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.
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.
Listen live from 11AM - 12PM Central on Lumpen Radio 105.5FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
11:10 - Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson examines the strategic implications of non-nonviolent protest.
Nathan wrote the articles We'll Beat the Fascists with Ideas, Not Fists for In These Times and Thinking Strategically About Free Speech and Violence for Current Affairs.
11:50 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen witnesses the crash that killed Princess Di - in his mind!
Jeff is capable of recalling things from his past, that's his secret to doing things like this.
