Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Truth to Power
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Mass Demonstration Planned: March Forward
On Saturday March 20, there will be a massive National March and Rally in Washington DC organized against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, while fighting for social and economic justice at home. The demonstrations will pull together veterans, active-duty service members and those have served in the US military. Other mass rallies will be held on the same day in San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The day before on Friday March 19, there will be a day of action and outreach. Today Michael Prysner joins us to give us more information and details on this mass demonstration. Michael recently delivered a powerful speech as an IVAW member. From Michael’s speech, ” Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it’s profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us.”
Mike Prysner:
- I’m a co-founder of March Forward, it’s also an affiliate with the ANSWER coalition which is Act Now To Stop War End Racism. We know now that there are more people who are becoming tired of the wars and watching 500 million dollars a day squandered on these senseless wars and occupations.
- On March 20, you’re going to see thousands of people from all over the country. We’re coming off of a year of President Obama being elected. Many people thought that they were voting for an to the war, and change to the colonial policies of the US government.
- So, change comes not from an election, but through a struggle and mass movement. We need to be there on the anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq.
- Demands: US out of Iraq and Afghanistan. An immediate end to occupations. Freedom for Palestine, reparations for Haiti, money for jobs, education, housing and health care, not for war.
- WAR: This is about the United States expanding its reach economically, to seize the local economies and natural resources and the markets of these countries. These wars are for empire to expand US business interests.
- I went to Iraq in 2003 during the invasion, and then month after month I thought we were there for a very different purpose. There was a growing frustration within the military, people don’t want to go and kill and be killed. People join the military because they need access to a job, education, health care.
- It was the Iraqi children that I saw, that cried and screamed at us, I dragged from their houses during raids. It was innocent Iraqis that were shot. This is what turned me around.
- Seeing their faces, that made me realize that we were not the liberators that we thought we were going to be.
- Afghanistan: Soldiers are used as bait. They are put at an outpost and wait to get attacked. They get attacked and call in air strikes. Soldiers are put in danger, without any real expressed purpose. Now the Generals have warned us that we should be braced for hundreds of casualties every month.
- We have these 2 things, the horrible deaths and destruction and then no reason why. It’s cloaked in chauvinism and racism, and that’s the only justification.
Guest – Michael Prysner, lead coordinator of March Forward and Iraq Veterans Against the War member.
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John Brown’s Farm Faces Possible Closure – Update
Today we look into the possible closure of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York. State lawmakers have announced that budget cuts could result in the closure of the farm where the famed abolitionist lived with his family and is now buried. There are others buried there, those that perished in Brown’s 1859 raid on a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry. Historic sites and parks are often the first casualties of budget cuts. In one scenario, the New York legislature would have to approve a proposed transfer of 5 million dollars from the Environmental Protection Fund to shore up the budget cuts that would affect New York parks including John Brown’s farm. Meanwhile, many New York residents are pulling together to speak out and save this historic area. John Brown’s Body – song Recent News: John Brown Resolution Introduced by Senator
Louis DeCaro:
- The land was given to John Brown by Gerrit Smith who gave land grants to many including “free blacks” from New York State. The area was nicknamed Tim Buk Tu. John Brown lived up there in a rented farm, but later his son in law built the farm house that is there (1854)
- He was somewhat of a black nationalist as well as being a forerunner in the civil rights movement. He supported black self determination. Some people had said it was an underground railroad stop and it really wasn’t.
- For years, African American churches made trips to the farm, John Brown was buried there, of course after being hanged in W. Virginia in 1859. It’s a spiritual experience, you ascend this road, you get to the top, you see the farm house there. There’s a great boulder where John Brown loved to sit on this boulder and read his Bible.
- I brought Charles 37X up there as an elderly man in 1999. I’ll never forget the impact this had, the connections he made up there. It’s marginalized in American memory.
- I believe as we progress as a society that this will a place that’s more treasured.
