The Trump administration is unveiling a plan to alter the very structure of the housing market, drastically reducing the federal government’s role in housing, and slashing regulations established in response to the 2008 housing market crash that caused financial devastation for millions of people around the world. At its core, the plan would release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government control.
Hundreds of people are missing in the Bahamas and at least 30 are confirmed dead there as Hurricane Dorian moved north and now sits off the coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks as a Category 1 storm. Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that stronger and more destructive storms will become more frequent as the climate continues to change. Meanwhile, meteorologists are watching three more tropical storms currently forming in the Atlantic, including one that’s already been named Tropical Storm Gabrielle. Danielle Purifoy, a board member of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, and a geographer at UNC Chapel Hill, and Fred Magdoff, professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and the co-author of “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism,” join the show.
Robert Mugabe, the independence icon who led Zimbabwe out of its colonial past and who became its first president, died this morning in a hospital in Singapore. He was 95. Mugabe was praised internationally for broadening access to health care and education for his country’s black majority. But his later years were marked by political opposition and by his country’s severe economic problems in the face of western sanctions. He lost power after his own military leadership turned against him in 2017 after 37 years in power. Brian and John speak with Dr. Gerald Horne, a professor of history at the University of Houston and the author of many books, including his most recent “White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela.”
Downing Street--that is, the Office of the British Prime Minister--is refusing to rule out the possible resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the coming weeks. No Prime Minister in British history has survived defeat in four major parliamentary votes, let alone the first four votes of his premiership. And pressed yesterday over whether he would resign if he cannot lead the UK out of the European Union by October 31, Johnson said, “That is not a hypothesis that I am willing to contemplate.” Sputnik news analyst Walter Smolarek joins the show.
It’s Friday! So it’s time for the week’s worst and most misleading headlines. Brian and John speak with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog, and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell.
Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on the Brexit political crisis in the UK, the impact of Hurricane Dorian on poor and working people, the potential peace agreement in Afghanistan, and more. Brian and John speak with Sputnik News analysts and producers Walter Smolarek and Nicole Roussell.
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