Norm Diamond hosts today program which includes the following segments:
Radical Re-envisioning of Life on a Hot Planet: Bill Resnick interviews Richard A. Smith, a historian of modern China, and also an environmentalist activist who co-founded the organization System Change Not Climate Change. His writings include two books: China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse and Green Capitalism: the God that Failed. In part one of a two part interview Bill and Richard discuss whether human society can survive climate change if it continues under the management of elites determined to maintain capitalism with its requirements for exponential growth. They conclude that unfettered growth is not possible on a finite planet.
In Part 2 next week, they will discuss the immediate future, which is likely to feature more frequent and damaging climate disasters, which in turn will lead to growing demands for a sweeping mobilization of all resources and a command war ecnonomy to meet the threat. Such a develpment would trigger the political war of the century, the left with its program in opposition to capitalist forces seeking ongoing and unsustainable growth. Who will prevail depends on how we organize today.
Race-norming: Our well-read red, Patricia Kullberg, shares a piece by Dave Zirin on the National Football League’s race-norming of cognitive testing, which has meant that Black players must be more cognitively impaired than their white counterparts to qualify for the same compensation for traumatic brain injury. The NFL’s use of race-norming continues a long and pernicious tradition of casting African-Americans as physiologically different and usually inferior to white people in order to justify brutal repression and other racist practices that have continued well into the 21st century. Dave Zirin writes and publishes widely about the politics of sports. His article, “The NFL’s institutionalized racism is just one part of a massive problem” was published online by MSNBC, on June 8, 2021. For more on race-based medicine, see Patricia’s interview of medical student Naomi Nkinsi about other race-based corrections and algorithms deployed in clinical medicine to the detriment of African-American well-being.
The Paris Commune: For Norm Diamond’s regular segment “Another World Is Possible,” he concludes our celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune. Norm responds to critiques by listeners, discusses how the Commune influenced both Marxism and Anarchism, and explores its relevance and lessons even for our own times. Music is from the Commune’s unofficial anthem, sung by Cora Vaucaire.
- KBOO