Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Update on BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
There are reports that nearly 200 thousand gallons of crude oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day as engineers work to cap the well head. Meanwhile an oil dispersant is deployed on the water surface to break up the oil slick before it reaches sensitive estuaries and shoreline. On the edge of what human engineering can accomplish, BP says it would use a giant, 100-ton dome-like device placed over the wellhead that might collect oil gushing out of the well.
Jackie Savitz:
- 200 thousand gallons per day, possibly 10 times more than that. It’s been gushing for almost 2 weeks.
- May take another week to stop, not guaranteed. Back up plan could take months.
- Gulf of Mexico: rich area biologically, a lot of our shellfish come from there. Many of the species that make their home in the Gulf are endangered, such as sea turtles, North Atlantic Right Whale, Bluefin Tuna, Snapper, Grouper
- In many cases, these animals are using the Gulf as a nursery. We may never fully know the impacts on populations of these animals. Fishing ban.
- Why do they let companies like BP drill in these dangerous circumstances that can pose these types of impacts without a plan? The public was convinced on offshore drilling by 3 myths. 1. Lower the price of gas at pump. 2 Energy Independence. 3. Drilling was safe.
- Why would we let these companies gamble with our lifestyle with no actual return.
- We’re looking at a potential reset moment. Politicians respond to public sentiment.
- We’re working toward a ban on exploratory drilling. This was an exploratory well.
Guest – Jackie Savitz, Senior Campaign Director for Oceana’s Pollution Campaigns. Savitz has shaped and led campaigns and projects dealing with global warming pollution from ships, mercury contamination of fish, and cruise ship pollution among other issues. Savitz has a background in marine biology and environmental toxicology combined with more than fifteen years of policy analysis experience through which she has developed expertise on a variety of pollution issues involving toxic contamination, water pollution and air pollution
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ICE Media Spin / Immigration Law Movement
Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney, Sunita Patel joins us today to give an update on the recent six-page internal memo from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was leaked to the press. The memo was a response to civil rights groups Uncovering the Truth on ICE and Police Collaboration, but specifically aiming at their campaign of week long rallies in 14 cities. The week of advocacy was launched on Tuesday in conjunction with a FOIA lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of Benjamin Cardozo School of Law to demand records relating to the Secure Communities program.
Sunita Patel:
- ICE launches media offensive against community organizations. Exposed: DHS plans to publish Op Eds by the head of ICE.
- DHS interface with local law enforcement – incentives to racial profile to determine status that could lead to: Non citizens to stay in jail even if there is police misconduct or unlawful arrest
- We want more information so communities can make reasonable decisions.
- FOIA lawsuit requests information on “Secure Communities” Program, a finger printing system operating inside jails. To be deployed to all jails in US by 2013.
- We want to stop these collaborations with local law enforcements, they make the community less safe and less secure.
Guest – Sunita Patel, Center for Constitutional Rights Staff Attorney, she is involved with racial profiling, immigrant rights and other human rights litigation. Prior to her position at CCR, she held a Soros Justice Fellowship at The Legal Aid Society, Immigration Law Unit in New York where she represented immigrant detainees in removal proceedings and worked with criminal justice and human rights groups to create independent community oversight for detention operations through public accountability boards
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Omaha Two / Black Panthers
We talk today with Claus Walischewski, a representative of Amnesty International in Germany. Claus has been working with Amnesty International following and investigating the case of 2 former Black Panthers Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (David Rice). The case is known as the Omaha 2. Amnesty International has found that the two men were unjustly convicted of murder and have been in prison since the 1970s. Amnesty has called for a retrial or release for these men.
Claus Walischewski:
- We don’t call them political prisoners because in the US you can have a fair trial.
- They were both Black Panthers in Omaha in the 1970s.
- The police answered a 9/11 call and went to a vacant building, there was a bomb in a suitcase, the police picked it up, it detonated, and the policeman was killed. The police thought it was the Black Panthers.
- Information that the FBI were working COINTELPRO in Omaha during this time.
- An individual named Dwayne Peak was arrested for the crime, and named the two Black Panthers.
- When he saw the 2 men and was asked if they were involved, he said “no.”
- The 9/11 call was not Dwayne Peak’s voice, it’s the voice of a much older man, not a 15 year old.
