This Is Hell!

Scholar, writer, professor, and cultural critic Henry Giroux talks to Chuck about his recent Counterpunch magazine article "Targeting Children - Killing Fields in the Age of Mass Shootings." Seb gets on his soapbox for a lesson on why people doing monstrous things should never be denied their humanity. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/31/targeting-children-killing-fields-in-the-age-of-mass-shootings/

Adrian Shirk talks to Chuck about her book "Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for American Utopia." In a Moment of Truth Jeff Dorchen takes the Party of Manson Family Values to task. A winner of the weekly Question from Hell! is chosen.

Legal scholar Joseph Marguelies talks to Chuck about his Boston Review article "A Path to Neighborhood Power." We have new answers to this week's Question from Hell!, and other shenanigans.

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/

Alex plays two interviews with Black Agenda Report founders Bruce Dixon (Jan 2017) and Glen Ford (Dec 2008)

Producer Sebastian presents a June 2020 interview with Writer Connor Woodman on his Verso blog series "The Imperial Boomerang" and in a new segment, Sebastian gets on his soapbox and lectures about the history of abortion rights and the anti-abortion right in the United States. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs?tag=375 Abortion rights: https://billmoyers.com/story/history-of-abortion-law-america/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Writer Jessa Crispin rejects today's mainstreamed, neoliberal feminism, and calls for a return to feminism's radical promise: as a sharp-edged, outsider's social critique, as a challenge to the supremacy of capitalism, and as a path towards a radically reorganized society. https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/why-i-am-not-a-feminist/ https://abortionfunds.org/funds/

Producer Dan presents a 2018 interview Chuck conducted with the amazing multi talented artist Boots Riley prompted by the release of his movie "Sorry to Bother You." Also due to the current news surrounding the United States Supreme Court's impending overturning of Roe v. Wade and the coming outlawing of abortions, here is a link to the National Abortion Fund where you can find a local fund to contribute to. https://abortionfunds.org/about/abortion-funds-101/

Writer Asad Haider explains how today's reductive form of identity politics acts as an obstacle to understanding and confronting oppression. FIRST BROADCAST: June 2018.

Political scientist Cedric Johnson examines the collisions of race, class, policing and activism in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and explains why the Democratic Party and capital threaten to co-opt and re-direct the protest movement's energy unless it commits to a politics of redistribution and power for the working class. https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/

Anthropologist James Doucet-Battle on sugar, diabetes, racialized science and his book "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" from University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood