Background Briefing: May 25, 2021

On By gram

 

An Explosive Story That Will Bring Down Turkey’s Spectacularly Corrupt Dictator

We begin with an explosive story erupting in Turkey that exposes how right wing demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro destroy civic and government institutions in order to gain more power and enrich themselves but no other example is as stark as what has happened to Turkey under Erdogan. But now a reckoning is underway with a Mafia boss turned whistleblower who is releasing videos, seven so far, revealing all the dirt about Erdogan, his corrupt family and his crooked inner circle which has the Turkish people appalled and enthralled as they learn that their leader is the boss of the Mafia bosses who gets the biggest cut of the proceeds from crime, in particular, the drug trade which explains why Erdogan is close to Maduro in Venezuela from where tons of cocaine are shipped to Turkey then on to Europe. Joining us to explain the exposure of this mega-criminal and wannabe dictator who is now speechless in the face of a torrent of damning evidence, is Ahmet Yayla, a Professor at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a fellow in the Program on Extremism at George Washington University who was formerly a counterterrorism police chief in Turkey.

 

Police Reform on the Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder

Then, on this anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, we speak with Ekow Yankah, a Professor of Law at the Cardoza School of Law who serves on the board of the Innocence Project and is the author of A Paradox in Overcriminalization. He joins us to discuss the possibility of police reform which is stalled in a partisan standoff in Washington with Republicans invested in the false equivalence that Black Lives Matter needs to be investigated as much as the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. 

 

The Scene of the Crime One Year Later

Then finally we go to the scene of the crime and examine further where race relations and police reform stand one year later after the murder of George Floyd with overpolicing and underprotecting still prevalent in Black communities. And with 1,126 killed by police last year, just as many police killings are happening this year. David Schultz, a Professor of Political Science at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota School of Law joins us to discuss his article at the Minnesota Journal of Law And Inequality, “How We Got Here. The Road To George Floyd.”