- Analysis has shown it’s not the same voice, still no re-trial. Caught and arrested in 1970, Poindexter 62, Mondo 67. I’ve visted them 10 years ago, they’re both very educated, no threat to anybody.
Guest – Claus Walischewski, a representative of Amnesty International
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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SB-1070 v. Human Rights
Today we get a perspective from the Arizona border on how the state’s new immigrant law will impact human rights. Many have expressed outrage at the state law that would force police to determine the immigration status of someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. Jennifer Allen, Executive Director of Border Action Network joins co-host Heidi Boghosian. Border Action Network was formed in 1999 and members work with immigrants and border communities in Southern Arizona to ensure human rights are respected, and human dignity upheld.
Jennifer Allen – Border Action Network:
- SB 1070 is a broad stroke, back door approach of enforcement of federal immigration laws.
- Other components of the legislation, include criminalizing day laborers and those who seek to hire them.
- Other provisions in the bill would require local cities, towns, agencies to save information about people’s immigration / citizenship status and then share that information with other agencies.
- Law enforcement being required, with lawsuits threatened against them, to ask people about their immigration status, based on their appearance. Indeed we do need a sensible immigration policy. We need borders that are safe, secure, orderly.
- If SB 1070 is not stopped in Arizona, it will surely spread throughout the country.
- SB 1070 fiscal analysis for 1 county in Arizona: would cost 10s of millions of dollars for trying to implement law.
- We’ve been calling on the Obama Administration to oppose this legislation.
- This law is a combination of six or seven pieces of legislation that the bill’s sponsor, Senator Russel Pierce has been trying to get through the Arizona legislature, the last 5 years.
- Targets of attrition, wearing people out so they leave Arizona.
- It’s not motivated by public safety and increasing security, it’s much more about pushing families out of the state of Arizona.
- A strong presence of white nationalists groups in Arizona. Minutemen style, state sponsored vigilante group – Border Security Commission Bill.
Guest – Jennifer Allen – Executive Director of Border Action Network
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William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe on DVD
We are excited to welcome back Sarah Kunstler, daughter of the late radical civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, and co-director of a biographical documentary about her father, titled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. The movie is now available on DVD, with extras. In our last interview, Emily told us that it was frightening for us to share the film with the world. She says the first 10 times watching with the audience, she clenched fists, couldn’t even look. The movie is the work of 4 years, but really 30 years says Sarah. Since they were children, she and her sister have been collecting footage and material for the film.
The movie has been described as a sensitive, truthful and insightful film about a man who stood at the center of a confrontational movement and became the public spokesperson for communities standing up to injustice. The story of this radical attorney is told by his daughters in an intimate narrative, from the Chicago 7 to the Attica trials, then the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee.
Sarah Kunstler:
- We had a theatrical run in about 25 cities.
- Chicago 8, DVD Extra: What you hear is someone unafraid of being held in contempt, someone outraged by the treatment of his clients the court room is an intimidating place. He didn’t let the austere surroundings get to him.
- What I’ve learned since making the film, is my relationship with my father continues.
- When Emily and I started making this film, we thought it would be something we would be getting over.
- This film was written in pieces, it was a struggle, I didn’t know how to write around something or Emily and I would fight in how to say something.
- He seems that he was painfully aware that he was being followed from state to state. The FBI had been listening to his speeches and trying to indict him with trying to incite a riot.
- He makes a differentiation between picayune violence and real demonstration.
Guest – Sarah Kunstler, co-producer and attorney. Sarah Kunstler graduated from Yale University with a BA in Photography in 1998 and from Columbia Law School with a JD in 2004. She is currently a criminal defense attorney practicing in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. Emily, her sister is a film major and former video producer for Democracy Now. They recently won the L’Oreal Women of Worth Vision Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize for Best New Filmmakers at the Traverse City Film Festival.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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Jobless Recovery and the Federal Reserve Holdout
Today we welcome back Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and his son Max Wolff freelance researcher, strategist, and writer in the areas of international finance and macroeconomics to discuss the current economic recovery, is it recovering without job growth? Rick is also the author of the book, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It, where he takes the reader back to 2005 and step by step reveals how policies, economic structures and wage-to-profit systems led to a global economic collapse.
