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 14, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• In Memory: Karen Detamore, Former Executive Director Friends of Farmworkers, Inc.
• Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit

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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper

Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper is the title of Patrick O’Connor’s new book. This is an important document chronicling Kevin Cooper’s  controversial conviction and death sentence in 1985.  When O’Connor committed to writing the book, he poured over thousands of case documents from trial transcripts, grisly autopsy photos, appeals and judicial rulings. He then began interviewing those involved in the trial and appeals. The picture began to take shape, a familiar one. The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin Cooper from the brutal murders of the Ryen Family and their guest.

J. Patrick O’Connor:

• In 2008, the Mumia book that I wrote was coming out and I was in the San Francisco Bay area with (attorney) Jeff Mackler of the Mobilization to Free Mumia.
• We had about 15 venues that we went to all over the bay area. Invariably, supporters of Kevin Cooper would come to these events and afterwards would take me aside and say you got to write a book about Kevin Cooper.
• His case is a lot different than Mumia’s but there are a lot of similarities.
• Once I started reading the transcripts of this trial, I could see there were a lot of things wrong with this case.
• It took me about 2 and half years from the start to the publication of the book.
• There was a terrible, in Chino Hills, this is Arabian horse country. This family named the Ryens, they live on a hilltop house with a very big spread, about 15 Arabians. San Bernadino-45 miles east of Los Angeles.
• In this area, most of the people were either raising horses or grazing cattle. This family was a mom and dad and they were both chiropractors. 41 year old chiropractors, and they had a 10 year old daughter named Jessica and an 8 and a half year old son named Josh.
• A friend of Josh’s 11 year old Christopher Hughs, spent the night.
• Around midnight that night, the home was breached. The master bedroom. The family was assaulted with an axe, or a hatchet, I think 2 knives, and an ice pick.
• It was an incredible fight, these people didn’t stand in line and say I’m next.
• The father Doug was 6’1″ 190lbs, a former Marine, an MP in the Marines and could take care of himself. The mother 5’8″ very strong, she was the one that could train the horses, these enormous horses that she could control.
• Both of them kept loaded weapons in the bedroom. The idea that one perpetrator could use 4 weapons to perpetrate this attack is kind of fecitious on its face.
• What put Kevin Cooper in the crosshairs is 3 miles from Chino Hills is Chino which is home to the California Institute for Men, where every felon in Southern California is sent for classification.
• Cooper was sent there for 2 burglaries in LA. Escapes and holes up in Chino Hills for the next 2 days, in a house located 125 yards from the Ryen’s house.
• Josh who had survived, told the deputy sheriff through a hand squeeze method that it was 3 white men.  They put out APBs for 3 white guys.
• When they discern Kevin Cooper’s prints are all over that hide out house, they discard that information and start planning evidence that would implicate Cooper and making big lies about stuff that would implicate him.
• He would have been the only African-American in the community.
• They contaminated the crime scene, there are 2 bathrooms in this house, the cops used one of the bathrooms that had blood in the sink.
• They don’t type the blood properly, they put blood from all different parts of the room in the same bag.
• So, there’s no way to track the motions of who died, what was the order of death?
• They took the walls out, they carted out all the furniture, put it on the front yard. Then they moved it to a warehouse where the air conditioner broke. It went to 120 degrees, they lose all the blood evidence in the warehouse.
• The night of the murders, Cooper left after 9pm to hitchhike to Mexico. Cooper sees his mugshot on TV, he goes on the lamb.  Cooper is got and convicted, he gets the gas chamber.
• He came with 3 hours and 45 minutes of being executed because of a moratorium. Kevin Cooper is fifth in line, this moratorium will end in 2013.
• They had to have the complicity of numerous people inside the sheriff’s department and a very willing DA’s office to perpetrate this fraud on Cooper.

Guest – J.Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crimemagazine.com and the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2008). He has previously worked as a reporter for UPI, editor of Cincinnati Magazine, associate editor of TV Guide, and editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times.

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Homeland Security Documents Show Massive Nationwide Monitoring of Occupy Movement

Last month we gave Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messinio of the Partnership for Civil Justice the Law and Disorder Tip Of The Hat Award for creative use of FOIA.  The documents obtained by the Department of Homeland Security show a massive nationwide monitoring, surveillance and information sharing between DHS and local authorities.  But its only the tip of the iceberg. The documents are heavily redacted and don’t show the full scale of coordination. “These documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people,” says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, she’s the Executive Director of the PCJF.

Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard:

• We filed a series of FOIA requests and demands in November of last year when it was clear the Occupy movement was being subjected to a coordinated assault.
• We wanted to expose and uncover the role of the federal government working hand in hand with local police and municipalities to shut down this movement. A movement that is inspiring people all over the country and is a force for social change.
• What we have is the tip of a very carefully submerged iceberg.
• What we’ve seen is massive surveillance, coordination, monitoring of peaceful protesters all over the country by the federal government.
• There is monitoring that’s gone on from Washington DC, to Atlanta, to Detroit, to Dallas, that there is an intense focus going all the way up to high ranking members of the administration.
• We know that with the creation of the fusion centers and the suspicious reporting activity, the vertical integration of law enforcement and intelligence operatives in the US, that coming from a federal level, from the Department of Homeland Security, with billions of dollars. There is in place where all of the hundreds and thousands of law enforcement officers . . local is almost deputized, where they’re collecting information and feeding data.
• It’s critical that the people of the United States see this. The way for this to be stopped is to uncover it and expose it.  We see time and again the FBI creating its own terrorist plots, in many times as PR to justify their oppressive apparatus.
• One of the defining features of the Obama Administration is the fact that it took on this apparatus put in place by the Bush Administration and not only didn’t take it apart, they have deepened it.
• There is really a structure now in the United States that has the US government spying and collecting data on its own citizens.
• We have regulation that has been put into place under the Obama Administration where there is growing use of military support for domestic civilian authorities which is very concerning.
• We can see that the real spark for social change is people getting together for collective action.
• What we want to accomplish is to keep the streets, sidewalks and parkland open for grassroots democracy and social change and people need the ability to come out and come together and in order to do that without fear that they’re going to be beaten . . or mass arrested.
• National Special Security Events: The Secret Service and Federal Government becomes the lead coordinating arm and local police work under that umbrella. In Tampa and Charlotte you can see they’re enacting these very repressive ordinances that facially look unconstitutional.
• The ordinances are trying to stop people from doing things are permitted, that are lawful.
• There is growing effort to take public space out from under our feet and one way of doing that is to say that there’s going to be an effort to restore the grass, and we fought this battle back in 2004 at the RNC in New York when we came to challenge the effort of New York City to ban mass assembly on the Great Lawn of Central Park.
• A lot of this effort is to make people feel alone and suffer in silence.

Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the Guild’s national Mass Defense Committee. Co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she recently secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia (involving targeting of political activists and false arrest by law enforcement based on political affiliation); and in National Council of Arab Americans, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (successfully challenging the city’s efforts to discriminatorily restrict mass assembly in Central Park’s Great Lawn stemming from the 2004 RNC protests.)

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

Updates:

• Update: Occupy The Justice Department
  
• Bradley Manning Trial Update: Attorney CCR Attorney Shane Kadidal
• Bradley Manning: A Show Trial of Secrecy by Michael Ratner
  

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39 Ways To Limit Free Speech

39 Ways To Limit Free Speech is the title Law Professor David Cole’s recent article.  Earlier this month, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating a document. The text he translated from Arabic is “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and its all over the internet, you can read it says David Cole, but don’t try to translate it. One issue in the government’s prosecution of this case is the use of the decision from the Brandenburg v. Ohio case in which the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against blacks and “Jews.”

Professor David Cole:

• He was accused of providing material support to al-Qaeda by translating various documents and videos from Arabic into English. There’s no allegations that Mehanna ever met with or even talked to a member of al-Qaeda. There are no allegations that the translations were delivered to or provided to al-Qaeda which was the designated group.
• The government argued that because he translated these documents and put them up on the web and hoped to encourage people to support jihad and support al-Qaeda, that’s enough to constitute material support.
• Here’s an instant in which the government is prosecuting pure speech but no showing that the speech was connected to illegal conduct, no showing that it was intended to produce eminent lawless action, which the Supreme Court said is required to produce under Brandenburg.
• It’s enough that he put it up on the web and wanted to support al-Qaeda.
• If that’s a crime what about the New York Times when it does a report on one of the many messages Osama Bin Laden put after 9-11?
• I represented the Humanitarian Law Project in the case that went to the Supreme Court in 2010, in which the HLP was in engaging in advocacy of human rights and peace, clearly non-violent, non-criminal conduct.
• But because they wanted to do it to and with the Kurds in Turkey and particularly the political representatives of the Kurds in Turkey which is the Kurdistan Workers Party (designated as a terrorist organization) the government argued that it was a crime to teach the KWP to bring human rights claims in Geneva and work with them in peace overtures to the Turkish Government.
• The Supreme Court upheld that, but doesn’t apply to independent advocacy. (until now)
• Now if you wanted your speech to support terrorist organizations, even if you did it independently of that organization, even if you never met or talked to anyone in that organization, we can make it a crime.
• Very much about declaring a “new front” in the war on terror and the front is going after internet propaganda.
• To me it recalls the kind of aiding the enemy prosecutions we saw in World War 1.
• We as citizens need to be active in monitoring and pushing back against this material support statute.

Guest – Professor David Cole teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center.  He is also a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He has been published widely in law journals and the popular press, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.

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FAA Releases Lists of Drone Certificates—Many Questions Left Unanswered
Earlier this year we discussed the partnership with Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The two institutions are working together to build a campus in New York City.  Technion is involved with developing robotic weapons systems, which include aerial drones, and unmanned combat vehicle technology.  There are many more universities involved with drone technology. Through a series of Freedom of Information requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FAA has been forced to reveal approximately 63 active drone sites. These sites are located in 20 states and their owners include military and universities. Universities include Cornell, (which we just mentioned)  the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, Eastern Gateway Community College and many more.

Attorney Jennifer Lynch:

• We filed a FOIA request with the FAA last April asking for copies of all the certificates of authorization and the special air-worthiness certificates that the FAA issues to anybody to wants to fly a drone in the US.
• We asked for these lists which are called COAs, or Certificates of Authorization. The COAs apply to public entities like state and local law enforcement, universities, the federal government.
• We got two lists from the FAA and the FAA says these cover all of the entities that applied for an authorization to fly a drone in United States.
• They’re very interesting, the COA list includes some unsurprising entities like DARPA, DHS, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, various branches of the military. We already knew those entities were flying drones.
• What was more surprising was the number of universities and colleges on the list.
• Universities that have an aerospace engineering program they may be seeking authorization so the students can learn about and design drones.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil liberties non-profit, we focus on civil liberties and new technology, and we’re concerned about surveillance equipment used by the government.
• Drones are a duel use technology, they can be used for good or for bad.
• They can see inside buildings, survey an area at night with heat sensors, they also have the ability to carry communications intercept tools. You could swap out various payloads on a drone.
• Then of course these drones can carry weapons.
• You can build your own drone, DIYDrones.
• We don’t know too much about what’s going on now. The reason the EFF file the FOIA request in the first place is that we just don’t know how agencies are using these drones.
• What we found is that a lot of the police forces that have drones are required to fly them under 600 feet. If its something that flying under 600 feet you’re going to be able to see that.
• Congress was getting a lot of pressure, and the FAA was getting a lot of pressure from state and local law enforcement, the military and the federal government to authorize more drones to be used in the United States.
• We’ve heard from the Congressional Research Service that 1 in 3 warplanes right now is a drone.
• The wars are going to end and the military is going to want to something with these drones.

