The DGS Think Tank with David Barklage & Jeff Rainford- h4

La la la la la la.

No.

No.

Look back guys.

DGS from K m oh X.

Happy Tuesday, sons out.

Streaming right on Jeff Freyneford's face looking hot.

Read for it is here with David Barclays for the Think Tank.

And they just handed me a dossier.

I haven't handed a dossier in quite a while.

And so even deep throat David David,

a game on the record so Dave, tell us what's going on here?

So, you know, the Holy Joes has been a group that has been looking at fraud in the City

and different agencies and they have uncovered in the Regional Arts Council significant

or potential fraud misuse of money from the charity and what I understand is that there

will be ongoing investigations by multiple agencies and there's nothing to with me other

than that. I've heard this breaking today. So, what is the Regional Arts Council?

The Regional Arts Council is funded in part and Jeff helped me here about eight million

dollars a year and money collected from the Convention of Visitors Fund, another three

to five million from other different sources and they're supposed to promote arts for

the region. Yeah, it's a tiny little agency that most people other than artists don't

really know about but the money from tourism taxes, most of it goes to the Convention

and Visitors Commission but a small portion of it goes to, and the Convention and Visitors

Commission is a City County entity. Likewise, where act, the Regional Arts Commission

is also a City County entity and a few years ago they decided to carve off about whatever

it was, 15% of tourism taxes to support this thing but while the mayor and the county

executive make the appointments, most people don't really pay very close attention to it

except people in the arts and I don't know whether any of this is true. I'd heard rumors

about these sorts of things but this is what happens in government agencies when nobody's

paying attention and it sounds like the state auditor is paying attention and others are

paying attention. I think the Attorney General, I would imagine

the US Attorney, I think the problem is this we have found waste and fraud and demic in

these independent subdivisions and St. Louis has a lot of them. We saw Kitty Ratcliffe

resigning and leaving because of I would say mismanagement of the Convention and Visitors

construction among other things and what happens is you've got like an even board of county,

even board of city and then chairman so no one really has control so eventually the institution

itself takes control and because they're independent there's hardly any independent oversight

and so you get good intention board members come to board meetings where a director gives

them sort of a dog and pony show a bag of goodies and then has them decide about what

color on the walls get them in a big debate while not talking about fundamental structural

problems in the administration. So just from listening to you and just a

cursory look at this it sounds like the rub here is that people were using the regional

arts council to funnel money to people who have no business getting it from the regional

arts council. I think that's very likely to come out. I think the fact that they are

statutorily capped at 15% so that 85% of everything they get goes to actually promote

arts and instead almost half that money is being spent on administration. I think the fact

that someone takes your entire staff to Puerto Rico or gives them cash bonuses or uses cards

to charge wedding gifts and things like that. Those are not responsible fiduciary decisions.

So the thing that has always sort of bothered me about this agency is I am for the arts.

I'm not as into the arts as I'm in the sports and other things. But I'm into the arts too.

But I think if we asked the one million people who live in St. Louis County and the 270,000

people live in the city have you ever gone to see an art show sponsored by the regional arts

commission. They'd be like, well, what's the you guys didn't even know what the regional arts

commission was. I'm really know they're spending a good chunk of money. We're in a situation in

St. Louis, St. Louis County where both the city of St. Louis is going broke. St. Louis County

is broke. And the convention center and the RSA, we got this white elephant, the dome and we don't

have enough money to do anything with it. And we can't have these, even if it's relatively small

amounts of money, we can't have these little agencies frittering away money. Jeff, you know,

what we're seeing is this after what happened with the CVC and the leaving of Kitty after

some of years. The RSA and the CVC has come together with the sports authority sports commission

and they're creating, you know, basically a new administration, a new approach to it. And we're

seeing some innovative and really aggressive approaches to try to turn that around.

Rack, however, is the last part of that. And they're going down. And one thing you'll see

and some of the stuff I gave you is, is there is a complete confusion as to its purpose is very

specifically spelled out to arts. Yet they are sponsoring things like $300,000 to the American or

to black executives of New York City, $49,000, something like that. My point is that how you relate

those things to art, and if you look further, there are so many organizations in there that have

nothing to do with art. And again, it's not that they're not worthy. You know, I don't know if they

are not, is that it is not the function of that agency to do so. It's always something, right?

Well, there is always something that's what makes being in the news so interesting, right? That's

makes their job interesting. There's always something going on. But I think again, it does point

to a bigger issue, which is unfortunately the CVC was involved in, I wouldn't call it a similar

scandal, but in a scandal where they spent an anordinate amount of money making very, very minor

improvements to the convention center. And so the hospitality industry is basically out of money

for those sorts of things. And our convention center is subpar, the dome is subpar. I mean, at some

point, you really do have to shake these things out and get rid of all of the nonsense. And

you know, start focusing public tax dollars where they're going to do the most good. Otherwise,

you know, you drive around downtown right now. I mean, you guys are already downtown,

where the hospitality industry is a huge portion of downtown. And it's in the dome and the

seep in the convention center and not doing well. One last thing, Jeff has not told you

that if anybody that no one probably more than him is responsible for the reforms at CVC and RSA,

now the chairman of both are very innovative in terms of the next steps. But Jeff really pushed

hard to get attention on the operations of the CVC to enact changes. And I watched him,

I watched his leadership and that leadership has resulted in giving the new regime and Brad Dean,

who I think is an innovator and Joe Blanner and Steve O'Loughlin. That trifecta, I think,

is going to really move the region forward along with the sports commission.

