Tag: humanism

Background Briefing: April 17, 2019

 

Will the Mueller Report Give a Career Criminal and a Traitor a Free Pass?

We begin with tomorrow’s release of the Mueller Report the impact of which has been cushioned by Barr who by some accounts has managed to redact 60% of what Mueller found in his 22 month investigation. Craig Unger, the author of the new book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia” joins us to discuss his article at The Washington Post “Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal” and how frustrating it is that there is so much on the public record indicating Trump is a career criminal and a traitor but so little is likely to emerge from Barr’s clutches. Collusion or not, the record is clear that President Trump and the Russians are thick as thieves.  For more than three decades at least 13 people with known or alleged ties to the Russian Mafiya held deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. And Trump real estate was used to launder vast amounts of money for the Russian mob under the supervision of Russian intelligence which regulates a criminal oligarchy in what is a security state headed by a former KGB colonel operating in league with organized crime. With Putin convinced America is a corrupt state that is easily corrupted, we will soon find out whether a man reeking of corruption who Russia helped get into office will get away with crimes staring us in the face.

 

Democratic Fratricide and Digital Technology’s Assault on Humanity

Then we speak with one on the world’s ten most influential intellectuals named by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff, who joins us in the studio to discuss his latest book Team Human and his article at Medium “Time for Progressives to Stop Shaming One Another”. He is a research fellow at the Institute for the Future and the founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at City University of New York and we will look into the unfortunate revival of the 2016 campaign wars between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders inflamed by Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress who worked on the Clinton campaign. And with digital technology being used to desocialize us and alienate us from our humanity, we examine a glaring example of technology taking over from humans with disastrous consequence. We will assess how the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft are not just exposing an over-reliance on computers, but are resulting in the destruction of brand America as one of the U.S.’s most successful companies is now mired in scandal ironically because of its successful regulatory capture of a government agency that in Trump’s hands-off administration was supposed to oversee the safety of its product.