Defunding UNRWA: From Containment to Destruction / Laura Robson

Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

9:15 - Security analyst Azeem Ibrahim explores Myanmar's campaign of genocide against the Rohingya.

Azeem is author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide from Oxford University Press.

10:00 - Journalist Sharon Lerner examines the legacy of environmental racism the EPA ignores.

Sharon wrote the articles A Legacy of Environmental Racism and EPA Welcomed Industry Feedback Before Reversing Pesticide Ban, Ignoring Health Concerns for The Intercept.

10:35 - Journalist Martha Pskowski explains how Coca-Cola is sucking Chiapas dry.

Martha wrote the article Coca-Cola Sucks Wells Dry in Chiapas, Forcing Residents to Buy Water for Truthout.

11:05 - Author Sasha Abramsky explains how irrational fear rules, and guides, life in America.

Sasha is author of the book Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream from PublicAffairs.

12:05 - Sociologist Christian Parenti watches capitalism's climate-driven crisis wash away our cities. 

Christian wrote the article If We Fail for Jacobin.

12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen has drinks with a wannabe thought leader and tax consultant.

Jeff's Tinder algorithm might need some retooling.

The Cult That Wouldn't Die... Of Salmonella

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Good morning, fellow-travelers. Hillary Clinton wrote another book, this one rehashing her losing battle to become the first female President of the United States, blaming everyone but herself, which is what politicians are supposed to do. I don't fault her for this. Unlike some of you, I don't think she is a special war criminal. She is certainly no more a war criminal than Condoleezza Rice or Madeline Albright, and all three of them stand like wispy seedlings beside the mighty sequoia of US war criminals, Henry Kissinger. Have they named a sequoia after Kissinger? It's long overdue.

But neither is she such a shining light of uncompromising progressive leadership that preferring an ancient left-leaning Jew indicates a psychosexually genocidal motive.

There were certainly some Bernie supporters whom it was reasonable to suspect of hating Hillary out of misogynist resentment. Likewise, though the majority of Hillary supporters are not unself-aware auto-inductees into a reactionary, self-pitying cult of personality, some are, too many, it's embarrassing, it's grotesque, and it's disappointing to see Hillary in her new book feeding them back the very lines of thought their psychoses generated. But, again, she is a politician, and it is fair play.

Did Bernie's primary candidacy hurt Hillary? Of course. An election is a contest. A popularity contest. If the person opposing you in a popularity contest gets popular, that is by definition an injury to you. Furthermore, Bernie remained popular, but, let's be fair: trying to be popular is part of his job.

To those with an actual leftist critique of capitalism, Bernie's campaign highlighted Hillary's shortcomings in that regard. It is good that we are now, thanks to Bernie, suspicious of progressives who are unwilling to speak forcefully against the miscreants milking our communities of resources. It's unfortunate that Hillary lagged behind the rest of us in understanding that kissing corporate ass could be considered a drawback to a large portion of the liberal coalition. Now that we all understand it, though, maybe next time we can field a really good candidate who is prepared not only to go at least partway to the mat for people of color, women, and the gender non-binary, but one who also doesn't suck corporate ass like it's a cream-filled doughnut.

Yes, Obama got... read more

Listen live from 10AM - 12PM Central on Lumpen Radio 105.5FM Chicago / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

10:15 - Historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces today's austerity politics to New York's 1970s fiscal crisis.

Kim is author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics from Picador.

11:00 - Sociologist Christian Parenti watches capitalism's climate-driven crisis wash away our cities. 

Christian wrote the article If We Fail for Jacobin.

11:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen says 'It's not global warming, it's Hillary.'

They just blame her for everything, these guys.

Working:

The politics of work, organization and resistance in 21st century retail chains. - Peter Ikeler

Claiming control of work and wage requires a radical imagination. - Rhiannon Colvin

Invisible in a number of ways: Spring break with Miami's hotel housekeepers. - Michelle Chen

Survival economics and DIY markets in post-crash Detroit. - Valerie Vande Panne

Startups never stop: On work minus life in Silicon Valley. - Julianne Tveten

Understanding capital's class war on Detroit labor. - Joshua Murray

Every person a market: The case against the sharing economy. - Tom Slee

Technobabel: Against the inevitability of tomorrow's robot economy. - Curtis White

Not Working:

Fuck work: The case against full employment, and for guaranteed income. - James Livingston

Not working: Reclaiming time from the demands of capitalism. - Eva Swidler

The case against work: Reclaiming purpose and productivity. - David Frayne

The forever strike: Quitting this world and working on the next one. - Edward Sutton

Less work, less stuff, more time: Why we could all be working 15 hours a week. - David Skalinder

The Drowned World

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink. Are you ready to live under the sea or die trying?

Did you see any of those pictures of the Interstate 10 Ocean in Texas? Pardon me, the sea. Did you see the sea? There didn't used to be a sea there. I drove that highway all the way from Baton Rouge through Houston and Austin, back in aught 1, arrived in Los Angeles the night before 9-11, and didn't see a single fish. Not even a grouper. I saw a plane fly into a building, through a nightmarishly clear sky, the next morning on TV. But no grouper.

So now the ocean's here. I think it's here to stay. I think the whole southern USA is going back underwater, like nature intended, before the Freeze Miser locked up all the water at the poles. Days were wetter then.

We can do this, America. We can get used to anything. You'll get used to the water. It's cold when you first get in, but then you get used to it. We got used to distrusting the Spectacle, after Nixon had to resign when it came out that he'd ordered Halderman and Erlichman to hypnotize Oswald to kill JFK. We got used to having a regulatory system run by the industries they're supposed to regulate. We got used to not having enough money for food, shelter, medical care, and education. We got used to the owners of massive, mind-blowing, stratospheric wealth telling us there just wasn't enough to pay us a decent wage or support the common weal. We got used to cops gunning down black people or murdering them in jail for any reason or no reason.

We did these things, we made these changes within our very selves, because it was our patriotic duty. We may not have a communal sense of distributing resources, but we do have a collective love of our country. And I don't think learning to breathe underwater is too much for America's Jesus to ask of us. On Venus, they're so patriotic they breathe ammonia, and on Mars they breathe almost nothing at all. We're lucky to be getting oxygen. Is it really too much trouble to extract dissolved oxygen from seawater? Come on, grow some gills, binch. If a goddam fish can do it, so can you.

We've gone soft, having all this readily available oxygen floating in the air, a veritable luxury dessert cart of oxygen, wheeled right to our table. We've become like delicate woodland sprites, prancing and sparkling and tinkling about the forest floor, sipping nectar from daffodils. We've become lazy lotus-eaters,... read more

Listen live from 11AM - 12PM Central on Lumpen Radio 105.5FM Chicago / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

11:10 - Writer Natasha Lennard promises confrontation, not a platform, for White supremacy.

Natasha wrote the In These Times piece Don't Give Fascism an Inch and Not Rights but Justice: It’s Time to Make Nazis Afraid Again for The Nation.

11:50 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen guides us to our underwater destiny.

Does this mean Jeffy finally read Kobo Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 since I been bugging him about reading it? Oh sorry, spoilers BTW.