1/8/26: Trump To Run Venezuelan Oil Forever, Trump Iran Bombing Likely, Blackstone Stock Craters

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1:211969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. At a Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.

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2:24Turning now to Venezuela, some major comments from the Secretary of Energy about indefinitely running Venezuela's oil companies. He was confronted on it on Capitol Hill. Here's what he had to say. Narrative in Venezuela that you are stealing our oil. I have not heard that narrative. I've seen celebrations in the street, Libre Venezuela out. I think people are thrilled they've lived under, between Chavez and Maduro, 26 years in a brutal dictatorship that's only devastated that country and hurt the whole hemisphere. So I've not heard that narrative at all. And of course, if it's that narrative is out there, it's untrue.

2:59We're just controlling the flow of revenues from their oil. We're just controlling the flow of revenue from their oil. We're not taking over. The celebration thing too. Yeah. See, this is why we focused on it. Yeah, that's right. Because, you know, people, I got an email. Why did you guys care so much about the celebrations? I'm how this stuff works is that it goes into people. Oh, didn't you see the video of people in Buenos Aires or whatever? We're in Miami and Doral. It's like, yeah, uh, on the streets of Venezuela, very, very different. It's like armed dudes who are going, trying to round up anybody who actually did celebrate.

3:37And then a lot of people who are actively angry that this all happened. So a little bit different. Yeah. People's phones are getting checked by like, you know, armed militias to see if they sent any text message that was supportive of Maduro being kidnapped. So yeah. So, um, you know, not, not great to be in the opposition there right now. Totally. Let's put the next one up here. Cause this is the actual story is about the quote control indefinitely from the secretary of energy. He says that after the United States will sell Venezuelan oil after completing sales of the crude currently accumulated that are currently in storage, it will then be deposited into accounts controlled by the US government, which will then flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people.

4:20Instead of the oil being blockaded, we're going to let the oil flow to US refineries and around the world to bring better oil supplies, but those have to be done by the US government. We're going to market the crude, first this backed up stored oil, and then definitely going forward, sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace. I mean, arguably, that is the most important and direct, effectively nationalization of the entire venezuelan oil industry trump is saying for now that the venezuelans have basically agreed to this they haven't confirmed any of it per se and it may work you know in the interim with the stored up amount of oil and the limited amount of capacity the big question is going to be i mean and i think this is one where look it is possible but are the venezuelan people just really going to take this like it just seems very unlikely if you look at the entire history of colonization and of everything, that unless that they're not only in control, but they're getting a pretty significant amount of revenue, that this is not going to be a longstanding arrangement.

5:22And reportedly, you know, yesterday, Trump sat for some four hour interview with The New York Times. He said we could stay there for years down in Venezuela, setting up, by the way, no democratic transition, more likely kind of solidification of the current Maduro regime under Delce Rodriguez and the security apparatus. So that means more repression. But yeah, it just seems so completely untenable. You're only in power for three more years. He even acknowledged it's going to take years to build out the oil infrastructure of the country, to even marginally increase it from its very low production of where it is right now.

5:58And then you just have the general instability of trying to run this country by proxy from Washington. And yes, the immediate sanctions relief, it will be a boon to the Venezuelan economy immediately because sanctions have what – I mean ultimately what crushed their oil industry and crushed them. So maybe they will be OK with it. But more broadly, I mean you are literally looking at a lifting the sanction and a nationalization of their entire oil industry and selling it going forward. Just historically, again, most countries just don't sit there and take it. I mean would you take it? Would I take it?

6:35I probably wouldn't. And most people wouldn't either. There's a reason why this kind of direct colonization went out of fashion. And it's not because the great powers decided out of the goodness of their hearts that this wasn't something that they wanted to do anymore. They couldn't afford it. There was too much local resistance. And so they moved to a more modern technology of colonization where it's like, OK, well, we'll use these other financial levers, especially the United States of America, which set up all of this post-war financial infrastructure and the international institutions to benefit us.

7:04So it's like, oh, we can get all the benefits of the extraction without having to own all of the like local tumult and deal with these uprisings, etc. So in effect, we're going back to this like very retrograde technology, which is completely outdated. And I think Trump really believes that because he did this one successful like strike and kidnapping operation, that now he's just going to be able to very easily control all of Venezuela. And that just seems insane. I mean, that seems like a complete and utter fantasy. The world does not work in this very simple way. You think just because you did this one action, that's going to be enough to compel the behavior of this state indefinitely?

7:50Not to mention, you know, then there's the other piece of this, too, which is any oil company that, you know, is wanting is being offered the chance to go into Venezuela. They're asking the government for guarantees and for financing, taxpayer financing for the build out that would be required because the infrastructure is so degraded, because it would take so, you know, such a significant amount of investment, billions and billions of dollars over years to bring significant Venezuela pumping capacity back online. so there's just a lot of pitfalls here a lot of pitfalls and a lot of questions i mean the other question is there were reports that they wanted to whatever revenue is brought in they don't want to put it in the u.s treasury they want to hold it in private bank accounts um that trump can deny that that trump can i mean who knows well they sort of they they actually didn't directly deny it um but that you know so who has control over that again like there seems to be this fantasy that we, the American people, are going to own this.

8:51We are going to benefit directly. And, you know, it's possible there's some reduction of prices at the pump or something. But this is largely for the benefit of elites. This is like, you know, a seizure for the benefit of like ExxonMobil and Paul Singer and Citgo and whoever else stands, you know, at the top of the chain to really benefit from this. And for some of those companies as well, they're not even sure that they want to get involved in that they're going to directly benefit too. The key point is, and I saw this today, is that oil companies who are expected to meet at the White House tomorrow are like, we need a multi-year guarantee, multi-year guarantee, and that foreign policy won't change, which you can't expect that from the current administration because that literally doesn't, in fact, you can't really expect that from any administration unless Congress literally were to declare that we are going to finance this operation indefinitely.

9:45You know, I was thinking about this in kind of the interesting way. One of the reasons that one of the things that usually happens when you explicitly decide you need to be an empire like we did after World War II. Well, what do you need to run an empire? You need a permanent bureaucracy by definition. It's called the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department. You need a vast array of people who don't change. This is what happened in the British Empire. The government may change, liberal or conservative, but the empire itself was always explicitly managed. It's just that the governance departments at the very, very top would occasionally change hands.

10:21But the build-out of that bureaucracy and of that deep state of what we've long, I think, left and now right, are kind of united against, is the very idea of a permanent bureaucracy which works against the interest of its people, which wants to enrich itself, which wants to run faraway lands into metal. Ultimately, that is kind of entrenching the very thing that Trump originally was running against, the idea of the swamp and of the deep state. And that's why one of the reasons that arch nationalists in the past were deeply skeptical of colonization. They used to say, we can have a republic or we can have an empire, but you can't have both because what they were watching was the very way that the aristocracy in britain would use the empire to solidify its control over the domestic population and to run it and to enrich it for itself and i think that that is ultimately one of the reasons why the way that we would traditionally run empire like you're saying you know it look you know to deny we're an empire is ridiculous obviously with foreign outposts and and uh preferential trade deals or you know international norms which are totally fake and only enforced to the benefit of the U.S., it's not just about that per se.

11:34It was an acknowledgment, as you just said, of being able to try and to do this in a different way while, though, retaining kind of the unelected bureaucratic class. And I think looking at this, it's going to solidify more of this idea where the Secretary of Energy is now trying to of our energy is trying to manage the Venezuelan oil supply. And in general, all this leads to is more enmeshment and more problems. So, for example, when the Venezuelan or when the oil companies, the U.S. oil companies say, we need a guarantee of the safety of our people. Well, who's going to do that? It's not going to be the Venezuelan military.

12:10It would have to be the U.S. military. Or let's say initially it is the Venezuelan military. But then something happens. Not exactly the most competent folks, right? They just allow their president to be kidnapped, literally, and the most secure person in the country. So if they can't even defend them, and if you're an oil company, would you really want to trust those people? Well, that would lead perhaps to a U.S. person having to come. And that's exactly how the chain reaction goes. You know, I was thinking about Juan David Rojas, and he talked about Vietnam. And something everybody forgets about Vietnam, and this is what the Pentagon Papers actually showed, is it started under the Truman administration.

12:44Like it became a multi-administration, multi-decade long boondoggle before 500 ,000 troops just show up. Remember, it only starts with a few advisors. It starts with allowing a coup. It's exactly the chain reaction where it can take a decade, maybe even two, before these things start to materialize. And that's what we originally had learned, I think, through Iraq and Afghanistan. But we're right back to where we started. We defeated Iraq in three weeks with shock and awe. That wasn't the hard part. The hard part was trying to run the country. And even if you'd wanted to, quote, take the oil, you know, there are a lot of different ways that it could have gone bad, even in the initial kind of Trumpian view of occupation and of trying to run something for literally years to come, which he's declaring right now.

