This Is Hell!

We revisit an interview with Michael Parenti from November 2005. Chuck is back next week.

Sudip Bhattacharya talks about his article at HardCrackers.com, "Socialism or Suburbia." Sudip is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. He is also a writer, organizer, and you can find his other work at outlets like Protean Magazine, CounterPunch and Reappropriate, and the Aerogram.

Correspondent Brian Mier connects with host Chuck Mertz to discuss the upcoming run-off 2022 Brazilian presidential election between Jair Bolsenaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Also featuring this week's Rotten History, Chuck has Christmas in October, and Lindsey shares the pear harvest from Oriana's Orchard. Brian is an editor and contributor to, “Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil,” co-editor of Brasilwire, Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English's News Program, From the South, and co-host on Brazil 24/7.

CD Davidson-Hiers and Jeff Vandermeer speak with Chuck about their article "Is Florida Becoming a Failed State?" published October 11th, 2022 by The Nation. This week's Hangover Cure and new Question from Hell. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/florida-hurricane-ian/ CD Davidson-Hiers is a native Floridian who grew up on a 40-acre horse farm in North Florida. Her work has appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Flamingo Magazine, and USA Today. She works for the nonprofit Education Writers Association while also overseeing the Florida Student News Watch, an organization to mentor new journalists. Her work covering the US Covid-19 vaccine rollout received recognition from NPR, The Washington Post, Soledad O’Brien, and other national news outlets. Jeff VanderMeer’s award-winning novel Annihilation is set in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. His environmental advocacy has included helping save cypress swamp in North Florida and sponsoring research into the endangered frosted flatwood salamander. A 35-year resident of Florida, he has previously written about the state for, among others, Current Affairs and The Los Angeles Times.

We have filmmaker Joe Winston on to discuss his new movie, ‘Punch 9 for Harold Washington, “The story of Harold Washington, elected in 1983 as Chicago's first African-American Mayor, the political battles he fought, and his legacy to Chicago and the nation.”

Los Angeles, California-based freelance journalist Cerise Castle speaks with host Chuck Mertz about her research and reporting published on Knock LA: “A Tradition of Violence,” the first history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the largest local law enforcement agency in the United States. The investigation was published as a 15-part reporting series exposing 18 gangs, 19 documented murders (all of whom were people of color), and over $100 million dollars in lawsuits paid for by the people of Los Angeles. The podcast of the same name and subject matter is due October 19th 2022. https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history/ Cerise Castle specializes in arts & culture, civil rights, crime, and human interest stories. She's produced and hosted segments for the Emmy-award winning nightly news program, VICE News Tonight, NPR, and several podcasts. Her reporting and commentary have been featured in publications like Knock LA, the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and MTV.

We have on Jodi Dean, author of, "Socialist Reconstruction, A Better Future for the United States."

Theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist Liz Theoharis is on to discuss her TomDispatch article, "No More Sacrifices: Mercy Makes Good Policy." Liz is Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She is the author of, "Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor," and, "We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign."

Reporter Alex Vuocolo speaks with host Chuck Mertz about his NOEMA Magazine article "The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance" published September 22nd, 2022. This week in Rotten History and new listener responses to the Question from Hell.

Elyas Nawandish is on to talk about his article at The Intercept, “I Watched the Afghan Government Collapse Under the Weight of Its Own Greed: Our leaders failed to give Afghan soldiers the food, tools, and respect they needed to defeat a brutal insurgency.” Elyas is an Afghanistan Observatory Scholar at New America. Since 2014, he has worked with the Kabul-based Etilaat Roz daily newspaper, where he is currently the online chief editor, supervising a team of 20 journalists. Previously, he served as news manager, investigative reporter, and text editor for Etilaat Roz. He has produced around 160 reports and editorials, including 12 major investigations on politics, security, human rights, rule of law, corruption, and abuse of state resources by former Afghan government officials.

We speak with Fatema Ahmad, co-author, along with Azadeh Shahshahani, of a new article at The Progressive, “The Surveillance State Can’t Solve White Supremacy: After the January 6 attack, federal surveillance programs expanded to counter white supremacist violence have made Black and brown communities their main target.” Fatema is executive director of the Muslim Justice League.

Sophie Lewis returns to This Is Hell on Tuesday, October 4th to speak with host Chuck Mertz about her new book, Abolish the Family, out on Verso, October 2022. https://www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

It's Chuck's Birthday! Jubilations all around! We welcome writer, researcher, and oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon to talk about her book "Tree Thieves - Crime and Survival in North America's Woods." We also present your Hangover Cure for this Monday, and have a new Question from Hell! for the week. Also producer Sebastian talks immigration history in another installment of The Past Inside the Present.

