Background Briefing: October 20, 2019
Billions Made on Trades Apparently Based on Trump Insider Knowledge
We begin with the bombshell article in Vanity Fair by their Wall Street special correspondent William Cohan, the author of The New York Times bestsellers “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World” and “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street”. Cohan writes a biweekly opinion column in The New York Times and he joins us to discuss his latest article at Vanity Fair, “There is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On: The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades”. With unknown players literally making more than one point five billion dollars on one perfectly timed trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday August 23, three days before Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart trade talks, and on June 28 someone bought 40% of the day’s trading on the CME just ahead of Trump announcing trade talks with China were “back on track”, whoever that was reaped a one-day paycheck of $1.8 billion. With the government watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission powerless to stop election interference from Russia thanks to Trump and the Republicans, we will assess what is going on at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Future Trading Commission and who, if anybody, is looking into these exquisitely timed trades which appear to benefit from insider knowledge inside the White House.
HRC’s Accusations Against Gabbard Boosts Her Campaign
Then with a record crowd showing up at Bernie Sanders’ rally in Queens on Saturday where Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez endorsed his candidacy for president, we will speak with The Nation magazine’s Washington Correspondent John Nichols about his article at The Nation “Bernie Sanders is Back” and how Bernie’s recent heart attack has done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of young voters flocking to support the oldest candidate in the race who has the biggest war chest among Democratic presidential hopefuls and is leading Trump in some polls. We also examine the accusations made without evidence by Hillary Clinton suggesting that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, a charge that has boosted Gabbard’s flagging presidential campaign.
How Long Can Big Tech Pretend to Be Platforms Not Publishers?
Then finally as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tries to avoid responsibility for the Trump campaign’s fake news and conspiracy theories published on his platform where two thirds of Americans get their political information, we speak with Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at The New Yorker about his latest book just out “Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation”. He joins us to discuss the absurdity of Zuckerberg’s excuse which Sacha Cohen of “Borat” fame likened to a restaurant owner not being able to throw out neo-Nazi patrons calling for the murder of Jewish customers.