Technocrats Are Purging Bureaucrats to Grab Data, Control Funds, Weaken Government, Cut Services and Install Loyalists to the Dear Leader
We begin with the Musk/Trump blitzkrieg underway to engineer a smaller and weaker government by Installing loyalists, sucking up data, controlling funds, weakening government oversight over businesses and corporations, and delivering fewer services while being loyal and servile to the dear leader. Joining us is Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University School of Law who works in the areas of legal ethics, government ethics, the law of whistleblowing, and national security law. She served as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and has led anti-corruption and ethics workshops in Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Kosovo, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Venezuela.
The One-Two Punch of Plutocracy and Theocracy Taking Over the Country
Then we look into the one-two punch of plutocracy and theocracy taking over the country and speak with Katherine Stewart, a journalist and the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, upon which the feature documentary God and Country by Rob Reiner is based. Her latest book is Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. We discuss her article at The York Times titled “Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?”
The Tinderbox in Eastern Congo Threatening a Regional War
Then finally, we look into Trump’s use of fentanyl to justify tariffs, as well as the tinderbox in Africa, as Rwandan-backed forces capture more and more of the Democratic Republic of Congo, threatening a wider regional war. We speak with Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution. She is the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and the co-director of the Africa Security Initiative and the Brookings series on opioids: “The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions.” Her books include The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It; Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption; and Militants, Criminals, and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder.