Law and Disorder May 21, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Federal Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Brought By Two Iraqi Detainees
• Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Update

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ACLU of Georgia to Release Report on Immigration Detention in Georgia

A report released by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Georgia exposes the privatized corporate  immigrant detention facilities in that state. The report contains interviews from more than 60 individuals detained inside four different detention centers.

Guest – Azadeh Shahshahani, the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project Director with the Georgia ACLU.

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HIV Specific Criminal Laws

We talk today about HIV-specific criminal laws and sentence enhancement.  HIV criminal prosecution of occurs when an HIV-positive individual does not disclose their HIV status to a partner before engaging in sex.  The person charged may face decades in prison, life time registration as a sex offender and stigmatization.  While there have been hundreds of prosecutions for HIV crimes in the United States, disclosure and consent is a defense but is difficult to prove and actual transmission of HIV is unnecessary.

Sean Strub:

• About 35 states and territories have HIV specific statutes that only apply to people with HIV that mandate disclosure of their HIV status prior to engaging in intimate contact with another person, independent of whether there is any risk present, independent of whether there is any harm incurred and independent of any intent.
• The statutes have created a viral underclass that is pretty concerning. Right now there’s an explosion of laws based on people’s viral status.
• The vast majority of the prosecutions do not involve the transmission of the virus.
• There are also a number of HIV prosecutions that fall within the phenomenon we call HIV criminalization that aren’t about sex but are heightened charges for other behaviors.
• Willie Campbell in Texas is serving 35 years for spitting on a cop because the court found his saliva to be a deadly weapon even though saliva doesn’t transmit HIV.
• We’ve been alerting people to the fact that this horrific public health policy, that increasingly you hear, take the test, risk arrest.
• The best defense (under the current laws) for not getting prosecuted for HIV criminalization is not getting tested.  Not knowing your status in the first place.
• A man in Iowa just had a 50 year sentence upheld. These forms are driving the criminalization specifically as well as contributing to the stigmatization that makes people reluctant to get tested, reluctant to disclose.
• These states that HIV specific statutes, they don’t have specific statutes for hepatitis or HPV. Four thousand women last died from cervical cancer, almost every single one of them got it from Human Papilla Virus.  HPV – genital warts.
• But we’re not out prosecuting people for HPV.
• The answer is obvious those sexually transmitted diseases aren’t associated with an outlaw sexuality.  They’re not associated with people of color or gay men, with anal intercourse or people who use drugs.
• Poz Magazine The SERO Project

Guest – Sean Strub, writer and activist who founded several magazines and websites, including POZ magazine and POZ en Español, (for people impacted by HIV/AIDS), Mamm (for women impacted by breast cancer), He is the founder of the SERO project to help oppose the use of HIV specific criminal laws.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Daniel Gross - Focus On the Food Chain Victory

Victories continue for Brandworkers,  a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees. Last fall we talked with Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers about the 470 thousand dollar settlement reached in a labor dispute with Pur Pac, a food distribution warehouse giant that illegally withheld wages from their workers. Today we discuss the latest victory in another settlement recovering nearly 600 thousand dollars in unpaid wages and compensation for workers at Flaum Appetizing. According to Daniel Gross, the Latino workers there were subjected to constant verbal harassment and forced to work at unsafe speeds.

Attorney Daniel Gross:

• New York City economy has a burgeoning food processing and distributing sector.  There are 35 thousand workers, the vast majority are immigrant workers of color.
• The vast majority depend on this sector for their livelihood.
• The business model is simple. It’s exploiting recent immigrant workers of color through wage theft, through reckless disregard of health and safety and egregious discrimination of workers from Latin America, China, Haiti, Nepal.
• Flaum Appetizing , regrettably but not surprisingly really fit the mold. Flaum is a hummus manufacturer and distributor of kosher food products based in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• It starts the sector of the food corridor of food manufacturing and sweatshops.
• Flaum Appetizing  engaged in a tremendous amount of wage theft, a failure to pay overtime and in some cases, minimum wage.
• Millions and millions of dollars of real wealth had been illegally withheld from workers.
• There was offensive and insulting discrimination against Latino workers including Latino workers being called cockroaches and aliens.
• The Flaum Appetizing workers approached me in 2010 with some hope and energy because they had seen the victories of our members at the Wild Edibles Seafood had won.
• The workers through incredibly persistent grassroots energy persuaded over 120 of the best most prominent grocery stores in New York to stop selling Flaum products including their Sunny and Joe’s Hummus until workers’ rights were respected.
• Our commitment with Brandworkers, if fight to win. When we engage with an adversary, they should know if we have to, we will chase them to the gates of hell and back.
• Almost all of our members in the Flaum campaign are raising young children.
• There were two components we were able to bring home which was really a hard fought struggle.
• One was our members were proud to report they recovered 577 thousand dollars in wealth that will help them transform their families lives both here and in their home countries, Mexico and El Salvador.
• They also one a binding code of conduct which will force  Flaum Appetizing into full compliance of workplace protections.
• Our model is the labor movement of the late 19th century. Unions like Local 8, the great IWW on the Philadelphia docks that used worker direct action and everyday solidarity.
• Unions and worker centers and community groups are going to converge at the New School on June 6, 2012.  Food Justice Movement  Food Chain Workers
• I owe my politicization to a company that’s now bankrupt. That was Borders Books and Music.
• I come out of working in retail and fast food and Starbucks as you mentioned.
• My grandfather was a member of the teamsters union. He drove a liquor truck out of the Bronx. So I knew in the back of my mind he was able to live the last years of his life as amazing grandfather with dignity because he had his union pension.
• Fighting Starbucks honed my skills because they are such a sophisticated and determined adversary.
• The evil brilliance of the Starbucks union busting operation.
• I had the unique pleasure which I will remember all my life to be represented by Leonard Weinglass.

