Episode 1190
The feminist war on crime / Aya Gruber
Jun 23 2020
No matter how careful you are when you go to the supermarket, it's virtually impossible to avoid plastic. And there are sound alternatives, but I think that what's really confusing to the public is plastics companies have spent millions of dollars deceiving the public into thinking, ‘don't worry about all the single use plastic we use, just toss it in your recycling bin’. But they know that most plastics never get recycled. The plastic recycling rate is an abysmal 5% to 6% nationwide. And the people who know this the most are the plastic makers. The number one plastic producer in the US today is this little mom and pop company called ExxonMobil. And the problem of deceiving the public about plastics recycling is so serious that in September of 2024, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil for making deceptive statements about plastics recycling and then their latest false solution, chemical recycling. I think that lawsuit has legs and we know that the courts are slow. But when plastics has its day in court, I think Attorney General Rob Bonta will have a very solid, judicial victory that will benefit all of us nationwide.
Judith Enck joins This Is Hell! to talk about the book that she recently co-authored of, "The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late”, published by The New Press.
Judith is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is eliminating plastic pollution everywhere. In 2009, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and served as deputy secretary for the environment in the New York Governor’s Office. She is currently a professor at Bennington College, where she teaches classes on... read more
Séamus Malekafzali
Jan 15
The Assassination That Paved the Way for Trump’s Venezuela Attack / Séamus Malekafzali
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Jun 17 2020
Jun 11 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Throughout the 400 years since it emerged, capitalism has believed it cannot exist without maintaining deadly domination of black bodies. And it’s been molding social discussion to promote this belief. Capitalist power derives from the mistrust of nature and has used black bodies as the anthropomorphic depiction of nature’s wild untrustworthiness. First, we had to make the Africans into our slaves because otherwise they wouldn’t become Christian. Clearly, if left in their own land, worshiping terrifying animistic spirits, or some crazy thing called “Allah,” they would eventually be overwhelmed by disease, poverty, and the pests of the natural world, a world which was itself not to be trusted. It was for their own protection.
Slavery in the United States was eventually outlawed, except when imposed on criminals, so black people were shaped in the propaganda story into basic, natural criminals. To prevent them from enjoying the opportunities of freedom, the dominant society criminalized their presence among white citizens, even to the point of policing the flow of their genes through Jim Crow laws. Eventually the Jim Crow system was defeated by appeals to society’s conscience, rather than its fear. Losing battle after subsequent battle of conscience, white cruelty has finally settled on police as the main lethal army, and prisons as the main segregating tool, safeguarding society against scary nature in the form of the black person.
For centuries before the advent of capitalism, most of civilization was convinced by rulers that it couldn’t survive without dominating women and the poor. In many similar ways to how black people came to be used, women, poor people, and nomadic peoples were seen as the main reflections of untrustworthy nature, until capitalism moved the imposition of its harshest propaganda of social mistrust onto the black body.
What has never changed during this multi-millennial propaganda blitz is that it’s always been best for the elite if we fear each other. It’s great, especially for men, if we buy into the fear of nature by distrusting woman. It’s great, especially for those who have an obscene amount of wealth, if we buy into the fear of nature in the guise of poor people. It’s great for those who profit, or believe they do, from the ownership of private property if... read more