Historian Peter Kuznick looks at the significance of Daniel Ellsberg's fight against America's insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Viet Nam War, and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, don't forget the donate button if you haven't donated yet or you want to donate again if you're watching on YouTube. Don't forget the subscribe button and I'll be back in a second.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and the margin call trades that led to a $20 billion liquidation of his family office, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The investigation is "routine" following such a high-profile market event, and the probe may not lead to allegations of wrongdoing. Archegos Capital was hit with several margin calls last week that it was unable to meet, prompting several banks that had prime brokerage relationships with the family to liquidate its stock positions in names like ViacomCBS,  Baid,  and Tencent Music Entertainment, among others. The trades led to extreme volatility in a handful of stocks on Friday, with ViacomCBS and Discovery notching their biggest daily declines on record.

Banks like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo managed to escape potential losses by quickly liquidating their exposure to Archegos, but others, like Nomura and Credit Suisse, are facing billions in potential losses from the trades, and of course, there's all kinds of ordinary people's money that is tied up in all of this as well. Now, joining us to make sense of more Wall Street nonsense is Bill Black. Bill's an American lawyer, academic, author and former bank regulator with expertize in white collar crime, public finance, regulation and other topics in law and economics. He is the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is To Own One, and he's associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Thanks very much for joining us again, Bill.

Bill Black

Thank you.

Paul Jay

So what is this all about? The billions of dollars of losses. Break this down for people that don't understand some of the terminology. What happened here?

Bill Black

OK, so this one is a demonstration of how completely screwed up modern finance has become, but not necessarily anything criminal in this transaction, which is  good news, bad news, that you can destroy 20 billion dollars in wealth without committing any crime is perhaps a disturbing as opposed to a non-disturbing fact, but remember that the problems were the government, right?

The government made banks make bad loans to poor people with dark skins and that's why we had the great financial crisis supposedly, right? That that series of racial tropes and myths. Here has none of those. This is supposedly in the absolute best circumstances where nothing catastrophic could possibly go wrong. So the theory that you would be taught in modern finance schools is that the key was to have skin in the game, and that's a weird phrase, and it just means you have something personally to lose.

A lot personally to lose, and Bill Hwong was investing his own family money almost exclusively. So he should have been at his absolute most careful. He should have had all the right incentives, and the banks, there were only about seven of them, they were all massive, the allegedly most sophisticated financial players in the world. So they should have never allowed themselves to be exp...

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

In the first of a series of video comments from viewers, Ann Morrison, who lives in rural Wisconsin, talks about why her neighbors vote for Republicans and Trump and against the Democratic Party.

In the first of a series of video comments from viewers, Ann Morrison, who lives in rural Wisconsin, talks about why her neighbors vote for Republicans and Trump and against the Democratic Party.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, and something new on theAnalysis.news. I got a letter  recently from Ann Morrison who lives in rural Wisconsin. The letter was titled “Why should rural Wisconsinites vote for a party that holds them in contempt?” I thought it was so powerful I asked her to do a video explaining why she thought so many of her neighbors voted for Donald Trump, voted for Republicans in state elections, and no longer voted for the Democratic party.

Hi, my name is Ann Morrison, I live in rural Wisconsin, which has a population of about four thousand, and it's in rural western Wisconsin, and I'm going to give my view as to why the Democrats and the left are not appealing to rural voters. I can only speak for Wisconsin so I'll just tell you how I see our area.  When I graduated from high school, 50 percent of my graduating class, which is one hundred and twenty people, lived on working dairy farms.

Ann Morrison

These were small farms, average acreage to one hundred average dairy herd, forty, and at that point in time, which is several decades ago, pre-farm crisis, the average income in this county was the national mean of the whole United States. In one generation, that average income, that median income for Vernon County, where Viroqua is the county seat, is reduced to poverty levels. So, people have gone from the national mean to poverty in one generation.

