Listen to Sam Seder talk about the newest scandal involving Wells Fargo and argue that Wells Fargo deserves the Corporate Death Penalty. Episode 397

Sam Seder is a New York based political talk show host. Seder’s daily podcast, The Majority Report, has been voted Podcastawards.com best News/Politics podcast for four years running. It airs live at www.majority.fm. Seder is an MSNBC contributor and has appeared regularly on nearly every major cable news outlet.

Seder is a former Air America Radio host,  including co-hosting The Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo, and the web only, video show, Break Room Live with Marc Maron. Seder also served as the Editor in Chief of AirAmerica.com.

Seder co-authored Fubar: America’s Right-Wing Nightmare with Stephen Sherrill; Seder’s writing credits also include comedy pilots for HBO, NBC, Fox and CBS. He co-wrote, directed, and acted in the feature length comedy Who’s the Caboose?, starring Sarah Silverman, H. Jon Benjamin and David Cross, acquired by the Trio cable Network.

Seder performed the same duties and reunited the cast in the Trio, six-part miniseries sequel to Caboose, entitled Pilot Season. Seder’s directing credits also include Comedy Central’s I’m with Busey and Studios USA’s Beat Cops. Currently, Seder does voice work on the Fox Network cartoon “Bob’s Burgers”, and his acting credits include 10 network pilots, guest spots on various television shows including Sex in the City, as well as several feature-length films.

This is a BBC article explaining some of the background of the situation in Venezuela.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40704184

Want to listen to a different take on the crisis in Venezuela?

PODCAST: Revolutionary Left Radio

“Venezuela In Crisis: Defending the Bolivarian Revolution.”

George Ciccariello-Maher is a writer, radical political theorist, and currently Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He has taught radical theory and politics at Drexel, U.C. Berkeley, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. He holds a B.A. in Government and Economics from St. Lawrence University, a B.A. Hons. and M.A. in Social and Political Sciences from St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley.

His first book, a history of revolutionary movements in Venezuela entitled We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, was published by Duke University Press in 2013. He recently published a short follow-up on the political dynamics of the post-Chávez era entitled Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (Jacobin-Verso, 2016). His third book, Decolonizing Dialectics, will be published in early 2017, also by Duke University Press.

  Roger Stone published a book about the Bush Family’s corruption, dirty dealings, sweetheart financial deals and bad behavior.  And, now, he’s with Trump?

“Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty.”  “The Making of the President  2016.”

Roger Stone, Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump – these are people who have no principles.  They want more than anything else to be famous, or infamous, they don’t care.  They want to be the darlings of the media, bad little boys and they think they are so very cute.  They aren’t serious people. They are acting parts, playing games and endangering people’s lives.   They have to be stopped.

“Don’t confuse Roger Stone with the character I play,” Mr. Stone said with a chuckle in an interview with the New York Times in 2017.

This is not a game.

I haven’t been able to make myself watch the HBO film on Roger Stone, but I did listen to part of a program on Fresh Air about Stone, which was depressing enough.  Stone, evidently, has been planning Trump’s run for the presidency since at least 1997.

Fresh Air.  “Following the Man who Created President Trump.”  July 13, 2017.  HBO.  “Get Me Roger Stone.”

Things I’m thinking about today:

• how John McCain can keep a straight face while posing as a hero when he came back to Congress to move forward the Republican take away of health care for the rest of the country;
• why the Democrats are allowing Manafort, Trump, Jr. and Kushner to testify in private.

https://www.thenation.com/article/sean-spicer-has-embarrassed-himself-badly/

John Nichols from the Nation Magazine

The Young Turks Podcast – July 21, 2017.  Listen to the Young Turk folks talk about Yemen, Sean Spicer and Films.  Well worth a listen.

•  Trump is signaling that if Mueller goes into his (Trump’s) finances, Mueller will be exceeding his mandate as Special Counsel (which Trump spells as Council).  This means that the Trump Administration is going to claim that Mueller should be fired for going outside his mandate.  The right-wing media has evidently been backing him up on this line of argument.

Podcasts

The Intercept has a great podcast on (scum of the earth) Eric Prince.  There is also an interview with Tavis Smiley on the real Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We must make our choice.  We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”  Louis Brandeis

Betsy DeVos (estimated family net worth: 5.6 billion)
Steve Mnuchin (500 million)
RexTillerson (325 million)
“Trump has also scoured the executive ranks of the banking giant Goldman Sachs for many of his senior advisers, includingGary Cohn as his top economic adviser and Dina Powell as a special adviser on economic initiatives.”