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David Kairys: Lawyers You’ll Like

David Kairy began his career at the Philadelphia public defender’s office in the late 1960s. Since then, he’s been a leader in effort to fight discrimination and protect individual rights, now he’s regarded as one of the nation’s preeminent civil rights attorneys. David is a professor at the University of Temple Law School, where he teaches civil rights and constitutional law. He has written several books, including Philadelphia Freedom: Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer, which was published last year.

David Kairys:

  • We were of a number of young firms dedicated to civil rights and representation of progressive groups.
  • The Camden 28, caught in the act of breaking into a Camden, New Jersey draft board and destroying all of the files. This was a Catholic Left action.
  • FBI had informant in the group, who the FBI was paying on an hourly rate. The informant supplied the means to make the action happen.
  • One hundred FBI agents sat around and waited til they destroyed all the files in the office.  Many of the 28 were priests. There were more than 300 draft board raids during Vietnam.
  • Father Michael Doyle said when your government is napalming children, the place you should be is in jail.
  • Father Doyle and I strategized a way to start talking to the FBI informant Bob Hardy and eventually got an affadavit saying that the FBI manufactured this crime.
  • I filed the affidavit and it was on the front page of the New York Times.

Guest – David Kairys, Professor of Law, the first James E. Beasley Chair (2001-07), and one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers. He authored Philadelphia Freedom, Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer and With Liberty and Justice for Some and co-authored the bestselling progressive critique of the law, The Politics of Law, and authored With Liberty and Justice for Some and over 35 articles and book chapters. His columns have appeared in major periodicals, and he has been profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. Kairys’s Public Nuisance Theory.

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Detroit’s Economic Corrosion

The bankrupt General Motors will use the billions of taxpayer bailout funds to move their productions to Mexico and China.  In one report Mexican workers will be making 3 dollars an hour without benefits.  Meanwhile, the jobless in Detroit rose to 13 percent unemployment. Retired Auto Worker member of local 235,  Dianne Feeley says Detroit is 40 percent unoccupied, homes are looted for furnaces and copper and soon burned to the ground.   Dianne joins us today to give us a sense of the economic corrosion in Detroit.   Dianne Feeley Speaking – Youtube.

Dianne Feeley:

  • In Detroit we were a city of 2.2 million now were about 900,000.
  • Saving Corporations, Sacrificing Workers by Dianne Feeley
  • We need manufacturing to be re-tooled like in WWII. It took 8 months to re-tool those plants.
  • We’re suggesting since the United States, doesn’t have mass transit, that’s something our plants can build.
  • General Motors used to manufacture buses. In addition to green vehicles, there’s the whole range of mass transit.
  • Detroit no longer has any department stores in the city, although we’re 140 square miles.
  • There’s no major grocery store in the city, no wonder fast food is the only thing available for large swaths of the city. Detroit is 85 percent African American.
  • GM has insisted that more auto workers are laid off, and more benefits are cut back.
  • Right before GM went bankrupt, the US Treasury Department demanded the UAW give up the retiree vision benefits and dental benefits.
  • Now, why in an economic downturn are you going after small benefits that retirees have?
  • Out of the price of the car manufactured, auto worker wages represent 8-10 percent of the total cost.
  • At least in other countries when the government gives money to corporations, they don’t lay off workers. In our case, the government has helped GM and Chrysler to lay off workers, that’s what they’re demanding.
  • (Instead of laying off workers) How do we move out of an auto-centric society into a mass transit society?
  • In the last 30 years the unions have taken the position of “how do we make the company profitable” so there’s no concession we can’t make.
  • The media and politicians (esp) have demonized the auto-worker. We’re supposed to be the high paid 73 dollars an hour worker.
  • No one talks about how much CEOs make an hour. We don’t make 73 dollars/hour, that’s a miscalculation.
  • The jobs not only left the US, but they left where there were better labor laws.

Guest – Dianne Feeley,  a retired auto worker who currently serves as an editor of Against the Current, a socialist magazine.  She is an advocate for auto workers and has written recently about the U.S. auto industry, arguing that the government should buy Chrysler and General Motors and turn them into a public trust.

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