Podcasts about Italian Americans

In this episode, host Geoffrey Zakarian speaks with celebrity chef Jeff Mauro. Even though Jeff's large Italian-American family cultivated a lifelong love for great food, he initially latched onto his early aptitude for performance and comedy. The pair discuss the bumpy road to bridging those two professional skills, and reflect on their experiences hosting the Food Network show The Kitchen together.    Check out Jeff Mauro's new book, “Come On Over,” here: https://comeonover.com/the-cookbook/  For more information on "Four Courses With Geoffrey Zakarian" follow Geoffrey on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/geoffreyzakarian Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Today, The Two Mikes interviewed Mr. Andre DiMino who is a member of the Executive Board of the Italian American One Voice Coalition (IAOVC). The Coalition's website is https://www.IAOVC.org. Mr. DiMino explained that IAOVC operates to protect the reputations and heritage of Italian Americans and to prevent attacks on them like the removal of statues of Christopher Columbus and the removal of Columbus Day from the annual calendar of national holidays. "Listening to Two Mikes will make you smarter!”- Gov Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr.Sponsors:- Our Gold Guy - Talk to IRA about whether investing in gold is right for you. Let them know Two Mikes sent you at http://ourgoldguy.com - My Pillow - Support a true Patriot in Mike Lindell by ordering pillows and sheets. Use Promo Code TWOMIKES by calling 800-797-8492- Freedom Phone - Break away from Big Tech and order a Freedom Phone. Promo Code COLONELMIKE https://freedomphone.com/?ref=toomikes- Freedom First Coffee - Drink the coffee of Patriots. Use code TWOMIKES for 10% off at http://freedomfirstcoffee.com - Freedom First Apparel - Look as patriotic as you feel. Use code TWOMIKES for 10% off at http://freedomfirstshop.com

Check out Andrea's latest Halloween Cocktails! Click Here Here's the low carb eggplant parmigiana Emily made!Listen to all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes!  AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUD!Subscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com!

Episode n° 73 of the Last Minute Wrestling Podcast has Frank Mandolini interview the Italian American wrestler and trainer Vinnie Massaro.Vinnie will discuss his career, coming from Sicily (Agrigento) to California at a young age, training MMA legend Cain Velasquez in wrestling, having wrestled with a who's who of names from John Cena to Mitsuharu Misawa to upcoming match vs NJPW's Tomohiro Ishii for West Coast Pro Wrestling, Danielson vs Suzuki's match in AEW, what he thinks of NXT's Tony D'Angelo's gimmick, experience in Lucha Underground & more.=========================================Go to the LMW podcast website for more awesome wrestling interviews:www.lmwpodcast.com BUY AN LMW T-SHIRT HERE: https://teespring.com/stores/lmw-podstore To donate on PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/lmwpodcastMake sure to not miss a single episode of the Last Minute Wrestling podcast. Check ‘em on all your favourite platforms right here: https://linktr.ee/lmwpodcast=========================================To check Vinnie Massaro:Twitterhttps://twitter.com/snoringelbow Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/vinniemassaro =========================================Remember to like, share, subscribe and spread the word about the Last Minute Wrestling Podcast with other fans!Listen to LMW on:SPOTIFY - https://spoti.fi/33idzmN APPLE PODCASTS - https://bit.ly/39SSzEq VURBL - https://bit.ly/2Qp8TqU Follow LMW on:TWITTER - https://twitter.com/lmwpodcast or @lmwpodcastYOUTUBE - https://bit.ly/3i76vNR FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/lmwpodcast/INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/lmwpodcast/ Support LMW on:PAYPAL - https://www.paypal.me/lmwpodcastMERCH - https://teespring.com/stores/lmw-podstore LMW podcast intro music by Jonathan Bagnarelli https://www.instagram.com/johnny_b_groove/#VinnieMassaro #LuchaUnderground #WWENXT

In the Italian tradition, we promote out own, so please join me in welcoming John M. Viola, Rossella Rago, and Patrick O'Boyle of the Italian American Podcast, whose mission is similar to ours, bringing together extraordinary stories from Italians past and present. I'm your host, #DeborahZaraKobylt, of our #LittleItalyOfLA Podcast. Their show started back East, but they recently visited our #LittleItaly district in San Pedro to highlight what we're doing on this side of the country. here. In fact, part of their mission is to learn about Italians from all around the U.S., and they join me to talk about that, their early influences growing up Italian, the future of Italian American culture in the states. Please join our conversation, and invite your friends. too. Our show is simulcast on all Little Little Italy and #DeborahKobyltLIVE audio and video podcasts platforms

In this Episode I have an authentic talk with Pianist Emile Pandolfi who is the Author of Play It Like You Mean It. We talk about the importance of introducing music to kids, what does it take to build a skill with or without a natural talent.We also discuss mindset, and why he wrote his newly released book, what type of information is found in the book, and there is information that you can take away from this episode. Here is a bit more on today's guest!! I enjoyed this conversation. — EMILE PANDOLFIWith more than half a billion streams across platforms including Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music, Emile Pandolfi ranks among America's most popular piano artists.Although the majority of his performance repertoire is lush, intricate arrangements of Broadway and pop standards, his influences are, in fact, more classical than pop. It is this subjective layering of classical style, which Pandolfi infuses into the broad palette of his performance selections, that continues to resonate with audiences everywhere.Recording since 1991, the pianist‘s albums of familiar music have sold over three and a half million CDs nationally. This has earned Emile the distinction of being one of the top-selling pianists in the music industry, distributed online as well as in specialty, gift and book shops across the nation. Now with 30+ albums, most major online retailers also carry Emile's music for download, and it is streamed thousands of times daily on Spotify, Pandora, and other streaming platforms.Emile's parents were first-generation Italian-Americans, and communicating with passion was natural. While Emile was growing up, the Pandolfi home was known as “the place to gather.” Music was always a part of their home, and always associated with fun.That attitude continues today in Emile's concert performances as, although serious about his playing, Emile is never serious about himself. While the audience is treated to a brilliant musical performance, they are also entertained by Emile's charming, light-hearted sense of humor and outgoing personality.Whether you experience Emile Pandolfi on recording or in live performance, you will experience the intensity and skill of communication that can only come from a true artist, in every sense of the word.ABOUT EMILE:https://www.emilepandolfi.com/about-emile-1GET THE BOOK:https://www.emilepandolfi.com/emile-pandolfi-play-it-like-you-mean-itMUSICAL ADVENTURES:https://www.emilepandolfi.com/Emile-Pandolfi-cruisesLISTEN:https://www.emilepandolfi.com/listen-on-spotifyMEDIA: Media Contact: judy@emilepandolfi.com Website: https://www.emilepandolfi.comPlaying in Venice: https://youtu.be/bgCk2MbEN8cPlaying in St Petersburg, Russia https://youtu.be/evCdsLUtcZE************************************************************************************WEBSITE:Authentictalks2.comEMAIL:Shanta@AuthenticTalks2.comAymbeyondthephysical.com***********************************************************************************BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL FREE 30 MINUTES & RECEIVE A FREE GIFT 100 FOR PROSPERITY, SUCCESS AND BUILDING SELF-CONFIDENCFE AND SELF LOVEAFFIRMATIONS VISIT: AymbeyondThePhysical.comSIGNATURE PROGRAM: 12 WEEKS - work with me one on one or in a group!***********************************************************************************

Imagine a place where you could go and spend the day surrounded by the art and artifacts of the Italian American experience, where you can immerse yourself in our story, and learn new and surprising facts about the history of Italians in America… all free of charge! Well, if you're lucky enough to live near or visit Los Angeles, California, this Italian American dream has been a reality since 2015, when the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA) opened its doors in the historic Italian Hall of Downtown LA. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of countless Italian Americans, and the leadership of our guest, IAMLA co-founder and executive director Marianna Gatto, the City of Angels is not just home to the nation's fifth-largest Italian American population, but also to one of its finest and foremost museums dedicated to studying and sharing the Italian American experience. We sit down with Marianna for this special Italian American Heritage Month episode to hear the story of how the IAMLA came to be, what aspects of the Italian American story it seeks to share, and why in just a few short years it has become a destination for hundreds of thousands of Italians and Italian Americans not just from Los Angeles, but from around the world. We'll examine what it means to preserve the material culture of Italian America, explore the other Italian American museums working to preserve our history around the nation, and ponder whether future generations might see the birth of a truly national Italian American Museum. It's a long overdue return to recording in-person, with a guest who is a true friend. If you know the Italian American Podcast, you know this is going to be an episode filled with interesting conversation, curious tangents, and a whole lot of infectious laughter, so we're confident it's one you won't want to miss! This episode was sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

Photo: Mob violence: Tarring and feathering Joseph Smith CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Russell Shorto #Unbound: the complete, forty-minute interview, April 22, 2021. Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Hardcover – February 2, 2021, by Russell Shorto   https://www.amazon.com/Smalltime-Story-My-Family-Mob/dp/0393245586/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. The best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You're a writer―what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting―but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author's great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life―and wife―in a Pennsylvania mining town. It's a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father―Tony, the mobster's son―as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony's health deteriorates, the book becomes an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative. 8 black-and-white illustrations

This episode is brought to you by National Office Systems Savannah District 4 Alderman Nick Palumbo joins the Thursday Commute to talk about his op-ed in the Savannah Morning News about the history of Columbus Day and being an Italian-American. Then, Chatham County Elections Board chair Tom Mahoney joins to update voters on what they need to know ahead of the Nov. 2 municipal elections and the changes to voting in Georgia. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts

Interview with Robert Allegrini, President of The National Italian American Foundation and the Honorary Consul for the Republic of San Marino. Recorded: September 30, 2021 Running Time: 42 minutes 28 seconds

Submit your real life ghost story by October 19th! Send to askjeff@comeonover.com! Latest Sauvage Commercial that will make you howlEmily and her coworkers dressed as “Business Cats”  See for yourself just how serious Jeff takes Halloween Listen to all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes! AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUDSubscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com! 

The legacy of the crime drama television series, The Sopranos remains a defining art of storytelling for mob TV shows. We have the genius behind this hit TV series, David Chase as our guest today. As expected, Chase is a twenty-five-time Emmy Awards-winner, seven times Golden Globes winner, and highly acclaimed producer, writer, and director. His forty-year career in Hollywood has contributed immensely to the experience of quality TV. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of Chase, let's do a brief of the HBO 1999 hit show, The Sopranos: Produced by HBO, Chase Films, and Brad Grey Television, the story ran for six seasons, revolving around Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, a New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster, portraying the difficulties that he faces as he tries to balance his family life with his role as the leader of a criminal organization.The series has been the subject of critical analysis, controversy, and parody, and has spawned books, a video game, soundtrack albums, podcasts, and assorted merchandise. During its run, the film earned multiple awards, including the Peabody, Primetime Emmy, and the Golden Globe Awards. Even though David has continued to dominate his craft, with other works like The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away, Not Fade Away, Northern Exposure, Almost Grown, Switch, etc, he is still most known for his television directorial debut, The Sopranos.The genius is back with the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, which stars Alessandro Nivola and James Gandolfini's son Michael Gandolfini as a young Tony Soprano. It has been in theaters and on HBO Max since October 1, 2021.The plot explores the life of Young Anthony Soprano. Before Tony Soprano, there was Dickie Moltisanti, Tony's uncle. Young Anthony Soprano is growing up in one of the most tumultuous eras in Newark's history, becoming a man just as rival gangsters begin to rise up and challenge the all-powerful DiMeo crime family's hold over the increasingly race-torn city.Caught up in the changing times is the uncle he idolizes, Dickie Moltisanti, who struggles to manage both his professional and personal responsibilities-and whose influence over his nephew will help make the impressionable teenager into the all-powerful mob boss we'll later come to know: Tony Soprano.We also talk a bit about David's five-year, first-look deal to create shows for HBO parent WarnerMedia. More culture moments, please!Let's get into the chat, shall we?Enjoy my entertaining conversation with David Chase.

Interview with Elena Frigenti of “Franky in New York”, a Digital Project to unite Italians and Italian Americans. Recorded: October 4, 2021 Running Time: 33 minutes 18 seconds  

Bernie & Sid in the Morning kick off your Tuesday by recapping the amazing event yesterday in the Columbus Day Parade. It's clear that many New Yorkers still believe in traditional American values, as droves of people attended the parade yesterday to honor Italian Americans and the hero that Christopher Columbus was. Yesterday's parade wasn't the only glimmer of hope, either, as by the day Biden faithful continue to develop buyers' remorse over their support of the current President. When he isn't mumbling incoherently, he's lying right to our faces and his drastic polling numbers show that correlation. His cabinet members squirm helplessly as they try to prop up the President and defend the endless nightmare he's putting the American people through. Inflation is already starting to take a heavy toll on our society, as supply chain shortages are leaving supermarkets and retail stores with vast, empty shelves. Bernie & Sid warn listeners to stock up on supplies now while they still can, before the shortage spirals out of control and people are left fighting over toilet paper again. Bo Dietl joins the boys in the second hour of today's program as he usually does on Tuesdays, and 'Real Housewives of New Jersey' star Margaret Josephs joins the program as well in the fourth and final hour. Also, candidate for Governor of New Jersey Jack Ciattarelli hops on the phone with Bernie & Sid to discuss his run against Phil Murphy and the highly anticipated debate between the two set to take place this evening. As always, don't miss the Tuesday installments of Lidia Reports and The Peerless Boilers Beat Bernie Contest.

