Best This Is Hell Interviews

Beautiful Day is a feel good, uplifting pop rock song that serves as a reminder to all of us that it is always possible to be optimistic.

Its a Beautiful Day

Its A Beautiful Day

CORRECTED DESCRIPTION 13 May 2024

This is a piece created by Duncan Chapman from recordings of forced rhubarb growing at David Westwood & Son rhubarb farm, near Wakefield. You can hear the rhubarb buds popping as they burst and also some mud as we squelched around in the dark. The audio has been cleaned up as much as possible to remove the sound of both the M62 and M1 motorways which are nearby!

A mass of popping rhubarb - forced rhubarb growing at DWS Farm

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/

Family Policing Punishes Poor Families and Protects White Supremacy  / Dorothy Roberts

What is money? Like actually is money? Yes, obviously it's complicated. That such a simple question is so hard to answer reveals not only the complicated status of money in the 21st century, but also that most of what we've been taught about wealth, credit and debt is totally wrong. 

In this wide-ranging, philosophical interview, Ole Bjerg, author of Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism, explores how money enters the modern world, why emerging alternative currencies like Bitcoin are inevitable reactions against modern banking, and whether the debtor's chains can unite the 99%. This is the kind of interview you will hear on NPR's Marketplace after the revolution.

Olje Bjerg is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. His previous works include 2011's Poker – The Parody of Capitalism.

Ole Bjerg considers the philosophical nature of post-credit capitalism.

The problem with being on the left is that we are much more certain about what went wrong in the past than what to do in the present, but the rise and endurance of neoliberalist policies might signal we are less right than we think about the present, and that's stopping us from fighting austerity, inequality and greed in future.

In his book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown," historian Philip Mirowski explains why the financial elite have enjoyed success after success, despite failure after failure, and why the left offers so little resistance. Naturally, Chuck has a ton of questions about this and Philip has a ton of thoughts. Listen to this if it feels to you like being on the left is like being left out of American politics.

Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Philip is author of 2002's "Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science" and 1999's "More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics." 

Historian Philip Mirowski explains why neoliberalism keeps surviving its own disasters.

Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer, but the system that engineered his death had plenty of willing Black actors. And adding more to that system won't mean less Black victims, writes Glen Ford writes in his Black Agenda Report piece "Ferguson Demands a New Black Politics," because Black complicity only strengthens the brutal system, and guns down more Michael Browns.

In the type of conversation people should actually be having after Ferguson, Glen talks with Chuck about why it looks exactly like police are at war with Black people, how the mass incarceration of Black Americans was a political reaction to the Black freedom movement of the 1960s, why current Black leadership voted in lockstep with their white colleagues for all the military equipment currently terrorizing their neighborhoods, and the deep conflict in Black America between the goal of self-determination and the desire for political representation.

Glen Ford is executive editor at Black Agenda Report.

Glen Ford gives the simplest answer for why it looks like police are at war with black people.

Being pro-choice feels like a defensive position these days. As abortion opponents exploit loopholes in health laws and defund women's health programs across America, people on the pro-choice side of the country are too busy holding back the tide to think about the social value of open access to abortions. Katha Pollitt covers the value of abortion access, to a society and to individuals, in her new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

Chuck talks with Katha about the role of abortion and contraception in the lives of America's women, from decades before Roe vs Wade to the current day, why abortion opponents are usually more concerned with controlling women's behavior than preserving the sanctity of life, and the quiet, revolutionary power of women talking honestly with other women about their lives and experiences.

Katha Pollitt is a poet and essayist.

Writer Katha Pollitt makes the case for abortion access as a moral right and social good.

www.thisishell.com

American conducts war like it conducts business - in secret and to the advantage of political elites. Jeremy Scahill covers the intersection of war, business and elites in his piece Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges for The Intercept.

Jeremy joins TiH! to discuss how America's secret/semi-secret/open-secret wars are having a very public impact on our democracy, how Blackwater's founder rose above accountability for his group's actions, why a silent coup of corporations co-opted the country's domestic and foreign policies, and what the cancellation of Nightline says about public interest and corporate profit. He also talks about his role in the Snowden documentary Citizenfour, which looks amazing.

Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist and founding editor of The Intercept.

Jeremy will be speaking at the 35th Annual Dinner Celebration for Chicago Area Peace Action on Saturday, November 1, at 6PM at the St Francis Xavier Parish Gym, in Wilmette. Hear him talk, eat dinner and support a great cause. What a night!

Jeremy Scahill sees elites winning - and democracy losing - America's secret wars.

This song was inspired by gangster and florist Charles Dean O'Banion (shot dead in his flower shop on November 10, 1924) and the long defunct Chicago punk bar named after him.

Blood On The Roses (remix)

Journalists Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge discuss their (at the time unknowing) role in smuggling leaked NSA data from Edward Snowden to Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras, and the work of uncovering and reporting on state secrets in an age of mass surveillance and all the paranoia that comes with it.

Jessica and Dale wrote the Harper's cover story Snowden’s Box: The human network behind the biggest leak of all: http://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/snowdens-box/

A conversation with Edward Snowden's (unknowing) data smugglers.

Released on Linear Obsessional's free download label, my album The Terminal Beach was first conceived in the early 80's.  It is a personal story as much as an attempt to capture JG Ballard's short story.  

A man maroons himself upon a former nuclear test atoll in the Pacific.  The small landscape is festooned with concrete structures.  Lakes, bunkers and two thousand blocks.  Wrecked bombers and more structures than even Ballard gets time to write about.  A story written in the shadow of the cold war, it perfectly captured who and what I was in my early 20's.  Come with me here, and see the sights?

A conversation with Edward Snowden's (unknowing) data smugglers.

This Is Hell!

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