13:28Yeah. And that was actually crazy comments that he made to Joe Scarborough recently. It's like, well, the problem with Iraq was that we didn't take the oil. Well, he said that not. No, but not not that the problem is we went in at all. I mean, now he's like, yeah, it was all good, except we just didn't take the oil. It's like, what part of this do you think went well? I mean, we're still dealing with the fallout of having created ISIS and, you know, we've got the ISIS guy in charge of whatever. But to bolster your point, let's put B3 up on the screen. Trump is now saying he wants a$1.5 trillion military budget,$1.5 trillion.

14:04OK, he just became the first president ever to get a trillion dollar military budget. And that is an insane, extraordinary number, far beyond what any other country in the world spends on their military. Now he wants to up that by 50%. Just to put this in perspective, you guys remember Build Back Better and all of the social welfare programs, all that that entailed. That was going to add to the deficit like$400 billion over a decade. We're talking about$1.5 trillion. dollars. So the amount of tax dollars shifted into the military and that apparatus, I mean, that tells you everything about what his focus is and the way he wants to run the whole world.

14:46This is how he wants to operate. And so it's also why, I mean, listen, the hypocrisy thing is just like, you can't even make it up. Here they are talking about fraud. Meanwhile, this agency, of course, never passes an audit, cannot account for 61 % of their own assets. Okay. So much fraud and extortion throughout the defense department. Not to mention last year at this time, we were ramping up into Doge and Elon was about to run around with the chainsaw. Oh my God, we got to cut the debt. We got to cut the deficit. Not when it comes to waging random wars around the world for resource extraction.

15:19Yeah, the 1.5 trillion is just so insane. It's insane. Yeah, and this is, I've always said this, money does not, in fact, with the Defense Department, the more money, the less good that we actually seem to be. True. Like we become more hyper inefficient, more precise, I talked a lot about this yesterday in our show, we become this like F1 race car, which can just spend to spend instead of focusing on things like the B-17, things that are just easy, cheap to roll, but with vast production and scale that you can just pump off of the assembly line. That's how you win a war. Ammo, exactly, drone. You just roll it.

15:58And that is the literal opposite. And this is also, to my bureaucracy point, to effectively and properly spend$1.5 trillion, which would be double what we were spending just two years ago, So imagine the level of competence and staff that that would require to be able to come in and to be able to do that. And you would have to do this over a two year period as long as you're in office. And I guess potentially if your vice president wins the election, that that person could do it as well. But like this is exactly the problem. This is how you get not just runaway spending, but you get corruption.

16:35And yes, stock buybacks and executive compensation, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, that they're trying to crack down on is great. But the very idea that money equals more is the problem, in my opinion. Like everything should always be, here is what we actually need. Sometimes you need more. Sometimes it's actually about the supplier. It's about the prime contractors. It's about the industrial base. It's about lacking certain types of rare earth minerals or others that you may need in order to produce something. the question should come from necessity not from the top line number because now everybody in congress is just going to salivate over this and turn it into even more of some you know hyper exactly and it's like look we all ridiculed remember with ukraine the ukraine bill they're like well we're not sending it to ukraine we're sending it here and then we're going to send the weapons to ukraine so actually it'll be good for everyone here it's like well it usually doesn't work out that way as you, you know, and yes, setting executive compensation at 5 million.

17:33Good. I guess it seems like too much money to me, but all right,$5 million. It's anybody who's running a defense contract or a middle manager at a defense contracting company. But more importantly, I mean, just, you know, what I took away from this is repeating the follies of empire. Like these things fell apart usually for a reason. And maybe it was inevitable. I mean, I remember I was on Lex Freeman once, he's like, well, the American empire fall. And I was like, well, you know, a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything. Yeah. Yeah. The survival rate for everything drops to zero, as they famously said in, uh, in fight club.

18:08But for this one, you can see that this explicit oil bureau, Venezuela, it repeats the very same problems that have always bedeviled people who try to do this. And, you know, the better option from the beginning just seems to have been make a deal with Maduro and buy it from him and then we don't have to run it, be responsible and now have to threaten to kill or any of that. He was governing fine. This is the modern way of extraction. That's the way it's done, right? Threaten and he'll make a deal, which he wanted to. He literally was able - And Paul Singer will get his payoff. He'll be able to get his Venezuelan oil into his Sitco refineries.