We get a critical update from both Rich and Max. Will there be another leg down as predicted. Another leg down meaning, will the economy continue to drop? This was mentioned because of the way people were investing, investing in a way that expected the market to drop.
Rick Wolff / Max Wolff :
- There’s a recovery in some parts and not others. The missing piece of the economic puzzle is job growth.
- Housing assets are 35 percent off their 2006 peaks. 15.5 million people unemployed. 1 out of 6 in the labor force in a dire economic situation. Misery index, looks at long term unemployed – 27 weeks or more.
- 41 percent of our unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks.
- Average unemployment benefits cap out at 2000.00 a month
- “Phony ‘Economic Recovery’, Real Alternatives” – article by Rick Wolff
- You have to wonder that we live in a time of massive unemployment, the recovery didn’t deal with that problem, and yet we don’t have a national discussion of “direct employment.” We did need a banking bailout, we chose to bail out some elements of society and not others.
- A couple of hundred billion dollars for say kids to continue to got to school on the subway, or community colleges can stay open, or job training programs, or the state of California can stay open, we decided was a waste of money?
- The average person in the US has a 30 day life expectancy without International finance.
- 61 thousand UAW workers laid off.
- US Cash for Clunkers program, borrowed European model but replaced old used cars with new SUVs, and increased price of used car parts.
- Oregon Example: Last summer, the state legislature controlled completely by the Democratic party passed a bill to face their 700 hundred million dollar shortfall, not by cutting social programs, but by taxing the corporations and the rich. Unions, liberal folks, and the democratic party (left of where it is in the rest of the country)
- We need 110 – 120 thousand new jobs a month to keep up with population growth. Jobless growth recovery from 2002 to 2007 was from explosive consumer debt.
- People buying more things without getting jobs (credit) The last 18 months we witnessed the largest re-distribution of wealth in US history. The bottom 80 percent stood still and the top 20 percent lead by the top 5 percent shot up.
- 7.8 million homes in the foreclosure pipeline
Guest – Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
Guest – Max Fraad Wolff , freelance researcher, strategist, and writer in the areas of international finance and macroeconomics. Max’s work can be seen at the Huffington Post, The AsiaTimes, Prudent Bear, SeekingAlpha and many other outlets.
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Radio Documentary – It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
April 24, 2010 marks the beginning of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race 95 years ago. Carried out by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire, over half of the Armenians living in the Empire were killed. To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian and producer Geoff Brady present a 90-minute program titled, It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories.
We wish to thank WBAI for their commitment to recognizing the Armenian genocide, and are grateful to the individuals we interviewed for opening their hearts and sharing the difficult memories of the past.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq War, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, Uncategorized
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Israeli Policy and Palestinian Children – Nora Barrows-Friedman
We talk today with the Nora Barrows-Friedman, she is the host of radio show Flashpoints at KPFA in Berkeley California. Nora spent the last month in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. She’s been investigating stories about the ongoing violations of Palestinian human rights and has been frequently traveling to Palestine since 2004. Today we look specifically at the Israeli policy against children from arresting, detaining, interrogating, torturing, imprisoning and beating children, some as young as 10. Nora says International laws designed to protect children — including the UN convention on the rights of the child are being circumvented and violated on a daily.
Nora Barrows Friedman:
- Kids randomly picked off the street, allegedly for throwing stones. The Israeli punishment is 10 years in prison for a child.
- Israeli military can arrest (Palestinian only) children as young as 12. Right now there are 300 Palestinian children in Israeli prisons.
- Hebron is a city where settlers have been given half of the old city, a settlement colony is inside the Palestinian community
- These two young children were followed and taken into a military center inside the settlement colony.
- This whole family had been destoryed by these illegal actions against these 2 brothers. The only recourse this family has is to take it to the Israeli military court. Motive: trying to get Palestinian families to leave.
- This family lives in an area where settlers have their eye on, seems to be very deliberate.
- There are hundreds of women in Israeli prisons, there’s a story where a woman gave birth in the prison, and the baby is now a prisoner.
Guest – Nora Barrows Friedman: Senior producer and co-host of KPFA’s Flashpoints.
