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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henrywood.

The usual toofer today. We'll hear from Stafford Professor David Palomboleu

about the politics of that institution, as well as one of its most notorious alumni, Peter Teal.

And the Sri Lankan writer, Indrajit Samarajiva, will delve into the economic and political crises plaguing that country.

Given that many of our national political writers and analysts are based in the northeast

and that many of them went to Ivy League colleges and the like, the universities of that part of the country

get most of the attention as shapers of our ruling class, and it scribes, as well as our national discourse.

I plead guilty to such provincialism myself. Stafford, despite its wealth and prominence, doesn't get the attention it deserves.

To remedy that oversight, we're joined by David Palomboleu, a professor of comparative literature in English there.

He'll address two topics, the overall political culture of the university,

which is deeply embedded in the worlds of Silicon Valley and its venture capitalists,

and the politics and influence of Peter Teal, who got his undergraduate and law degrees from the university.

Teal, whose net worth is on recording these words as $7.7 billion according to Bloomberg, was a co-founder of PayPal.

He was also Facebook's first outside investor and funded a lot with the CIA's venture capital arm, Palomboleu Technologies.

He's also a right-wing authoritarian, afraid of Donald Trump, and holds some curious views on race and gender.

In a 2009 essay for a Cato Institute magazine, Teal observed,

since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries in the extension of the franchise to women,

two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians, have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.

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