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Workers’ Rights And Leadership Moving Forward
Ex-president Donald Trump was indicted three weeks ago in New York City by progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg on 34 separate counts for paying hush money to two women before the 2020 election. The charges are serious and provable. These are the first; there will likely be three even more serious indictments in other jurisdictions. Although Trump looks like the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, the accumulation of charges against him will both narrow but harden, invigorate, and mobilize his political support.
Trump is the most prominent figure in what has quite accurately been described as an American version of fascism called white Christian nationalism. These forces have captured half the state houses in the country, many courts, and many local governments all the way down to school boards. Bertold Brecht, the great German playwright and political thinker, observed during the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany that in order to understand fascism you must understand capitalism from which it springs.
Under a viral form of capitalism. known as neoliberalism, inequality of wealth has reached enormous proportions. Half the population of our country are poor or near poor. Healthcare, education and housing go abegging with 15 million people about to lose their health care and hundreds of thousands of others sleeping on the streets
Sections of the American working class are fighting back. Workers are organizing in Amazon and Starbucks. 9000 of them are on strike at Rutgers University. United Automobile Workers are gearing up for a strike. Polls show that most working people would like to be in a union.
But Americans are fighting back with one hand tied behind their backs. They have no independent working class party that defends their interests Both the Republican and Democratic parties are Corporate capitalist parties. In fact, last year, the Democratic Party received more massive dark money than Republicans.
Fascism is characteristically antiworker, anti-democratic, racist, nationalistic, misogynist, and violent. It is irrational. It believes in a make-believe past when America was once great.
Guest – Paul Street, historian and activist has written 10 books, most recently “ This Happened Here : Neoliberalis, Amiericaners, and the Trumping of America”. He wrote the introduction to “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA“ co-edited by Law And Disorder cohost Michael Steven Smith. He writes regularly for “Counterpunch“ and manages “The Paul Street Report” on Substack.
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Mumia Abu Jamal’s New Trial, Exculpatory Evidence
American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served over 40 years in Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons; 16 of them on death row -for the murder of a
Philadelphia police officer that he did not commit. His trial was a sham from day one. The judge who convicted him was overheard promising, “I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Before Mumia’s conviction, he was a nationally broadcast, award winning radio journalist, and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and its notorious Police Chief, and later Mayor, Frank Rizzo. Mumia had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison, Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show, “Live from Death Row“. He holds a master’s degree and is working on a PhD in history.
Most recently, Mumia’s attorneys have sought a new trial for him based on their discovery of exculpatory evidence clearly supporting his innocence. The newly discovered evidence had been wrongly kept from Mumia’s lawyers at the time of his trial, being deliberately buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented that key witnesses had received promises of money and favorable treatment in their own criminal cases, in exchange for their perjured testimony in Mumia’s original trial. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
But sadly, despite the obvious significance of this newly discovered evidence, his petition for a new trial has been denied.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan, is a Pennsylvania attorney and longtime supporter of Mumia, and the producer the long-running radio show, “Prison Radio“. She was in the courtroom when the newly discovered evidence was presented in support of Mumia’s petition for a new trial, and again when it was recently denied. Prison Radio
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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