Journalist Kari Lydersen is an author and assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University. She's on to discuss her article at The New Republic, "Can Liberal Evanston, Illinois, Atone for Its Racist Past?"

Hadas Thier returns to This is Hell! to discuss her In These Times Article "A Left Answer to Inflation." Producer Alex returns for one show. We have new answers to this week's Question from Hell!, and This Week in Rotten History.

Chuck talks to cultural anthropologist Andrea Vetter and economic historian Matthias Schmelzer about their new book "The Future is Degrowth - A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3989-the-future-is-degrowth We also have your hangover cure for this Monday, and this week's new Question from Hell!

Investigative journalist Boyce Upholt wrote The New Republic article, "Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?: This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S. farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new viruses."

Host Chuck Mertz speaks with with Geographer Matthew Huber to discuss how individualized focus on the purification of consumer choices divides the working class and depletes energy for collective organizing against the the Capitalist culprits profiting off the extraction of environmental resources. Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet published May 2022 on Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3973-climate-change-as-class-war Chuck also discusses the 26th Anniversary Listener Appreciation Party, reads this week in Rotten History, and new responses to the Question from Hell.

Legal scholar Daniel Medwed talks about his book "Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get Out of Prison." We present your Hangover Cure, talk about the weekend's Listener Appreciation Party, and present this week's Question from Hell!.

Today we have on James Wilt, author of, “Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy.” James is a writer and PhD candidate based in Winnipeg, Canada. James discusses how working class people form their relationship with drugs and alcohol when these are commodified by big business interests as well as the way in which enforcement of norms surrounding drugs and alcohol are often racialized.

Dorothy Roberts is an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Chuck Mertz interviews Roberts about her latest book, TORN APART: How the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world. TORN APART available Now at Basic Books https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/dorothy-roberts/torn-apart/9781541675445/

Historian Steve Fraser talks about his Tom Dispatch article "The Trump Supreme Court is Nothing New," about how the Supreme Court has over time been used to kneecap the democrat process in the U.S., and how it's been originally designed to provide that function to uphold the rule of the powerful against the masses. https://tomdispatch.com/the-trump-supreme-court-is-nothing-new/

Steve Fraser talks about his Tom Dispatch article "The Trump Supreme Court is Nothing New." Chuck complains about the hell of a week he's had. Seb presents another Past inside the Present, in which he muses about what 9/11 means in the age of Covid. We reveal this week's Question from Hell! (anniversary edition), and this week's Hangover Cure.

Chuck Mertz talks with Sean O'Leary about his writing for the Ohio River Valley Institute on the impact of the natural gas industry on Appalachian Americans. Also including this week's Hangover Cure, Rotten History, and Introducing this week's Question from Hell. Featuring a first announcement of musical artists performing at This Is Hell's listener appreciation party on September 17th, 2022. Sean O’Leary is senior researcher of energy and petrochemicals at the ORVI and is a native of Wheeling, WV. He has written about coal, natural gas, and their role in the economies of Appalachia in a book, a newspaper column, and blog titled, “The State of My State”. Previously, Sean served as communications director at the NW Energy Coalition in Seattle, Washington.

Brianna Muir wrote the Sapiens article, "An Archaeology of Personhood and Abortion: Opinions about fetal personhood and abortion have fluctuated enormously throughout history and differ in surprising ways between cultures." Brianna is a master’s student in biological anthropology at the University of Central Florida. As an emerging bioarchaeologist, she is interested in how integrative approaches can be used to address questions of personhood, identity, and agency in the past. In particular, she investigates how these factors may have shaped and influenced a person’s lived experiences. Muir received her B.A. from the Australian National University in 2019 and has undertaken fieldwork and research in the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Australia.

William Deresiewicz is a writer and former professor of English at Yale University. William discusses his article "Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering)" published August 17th 2022 on Quillete.com with host Chuck Mertz. New responses to the Question From Hell and this week in Rotten History

We have on Tarence Ray from the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast to discuss the devastating effects of recent flooding in Eastern Kentucky and how the government response affected the poor and working class.

The return of economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Dean is on to discuss his most recent writing, including, “Structuring the Economy to Give Money to the Rich Is Inflationary.”

Penny M. Von Eschen is author of the new book, “Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989.” Penny is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of, “Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War,” and “Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957.” We speak with Penny about the enduring legacy of the Cold War in international politics.

Sociologist Laura Mauldin talks about her Baffler article "Care Tactics: Hacking an Ableist World," we introduce this week's Question from Hell!, and bring you your Hangover Cure for this Monday. Also, producer Seb gives another history lesson on the Nazis, and the Holocaust - and why we need to remember it.

