Landon Shroder on Terrorism & White Nationalism

17 July 2017 – Will is back and he brought political risk and security expert Landon Shroder (@LandonShroder) with him. The interview, both in the broadcast and in the podcast versions of the show, is longer than usual and with good reason. We go wide getting into Mosul, the Kurds, Saudi, Yemen and the UAE during the broadcast show and then, in Extra Mad, coming stateside to talk about the rise of terrorism within the white nationalist movement.

Will continues his series on small “d” democratic principles and progressives. For this show Will is thinking about citizenship and it’s relationship with social responsibility. I push back just a bit asking Will about the difference between what is a right and what is earned. Also, Will and I talk about distinguishing between ideals and the reality of history and privilege.

I geek a bit on this show about the continuing rise of the discussion about how modern money really works (aka modern monetary theory or MMT) and the implications of having the power of fiat money recognized and utilized by society. It turns out that the debt-ceiling battle of 2013 really was an inflection point for MMT and voices have been added at a steadily growing clip. The Nation has a great article on 8 May 2017, The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory, and that is just one of the many, many places MMT is being discussed.

I love having Will back and, friend of the show, Landon on with us again. We have another strong interview lined-up for next week too. We are definitely getting our hop back on! Carrots – Arliss

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William Spriggs, Scots & Saudis

2 May 2016 – Even more than in the past there is this nexus between the progressive movement and the labor movement in the US. This week we were joined for the interview by the Chief Economist of the AFL-CIO, the deeply knowledgable Dr. William Spriggs. Dr. Spriggs kindly gave us an unusually long and detailed interview and we highly recommend visiting some of the pages, to which I refer during our talk. They are on the excellent website of the AFL-CIO here, here, here and here.

At the top of the show Will fills us in on what is going on with the protestors who have just taken the Iraqi Parliament. Later in the show he gives us the promised update on the Scottish elections which will take place on 5 May.

I start out on the newly released anti-austerity budget which has just been announced by the Trudeau government in Canada. I come back a bit later to give a lot of detail about the very aggressive Vision 2030 economic plan aimed at weaning Saudi Arabia off of its dependence on oil. Headed by favorite son Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS as he is called in Saudi), the plan is interesting and hopeful but will have to overcome significant resistance from Wahhabi fundamentalists in order to succeed. We’ll see….

I also learned that Netroots Radio has moved all of the old shows to which we had links from this site. Of course, all those links are now dead. I’ll have to figure out where they went and fix that. On a more cheerful note, the archive section for Hopping Mad has been updated and an index has been added making it easier to find specific subject – Carrots! Arliss

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The “U” in “UK,” Fiscal Spending and Iraq Expert, Landon Shroder

26 October 2015 – This week we were fortunate enough to have Landon Shroder (@LandonShroder on Twitter) join us for the interview. Landon spent seven years living in Iraq representing Royal Dutch Shell, the last five of which as Shell’s head of intelligence and assessment. Now he is writing for Vice News and continuing to cover the region as a journalist. Landon gave us an incisive interview for the broadcast show but the podcast version, below, contains the additional Extra Mad portion of the interview and it is exceptional. Truly.

In his block Will covered the new version of crazy in the UK which is so poorly conceived that it may actually lead to the devolution of the UK itself. It’s called English Votes for English Laws or EVEL (pronounced “evil”). You can make of that acronym what you will. I’m going back to do the first of what will be several segments on basic concepts. This week I’m talking about how fiscal policy comes in to being.

Also, in response to multiple requests from loyal fans, we finally found the problem in the RSS feed we had submitted to Stitcher and to iTunes. We have resubmitted the new information and really should be up on those services soon. To tide you over we have also added in an mp3 download button below each podcast player below so that you can grab the full Extra Mad Hopping Mad from there in the meantime. The encouraging thing is that for the first time we had no major technical crisis during the actual recording process. This is a big step and an even bigger relief for us both. I’m celebrating with carrot cake. Carrots to you and yours! – Arliss

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