Guest – Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees.

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 Law and Disorder May 7, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian Discuss May Day Events
• Michael Smith Reads A May Day Letter From Lynne Stewart
• Retired Chemistry Professor Tried For Jury Tampering Represents Self and Wins.
• Federal Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD For Improper Use Of Barricades
• Four City Council Members File Suit Against NYPD For Police Abuse

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Former Head of CIA Clandestine Service Justifies Torture On CBS 60 Minutes

In a recent interview on CBS news, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service Jose Rodriguez discussed the destruction of 92 tapes in which terrorism suspects were subjected to water boarding and other forms of torture. Rodriguez told CBS that he destroyed the tapes to protect the people who worked for him at various black sites. But critics say Rodriguez is afraid of criminal prosecution because those 92 tapes contained compelling evidence of criminality and are a threat to Rodriguez and those who approved the use of torture.  Rodriguez,  a thirty-year veteran of the CIA, and spent most of his entire career in Latin America, supports the idea that torture works to get information.

Attorney Scott Horton:

• We know the government in response to FOIA requests, and litigation requests has released photographs and tapes repeatedly in the past, and always obliterates the faces involved, so of course the identities are not released.
• Obama announced in his speech from Kabul, al-Qaeda’s been defeated. It’s a faint shadow of what it was before.
• The tapes contained evidence of crimes, it showed water boarding and other torture techniques. It documented those techniques, and that presented a risk to Jose Rodriguez and to the the people up above Rodriguez who are responsible for putting through torture policy.
• George Tenet was involved, Bybee, a judge in the Ninth Circuit in Las Vegas, John Yoo who is a professor at the University of California, Steven Bradbury who is now a partner in a law firm in Washington DC and then it went into the White House where it went into the National Security Council.
• The trail consistently leads straight into the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the key mover for the introduction of torture policy.
• Domestically, we have an anti-torture statute that includes for conspiracy to torture, both of those things were violated. They apply outside of the United States, so they would have applied to the conduct of a CIA agent operating in Poland or Thailand for instance.
• Jose Rodriguez: He’s trying to make money, he’s selling a book, what you saw was a 36 minute advertisement for his book, published by an affiliate of CBS.
• Beyond that I’d say he’s trying to build sympathy and beat back calls for his own prosecution.
• I think this was an ill advised strategy and I think he confessed to criminal conduct in the course of this interview.
• At one point they claimed that they were able to track down and pick up Jose Padilla through the use of water boarding, which is very very interesting because Padilla was arrested and in custody before the first case of water boarding was applied.
• Mitt Romney has been out there punching away constantly on the advocacy of torture and the response from the Obama campaign has been silence. Silence.
• The guy came across to me as something of a psychopath (Jose Rodriguez)

Guest -  New York attorney Scott Horton, Scott is known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict. Scott is also the contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.

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Common Cause Files IRS Whistleblower Complaint Against ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is a tax exempt charity that spends millions of dollars annually to lobby for hundreds of bills in state legislatures around the United States. It came to the attention of the public for having drafted and pressured passage of the so-called stand your ground legislation after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February. The watchdog group Common Cause has asked the IRS to review ALEC’s status claiming that ALEC is “a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity,” and that contributors should not be allowed to claim the gifts as charitable contributions.

Nick Surgey:

• ALEC describes itself as nonpartisan although the majority are members of the Republican Party.
• It’s concerning from a tax perspective, ALEC is operating as 501c non-profit, which means its a charity.
• Therefore corporations who are members of ALEC are allowed to take a tax deduction, when they contribute up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• If Visa, Verizon or Amazon then those lobbying would not be tax deductible, they would be subject to tax, but they do the same lobbying through ALEC.
• All of those contributions are subsidized by us – the tax payer. And that’s wrong.
• We shouldn’t be subsidizing the activities of any corporation.
• Until recently ALEC operated 9 Task Forces, they were forced to close one 2 weeks ago.
• Stand Your Ground Bill / Drafted by the NRA, lobbied by them and presented to legislators in Florida 2005.
• The NRA took it to ALEC, who they’re a member of, Walmart chaired the taskforce. Walmart the largest retailer of weapons in the United States.
• The Stand Your Ground bill is now law in 20 states.
• ALEC organizes around these 9 task forces. They have bills that really cover almost every policy area.
• Other areas include rolling back environmental protection, they have a commerce task force, where a lot of anti-union bills, the right to work legislation, it comes from that task force.
• Corporations will use the state essentially to lobby on their behalf.
• Common Cause has a very good picture of what ALEC has been doing in the last 2 years and this formed the basis of this massive IRS submission.
• One document are these scorecards which they send to their corporate members, where they celebrate the success that they have. Some of the early scorecards, they mapped out the complete picture of the United States and where all of their model bills have been introduced.
• A source provided us with emails going between ALEC and state legislators. We were very greatful to be represented pro-bono by one of the country’s leading whistle-blower firms, Phillips and Cohen.
• Voter ID has been increasingly connected to ALEC.
• We believe the bigger fraud is disenfranchising millions of predominantly African American, elderly or young student voters.  In wasn’t until 2009 when ALEC took it up, that it really injected energy into it at the state level and its been introduced in 34 states. (Voter ID)
• ALEC has an ability to take a law, not always a new law and sell it to their almost 2000 state legislator members.
• ALEC has about a third of all state legislators in the entire country as members.
• There was a fracking bill, and it was sponsored by Exxon Mobile.
• ALECExposed.org