Guest – Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on open government, transparency and privacy issues as part of EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. In addition to government transparency, Jennifer has written and spoken frequently on government surveillance programs, intelligence community misconduct, and biometrics collection. Prior to joining EFF, Jennifer was the Clinical Teaching Fellow with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law. At the Samuelson Clinic, Jennifer specialized in privacy and intellectual property issues, including investigations on social media, privacy and the smart electrical grid, digital books, and open source regimes for biotech. Before the Clinic, Jennifer practiced with Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz in the Central District of California. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley.

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

Updates:

• Law and Disorder Tip Of The Hat Award: Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messinio For Creative Use of FOIA
• Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)
• Forty years in solitary: Two Men Mark Somber Anniversary in Louisiana Prison
  
• Movie – Herman’s House
• Creative Protest At the Florida Atlantic University Campus

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Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice

The FBI now spends more than 3 billion dollars a year on counter-terrorism, the bureau maintains a team of 15 thousand spies in a nationwide network of informants. Criminal informants or snitches are part of a criminal system most people know little about. Many of these informants are tasked with infiltrating Muslims communities in the United States. We’ve discussed in the past, the expanded FBI guidelines plus the broad over reaching powers and underhanded tactics the FBI use when targeting Mosques and Muslim Americans.

We talk today with Professor of Law and author Alexandra Natapoff, about her book Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.  Her book catalogues the downside in the use of snitches on social structure and democracy and suggests ways to make the use of informants acceptable within the criminal justice system.

Professor Alexandra Natapoff:

• Snitching is such a massive part of our criminal justice system even though the public rarely gets a good look at it.
• It’s an under the radar aspect of the way our criminal justice system handles investigations, the way it handles cases, the way it shapes our case law.
• It’s such a powerful deal, a deal that exerts a huge amount of influence and plea bargaining.
• The reality is that this is a deeply under-regulated arena. The handler is the law enforcement official who creates and uses an informant.
• It could be a police officer talking to a street corner addict cutting a deal right then and there.
• It could be an FBI agent who has an established documented supervised relationship with a long term criminal informant.
• Somebody may be suspected of a crime or even just of interest to the government. People who have mild brushes with the criminal system can end up through this mechanism of criminal informing entering into a world in which really anything can happen to them.
• Argument: Either you let us use informants in an unaccountable, invisible, secretive, undocumented way or we can’t run the criminal system at all.
• We permit the barter of crime under the radar, in a way that is unfair to other defendants and other suspects. We produce unreliable information through the use of informants without regulation.
• My contention is that we shouldn’t ban this practice, but run it as any other public policy with transparency and accountability and some rules.
• My favorite criminal informant of recent is Jack Abramoff.
• Usually we don’t learn when informants have been mistreated because often they have very little power.
• The courts have said, informants proceed at their own risk.
• This is a deal that they can enter if they want to risk their life.
• The law does not owe criminal informants much protection.  Our criminal system is built on the principle that the defendant should not have to face the government unaided by council.
• That’s a principle that should be extended to criminal informants.
• The state of Florida passed a ground breaking law, called Rachel’s Law.
• What sort of deal should we permit the government to cut with informants?
• The use of criminal informants is a massive source of error in capitol cases.
• States across the country are starting to impose greater restrictions on the use of criminal informants, in particular jailhouse snitches as a way to improving reliability of the information.
• Confidential Informant Accountability Act – Federal Legislative Proposal
• One of the things the government doesn’t keep track of is how many crimes are committed by criminal informants in the pursuit of investigating new cases.

Guest – Alexandra Napatoff, professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and a member of the American Law Institute. I have also been a federal public defender, a community organizer, and the recipient of an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship.

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It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest

Remember the multi-day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol by tens of thousands of people. Massive demonstrations erupted when the Republican controlled state government proposed to dismantle public employee bargaining rights as Wisconsin trade unions already conceded to wage and benefit cuts. These protests became the largest labor demonstrations in modern American history. Protesters from the Middle East sent pizzas and solidarity as thousands occupied Madison’s Capitol building.

We’re joined today by Paul Buhle, historian, and editor of the book It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest. A powerful collecton of eyewitness reports and essays by striking teachers, students, and many others. This book exposes the corporate agenda that imposed anti-union legislation across the country and highlights the power of the people coming together in protest.

Paul Buhle:

• Brecht Forum, Friday night – April 27,2012
• The “it” is very large, perhaps vaporous and very promising.  We were thinking of occupy in the sense that Madisonians, labor supporters from as far away as California, occupied the State Capitol, the rotunda in February of last year and remained there for some weeks.
• The “it” may mean occupy or the emergence of a new kind of movement.
• We should have seen it coming but we were deluded or Walker, when running for election never mentioned these promises or threats at all and made some statements about getting along with unions when he was a county executive.
• The response was just as stunning as the shock. A mass outpouring that really began with students in Stoten, an old Norwegian community about half an hour south of Madison – working up their own protests with facebook to support their teachers.
• And then, the following weeks, a massive outpouring of people around the Capitol and then occupying the Capitol.
• Things went on and on until there were crowds of 150 thousand in a town of Madison that has normally only 250 thousand residents.
• Pacifica has been in the business from the late 1940s in the Bay area, in providing the documentation that other commercial radio stations rarely provide.
• I would say these protests in Wisconsin are probably the most recorded mass movement of the Left in recent history.
• Among the most important developments, relative to the stories in the history of labor, the unions of public workers are substantially, if not overwhelmingly women.
• So, the shape of the movement, perhaps its cultural character, perhaps the infernal degree of politeness that outsiders frequently complained about, the chant – let us in, let us in please.
• What it demonstrated was that women in the labor movement were ferociously militant.
• My assessment was that the labor movement was in no way prepared to stage a general strike.
• Nor that a massive walk out of public workers mean that the wheels of industry would stop what few wheels are left.
• The sense that public workers wish to put pressure on the political system.
• Contrary to our expectations of the Democratic Party in general, assorted leaders, were quite wonderful in their constituencies and the things that they did, and how they related to the movements.
• As an editor and producer of radical comics, I’m always interested in new developments in the field, and its exciting there are young comic artists who are working in and around “occupy.”

