Investigative reporter, Allan Nairn, warns of the autocratic drift of the Republican Party under Trump, and how important the midterm elections are in putting the brakes on it. And Paul Hudson of Flyers Rights updates us on the latest on airline travel from the traveler’s point of view.
Allan Nairn is an award winning investigative journalist, who has reported on death squads in Central America, mass killings in Indonesia, and brutal paramilitary activity in Haiti. He has been jailed. He has been beaten. He has risked his life to tell the stories of brutal regimes, many of which have been backed by the United States. He has seen on the ground the bloody effects of those policies. Noam Chomsky called him one of the only true investigative journalists working today.
“Trump said, ‘Yeah, the economic possibilities of the American working class have collapsed. How are we going to solve that? We’re going to solve it with racism. We’re going to solve it with a wall. We’re going to solve it with scapegoating.’ Sanders took the opposite more constructive approach. But in the end, when Trump was up against Clinton, you had one candidate who was at least addressing the reality and another candidate, Clinton, who was denying it, saying, “Everything is okay. There’s no collapse of the American middle class.” And so some people, I think, were maybe naïve enough to believe so many of Trump’s lies. But others may have said, ‘Okay, he’s a liar. He’s a crook. But at least he’s acknowledging that we’ve got a problem.’”
Investigative journalist, Allan Nairn
Paul Hudson has been a ground breaking public interest advocate for over thirty years: In the 1970s in energy and utility policy, in the 1980s for crime victim rights, in the 1990s to 2012 for air travelers and terrorist victims. He led the Pan Am 103/Lockerbie bombing victim family organization and the Aviation Consumer Action Project. Today, he is the president of Flyers Rights.
“The first thing the organization did in 2009, it succeeded in getting what’s called the ‘three-hour rule’ enacted. That meant that the airline could not keep you on the tarmac more than three hours without letting you out of the airplane if you wanted to.”
Paul Hudson, President of Flyers Rights
Neo-Fascism/Flyers’ Bill of Rights