The DSR Network

According to economist Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard's Kennedy School, the economic crisis triggered by the COVID pandemic is going to be very different from any we have faced in memory. It will be different in scope, in severity, in what it may demand of afflicted governments, and in what it will demand of the global financial system. It is a massive problem and observes Hausmann, one of the world'...

If Parson Weems, who wrote of little George Washington's inability to tell a lie, were to write the story of Donald Trump and the cherry tree, you can bet that the president-to-be would be portrayed as saying "I would never lie, Father, I'm the hugest truth teller there is. And nobody has done more for cherry trees than me." Lying is what Trump does. It is who he is. And this week we have seen how...

There is no question that the Trump Administration has been a dramatic departure from past US Administrations on issues like democracy promotion, human rights and protecting press freedoms. Autocrats have been embraced. Press freedoms and free speech have been under siege here in the U.S. What would change if Joe Biden took office next January? In the second of our Agenda 2021 series, Amb. Derek M...

As if a public health catastrophe and an economic disaster were not enough, America is now rocked by the worst civil unrest in 50 years. And, to make matters worse, the president is...making matters worse. Wherever he can he is pouring gasoline onto the flames. Having declared the riots the result of the work of far-left "terrorists" Trump is seeking to militarize the racial, political and regiona...

America is re-opening. Whether we should be or not is beside the point. It is happening. So the question becomes how do we manage that re-opening and what risks may be emerging that we are ill-prepared for? Some are public health risks? Some have to do with adapting to a new way of life. In addition, just as we face the greatest public health crisis in a century, we witness the scene of a police o...

It is possible that in January 2021, America may welcome a president with more foreign policy experience than anyone who has assumed the office in more than three decades. That will be vitally important given the damage that Trump has done to our institutions, relationships and interests at home and abroad. In the first of our "Agenda 2021" series of podcasts exploring the priorities a new preside...

COVID has taken such a ghastly human and economic toll that people can speak of or think of little else. That's dangerous. Because opportunists and worse are seeking to take advantage of the fog of this moment to advance dangerous or unsavory agendas. From China moving against democracy in Hong Kong to Russia upping the ante in Libya, from Netanyahu planning illegal annexations of Palestinian terr...

We have a new Director of National intelligence who doesn't meet the minimum statutory requirements for holding the job. We have an administration that has become a disinformation engine. People are fired for telling or seeking the truth. We are actively dismantling the international system that we helped build and giving autocrats their way worldwide. Sometimes it all feels like more reality TV p...

Donald Trump likes to talk a lot about being a wartime president. But wartime presidents lead by example and inspire the country to set aside politics to focus on a common goal. This week, Trump is headed to Michigan to view how the state went from being the arsenal of democracy in the 40s to the "arsenal of health" today. According to Rep. Debbie Dingell who represents Michigan's 12th Congression...

In many ways, one of the unexpected side-effects of the COVID pandemic has been a rapid acceleration of the application of new technologies and the adaptation to technology driven new realities. From the ubiquity of Zoom to tele-medicine, from a focus on biotech to living our lives and conducting our work remotely, we've been given a taste of the world to come. On the heels of these changes are co...

Almost 40 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past 8 weeks. That is a quarter of the workforce. We have never faced a crisis like this one. How we choose to rebuild will be the decision that will define us all in history's eyes. Gene Sperling was the top White House economic advisor for both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. He has written a book that addresses the core...

In boxing, repeated body blows are seen as a way to bring down an adversary. We will soon see whether the repeated body blows the US economy and society have endured during this crisis will have the same effect on the Administration that is seen as having at the very least left the country undefended against them and that very likely exacerbated the impact of those blows. We discuss the state of t...

With more than 33 million people claiming unemployment insurance in the past six weeks, 75,000 reported dead of COVID, 1.3 million reported infected with the disease and an unprecedented social crisis that now has 1 in 5 mothers of young children fearing they will be unable to provide their children with the food they need, the U.S. faces its worst domestic crisis since the Civil War. The governme...

Sarah Kendzior's latest book "Hiding in Plain Sight" describes precisely why Donald Trump's failures as a leader, his support for our enemies and his profound corruption should not be a surprise to anyone. To Kendzior's many followers, it supports work she has been doing for years calling out the Trump backstory that the president, his supporters and his Russian sponsors have been trying to suppre...

We are joined on this special episode of DSR by Rep. Ted Deutch, a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees as well as chairman of the Ethics Committee. Deutch has been actively leading efforts for more oversight into Jared Kushner and the Administration's management of the program to collect and distribute vital hospital supplies. He has also provided guidance to the White Hou...

60,000 Americans are dead. 1 million are infected. And those are just the official numbers. 30 million are unemployed. And Jared Kushner declares "Success!" And Trump's approval rating rises. But the coronavirus pays no attention. The total dead is probably closer to 85,000. The total infected may be as high as 15 million. And we're just getting started. There are global and domestic waves to come...

Is Kim Jong Un dead? Chilling at the beach? Succumbing to an overdose of cheese? Will he fully recover? Or will he be succeeded by his sister? His uncle? His two year old son? We bring together three of the world's leading North Korea experts--Anna Fifield, author of "The Great Successor", the definitive biography of Kim and the Washington Post's Beijing Bureau Chief, former Under Secretary of Sta...

The President of the United States keeps talking about the light at the end of the tunnel. But even his top economic advisors don't expect the economic aftershocks of this crisis to end for 18 months or more. Those shocks will be severe, throwing the whole world into depression, perhaps 195 million people to unemployment, 130 million people to severe food insecurity, raising the possibility of fam...

As Angela Merkel observed this week, we are just in the first stages of this crisis. As many Americans have observed, we would be better off if we had a leader like Angela Merkel. But we don't. And we won't until January at the earliest. So what can we practically do to save lives and protect each other? We turn to Dr. Craig Spencer, Dr. Kavita Patel, Ed Luce and Ryan Goodman to discuss our option...

Trump is a wannabe authoritarian who has consistently abused the power of his office and sought to place himself above the law. Trump is also a president who, when faced with a crisis, failed to use the resources of the U.S. government to help the American people. As it turns out, both things are true...but the question is, as we enter the next phase of this crisis and the run up to the election,...

While we are making some headway on flattening the curve when it comes to coronavirus in some parts of the US, it is clear the one curve that will not be flattened is the president's learning curve. The timeline of this debacle reveals a resistance to knowledge and an inability to acknowledge much less even learn from mistakes that hasn't wavered. So what do we do? The stakes are too high to wait...

Representative Val Demings is, for good reason, on every short list there is to be Joe Biden's Vice Presidential running mate. Join us for a great and wide ranging conversation with her about the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the communities she represents in Florida, the troubling response of Governor DeSantis and his administration to the virus, the vulnerability of communities of color du...

As we anticipate months more of lockdown and efforts at recovery, at further tragic loss of life and catastrophic economic dislocation, it is clear that we are living through an era-defining event. Such events typically shape the outlook of generations and lead to shifts in priorities, program, and even the distribution of wealth and power in society. What will the consequences of this era's uphea...

On April 11, the New York Times published an in-depth examination of the repeated warnings President Trump received concerning the impending coronavirus crisis and the story behind his steadfast opposition to doing anything about the looming disaster. Two of the authors of that exceptional piece, Deep State Radio regular David Sanger and NYT White House correspondent Michael Shear join us for a di...

The only thing you know about the ghastly numbers the grow larger every day on your computer or television screen is that they are wrong. They hugely understate the number of victims of the current pandemic and because we are testing a fraction of a fraction of what we should be, we can't tell how far off we are...or what the real nature of the disease is. The Administration is lying and suppressi...