Guest -  Paul Buhle, senior lecturer at Brown University, a historian of American radicalism., a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of many books including images of American Radicalism. Also, Che, A Graphic Biography, and Isodore Duncan, a graphic biography by Sabrina Jones.

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May Day: Workers’ Rights and Immigrant Communities

In the past year, public employees around the country have rallied to hold on to their collective bargaining, workers rights and pensions. May Day protests this year will emphasize these issues and will be especially significant for immigrant rights in California that directly effect certain communities. On May Day in 2006, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of San Jose marking one of the largest demonstrations in California history.

Guest -  Celina Benitez, director of the Committee In Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, Celina is also with the Southern California Immigration Coalition and produces radio for Suplemento Comunitario on sister station KPFK in Los Angeles.

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 Law and Disorder December 26, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Mumia Abu-Jamal Re-location Update
• Bradley Manning Case and Erasing Computer Harddrives

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National Defense Authorization Act Update

Co-host Michael Ratner expounds on National Defense Authorization Act.  The Act has passed both houses, despite Obama threatening to veto the Act. Obama thought that various provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act concerning detentions, might impinge on his authority as the executive.  Obama was more concerned about Congress telling the President how to treat those captured or kidnapped in “war on terror.”

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UPDATE: Political Prisoner Lynne Stewart

Political prisoner and good friend, Lynne Stewart continues to uplift people around her while serving a 10 year sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth Texas.  Lynne, as many listeners know, was prosecuted for representing her client the blind Egyptian Sheik,  Omar Abdel Rahman. In trying to negotiate a return to Egypt out of solitary confinement, she made a press release public.  She was tried and found guilty for materially aiding “terrorism.”  She received a 2 and half year sentence, instead of 30 years that the government wanted. Then, the Second Circuit Court sent the case back to the Judge.  Judge John G Koeltl sentenced defendant, Lynne Stewart: 120 months incarceration on five counts to be served concurrently.  Lynne Stewart is now 72 years old, she’s a breast cancer survivor with other pending health issues.  She’s called them the usual brush fires of aging, yet many are concerned.  SAVE THE DATE FEBRUARY 28-29

Ralph Poynter:

• She is looking forward to her attorney Herald Price Fahringer to presenting to the court once again testing the law.  We are planning a Occupy the Court Room and the park, the night before on February 28 through to the 29.
• The lawyer will be talking about the laws used to extend Lynne’s sentence. He said any lawyer that wouldn’t want this case, doesn’t understand law. He looked forward to doing it.  He went for a one hour visit with Lynne at MCC and stayed all day.
• No matter what happens, Lynne will continue to fight for her license.
• She’s is Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Big airbase there. It’s an enormous prison, but she’s in the hospital ward.
• Even though I’d been on the list visiting her (in New York prison) I was not on the list (Texas prison)
• I just went down there, and she said, you’re not on the list but I’m going to go to floor supervisor and she says, you just come.
• That Saturday morning I was in front of the prison and they told me I was not eligible to go in. They said it was like an airbase, so I walked outside the gate and stood there. The guard came over and said what are doing here? I said, I’m waiting.
• Around 10:30 an official car came down and said you’re denied admission.
• I said, I understand, but I’m going to wait.
• Around Noon, the woman came back and she says, fill out an application.
• She said I knew if you fought from the outside I was going to fight from the inside and it only took 4 hours.
• You can’t imagine after sleeping on a 2 inch exercise mat on a steel platform for a year, and they showed me the hospital bed.
• She is Miss S, in the prison. Everybody brings her their papers.
• She heard noise outside her room at 5 o’clock in the morning, they were lined up some with papers stacked 3 feet high.
• There is an oxymoron – prison health care. There is no such thing.
• She’s lost about 45 pounds.
• She’s very sick, she can’t sit down. In the visiting room she has to sit sideways.
• Thanks again for all of the people sending bucks for me to go see Lynne.
• Write her a letter. The letters pick her up.
• They gave her medicine and she couldn’t get out of bed. We have a system now when they give her medicine she calls me up. I call my daughter the doctor and she tells me whether Lynne should take it or not take it.

Guest – Ralph Poynter, Lynne’s husband, father, activist. Please write to Lynne Stewart - LYNNE STEWART / 53504-054 FMC CARSWELL / FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER / P.O. BOX 27137 / FORT WORTH, TX 76127

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Photo by flickr user G20Voice

 Law and Disorder December 19, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Police To Test Laser That Blinds Rioters
• Police Employ Predator Drone On the Home Front

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Appeal Denied In Holy Land Foundation Case

Last week, the Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeal for the Holy Land Foundation case. This decision affirmed the conviction of Ghassan Elashi, the co-founder of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. As many listeners may know, the Holy Land Foundation was considered the largest Muslim charity in the United States before the Bush administration shut it down after the September 11 attacks. In May 2009, a federal judge in Dallas handed down sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years in prison to five of the charity’s founders and former fundraisers. Over a year before, a federal jury returned guilty verdicts on all 108 counts against the Foundation and the five former officers on charges of providing material support to Hamas after the U.S. government designated it a foreign terrorist organization in 1995. During that trial, the prosecution used unrelated video of suicide bombers to emotionally sway the jury.

Ghassan Elashi was then sentenced to 65 years in prison for giving material support in the form of humanitarian aid to Zakat committees – Palestinian charities in the West Bank and Gaza, that prosecutors were alleging were fronts for Hamas. Ghassan is being held in the Communications Management Unit in Marion, Illinois.