So sitting in this chair, I could just give you a laundry list from, you know, my old friend,

Jeffrey Boyd and, you know, taking bribes and what was her face, the prosecutor,

Kim Gardiner, now the regional arts council. My question to you guys, I don't expect a definitive

answer. But do you think we catch most of these guys? Or do you think there's a whole bunch of it

that they just get away with it? Look, I'm telling you that the infrastructure of these subdivisions

is corrupting in itself. They are completely out of really any independent

supervision. And as a result over time, you get a director or a manager who takes control of it

and starts to make it their personal piggy bank. I can just tell you that you will see over the

next couple of years, I believe scandal after scandal emerging from these different entities.

And one last thing I'll take, we sunshine a large number of these subdivisions.

And over months, we would get, and we sunshine them for the most basic records,

credit card receipts or credit card records, their budget, things like this. We got almost every

major law firm in this town writing letters back explaining how that we didn't ask it in the

right way, that the budget term was not, you know, not, they did not understand what that meant.

Or we did not put this in the right frame or whatever. I've never seen such a mass effort to

protect the public's interest from the public's interest. So Dave, the answer to the question is

there's kind of two different things here. One is bribery, right? Which is what Jeffrey and the

others did. They took bribes. That's hard to catch somebody doing unless somebody rats them out.

What we're talking about here is, is misspending public resources. And I do think that there

probably is a lot more of that going on today. And I will tell you why. I mean, I used to be in the

news business. I used to work at this at KMOX. And I think when we had two newspapers, when we had

the Globe Democrat and the Postus batch and when he had two, four and five fighting with each other

to come up with the scandals, I think they held the government spending part of it a lot more

accountable than what we have today. Bribery is really hard to catch unless the guy you're

bribing got flipped and said, okay, I got an alderman or something. But the misspending of money

is going through documents like the auditor is doing now, but reporters going through documents,

going to meetings and doing the boring stuff that, you know, if you watch TV nowadays, you don't

see it. Really, you don't see as much in the post as you did when they were competing against the

Globe. It's the word we're in. I mean, nothing's going to change. And the idea that like citizen

journalists are going to figure this out. Yeah, maybe they'll find a needle in a haystack once

in a while, but it's not going to replace old fashioned journalism. So I don't, I don't know

what the answer is going to be. I guess it's the auditor, the US attorney and things like that.

It's going to take multiple regulatory bodies, but the bottom line is is that the structure of

government in this region was meant to create these independent agencies, sort of free of, of,

you know, politics. Yeah, politics. And instead it is created permanent interest in my, my opinion,

our corrupting, for example, you never heard the CVC complain about crime in the city yet crime in

the city probably caused a significant, or didn't probably caused a significant reduction of tourism.

Yet there was no mention of it. I remember recently a civic leader talked about, let's change

the crime statistics so that we, we don't look like we're having as much crime. And I, I, I don't

think it was ill-intentioned, but the point is, again, it goes back to the problem of this region.

It is a lot of dysfunction. Rachel, why don't we take an early break here,

Dulembara, so we can come back and get the guys' views on the, uh, Rainian War?

Roll the new leaf over in the middle of the night, there's an old man shredding around in the

back. DGS for 21, David Barcliffe, Jeff Rainford here for the thing tank. Okay,

ordinary and we all woke up to it on Saturday. Do you have what you think?

I think that the president probably went to bed on Thursday not thinking about it by Friday

decided he was going to go to war with Iran. That's kind of about the amount of thought he gives

the things. The thing I, I'm going to just focus on one thing, which is the thing I worry about is

there's a mismatch coming where Iran is going to stall. Now they're going to, they don't

care if their people get killed, their people get starved or whatever. They're going to try to drag

this thing out. They're going to try to drive up the, the price of oil and they're going to try

to wait out the Trump administration. I do hope my facetiousness aside that, that, that the president

and his team thought this through really, really deeply understand what they got into and that

they can finish what they started because they've never shown any before. They've never shown

they can do that. Doge, they didn't finish with doge. We had two billion or two trillion dollars.