Michael Hudson, American economist and author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972) discusses the rentier economy that accounts for the growing disparity in wealth due to finance capitalism. Giving a history of the the polarisation of the US economy since the 1960s through the present, Hudson discusses how the high costs of education and housing have led to a growing problem of student debt, higher costs of living and increasing austerity. Noting how 80% of bank loans are made for real estate in the US, Hudson expounds upon how loans and exponentially growing debts outstrip profits from the economy proving disastrous for both the government and the people who are paying increasing amounts on housing with little to no money left to spend on goods and services. Hudson contends that finance capitalism is a “self-terminating” oligarchical system leaving workers traumatised, afraid to strike or react to working conditions, while they are pushed towards serfdom as US and Europe are heading towards a debt crisis on par with that of Argentina and Greece.TranscriptIntroduction: Welcome to Savage Minds. I'm your host, Julian Vigo. Today's show marks the launch of our second season with a very special guest: Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson is a financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of long term economic trends. He is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and the professor at the School of Marx studies, Peking University in China. He's also a research fellow at the Levy Institute of Bard College, and he has served as an economic adviser to the US Canadian, Mexican, and Latvian governments. He's also been a consultant to UNITAR, the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the Canadian Science Council, among other organisations. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in economics from New York University. Professor Hudson is the author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (2015), and most recently, J is for junk economics, a guide to reality in an age of deception. His super imperialism, the economic strategy of the American Empire has just been translated into German after its appearance in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. He sits on the editorial board of lap times quarterly and has written for the Journal of International Affairs, Commonweal, International Economy, Financial Times, and Harper's, and he's a regular contributor to CounterPunch. I welcome Michael Hudson, to Savage Minds.Julian Vigo: Class analysis in the United States is rather subterfuge amidst all these other narratives of the American dream as it's framed—that being the right to own one's home. In the UK, that became part of the Trojan horse, that Thatcher built to win her election. It was a very smart move. She won that election—she won her elections—by the reforms in the “right to buy” scheme as I'm sure you know. I t was really clever and disastrous for human rights in the country. I've spent quite a bit of my life in the UK and to see that in 1979 was, I believe, 49% of all residential housing was council housing. And when I wrote a piece on this for the Morning Star about eight, nine years ago, that rate was reduced to under 11%. So we're seeing the haves- and have-nots. And this is where your work really struck a chord for me. And let's kick into the show at this point. I have written over the years, about rentier capitalism, a term that is increasingly used to describe economies dominated by rentier, rents and rent-generating assets. And you discuss this quite a bit in your work, more recently, your article from July, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover.” And in this article, you discuss how today the finance, insurance and real estate sectors have regained control of government creating a “neo-rentier” economy as you put it, while you note—and I quote you: “The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation.” Unquote. I was wondering if we might begin our talk by branching out from this piece you wrote in July. And if you could explain for our listeners why discerning rentier capitalism is essential for understanding the global push to privatise and financialise those sectors that formerly existed in the public domain such as—and we see this everywhere, including in the EU—transportation, health care, prisons, policing, education, the post office, etc.Michael Hudson: Well, most textbooks depict a sort of happy world that almost seems to exist in the 1950s. And this “happy world” is when wealthy people get money, they build factories and buy machinery and hire workers to produce more goods and services. But that's not what the credits created for today, it's the textbooks that pick the banks that take in people's deposits and lend them out to people who build industrial production, and you'll have a picture of workers with lunchboxes working in. But actually, banks only lend money against assets. And the main assets do not make a profit by employing people to produce things there. They simply are opportunities to extract rent, like real estate 80% of bank loans are made for real estate. And that means they're made against primarily buildings that are in land that are already there. And the effective more and more bank credit is to raise the price of real estate. And in the United States, in the last year, housing prices have gone up 20%. And typically, in America, if you go to a bank and take out a loan, the government is going to guarantee the bank that you will pay the loan up to the point where it absorbs 43% of your income.So here's a big chunk of American income going to pay simply for housing, those price increases, not because there's more housing, or better housing. But in fact, the housing is built worse and worse every year, by lowering the standards, but simply inflation. There are other forms of rent, other people pay, for instance, 18% of America's GDP is healthcare, much higher than the percentage in any other country for much lower quality of service. So you know, that's sort of taken out of people's budgets. If you're a worker in the United States, right away, you get your paycheque 15%—a little more, maybe 16% now—is deducted for Social Security and medical care for when you're older. They also need up to maybe 30%, for income tax, federal, state and local income tax before you have anything to spend. And then you have to spend for housing, you have to pay for transportation, you have to pay for your own medical insurance contributions, your own pension contributions. So there's very, very little that is left over in people's budgets to buy goods and services. Not only have real wages in the United States, gone down now for three decades, but the disposable income that people and families get after they meet their sort of monthly “nut,” what they can spend on goods and services is shrunk even more. So while they're getting squeezed, all this money is paid to rentiers as at the top. And because of the miracle of compound interest, the amount that the 1% of the economy has grows exponentially. Any rate of interest is a doubling time. And even though people know that there's only a 0.1% rate of interest, now for the banks, and for large wall firms, it's about 3% if you want to buy a mortgage. and so this, the 0.1% is lent out to large companies like Blackstone that are now buying up almost all of the housing that comes onto the market in the United States. So in 2008, 69% of homeowners of Americans own their own homes. Now it's fallen by more than 10%. It's fallen to about 51%. All this difference has been basically the financial sector funding a transformation away from home ownership into landlordship—into absentee ownership. And so the if you're part of the 1%, the way that you make money is by buying stocks or bonds, or corporate takeovers, or buying real estate and not building factories. And that's why the factories and the industry have been shifting outside of the United States over to China, and other countries. So, what we're having is a kind of…I won’t say its post-industrial capitalism, because people thought that the what was going to follow industrial capitalism was going to be socialism. They thought that there will be more and more government spending on providing basic needs that people had. And instead of socialism, and a more, egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, you've had a polarization of wealth and income, you've had the wealthy people making money financially, and by real estate, and by rent seeking, and by creating monopolies, but not by building factories, not by producing goods and services. And that is why the economy's polarizing, and so many people are unhappy with their conditions. Now, they're going further and further into debt and their student debt. Instead of education here being a public utility that's provided freely, it's become privatised at NYU, it's now $50,000 or $60,000 a year. There is no way in which the United States can compete industrially with other countries when they've loaded down new entrants into the labor force with huge housing costs, student debt, huge taxes have been shifted off the 1% onto the 99%. So in the United States, finance capitalism basically is self-terminating. It leads to a polarised economy, it leads to austerity. And it leaves countries looking like Greece looked after 2015, after its debt crisis, it looks like Argentina is trying to struggle to pay its foreign debts. And that seems to be the future in which the US and Europe are moving towards.Julian Vigo: I posted on my Facebook wall about this about maybe five weeks ago, that the rentier class, I'm not just including the likes of Blackstone, but the middle class that are multiple home dwellers. I noted that during the lockdown, I was reading through accounts on social media of people who were being threatened by landlords, landlords, who actually had no mortgage to pay. And I had to wonder at that point, what is the input of the rentier class by the landowning class who are not necessarily part of the 1%. These are people who, as some of these people came on my wall and said, “I worked hard to buy my second and third houses!” And I thought, “Well, let me pull out my violins.” One thing that really alerted me during lockdown was the lack of sympathy for renters. And I don't just mean in the US, in fact, I think the US had a kinder response to renting in some sectors such as New York state where there has been—and still—is a massive pushback against any form of relaxation of rent forgiveness, since lockdown in the EU and Italy and France. It's appalling the kind of treatment that renters received here. I spoke to people in Bologna, who were doing a rent strike, but fearful of having their name mentioned. I ended up not being able to run the piece because of that. And there are so many people who don't have money to pay their rent in the EU, in the UK, and yet, we're somehow focusing oftentimes on these meta-critical analyses of the bigger corporations, the 1%. But where does the middle class fit into this, Michael, because I do have to wonder if maybe we should be heading towards the model I hold in my mind and heart is St. Ives in Cornwall, which about eight years ago set a moratorium saying no second homes in this city. Now, they didn't do it because of any allegiance to Marxism or socialism. They did it in part because of that, and because of a left-leaning politics, but mostly because they didn't want to have a ghost town that when the summer was over, you had very few people living in town. What are the answers to the rentier class that is also composed of people who consider themselves hard-working people who just want someone else to pay for their house, as one person on Twitter, put it.Michael Hudson: This is exactly the problem that is plaguing left wing politics, from Europe to America in the last fifty years.Julian Vigo: Exactly. It's astounding because there was a lot of debate on Twitter around last summer, when one woman wrote, I just did the math, I'm almost 29 years old, and I paid and she listed the amount in rent, I have just bought my landlord a second house. And people are adding it up that we are back to understanding. And I think in terms of the medieval period, remember in high school in the US when you study history, and you learn about feudalism, and the serfs coming in from far afield having to tend to the Masters terrain. And I think, are we heading back to a kind of feudalism under a new name? Because what's dividing those who can afford rents and those who can, it's not only your eligibility to receive a bank loan in this climate, which is quite toxic in London. I know many architects, lawyers, physicians who cannot get bank loans. Ironically, the bar is being raised so high that more and more people in London are moving on to the canal system—they're renting or buying narrowboats. The same is happening in other parts of the world where people are being barred out of home ownership for one reason or another and at the same time, there's a class of people often who got loans in a period when it was quite easy in the 80s and early 90s, let's say and they hold a certain control over who's paying—43% of income of Americans goes on housing. And as you know, in New York City that can be even higher. How can we arrive at a society where there's more equality between these haves and have-nots? Because it seems that the middle class is playing a role in this. They're trying to come off as being the hard-working schmoes, who have just earned their right to own their second or third homes, and then the others who will never have a foot on that ladder, especially given the crash?Michael Hudson: Well, I think you've put your finger on it. Most people think of economies being all about industry. But as you've just pointed out, for most people, the economy is real estate. And if you want to understand how modern economies work, you really should begin by looking at real estate, which is symbiotic with with banking, because as you pointed out that in a house is worth whatever a bank will lend. And in order to buy a house, unless you have an enormous amount of savings, which hardly anyone has, you'll borrow from a bank and buy the house. And the idea is to use the rent to pay the interest to the bank. And then you end up hoping late hoping with a capital gain, which is really land price gain. You borrow from the bank hoping that the Federal Reserve and the central bank or the Bank of England is going to inflate the economy and inflate asset prices and bank credit is going to push prices further and further up. As the rich get richer, they recycle the money in the banks and banks lend it to real estate. So, the more the economy is polarised between the 1% and the 99%, the more expensive houses get the more absentee landlords are able to buy the houses and outbid the homebuyers, who as you pointed out, can't get loans because they're already loaned up. If they can't get loans in England to buy a house, it's because they already owe so much money for other things. In America, it would be because they own student debt or because they own other bank loans, and they're all loaned up. So the key is people are being squeezed more than anywhere else on housing. In America, it rents care too and on related sort of monopoly goods that yield rent. Now the problem is why isn't this at the centre of politics?Is it because— and it's ironic that although most people in every country, Europe and America are still homeowners, or so they only own their own home—they would like to be rocky as a miniature? They would like to live like the billionaires live off the rents. They would like to be able to have enough money without working to get a free lunch and the economy of getting a free lunch. And so somehow, they don't vote for what's good for the wage earners. They vote for well, if I were to get richer, then I would want to own a house and I would want to get rent. So I'm going to vote in favour of the landlord class. I'm going to vote in favour of banks lending money to increase housing prices. Because I'd like to borrow money from a bank to get on this treadmill, that's going to be an automatic free lunch. Now, I not only get rent, but I'll get the rising price of the houses that prices continue to rise. So somehow, the idea of class interest, they don't think of themselves as wave generators, they think of themselves as somehow wouldn't be rentiers in miniature without reaising that you can't do it in miniature. You really have to have an enormous amount of money to be successful rentier.So no class consciousness means that the large real estate owners, the big corporations like Blackstone, that own huge amounts can sort of trot out a strapped, homeowner and individual, and they will sort of hide behind it and say, “Look at this, poor family, they use their money to buy a house, the sort of rise in the world, and now the tenants have COVID, and they can't pay the rent. Let's not bail out these, these landlords.” So even though they're not getting rent, we have to aid them. And think of them as little people, but they're not little people. They're a trillion dollar, money managers. They're huge companies that are taking over. And people somehow personify the billionaires and the trillion dollar real estate management companies as being small people just like themselves. There's a confusion about the economic identity.Julian Vigo: Well, certainly in the United States, we are known to have what's called the “American dream.” And it's, it's quite interesting when you start to analyse what that dream has morphed into, from the 1960s to the present, and I even think through popular culture. Remember Alexis, in Dynasty, this was the go-to model for success. So we've got this idea that the super rich are Dallas and Dynasty in the 80s. But 20 years after that, we were facing economic downfalls. We had American graduates having to go to graduate school because they couldn't get a job as anything but a barista. And the model of getting scholarships or fellowships, any kind of bursary to do the Masters and PhD. When I was doing my graduate work, I was lucky enough to have this, but that was quickly disappearing. A lot of my colleagues didn't have it. And I imagine when you went to school, most of your colleagues had it. And today, and in recent years, when I was teaching in academia, most of my students doing advanced degrees had zero funding. So, we've got on the one hand, the student debt, hamster wheel rolling, we have what is, to me one of the biggest human rights issues of the domestic sphere in countries like the US or Great Britain, frankly, everywhere is the ability to live without having to be exploited for the payment of rent. And then we have this class of people, whether they're Blackstone, and huge corporations, making billions, or the middle class saying, “But I'm just living out the American dream.” How do we square the “American dream,” and an era where class consciousness is more invisible than ever has it been?Michael Hudson: I think the only way you can explain that is to show how different life was back in the 1960s, 1950s. When I went to school, and the college, NYU cost $500 a semester, instead of 50,000, that the price of college has gone up 100 times since I went to college—100 times. I rented a house in a block from NYU at $35 a month on Sullivan Street. And now that same small apartment would go for 100 times that much, $3,500 a month, which is a little below the average rent in Manhattan these days. So, you've had these enormous increases in the cost of getting an education, they cost of rent, and in a society where housing was a public utility, and education was a public utility, education would be provided freely. If the economy wanted to keep down housing prices, as they do in China for instance, then you would be able to work if the kind of wages that Americans are paid today and be able to save. The ideal of China or countries that want to compete industrially is to lower the cost of living so that you don't have to pay a very high wages to cover the inflated cost of housing, the cost of education.If you privatise education in America, and if you increase the housing prices, then either you're going to have to pay labor, much higher rates that will price it out of world markets, at least for industrial goods, or you'll have to squeeze budgets. So yes, people can pay for housing, and education, but they're not going to buy the goods and services they produce. And so and that's one of the reasons why America is not producing industrial manufacturers. It's importing it all abroad. So the result of this finance capitalism that we have the result of the rent squeeze, that you depict, and the result of voters not realising that this is economic suicide for them is that the economy is shrinking and leaving people basically out in the street. And of course, all of this is exacerbated by the COVID crisis right now. Where, right now you have, especially in New York City, many people are laid off, as in Europe, they're not getting an income. Well, if your job has been closed down as a result of COVID, in Germany, for instance, you're still given something like 80% of your normal salary, because they realise that they have to keep you solvent and living. In the United States, there's been a moratorium on rents, they realise that, well, if you've lost your job, you can't pay the rent. There's a moratorium on evictions, there's a moratorium on bank foreclosures on landlords that can't pay their mortgage to the bank, because their tenants are not paying rent. All of that is going to expire in February, that’s just in a few months.  So they're saying, “OK, in New York City, 50,000 tenants are going to be thrown out onto the street, thousands of homes are going to be foreclosed on.” All over the country, millions of Americans are going to be subject now to be evicted. You can see all of the Wall Street companies are raising private capital funds to say, “We're going to be waiting for all this housing to come onto the market. We're going to be waiting for all of these renovations to take place. We're going to swoop in and pick it up.” This is going to be the big grab bag that is going to shape the whole coming generation and do to America really what Margaret Thatcher did to England when she got rid of—when she shifted from housing, the council housing that you mentioned, was about half the population now dow to about 1/10 of the population today.Julian Vigo: This is what I wonder is not being circulated within the media more frequently. We know that major media is not...[laughts] They like to call themselves left-of-centre but they're neoliberal which I don't look at anything in the liberal, the neoliberal sphere, as “left.” I look at it as a sort of strain of conservatism, frankly. But when you were speaking about paying $35 a month for an apartment on Sullivan Street, get me a time machine! What year was that? Michael?Michael Hudson: That was 1962.Julian Vigo: 1962 And roughly, the minimum wage in New York was just over $1 an hour if I'm not mistaken.Michael Hudson: I don't remember. I was making I think my first job on Wall Street was 50 to $100. A year $100 a week.Julian Vigo: So yes, I looked it up because I was curious when you said 100 times certainly we see that. If the tuition at New York when and New York University when I left was $50,000 a year you were paying $500 a semester. This is incredible inflation.Michael Hudson: And I took out a student loan from the state because I wanted to buy economic books. I was studying the history of economic thought and so I borrowed, you know, I was able to take out a loan that I repaid in three years as I sort of moved up the ladder and got better paying jobs. But that was the Golden Age, the 1960s because in that generation there was the baby boom that just came online. There were jobs for everybody. There was a labor shortage. And everybody was trying to hire—anyone could get a job. I got to New York and I had $15 in my pocket in 1960. I'd shared a ride with someone, [I] didn't know what to do. We stayed in a sort of fleabag hotel on Bleecker Street that was torn down by the time you got there. But I,  took a walk around and who should I run into that Gerde's Folk City, but a friend of mine had stayed at my house in Chicago once and he let me stay at his apartment for a few weeks till I can look around, find a place to live and got the place for $35 a month,Julian Vigo: When there was that debate on Twitter—there were many debates actually about renting on Twitter—and there were a few landlords who took to Twitter angry that they learned that their renters had received subsidies in various countries to pay their rent. And instead of paying their rent, the people use this to up and buy a downpayment on a home. And they got very upset. And there was a bit of shadow on Friday there with people saying, “Well, it's exactly what you've done.” And I find this quite fascinating, because I've always said that the age of COVID has made a huge Xray of our society economically speaking. And it's also telling to me that in countries that I would assume to be more socialist leaning, if not socialist absolutely, in the EU, we saw very few movements against rent. Very few people or groups were calling for a moratorium on rent. It's ironic, but it was in the US where we saw more moratoria happen. What is happening where—and this reaches to larger issues, even outside of your specialty of economics and finance—but why on earth has it come to be that the left is looking a lot more like the right? And, don't shoot me, but you know, I've been watching some of Tucker Carlson over the past few years, someone who I could not stand after 9/11. And he has had more concern and more investigations of the poor and the working class than MSBC or Rachel Maddow in the biggest of hissy fits. What is going on politically that the valences of economic concern are shifting—and radically so?Michael Hudson: Well, the political situation in America is very different from every other country. In the Democratic Party, in order to run for a position, you have to spend most of your time raising money, and the party will support whatever candidates can raise the most money. And whoever raises the largest amount of money gets to be head of a congressional committee dealing with whatever it is their campaign donors give. So basically, the nomination of candidates in the United States, certainly in the Democratic Party, is based on how much money you can raise to finance your election campaign, because you're supposed to turn half of what you raised over to the party apparatus. Well, if you have to run for an office, and someone explained to me in in the sixties, if I wanted to go into politics, I had to find someone to back up my campaign. And they said, “Well, you have to go to the oil industry or the tobacco industry.”And you go to these people and say, “Will you back my campaign?” And they say, Well, sure, what's your position going to be on on smoking on oil and the the tax position on oil, go to the real estate interest, because all local politics and basically real estate promotion projects run by the local landlords and you go to the real estate people and you say, “Okay, I'm going to make sure that we have public improvements that will make your land more valuable, but you won't have to pay taxes on them.” So, if you have people running for office, proportional to the money they can make by the special interests, that means that all the politicians here are representing the special interests that pay them and their job as politicians is to deliver a constituency to their campaign contributors. And so the campaign contributors are going to say, “Well, here's somebody who could make it appear as if they're supporting their particular constituency.” And so ever since the 60s, certainly in America, the parties divided Americans into Irish Americans, Italian Americans, black Americans, Hispanic Americans. They will have all sorts of identity politics that they will run politicians on. But there's one identity that they don't have—and that's the identity of being a wage earner. That's the common identity that all these hyphenated Americans have in common. They all have to work for a living and get wages, they're all subject to, they have to get housing, they have to get more and more bank credit, if they want to buy housing so that all of the added income they get is paid to the banks as mortgage interest to get a home that used to be much less expensive for them. So basically, all of the increase in national income ends up being paid to the campaign contributors, the real estate contributors, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, that back the politicians. And essentially, you have politics for sale in the United States. So we're really not in a democracy anymore—we're in an oligarchy. And people don't realise that without changing this, this consciousness, you're not going to have anything like the left-wing party.And so you have most Americans out wanting to be friendly with other Americans, you know, why can't everybody just compromise and be in the centre? Well, there's no such thing as a centrist. Because you'll have an economy that's polarising, you have the 1% getting richer and richer and richer by getting the 99% further and further in debt. So the 99% are getting poorer and poor after paying their debts. And to be in the centre to say, and to be say, only changes should be marginal, that means—a centrist is someone who lets this continue. With that we're not going to make a structural change, that's radical, we're not going to change the dynamic that is polarising the economy, between creditors at the top and debtors is at the bottom, between landlords at the top and renters at the bottom between monopolists and the top and the consumers who have to pay monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals, for cable TV, for almost everything they get. And none of this is taught in the economics courses. Because you take an  economics course, they say, “There's no such thing as unearned income. Everybody earns whatever they can get.” And the American consciousness is shaped by this failure to distinguish between earned income and unearned income and a failure to see that dynamic is impoverishing them. It's like the proverbial frog that's been boiled slowly in water. So, with this false consciousness people have—if only they can save enough and borrow from a bank—they can become a rentier in Miniature. They're just tricked into a false dream.Intermission: You're listening to savage minds, and we hope you're enjoying the show. Please consider subscribing. We don't accept any money from corporate or commercial sponsors. And we depend upon listeners and readers just like you. Now back to our show.Julian Vigo: I don't know if you saw the movie called Queen of Versailles. It was about this very bizarre effort to construct a very ugly Las Vegas-style type of Versailles by a couple that was economically failing. And it spoke to me a lot about the failings of the quote unquote, “American dream.” And I don't mean that dream, per se. I mean, the aspiration to have the dream, because that is, as you just pointed out, unearned income, that is the elephant in the room. And it almost seems to be the elephant maybe to keep using that metaphor, that the blind Sufi tale: everyone's feeling a different part of it, but no one is naming it. And I find this really shocking, that we can't speak of unearned income and look at the differences as to which country's tax inheritance and which do not—this idea that one is entitled to wealth. Meanwhile, a lot of US institutions are academically, now formally, being captured by the identity lobbies and there are many lobbies out there—it's a gift to them. They don't have to work on the minimum wage, they don't have to work on public housing, they don't have to work on housing.They can just worry about, “Do we have enough pronoun badges printed out?” And I find this really daunting as someone who is firmly of the left and who has seen some kind of recognition have this problem bizarrely, from the right. We seem to have a blind spot where we're more caught up in how people see us, rather than the material reality upon which unearned and earned income is based. Why is it that today people are living far worse than their grandparents and parents especially?Michael Hudson: Well, I think we've been talking about that, because they have to pay expenses as their parents and grandparents didn't have to pay, they have to pay much higher rent. Everybody used to be able to afford to buy a house, that was the definition of “middle class” in America was to be a homeowner. And when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, everybody on the salary they were getting could afford to buy their house. And that's why so many people bought the houses with working class sell rates. As I told you, I was getting $100 a week. At least if you were quiet you could do it. If you were black, you couldn't do it. The blacks were redlined. But the white people could buy the houses. And that's why today, the white population has so much more wealth than the black population, because the white families would leave the house to the children and housing prices have gone up 100 times. And because they've gone up 100 times, this is endowed with a whole white hereditary class of kids whose family own their own homes, send them to schools. But America was redlined. Now Chicago was redlined, blacks were redlined. In New York City, the banks would not lend money to black neighbourhoods or to black borrowers. I was at Chase Manhattan and they made it very clear: they will not make a loan to a mortgage if they're black people living in my block. And they told me that when I was on Second Street and Avenue B. I won't repeat the epithet racist epithets they used. But what has caused the racial disparity today is what we've been talking about: the fact that whites could buy their own homes, blacks could not.And the reason I'm bringing this up is that if—we're working toward a society where white people are now going to be reduced to the position that black people are in today: of not having their own homes, of not being able to get bank credit. One friend of mine at the Hudson Institute, a black economist, wanted to—we were thinking of cowriting a book, The Blackening of America. The state of, well, the future of the whites, is to become blacks if you don't solve this situation. And I've been unable to convince many black leaders about reparations—that the reparations, very hard to get reparations for slavery, which was to their grandparents, their reparations are due to the blacks today who do not have housing, their own homes, because of the redlining that they have been experiencing right down to today.So, you have this, you do have a separation in this country. But this is not the kind of hyphenated politics that the politicians talk about. Not even the black politicians, the fact that if you're going to hyphenated American, how did this hyphenisation affect the real opportunities for real estate, for homeownership, for education, and all of these other things. I think maybe if people begin to think as to how there is a convergence of what was diverging before—now you're having the middle class pushed down into its real identity which was a dependent wage-earning class all along—you're going to have a change of consciousness. But we're still not to that. People don't realise this difference.And at the top of the pyramid, at New York University, for instance, where we both went to school, I have professor friends there and there was recently an argument about getting more salaries for professors, because they're hiring adjunct professors at very low prices instead of appointing them full time. And one professor turned to my friend and said, “They’re treating us like wage earners.” And my friend said, “Yes, you are a wage earner. You’re dependent on the wage you get from New York University.” And he said, “But I’m a professor,” as if somehow being a professor doesn't mean that you're not a wage earner, you're not dependent on salary, you're not being exploited by your employer who's in it to make money at your expense.Julian Vigo: Oh, absolutely. We've got the push from NYU in the 1990s by adjunct professors to get health insurance, and to have a certain modicum of earnings that would allow them to pay rent in an extremely expensive city. I find it amazing how many of my students at the time had no idea how much I was being exploited at the time, I was at lunch after the graduation of two of my students, they invited me to lunch, and they were having a discussion about how well we must be paid. And I laughed. I didn't go into the details of my salary. But later in later years, they came to understand from other sources, how exploitation functions within the university where they were paying almost quarter of a million to go to school, and graduate school, and so forth. So it's quite shocking that even though we have the internet and all the information is there, anyone can see precisely how much NYU or Columbia cost today, or how much the cost of living is, as opposed to 1961, for instance, that people are still not putting together that when you have housing, that is like income. For most of us, if housing is affordable, the way one lives, the efficiency to live, the ease, the mental health, and physical health improves. And it's fascinating to me that during lockdown, people were told, just to bite the bullet, stay inside, and how many publications, how much of the media went out to discover the many people being locked down in extremely small hovels? Multiple families living in three bedroom houses, even smaller. And I just kept thinking throughout these past 20 months or so that the media has become complicit in everything you've discussed, we've seen an extra tack added on where the media is another arm of industry and the 1% they are able sell lockdown stories: stars singing, Spaniards singing, accordionists from Neapolitan balconies, everyone's happy. But that was a lie. And that was a lie being sold conveniently.I regularly post stories from CNN, where their recent yacht story—they love yachts—their recent yacht story from about five or six days ago was how the super-rich are “saving” the world's ecology. And it was a paid advertisement of a very expensive yacht that uses nuclear power, what you and I hope: that all the rich people are running around with little mini nuclear reactors on the seas. And I keep thinking: what has happened that you mentioned campaign financing? Remember what happened to Hillary Clinton when she suggested campaign finance reform? That went over like a lead balloon. And then we've got CNN, Forbes, all these major publications that run paid sponsored news articles as news. It's all paid for, they legally have to see it as but you have to find the fine print. And we're being sold the 1% as the class that's going to save the planet with this very bizarre looking yacht with a big ball on it. And another another CNN article about yacht owners was about how it's hard for them to pay for maintenance or something and  we're pulling out our tiny violins.And I keep wondering, why is the media pushing on this? We can see where MSNBC and CNN and USA today are heading in a lot of their coverage over class issues. They would much rather cover Felicity Huffman, and all those other stars’ children's cheating to get into a California University scandal which is itself its own scandal, of course. That gets so covered, but you rarely see class issues in any of these publications unless it refers to the favelas of Brazil or the shanty towns of Delhi. So, we're sold: poverty isn't here, it's over there. And over here, mask mandates, lock up, shut your doors stay inside do your part clap for the cares and class has been cleared. Cut out. Even in the UK, where class consciousness has a much more deeply ingrained fermentation, let's say within the culture, it's gone. Now the BBC. Similarly, nightly videos at the initial part of lockdown with people clapping for the cares. Little was said about the salaries that some of these carriers were getting, I don't mean just junior doctors there, but the people who are cleaning the hallways. So, our attention has been pushed by the media away from class, not just the politicians doing the dirty work, or not just the nasty finance campaign funding that is well known in the US. What are some of the responses to this, Michael, that we might advance some solutions here? Because my worry, as a person living on this planet is enough is enough: Why can't we just try a new system? Is it that the fall of the Berlin Wall left a permanent divide in terms of what we can experiment with? Or is there something else at play?Michael Hudson: Well, recently, Ukraine passed a law about oligarchs, and they define an oligarchy as not only owning a big company, but also owning one of the big media outlets. And the oligarchy in every country owns the media. So, of course, CNN, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, are owned by the billionaire class representing the real estate interests and the rentier interests. They're essentially the indoctrination agencies. And so of course, in the media, what you get is a combination of a fantasy world and Schadenfreude—Schadenfreude, when something goes wrong with people you don't like, like the scandal. But apart from that, it's promoting a fantasy, about a kind of parallel universe about how a nice world would work, if everybody earned the money that they had, and the wealth they had by being productive and helping society. All of a sudden, that's reversed and [they] say, “Well, they made a lot of fortune, they must have made it by being productive and helping society.” So, everybody deserves the celebrity, deserves the wealth they have. And if you don't have wealth, you're undeserving and you haven't made a productivity contribution. And all you need is to be more educated, managerial and intelligent, and you can do it. And it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. As soon as you inherit a lot of money, your intelligence, your IQ drops 10%. As soon as you don't have to work for a living and just clip coupons, you write us down another 30%. The stupidest people I've met in my life are millionaires who don't want to think about how they get their money. They just, they're just greedy. And I was told 50 years ago, “You don't need to go to business school to learn how to do business. All you need is greed.” So what are all these business schools for? All they're doing is saying greed is good and giving you a patter talk to say, “Well, yeah, sure, I'm greedy. But that's why I'm productive.” And somehow they conflate all of these ideas.So, you have the media, and the educational system, all sort of combined into a fantasy, a fantasy world that is to displace your own consciousness about what's happening right around you. The idea of the media is that you don't look at your own position, you imagine other people's position in another world and see that you're somehow left out. So, you can say that the working class in America are very much like the teenage girls using Facebook, who use it and they have a bad self image once they use Facebook and think everybody else is doing better. That's the story in Congress this week. Well, you can say that the whole wage earning class once they actually see how awful the situation is they think, “Well, gee, other people are getting rich. Other people have yard spots, why don't I have my own house? Why am I struggling?” And they think that they're only struggling alone, and that everybody else is somehow surviving when other people are struggling just the way they are. That's what we call losing class consciousness.Julian Vigo: Yes, well, we're back to Crystal and Alexis wrestling and Dynasty’s fountain. Everyone wants to be like them. Everyone wants a car. You know, I'll never forget when I lived in Mexico City. One of the first things I learned when you jumped into one of those taxis were Volkswagen beetles,  Mexicans would call their driver “Jaime.” And I said to them, why are you guys calling the taxi drivers here “Jaime”? And they said, “We get it from you.” And I said, “What do you mean you get it from us? We don't call our taxi drivers Jaime.”And then I thought and I paused, I said,  “James!” Remember the Grey Poupon commercials? That's what we do—we have James as the driver in a lot of these films that we produced in the 1970s and 80s. And the idea became co-opted within Mexico as if everyone has a British driver named James.Now, what we have turned into from this serialised, filmic version of ourselves to the present is dystopic. Again, you talked about the percentage of rent that people are paying in the US, the way in which people are living quite worse than their parents. And this is related to student debt, bank debt, credit card debt, we've had scandals directly related to the housing market. We saw that when there were people to be bailed out, they had to be of the wealthy class and companies to be bailed out. There was no bailout for the poor, of course. I was in London during the Occupy Wall Street. In London, it was “occupy the London Stock Exchange” (Occupy LSX) right outside of not even the London Stock Exchange. It was outside of St. Paul's Cathedral. And there was a tent city, and people were fighting ideological warfare from within their tents. There wasn't much organising on the ground. It was disassembled months later. But I wonder why Americans, even with what is called Obamacare, are still not pushing for further measures, why Hillary Clinton's push for or suggestion merely of finance reform within the campaigning system, all of this has sort of been pushed aside.Are there actors who are able to advance these issues within our current political system in the United States? Or will it take people getting on the streets protesting, to get housing lowered to maybe have national rent controls, not just of the form that we have in New York, which, before I got to New York in the late 80s, everyone was telling me how great rent control was. Now it's all but disappeared? What is the answer? Is it the expropriation of houses? Is it the Cornwall style, no owning more than one house type of moratorium on homeownership? What are the solutions to this, Michael?Michael Hudson: There is no practical solution that I can suggest. Because the, you're not going to have universal medical care, as long as you have the pharmaceuticals. funding the campaign's of the leading politicians, as long as you have a political system that is funded by campaign contributors, you're going to have the wealthiest classes, and decide who gets nominated and who gets promoted. So, I don't see any line of reform, given the dysfunctional political system that the United States is in. If this were Europe, we could have a third party. And if we had an actual third party, the democratic party would sort of be like the social democratic parties in Europe, it would fall about 8% of the electorate, and a third party would completely take over. But in America, it's a two-party system, which is really one party with different constituencies for each wing of that party, and that one party, the same campaign contributors funds, both the Republicans and the Democrats. So it's possible that you can think of America as a failed state, as a failed economy. I don't see any means of practical going forward, just as you're seeing in the Congress today, when they're unwilling to pass an infrastructure act, there's a paralysis of change. I don't see any way in which a structural change can take place. And if you're having the dynamics that are polarising, only a structural change can reverse this trend. And nobody that I know, no politician that I know, sees any way of the trends being reversed.Julian Vigo: The funny thing is that scandal, quote-unquote, scandal over Ocasio Cortez's dress at the Met Gala was quite performative to me. It's typical that the media does. “Tax the rich,” as she sits at a function that I believe cost $35,000 to enter. And she socialised the entire night even if she allegedly did not pay either for her dress nor for the entrance. And I'm thinking, isn't this part of the problem: that we have so much of our socio-cultural discourse wrapped up in politics in the same way that Clinton's suggestion that campaign finance reform disappeared quite quickly? Is there any hope of getting campaign finance reform passed in the States?Michael Hudson: No. Because if you had campaign finance reform, that's how the wealthy people control politics. If you didn't, if you didn't have the wealthy, wealthy people deciding who gets nominated, you would have people get nominated by who wanted to do what the public ones, Bernie Sanders says, “Look, most of them are all the polls show that what democracy, if this were a democracy, we would have socialised medicine, we'd have public health care, we would have free education, we would have progressive taxation.” And yet no party is representing what the bulk of people have. So by definition, we're not a democracy. We're an oligarchy, and the oligarchy controls. I mean, you could say that the media play the role today that the church and religion played in the past to divert attention away from worldly issues towards other worldly issues. That's part of the problem.But not only the pharmaceutical industries are against public health care, but the whole corporate sector, the employer sector, are against socialised medicine, because right now workers are dependent for their health insurance on their employers. That means Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman said, this is causing a traumatised workers syndrome, the workers are afraid to quit, they're afraid to go on strike. They're afraid of getting fired because if they get fired, first of all, if they're a homeowner they lose their home because they can't pay their mortgage, but most importantly, they lose their health care. And if they get sick, it wipes them out. And they go broke and they lose their home and all the assets.Making workers depend on the employer, instead of on the government means you're locked into their job. They have to work for a living for an employer, just in order to survive in terms of health care alone. So the idea of the system is to degrade a dependent, wage-earning class and keeping privatising health care, privatising education, and moving towards absentee landlordship is the way to traumatise and keep a population on the road to serfdom. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

