Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
New interviews throughout the week
Indentured indian workers

We are trying to draw a connection here about the colonial logics of racial hierarchy, where you have Palestinians building their own prisons, but you also have a racial hierarchy between Palestinians and Israelis, which have been referred by Amnesty International and others as an apartheid state. Then you also have the Indian government, which is a post-colonial, independent, “democratic” government that is using this kind of logic. This colonial racial division of labor to reproduce its own version of colonial racial division of labor in which you have this segregation of the terms of work and a racialization of the ways that certain kinds of workers are allowed access to remunerative work in the global labor marketplace.

We wrap up the week with geographer Michelle Buckley and media scholar Paula Chakravartty co-wrote the Boston Review article, "Labor and the Bibi-Modi 'Bromance': The Israel-India worker deal resembles British indenture." "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.

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Episode 1111

Soleimani in Iran.

Jan 9 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri

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

Episode 1110

Towards a new England.

Jan 8 2020
Jan 7 2020
Episode 1108

Capitalism on Edge.

Jan 6 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Books2019

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

Dec 18 2019
Dec 17 2019
Dec 16 2019