Month: April 2022

One of the Few People to Stand Up to Putin Who Are Still Alive

We begin with one of the few people who have stood up to Vladimir Putin and are still alive and speak with Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management who was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005 when he fell afoul of Putin. Since 2009, when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was murdered in prison after uncovering a $230 million fraud committed by Russian government officials, Bill has been leading a campaign to expose Russia’s endemic corruption and human rights abuses. We discuss his new book, just out, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath and how Trump wanted to hand Bill over to Putin to never be seen again only to be stopped by a 98 to 0 vote in the U.S. Senate and why has it taken Western leaders so long to acknowledge that Putin is a thief and a mass murderer.

The Shadow Network Behind the Judge Who Ended the CDC’s Mask Mandate

Then we look into the nakedly political move by a Trump-appointed judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a protege of Clarence Thomas who overturned the CDC’s mask mandate based on specious and amateurish legal reasoning, preempting Biden from taking credit since he was about to end the mask mandate. Joining us is Anne Nelson, who teaches journalism and public affairs at Columbia University whose latest book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, now out in an updated paperback version. She has an article at The New Republic, “10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy.”

DOL About to Ban Repeat Felon Credit Suisse From Pension Fund Management

Then finally we share some good news in as much as the repeat felon Credit Suisse is poised to be banned from the lucrative business of steering pension fund assets into often dubious investments while charging huge fees. Joining us is James Henry, an economist, lawyer and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global banking, debt crises, tax havens and economic development. The former chief economist at McKinsey & Co., he is the co-founder with David Cay Johnston of the new investigative reporting news service DCReport.org and is the author of Blood Bankers. His years of work exposing the crimes of Credit Suisse has contributed to the Labor Department yesterday announcing plans to take away the bank’s privileged status as a Qualified Professional Asset Manager.