FEATURING SETH DONNELLY – Massive protests have gripped the nation of Haiti for days now over demands of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse to resign. Haiti’s economy is in freefall as the government faces accusations of corruption and state repression leading to mass opposition building up for months and even years. Last Wednesday protests brought major cities to a standstill and opposition leader André Michel urged protesters to keep up the pressure by continuing street demonstrations. Haiti has been wracked by political turmoil going back to more than ten years ago when a US-backed coup ousted the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. 

Seth Donnelly member of the Haiti Action Committee and a public high school teacher in the Bay Area of California.

The Washington Post reported that Attorney General William Barr had enlisted the help of foreign government officials to dig into the role of the CIA and FBI in launching the Special Counsel investigation into President Donald Trump and the 2016 election. Barr has been overseeing the work of John Durham, a US Attorney in Connecticut who has been assigned to the task of reviewing materials. According to the Post, “Barr has already made overtures to British intelligence officials, and last week the attorney general traveled to Italy, where he and Durham met senior Italian government officials and Barr asked the Italians to assist Durham.” Additionally, “The Trump administration has made similar requests of Australia.” In fact Trump himself, “[I]n a recent phone call, Trump urged Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to provide assistance to the ongoing Justice Department inquiry.” A New York Times report found that, just as records of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president were restricted on a highly secret server, the transcript of his call with Australia’s leader was also kept secret. 

As House Democrats move swiftly with their impeachment inquiry, lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee in a court filing on Monday requested access to the Special Counsel’s grand jury materials which have so far remained secret. The lawyers wrote, “Not only could those materials demonstrate the president’s motives for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation, they also could reveal that Trump was aware of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks.” The statement made the stunning implication that Trump may have lied to the Special Counsel about Wikileaks.

Meanwhile Trump expressed once more how little he understands about Presidential power and the US Constitution by railing against whistleblower protections. In one set of his many tweets (here and here) that Trump has been relentlessly deploying he demanded, “why aren’t we entitled to interview & learn everything about…. the Whistleblower, and also the person who gave all of the false information to him. This is simply about a phone conversation that could not have been nicer, warmer, or better. No pressure at all.” And, commentators are reviving another whistleblower complaint regarding Trump. House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal, who has been trying to get Trump’s tax returns released for months says he is considering making public a complaint about potential misconduct within the IRS to keep Trump’s tax returns hidden. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also deeply implicated in the political firestorm around Trump with news emerging that he was listening in on the same phone call that Trump had with Ukraine’s President on July 25th. When asked if he knew about the phone call in media interviews, Pompeo had earlier dodged the question.

FEATURING DAVID MARPLES – While Washington DC is roiled with a looming impeachment inquiry, what is happening in the nation that has been ensnared in the political intrigue, Ukraine? President Volodymyr Zelensky is clearly unhappy about his side of the phone call with Trump shared publicly. But the deeper issue is how dependent Ukraine has been on US military aid  against Russia, and the political involvement of Ukraine’s the oil and gas sector.

David Marples, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, specializing in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. 

FEATURING SARAH ANDERSON – A week after Vermont Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unveiled his ambitious plan to tax billionaires, he has proposed a new plan to tackle the growing wage gap between corporate CEOs and their workers. Explaining on his website that, “In the 1950s, CEOs made 20 times more than their median employees,” and that, “Last year, the average S&P 500 CEO made 287 times their median worker pay,” Sanders wants to tax those corporations for widening their CEO-worker pay gap. 

The proposal comes on the same day that the Institute for Policy Studies released its 26th Executive Excess report, a yearly report on the CEO-worker pay gap.

Read the IPS report HERE.

Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project and Co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff says he has reached a deal with the unnamed whistleblower at the heart of the on-going Ukraine scandal, to testify to the panel. The whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct in a July phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is the focus of an impeachment inquiry in the House that is proceeding quickly as Democrats agree to work during their recess. On Friday, House Democrats issued a subpoena for State Secretary Mike Pompeo who has also been implicated in the scandal, as well as for Kurt Volker, the US Ambassador to Ukraine who abruptly resigned from his post last week. Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, when asked if the Senate would take up an impeachment vote said, “I would have no choice but to take it up, based on a Senate rule on impeachment.” McConnell has not shown such deference to Senate rules in the past. 

Sounding increasingly desperate on what he faces Trump spent the weekend lashing out on Twitter. Among the many warnings and threats he issued was a post quoting a Fox News guest who said, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” He also threatened to have Representative Adam Schiff arrested for casting the President’s phone call to Zelensky as similar to the way a mafia boss would make threats during a hearing last week. Trump wrote that Schiff, “illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?” Trump has also demanded to meet the whistleblower saying, “I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely incorrect, to the ‘Whistleblower.’ Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!” Lawyers representing the whistleblower wrote to the acting Director of National Intelligence saying they feared for their client’s safety. They quoted Trump’s earlier threat revealed in a secret recording last week. 