Guest -   Nick Surgey, Nick conducted the research helping to expose the American Legislative Exchange Council.  Nick joined Common Cause in March 2011 as a Legal Associate.  He formerly worked at the British Refugee Council in Leeds, England, where he advocated on behalf of asylum seekers. He previously worked at an immigration law firm, as an elected student union officer and as a paid campaigner. Nick holds an undergraduate degree in History and Politics and a post-graduate diploma in law.
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 Law and Disorder April 16, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Cuban Five Rally in Washington DC
• Coalition For Immokalee Workers Rally Tour
• Mumia Abu-Jamal – Occupy The Justice Department
• European Court of Human Rights Allows Extradition: Imprisonment In Supermax Prison Doesn’t Constitute Torture

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Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning

In the past year, we’ve covered Wikileaks and specifically the Bradley Manning case in our updates.  We talk today with Greg Mitchell co-author of the new published book, Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning.  In the first part of the book titled Solitary Man, Greg Mitchell gives readers a detailed look into the character of Bradley Manning. The second part of the book details the Bradley Manning trials written by co-author Kevin Gosztola.  Hard journalism let the voices of friends and family document the important details in Manning’s life leading up to Wikileaks and then the book dives into the complexities of the trial. In the preface Greg writes “Ultimate truths, in this case, may lead to ultimate consequences for one who would not be silent.

Greg Mitchell:

• The second half of the book is really the only thing out there that covers in depth what has happened to him in the last few months.
• Namely his court martial proceedings after he was imprisoned for a year and a half. His first hearing was last December.  He is awaiting what is expected to come out as a formal court martial in August. If it does start in August, it will be well over 2 years since he was arrested.
• A lot of the charges are related to passing along to Wikileaks, this classified secret information. Course the most dynamite charge is that he gave aid to the enemy.
• Who is the enemy? The government was forced to say that it was Al-Qaeda. That charge potentially carries the death sentence.
• They’re interested in punishing Manning, the big fish they’re after is Julian Assange.
• Last year there was global outrage when he was kept in solitary confinement, being forced to sleep naked, and stand at attention naked.
• All the top media outlets had a falling out with Wikileaks, and I think there’s a spill over from that.
• There hasn’t been any media coverage that really probes into what’s going on here.
• Over and over he (Bradley Manning) cited his outrage at what he was seeing in those cables and in Iraq, and things he was asked to participate in.
• The court martial will be extremely embarrassing to the military because they gave him access to these documents.
• He was a kid who grew up in Oklahoma, his parents eventually got divorced. He was a computer nerd, growing up. He realized in his teens, he was gay.
• He wasn’t a longtime peacenik or things like that, he always had some social conscience, and when he got to Iraq, he saw things that upset him.
• It may have never come out, that he would be arrested, except that he had these online chats with Adrien Lamo, who is a convicted hacker. Lamo decided Manning was talking too much about what he did and went to the authorities.
• The Manning case shows this incredible legacy of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gone on for a decade, its never ending and yet the American public has never been brought face to face with what the US has done in those countries, civilian casualties.

Guest – Greg Mitchell writes daily for The Nation magazine’s web site.  He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Campaign of the Century (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize), So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq,  Why Obama Won, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, The Age of WikiLeaks, and with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death?   His most recent books are Atomic Cover-up and Journeys With Beethoven.   He was the editor of Editor & Publisher from 2002 to 2009.  He also served as longtime editor of Nuclear Times magazine, and before that was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy.  Hundreds of his articles have appeared in leading publications and he has served as chief adviser for two award-winning documentaries.

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Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Natsu Saito

For our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we welcome back attorney and professor Natsu Saito. In our last interview, Professor Saito mentioned how the current system of international law evolved from the a broader agreement between the European colonial powers based on how they were not going to destroy each other in the process of taking over the rest of the world. It is this duality that Natsu writes about in her book Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law.  Professor Saito joined the College of Law faculty in 1994 and teaches international law, human rights, race and the law, immigration, criminal procedure, and professional responsibility. Her scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States, the plenary power doctrine as applied to immigrants, American Indians, and U.S. territorial possessions, and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly with regard to the suppression of political dissent.

Professor Natsu Saito:

• The duality that the US does exempt itself (from international law) very consistently and very frequently and yet promotes international law very strongly and relies upon it.
• It has relied upon certain premises that are fundamental to the whole outlook and paradigm of colonialism – which is that there is a higher good, a more civilized approach the US embodies.
• The law doesn’t apply because we have a higher aim of civilization and that justifies not playing by the rules.
• The United States making others comply with human rights standards while exempting itself
• Moving humanity toward this higher goal is so critical because if you strip that away and you look at the realities on the ground, you see what has been termed Western civilization has been incredibly barbaric.
• In order to get around that analysis, you have to say it was for a higher good.
• I think the “left” tends to accept the general framework, and to make particular criticisms of policies and practices that are obviously problematic. The US government engaging in torture for example, but each instant is accepted as anomalous instead of the larger picture.
• It is too frightening even for the people on the left to deal with the reality that this is a country that sits on occupied land, illegally occupied by its own rules. People on the left want to make it a kinder, gentler colonialism.
• I started out thinking I was writing a book about the failure of the United States failure to comply with international law, as I got into it, the more interesting questions were the push / pull dynamics between reliance on international law
• The current system of international law evolved from the international law which was the agreement between the European colonial powers of how they were not going to destroy each other in the process of taking over the rest of the world.