A pair of House Republicans introduced a measure in support of the federally recognized Columbus Day holiday amid efforts largely on the left to promote Indigenous Peoples Day instead. The resolution from GOP Reps. Andrew Garbarino and Mark Amodei expresses  support for recognition of the explorer Christopher Columbus and "his impact on the Italian-American community." "Columbus Day honors not just the contributions and ingenuity of Christopher Columbus, but also of the generations of Italian Americans that followed. It is a day of great pride and celebration for the Italian American community," Garbarino tweeted on Monday. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(00:00-7:09): Should we celebrate Columbus Day? Brian and Aubrey talked about this and commented on the following news stories:  “Columbus Day is not a holiday the U.S. — and Italian Americans — should celebrate” “Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day? Getting to the heart of the American identity crisis” “Celebrate Columbus's Achievements” (7:09-16:07): Brian and Aubrey shared their thoughts on a tweet from Jen Wilkin, “The antidote to anxiety about the future is not to discern the future, but to remember the past. Instead of straining your gaze forward, look over your shoulder and rehearse God's faithfulness to you, and to all generations.” (16:07-24:42): Is there a right and a wrong way to make an apology? Brian and Aubrey talked about this and shared their thoughts on an apology from Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden about a 2011 email.  (24:42-34:06): Brian and Aubrey discussed Emily McFarlan Miller's Religion News Service article, “How one Chicago church is stepping up to help Afghan evacuees.” They also talked about faith-based organizations working with Afghans overseas and in the U.S. (34:06-51:54): Karen Swallow Prior, Research Professor of English and Christianity & Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and Author of “On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books,” joined Brian and Aubrey to chat about her Religion News Service article, “Beauty is the extravagance that makes us human,” and her New York Times opinion piece, “Texas' Abortion Law Should Force America to Change Its Ways.” Learn more about Karen and her books at karenswallowprior.com and connect with her on Twitter at @KSPrior See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Boston, Columbus Day is now Indigenous Peoples Day. The change was decreed via executive order last week by acting Mayor Kim Janey. The surprise move has angered a number of people including Diane Modica, a former city councilor now with the Sons and Daughters of Italy in America. Modica joins Dan to discuss what she calls the "erasure of Italian Americans."

