This Is Hell!

Journalist Alyssa Katz unravels the powerful influence of the US Chamber of Commerce, where dark money and secret lobbying touch all aspects of the American political process, and allow a small group of businesses to prolong their grasp on power and protect themselves from a changing, diversifying economic landscape.

Alyssa is author of the Spiegel & Grau book The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life.

Journalist Matthieu Aikins explores the intersection of crime and politics in Karachi - where gangs fight for territory and revenue, backed by political parties and targeted by a military crackdown - and explains the stresses of violence and corruption on democracy and daily life in a rapidly growing metropolis.

The Radical Pessimist, Kevan Harris explains why Chinese state-owned enterprise involvement in Southern Africa's extraction and infrastructure industries doesn't fit traditional leftist narratives (good or bad), what South-South transactions mean for African economies and global politics, and why our current blob theory of neoliberalism blinds us from seeing economic change.

Journalist Gary Rivlin explains how Hurricane Katrina exposed massive racial fault lines across New Orleans, and why the rebuilding process reinforced structural inequality - from loss of Black political power and public assets to a government response that ignored Black lives in favor of free market urban development.

Gary is author of the new book Katrina: After the Flood from Simon & Schuster.

Gary Rivlin is journalist, author and an investigative reporting fellow at The Nation Institute.

Interviews with guests found on the bookshelves of Osama Bin Laden. Featuring: Michel Chossudovsky, Michael Ruppert, Greg Palast, Bev Harris, John Perkins and Michael Scheuer.

"Best of" clips exploring the past and future of global protest movements.

Cultural critic Henry Giroux explains how the harsh, arbitrary nature of life in America is actually a feature of our political and social setting, what distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism and capitalism, and why Donald Trump’s unlikely political success represents a fundamental poison in our society.

Henry is author of the new City Lights Press book Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle.

Jeff Dorchen returns from a tech conference with a look at bleeding edge products, new ideas about wealth, debt, capitalism and bullshit, plus a pocket full of vapor.

Writer Richard Beck explains how the mass moral panic around day care child abuse reflected America’s anxieties about the changing roles of work, motherhood and family in the 1980s, and the impact of the McMartin trial and similar cases on American society, from psychiatry and law enforcement to the second wave of feminism.

Richard is author of the new book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s from PublicAffairs.

Investigative journalist Steve Horn digs through a web of paperwork and political deals to explain how the city of Milwaukee engineered a new NBA stadium deal with $400 million in taxpayer money through deceptive numbers, insider relationships and almost no public input.

Steve posted the Truthdig report Gov. Walker and the Democrats’ Dance: Shady Politics Behind the Milwaukee Bucks Arena.

Journalist Sarah Jaffe examines recent moments in Democratic cynicism, from a Bernie Sanders non-moment at Netroots Nation to Andrew Cuomo’s two-faced Fight for $15 victory lap, and explains why we can’t let politicians take credit for the work of activists, organizers, and regular pissed off people pushing for a voice and a vote in American politics.

Sarah wrote the article Politicians Are Not Our Friends for Dame Magazine.

Foreign affairs analyst Patrick L. Smith examines President Obama’s recent military alliance with Turkey and finds another victory for American exceptionalism in the Middle East, short term military priorities defeating regional stability, and a colossal betryal of America’s strongest allies in the fight against ISISs – Kurdish fighters now under attack by Turkey.

Patrick wrote the article Our monumental Turkey blunder: Who put the American exceptionalists back in charge? for Salon.

East Asia analyst Brian Hioe reports on two mass protest movements in Asia - one environmental in Shanghai, one constitutional in Tokyo - and explores the challenges to social movements in a region of one-party governments, a political legacy of Cold War authoritarianism and the consuming force of trans-national capitalism.

Brian wrote the recent articles How Could A Demonstration of 50,000 in Shanghai Not Be Reported in International Media? and Article 9 and Japan’s Democratic Crisis for New Bloom.

Jeff Dorchen was just minding his own business, posting anti-infant propaganda on his Facebook wall, when everyone got all mad. So he balls his lil fists, quivers his tiny lips, and unleashes against all the babies on Earth.