On Sunday Tom Bossert, a former Homeland Security Department adviser under Trump expressed frustration with the President’s faith in conspiracy theories regarding the 2016 election. This is what he said on ABC’s This Week. Reports emerged over the weekend that in addition to hiding the original transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky on a secret server, White House staff also hid transcripts of Trump’s calls with

FEATURING ROBERT ELLIOTT SMITH – The rapid rise of digital technology and the Internet has changed our political landscape, how we communicate with our peers, and how we communicate to the whole world. One of the major lessons of the 2016 elections was just how useful the Internet was to those who wanted to hack our electoral systems. 

Fake news and polarizing memes skewed voting patterns and hate flourished online. Today companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are under fire from those who are outraged at the proliferation of fake news and hate-groups, while right wing extremists claim they are biased against conservatives. 

My next guest says it’s the algorithms these tech platforms use that are the problem.

Robert Elliott Smith, an expert in Artificial Intelligence who has worked on projects for Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and more. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. His new book is called Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All.

FEATURING KHURY PETERSEN-SMITH – The United Nations General Assembly began its 74th session on Monday September 23rd just days after climate protests broke records. The meeting, taking place at the UN headquarters in New York City is expected to go until September 30th. Eclipsed by the controversy over President Trump soliciting Ukraine for political dirt this week were a number of critical developments that flew under the radar. 

The US worked to rally nations to side against Iran after a major air strike on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. A potential step toward peace in Syria was discussed on the sidelines of the UN meeting. Turkey lobbied for refugee rights. And Egypt faced growing protests at home while President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi avoided the topic altogether.

Khury Petersen-Smith, Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

The scandal over President Donald Trump using his office to solicit dirt on his political opponents from a foreign nation continues to roil Washington DC. On Thursday Trump was caught on tape slamming the intelligence community whistleblower who filed the original complaint that has now led to a formal impeachment inquiry against him. In a closed door meeting Trump suggested the whistleblower was a spy who deserved punishment. The complaint was based on a phone call that Trump had with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that White House staff scrambled to hide once it was apparent how the President had seemingly violated his oath of office. The complaint also referenced that Trump’s National Security Council went to great lengths to store the transcript on a much more secure and hidden computer server than the usual servers. Meanwhile the New York Times published a report based on internal sources that publicized identifying details about the whistleblower in a move that privacy advocates slammed. Given Trump’s veiled threats, many accused the paper of putting a “target on the whistleblower’s back.” 

Implicated in the complaint is Attorney General William Barr who Trump repeatedly mentioned in his call to Zelensky, and who declined to pursue an inquiry when the complaint was brought to him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Barr should not have been involved directly in the complaint that implicated him and that the Attorney General has “gone rogue,” in an interview on CNN. Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has also been deeply implicated in the scandal. In an interview with The Atlantic Giuliani, who has emerged as a major political liability for Trump said, “It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero.” Meanwhile Senator Kamala Harris who was the former California state Attorney General, has said that Giuliani should be disbarred. Worried about the impeachment process, Trump said to reporters on Thursday, “”What … Democrats are doing to this country is a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it, maybe legally through the courts.” He has also decided that Congressman Adam Schiff should resign for his handling of the complaint as head of the House Intelligence Committee. 

In immigration news the Trump administration has formally cut the nation’s refugee quota to only 18,000. That’s just over half of the 30,000 accepted this year, a sharp decline from previous years. Meanwhile a

FEATURING JOHN NICHOLS – President Donald Trump in a closed-door meeting with Republican allies reportedly rages against the media for covering the whistleblower complaint over his phone call with Ukraine’s president. The whistleblower, whose identity remains secret, is apparently a male CIA staffer as per new reporting from the New York Times. Trump also said in a recording made public to press that the whistleblower was akin to a spy and may be guilty of treason.

The firestorm of scandal that has erupted around the whistleblower complaint has given new impetus to Democratic efforts to impeach the President with a majority of House Democrats now supporting such a move. A new poll also shows that 44% of the public supports impeachment, including 22% of Republicans. 

John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine and host of their new podcast, ‘Next Left,’ featuring interviews with rising progressive politicians who explain how they plan to change the country. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times. He is also the author of numerous books including Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America (Nation Books) and his 2006 book, The Genius of Impeachment (New Press).

FEATURING IMANI PERRY – The United States is a deeply racialized country, no matter what pundits and commentators like to say. This nation was found on genocide and slavery and has never reconciled with its ugly past. And so there is no surprise that the vestiges of that deep racial injustice continues to manifest today even as we pay lip service to equality and freedom.

How do parents, especially black parents, raise their children in a society that teaches them they have the same rights as others but in practical terms they will face more discrimination and more brutality? Addressing that difficult task in a deeply moving book is my guest Imani Perry. 

Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of six books including the award-winning “Looking for Lorraine.” Her new book is called ‘Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.’