We begin with Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to the Caricom summit of the 15 Caribbean nations in Trinidad Tobago and the UN Secretary General’s visit today to Haiti as both Caricom and the UN deliberate on how to address the lawlessness in Haiti by sending an international force of police, likely from Rwanda since its leader has been at the summit, in the hope of restoring law and order in the poorest country in the hemisphere. We discuss how propping up the corrupt government in Haiti only perpetuates the problem since the Prime Minister and his predecessors are in league with the gangs and the morally repugnant elite. Joining us is Brian Concannon, a human rights lawyer and the Executive Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti who lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, where he served as a Human Rights Officer with the United Nations and Co-Managing Attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a public interest law firm.
Then we look into the battle of the billionaires as Mark Zuckerberg challenges Elon Musk with Threads, a competitor to Twitter which on its first day signed up 30 million users. We assess the likelihood that Twitter, which is already losing advertisers and is not paying its bills, will end up as a snake pit for right wing trolls or go bankrupt and speak with Jonathan Taplin, an author and director emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. He has produced music and film for Bob Dylan and the Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant and many others and was the founder of Intertainer, the first streaming Video On Demand Platform in 1996. He is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, and his latest book out September 5 is The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto.
Then finally, following the decision by Supreme Court’s Six Right Wing Republican Operatives in Robes to deny debt relief from the crushing burden of usurious student loans, we will speak with Blake Zeff, who was a Senior Aide to Senate Majority Leader Schumer. The former politics editor of Salon, he is the director and producer of the critically acclaimed feature documentary LOAN WOLVES, probing the origins and effects of the student debt crisis in America, currently airing on Peacock & MSNBC. We discuss how two lines that were slipped into the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has led to the two trillion dollars in student debt which a few are profiting from while 43 million Americans remain indentured for decades unable to declare bankruptcy.