Gender and Sexuality studies scholar Heather Berg talks about her Boston Review article "Freedom, Not Benefits Sex workers are labor’s vanguard. The left ignores them at its peril." We have the winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!, and producer Seb introduces his rebranded segment "The Past inside the Present" with the first half of a two-parter on the most fun topic of all: the Holocaust. https://bostonreview.net/articles/freedom-not-benefits/

Algernon Austin, Director for Race and Economic Jusice at the Center for Economic and Policy research discusses his recent writing including, "Black People Need Better Options than the Morgue or Mass Incarceration," "Black People (And Everyone Else) Should Avoid Crypto," "Only Radical Changes Will Make Rents Affordable," and "Black Children are Disproportionately Harmed by Extremist Gun Rights Policies in the US.

Chuck is back from his vacation! Today he talked to journalist Steven Thrasher about his book "The Viral Underclass The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide." We also have your Hangover Cure, this week in Rotten History, and some of your answers to the Question from Hell!.

Producer Dan introduces two interviews with activist and scholar Norman Finkelstein, talking about the Israeli siege of Gaza. We also crown this week's winning answer to the Question from Hell!.

Producer Lindsey presents a 2020 interview with Labor historian Tamara Fernando on disease and East Indian pearl fisheries, and what those early capitalist labor conditions in relation to diseases can tell us about the still-current moment.

Producer Seb introduces a 2016 interview with postcolonial studies scholar Ashley Dawson on capitalism powered extinction events around the globe. He also has some answers to this week's Question from Hell! and tries (without success) to come up with a valid hangover cure.

Producer Lindsey plays a 2015 interview with science journalists Elizabeth Grossman and Valerie Brown on the failure of government regulatory agency and corporate greed in the chemical industry and how those things are making everyone sicker and less safe.

Producer Dan introduces two interviews with Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik, talking about the movement for Kurdish liberation and how that movement's politics represent an alternate vision to the neoliberal world order.

Producer Dan plays two interviews from the vault that deal with the U.S. war in Iraq, and the subsequent rise of ISIS in the region.

We welcome investigative journalist Amanda Sperber back to the program to talk about her recent Baffler article "Prelude to a Redeployment - Listening for signs of the Americans in Kismayo, Somalia." After the interview we present a brand new Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen, and declare the winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!. https://thebaffler.com/latest/prelude-to-a-redeployment-sperber

Sociologist Raul Perez talks about his book "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy," we have this week in Rotten History, and read more of your answers to this week's Question from Hell!.

We welcome Gerald Horne back to the show to talk about most recent book "The Counter-Revolution of 1836 - Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism." Stay tuned and learn of this week's whale-snack sized hangover cure, hear this week's Question from Hell!, and learn from Seb's Soapbox about some of the origins of Whiteness.

We welcome legal scholar and lawyer William E. Forbath to the program to talk about his book "The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution." Chuck muses about 26 years of running God's favorite radio program with Jeff Dorchen in this week's Moment of Truth, and we declare the winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!

We welcome law scholars Dre Cummings and Kalvin Graham to talk about their work published in Tulsa Law Review about the relationship between race massacres and capitalism. We also have This Week in Rotten History, and more of your answers to this week's Question from Hell!

We welcome Dean Starkman of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to talk about the coverage of the Uber Files, detailing the misdealings and corruption that the rideshare giant engages in. Producer Seb Wuepper gets on his soapbox to talk about the old question whether or not the United States is a democracy, we present your hangover cure for this week, and also introduce this week's Question from Hell!

Producer Lindsey introduces a 2015 interview with anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jeff Dorchen delivers another Moment of (Super)Truth on a flashforward seance in the stone age, and we declare the winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!.

Producer Dan Hill presents a 2017 interview with writer and medical sociologist Zoe Samudzi and activist William C. Anderson on their piece "The Anarchism of Blackness" piece in Roar Magazine. Dan also has this week in Rotten History, and reads more of the listeners' answers to this week's Question from Hell!. https://roarmag.org/magazine/black-liberation-anti-fascism/

Producer Seb hijacks the studio for a soapbox-y episode while Chuck recuperates from surgery. Seb gets on his soapbox to question what, if anything, the Nazis can teach us, and plays a 2019 interview on capitalism and forced, migrant labor with writer and housing advocate Richard Hunsinger. We also have an all new Question from Hell! with some replies from the listening audience.

Producer Dan presents an October 2017 interview with Ajamu Nangwaya and Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson, talking about retaking democracy for the people and how to build functional, bottom-up cooperation. Jeff Dorchen presents this week's Moment of (SUPER!)Truth, and Dan declares a winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!

Chuck is out, preparing for surgery, so cross your fingers and send good vibes. Inspired by the preceding episode's new interview with Kate Manne, producer Lindsey plays the 2017 interview with her on her book "Down, Girl - The Logic of Misogyny." We also have this week in Rotten History, and Lindsey reads more answers to this week's Question from Hell!