Go down the rabbit holes here. Tariffs, they, you know, didn't think it through in the Supreme

Court, threw them out. They had this live. I was flying a week ago Sunday woke up and Christy

Nome said, Oh, yeah, we're going to, we're going to do away with TSA precheck at six o'clock in the

morning by 10 o'clock and the morning was back in again. Well, they get, they don't call

parents to this administration and I worry. I hope I'm wrong because I think, you know, there's

no argument from anybody that getting rid of, of the, I told it was a good thing to, you know,

destroying their nukes is a good thing. I just worry that we're going to, you know, it's either

going to become another forever war or he hadn't thought it through and he's going to pull out

before he finishes. I, you know, I, I will disagree to several things. One, I agree with

Iran, but there was a very slow methodical buildup of the military. You look at all the different

flotillas that were there in position. They gave them every chance. Look, we have been

for over 20 years trying to get a hold and deal with Iran's nuclear program. Iran is,

do you know how many times American embassies have been overrun three times? Do you know who was

involved with it? Iran, Iran, and Iranian agitators in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran, I can count

42 incidences where Iran has attacked Americans over the last 20 to 30 years. Iran was a problem and

I think he's dealing with it. I think we'll know history will tell us, but look at Vince Waley.

You say we don't finish anything. We went in and we got Madura. Madura was was was a con was a

criminal under previous administrations. No one did anything. And we took him out. We blew up

a major part of the capacity of Iran, but they were not giving up in a strike. And no American

lives were lost. Yes, absolutely. And what way? Well, importing fentanyl, importing fentanyl comes

from China. You got it. And most of the drugs, most of the drugs that you've done is Wala do not

come here. And the drugs that come here come through Mexico and from Columbia. But this is the

point. This is the problem with the whole thing. They never provide the evidence to back up

what they're saying. It's trust me, bro. And when you're talking about putting soldiers

lives at line and my gas prices and my food costs, because those are going up with gas prices

going up before you're doing all of that, we should know that you have what you say you have instead

of trust me. First thing is 125 times has has presidents acted independently of Congress.

And this is not the question. Let me give you this. Look at the decline of fentanyl deaths.

Now that decline. But it is transported by by the cartels that operate Vince Wala,

Columbia, and Mexico to that extent. They have to go in the Mexico and Colombian. We are. We are

or absolutely. It's important. Why did why does he pardon like drug some of the biggest drug

deals? Why is the US attorney let someone go to get someone higher up the chain? That's not what

happened. Absolutely. No, there's no there's no coherence. There's a lot of

illustration. I mean, they're talking about results in the other. The other big issue. I think

in someone that you're sort of getting at is, okay, fine, we can have a legal argument about whether

you have to go through Congress or not. But at the end of the day, you know, when you're going to go

to war, whether it's technically war or not, you want the American people to know why you're

going to war and you want at least a majority of the American people to be for you and not scratching

their heads and going, what the heck? I went to bed on. Especially when you ran on America first,

we don't want foreign wars. We don't want to go. There are a lot of people that are pissed right now.

Right. Because you told us we weren't going to do this. Five months ago, he said he wasn't going

to be doing stuff like this. That's why I said he probably went to bed Thursday, not

now thinking about it. Friday, somebody come and said, hey, why don't we go to Israel? He's probably

saying, hey, let's go blow up Iran. He's like, yeah, that sounds good. Oh, get me off the

Epstein stuff. Epstein, to see, that's another one. That's incredible because Epstein, I mean,

you had the Carter's testifying, I mean, the, the Clinton's testifying the other day. That was a

Democrat scandal that that Trump inherited and Trump has tried to be to disclose everything for

the first time of any precedent. Yet the Democrats try to blame it. He was in there more than any

other human. No, he was. There is an allegation. There is an allegation against him. There is

an allegation against him that they, they, you know, that there's not enough in the dog allegation

that does. And the documents with the FBI investigations, yesterday, interviews were pulled so that

people wouldn't see them. Right. And there's all kinds of documents that by law are supposed to be

out there that are not. Well, look, I'm an affectionado to, to get disclosure on UFOs. Jeff knows

this. And we're not seeing him. We haven't seen him how hard everybody tries. But I got to keep my

eye on the ball under these cups. Yeah. I, I, I don't see the evidence that you claim. I hear

allegations, but allegations are made. Forget the allegations against the president. Why is the DOJ

doing nothing? They're not doing nothing. All of the news. Listen, in the UK, people are getting

fired and being prosecuted because they know they go down. Nothing's happening. They go down

that avenue. And it's going to lead right back to the president. And they wanted this thing the

whole way. Even if it doesn't, even if it doesn't, these are all really wealthy influence. Oh,

it's terrible. How is Howard Lutnik allowed to keep his job? Yeah. I agree. Well, then why are we

protecting him? I'm not. So why isn't, why is the president not firing a man who once said I

would never be in the room with that guy and then took his family to the island and admitted it?

Wow. That's true. Yeah. Here's your problem. I mean, 30 seconds about Larry Summers. We got 30

seconds. So go ahead. You want to wrap up or Dave? I don't want to do it. I think that was for you

to get to know. No, you're making a point. So look, you know, I think this country has been so

torn apart. You know, I don't like the tone of President Trump. It adds to it. You watch the

the other night and how partisan it was, but our country has gotten to a point where I don't know

that either side supports the other over the most reasonable things. So I think it is very hard

to have a reasonable conversation when like the Democrats won't stand up on the most basic

things that they should because of their partisan divide with the president and where the president

uses the speech to attack individuals in that body. I think that is far out of bounds and that's

why we have the problems we have today. That's why we have the problems we have today.