18:46You don't have to do this whole thing and now you break it, you own it. Okay, Teresa Parsi's standing by. Let's get to it. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution.

19:26I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

20:09I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:56Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is, congratulations, you get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. and also you know your daughter's incredible that's beautiful man yeah thank you that's so beautiful i can see that got you a little yeah for sure our daughter she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances which i've not really talked about ever growing up on disney in front of million how did that shape your sense of self i went blank i hit a bad note then i couldn't kind of recover.

21:39And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, guys, to talk more about geopolitics, especially with regard to the U.S. and Iran, we are joined by Dr. Trita Parsi, who, of course, is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Politics and a friend of the show, probably a fan of the show too, but I meant to say friend of the show. It was great to see you.

22:15I appreciate it. Good to see you as well. So let's go ahead and start with this truth from President Trump threatening Iran where there are ongoing protests. And this does tie into the very lengthy discussion Sagar and I had at the beginning of the show about ICE. He says, if Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. So, you know, how serious do you take these threats? How serious do you think the Iranian government takes these sorts of threats?

22:48I think the Iranian government would be extremely mistaken if it didn't take it seriously that both the United States and Israel are likely to strike Iran. I think, you know, we've spoken about this before as well. The Israelis did not finish the job from their standpoint in June, even though Trump said that he had obliterated the program. It was never just about the program. So the Israelis are very much likely to go forward. But I think the result of the December meeting that Netanyahu had with Trump is not only that they got a green light. It seems like Trump actually was convinced to take the lead on this, or at least take a big part of it, which is unlike what happened in the summer, in which initially the U.S.

23:28had a defensive role in terms of shooting down Iranian missiles, but then later on stepped in more further into the war itself by taking out the Iranian Fordo plan. But this time around, it looks as if he has been convinced, just looking at who he's hanging out with, he's on the airplane with Lindsey Graham, etc., using that language, posing with hats of make Iran great again, it would be a mistake for the Iranians not to take this very seriously, I would say. Dr. Parsi, I'm curious here. One of the things that has come out is Trump's own infatuation with the Midnight Hammer operation and now with the successful rendition of Nicolas Maduro.

24:05How does that play into his expectation or what the Israelis are telling him about possible action against Iran versus the reality of what something like that would look like? I think what has happened here is that Trump is quite surprised and quite euphoric about the success, the military aspect of Venezuela. And that has now skewed his risk assessment of what other operations that may be tremendously different and far more difficult, mindful of the fact that it is in a completely different geography, what that may be. But I think he looks as if he is now thinking that, well, this was easy. Why don't we do more of it?

24:44In fact, he said, why don't we do more of it? And I think in combination with the fact that you are seeing a very determined campaign to portray the Iranians as weak as possible, to then convince him this is not going to be difficult. You just need to do a little push, the regime will fall, etc. I think it's important to recognize that Trump doesn't seem to have a real commitment to oppose war or to oppose regime change. He has a real commitment to things that he thinks are costly and complicated and won't make him look good. But if you can convince him that the war will be easy, if you can convince him that regime change will be easy, then I don't think he has a tremendous amount of resistance.

25:23And I think what we've seen in the last two weeks or so is a very significant campaign to make it look as easy as possible in order to get Trump in on it himself. Some of the analysis I've seen, Dr. Parsi, directly does connect the strike and kidnapping of Maduro in Venezuela and the, you know, takeover of Venezuelan oil with potential war with Iran because the idea being, OK, well, then we'll have control of more oil reserves. We don't have to worry if there are implications in terms of the oil trade regionally in the Middle East. Do you read it that way? Do you think that is part of the calculus for why we, you know, did this insane thing in Venezuela?

25:58I think oil is a huge part of the calculation here. I don't think it is for this reason. Getting Venezuelan oil, which is a very different kind of oil than what the Iranians have, requires completely different type of refineries, etc. You're not going to be able to just stabilize the oil markets because you have Venezuelan oil pumping. First of all, it's going to take quite some time for that to be able to really get on the market. So I don't think there is... You think Trump knows that, though? Well, that's a different question. It's a very, very different question. But I do think that oil does have a central role in the calculation behind Venezuela.