Guest - Professor Natsu Saito, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado. Co-Sponsors: UCI Department of Asian American Studies; UCI Department of Planning, Policy, and Design; UCI Department of Criminology, Law and Society; The Center for Unconventional Security Affairs; The Center for Research on Latinos in a Global Society. Legal scholar Dr. Natsu Saito delivered a lecture on homeland security. Her lecture examined the implications of the USA Patriot Act on Civil liberties for immigrant groups and for the rest of the population

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 Law and Disorder March 26, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Bradley Manning Update: Michael Ratner – We Have A Secret Trial Going On Right Now
• Park Slope Food Co-op Vote
• Len Weinglass Remembrance

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Leonard Weinglass TV Interview: Cuba 2004

We hear excerpts of an interview with attorney Leonard Weinglass and Miguel Alvarez, adviser on international and political affairs to Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba’s National Assembly.  In this interview Len Weinglass discusses his early career representing the first African-American mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Paper, plus  crucial turning points that shaped his life story as a people’s lawyer.

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Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story Of An Action That Changed America – Writers For The 99%

A collective of writers for the 99 percent have created a very interesting new book for OR Books, distributed by Haymarket Books. They’ve employed a  unique writing method to chronicle the many details within the movement of Occupying Wall Street. A team of nearly 60 writers with rotating membership, collaborated on the describing the intricate structures and daily life of the movement such as running the general assembly, how the security and medical center operate and then the stories of the activists involved.

Colin Robinson:

• We were supportive of what was going on down in Zuccotti and I thought we should do a book about this too.
• Beginning of October I went down to the trash cans outside my apartment and pulled an old Budweiser carton out of the trash and cut it into the shape of a book cover and wrote on it with a Sharpie, “Occupying Wall Street, By Writers With the 99%.
• I photographed it with my iPhone at home, and sent it out with a press release, and New York Magazine picked it up saying Occupy Wall Street has a book and it then went everywhere.
• The journalists were calling me up saying, who are the writers for the 99 percent?
• So then I had to get some volunteers. We went down to Zuccotti and talked to some of the facilitators down there. They said you should just come to a General Assembly and we’ll put it on the agenda.
• Tell the GA about the book, get some volunteers and you’ll be fine.
• So we went down on a Wednesday night, in early October. I was not feeling comfortable about this.
• I was a little nervous about speaking at the GA to try and get permission to publish the book.
• They suggested to go to and Education and Empowerment Meeting Committee at 60 Wall Street and take it up there and ask for volunteers there.
• The following week we went the meeting and the response at that point was not very encouraging.
• People were suspicious of who we were. Whether this book was going to be seen as the official book of Occupy Wall Street, which we were saying it wasn’t but they thought it would be.  And that it was going to develop an analysis that they didn’t agree with.
• No, we were saying its going to be descriptive, it’s not analytical. A lot of the twinkling was out flat, some of it was down. In the end, some guy stood up in the back and said I don’t think we should support this.
• We got blocked, he crossed his arms in front of chest. If this goes through, I’m walking out. We felt really wounded by it.
• But afterward some people from the committee came up and said we feel badly about the way you were treated, we’ll volunteer to help.  We started meeting weekly at 60 Wall Street and the meetings got bigger and bigger.
• We came up with a structure, chapter by chapter. There were 2 themes in the book, one was a chronological account of the action. The day the occupation started on September 17.
• The drilling down of the daily detail for what life is like in the square. We’ve got sections in the book of how the kitchen worked, how the library worked, how the general assembly worked.
• I thought at first, what I would do would be to interview the people who are volunteering to write, pick the ones who could write well, and as kindly as possible tell the ones who couldn’t write they couldn’t be part of it.
• I soon realized that was not is the spirit of Occupy Wall Street.
• We were trying to reproduce the book in a way that reflected the values of Occupy Wall Street that meant it was produced in a very democratic, horizontal fashion. Anyone who wanted to participate could.
• We came up with a chapter structure, we sent people out into the square and we did about 200 interviews in the square. We allocated the interviews to each chapter and we tried to find 3 or 4 people to write each chapter.
• The whole book was written by 60 people in 2 weeks. This book absorbed the ethos of Occupy Wall Street.
• If you repress a little bit of it, its going to spring up somewhere else.

Guest – Colin Robinson,  former Publisher, Verso Press and The New Press, and Scribner senior editor; John Oakes, former Grove Press Editor and founder of 4 Walls, 8 Windows and ORBooks.  He’s written for magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the London Guardian.

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 Law and Disorder March 19, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Rene Gonzalez – Cuban Five Update: Contact Form
• CIW: Publix Campaign Fast – Publix Surveillance Truck
• Ugandan LGBT Activists File Case Against Anti-Gay U.S. Evangelical in Federal Court
• The Progressive: Michael Smith’s Book Interview “Who Killed Che?”

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Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group

Earlier last year, we reported on the Vatican revising its laws making it easier to discipline sex abuser priests.  This month, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse and pedophilia have used the courts to force the group SNAP Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.  A Kansas City judge decided SNAP must comply with lawyers because it had relevant information regarding 2 cases in Missouri.

