September 26 - The Republican Senate Poised to Kill Consumer Protection; Trump's Belated Attention to Puerto Rico's Plight; Threats From Turkey After an Independence Referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan

Full Program

Part 1

Following the collapse of the Republican Senate’s latest effort to repeal Obamacarewe will begin with another less publicized effort by Republican senators to jam through unpopular legislation, this time a vote to kill a new ban by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on banks and credit card companies requiring customers to give up their right to sue and participate in class action suits, forcing them instead into corporate-friendly closed-door arbitration. Amanda Werner, the arbitration campaign manager with Americans for Financial Reform and Public Citizen joins us to discuss how this brazen stealth attempt to cripple the CFPB that comes on the heels of exposes of widespread consumer fraud by Wells Fargo who ripped off customers and corporate negligence by Equifax who have exposed the personal data of 143 million to cyber-criminals. In both cases these corporate miscreants have used arbitration clauses buried in the fine print to deny consumers access to the courts for restitution.

Part 2

Then we examine the humanitarian disaster that Puerto Rico is enduring following the devastation from two hurricanes that have left the island’s 3.5 million American citizens without electricity and water. An historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Martinez-Fernandez, a Professor of History at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, which has one of the world’s highest concentrations of Puerto Ricans, joins us. We discuss Trump’s belated attention to the island’s plight after days of distracting the nation with a ginned-up controversy over football players kneeling during the national anthem. But today, following a series on insensitive tweets about bad infrastructure and too much Wall Street debt, at a White House press conference Trump repeatedly congratulated himself on his handling of the crisis in Puerto Rico.

Part 3

Then finally we assess the impact of Monday’s non-binding independence referendum by the Kurdish Regional Government which has provoked threats from Turkey and rebukes from the Iraqi government in Baghdad. An internationally recognized expert on the Kurds, Edmund Ghareeb, the author of “The Kurdish Question in Iraq” and “The Kurdish Nationalist Movement,” joins us to discuss the unusual nature of Iraqi soldiers joining with Turkish troops for military exercises near the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.