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 Attorney General William Barr’s seemingly planned pushback against President Trump, Roger Stone’s sentencing, New Hampshire and the surging Sanders campaign, the myriad deeply conservative statements and policies that Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg has made over the years, several Democrats’ focus on taking Radio Sputnik off the air instead of issues their constituents care about, Trump’s proposed budget for 2021, and oligarchs in the form of Microsoft and Amazon fighting over public money.
A federal judge in Washington yesterday ordered Microsoft to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud computing contract for the Pentagon. This is a major victory for Amazon, which had contested the awarding of the contract. The judge said there should be no work on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI) system until Amazon’s legal challenge had been resolved. Brian and John are joined by Steve Keen, the author of “Debunking Economics” and the world’s first crowdfunded economist, whose work is at patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen.
The National Health Law Program today won a unanimous appeal in the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia against the Trump Administration. What was at stake was the Trump policy of trying to force work requirements or other barriers on recipients of Medicaid. Leo Cuello, an attorney and the director of health policy for the National Health Law Program, joins the show.
A group of House Democrats criticized the Federal Communications Commission yesterday for not taking action to put Sputnik radio out of business in the United States. The members said in a letter to the FCC that they feared Sputnik would try to influence the 2020 presidential election. This same group of Democrats earlier accused Sputnik Radio of impacting the 2016 election, despite the fact that we were not on the radio until 2017. Brian and John speak with Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor lawyer who is the author of the book “No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using 'Humanitarian' Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.”
Stanford University’s Internet Observatory (SIO) is part of a growing network of cybersecurity groups policing the activity of social media users while towing the federal government’s political line. SIO is not a part of one of the myriad neoliberal think tanks. Instead, it remains attached to the university. So why is it monitoring our social media usage? And what is it doing with the information? Morgan Artukhina, a journalist with Sputnik News in Washington, 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.
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