- There’s optimism but still the real possibility (of the farm to be closed)
- Write to: Assembly woman Teresa Sayward / 940 Legislative Office Bldg / Albany NY / 12248 / EMAIL: sayward@assembly.state.ny.us
- State Senator Betty Little / Room 506 / Legislative Office Bldg / Albany NY / 12247/ EMAIL: little@senate.state.ny.us
Guest – Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of History at Alliance Theological Seminary’s New York City campus, and is also the pastor of an urban church. Of course, he often dreams of being a full-time researcher and student of the life and letters of John Brown the abolitionist. His latest work is entitled, “John Brown: The Man Who Lived” (Lulu, 2009), a collection of essays prepared in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Harper’s Ferry Raid and the hanging of John Brown. Lou’s previous works on the abolitionist are “John Brown–the Cost of Freedom” (International Publishers, 2007)–which features new insights based on cutting edge research and transcriptions of twenty John Brown letters, and ‘Fire from the Midst of You’: A Religious Life of John Brown” (New York University Press, 2002). He is also a contributor to “The Afterlife of John Brown,” edited by Eldrid Herrington and Andrew Taylor (2005), and Jean Libby’s monumental “John Brown Photo Chronology” (2009).
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Death Penalty, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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The Death Penalty Loses Support of The American Law Institute
In late 2009, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual structure for the current capital justice system for nearly 50 years, essentially announced that its project has failed. The American Law Institute or A.L.I. is made up of around 4 thousand judges, lawyers and law professors, streamlines law and model codes to provide coherence in a federal legal system that is usually taking a varied approach. In a 1962 Model Code, the best legal minds of the institute framed a way for the death penalty to be carried out fairly, it then was re-instated in 1976. Now, the same people disavow the structure saying there is no fair system of capital punishment. The New York Times, in one article wrote (quote) the institute’s move represents a tectonic shift in legal theory. The article also points out that capital punishment was plagued by problems including racial disparities.
David Seth Michaels:
- American Law Institute, the intellectual group that tries to cobble together federal law in the United States including capital punishment. The capital punishment rules that they invented fifty years ago, have been the groundwork on which everything has happened since.
- So, it comes as a bit of a shock that fifty years later, they say “oh, oh.” It doesn’t work. It won’t work, we can’t make it work, so we’re going to fold up our tents. We won’t have anything else to do with it.
- Unworkable elements in the system: They’re troubled by the racial disparity on who gets executed, there’s tremendous disparity that is regional across the U.S. The prospect of capital punishment is ridiculously expensive. There’s risk of executing innocent people and politics of appointed judges who wantonly convict.
- It’s one of these circumstances that it is irreparably falling apart, broken. Everywhere you turn you find horrendous errors, egregious discrimination.
- The murder rate is higher in places where they have the death penalty than places where they don’t have the death penalty. Public support for the death penalty has been slowly and gradually decreasing.
- In the early 70s I became concerned about conditions in the prisons and mental hospitals in Tennesee and Mississippi. This is after the restoration of the death penalty in 1976.
- I can’t wait for the day that capital punishment is abolished. This system can’t die soon enough. You got nobody supporting the death penalty on an intellectual basis.
- National Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Guest – Attorney David Seth Michaels. David has represented clients for 30 years, clients such as prison inmates in Mississippi and Tennessee. He’s worked with Brooklyn Legal Services B and with the Federal Defenders Service Appeals. He is also a novelist, has his own practice in New York.
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Jim Lafferty Part II
We’re delighted to have back with us attorney Jim Lafferty for the second half of our Lawyers You’ll Like series. He is the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and host of The Lawyers Guild Show, a weekly public affairs program on Pacifica radio sister station KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
He has served as a chief officer of, and spokesperson for, various national anti-war coalitions, including the National Peace Action Coalition, the anti-Vietnam War coalition that organized the largest protests during that war; the National Coalition for Peace in the Middle East; and, the National Campaign to End U.S. Intervention in the Philippines. In the 60s and 70s, his law firm, Lafferty, Reosti, Jabara, Papakian & Smith, represented virtually all of the left political movements in and around Detroit, Michigan, during which time he became one of this nation’s leading experts on Selective Service law and military law.
In the early 80’s, Mr. Lafferty founded and chaired the largest A.C.L.U. Chapter in the State of Michigan. In New York City, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, he traveled the world organizing on behalf of the labor rights of merchant seafarers. During this time he also taught a course at the New School for Social Research, entitled, Vietnam: The War at Home and Abroad. More recently, Jim Lafferty was the Coordinator of the L.A. Coalition to Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as a member of the national steering committee of the Campaign to Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Jim Lafferty:
- The man who was presented to me as my uncle, when I was sixteen he died, my mother acknowledged that he was my father. A friend of mine, she was a white nurse and she was married to a white school teacher and had a 3 year old daughter.
