the demands of an environment undergoing catastrophic climate change.

Matt and Chris describe structural and ideological impediments to transitioning to an ecologically sustainable society, and explain the shortcomings of the “ecomodernist” strain of socialist thought that pushes technological fixes to climate change and views a future of “fully automated luxury communism” as not only desirable but attainable. The crew discusses the necessity for ecological economics, which currently lacks influence in the mainstream of the economics discipline, to frame maximizing growth as a principle that assumes impossible levels of energy consumption.

Follow Matt on Twitter @cutasterfee, and Chris @costrike.

A transcript for this episode will be provided upon request. Please send an email to deleteuracct @ gmail to get a copy sent to you when it is completed.

Mar 7, 2018

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

Roqayah is out for the week, but returning guest-co-host Nora Barrows-Friedman fills her shoes and joins Kumars for a conversation with Ali Abunimah, co-founder and editor of The Electronic Intifada. Ali is also the author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine and One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. We discuss several developments in Israel/Palestine since we last spoke to Ali, both on-the-ground and diplomatically around the world, and to what extent these changes are attributable to Trump. Ali shares the story of the Tamimi family, resisting the seizure of land in their village of Nabi Saleh for Israeli settlement construction. Multiple members of the Tamimi family have been killed in recent years as a result of their participation in weekly protests against the settlements. Not long after the near-death of 15-year-old Muhammad Fadel Tamimi, shot in the head with a "rubber" bullet, Ahed Tamimi, his 16-year-old cousin, lightly slapped one of two heavily armed Israeli soldiers as she attempted to remove them from her family's property. Video of the event went viral. Not long after, Ahed was arrested by the Israeli military where she now faces years in prison, and her family members have been targeted for arrest and abuse ever since. Ali talks about how Trump's Israel/Palestine policy agenda is largely in line with the increasing permissiveness for abuse and subjugation of Palestinians that has continued unaltered under Republican and Democratic presidents for decades. Ali posits that the salient difference between Obama and Trump is that Trump is "taking the mask off", dropping all pretense and revealing the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. We also talk about shifting public opinion on the question of justice for all Palestinians, particularly among young people, and why recent high-profile BDS victories have pro-Israel advocacy groups running scared, aligning more and more with far-right-wing governments and organizations.

You can find Ali on twitter at @AliAbunimah. Find Nora at @norabf.

A transcript for this episode will be provided upon request. Please send an email to deleteuracct @ gmail to get a copy sent to you when it is completed.

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