Noor Elashi:

• One of the arguments the defense lawyers made is that USAID, which is a government agency sent money to the same exact Zakat Committees which are these distribution centers in Palestine that the Holy Land Foundation sent charity to.
• That was their main charge, they were charged with giving material support in the form of humanitarian aid to Zakat Committees which the prosecutors were claiming were fronts for Hamas.
• In their appeal, one of their main arguments is that these Zakat Committees received money from many NGOs including an American agency.
• Another argument in the appeal was for the first time in US history, an expert witness who was an Israeli intelligence officer who testified under a fake name was allowed to testify under a pseudonym.
• My father recently had a phone call ban, because he put his name on a yoga mat, and it was considered destruction of government property.
• Our defense attorneys are not going to quit. They will ask the entire panel of appellate judges to re-hear the case, if that is denied, they’ll take the case to the Supreme Court.
• The foreign policy and politics of this country have been very favorable to Israel.
• FreedomToGive.com

Guest – Noor Elashi – the daughter of Holy Land Foundation prisoner Ghassan Elashi. She is a writer based in Dallas, Texas. After receiving a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Texas, she worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In July 2008, she won the 3rd place Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Award for her manuscript titled “Displaced,” which she plans to expand into a memoir about the displacement of three generations of Palestinians: her grandmother, father, and herself. She can be reached at noorelashi@gmail.com.

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 Law and Disorder September 5, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• In Memory: Attorney Debra Evanson
• Court Says Public Has Right To Video Police In Public Places

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Workers Win Large Settlement at Supplier to Chinese Restaurants After Hard Fought Campaign

A bitterly contested campaign against Pur Pac, a food distribution warehouse giant reached a settlement of 470 thousand dollars for workers who had their wages illegally withheld and more. The workers organized with Focus on the Food chain, Brandworkers and International Workers of the World to challenge sweatshop conditions, wage theft, retaliation and discrimination in the sprawling industrial corridor of food processing and distribution that service New York City markets and restaurants.  Daniel Gross, the executive director of Brandworkers said – quote – The conditions in the sector are deplorable and systemic but, as the Pur Pac workers have shown, positive workplace change can and will be won.”

Attorney Daniel Gross:

• Pur Pac is typical of an industrial corridor of food processing and distribution warehouses that service a tremendous amount of food to restaurants and supermarkets in New York. Much of what we eat in restaurants is processed in sweatshops.
• Pur Pac is a distributor of restaurant and food supplies to Chinese Restaurants, cafes and bakeries. They distribute huge quanitities of rice, cooking oil, chopsticks.
• Sweatshop, tremendous amount of wage theft, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Vicious retaliation for workers who stand up for their rights, exhausting long shifts, very heavy work.
• We facilitate worker led, comprehensive campaigns. The company used several tactics to avoid accountability here, the main approach that they used is they engaged in sham sales.
• They would fraudulently transfer assets, rebrand the company. The company was originally called Easy Supply. Easy Supply escaped accountability by purporting to go out of business, now same factory, same trucks, same products was called Sunrise Plus. We caught up with Sunrise Plus and they engaged in another sham sale and that created Pur Pac.
• We were also able to win a binding code of conduct, which creates very powerful protective mechanisms for collective activity, going forward.
• We were able to win recognition for the IWW, as exclusive bargaining agent for Pur Pac workers. It was really the biggest victory for Focus On The Food Chain.
• I was a low wage worker mostly in retail and fast food. I was working at Borders Books and Music and really felt the sting of a multi-national employer which at the time was highly profitable. It didn’t pay a fair wage, offered an insecure and unpredictable schedule.
• It employed a management force that really showed tremendous disrespect for rank and file workers.
• We had 44 Starbucks stores that were infested with rats and insects. We did worker-citizen journalism and we got photos and video of these rats and roaches, we inflated a huge, inflatable rat in front of the stores and shared our video and photographic evidence.
• Starbucks is still engaged in really a scorched Earth effort, complete disrespect for the right to organize and free association.
• The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is the administrative agency charged under federal with administering union management affairs. They have jurisdiction over cases under the National Labor Relations Act.
• Mezonos Maven Bakery is a food production sweatshop. Mezonos Maven was cheating workers out of their wages, disrespecting workers, and the workers came together, they didn’t join a union but they came together with community groups, etc.  Mezonos Maven, started illegally firing workers.
• When the workers stood up to the most basic worker’s rights, they were subjected to fierce immediate retaliation.

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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Federal Judge Rules Former Mayor Daley Can Be Sued For Alleged Torture Cover Up

We continue to bring updates on the ongoing police torture and abuse scandal revolving around former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Recently, a federal judge has now ruled that former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley can be allowed to be kept in the lawsuit where he is charged with conspiracy to cover up police abuse and torture. As many listeners may know,  Burge has been sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners to obtain coerced confessions. The People’s Law Office brought the case in 2005 and the city of Chicago refused to settle while pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the case.

In the beginning of September, attorney Flint Taylor will depose former mayor Richard Daley which will force him to answer questions about the abuse of African Americans under Burge’s command. This case has already cost Chicago taxpayers more than 43 million dollars in settlements and legal fees.  Past shows with Attorney Flint Taylor

Attorney Flint Taylor:

• Daley was the state’s attorney for Cook County for eight years in the 80s during that time he was specifically informed of police torture.
• Instead of doing anything about it and dealing with the torturers, Jon Burge and company, he continued to encourage it by prosecuting men who had been falsely arrested and charged based on tortured confessions sending as many of them to death row.
• When he became mayor, he continued to have an active role in the cover up of the torture practice.
• He had at various times as chief of law enforcement and chief executive of the city of Chicago, the power and obligation to act and if he did, we wouldn’t have had all these men on death row, and in the penitentiary and we wouldn’t have had all these men tortured.
• We brought it several times in lawsuits starting in 2003. Judges had consistently turned their backs on that claim.
• The new Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel who has successfully tip toed past this both in his campaign and now as the first 100 days of being mayor had to respond to it.
• They’ve paid over 13 million dollars to defend these civil cases that we’re in.  We take the mayor at his word, and we hope this leads to settlements and compensation for the men who’ve been tortured.
• There are six men who have lawsuits in court. Unfortunately because of statute of limitations most torture survivors don’t have lawsuits.
• There are still 15 men behind bars in Illinois, based on tortured confessions that Jon Burge and the Area 2 torturers coerced from them.  We’re fighting to have them all get new hearings.
• I don’t know if a Daley denial in some of the actions in this case would tantamount to perjury that Fitzgerald would be interested in.
• There is a major memoranda that was sent from the police superintendent at that time to Daley, a kind of CYA saying “I’ve been giving this powerful evidence of torture from a doctor over at the county hospital.

Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio

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 Law and Disorder June 6, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Justices Block Suit Over Use of Material Witness Law Against Detainee
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Re-charged
• The Conspirator Movie and Military Commissions

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Chicago Torture Cases and Jon Burge’s Deposition

Torture has cast a long shadow over Chicago and its past administrations. Yet in the past year, with the conviction and sentencing of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, Chicago has been a beacon of light in the fight against torture.  Many are waiting to see how the city’s new administration will handle the ongoing torture cases of African American men that number in the hundreds.  Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners in the 1960s to obtain coerced confessions. Attorney Flint Taylor and the People’s Law Office in Chicago fought for decades to get prosecutions, and sentencing while the city poured millions of dollars to fund private lawyers for Burge’s defense.

Attorney Flint Taylor:

• We’ve been working on these cases since 1986. Deposing Jon Burge: We were reaffirming to the African American community that he was in prison and he is a prisoner.
• He was complaining about the lack of medical care and the kind of treatment he felt he should be getting.
• The struggle to put him behind bars has come to fruition. Pin stripe patronage, the city funding Burge’s defense. Rahm Emanuel needs to change course, he’s very close to Daly.
• Daly’s policy was not to settle these cases, not to apologize to the victims.
• There’s another issue about Burge getting his pension even though he’s in the joint.
• When you’re convicted you’re supposed to lose your pension.
• There’s eight people on the pension board, 4 of them are former cops.
• Several of the men who were responsible for Burge going to the penitentiary don’t have a claim civilly, never got a penny for the torture they suffered.
• There are about 20 men still in jail, still in the prisons, based on tortured confessions by Burge and his men.
• There is a demand to challenge these confessions, its been happening on a piece-meal basis.
• You most often find that torture does not lead to information that is useful. In the situation here it is to punish African American people.
• It’s a very racist type of torture in this city. There’s linkage here in what happened in Guantanamo, what happened in Abu Ghraib.
• The Fraternal Order of Police: They’re a very reactionary force when reforming the police department generally. In the early nineties when they fired Burge, the FOP stood up and paid for his defense.
• In case that has gotten him to prison now, the FOP paid a million dollars for 3 lawyers of his choice. Now, the same lawyers have switched hats, and the city is now paying them in the civil cases that we talked about.
• When it gets to a point where the city can’t pay for his defense, the FOP steps in.
• Burge deposition: I set up a series of questions for 3 hours where he consistently took the fifth amendment to all questions that would have implicated him if he answered truthfully.

Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio

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California Inmate Reductions

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling had ordered California to release 46,000 of its 143,435 inmates which has the state trying to figure out what happens next.  The SCOTUS ruling affirmed a lower court order that required California to reduce its inmate population to 137% capacity.  The state’s prisons are now at about 180% capacity and one cause of overcrowding problems is the state’s “three strikes law” which puts third time offenders in jail for life.  Meanwhile, under Governor Brown’s current “re-alignment” program, the tens of thousands convicted of non violent, non-serious, non-sex crimes will serve sentences under county instead of state supervision.  Our guest Professor Ruth Gilmore said to one media source, quote – “County jail expansion does not solve the underlying problems,”  – -These are goals we can achieve now if we take this opportunity to shrink prisons and jails. Building bigger jails to ease prison numbers is the same as rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic: wasting the same dollars in different jurisdictions.

Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

• California is out of line with the rest of country when it comes to parole policy. California sends twice the number of people back to prisons than other jurisdictions, when the person has committed a technical violation, late for a meeting, that kind of thing.
• For that reason, California prisons have been bulging.
• We see that numbers are kept up by this one category, parole violation return to custody.  They have to start over and over and over again.
• The Supreme Court ordered the Department of Corrections to reduce the number of people in its custody in its current physical plant. In the 33 prisons, prison camps and dozens of facilities.
• One method to thin the prison population is shipping about 10 thousand prisoners out of the state of California, renting space in other jurisdictions. They’ve been shipping prisoners out of California for 2 and a half years.
• Cost does not seem to have an important effect on the kinds of political decisions, that have been made about prison expansion throughout the United States for the last 30 years.
• A year and a half ago the state presented a plan to the Ninth District court saying here are the changes that we will make to meet the 3 judges’ order that we reduce the number of people in the California State Authority Physical Plant.
• Then, the 3 judges agreed to let California delay in implementing the plan, while they appealed to the Supreme Court.
• California is the proving ground for a new relationship between the state and society.  California is a place that started turning its back on public education.
• For some time, the union of California prison guards were a political force and continue to be quite powerful.
• There are many alternatives to locking somebody in a cage for part or all of their life. We should be cautious in thinking GPS tracking is the answer, because one of the huge barriers, that people convicted of a felony face in their lives, is the impossibility of them reintegrating into society.
• My colleague Michelle Alexander has put out a call in a campaign to end The New Jim Crow.
• Criticalresistance.org / Curbprisonspending.org

Guest – Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.  Professor Gilmore has examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award. Gilmore’s wide-ranging research interests also include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, and the African diaspora. She comes to the Graduate Center from the University of Southern California, where she taught courses in race and ethnicity, economic geography, and political geography, was the founding chair of the department of American studies and ethnicity, and won the USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She also works regularly with community groups and grassroots organizations and is known for the broad accessibility of her research. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.