- She divorced that man and married a black surgeon. Her mother and former husband wanted custody feeling it was inappropriate for child to be raised in biracial home. George Crockett was one of the lawyers in the National Lawyers Guild in Michigan, took the case only if I clerked and read every opinion on domestic relations given down by the Michigan Supreme Court.
- We lost that case, and I continued working with that firm. They made a movie about that called “One Potato, Two Potato”
- The firm had been lawyers for UAW. I had gone down South to work with the lawyers guild in 1963, I was taking depositions for the Freedom Democratic Party. That’s where I met Mary Robinson.
- Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy / Bill Kunstler’s book (1966) Deep In My Heart
- Michael Smith: Jeff Haas says Fred Hampton had Bill’s book, Deep In My Heart on his bed.
- When you finally take a stand, even though it leads to your incarceration and apparent lack of freedom, you’re finally free. Anti-war movements: Some friends of mine ran as peace candidates just to bring up the question of the war. We ran the entire campaign for 3300.00. Including 10 small billboards. Later we put together the Detroit Coalition to End the War in Vietnam Now.
- I wasn’t representing people anymore, but as the head of this coalition, you were doing public speaking, and getting an appreciation for what the power of people could do. To the credit of those lawyers who were winning those victories, even then they were saying to younger lawyers like me, but the real important thing is what goes on in the streets.
- Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, – Labor Movement is vital. The anti-war movement is vibrant. You can’t blame the young activists for not knowing history, because nobody’s bothered to teach them. I’d like to see the movement coalesce around a meaningful left socialist third party.
- On the issue of the war, we’re worse off than we were with Bush.
- Healthcare plan: boondoggle for insurance companies, if you insure people who haven’t been insured, the profits of insurance companies aren’t gonna go down, you and I will pay more. Whereas the government should be paying more. NY Times article: putting aside the public option, you get past it by not dealing with it.
Guest – Attorney Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and host of The Lawyers Guild Show, a weekly public affairs program on Pacifica radio sister station KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Historic Win for Constitutional Rights! Injunction Granted in CCR Lawsuit on Behalf of ACORN
Recently, a federal judge blocked Congressional effort to withhold funding to the community group ACORN. In the decision, the court found that ACORN can show that the targeting by Congress in de-funding the anti-poverty group, is a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against the Bill of Attainder. This is a legislative act which singles out a specific person or group for punishment. Jules Lobel, CCR Vice-President and Cooperating Attorney says quote “This historic decision by the Court affirms the fundamental constitutional principle that the Congress cannot be judge, jury, and executioner.” Following the decision, Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s Executive Director, said quote “The court’s decision is a victory not only for the many dedicated citizens who work with ACORN to improve their communities and promote responsible lending and homeownership, but for the Constitution and the rights of all Americans.”
Bertha Lewis:
- ACORN is 39 years old, started in Little Rock, Arkansas. It grew out of the welfare rights movement, George Wiley founder of WRO. We began to organize folks in the South first, just around bread and butter issues.
- Red-lining banks, block busting racist strategies, potholes. Most people would know us by the housing work that we did, we challenge the banks for the red-lining tactics. I was the executive director for New York, I’ve been with ACORN for almost 20 years.
- We had an internal scandal, where the founder Wade Rasky had allowed his brother in a 2 year period of time misappropriate almost a million dollars. I was appointed CEO after that for my New York City organizing work. We’re (ACORN) the best organizers, but we’re not the best managers.
- It was fine if we stuck with soup kitchens, etc, but we started registering poor people to vote around issues. The minimum wage law passed in Florida. I think we became a threat when we actually moved those people to the polls. Now we begin to change the balance of power.
- We need to organize multi-ethnic, multi-culture, multi-issue, and build an institution where people have real power. Karl Rove leaked emails revealed : “Bring me the head of ACORN.”
- The organizing was effective because we’re not a single issue organization. We can be better managers, but I guess we had a naivete about the forces we’ve been going against all these years.
- Since 2000, the right has seen us as a growing threat, we were effective and almost immediately we were accused of voter fraud, voter registration fraud. Nothing stuck. They decided, we got to keep (ACORN) in the news, we gotta keep attacking them.
