This Is Hell!

Political scholar Aasim Sajjad Akhtar talks to Chuck about his Catlyst Journal article "Breaking Afghanistan." We also have a new Rotten History, and your weekly Hangover Cure. https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/03/breaking-afghanistan

Chuck interviews, Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology at Rice University and Berggruen Institute fellow, who wrote the Noema Magazine article "Why We Have To Give Up On Endless Economic Growth." Jeff Dorchen is doing some deep brooding in a brand new Moment of Truth. A winner is declared for the weekly Question from Hell!

Chuck is back! He welcomes writer, activist, and co-founder of the Los Angeles Tenants Union Tracy Rosenthal, who wrote the New Republic article "Inside L.A.'s Homeless Industrial Complex" Also: A new Rotten History, and a new Hangover Cure, and a new Question from Hell! https://newrepublic.com/article/166383/los-angeles-echo-park-homeless-industrial-complex

Producer Sebastian muses on origin and utility of racial categories and introduces a 2019 interview with writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on a dying planet. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/after-the-storm-ehrenreich

Producer Lindsey introduces a 2017 interview with Journalist Sharon Lerner, who reports on the Exxon Mobil refinery polluting the majority-black Charlton-Pollard neighborhood of Beaumont, Texas, and the poisonous, 14 year silence from the EPA after the citizens' civil rights complaint, and connects the mechanisms of environmental racism to a history (and present) of regulatory rollbacks and industry noncompliance in powerless communities across the country.

Producer Dan introduces an interview with African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor who in her book "Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" examines the mechanism of racism in the American real estate industry - as post-1968 public policies pushed Black renters and homeowners into a racially stratified, predatory housing market without Civil Rights protection, a predatory inclusion took shape, funneling wealth into private industry and foreclosing the futures of Black families for decades to come. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-for-profit/

Chuck is back live in studio for his first full interview in two months, welcoming back independent journalist and writer Alexander Zaitchik, who wrote the book "Owning the Sun - A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines." Chuck and Alexander talk about medical monopolies, the role people like Bill Gates and Joe Biden play in keeping medical patents in place, and why this makes the world sicker and poorer. It is a new week, so we have a new Question from Hell! as well as a new Hangover Cure and an all new Rotten History! https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/owning-the-sun/

Black Agenda Report's Danny Haiphong examines the lies at the root of the story America tells itself - as the corporate media obscures the reality of social relations at the base of American power, our collective notions of exceptionalism and innocence mask the exploitation that occurs around us everyday, and the exploiting class at the top of American society. In a brand new Moment of Truth Jeff Dorchen takes the Catholic Fascist United States Supreme Court Justices to court. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Exceptionalism-and-American-Innocence/Roberto-Sirvent/9781510742369 https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Writer DaMaris Hill traces a history, and present, of Black women imprisoned in America - under a parallel regime of sexual violence and exploitation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, subject to the edges of a legal and economic system built on repression, risking freedom and safety in the simple acts of navigating daily life in a racist country. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-bound-woman-is-a-dangerous-thing-9781635572629/ https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Producer Dan presents a 2019 interview with organizer Jenny Brown who examines the long history and present politics of the fight for abortions in America, and explains why the left must be clear and honest about abortion - as an unrestricted right, as a social service to be included in national healthcare, and as an unfinished front of the feminist revolution. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3095-without-apology https://abortionfunds.org/funds/