Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments:
Crypto and Fraud: After the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX last November, federal prosecutors charged the company's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, with fraud and what prosecutors describe as the largest financial fraud in recent history. Pleading not guilty, Bankman-Fried made an appeal to the jury during the fourth week of his trial in Manhattan. Psychologists Jan Haaken and Emaline Friedman look at the dramatic rise and fall of Bankman-Fried, the social/cultural influences that nurtured his reputation as the "J.P. Morgan of crypto," and how to think of the case as a symptom of this phase of finance capitalism. Emaline Friedman, Ph.D. is a social theorist and psychodynamic therapist in Portland. Focusing on the intersection between subjectivity and digital technologies, her book Internet Addiction: A Critical Psychology of Users argues that we are all implicated in Internet excesses as a function of social power under capitalism.
The Man who Marches to War: Book Mole Patricia Kullberg reviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March, by Geraldine Brooks. In a searing Civil War story of a man of conviction who marches off to war, Brooks explores in horrific and haunting detail the consequences of acting, or failing to act on one’s convictions.
Middle East in Crisis: In the last month after Hamas’s savage murderous and senseless attack, Israel has revealed itself as just as murderous and far more lethal in its drive to ethnically cleanse the entire territory that before 1948 was peacefully inhabited by majority Palestinian minority Jewish populations. But in its ruthless killing, Israel has lost support, while Palestinians have gained sympathy from citizens around the world. Can this reversal produce movements sufficient to force Israel to accept a binational state? Bill Resnick talks to David Finkel, the editor of the journal “Against the Current” and middle east scholar.
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