Attorney Barbara Blaine:

• As you know we are a not for profit, self help support group run by and for people who have been victims of clergy sexual abuse.  We have been providing support information to each other since 1988.
• The church officials have taken an unprecedented move and they have subpoenaed records from our SNAP leaders.
• We are an international group, we have groups forming in other countries as well.
• Here in the United States, we have support groups meeting in about 70 cities. In these support groups people share their feelings and tidbits of information on how to cope with the repercussions of sexual violence.
• There are subpoenas from 2 different cities, 2 different cases, both from the state of Missouri.
• In Kansas City, what’s happen in the past year, is a lot of sex abuse by priests has been uncovered, exposed and brought to light. In the process, the Bishop himself was indicted for failure to protect children.
• In one particular civil case, the church attorneys have subpoenaed the records of our national director and they are looking for very extreme information.
• These subpoenas are not tailored to be helpful to get information for the case, SNAP is not a party to either of these cases. They ask for records with no date, from the very beginning of SNAP, from 1988.
• They’re asking for all the information in our emails, in our files, and they’re looking for any information that names any priest from the diocese of Kansas City, St Joseph.
• We do believe that the victims who have spoken out in Kansas City, have had an impact. I think its empowered other victims to come forward. I think they’re trying to shut down SNAP in Kansas City.
• The biggest concern we have now is the fear that this is spreading. In many ways, the intended effect has already taken place.
• I started SNAP, I did so, after I was raped and sexually violated by a priest in my parish growing up.
• Stop The Legal Bullying Petition.

Guest - Attorney Barbara Blaine, founder of SNAP  the nation’s oldest and largest self-help organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse 10 thousand survivors.

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Court Rules FDNY Liable for Up to $128 Million in Back Pay to Black and Latino Applicants

Last week, a US District judge awarded plaintiffs back pay in a class action lawsuit that found the New York Fire Department to have racially discriminatory hiring practices.  US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis also ruled that the City of New York is liable for nearly 129 million in lost wages.  This amount will be distributed to Black and Latino applicants,  82 and 42 million dollars respectively.   The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 186 Black firefighters and 107 Latino firefighters.

Attorney Darius Charney:

• The Vulcan Society which is the Black fraternal organization for New York City brought a lawsuit in the early 1970s challenging the hiring practices of the department as violative of the equal protection clause of the Constitution, saying that they racially discriminated.
• Blacks and Latinos, its over half of the city’s population today. If you look at the fire department today, its roughly if you combine Blacks and Latinos about 10 percent.
• A federal judge in New York found that the hiring practices were discriminatory and violated the 14th amendment, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision and the Fire Dept was ordered to make some changes in 1970s.
• As of 2002 when we actually formerly brought this case, the department was 3 percent Black, 5 percent Latino, which is not much different than it was in 1970.  The city was asked to work out a settlement, the city refused for 2 years.
• So, the EEOC referred the case to the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. This was during the Bush Administration and as you know the Civil Rights Division didn’t do much.
• We’ve proven discrimination about 3 times over now to the judge. Last year we had a big federal trial in Brooklyn on what relief the court should order because of the discrimination that was found.
• If you try to obstruct a federal court order, that could lead to some serious penalties.
• Our clients, the Vulcans first met with Mayor Bloomberg when first came to office in 2002 about this problem.
• We felt it was a purposeful and intentional effort by the city to exclude people of color.
• There have been incidence, we think retaliatory incidence we think against Vulcan members for there efforts in this case.
• The FDNY has really dropped the ball in responding to these acts of discrimination.
• The court has to oversee a lot of different aspects to this case. There’s a new test being developed, they’re going to start administering this week. There’s now the piece about the compensation for the plaintiffs.
• Federal judges can’t closely supervise the case so they appoint these monitors to simply act in the role of the judge and oversee each of these aspects of the case.
• We hope that the city will at some point stop fighting because all the things the judge has ordered for changing, I think benefits the fire department.
• A group of women sued in the early 1980s alleging sex discrimination and again they pointed to the test and other aspects of the hiring process.
• They were victorious and the court ordered them to hire 50 women, which they did do.

Guest – Attorney Darius Charney,  senior staff attorney in the Racial Justice/Government Misconduct Docket.  He is currently lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, and Vulcan Society Inc. v. the City of New York, a Title VII class action lawsuit on behalf of African-American applicants to the New York City Fire Department which challenges the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the FDNY.

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 Law and Disorder March 12, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Squatters Museum, Lower East Side
  
• AIPAC Speech and Netanyahu Gifts Obama Esther Scroll
  
• CIW Fast Campaign Against Publix Supermarkets
• Co-host Michael Smith Returns From Who Killed Che? Book Tour

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Nestlé Test Case: Charges filed on murder of Colombian Trade Unionist

In a previous show we discussed the lawsuit Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case pushing to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations. We talk today about a similar case. Recently a Columbian Trade Union filed charges against the Swiss company Nestle and members of its senior management.  They are accused of failing to take precautionary measures for the 2005 murder of Luciano Romero. Romero was murdered by paramilitaries in Valledupar, a north eastern part of Columbia. His body was found with 50 stab wounds. Romero worked for a the Columbian Nestle subsidiary company Cicolac. Cicolac is accused of being negligent in failing to prevent this crime. 

Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck:

• We are presenting cases against European Transnationals who are involved in human rights violations.
• One of our targets is Nestle’s, Switzerland whom we try to hold accountable for an assassination of a Columbian Trade Unionist Luciano Romero in 2005.
• The Nestle subsidiary was very close to the paramilitary.
• Columbia has a record of killing over 2000 trade unionists over the last 20 years.
• The solidarity movement here in Switzerland was very active of the defense of the threatened trade unionists. They were threatened over years, some of them had to go into exile, some of them moved within Columbia.
• What we accused them of is negligent killing through omission.
• If you go into a conflict region and if you link with one of the conflict parties, you can be held accountable.
• The companies have the duty of due diligence. You have the task to take a human rights risk assessment. Then you have as a mother company, you have a role to play for your subsidiaries.
• That’s why we presented the case here in Switzerland, we’re not only talking about the murder in 2005, we’re also talking about future responsibilities of transnational companies.
• That’s why the whole complaint here, got huge media coverage.
• The managers who we are suing live in Switzerland, and are Swiss citizens.
• We want the prosecutor in Switzerland to undertake an investigation.
• In Columbia there is no real possibility to sue a transnational company, but this is why the Swiss judges and prosecutors have to act right now.
• The spectacle in the German and Swiss media helped us put the problems on the table.
• Havard Professor was appointed by the UN to elaborate principles to regulate the behavior of transnational companies and human rights. The principles are very general.
• The prosecutor got quite a difficult criminal complaint. He has to decide in the next weeks or months to open this criminal procedure.
• Nestle did the other way around, because they didn’t like the trade unionists. They were an obstacle.