An update on the wind advisory and its impact on the Big Fresno Fair. Today is Columbus Day, or Indigenous People's Day, depending on who you ask. A look at its history involves the killing of police chief, allegations of the mob paying off jurors, an angry murderous mob, a near war with Italy and a political move to secure the Italian American vote for President Harrison's re-election campaign. William Shatner's trip to space aboard the Blue Origin's shuttle has been postponed to Wednesday due to high winds in west Texas. With a personal wealth valued at $222 billion, Elon Musk has become the richest man on the planet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day. In Rochester, a committee formed by Italian Americans has been working to determine the best way to honor Indigenous peoples while maintaining a day of celebration for Italian heritage. Our guests discuss their work: Ronnie Pollack, Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, Eagle Clan, co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples' Day Committee, and executive director of the Native American Cultural Center Lawrence Torcello , associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at RIT Kathy Castania , co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples' Day Committee, member of the Italian Heritage Committee, and member of the SURJ ROC education committee

Listen to Sean Rima on demand. Topics include Coach Popovich sounding off about his dislike of Columbus Day, and basically trashing Italian Americans for their celebration of Christopher Columbus. Sean discusses the concept of “menstrual equity,” along with the call for the availability of feminine products in men's rooms. William Shatner admits he is scared about his upcoming space flight, Paul McCartney is blaming John Lennon for the break up of The Beatles.

Bernie & Sid in the Morning kick off today's 77WABC Columbus Day Celebration with a jam-packed show filled with the biggest Italian-American guests New York City has to offer. 77WABC owner and operator John Catsimatidis closes out the opening hour of today's program to kick off the festivities with Bernie & Sid. Following John in the show's second hour is 'Real Housewives of New Jersey' cast member Dolores Catania and the editor-in-chief of National Review Rich Lowry for his weekly Monday segment with the boys. The big names continue to roll in as the Chairman of the Board of the Columbus Citizens Foundation Angelo Vivolo kicks off today's third hour with Bernie & Sid, and he is followed promptly by the legendary Actor/Producer/Director/Restaurant Owner Chazz Palminteri. In the fourth and final hour of today's program, Congressman Tom Suozzi joins Bernie & Sid to discuss his Italian heritage and what it means to him to represent that heritage in Congress. Also, Vice President of Sales for Absolute Mortgage gives the boys a call and Bo Dietl quickly stops by the studio to talk about his Italian roots. All this and more on your Monday edition of Bernie & Sid in the Morning, and as always be sure you do not miss Lidia Reports and today's edition of The Peerless Boilers Beat Bernie Contest.