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Obama’s Plan for Elimination of Nation-Controlled Nuclear Power
Nine nations now have a combined total of more than 22 thousand nuclear weapons. The United States has about 5 thousand nuclear weapons, 500 of them are land based warheads which can fly in three to four minutes after the order is given. President Obama recently hosted a nuclear security summit in DC with more than 45 foreign leaders, he traveled to Prague and signed a treaty that would cut the combined US and Russian stockpile by a third. Meanwhile, the US nuclear stockpiles have been shrinking for the last 40 years. We talk more about the current nuclear disarmament effort with attorney Peter Weiss is Vice-President, former President, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms.
Peter Weiss:
- Leave the doomsday clock where it is. Reaffirming of the status quo. The agreement with Russia in reducing the nuclear weapons allowed to each country from 2200 to 1500. They count all the warheads on a bomber plane as one, instead of 10 or 12 weapons.
- Jimmy Carter: A single nuclear armed submarine had enough weaponry to destroy every Russian city of 100 thousand or more.
- Nuclear Posture Review – Zero document / “It’s difficult to operationalize a vision.”
- Obviously there is a great danger of loose nukes. No one seems ready to adopt an anti-nuclear convention except the countries that don’t have nuclear weapons.
- Conference in Riverside Church on May 1, 2010, United For Peace and Justice
- The anti-nuke movment will be re-energized.
- The US wants to be the sole repository of weapons grade nuclear material, committment from Chile, and Canada, to ship WGNM to the US. That’s kind of weird isn’t it?
Guest – Peter Weiss, former Vice President, Center for Constitutional Rights and Vice President, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms.
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Why Human Rights are Indispensable to Financial Regulation
Today we speak with Radhika Balakrishnan, Professor of Economics and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College, about her recent article in the Huffington Post titled Why Human Rights are Indispensable to Financial Regulation. Balakrishnan enumerates the global human fallout from the world financial crisis. The World Bank estimates an additional 400 thousand children will die before their fifth birthday, while those responsible for the turmoil are benefiting from bailouts and promotions. She references the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its inclusion of economic and social rights, that is the right to work, to education, to rest, to an adequate standard of living. Dr. Balakrishnan has also outlined steps for meaningful reform that we will also examine today. She is currently working on a project trying to use human rights norms to evaluate and construct macroeconomic policy.
Radhika Barakrishnan:
- We pretend there is no criteria regulating (economic policies) We argue in our piece, that human rights have a way to set up an ethical basis and framework. Most people don’t know that human rights include economic and social rights.
- In the United States the assumption is you can vote the people in to give you social and economic rights.
- The idea that the market is this Greek Oracle that we can’t question. . . is a problem.
- We’re saying there is a form of biased market regulation, where the state has the interest of the financiers and the banks.
- and not those of the working people and the working class. One example is the minimum wage.
- The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate, one is to have price stability, the other is the right to work.
- In the United States, we have not signed the Convenant on Economic and Human Rights.
- The Federal Reserve is a government agency and the fact that they act in a cloak of secrecy is a real problem.
- I think there is a great case to be brought, as far as freedom of information.
- What kind of financial models are they using to make their decisions? This cloak of secrecy because you independence to make monetary policy? But independence doesn’t mean secret.
- Their Board of Governors are from the commercial banks, whose interest will they work for?
- Bailout Bill – TARP / This went to financial agencies to give them the money. 720 Billion dollars overnighted to the Federal Reserve has not gone out? The Stimulus Money, for employment creation, though it was used for tax cuts.
- Congress did not extend unemployment benefits for Spring recess.
- The United States is coming up for the Universal Periodic Review in the Human Rights Council of Geneva
- The Center for Women’s Global Leadership
Guest – Radhika Balakrishnan, Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from Rutgers University. Previously, she was Professor of Economics and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College. She has worked at the Ford Foundation as a program officer in the Asia Regional Program. She is currently the Chair of the Board of the US Human Rights Network and on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. She has published in the field of gender and development.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Gaza, Human Rights, Iraq War, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness joins hosts. Michelle book has been called an incisive critique of racial caste system in America. As many celebrate the “triumph over race” with the election Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in the US are locked behind bars or permenantly labeled felons. Michelle Alexander, a former litigator who is a legal scholar, argues that the civil rights community—and all of us— are challenged to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
Michelle Alexander:
- I began in my own research to question the prevailing political media narrative about the reasons of people of color and ghetto communities cycle through the criminal justice system today, it is not as it appears.