Guest – Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck,  General Secretary and co-founder of ECCHR,  specializing in criminal law, he has established an international reputation as an advocate for human rights. He made a name for himself when he filed suit against the U.S. Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture committed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
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Exposed: NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Spill Over Into Other States, Africa and Europe

We’ve covered a wide range of stories involving the FBI spying on Muslim students and using undercover agents at mosques.   Last month, news of this spying had broke into the mainstream news.  The New York Police Department’s ongoing surveillance operations of Muslims across the Northeast has exposed a broad spectrum of civil rights violations. Documents recently obtained by the Associated Press reveal the NYPD built databases showing where Muslims live, buy food, and where they watch sports. The NYPD municipal spy operations spilled out of New York City and reached into New Jersey, Long Island and to colleges across the Northeast.

Cyrus McGoldrick:

• This program amounts to a comprehensive and warrant-less and invasive surveillance program of all Muslim life.
• Not just here in New York City but now we have reports of cops going down to UPenn in Philadelphia.
• Up to Yale in New Haven, Albany and Buffalo. It’s even worse than that. NYPD officers out in North Africa and Europe.
• This is one of the worse things I’ve seen is people being scared out of their public activities. I think there’s a fear of speaking publicly about things.
• We’re hearing reports of a network of up to 15 thousand informants feeding information to the NYPD.
• One of the earliest documents that came out was a powerpoint presentation from the NYPD called the demographics unit. The third or fourth slide in this document is titled “ancestries of interest.”
• Anyone who is trying to make the argument, “they’re trying to protect us” they need to see this slide.
• It’s human mapping, community mapping, modeled off of how Israelis operate in the West Bank.
• It’s essentially Muslim until proven innocent.
• The documents are there, they’re online, we’ve seen them for ourselves. I would love to put Mayor Bloomberg in front of the power point presentation of the demographics unit and let him justify that.
• They’ll trot out pictures of terrorists and say this is what we’re keeping you safe from .
• You’re really in danger of honey bees than from a terrorist attack
• And don’t let the NYPD tell you that that’s because they’re spying on Muslim students from Philadelphia to New Haven because that’s not the case.
• There’s maybe two cases where the FBI was not the primary planner of that attack.
• Within 200 miles of New York City, the NYPD are sending people just a shocking number of informants and sometimes undercover officers culling political speech, political activity, hearing what people are talking about.
• So they’re watching everything they can, and anyone who is expressing some anger.
• Watching for raising a dissenting voice, that’s what the rakers were.
• Mosque crawlers played a similar role.
• Rakers is a more general term for the invasion, infiltration.
• We’re lucky that this got discovered.
• The involvement of the CIA is very interesting. David Cohen from the CIA who came to the NYPD after 9/11. Sometimes they refer to him as a former CIA agent. I’m not sure that’s a type of club you can leave.
• There are other CIA agents that were on CIA payroll but were posted in the NYPD.
• Later, the CIA actually removed the officers that were in the NYPD because of a lack of supervision, they called it.
• When you see these people lining up to defend this, you have to wonder why.
• They’re using the fear of us to get to your rights.
• It’s really amazing the assumptions of power that the government has justified with the war on terror.

Guest – Cyrus McGoldrick,  Civil Rights Manager with the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New York

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 Law and Disorder March 5, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Julian Assange Update
• Michael Ratner Discusses Bradley Manning’s Arraignment
• Coalition For Immokalee Workers Fast
• Occupy For Mumia Abu-Jamal April 24,2012
• Egypt NGO Update
• Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum
• Follow Michael Ratner on Twitter – @JustLeft
• Follow Heidi Boghosian on Twitter @occupylawyer

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Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Filed Over Boycott of Israeli Goods

Last month, a judge in Olympia, Washington dismissed a lawsuit tailored to force the Olympia Food Co-op to rescind its boycott of Israeli goods. The judge ruled that the lawsuit brought by opponents of the boycott violated a Washington State law designed to prevent abusive lawsuits which are aimed at suppressing lawful public participation. Interestingly, an investigation by ElectronicIntifada had unearthed that the lawsuit against individuals with the Olympia Food Co-op Board was also planned in collusion with a national anti-Palestinian organization called StandWithUs that was working with the Israeli government. Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that the lawsuit qualified as a SLAPP, that stands for – - Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.  SLAPPs are lawsuits that target the constitutional rights of free speech and petition in connection with an issue of public concern.

