March 20 – “Russia’s Powerful Media Bubble”; Vermonters Push for a Public Bank; The Latest Outrageous Corporate Golden Parachute

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the additional sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s bank and his cronies and speak with Kevin Platt, a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania who has an article at The Huffington Post, “Russia’s Powerful Media Bubble”. We discuss how Putin has created an alternative universe that Russians inhabit and assess what impact Kremlin propaganda is having on Russians in Eastern Ukraine and Russian minorities in the Baltic states of the former Soviet Union, what Russia calls the “near abroad’.

Part 2

Then we examine the growing movement for public and community banks like the Bank of North Dakota that was foundered a century ago in the last Gilded Age as an alternative to plutocratic control of banking. Gwendolyn Hallsmith, the executive director of the Public Banking Institute and the co-founder of Vermonters for a New Economy joins us to discuss a bill in the Vermont Senate that would establish a public State Bank in Vermont out of an existing State institution that has enormous grassroots support but is being subjected to intense lobbying from the powerful banking industry who have dominated the hearings.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the giant $45 billion Time Warner/Comcast merger that the CEO of Time Warner Cable Robert “Rob” Marcus describes as ‘a dream combination”, which it certainly is for him, since he will receive an $80 million golden parachute for losing a job he has only held for three months. John Simpson, a veteran journalist and consumer rights advocate with Consumer Watchdog joins us to discuss how executives who negotiate mergers are able to reward themselves so lavishly and whether this “dream combination” that will create a monstrous cable TV and Internet monopoly will have the lobbying muscle to buy off anti trust regulators and the informational power to blunt public resistance to a corporate monopoly that is free to charge what they like for delivering increasingly lousy service.