Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder September 30, 2024
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The Power Of Labor And A Workers’ Party
The forces of the gathering authoritarian storm in our country are evident in many ways. It is manifesting itself in powerful and continuing nationalism, in disdain for human rights, in the entwinement of government and religion, in a controlled mass media, in the protection of corporate power and the suppression of labor power and in the encouragement of violence.
The power of labor has been channeled into the Democratic and Republican Party, the twin parties of capitalism. We need a workers ‘ party, but we don’t even have the nucleus of one. Race and gender are formative in the building of authoritarian regimes. We see this in the United States. Haitians, who are Black, have been accused of eating cats and dogs. Women’s right to control their own bodies is under attack from the Supreme Court on down and women are marked as “childless cat ladies” and told to stay home and bear children.
Guest – Dianne Feeley is an editor of the magazine Against the Current. She is a leader of Solidarity, a socialist feminist organization. Dianne lives in Detroit where she has been an activist for many years in the United Automobile Workers union.
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Complicity In Genocide: CCR Case Against The Biden Administration Update
Last fall, the internationally acclaimed Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of several Palestinian groups and individuals against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, alleging that Israel’s actions in Gaza have amounted to genocide and that Biden, Austin, and Blinken have failed their obligation under international law to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza.
The lawsuit claimed that the 1948 International Convention Against Genocide requires the US and other countries to use their power and influence to stop the killing. and the lawsuit asked the court to bar the US from providing weapons, money, and support to Israel. At the time of the filing of that lawsuit here on Law and Disorder, we spoke with an attorney from CCR about the case. Since that time there have been a number of developments in the case.
Guest – Attorney Maria LaHood, the Deputy Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, to join us to bring us up to date on where the lawsuit now stands. Much of Maria LaHood’s own work at CCR is on behalf of defending the constitutional rights of Palestinian advocates in the United States, such as in the case of Davis v. Cox. She was involved in defending the Olympia Food Co-op board members for deciding to boycott Israeli goods and the case of Awad v. Fordham, compelling the university to recognize Students for Justice in Palestine as a student club.
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Law and Disorder September 23, 2024
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The Center for Climate Integrity
Today, we’re delving into a legacy of deception and destruction. For more than 50 years, Big Oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP have known that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures. Yet, instead of taking responsibility or warning the public, they have orchestrated campaigns of denial, disinformation, and delay.
As a result, we are living with unprecedented climate disasters. Following the hottest year on record in 2023, extreme weather events have intensified, from record-breaking wildfires scorching California and Canada, to catastrophic hurricanes pounding the Gulf Coast. During this past June, nearly 5 billion people globally faced intense heat over nine days, with more than 60% of the world’s population encountering temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change. These events not only devastate ecosystems and communities, but they also cost taxpayers billions of dollars in damage and recovery.
Guest – Corey Riday-White, Managing Attorney at the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that is fighting to hold Big Oil accountable for its deceit. The Center is supporting litigation efforts in several states, aiming to force fossil fuel companies to pay for the damage they’ve caused. Let’s hear more about their approach, and how the legal system might be used to confront this ongoing climate crisis.
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Surveillance Dragnet: Geofence Warrants
Recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jamarr Smith, holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” What is a Geofence Warrant? They compel companies such as Google to hand over data on every device in a particular geographical area over a set period of time. Not surprisingly they are a controversial tool in law enforcement’s investigative arsenal.
Privacy experts argue they amount to a dragnet search that violates the privacy of countless innocent individuals. Proponents, on the other hand, see them as necessary for solving crimes in our digital world. The Fifth Circuit ruling is a major development in the ongoing debate over privacy and mass surveillance.
Guest – Alan Butler, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC, in Washington, DC. EPIC has been at the forefront of legal battles to improve data protection standards to protect individual rights in the rapidly advancing surveillance state. Alan Butler is Chair of the Privacy and Information Protection Committee of the American Bar Association Section on civil Rights and Social Justice. He has authored briefs on behalf of EPIC in significant privacy cases, including an amicus brief in Riley v. California that was cited in the Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark ruling that the warrantless search and content seizure of cell phones during an arrest is unconstitutional.
Music out: The Down Hill Strugglers – Abandoned Orchards That Grow
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Law and Disorder September 16, 2024
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Understanding Capitalism
The great German playwright, and political figure, Berthold Brecht, observed that to understand fascism you have to understand capitalism, from whence it springs. Today, it is also helpful for us to understand that the rise of fascism in Germany 100 years ago, has parallels we can see now with the rise of fascism in the United States.
Prior to World War I, which began in 1914, the German working class and middle class were relatively prosperous. The German unions were strong and influential. Prior to World War I, Germany also had the largest and strongest socialist party in the world, and it was the second largest political party in the German Parliament. The German economy was booming. And German culture was the jewel of Europe.
This all came to a crashing end in 1917, when Germany was defeated in what was an inter-imperial war against the United States, France, Great Britain and Russia. The consequences of that defeat brought us fascism and World War II, 20 years later. In the 1920’s, inflation wiped out the savings of the German people. When the depression hit in 1929, the German working class was desperate. The ground was fertile for the rise of Adolf Hitler, a ruthless, cunning and violent demagogue.
Here in the United States, our economy boomed for 100 years, from the end of the Civil War until the 1970s. But since then, American workers have not made any progress. Their wages, in real terms, have not risen in 50 years! “Neo- liberalism”, which is just another word for aggressive capitalism, has wiped out 30 million industrial jobs in the US, starting in the 1980s. Women were driven back into the workforce. People had to work two jobs just to keep up.
In Germany, it was the Jews who were blamed. Here in the US, it is immigrants and people of color who are scapegoated. The demagogue Trump, like Hitler before him, is a captivating speaker and a very effective cult leader, who is now poised to take the power of the government and turn it against “we the people.”
Guest – Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of the forthcoming book, “Understanding Capitalism”. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
Instead of the socialist ideal of universal human emancipation, that many European Jews supported, Zionist Israel is the outcome of a very different political ideology…an ideology that a relatively small number of middle and upper class European Jews advanced unsuccessfully until after World War II.
The founders of Zionism promoted it as a Jewish solution to the “Jewish problem.” Communists and socialists rejected this self-segregating reliance on Western colonial powers. And the current increasingly pariah status of Israel and its imperial backer, the United States, has proven the fallacy of the Zionist solution.
Israel is the product of a colonial settler ideology that has its roots in the racist and imperialist practices of the European powers of the 19th century. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, an Austrian /Hungarian journalist, was a great admirer of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperial figure who founded the mineral settler colony of Rhodesia in what became apartheid South Africa.
From its inception, the goal of the Zionists was to overwhelm and displace the indigenous native Arabs in Palestine. As a result, despite its own self-promotion, Israel is not the moral legatee of the victims of the holocaust, much less of the prophets of the Hebrew people who propounded the 10 Commandments.
The horrific slaughter since last October 7th of the Palestinians in Gaza, has been live streamed for people all over the world to see.
Guest – Emmaia Gelman is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and the founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her book on the powerful Zionist organization the Anti-Defamation League is about to be published by the University of California press.
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