Attorney Maria LaHood:

• The Olympia Food Co-op is a non-profit in Olympia Washington, that not only makes good food accessible to people, but also encourages economic and social justice in other ways.
• So it has a long history of doing social justice work, including adopting boycotts.
• The board decided to boycott Israeli goods in 2010 by consensus. A few months after that there was a co-op election. Three of the five plaintiffs who ended up bringing the lawsuit, members of the co-op, the co-op has about 22 thousand members. They ran for the election opposing the boycott and they lost.
• They ran for the board on an anti-boycott agenda and not voted in by the members.
• The board decided to boycott Israeli goods and divest from any Israel investment.
• One Israeli product: Gluten free ice cream cones,
• Obviously it had symbolic significance so that the five plaintiffs decided to send a letter to the board promising litigation that would be complicated, burdensome and expensive if the board didn’t end the boycott.
• CCR got involved and CCR cooperating council to represent the board members and decided to file an anti-SLAP motion as well as a motion to dismiss.
• Plaintiffs were also seeking discovery which of course they had promised. They started out serving 200 pages of discovery on all 16 defendants and trying to depose all 16 defendants. After we file the anti-SLAPP motion which actually stays discovery, they sought to depose three of the defendants as well as additional document requests.
• We challenged that discovery request.
• Olympia, Washington, is where Evergreen College and that’s also where Rachel Corrie is from.
• Stand With Us is basically an anti-BDS organization.
• The lawsuit against the co-op board members was actually identified by Stand With Us as one of its projects months before the case was even filed.
• Stand With Us also produced and posted online an anti-BDS video with four of the five plaintiffs in the case.
• They described themselves as an international organization ensuring Israel’s side of the story is told.
• They also have apparently connections as well to the Israeli government.
• The hearing was last Thursday, there was a great turn out, they had to move us to a bigger court room.
• The judge ruled that this lawsuit did challenge public participation so it did fall under the anti-SLAPP statute.
• Boycotts are constitutionally protected under the first amendment.
• This kind of suit is exactly what this statute was meant to address.
• We argued that the board under the bylaws has the authority to adopt any policy essentially it wants, that promotes the co-opts mission.
• He (the judge) did say that it was a nationally recognized movement.
• The victory here sends a message that you cannot sue to chill free speech issues.

Guest – Senior staff attorney Maria LaHood, who specializes in international human rights litigation, seeking to hold government officials and corporations accountable for torture, extrajudicial killings, and war crimes abroad. Her cases have included Arar v. Ashcroft, against U.S. officials for sending Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria where he was tortured and detained for a year; Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, to prevent the “targeted killing” of a U.S. citizen in violation of constitutional and international law;  Matar v. Dichter, against an Israeli official responsible for a “targeted killing” that killed 15 Palestinians; Belhas v. Ya’alon, against a former Israeli official responsible for the 1996 shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon, that killed over 100 civilians; Corrie v. Caterpillar, on behalf of Palestinians killed and injured in home demolitions, and Rachel Corrie, a U.S. human rights defender who was killed trying to protect a home from being demolished; and Wiwa v. Royal Dutch/Shell, for the torture, detention and execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other human rights activists and protestors in Nigeria. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School in 1995, Maria advocated on behalf of affordable housing and civil rights in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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 Law and Disorder February 6, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• OWS: Three Months of Twitter Supoenaed
• Hackers, Copyright Pirates and US Extradition
• The Third Jihad Film Shown To 1498 NYPD Officers
• Past Show: Fear Inc: The Roots Of Islamaphobia In America
• Taliban Prisoners In Guantanamo Used As Bargaining Chip
• Sundance Film Festival: The Law In These Parts.
• Sundance Film on Paul Simon Playing South Africa Undercuts Power of Cultural Boycott
  
• Mumia Abu-Jamal In General Population: With Heidi Boghosian and Johanna Fernandez
• Update: Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Trader Joe’s Sign Fair Food Agreement

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Weapons of Mass Destruction Part 2: Iran

Similar to accusing the Iraqi government for stockpiling weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for a military invasion, Israeli and US intelligence assert that Iran is bent on becoming a nuclear weapons state by enriching uranium. This narrative as many listeners know has been going for many years  In the New York Times article titled Confronting Iran In A Year of Elections, New York Time’s chief Washington correspondent David Sanger platforms his article on the assumption there is evidence Iran is making nuclear weapons. We talk today with Professor Bill Beeman author of The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. Beeman has criticized the New York Times and other media for falsely claiming there is evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons. He also points out that Iran has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and that their facilities are monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Professor William Beeman:

• First of all its very important to understand there is no evidence anywhere that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.  Every report from the IAEA has reaffirmed that Iran has not diverted any nuclear material for military purposes, including the last report in November 2011.
• The news media, especially the New York Times, I must tell you has distorted the IAEA report in order to make it seem as if Iran is building nuclear weapons.
• We have no evidence to the contrary.
• The New York Times article written by an Israeli journalist not only has actually attracted hundreds and hundreds of objections.  Because of its war mongering tone and because it contains a lot of inaccuracies.
• Clapper claims Iran is most likely to attack the United States based on the incident that took place a few months ago.
• There are some countries like Japan that have said outright that they intend to develop the capacity to construct nuclear weapons.  Iran has said it doesn’t intend to do this.
• The United States is not coming after Japan. . or Brazil which has issued a similar statement or any of the 20 countries that don’t have weapons but are now enriching uranium.
• When Colin Powell went before the United Nations saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction I wrote a column saying its simply not true.
• That got me on the Bill O’Reilly show where I had a big arguement with him about this.
• I said simply show us the actual proof.
• My feeling at the time was that Colin Powell had been badly misused by the Bush administration in order to sell a false picture of what was actually going on in Iraq.
• Iran was given uranium many years ago during the time of the Shah to use in a medical reactor to develop isotopes for the treatment of cancer.
• Every scrap of uranium that they’ve been working with is under inspection.
• The IAEA is watching the process as it goes on every day.
• They say if Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map they’re probably going to use nuclear weapons.
• The joke is of course we knew Iran was enriching uranium, because we started the enriching program 40 years ago.
• The idea that it was carried out in secret, quite frankly revealed the extraordinary ignorance of the Bush Administration.
• They have a continual drum beat to attack Iran. The aim is not to stop Iran’s nuclear program because Iran’s nuclear program is anemic. The aim is regime change.

