246 - Twilight of the Virtue Hoarders & Oklahoma's Orphan Wells
Added 2025-11-11 21:39:18 +0000 UTCWelcome to Left Reckoning on Tuesday afternoons!
Nick Bowlin (@npbowlin) returns to discuss oil industry externalities and Catherine Liu joins us to talk about the fall of the PMC and rise of gangster capitalists.
Read Nick in ProPublica here: https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-oil-gas-wastewater-pollution
Check out Catherine Liu's Vitrue Hoarders here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/ And Catherine Liu's Substack here: https://cliuanon.substack.com/
Comments
I'm glad y'all had Nick on the show. Before listening to Left Reckoning I had no clue what orphan wells are and while it's worrying knowing it exists is the first step to fixing the issue. Us texan socialists need to start working towards that. There's definitely the potential for breaking ground further from the urban cores in that work. But I gotta say, the few times I've heard Cathrine Liu talk I've been pretty disappointed. I should read her book and some of her articles but her critique seems to be stuck in this cultural mode where she's more focused on the attitudes of, not even pmcs as a whole, just liberal professionals. It just comes off as complaining about her coworkers rather than explaining the economic shift towards credentialization, the expansion of managerial sector and the break up of large workplaces that went with that shift. That would be a more useful contribution towards building the kind of economically focused left that we all want.
lolamortem
2025-11-15 23:31:21 +0000 UTCLoving Catherine Liu - ALWAYS good to hear her insights! Thank you!
Aaron Botts
2025-11-12 14:33:19 +0000 UTC
