Boric Wins Chile Election; Rampant Corruption in Congress; Omicron Spikes in DC

Gabriel Boric wins the election in Chile promising to upend the neo-liberal order. How local and international elite pushback could hamper his program.

Luis Gárate, journalist and director of Comunicambio, an independent news media organization based in Perú, joins us to talk about results of the presidential run-off election in Chile over the weekend, which brought a resounding win to a leftist former student organizer Gabriel Boric over right wind candidate José Antonio Kast. We also talk about Boric’s campaign, pinning the blame for stratification and poverty on the neoliberal system brutally implemented in the 1970s and his promises to end it in the country, how Chile is undergoing deep political polarization and specific domestic issues that may make challenging the hegemonic system internationally a difficult proposition, and how the pushback from the U.S. and local elites may hamstring his domestic proposals.

Lucy Komisar, investigative journalist focusing on corporate and financial corruption on thekomisarscoop.com, joins us to talk about a recent report that pored over financial disclosures from members of Congress and their connections to Wall Street that found that dozens of congresspeople and hundreds of staffers violated conflict-of-interest laws, from investments in healthcare companies, military contractors, cryptocurrencies, and using non-public information as insider trading for their benefit. We also talk about Nancy Pelosi’s response about the ethics of allowing lawmakers to trade stocks while in office, using the “free market economy” justification, and what could be done to fix this.

Parisa Norouzi, executive director of Empower DC, joins hosts Michelle Witte and Bob Schlehuber to talk about Washington DC schools closing as the omicron variant of COVID-19 slams the Capital region, with DC reporting the highest single-day total of new coronavirus cases since March 2020, and Maryland reporting that 1,257 people had been hospitalized with the virus, more than double the rate of 581 people this time last month. We also talk about the impacts of destroying homeless encampments by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser as DC’s cold winter is around the corner, and how foreign investments across the United States are dramatically changing the real estate landscape and making access to affordable housing even more difficult.

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