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 Law and Disorder May 9, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Osama Bin Laden Story Inconsistencies: Analysis
• CF Law (By analogy in law) Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch
• Authorization To Use Military Force, the Justification For Torture, Blowback
• Torture Architect John Yoo Writing in the National Review
• Dalia Hashad: Article In The Scoop: Bin Laden Gone Problems Remain

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Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments

The 759 Guantanamo files that were classified “secret” cover nearly every inmate since the camp opened in 2002. The documents obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian last month, reveal how children, the elderly and mentally ill were wrongfully held. The documents also reveal that many prisoners were sent to Guantanamo for nearly nothing or to be interrogated. What did these documents reveal?

Attorney Shane Kadidal:

• These stories started on Monday morning, because administration officials gave out a briefing saying that the nickname of Osama’s couriers was given out by one of the detainees.
• Assuming information taken from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• We do know it took eight months from the time they identified this compound to the point they decided to strike at it.  I think its clear, they relied on a whole slew of information from a variety of sources.
• We already know the true name of the courier, which is more important than a nickname came from agents on the ground and electronic surveillance.
• 172 detainees, 90 cleared from release, 2/3 of those from Yemen have been indefinitely suspended for repatriation because of the “underwear bomber.”
• The problem is so much of (media) attention is focused on the ones that will never be released.
• WikiLeaks – 2400 pages of documents almost all risk assessments of about 740 detainees who’ve been to Guantanamo
• They represent the Defense Departments best case for detaining someone.
• You have these long analysis of very shady facts, not detailing where allegations are coming from.
• If you look at the documents as a whole, it shows that most of the detainees were held on flimsy, unreliable information.
• The documents show that people were interrogated in GTMO about nothing to do with terrorist attacks in the United States. You had Samuel Hodge interrogated about the inner workings of Al-Jazzera
• Everyone ended up with the categorization of high or medium risk
• When you see a leak of this magnitude, the only corrective is to release more information and that’s what we’ve called for at CCR.
• The government quickly emailed us – They said consistent with the security clearances you signed on for, you have to treat this information as classified (leaked documents) even though its been scattered to the winds on every newspaper on Earth.

Guest – Attorney Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps.

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Green Is The New Red: An Insiders Account of A Social Movement Under Siege

We welcome Will Potter award-winning independent journalist and now the leading authority on “eco-terrorism.” He’s the author of the new book ,Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, and it reveals a complex environmental movement emerging amid police state pressure. As we’ve reported here on Law and Disorder, environmental activism have been labeled terrorism under certain interpretation of the Patriot Act, essentially criminalizing dissent and chilling free speech in this country at a critical time.  Our guest was an FBI target for merely leafleting against animal testing, and he was threatened to be put on the domestic terrorist watch list if didn’t comply with FBI demands. We talk more about that, the environmentalist movements and his new book.

Will Potter:

• My background is in mainstream newspapers. As I was working as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, about 9 months after 9/11. I was covering breaking news, blood and guts.
• I decided to go out leafleting on a campaign I became aware of against a controversial animal testing company.
• Couple weeks later the FBI knocks on my door telling me I need to become a government informant and help infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups and if I didn’t they’d put me on the domestic terrorist list.
• It scared the tar out of me. I wish I could say it didn’t.
• Afterward it really lit a fire under me to figure out what was going on.
• One of the reasons I started the website was because of this new law being considered called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
• What I decided to do with the book is tell the personal stories of the people involved.
• I followed Daniel McGowan a few days before his sentence to how he ended up in this facility, his own journey as an activist. Daniel was convicted of serious crimes, two arsonists that didn’t harm anyone and he was labeled a terrorist.
• The book looks at the wide range of activity being labeled “eco-terrorism”
• The FBI has labeled the environmental and animal rights movement the number one domestic terrorism threat.
• These corporate campaigns were pushed for so long through the courts, politicians, and the press that over time they began to dovetail with government policy.
• The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is so broad it can even wrap up non-violent civil disobedience as terrorism, only if its directed at what is called animal enterprises.
• The real power of this is fear.
• The activists who are really effective and pushing the boundary are the ones being labeled eco-terrorists.
• I recently wrote about 3 bills that are under consideration for the Huffington Post. What Is Big Ag Trying To Hide.

Guest – Will Potter,  award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on “eco-terrorism,” the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties post-9/11. Will’s work has appeared in publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and the Vermont Law Review, and he has testified before the U.S. Congress about his reporting. He is the author of Green Is The New Red: An insider’s account of a social movement under siege forthcoming from City Lights Books.

 Law and Disorder May 2, 2011: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

• Federal appeals court orders a new sentencing hearing for Mumia Abu-Jamal
• CCR Says Guantánamo Leaks Must Be Met By Release of Obama Task Force Assessments
• Memorial for Leonard Weinglass Friday May 13 At the New York Ethical Culture Society

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Largest Human Trafficking Case In The US?  Workers Lured To U.S. After Hurricane Katrina And Subjected To Abusive Conditions Seek Class Certification

In what may be the largest human trafficking case in US history, Indian guest workers are suing Signal International for human trafficking ad racketeering. Several law firms filed the lawsuit on behalf of seven plaintiffs representing 500 formers guest workers lured into the US after Hurricane Katrina. The guest workers were subjected to racial discrimination, forced labor and other abuse.

Signal is a multi million dollar marine fabrication company with shipyards in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama. They repair and build oil rigs and ships and subcontract with the Dept of Defense and multinational companies. After Hurricane Katrina, Signal’s workforce scattered and they used the government’s guest worker program to import employees as welders and pipe fitters. Between 2004 and 2006 hundreds of Indian men were paid up to 20 thousand dollars each for travel, visa and other fees after being told it would lead to good jobs and permanent US residency.

When the men arrived at Signal they discovered they would not receive green cards, but instead were given 10-month guest worker visas. Signal forced the men to pay $1,050 a month to live in overcrowded, unsanitary and racially segregated labor camps with no visitors allowed.  To talk more about this case, we’re joined by Chandra Bhatnagar is a Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program and Sabulal Vijayan, a former guest worker involved in the lawsuit.

