Happy Monday! Sam and Emma host Rosie Collington, Ph.D candidate at University College London, to discuss her recent book The Big Con: How The Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, And Warps Our Economies, co-authored with Mariana Mazzucato. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on the debt ceiling fight, Biden’s plummeting polling (and why he still fares better than the GOP’s candidates), Minnesota’s gig work bill, Manchin sinking Julie Su’s candidacy, the NAACP travel advisory for Florida, the devastating death of an 8-year-old in border custody, and failing US intelligence at home and abroad, before diving into the Democratic party’s (and particularly their leadership’s) insistence on never having any real power. Rosie Collington then joins as she parses through the massive state of the management consulting industry in the US, with agencies like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain, working for both the regulatory (political) and industrial sides, and conning the public into believing they actually have a massive impact on the economy. She walks Sam and Emma through the evolution of the consulting-industrial complex, with the introduction of the Reaganomics of the 1980s in both reducing spending on welfare and shifting the distribution of it onto private industry, and the neoliberal establishment cementing this shift over the next couple of decades, with private companies slowly taking over not just the implementation, but the development of public policy in the US. After parsing through the rollout of the ACA under Obama, as well as stories like the East Palestine derailment and McKinsey’s role in the opioid crisis, as key examples of the failure of consulting’s control over the government, from the conflicts-of-interest in creates to the obscuration of responsibility for our democratic officials, Collington wraps up by tackling the role of elite institutions in laundering the reputation of consulting industries, and explores what actions the US government can take to protect democracy.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma dive into AI’s role in the WGA and SAF strikes, with some help from Tesla stans, Moms for Liberty exemplifies the GOP’s exterminationist rhetoric, and Hitchen’s Ghost dives into his personal experiences with Killology experts. Ash from Southern Illinois reflects on the criminalization of a teacher’s trans acceptance, Dez from NJ discusses unionizing his workplace, and Emma reflects on mistakes made in reporting on a recent “Karen” story. DeSantis continues to flounder socially, and Tim Pool acts in his role as the final body in the reactionary right’s human centipede of (dis)information, plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out Rosie's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710959/the-big-con-by-mariana-mazzucato-and-rosie-collington/

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