Guest – Professor William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of Anthropology and specialist in Middle East Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota, formerly of Brown University. It includes current publications on Middle Eastern affairs, especially Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region; anthropology; linguistics; performance; opera; things Japanese and Central Asian.

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 Law and Disorder January 30, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Smith visits political prisoner David Gilbert and discusses David’s book Love and Struggle.
• Genocide Bill Angers Turks – It Was Genocide Radio Documentary by Heidi Boghosian
  
• Supreme Court: GPS Tracking Device Illegal
• Lizzy Ratner Co-hosts Beyond the Pale on WBAI

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Tariq Ali: Turning Points in the History of Imperialism

Today we’re joined by internationally renowned writer and activist Tariq Ali. Tariq is visiting from London where he is editor of the New Left Review.

A writer and filmmaker, Tariq has written more than 2 dozen books on world history and politics, including The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, The Obama Syndrome and On History. We talk specifically about several turning points in global history, the Occupy movement and US elections. .

Tariq Ali:

• The think the first World War was crucial but it wasn’t the war itself it was the consequences of that war. Here you had huge empires.
• The Russian revolution challenged capitalism frontally and its leaders said we want Europe to be with us, on our own we can’t do it. We need the Germans, we need a German revolution. That frightened the capitalist class globally.
• Woodrow Wilson, decided that the time had come to intervene. 22 countries came to intervene.
• This intervention made it impossible for the early infant Soviet Union to achieve what it wanted to achieve.
• The Second World War was an effort by the German ruling class to get its share of the world market in countries.
• The US helped rebuild Japan and Germany. They helped build France and Britain by the Marshal Plan and that has never been done by a big imperial power before.
• They managed to get the Soviet Union to implode by having an arms race. The Russians fell into their trap and decided to go for the arms race, had they not history might have been different.
• I hope the Chinese do not fall into the same trap, threatened by Obama’s puny little bases in Australia.
• People, early settlers in the United States got land totally free and they took it and that created the belief in the American psyche of private property.
• The Soviet Union imploded because the people lost faith in the system.
• The entire elite in the United States and Western Europe is wedded to the Washington consensus that emerged after the collapse of communism. The center piece of this consensus was a system which believed in market forces. I refer to it as market fundamentalism.
• We are confronting the extremism of the center and the result of this is no alternatives exist within mainstream politics. The effect that this is having is hollowing out democracy itself.
• Occupy: What we need is for these movements to call an assembly nationally and discuss a charter of demands for progressive America which need only be ten demands but something around which people can rally. I think its a movement that should be created bearing what the needs of ordinary people are.
• In order to understand the laws of motion of capital, you have to read Marx. It’s true capitalism has become much much more complex. Zombie capitalism, or fictitious capitalism, where money is used to make more money.
• It’s not money that’s creating productive goods.
• I had written a book on South American because I got very engaged in the Venezuela-Boliverian struggle and got to know Chavez very well.
• If Americans had access to Cuban medicine, the pharmaceutical companies would collapse, they would never let it happen.

Guest – Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and film-maker, born in Lahore and educated at Oxford University. He writes regularly for a range of publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books.  He has written more than a dozen books including non-fiction as well as scripts for both stage and screen.

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 Law and Disorder January 23, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Heidi Boghosian: Mumia Abu-Jamal Update
• Support Mumia Here
• Michael Smith: Occupy Chicago Tribune Lawsuit Is On
  
• Michael Ratner: Tenth Anniversary of Guantanamo Prison: Cage Prisoners
  
• Movie: Death In Camp Delta
• Iranian Scientist Murdered: Mossad, CIA, ISI
• Covert War Against Iran
• Michael Ratner Speaks At Occupy London About Bradley Manning Case
• Julian Assange Extradition
• Judge Goes Forward With Investigation Of Guantanamo Torture Cases
• UK Transferring People To Qaddafi To Be Tortured

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Newly Launched Whistle Blower Site – Honest Appalachia

Activists in Virginia have launched a website appealing to whistleblowers wanting to reveal evidence of corporate and government wrongdoing. The site is called honestappalachia.org, it uses a security technology to protect citizens who upload documents and it keeps their identity hidden if there’s legal action. Inspired by Wikileaks, honestapplachia is a low cost model that can be adapted by others worldwide.

Jimmy Tobias:

• The site is meant to be a resource for whistle blowers, that allows them to anonymously upload documents to our site. We will take those documents and vet them, and distribute them to journalists.
• SOPA is definitely a risk to transparency and whistle blower resources on the web.
• You go on our site, and you read our submission guide which is a step by step.
• The guide will tell you to download TOR. A simple piece of software which routes your activity through servers across the world, which essentially makes your activity anonymous.
• Your IP address basically gets lost in the crowd. We will never know who you are uploading to our site.
• We also encrypt the documents we receive.
• We have information on our site where others can take our open source software and use 80 percent of it.
• Our project is focusing outreach in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, also includes Georgia and South Carolina.
• We’re really hoping to receive documents about wrongdoing at the state and local level of government, from corporations in the region.
• Appalachia is a very industrialized region but its also very rural.
• We were funded with a grant from the Sunlight Foundation.
• Generally there’s a lot of cozy relationships in the states, between industry and government.
• We’re focusing on a broad array whether they’re coal or gas companies, banks, zoning boards, state and local governments, anything that could engage in corruption at the expense of the public.

Guest - Jim Tobias, activist and direct action protester.

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