The legacy of the crime drama television series, The Sopranos remains a defining art of storytelling for mob TV shows. We have the genius behind this hit TV series, David Chase as our guest today. As expected, Chase is a twenty-five-time Emmy Awards-winner, seven times Golden Globes winner, and highly acclaimed producer, writer, and director. His forty-year career in Hollywood has contributed immensely to the experience of quality TV. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of Chase, let's do a brief of the HBO 1999 hit show, The Sopranos: Produced by HBO, Chase Films, and Brad Grey Television, the story ran for six seasons, revolving around Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, a New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster, portraying the difficulties that he faces as he tries to balance his family life with his role as the leader of a criminal organization.The series has been the subject of critical analysis, controversy, and parody, and has spawned books, a video game, soundtrack albums, podcasts, and assorted merchandise. During its run, the film earned multiple awards, including the Peabody, Primetime Emmy, and the Golden Globe Awards. Even though David has continued to dominate his craft, with other works like The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away, Not Fade Away, Northern Exposure, Almost Grown, Switch, etc, he is still most known for his television directorial debut, The Sopranos.The genius is back with the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, which stars Alessandro Nivola and James Gandolfini's son Michael Gandolfini as a young Tony Soprano. It has been in theaters and on HBO Max since October 1, 2021.The plot explores the life of Young Anthony Soprano. Before Tony Soprano, there was Dickie Moltisanti, Tony's uncle. Young Anthony Soprano is growing up in one of the most tumultuous eras in Newark's history, becoming a man just as rival gangsters begin to rise up and challenge the all-powerful DiMeo crime family's hold over the increasingly race-torn city.Caught up in the changing times is the uncle he idolizes, Dickie Moltisanti, who struggles to manage both his professional and personal responsibilities-and whose influence over his nephew will help make the impressionable teenager into the all-powerful mob boss we'll later come to know: Tony Soprano.We also talk a bit about David's five-year, first-look deal to create shows for HBO parent WarnerMedia. More culture moments, please!Let's get into the chat, shall we?Enjoy my entertaining conversation with David Chase.

Joe Piscopo, actor, comedian, and host of the Joe Piscopo Show on AM970 The Answer in New York City, joins the Dom Giordano Program to discuss and promote his appearance at the upcoming Philadelphia Columbus Day parade. Piscopo tells us about his love for his Italian-American heritage, and discusses his time spent on Saturday Night Live. Also, Piscopo reveals what his relationship with the great Frank Sinatra was like, after the legend labeled him the “Vice-Chairman of the Board” for his incredible impressions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Submit your real life ghost story by October 19th! Send to askjeff@comeonover.com! Check out the questionable pumpkin patch adventureListen to all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes! AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUDSubscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com! 

Andre DiMino from the Italian American One Voice Coalition joined Gene to discuss the fight against Christoper Columbus.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bringing Passion and Innovation into Estate Planning Lori Vella, Law Office of Lori Vella   – The Sharkpreneur podcast with Seth Greene Episode 700 Lori Vella Lori Vella loves what she does, and it shows in her daily life and work. She takes pride in being an attorney and takes her professional duties seriously. Lori is a native of Rochester, New York (think snow and white hots!). She is the daughter of Sicilians, being a first-generation Italian American as well as the first lawyer in her family.   Lori is truly passionate about assisting hard-working people to ensure they protect their assets. She attended University of Rochester (B.A. Political Science 1996) and Albany Law School of Union University (J.D. 2000). She was 25th in her class after the first year. She attended Stetson Law School for her senior year and decided to permanently leave the snow behind for the sunshine state. Nowadays she travels to and from her offices in Rochester NY and Tampa FL and helps other "snowbirds" with their estates.   Listen to this illuminating Sharkpreneur episode with Lori Vella about bringing passion and innovation into estate planning. Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week's show: ●    How estate planning is for everyone, not just the very wealthy. ●    Why avoiding probate is important for your remaining family members. ●    How people need a durable power of attorney that is very robust. ●    Why beneficiary designations help people avoid probate. ●    How many people drag their feet when it comes to estate planning.   Connect with Lori: Guest Contact Info Twitter @lori_vella Instagram @attorneylori Facebook facebook.com/LawOfficeLoriVella LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/lori-vella-3520744 Links Mentioned: lorivella.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Filmmaker Michael Cavalieri doesn't want to make just another movie. The passionate and proud Italian American, whose career as an actor spans three decades, decided he had had enough of the stereotypical “Italian tough guy” roles that his sharp looks and New York City upbringing seemed to encourage Hollywood producers to type cast him for. With a grant from the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum, he decided to make his own film… one that might honor his Sicilian ancestors. On this week's episode of the Italian American Podcast, we'll sit down with Michael to discuss that labor of love, his new short film “Ritornato," which is based on a true story and shot entirely on location in Limina, Sicily, the town where Cavalieri's grandfather, Agatino, was born. It's the story of a man who goes back to his roots to fulfill a promise made to his dying mother and, in turn, finds out a family secret that will change his life forever. In an ode to the Italian neorealist films of the post-war era, and conscious of a budget coming mostly from his own pocket, this first-time producer/director opted to cast only the local people in the village, not actors, to help him realize his vision! We'll discuss not only this incredible project, but the conditions that inspired Cavalieri to forgo the normal “Hollywood Route," why many Italian American actors struggle with the stereotypical roles they are often offered, and how, perhaps, our community bears some of the blame! Michael Cavalieri created a film to “inspire other Italian-American filmmakers to go back and search for their roots and share their own stories”… perhaps this episode will inspire you to see your own stories in a whole new light! This episode is sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

Pizza Hut is an American multinational restaurant chain and international franchise founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas by Dan and Frank Carney. It provides pizza and other Italian-American dishes, including pasta, side dishes and desserts. The chain has 18,703 restaurants worldwide as of December 31, 2019, making it the world's largest pizza chain in a number of locations. It is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc., one of the world's largest restaurant companies.

Daniel, Shahbaz, & Anthony review Alan Taylor's THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, a prequel film to David Chase's HBO crime drama series The Sopranos. It stars Alessandro Nivola, Leslie Odom Jr., Jon Bernthal, Michael Gandolfini, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, Michela De Rossi, John Magaro, Ray Liotta, and Vera Farmiga. The Many Saints of Newark releases in theatres October 1, 2021 and is also available on HBO Max in the U.S.Listen now on all podcast feeds and on TheMoviePodcast.caContact: hello@themoviepodcast.caYoung Anthony Soprano is growing up in one of the most tumultuous eras in Newark, N.J., history, becoming a man just as rival gangsters start to rise up and challenge the all-powerful DiMeo crime family. Beginning in the late 1960's and leading into the 1970s, The Many Saints of Newark offers a look at the relations between the Italian-American and African-American communities in Newark at a time when the 1967 riots in Newark were happening. Caught up in the changing times is the uncle he idolizes, Dickie Moltisanti, whose influence over his nephew will help shape the impressionable teenager into the all-powerful mob boss, Tony Soprano.FOLLOW USFollow Daniel on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdFollow Shahbaz on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdFollow Anthony on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdFollow The Movie Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTubeThe Movie Podcast is on a mission to hit 200 Apple Podcast reviews, click here to head over to our show page on APPLE PODCASTS and leave us a 5 STAR review!ABOUTThe Movie Podcast is one of Canada's top film and review podcasts. Every week you'll hear film lovers Daniel, Shahbaz, and Anthony discuss the biggest movie news, talk trailers, what's coming soon, ponder a unique topic of show, and speak to special guests from across the film industry. Catch a new episode of The Movie Podcast every Monday and watch out for Review episodes on all the latest movies and series.

Melanie “Mel” Salvatore-August is a former comedy writer, veteran yoga/meditation teacher trainer, Reiki Master, mama of three and author of Fierce Kindness, Be a Positive Force For Change; Kitchen Yoga: Simple Home Practices to Transform Mind, Body & Life and the 2021 release Yoga to Support Immunity: A Mind Body Breathing Guide to Whole Health (Mango Publishing) Born in Pittsburgh PA of an Italian-American family. Her voice is warm, inclusive, practical and filled with joy for life. With her early years as a classically trained actor, comedy/theatre writer-producer and teacher, she creates offerings that cultivate joy, personal growth and freedom elevating everyday challenges, humor and spirit into one. She is the founder of the Fierce Kindness Organization, MelWell Classroom and can join Mel daily on the acclaimed YogaWorks-at-Home platform. learn more at melaniesalvatoreaugust.com. www.melaniesalvatoreaugust.com Yoga to Support Immunity ++++++++ MarisaRadha.com *****Please rate Love Service Wisdom on iTunes.  It helps me to get the guests you want to hear. 

Rita Mattia's great grandfather Petrino B. Mattia was an extraordinary artist. But not all of his paintings were on canvas or paper. This story of her Italian-American family in mid-century New Jersey includes some good eating and good music as well.

Follow us on social media @damianbellino || @rodemanne  Discussed this week: Chris Pratt is playing Italian American icon, Mario  Super Mario Bros movie with John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins Joanna Cassidy told us Bob Hoskins was a member of the mob (YMKHFEp #88) Samantha Mathis was Princess Peach/Daisy in Super Mario Bros (YMKHF Ep #1)  Kathryn Hahn does she really need to be cast as another Jewish woman (Joan Rivers)? Beanie Feldstein cast as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of of Funny Girl   (thank god not Lauren Ambrose who was previously buzzed about for a revival years ago) Behind the Table: The View podcast that we are LOVING Sunny and Ana were diagnosed with COVID moments before Kamala Harris came onstage Joy Behar does NOT know what is happening The Tonys were 4 hours and you had to change channels in between Work in Progress on Showtime is a great show, go watch it Lilly Wachowski who wrote and directed The Matrix and Bound with her sister Lana is an executive producer for Work in Progress Abby worked a lot at Improv Olympic (IO), and the legendary theatre closed during the pandemic but has new buyers and will apparently reopen Showtime positioned Work in Progress opposite The L Word: Generation Q Abby met Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig at a Showtime event Abby loves Kate in Ray Donovan (where she also plays a lesbian) Kristy McNichol as Buddy in Family and Little Darlings with Tatum O'Neal (Abby said she fucked Matt Damon but it was actually Matt Dillon) Jack Klugman was Herbie in the OBC of Gypsy Bionic Woman Julia Sweeney and her Saturday Night Live character Pat, plays a huge part of Work in Progress.  Weird Al plays Julia Sweeney's husband in the Work in Progress universe  Kate James and Samantha Irby write for Work in Progress  Abby loves Miller Lite (Josh Adler get the coveralls) Big Chicks in Chicago is a great queer bar in Chicago Anne loves Mr Peanut We love Bound  Fave queer women: Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Maddow, and Alison Bechdel Bechel's new book: The Secret to Super Human Strength “Ring of Keys” is the lesbian anthem from the musical adaptation of Bechdel's masterpiece, Fun Home Vincent d'Onofriob of Law & Order: Criminal Intent  is Abby's one true love Vincent advised Brooke Smith to make the studio give her a credit card to buy food to gain weight for Silence of the Lambs. As heard on our ep of YMKHF with Brooke Smith (Ep# 85) Teaser for next week's guest:  Abby is in Work in Progress with Julia Sweeney Who starred in It's Pat with Kathy Najimy Who was in Sister Act 1&2 with former YMKHF guest, Wendy Makkena Who was in Serving in Silence: the Margarethe Cammermyer Story with Judy Davis Who was in Celebrity with Allison Janney Who was in The West Wing with next week's guest

Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. A devout Catholic, he received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. He then obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School and spent six years in a Cleveland law firm before becoming a law professor at the University of Virginia. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually becoming an Assistant Attorney General. He spent most of the Carter years teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the first faculty advisers of the fledgling Federalist Society. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1986, he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Reagan and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, becoming the Court's first Italian-American justice.thefacthunter.comfacthunterradio.com

