Episode 1393
Inside the Pandora Papers / Michael Hudson
Oct 6 2021
There's a lot of attention being paid to the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed, but the “leadership” of higher ed—the presidents, the boards of trustees—have been hollowing out higher ed for decades by following a neoliberal low road model. All the people on the board of trustees, not just here at Loyola, but at most colleges and universities, are not educators. They don't know anything about how education, or research for that matter. There are businesspeople. Once upon a time that made sense because their job was to raise money. But now with the rise of, “we need to run everything like a business,” they have imposed not just a business model on the school, but the McDonald's business model—the low road business model of “don't invest in people, hyper exploit them.”
Members of the leadership team of the SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union representing non-tenure-track faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago update us on their 14-month-old fight for a fair contract. NTT faculty Matt Williams, Paige Warren, Sarita Heer, and Deb Goodman discuss the precarity and exploitation facing faculty at Loyola and on campuses across the United States and the union's efforts to bargain collectively at a corporatized university. We will follow up with them next Tuesday after strike authorization votes have been tallied.
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Oct 4 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the drink.
Over twenty years ago, I started a project I’m still working on, documenting the life and work of an artist, Resh Shaprudhi, who used iconography around the god from the purana literature of what is now Hinduism, the god called Ganesh, or Ganapathi, or Vinayaka, or any number of other names, to explore the nature of oppression. Part of Resh Shaprudhi’s mythos is how and why Ganesh enters the events of the European genocide of WWII, often known as the Holocaust, and how through Ganesh’s intervention, the God of the Jews and the gods of the Hindus agree to bestow moksha upon the impoverished and oppressed. Moksha is the release of the soul from the cycle of metempsychosis, or reincarnation. It’s considered a good thing, to be released from that cycle.
If you’re not familiar with Ganesh, he’s the chunky god with the head of an elephant. He’s really easy to pick out of a crowd. A big part Resh Shaprudhi’s work involved syncretically assembling images, language, and symbols from Hinduism, Judaism, and the European genocide in World War II. So a lot of the art created by Shaprudhi involves Ganesh appearing in scenes of Nazi labor and death camps.
Coincidentally, about a decade-and-a-half after I started working on the Resh Shaprudhi project, an Australian play was touring the world called, “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich,” created by Back to Back theater company. The conceit was this: a theater company is in the process of putting together a stage play about Ganesh coming to Earth to recapture the swastika from the Nazis, who’d misappropriated it. I’m not sure if I was ever in a position to see this work. 2013, the year it toured, was also the year I was in India on the set of a movie, and after the shoot traveling through India, Thailand, and Laos.
Recently I decided to go back into the project, and encountered some clippings on the Back to Back play. I was barely familiar with the company’s esthetic, which is political, experimental, and purposely provocative. The theater company to which I claim membership, Theater Oobleck, boasted a similar esthetic back then. It may still, I don’t know. I know we considered art to be less interesting if it didn’t in some way transgress the everyday.
Back to Back is a company the majority of whose membership are disabled,... read more
Sep 14 2021