Chandra Bhatnagar:

• Signal used the opportunity of the storm to seek out new labor pools. Signal in partnership with an American labor broker, an American Immigration lawyer and an Indian recruiter, conspired to bring in a group of 500 men from India as H2B guest workers.
• The workers were promised green cards, permanent residency, and the opportunity for long term jobs.
• Sabulal Vijayan: I was working in the middle east, the United Arab Emirates, I saw the ad by Signal that said we would get permanent residency in America. I paid about 18 thousand dollars, I cut my wrists in fear, I tried to kill myself because I spent a bunch of dollars. I was in the hospital for 3 days. I couldn’t go back to my family in India with bare hands, because I spent all the money on this job. Not only me but 500 workers, sold all their land and houses for this job.
• The EEOC, brought a separate lawsuit against Signal, alleging racial and national origin discrimination and hostile work environment.
• Because Sabulal was one of the workers seeking his rights under the law,  he was particularly targeted by Signal and rounded up in an early morning raid.  The camp was built on a lead contaminated waste site.
• It’s not OSCHA compliant to have 24 guys jammed together in a temporary trailer.
• These are in the United States and in debt. The average income in India is 3000 dollars a year for a ship worker. To pay 20 thousand dollars, you have to sell your property, borrow money from loan sharks.  You have to mortgage your whole life for the opportunity to come here.  Signal also said if you file a lawsuit, we’ll send all of you back.
• Signal is a marine fabrication company, a multi-million dollar company. They repair and build oil rigs and ships. They have yards in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. They provide services to the Department of Defense and major corporations.
• It was a conspiracy between the Immigration lawyer, the Indian recruiter, the labor broker and Signal.
• Signal got this vulnerable pool of workers who they could throw away whenever they wanted to.
• You don’t have freedom of contract as a guest worker, you’re the disposable property of the employer.

Guest - Chandra Bhatnagar, ACLU  Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program. He leads the domestic and international advocacy around racial profiling, affirmative action, and juvenile justice issues, and is engaged in federal court litigation and litigation in international tribunals involving the rights of low-wage immigrant workers, undocumented workers, and guest-workers.

Guest – Sabulal Vijayan, guest worker from India, who is involved in the case. Sabulal, a pipefitter, paid nearly 20 thousand dollars to work in the United States as a guest worker. He worked with others in slave labor-like conditions for Signal International.

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Professor John Ehrenberg: Class Warfare Update and Analysis

Returning guest, professor and author John Ehrenberg joins us in the discussion of where the last 3 years the Obama Administration has led the country.  The United States is pouring trillions into multiple war theaters, unemployment continues to rise, CEOs of banks and corporations have been rewarded with taxpayer bonuses and bailouts, and a massive unequal distribution of wealth has polarize the country. Meanwhile, the very rights that protect organized labor and the benefits of workers are attacked and disassembled during one of the worst economic downturns to hit the United States.  Corporations and the far right wing of the Republican Party are behind some of the union busting yet even President Obama turned his back on supporting union labor demonstrations.  Most recent show with John Ehrenberg

Professor John Ehrenberg:

• The elephant in the room that nobody talks about is the role of the state and the role of the government.
• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
• What you had since the 1980s is a policy pushed by the Republicans and acquiesced by the Democrats of undoing the Great Society. We’ve seen this in the union busting and refusing to tax the rich. It’s been happening because the Republican party is getting more radical.
• The villan in the room is governmental and fiscal policy.
• The top 1 percent of the population received more than a third of all the wealth created in the country from 1979 to the beginning of the recession.  The top 1/10 of one percent, that’s one out of every thousand households, received over 20 percent of all the after tax gains between 1979 and 2005.
• It was a conscious policy. It began in the late 70s by business. If you look at the neo-conservatives of that period, their target is the Great Society.
• Basically in the late 60s and the early 70s, the traditional stimulus programs of the Democrats failed.
• Along comes Reagan and he takes on a radical restructuring of the economy.
• Which began this process of shoveling huge amounts of wealth to the rich, hoping that it would trickle down and you’d have sustained growth.
• Consider that Obama is going to raise a billion dollars for his reelection campaign. Where is he going to get it from?
• Look, anybody at this stage of the game who continues to trust the Democratic party to lead the country out of this mess, is a fool.
• The Democratic Party by itself is incapable of democratic initiative and progressive change unless forced to respond from pressure from outside.
• When do they have enough? The answer in 1100 pages of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is it’s never enough.  That the logic of capital is to reduce everybody to starvation and take everything they have.
• This is the motor of the system, this has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers.
• Hopefully people are tired of being pushed around. American exceptionalism, meant that Americans were more tolerant of inequality, than were people from a stronger labor tradition.
• That American’s didn’t care so much if other people got rich as long as they got rich too.
• If you have a situation where Americans are misinformed about the distribution of wealth and are open to appeals to redistribute wealth in the name of fairness and equity, then this is the time for a redistributus Democratic party to step forward.
• If the Democratic Party is even a modicum of sanity in America, it’s because its going to have be pushed again.  Pushed and pushed and pushed from outside.
• 55 percent of Republicans want higher taxes on the rich.
• There are local manifestations of outrage and rebellion, in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ft Lauderdale, around different aspects of the mal-distribution of wealth. – but nothing has been coordinated on the national level.
• There are as yet, no forces talking about the system as a whole, as a state.
• There are a lot of indications across the board that people have had enough.
• Go out there and join something and get involved.
• UNICEF publication. The Children Left Behind. Indices: Health, Education, Material Well Being.  The United States is last of the 24 countries.
• If you look at the fall of any of the world’s empires, it was a combination of the over reach and the refusal of the rich to pay their share of taxes.

Guest – John Ehrenberg,  author of Servants of Wealth, The Rights Assault on Economic Justice, he’s also professor of political science at Long Island University.

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