- I argue that in a few decades after the collapse of Jim Crow, we as a nation, have managed to re-create as a racial caste in America, in some major American cities, the majority of African American men, are locked behind bars, labeled felons for life.
- Legally discriminated in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. We have not ended racial caste, we redesigned it.
- The Drug War was declared in relation to racial politics, not drug crime. About 30 million were arrested for drug offenses after the launch of the drug war. Most were for marijuana possession, now considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.
- Drug markets like American society generally are segregated by race and class
- The Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible for these cases to be brought.
- Baldus Study: McKleskey v Kemp
- Finding proof of conscious intentional discrimination is nearly impossible. Severe racial disparities are of no consequence, immunized not just the death penalty.
- I wrote this book, largely because I was deeply troubled by the failure of civil rights organizations and black leadership in this country to place mass incarceration and the war on drugs at the top of our racial justice agenda.
- Ten of millions of people in the United States are now regulated permanently to an under-caste, who are barred by law from seeking jobs or housing, public benefits, food stamps.
- Prisons have been holding many rural towns together as jobs have disappeared. The majority of people put behind bars are non-violent offenders. Every race suffers from this drug war, there are white people doing decades in prison for drug possession charges. The suffering of the drug crosses the color lines, and we got to be able to galvanize a level of public awareness and support.
- Something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in the United States.
Guest – Professor Michelle Alexander, joined the OSU faculty in 2005. She holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic.
Professor Alexander has significant experience in the field of civil rights advocacy and litigation. She has litigated civil rights cases in private practice as well as engaged in innovative litigation and advocacy efforts in the non-profit sector. For several years, Professor Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California.
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Ayman Mohyeldin, Al-Jazeera TV correspondent
Ayman joins hosts in the studio. He is an Al Jazeera TV correspondent and former CNN producer based in Baghdad. He was the only news producer allowed to observe and report on the US handover of Saddam Hussein to an Iraqi judge. Ayman has been stationed in the Gaza Strip since May 2008, where he has covered the Gaza siege. Ayman talks with hosts about his experience covering the destruction during Operation Cast Lead. Filmmakers and producers are working on a documentary film about Ayman’s war reporting in Palestine. Facebook link
Ayman Mohyeldin:
- Saturday December 27th, 2008, I had been based in Gaza. It had been quiet in Gaza up to November 4th.
- We started hearing the first wave of Israeli air-strikes that destroyed government buildings, police station within minutes. It kicked of a series of air strikes throughout the day. 200 hundred Palestinians were killed that day.
- We really saw everything, I can’t begin to describe the horrors of what we saw. On the first day we went to the main Gaza hospital.
- People of Gaza were trapped in a territory subjected to a very modern sophisticated, well trained and equipped Army.
- By Israel’s own admission rocket fire into Israel had dropped 98 percent 4 months ago (before Operation CastLead)
- What were the real reasons for the attack, the war was unnecessary given what was achieved in the 4 months prior.
- The siege on Gaza has allowed Hamas to tighten it’s grip on Gaza. The siege has not punished Hamas.
- Palestinians have recycled the rubber and steel from the destruction.
- I was standing on a rooftop and they were dropping hundreds of leaflets from planes, that read “your area is going to be attacked, if have any information about Hamas, please call this number.”
- Goldstone Report: Israel while bombing did not distinguish between military and civilian targets. Not a mistake.
- Targets include – Mosques, schools, ambulance drivers, government buildings, ministries, Palestinian Legislative Council Building.
- Gaza, historically was not an affluent place, it was a merchant trade route from Africa into Asia and Europe.
- Stunted growth is starting to appear among Palestinian children.
- Gaza: Desperate, frustrated, a sense of abandonment by the international community.
Guest- Ayman Mohyeldin, Arab American journalist based in the Middle East and is the Gaza Correspondent for the English language channel Al-Jazeera. Previously a producer with CNN and NBC, Ayman was one of the first western journalists allowed to enter and report on the handing over and trial of the deposed President of Iraq Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi Interim Government for crimes against humanity
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