And how does this affect the Democrats? Well, let's go through what has happened to people in this area. OK, 1980, Reagan is elected. He slashes the milk subsidies and therefore farming has to work like quote a "business" and moves to corporate farming, big giant gross factory farms, this takes quite a while, 15 years to happen, but all the dairy industry goes to giant, unsustainable, polluting, disgusting, cruel to animal farms out in California, out west. 

All the small dairy farms around here, two hundred acres cows were named, wasn't organic, but it was pretty low, intensive agriculture is gone. So, when that goes the towns, it was our primary industry, the towns that support it, start losing money. OK, then we add on top of monopolies, OK, there are no small businesses anymore, anywhere. So, Wal-Mart comes and sits on the town and kills the rest of it. So, everybody's getting poorer and poorer and poorer and one option is to go to trade school or everything's credentialized so what used to be trade school is now Western Technical College.

Oh, I think they took the technical college out of it, but for example, a friend of mine who had been a union welder in Chicago previous to moving to Wisconsin and had worked as a welder in Wisconsin for decent union wages like thirty, thirty-five bucks an hour, gets laid off, goes to WTC, learns how to do graphic design on the Internet. Well, nobody tells him nobody's going to hire old people and the starting wage for that is like $14 an hour.

I mean, this is not apples to apples, and as noted in your previous podcast, the left cannot appeal to rural voters. There is no hope for the left. In the history of Wisconsin, we were pretty much a blue state for the most part. If you lookback at history and the history of the populists around the turn of the 20th century, these were farmers, of course. America was mostly rural at that time, but the farmers, and they worked together with African-American farmers, and Eugene Debs sprang out of that, and, of course, they got squashed,

In the first of a series of video comments from viewers, Ann Morrison, who lives in rural Wisconsin, talks about why her neighbors vote for Republicans and Trump and against the Democratic Party.

The demand by Democrats for Big Tech to censor right-wing conspiracies on social media is a betrayal of the ideals liberals claim to stand for, says Thomas Frank. The real question is why so many people, particularly in rural America, believe such outlandish lies. Thomas joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Please don't forget at the top of the website, there's a donate button. If you're watching on YouTube, there's a subscribe button.

In a recent piece in The Guardian, Thomas Frank writes:

"In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.

What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe."

That's Thomas laughing at his own lines (in the background).

Thomas Frank

I haven't thought about it for a long time.

Paul Jay

I love when I'm interviewing someone who can really write and all I have to do is read their piece as an introduction. It makes my life so much easier. Anyway, here we go.

"Debunking' was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery, and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists, and corporate liars of every description. Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or left-wingers who were gainfully employed. Or these days, left-wingers like us who aren't so gainfully employed."

Now joining us to discuss the liberal demand for more censorship is Thomas Frank. He is a political analyst, historian and journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine. He's written several books, including What's the Matter with Kansas? Listen, Liberal and his most recent is The People, No: A Brief History of Anti Populism. Thanks for joining me, Thomas.

Thomas Fran

Paul Jay. It is great to be here. Here among the canceled.

Paul Jay

So, you accuse this demand for, particularly the big social media companies, the demand that's come from corporate Democrats and from a lot of the newspapers and much of the liberal political elite to essentially censor Trump's stuff on the social media?

Thomas Frank

Yeah.

Paul Jay

And you're saying this is essentially a betrayal of the liberal ideals liberals claim to stand for. So why is this a betrayal?

Thomas Frank

Well,

The demand by Democrats for Big Tech to censor right-wing conspiracies on social media is a betrayal of the ideals liberals claim to stand for, says Thomas Frank. The real question is why so many people, particularly in rural America, believe such outlandish lies. Thomas joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

The demand by Democrats for Big Tech to censor right-wing conspiracies on social media is a betrayal of the ideals liberals claim to stand for, says Thomas Frank. The real question is why so many people, particularly in rural America, believe such outlandish lies. Thomas joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news