December 4 - A Compilation of Recent Interviews: Steven Mnuchin's Amazing Raid on the Treasury; A Fox News Political Hack for the National Security Council; Fox News as the Brains of the White House

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an interview from November 30th examining the business reputation of Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, whose wealth appears to be derived from massive corporate welfare as a result of a vulture capitalist feast on the carcass of the 2008 Wall Street crash. After which Mnuchin bought a bailed-out bank for pennies on the dollar then aggressively foreclosing on tens of thousands of families using robo-signing of dubious liars-loan documents. Saied Kashani, a lawyer whose clients included the largest private homebuilders in California and litigated extensively against Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank, joins us. Saied acquired numerous private agreements between the government and the owners of OneWest through court orders and the Freedom of Information Act and we discuss Mnuchin’s amazing raid on the U.S. Treasury that he will now be in charge of. 

Part 2

Then we assess the 50 year-long U.S. embargo and countless assassination attempts on Castro’s life which just ended with him having outlived ten U.S. presidents. Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under presidents Johnson and Nixon and is the author of a comparative history of the inner politics of the U.S. and the USSR, “Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and Their Failed Ideals”, joins us. We will also discuss the makeup of Trump’s new national security team with the addition of a Fox News political hack, K.T. McFarland as the Deputy National Security advisor.  

Part 3

Then finally we discuss the extraordinary number of Fox News analysts who will be staffing the Trump White House, in part because Trump watches Fox News and gets much of his information from it. Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and author of “Fox News and American Politics: How One Channel Shapes American Politics and Society” joins us to discuss how Fox News, the “Pravda” of the Republican Party, will now become the voice if not the brains of the White House. We also discuss the irony, now that Trump is considering General Petraeus to be the next Secretary of State, of the appointment of Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland as the Deputy National Security Advisor, given her past effort on behalf of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch to recruit General Petraeus to run for president against his Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama in 2012. Apparently Petraeus’s conviction for sharing classified information with his mistress does not rise to the level of “crooked Hillary’s” alleged crime of having a private email server for which she was exonerated by the FBI.