The Fight Inside the NRA
We begin with the battle raging inside one of the most powerful political lobbies in the U.S., the NRA, the National Rifle Association which, thanks to leaked internal documents, is beginning to look more like a self-dealing slush fund for greedy conmen with lavish spending habits rather than a gun rights group representing rural Red State dues payers opposed to the Washington elite and the swamp that Trump, a big NRA backer whose campaign was showered with NRA money, some of which came from Russia, promised to drain. Joshua Horowitz, the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and author “Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea” joins us to discuss the battle between Oliver North the recently fired president of the NRA and longtime CEO Wayne LaPierre who North tried to get fired by threatening to expose to the NRA’s board LaPierre’s excessive spending such as $275,000 at just one high-end men’s clothing store in Beverly Hills. But LaPierre got the better of North and had him fired and now the documents are leaking out, revealing the wholesale looting of the NRA by LaPierre and his cronies who all the while try to project the image that they are selfless Second Amendment heroes fighting for the little guy to protect his guns from the smug liberal elite who shop in Beverly Hills, not at the local Walmart.
How Our World Is Being Impoverished for the Benefit of a Few Kleptocrats
Then we go to London and speak with Oliver Bullough, a journalist and regular contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times who has written about Russian history and politics in “The Last Man in Russia” and “Let Our Fame Be Great”. He joins us to discuss his new book “Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule The World And How to Take It Back” and the how the world had been impoverished for the benefit of a few kleptocrats by the fateful decision by some bankers in London in 1962 who changed the world when they came up with the idea of offshore banking.
Too Many Democratic Candidates Are Running for President but Not Enough for the Senate
Then finally we explore the contrast between an excess of Democratic candidates running for president and the paucity of qualified Democratic candidates prepared to run to take back the U.S. Senate in 2020. Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and veteran of the U.S. Senate where he served as senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and before that as an aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, joins us to discuss this imbalance in focus on trying to capture the White House at the expense of getting electable candidates to run against vulnerable Republicans for Senate seats in 2020.