We're back! Since we last released an episode, Mike Miranti has become MIKEY POMODORO. So, Tom decided to interview him about his transformation from "Front of house guy" to a budding restaurateur.  Plus we talk about the "10 New Rules of Dining Right Now".   ****************************** Transcript below: From the NotAFoodie studio which is not actually a studio it is a zoom meeting from I don't know where are you Mikey? In Hell's Kitchen, at our pop up kitchen space. So anyway, it is the NotAFoodie show. I am Tom and I am your co host along with Mike Miranti aka Mikey Pomodoro. Mikey Pomodoro. So I think, Mike, one of the things that I want to talk about about this episode I bet the focus of this episode I think, is the evolution of Mike Miranti. Front of House guy, podcast host extraordinaire, to Mikey Pomodoro restauranteur. Pop Up manager pop up restaurant or chef Chef Smorgasburg like we've got a lot to unpack there. But I think I think we should just get started with some food news first What do you think? Yeah, I meet you that that's the plan that's what we do. You're out of practice because you didn't do the Food News jingle. So what do you what do we have to talk about today? What do we got? Yeah, so pretty much if you've been if you're just coming out of the coma The first thing you needed to do is listen to the new nada foodie show there's been a worldwide pandemic since the end of 2019 what restaurants closed for a year then there was a vaccine where there is a vaccine and a lot of people have taken it but not everybody yet for some reason I thought to get a microchip I didn't know that there was a vaccine alright Because there's a vaccine restaurants are kind of back there's no more 50% seating there's no more outdoor only seating restaurants are back so restaurants are back but it's not the same as what it was pre COVID and food and wine put out a really like perfect Instagram post like a 10 slide post about the new rules of dining out Yeah this is awesome I came across this the other day and just to be clear you and I started talking about food news we started talking about just the shit that servers have to deal with like that they've had to deal with historically right like you go to a restaurant people see it people are entitled and you know that's not even talking about the people that don't tip but the people who you know as my my daughter would call them Karen's but like just people who are complaining who who have the sense of entitlement and it's gotten worse across the board for for everything right like people are understandably angry people are you know, frustrated with the world and things start to open up a little bit and they there's this trend I guess or this this immediate like you know urge to get back to Oh, everything should be perfect again, you know, when on the back end there's there's a lot of shit that's not perfect. We lost how many fallow hundreds of 1000s of people you know, died, that there's no so that means there's a labor shortage to there's a labor shortage are more people to go back to work? Yes. Which is a really like, cynical way of looking at it. But it's true. But also people are choosing not to people who might not feel comfortable going back to work in a restaurant where you're dealing with people with dealing with the public. You know, I know me personally like I've got kids at home who are not vaccinated yet I would probably feel uncomfortable if I had a job working in a restaurant like that. I had to go to a conference in Nashville, back in August, which is like the breakthrough COVID capital of the fucking world because it's just crazy, unmasked unvaccinated mass of people and I, I quarantined at home, before seeing my kids, like I can't imagine having to do that every single day and having to go to work and being treated like shit and, you know, by customers and everything like that. I think it's just, we're at a we're at a breaking point. So that led us you and I to talk about this post that came out from food and wine. It was an Instagram post and once you take us through it, yeah, so it's 10 words. Yeah, it's 10 rules. Number one, the customers not always right. Which is the truth. The customer Usually wrong. And also people hate asking servers questions when they go out, and then they don't have as good of the time. You and I are generally friends because you asked me things that Christos though. So like this is it's interesting because I, I've always struggled with, like, I'm not gonna complain about certain things, but I will talk to my servers and I'll talk to chefs and I'll ask for recommendations. And I'll, you know, at the other day, I had some really bad service at a place that I'm not going to blow up their spot and but I'll but I sent the manager a note, because I feel like they want they want to know, right? Like, I'm not asking for anything for free. I'm not demanding things. Like sometimes I'll tell if I had really bad service or like a bad dinner meal, I'll pay for it. And then after I paid for it, I'll bring the manager over. Oh, that's exactly what I did. I paid for it. Yeah. That's it, I paid for it. I and I, you know, and I said, Hey, I know that you're a new restaurant that's been around for only, you know, a few months, I know that you are beloved, you're developing a relationship or a reputation of being beloved in the community. And every experience I've had up until this point was good, but I just want to let you know that this is really screwed up what you did like this, this was a really bad day. And everybody has a bad day. So anyway, the customer is not always right. Yeah. What's the natural? Big 20% is minimum now? I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with them. I also like when I kit I tip 20% after tax, that's usually like 25% Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've always kept 20% after tax sometimes. I when when I first started going out, I was tipping like, 50%. I was just, I felt so grateful. I know, right? Well, I mean, it's not like I was going out to like, you know, a like, and well, let me just say, I'm not tipping 50% of the bill, if I'm going to a restaurant that I know is owned by some rich person. What about when you go to EMP for vegan? Yeah, no, not at all. So pay $350 I will not Don't they have no tipping and keep Danny Meyer of like the old anywhere. method for that. Anyway, number three. Number three, be clear about food allergies? Uh, yeah. But servers should always ask allergies too, because people are stupid. So you, if you ask them, they'll more they'll be more likely to tell you then if they just have it. Right? Well, and this all I think the ethos behind this is be clear, because restaurants have always had to work on razor thin margins. But like, you don't want to be sending things back. You don't want to be causing a problem when people are short staffed and barely getting by. Right. So be offended about some kitchen. Yeah, no, exactly. And so the next one is use your phone for memories, not calls. With your pictures. Yeah, take take pictures, put them on Instagram, take a phone call in the restaurant. I know. I could not believe that this was a new rule of dining. This is always my rule of dining my phone. I take a photo when things come out, but it goes into my pocket or it gets turned over upside down. If I'm ever on my phone. While eating dinner. You can come over and slap me. Yeah, if you're if someone calls you to pick up like, Hey, I'm out to dinner. I'll call you back. And that's it. Yeah, yeah. If I go to a table and they're on the phone, I just leave and then they'll get me when they're off when I'm when they're off the phone. Number five is saving that reservation. Oh my god, I this is something that I am always like, I think my wife gets annoyed with me. Because if I'm going to be 10 minutes late for a reservation, I will call the restaurant and let them know. I am I know I'm a little bit crazy with that. You can give a rest you could be 15 minutes late to a reservation. Yeah, I think that's the that that's the absolute most I think that's totally acceptable after that. It's really not fair. But I mean, obviously, restaurants close earlier now. So if they're closing 10, and you have a 945 reservation or 930 reservation, and you get there at 945 You better get your ordering quick because they're so close. But I think that the first sentence on this slide that food Why put out as restaurants simply can not sustain the financial losses of no shows, particularly right now. I mean, that's something to keep in mind when you make a reservation, especially at a place where you've got limited staff, you've got limited food that people have, you know that they've ordered that the restaurant has ordered to cook for you. Like that's all based on your reservation. So respect the reservation number six patients vacation patients. I agree with that. 100% I mean, I think my first dining experience my first indoor dining experience, Post getting vaccinated definitely took probably 15 to 20% longer than normal and I was fine with it. I am happy to be out I'm happy to be to be partaking in the economy I'm happy to have people cook for me and serve me. It is a privilege right to be able to go out and do this absolutely. Just I miss it so much. During quarantine I miss going out and like just having a meal night like dreaming about diner breakfast like the idea of someone just like making me eggs and toast in home fries and sausage. Yeah, I mean you know what i like? I love a dirty dark tight bar like yeah, that is that like when I say tight I mean like your shoulder to shoulder with people. Like when people ask me what I want to do after you know getting vaccinated I want to be in a tight bar with like, shoulder to shoulder people that screaming with some drunk next to me about whatever sports is on the TV. You know what I did? Like two three weeks ago. What I took I took over the jukebox and Billy markwest Oh Billy marks that is we could have a whole episode about billion marks. I can you know talk to you about the the sex worker friends that I made there even though they would they would be beginning their shift when I was finishing my shift. I was not a sex worker. I was working at a media company but I would come in at like seven or eight o'clock at night. There'd be the sex workers gearing up for the evening. What a great place that place. Anyway, never said when you when you play music, they talk to you about what you play. Oh, yeah, they're like big like music guy big like all these guys. So did you know for a while they were the only bar in New York that you're allowed to smoke in? Yeah, you told me that I didn't. told my friend that. Yeah, the police had no employees. They just had the two owners. It was Billy and mark. Number seven smaller menus on the order of the day. Totally fine. I feel like that was the trend. Pre COVID. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm fine with that. I'm always like, Hey, man, give me one of everything on the menu. You know, don't come on. Anyway, sorry, I'm cutting you off my dad. Hey, don't weaponize your online review? Yes, uh, yeah, that's just called being a good human being. I know, I know, I and I also will go as I very rarely have left bad reviews online for restaurants. I, I followed a lot of food writers and food critics who just decided they're going to stop reviewing restaurants, like they'll go out and they'll highlight restaurants, but they're not going to if there isn't something negative to say they're probably not going to do it right now. Because we're in a place where these, you know, these these restaurants, these businesses are trying to survive and you know, do they need someone some idiot writing a one star Yelp review, like is not helpful. I mean, okay, well, one, remember in the beginning of the pandemic, the picture of the fajitas, and it was like, we've been waiting for 20 minutes, she can't eat her fajitas without cheese or something like that. Yeah, something stupid like that. That's how all those people come off as well. Like that's that's the problem with Yelp reviews is that like, you can't trust the person who's writing it to begin with. And if someone didn't get their, you know, their iced tea with enough ice cubes in it, they're going to leave a one star review on Yelp and that one star review is going to be into it's going to be put into the weighted average of the the overall review of the so I never trust any, any of that stuff. We got a one star review on seamless or grubhub. And it was like food was not good. Okay, that was it. Sorry. Alright, number nine. Prove your status. That means if you're asked to show proof of vaccine, do it don't give people a hard time for enforcing regulations. No matter how you feel about whether you should be vaccinated or not. It's the same as like being 18 and going into a bar and being like, why can't I drink? Why can I serve in the army but I can't drink it's not the market. It's not up to the bartender. Yep, it's not That's it. That's it. That's a cut it's it's it's that cut and dry. Number 10. Being kind, keep timeliness and or directness and kindness and communication. Top of Mind. I think the next sentence is recognize the humanity of every worker. That is something that was gone for a long time. Just because you're paying somebody to serve you a meal doesn't make you better than them doesn't mean that you get to not kinds to them. I mean that was always always my rule when I was looking for a partner in life is watch how they treated the waitstaff at a restaurant and if they didn't treat them with like the utmost kindness and respect then they weren't the person for me so anyway those are the 10 new rules as put out by food and wine magazine this week couple well like yesterday they put this out but yeah, I love that Yeah, shout out my friend chef marker CS for putting me on to a really good love marker See? Anyway on friend of the pod Mikey so Mikey pop I'm gonna call you Mikey from now on because it's Mikey pomodoro I never called you Mikey I use called you Mike. You know, I don't like Mikey right? But I can't gotta get used to it. It's a really good name. It's a really good name for the business. But when I introduce myself to be pious might Alright, well, we're transitioning you are no longer for this segment. At least. You are no longer Mike Moran D co host of the nada foodie show you Mikey pomodoro restaurant tour. And I want to hear your story Mikey. pomodoro. Talk about so. I really I find it fascinating. And I'll set you up pandemic hit you. We're not working in restaurants anymore. So you decided you can start making chicken parm kits that you're going to sell. You're going to make chicken farms and and little speakeasies, little pop ups, and sell them to your friends. And then that evolved? So take it from there. Yeah, so it was a couple of things to start to start like I was, I was so bored. I was going I was by myself. I watched all of Netflix. I listened to all of Spotify. I was going out of my fucking mind. I was cooking a lot. And my friend asked me if I would cook dinner for him and his pregnant wife to surprise them. For it was her birthday slash she was pregnant. So I I pay I charged him like 150 bucks with food and everything. And I went and I cooked for them. And that was like the first Mikey pomodoro thing. And then my other friends turned their backyard into the speakeasy bar and they wanted to get chefs. So I came and that's how the chicken parm sliders were born. And then I started selling the chicken parm sliders out of my apartment in Harlem to as a kid, and the chickenpox sliders are not just chicken parm like it's a ground chicken with proprietary blend of herbs and spices and deep fried and then you know layered on with the new middle parm farmed up. So it's not just Potato, potato so it is it is very it's very unique. It's not like you know, not your Italian deli chicken parmesan. I say when you're eating it, you know it's a chicken parm, but it's like no chicken parm we've ever had. All right, there you go. And those got they got rave reviews. You ended up going on to barstool and supply yes and chicken farm. I've done barstool twice. I just catered for them on 421 says like, Hey, guys, what's up? Yeah, pop up. And I did barstool breakfast last December. Nice night. So the morning show. So how did that transition from selling kits to putting together a few menu items and opening up a pop up, I needed to kind of put this into high gear I so pandemic kit, there was no vaccine. I knew restaurants or restaurants aren't going away. Like as nothing's ever actually going to kill restaurants. As a whole, there's always going to be some sort of rest there's always gonna be like a McDonald's or something. So I thought about one was quick service restaurants. I've always been really into them as a business concept. And there really isn't a space for Italian American fast casual, quick service restaurants, there's pizza, but there is no space for that. And then that was probably the vessel that post pandemic restaurants would do the best in because it's mainly food that's like made for travel. for delivery. It's not really like like people will go to Chipotle and like sit down but most people are going to pull their food back to the office. Right so so I wanted to put together a menu that would travel well and still be in that quick service space feel like it would serve as restaurant. So I wrack my brain a little bit I put together a nice menu. I called my friend Marco to come in and do this with me. Because I knew I couldn't do it by myself. You can't one person can't run a restaurant, right? That's impossible. And I don't have any money size like I can't like hire somebody. So I brought him on as my partner and we did the the metro taco pop ups and bar stills every Sunday. Yeah, so so you guys, and I, we might have talked about this on a previous episode, but we did. You basically took over one of your friends, Mexican restaurants. You took it up. You took it over for lunch service. All day, Sunday, all day Sunday. Every Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday where indoor seating wasn't allowed. The second Sunday was Valentine's Day where they just had brought back indoor seating at like 30% or whatever the capacity was. Then the last two Sundays we sold out. Nice, nice. Yeah, I mean, and that's where I got to experience that Mikey pomodoros Chicken sliders and a whole bunch of other stuff. Go through the menu real quick. Yeah, well, like I was gonna say go through the original menu and then how it's evolved. Okay, so the original menu was nine items. It was chicken parm, meatballs. Mmm, string beans, spaghetti. pomodoro. rigatoni. vaca. mozzerella, corrodes suply Mexican chocolate cannolis we added, and I feel like I'm missing one thing. Oh, chicken tutor band aid, which is a grilled chicken piccata sandwich. That's also like a bat that evolved at the next location. Because we're in the Indian restaurant. So we did in the tandoor oven, so is more like a Mediterranean. Slovakia most nice I that's. So that's something that also I've been fascinated with like your first pop up was in the Mexican kitchen. Your second pop up was in an Indian kitchen. No, we were the first pop up forgetting Mexican kitchen. The first pop up was in a gluten free kitchen. Oh wow. couldn't use the deep fryer. We had a big ass heavy bottom pot. We filled with oil and had a thermometer a candy thermometer in the oil to monitor the oil. Yeah, but you're frying for four people. I know. I say that. I mean, you've never been to Christmas Eve at my house. There are 4050 people it's like doing a you know dinner service. Yeah, that's legit. But so so the first one was gluten free. The second one was that's how the Mexican chocolate came in. And the third Yeah, I thought it would be like a cute thing to do like, chocolate cannoli. And they were fire. Nice and yeah. So now now that pop up the pop up was at an Indian restaurant in Manhattan and that ended at the beginning of September and now you're doing smorgasburg for those of you who don't know what smorgasburg is once you explain it, like okay, so smorgasburg is a free outdoor food vending Hall. It's on Saturdays it's at Marsha p Johnson State Park it's it's free to walk around it's not free to eat food but it's absolutely free to enter Yeah, um and there's dozens of vendors just like me all small businesses who are there selling their wares and all the food is pretty good I've had by now because I went once to just like hang out and talk to some people and try some food and then last weekend we get to all the food is very good it's nice being around a lot of people who are like putting everyone's putting out like a good product yeah it's always been a great little you know addition to that neighborhood and Williamsburg and I mean and they've also expanded they've got a business smorgasburg Park on Sundays was like there's also yeah there's there's one in LA though there's one CCD there a Yeah, they're all over it's a brand now. But um, I remember going in the early days when like, I would go to meatball shop and the orange cine brothers were there you know, brothers were never there. They want to talk. I know when I sat down with the two guys two owners of smorgasburg I was just like saying brands was like oh, yeah, like, like the araghchi brothers are super impressive. They're like we've never had them. Wow, like that. Yeah, well there that's a weird man. They're they're super impressive brand. They don't have a single brick and mortar location. Yeah, but they have like permanent locations. There'll be someone differences. Yeah. That's awesome, though. So So what's the menu like at smorgasburg? So we ran a four item menu we did on chicken sliders back to chicken parm sliders, mozzarella and Kuroda and suplee which are rolling style rice balls and mozzarella. crozes and deep fried grilled cheese. Um, and let me last week was a shit show. None of our equipment worked. We did. So we had the fissara Yeah, I saw I saw you do you know he did something about it or what I admire. We didn't have the propane tank or anything, right? So there's a propane guy there. He sold us the propane tank, he sold us the regulator. He sold us the hose. But the hose didn't have the piece to fit into the fryers regulator. It just fit into the actual fryer. And then the machine wasn't regulating the gas. So it turned on and like butane going and everything running great, but we get too hot. And that would turn itself off. Yeah. So it took us a while to figure out what was going on. And what we did was we were batch frying chicken and suply then the broiler that I bought. I just look I look like a nice broiler on Amazon. I good reviews and big and not particularly too expensive. And we get there we open it up. And it's a 220 watt European broiler. So we couldn't use that. So we didn't have like one of the it had like a European figure. Yeah. And Marco's mom and stepdad drove from Sunset Park. And they brought two little Breville toaster ovens. Oh man. So that's actually what we have to rock out with this weekend too. And then we'll have a new brother thing in by next the following weekend. Oh, wow. Yeah. Which is fine. It's okay. Is it Saturday and Sunday? Sunday's Prospect Park that's right so Saturday night doing that you're not doing that so you just do it Saturday so you got Yeah, the amount of work that you have to put in just to do you know one day Saturday it's a lot it's you're essentially opening a restaurant like it but um the guy next to us set up his entire booth by himself in like an hour and he had a bunch of stuff he's like yeah, it just took practice and I'm not between me and Mark I'm not too worried about us like getting it The hardest thing is when I have to parallel park a u haul that's the app some nice well that's the one of the perils of having to run a run a pop up stand or a restaurant in New York not the giant truck Yes. So what's next what's next with for Mikey pomodoro what like if I all of a sudden um, sell one of my NF T's and I've got you know $20 million and I'm going to give you you know half a million dollars or a million dollars what do you want we're gonna we're gonna open a place in the Lower East Side and brand it and do everything we need to do and get the first one going and then hopefully open multiple ones throughout the East damn East Coast into like the South they can help shape right right so what's your what's your Who's your like audience who's your anyone that likes food? But it sounds like with all the fried stuff I feel like you are the Lower East Side is perfect for you. I feel like you're not a late night when you're you know, but well one Yes, absolutely. Well, let me let me back up. There's there's stuff that isn't Friday we had I just meant what I meant by that went out and again, I'm backing up a little bit. The the stuff that from smorgasburg is Yeah, would be awesome. Drunk food, bar food, walking around food. smorgasburg stuff. We're not doing eggplant parm, because you I we don't want to carry like three types of bread. I don't want to carry like a semolina hero on top of everything else. And I don't want to do like an eggplant parm in a tray that you have to like, walk around. Yeah, go leave and sit down and get one. Like there's like, there's a guy who does Thai fried chicken inside of a pineapple. Yeah, like that's awesome. And it's like a whole like, wow, oh my god. And then there's like a Bart. There's one guy that does barbecue. And that's another train where you have to like go and sit down, but it's barbecue. Yeah, I don't think people want I want to try that. By the way. that's a that's a good American barbecue place. No, no, it's called bark barbecue. Yeah, I thought it was them. No. Okay. No. Um, and then like an eggplant parm, I don't know. I can't imagine that being a thing that like gets people to sit down. I'm cracking up because I don't know if you ever saw the movie, the jerk which I think is one of the funniest movies in the world. And when he Steve Martin is in it, and it's like a 70s movie and you know, he's tired. He's working at a carnival and he's like, Yeah we're right over there right next to the pizza in a cup guy and then they're like pizza in a cup because oh yeah that guy's good he put the other pizza in a cup guy out of business but yeah I know that mine yes yes so yeah it's I understand you need you need that walking around food you know yeah cool so that's why we're not going to ask them but we are going to do meatball which is ordered another soup kettle we're gonna do meatballs this weekend too nice. I mean who doesn't love a meatball especially on winter day like like a cold as the weather gets cooler you'll you'll sell more of those. That's awesome. So and so when I sell when so what we're gonna do is we're gonna mint one of these episodes as an audio NFT and our our listeners are going to be part owners of this NF T which we're going to then convert into an NF T of Mikey pomodoro and I'm half joking but now that I say 85 eath that's like oh 85 eath yeah oh my god that's like you know $150,000 so we're we're in cool well I mean so is it this is something like you're you're still a little bit involved in the New York you know you're working jobs to sort of keep things moving during the day Yeah, you got bills to pay but like this is what you want to do you want to open Mikey pomodoro you want open Yeah, I'm not I'm not doing this for fun. Yeah, I'm doing this because I believe in it and I really like I 20 at the point of 2021 January 1 2021. I was like, Okay, this year is not about making money. It's about proving the concept. And I went from in under a year selling chicken parm sliders I have my apartments being a smorgasburg vendor so that's awesome that's good. We haven't even talked about that people will not like your review but he came by I got people's Instagram shout out yeah of course. Well I mean so the like the meatballs actually that's what he had I think that the what that says about you is that you know peep people can feel your passion you know people can feel it they can when you're out there you're promoting it you're you're you know I could feel it on Twitter I haven't eaten chicky POM slider in in seven eight months eight months you know I haven't been to I couldn't go to the pop up in in Manhattan when you had it I just wasn't around the city those days but I'm excited to the town during lunch and I couldn't I didn't I don't live here I don't live here during the summertime you were only here during the summer that Yeah, no I know but um but I but I do like I do feel like I can feel your enthusiasm for everything and Pete wells when I when I read that you could tell that he that felt the enthusiasm to and so every everyone should go check out i mean it's it's it's just it's awesome what you've done everyone needs to go to smorgasburg and check it out to the booty and we're back. I don't know why is it and we're back where I'm where we don't go anywhere and it's just to the listener it's just a quick edit it's not like we have radio I know the old radio show and I called you Mikey you're not Mikey now now you're back to being Mike Moran D So Mike you've got a busy day ahead of you. Um, we were going to a welding store to find the part to put the hose into the regulator. Well as we always end our episodes, I know you've got a busy day so I want to end it wrap it up for like, What are you drinking? What are you going to have as a cocktail tonight to to celebrate your success and in finding the proper coupler for your propane tanks? So I think um, we used to say we're never going to repeat cocktails. Okay, we've got a whole bunch of new pandemic. Yes. Um, so I'm going to repeat a cocktail. Well, I mean, the theme of the pandemic is just repetition. So I'm fine with it. Good. So I'm gonna find a nice talented bartender to meet me in aviation. Oh, my favorite cocktail? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. gin, lemon marish you know, the core literal comme des violet. It is with with America. Good, nourishing, you're chairing it. It's so good. It's acidic. It's bright. It has all the complexities of gin. My absolute favorite things especially like when it's still really fucking hot out, and it shouldn't be like it's really good weather. Good CBH weather. What about you? I? Well, I am I discovered a cocktail. That or a variation on a cocktail last week. So last week. I decided we had a bunch of acorn squash that we got from our farm and I made a corn squash and yoky like fresh acorn squash and I saw that some duck eggs that I had from another farm. So like really fresh and yucky. And then we made a Brazil so it was a combination of like a fall meal. And then grilled pretzel like summertime. It was a pork line stuff with provolone and prosciutto and some spices and things like that. And while I was making all that stuff, I was like, you know, I want something that's sort of fall ish, but something that is also like a little summer ish. And I ended up with I wanted something that was a little bit more Amaro or Omari sort of flavor, Omari is yes, so I ended up with a with a Toronto so do you know what Toronto? Is this spelt like the city? Yes. And it is Oh, no, I don't know it's right. fernet Branca simple syrup and some bit Angostura bitters, right for net simple and historic so it's like a like a little elevated. Yes, it's like an old fashioned we put some fernet in it. But what I did was I instead of using simple syrup, I use a little bit of maple syrup because I thought that would go really well first of all with the squash Second of all, just with the Canadian theme of the drink, and but I wanted since it was it was hot out. I wanted a little bit of a little bit of spiciness to it. So I added some cayenne pepper in there. So it's cayenne pepper and maple maple syrup instead of simple syrup, right, and fernet Branca and because it's Toronto, but it was a little bit spicy. I couldn't decide whether I was going to call it the Drake or the hotline bling or something like that. But that's how the hotline bling that's that's my so that's my new cocktail for that and I'm going to make that tonight. How's the ghost pepper tequila? Honestly, I open it once like once every few months, I take a sip and my lips are burning. You know what I did though, this summer. I just I diluted it down quite a bit. And I made some like, which is more tequila well when I made cocktails, and I diluted it with more tequila when I made cocktails. Like I didn't dilute the actual bottle that you made for me. Yeah, but Oh man, I gotta tell you it is. It is. So for those of you who don't know Mike gave me a ghost pepper. Tequila like a bottle of tequila with a ghost pepper in it that and I left the ghost pepper only so I left the ghost pepper in there for one day and then I was like I tasted it. I was like oh my god, this is like undrinkable. It's so hot. But this is the time of year Maggie I am I am a Calabrian chili pepper Baron right now. And I ordered I ordered the wrong variety from my seed guy in Sicily. So I ordered the little they're tiny tiny little ones are called Satan's kiss peppers or devils kiss. Way too spicy. So what I'm doing is I'm drying them and I've been experimenting with them I made like a little bit of a chili paste a fermented chili paste with some basil and garlic. But with the majority of them I'm just drying them and grinding them so like I'll have this really good crushed red peppers. But my hands I forgot to wear gloves the other day and literally for like three days. I my hands if I go anywhere near my lips, or my tongue or my eyes like putting contact lenses in. I'm crying for a half hour. It's incredible. It's like It's like bear spray like you know the Bear Bear powered pepper spray. me Yeah. So anyway, um, so we're gonna keep trying to do more episodes not a foodie. Now that we both have semi regular schedules, we're gonna find time to do it. Yeah, we're gonna try to do them like once every couple weeks. Thanks for thanks for recording and thanks for listening, everybody and we'll we'll talk to you soon. See you soon. Bye bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai

It's no surprise to longtime listeners of the Italian American Podcast just how much we love our Southern Italian roots and this week's guest, Valarie D'Elia, is seeking to bring our ancestral home to people in a tangible, living way. Valarie is an award-winning multimedia travel journalist and content provider who specializes in both Italy and ancestral travel. In her latest project, “Saving Southern Italy,” which is part of the National Italian American Foundation's Russo Brothers Film Forum, Valarie turns her directorial eye to the abandoned properties scattered throughout the region. When the late stages of the pandemic brought her back to Italy in search of a home to buy and renovate, Valarie discovered other expats who were also going through a similar process of rewarding and honoring their roots. Realizing that building a home in Southern Italy is a way of building gratitude, Valarie sought out other Italian Americans seeking concrete ways of honoring their heritage, such as establishing businesses in Italy or even populating an artist-in-residence borgo. In true Italian American Podcast style, we even veer off into a discussion of the foods of Southern Italy, including a spirited debate about caciocavallo and a foray into the ins-and-outs of the Italian bureaucracy and why overcoming the frustrations is well worth the efforts! If you've ever imagined yourself moving to Italy or starting a business there, you won't want to miss this episode! Valarie can be contacted via her website, www.travelwithval.com or by using this contact form. This episode was sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

Come along for the ride as Cynthia talks about all things cooking with celebrity chef Sophia Manatakis.  They talk about the importance of fresh ingredients, tips for the home cook and much more...including some insight into her time on Chopped and the Family Food Showdown. Sophia Manatakis is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City and owner of Uncle Nick's Greek Cuisine, NYC. Manatakis is a Greek and Italian-American chef who has appeared on the Food Network's Chopped and winner of the Family Food Showdown cooking competition. Manatakis is also a recipient of the Orthodox Christian Network “30 under 30” entrepreneurship award. Sophia has recently published Our Greek Kitchen, the first of many cook-calendars, hasa thriving catering business, and is a private culinary instructor (chefsoph.com). Sophia's intensity and passion for culinary art is unmeasurable.   Instagram: @ChefSoph https://www.chefsoph.com Sophia likes:  https://www.flavcity.com Is it time to make some changes in your life? Do you want to stop the madness and get on track with your health? Maybe coaching is right for you. I've helped many people gain their health back over the years, and would love to talk with you. Just reach out with the link below to get on my schedule. From time to time I have openings for new clients and accept them on a first come first serve basis. Book a Discovery Call

Photo: Vista of fishing boats in Palermo, Sicily. Veduta della pescheria di Palermo in Sicilia CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Russell Shorto #Unbound: the complete, forty-minute interview, April 22, 2021. Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Hardcover – February 2, 2021, by Russell Shorto   (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Smalltime-Story-My-Family-Mob/dp/0393245586/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. The best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You're a writer―what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting―but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author's great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life―and wife―in a Pennsylvania mining town. It's a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltimedraws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father―Tony, the mobster's son―as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony's health deteriorates, the book becomes an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.                       8 black-and-white illustrations

Listen to all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes!    AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUD   Subscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com! 

This week's episode of The Italian American Podcast takes listeners on a journey through the Neapolitan Sceneggiata with special guest Dr. Reba Wissner, who is assistant professor of the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Dr. Wissner's specialty is the Neapolitan Sceneggiata, which is a form of musical drama typical of Naples. Beginning as a form of musical theater after World War I, it was also adapted for cinema; sceneggiata films became especially popular in the 1970s and contributed to the genre becoming more widely known outside Naples. We talk about this “musical soap opera” and how the Sceneggiataplots revolve around melodramatic themes drawing from the Neapolitan culture and tradition, such as passion, jealousy, betrayal, personal deceit and treachery, honor, vengeance, and life in the world of petty crime. We also discuss the great talents of this genre, including Alfredo Bascetta, Mario Merola, and Gino Merignola. We also discover how the Sceneggiata became synonymous with artistic expressions of Italian immigrant culture in the United States and how the New York City area was the “hot spot” for this type of theater. We also compare it to other forms of immigrant theater, including Irish, German, and Yiddish, and discuss ways that this form of art can be preserved for years to come. And we also discuss how this artform made its way into one of the best-known movies of all-time, The Godfather Part II, and how Little Italy's longest-running store, E. Rossi & Co., played a role in preserving Sceneggiata for future generations. If you're looking for a very special way to broaden your Italian American cultural horizons, you won't want to miss this week's episode! Discover More: “Italian Birds of Passage” by Simona Frasca “La Tradizione la Sceneggiata” by Mario Merola “Mario Merola canta Napoli” by Mario Merola “Le ragazze di New York” by Alfredo Bascetta “Se n'è fuiuto 'o banchiere” by Alfredo Bascetta “I ricordi de lu primmo amore” by Gino Meringola The Godfather Part 2 on Amazon Video This episode was sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

RENEE TAYLOR BIOTaylor worked as a comedian in the early 1960s at the New York City nightclub Bon Soir. Her opening act was a then-unknown Barbra Streisand. In 1968, Taylor played an actress portraying Eva Braun in Mel Brooks' feature film The Producers, a role she got while performing the play Luv with Gene Wilder, whom Brooks decided to cast as protagonist Leo Bloom.Taylor and her husband, Joseph Bologna, co-wrote the Broadway hit comedy Lovers and Other Strangers and received Oscar nominations for having written the 1970 film adaptation. In 1971, the couple co-wrote and starred in the film Made for Each Other. A 1985 offering of theirs included the two-character comedy title It Had to Be You. The story concerns two entertainers who meet, fall in love, eventually irritate each other, and decide to marry and collaborate on playwriting together. Taylor and Bologna also co-wrote and starred in the television show Bedrooms, a series of four skits on love which Jeff Jarvis in People called "cute (if slightly off-color)." In 1996, after a several year hiatus, Taylor and her husband co-wrote and acted in the film Love Is All There Is, the story of two Italian-American families who must learn to get along when their son and daughter decide to get married. In the mid-1990s, Taylor and Bologna wrote and produced the off-Broadway play Bermuda Avenue Triangle. From 1992-94, Taylor played the overbearing Jewish mother of Brian Benben's lead character on the HBO series Dream On. In 1993, she was cast as the mother of Richard Lewis, and the ex-wife of Don Rickles, in the Fox sitcom Daddy Dearest, which was canceled after a two-month run in the fall. Also in 1993, Taylor was slated for sporadic guest appearances on the new CBS sitcom The Nanny, playing Sylvia Fine, the mother of Fran Drescher's title character. After the cancellation of Daddy Dearest, Taylor was upgraded to a recurring cast member during the first season of The Nanny and eventually a full-time cast member by the third season. Her roles on the two broadcast network series were concurrent with her work on Dream On. Taylor is most often recognized for her role in The Nanny. Her character is intent on helping daughter Fran find a husband and has a passionate love for food. Taylor's husband, Joseph Bologna, made two guest appearances on The Nanny. First, as an egomaniacal actor named Allan Beck, who tormented Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) and second, in the final season, Bologna again guest-starred as a doctor and admirer of Sylvia in the episode "Maternal Affairs". In recent years, Taylor has guest-starred as Ted Mosby's neighbor, Mrs. Matsen, on How I Met Your Mother. She also had a guest-starring role on the Disney show, Shake It Up, portraying a cranky elderly woman, Mrs. Lacasio, in a retirement home. She also had a guest-starring role on the Nickelodeon show, Victorious as Robbie's cranky grandmother who needed Robbie's help with the internet. In addition to her numerous guest-starring appearances, Taylor has worked as a voice actor as the character Mrs. Start in the animated feature film Ice Age: The Meltdown, and in a recurring role as Linda's mother Gloria in the animated Fox series Bob's Burgers. Taylor also played Martha Benson in the film Opposite Day, released in 2009. Taylor also appeared on Fran Drescher's latest show Happily Divorced as the best friend of Fran's mother. In 2011, Taylor was cast in the short-lived Fox cartoon Allen Gregory, in which she voiced the character of Principal Gottlieb. In 2013, she starred in the Tyler Perry film Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor as Ms. Waco Chapman, the owner of Chapman drug company. In 2016, Taylor starred in the Netflix movie The Do-Over with Adam Sandler as the role of Mrs. Kessler and in the TV show Rock in a Hard Place. Recently, Taylor appeared in the 2017 film How To Be A Latin Lover. Taylor had a role in Tango Shalom, which she acted alongside her husband, in his final film role before his death. ABOUT TANGO SHALOM, NOW IN THEATERS Tango Shalom was directed by Gabriel Bologna, son of Renée Taylor and the late Joseph Bologna. The cast includes Golden Globe Nominee Lainie Kazan (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Oscar and Emmy Award-winner Renée Taylor (Adam Sandler's The Do Over, The Producers, The Nanny), Karina Smirnoff (Dancing With The Stars), Joseph Bologna (My Favorite Year, Blame It On Rio, Big Daddy, Lovers and Other Strangers), Jos Laniado Claudio Laniado (Mudbound), Bern Cohen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and Judi Beecher (Taken 3, Family is Family, La Garconne). Synopsis: When a female Tango dancer (Smirnoff) asks a Rabbi (Jos Laniado) to enter a dance competition, there's one big problem-due to his Orthodox beliefs, he's not allowed to touch her! Desperately in need of splitting the prize money to save his Hebrew school from bankruptcy, they develop a plan to enter the competition without sacrificing his faith. The bonds of family and community are tested one dazzling dance step at a time in this lighthearted fable. In Los Angeles, the film can be seen at Landmark Theaters on Pico and Town Center 5 in Encino, and September 10 opens at The Laemmle in Newhall. In New York, at AMC Empire 25, The Village East Cinema By Angelika, and also opens on September 10 at The Cobble Hill 5 and Williamsburg Cinemas Brooklyn, Kew Garden 6 Queens, and Malverne 5 and Roslyn 4 on Long Island. Canadian Cinéma Cineplex locations include Forum et VIP - Montreal, Empress Walk - Toronto, and Fifth Avenue Cinemas - Vancouver. Tango Shalom finished its three day weekend engagement better than expected at $20,581, with an astonishing per theater average of $5,145 (second best only to Marvel's Shang-Chi). Tango Shalom also claims bragging rights to the best 2021 exclusive opening, as well having the best PTA, this Memorial Day to Labor Day summer season. Showing daily gross increases this weekend (Saturday +32% from Friday and Sunday +54% from Saturday) boasts to be the number one independent film release this weekend. On Friday, September 10, the interfaith movie that promotes peace, tolerance and inclusion, will expand onto more screens in New York and Los Angeles, and also across Canada in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver with additional screens to be announced soon. Here's the Tango Shalom trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6w9qkvKca8

Get a free month at The Saltdrop! Use code “Mauro” Watch and workout along with Jeff, Emily and Dino! See the actual Jelly Bee for YOURSELF! Click Here Check out Jeff's Homemade Chicken Shawarma https://www.instagram.com/p/CTf6DzULwKx/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Listen to the new Malvone Zone Song and all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes!   AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUD Subscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com! 

If you've visited Italy at some point in the last 75 years, and if you arrived in ‘il Bel Paese' by air, chances are you've traveled with Alitalia, which has been the official Italian national airline since 1947. And, if you're like co-hosts Rossella, John, and Pat, you've got countless memories of returning to the Motherland “Italian Style” aboard this legendary airline. But, as of October 15, the famed carrier will be no more. After decades of financial difficulties, and numerous near misses on the executioner's block, Alitalia's world recognized green-white-and-red livery will descend from the skies one last time, and then pass quietly into memory. Sure, it'll be replaced by a new Italian flag carrier called ITA, but for thousands of Italian American families, Alitalia will always be remembered as the airline that brought them and their ancestors to a new life in the New wWorld, or carried them and their offspring back to the old country in its quintessentially Italian way. Join us as we raise a toast, and share history, memories, and some surprising facts about this treasured Italian brand, while we look to diagnose exactly why the loss of Alitalia is hitting so close to home. We're sending Italy's famed “Flying Arrows” off in style, and you won't want to miss it! This episode is sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

Party's here! Heather and Jameson take a break from the MTV timeline to explore current programming with millennial pop-culture expert, Julie Mirwis, as they watch Jersey Shore (https://tinyurl.com/5ewh2dd7). Julie shares her vast knowledge of Jersey Shore, including all the spin-offs and current cast status. Jameson pays homage to hometown East Haven or “Staven” with a little Italian-American history (https://tinyurl.com/4mz2ea7m) and the significance of fried dough at the OLOP carnival. And of course, the classic song “Christmastime in East Haven” (https://tinyurl.com/3uvfj9m7). Top Countdown explores the 1985 “Dancing in the Street” from David Bowie and Mick Jagger (https://tinyurl.com/fkjadcxz). For next week, check out Live Aid minute by minute (https://tinyurl.com/u5y8panh) and watch the End of Bohemian Rhapsody featuring Queen at Live Aid (https://tinyurl.com/9w64k4m6).

Photo: FBI chart of American Mafia bosses across the country in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia#/media/File:CommissionChart1963.jpg CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Russell Shorto #Unbound: the complete, forty-minute interview, April 22, 2021. Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Hardcover – February 2, 2021, by Russell Shorto   (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Smalltime-Story-My-Family-Mob/dp/0393245586/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. The best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You're a writer―what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting―but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author's great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life―and wife―in a Pennsylvania mining town. It's a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father―Tony, the mobster's son―as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony's health deteriorates, the book becomes an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative. 8 black-and-white illustrations

Order the Come On Over cookbook if you haven't already! Check out Emily's “batventures” in Michigan City!Watch another pineapple video! This time it's of Jeff and Emily doing commentary of the first one! Listen to Jeff's NEW SONGS and all of his original, face-melting tunes!  AND you can also listen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUD Subscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL!Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com! 

If you were set out to tell the stories of every great Italian and Italian American to leave their mark on human history, you could probably speak for a thousand years without even scratching the surface of such an illustrious list. And for businessman and philanthropist Robert Barbera, that's exactly the task he has set out for himself. At 89 years young, this proud Italian American dedicates each day, as he has since his boyhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, New York, to the promotion and promulgation of his Italian heritage. His immigrant parents taught him the value of hard work and the importance of family. As a young man, Robert made his first stock investment when he was only four years out of high school in 1954, and he bought his first building in 1961. Through hard work, dedication, focus, and the support of his family, he now has 500 units and multiple subsidiary companies, making real estate the cornerstone of his success. He launched The Barbera Foundation in 1994 and has donated his time, expertise, and financial resources to many worthy organizations, including Pepperdine University, Thomas Aquinas College, and the California State University system. The founder of numerous organizations to promote Italian culture and language, this tireless community leader even purchased and revived L'Italo-Americano, the last surviving Italian newspaper in his adopted home of Los Angeles, California. But of all of his works, the Mentoris Project best represents Robert's legacy. A series of novels and biographies about extraordinary Italian and Italian American men and women, Barbera sees the books that form this series as an inspiration to all those who are seekers, trying to find enduring principles to guide them on their own life's journey, while sharing many untold stories of the countless contributions Italians have made in every field of human history. As inspired as you will be by the dozens of stories the Mentoris Project has shared with the world, perhaps none will affect you as much as that of this indefatigable champion of the Italian culture. For more information, visit www.mentorisproject.org. This episode was sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Tuesday August 31, 2021