Episode 1113
Irregular warfare, worldwide.
Jan 14 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
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Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
I don’t know what I’ve been doing all week. Mostly I’ve been trying to draw pleasure from the same old things that have given me pleasure in the past. But it’s not working. Maybe it’s the law of diminishing returns, but I think that only affects people below a certain level of capitalization. It seems like the uber-wealthy follow a different law, the law of infinitely increasing returns.
By the time I’m on This Is Hell radio, with your host Chuck Mertz and your producer Alex Jerri, who knows what part of the world will be in flames?
Then again, maybe everything will be resolved nicely by then, wrapped up with a bow, and I will have stopped agonizing about World War III.
It all makes me worry about Hillary Clinton. How it must eat at her, believing she could have saved the world from its now immanent destruction. Has anyone checked on her? I just think someone should console her, tell her, “It’s all right. Yes, your management of our forever war would’ve been much more discreet, but Australia would still be on fire. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t have done much to fix most of the problems, which we might not have even known existed if we didn’t have Dump to highlight them and to blame them on, when a lot of them were actually results of Obama, Bush, and even Bill Clinton policies. So, rest easy. You were never going to save us from what started long before Dump, only from the pain of his most flagrant vulgarities. You certainly wouldn’t have saved the world, get over yourself.”
What I should do, rather than worry about the world or Hillary, I’ll pick a distraction, that usually works. Eating, that’s something to do. What shall I eat? How about that piece of farm- raised salmon I got for such a reasonable price at the Armenian market? Color added for appeal!
Yes, I know, I know. Everything I do, every move I make, adds to the destruction of the planet. Well, at least I’m not assassinating anyone. At least I’m not provoking a region’s largest military in order to distract from the untimely publication of evidence of my crazy, ego-driven crimes. At least I’m not Donald Dump.
I agree, faithful listener, that is not a very high standard to hold oneself to. No, you’re right. I ought to expect more from myself. At least I don’t damn... read more
Dec 20 2019
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Chuck picks his 18 favorite books from the 100+ he read for the show this year:
A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland
DaMaris Hill / Interview
Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
Kellie Carter Jackson / Interview
Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power
Anna Merlan / Interview
Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo
Mithu Sanyal / Interview
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Sophie Lewis / Interview
White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela
Gerald Horne / Interview
Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism
Marquis Bey / Interview
How To Be An Antiracist
Ibram Kendi / Interview
Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging
Jodi Dean / Interview
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
Corey Robin / Interview
Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now
Jenny Brown / Interview
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West
Wendy Brown / Interview
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Keeanga Yamhatta Taylor / Interview
The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago
Flint Taylor / Interview
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Charles King / Interview