Best of 2023: Big Pharma Rigs the Game / Julia Rock

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Chuck celebrates a new year of Hell by looking back at his favorite interviews of 2015

Hello This is Hell! weirdos,

Zurich correspondent Ed here with an important message about autonomous solidarity efforts along the Balkanroute in Europe.

As many of you may have seen in my Truthout piece about conditions for refugees in the Balkans (haha shameless plug), in the absence of any positive action among European governments or international NGOs, self-organized citizen initiatives have sprung up across the continent and have been scrambling to pick up the slack and prevent a humanitarian disaster the likes of which hasn't been seen on European soil since World War Two.

Though conditions along the route vary from country to country and from day to day, one thing has been constant so far: Serbia sucks. They haven't made the big headlines for their suckiness the way Hungary or Macedonia have, because they haven't put up big barbed-wire border fences (the Greek-Macedonian border was recently described to me by a well-traveled border security expert as the tightest and most aggressively patrolled he had ever seen).

But the Serbian authorities have played a much subtler game, the logic of which isn't entirely clear unless they are simply trying to wish away the refugees bottlenecked in their country by ignoring them out of existence meanwhile hiding them from public view. Because border controls on relief supplies coming into the country from the northwest have been so maddeningly strict, the improvised, extra-institutional solidarity organizations most active in the Balkans so far have all almost entirely given up. There are, after all, plenty of refugees in dire need elsewhere.

The organization I am working with in Switzerland, Stand Up For Refugees (SUFR), has worked some magic through fervent organizing and using the presence of citizens of the former Yugoslavia here to our advantage. We have scraped together the credentials necessary to transport relief supplies into Serbia and distribute them, and have the infrastructure necessary to house activists in the border town of Sid (pronounced "Shid," sorry FCC) and to warehouse regularly arriving shipments of donated winter clothing and camping equipment there as well.

Aid and solidarity will be delivered daily from there to the completely unattended, cold and desperate camp in Adasevci (pronounced a-DAH-shev-tsy) where thousands of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and sub-Saharan Africans are waiting for buses or trains over the border into... read more

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9:10 - Ecologist Andreas Malm explores the links between fossil fuels and capitalism's 19th century explosion.

Andreas is author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming from Verso Books.

10:05 - Writer Ayesha Siddiqi explains why the West wants a Malala without the war.

Ayesha wrote the VICE essay Does America Deserve Malala?

10:35 - Attorney Vanessa Lucas reports on US complicity and profit from violence in the Philippines.

Vanessa co-wrote the Foreign Policy in Focus article The Philippine People Are Under Attack from Washington - and Their Own Government

11:05 - Journalist Michael Griffin rewrites a long history of Islamic State's short rise to power.

Michael is author of Islamic State: Rewriting History from Pluto Press.

12:05 - The Hopleaf's Michael Roper explain why industry mergers could mean less shelf space for craft beer.

Michael's 2015 Beer in Review will focus takeovers, fake breweries, craft bubbles and private equity.

12:45 - In 2015's last Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen torments the soul of a dead atheist.

Jeff's been mining the spirit world to end the year. Spooooky!

Here is what Chuck is reading to prepare for Saturday's show:

Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming - Andreas Malm [Verso Books]

Does America Deserve Malala? - Ayesha Siddiqi [Vice]

The Philippine People Are Under Attack from Washington - and Their Own Government - Vanessa Lucas / Azadeh Shahshahani [Foreign Policy in Focus]

Islamic State: Rewriting History - Michael Griffin [Pluto Press]

On this day in the year 1098 – (917 years ago) – an army of several thousand European crusaders, who for weeks had laid siege to the town of Ma’arrat al-Numan in what is now Syria, managed to breach the town’s walls. Once inside, the crusaders negotiated a peace agreement with the town’s Muslim leaders. But as soon as the Muslims surrendered, the crusaders launched a massacre, killing some twenty thousand people. Taking control of the town, they found that it was not as rich or well supplied as they had assumed it would be, and the army’s two European leaders fell into a power struggle over control of what was there. Most of the other crusaders mounted their horses and left, proceeding onward to Jerusalem. But a smaller group stayed behind and was soon forced to deal with cold weather and lack of food. Driven mad by starvation after winter set in, the Europeans finally resorted to cannibalism—cutting up, boiling, grilling, and eating body parts of the Muslims they had killed.

On this day in 1899 – (116 years ago) – in Honolulu, Hawaii, a twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper named You Chong became the first person to die in what would quickly become a disastrous epidemic of bubonic plague. The disease was thought to have been brought to Hawaii from Hong Kong aboard the Japanese merchant vessel SS Nippon Maru, which had docked in Honolulu a few weeks earlier, carrying two human corpses and numerous rats infected with plague. As the usually fatal disease spread at first among Honolulu’s residents of Asian extraction, local authorities responded by cordoning off the city’s Chinatown and deliberately setting fire to allegedly plague-infected homes. One such fire went raging out of control, creating a conflagration that burned for seventeen days and destroyed some four thousand flimsy wooden houses. More than five thousand Chinatown residents were left destitute, and were marched off to hastily improvised sanitariums where they were kept under involuntary quarantine for months. Meanwhile, the plague continued spreading across the island of Oahu, eventually claiming more than sixty lives before burning itself out.     

On this day in 1933 – (82 years ago) – during an NHL hockey game between the Boston Bruins and the Toronto Maple Leafs, the legendary Boston defenseman Eddie Shore, hit by Toronto’s Red Homer, responded... read more

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.

Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images

Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantanamo Bay

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars

Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal About Al-Qa'ida

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman

Class War: The Privatization of Childhood

In Harm's Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence

Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com

9:10 - Writer Roy Scranton looks ahead to a future of mass global death, and what is left behind.

Roy is author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization from City Lights.

10:05 - Dan Litchfield apologizes for his tiny part in the whole Volkswagon / diesel thing.

His part was pretty tiny, don't be too mad at him.

10:35 - CEPR's Mark Weisbrot explains what's behind rightward gains in the Venezuelan and Argentine elections.

Mark wrote the Hill post What next for Venezuela? and the new book Failed What the "Experts" Got Wrong about the Global Economy.

11:05 - Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran explores the rise of predatory finance and the unbanked class.

Mehrsa is author of How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy from Harvard University Press.

12:05 - Journalist Doug Henwood explains how American politics are 'Ready for Hillary' - and why that's the problem.

Doug is author of My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency from OR Books.

12:45 - In a live, undead Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen is awakened by the ghosts of the living.

Here is what Chuck is reading to prepare for Saturday's show:

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization - Roy Scranton [City Lights]

Volkswagen diesel civil suits to be heard in California - Reuters

What next for Venezuela? - Mark Weisbrot [The Hill]

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy - Mehrsa Baradaran [Harvard University Press]

My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency - Doug Henwood [OR Books]