- This filmmaker – James O’Keefe made up this fantasy scenario, was racist and sexists. So, they had this series of videos, when you looked at it, it was very sensational.
- Anyone could see it was highly edited, where they had this woman say she hadn’t paid taxes, and there are these girls from Honduras we want to bring over.
- So, what you see in these tapes is some of our workers giving advice. Next thing it was online, it went viral. Funders were saying they didn’t want to be associated with us. Five hundred organizers, four hundred thousand member families.
- Three times before the Republicans tried to say ACORN was a criminal organization, no due process. In October after that video, they put in writing, no funds given to ACORN. Omnibus funding bill. The bill passed, only 7 brave senators voted against it.
- Congress (right wing) was pushed to name ACORN, because federally funded groups such as Blackwater / KBR / would be snared in broad language net. This is about the Constitution, it applies to poor people, it applies to poor people’s organizations.
- CCR lawyers – “I call them Jedi Knights for Justice”
Guest – Bertha Lewis, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Organizer of ACORN, the largest community organization in the country. Appointed in May 2008, Ms. Lewis oversees the operations of its 400,000 strong membership, which is active in over 110 cities across the country. A 16 year veteran of the organization, Ms. Lewis was most recently the Executive Director of ACORN’s New York affiliate and is a founding Co-Chair of the New York Working Families Party.
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Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Why Are We in Afghanistan is the question many listeners still have and is the title of a film by Michael Zweig. The film examines how the reasons for the Afghanistan war have clouded since September 11, 2001. The conflict centers on geo-political positioning that holds the US in the war torn landscape. At this stage, the Afghanistan war is a humanitarian disaster, the civilian casualities are stunning and conditions on the ground are desperate for Afghani women and children. The film, Why Are We in Afghanistan? is an educational resource for communities, unions, veterans and active duty military, classes, and anyone who wonders why we are in Afghanistan, and what to do about it.
Michael Zwieg:
- We started out being in Afghanistan because of the 9/11 attacks, the idea was they attacked us from a base in Afghanistan, and we’re going to get the bad guys. Once they were there it became clear, that they weren’t interested in going to Afghanistan, they were interested in invading Iraq.
- Starting in 2002, the focus left Afghanistan, we were there, in an inactive state. Then comes the presumed resolution in Iraq, then Obama comes in and tries to be the president, running the campaign of prosecuting the good war.
- Why are we now doubling down in Afghanistan?
- Obama’s latest speech says primary reason for war escalation is Taliban, who are sheltering Al-Qaeda. To “nation-build” – stabilize Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, though, if you were to stabilize Pakistan, Al-Qaeda would go to Somalia, etc. It’s like wack-a-mole.
- General Petraeus’s American Counterinsurgency Doctrine. 2006
- They accept in the doctrine, that counter-insurgency is 80 percent civilian work and taking care of civilian population / 20 percent military. But if you look at the budget in place right now for 2010, it’s 6 percent civilian and 94 percent military.
- So, what’s going on? It’s not really about counterinsurgency, it’s not really about Al-Qaeda? We shouldn’t downplay the domestic and military pressure to do this.
- Sentiment about Afghanistan War changed in the US Labor movement summer of 2009
- Pipelanistan: During collapse of Soviet Union, the central asia “stan” countries came in to play.
- The US department of Energy forecasts between the year 2000 and 2025, China’s need to import oil is going to increase to 73 percent of its oil needs they will have to import.
- Pakistan’s agent in Afghanistan are the Taliban.
- Unocal – Moderate size US oil company, negotiating with Taliban and Pakistan to build pipeline.
- Unreported: There were meetings in Turkmenistan, in 2002 with the Bush Administration and Asian development Bank to build a pipeline going to Arabian Sea.
- There was a meeting in 2001 before 9/11, with Cheney and energy executives. They issued a report on American energy strategies May 2001. They identified the Central Asia republics as a major source of oil and natural gas.
- They identified these resources, Cheney and his crew, as a source to block from the Chinese and others from getting those resources.
- We’re in Afghanistan because of both strategic interests which include the oil resources and to block others.
- What are going to do, we can’t win, but we can’t not fight it. Obama doesn’t see a way unless there’s a mass movement in this country or military rebellion.
- Barbara Tuchman – March of Folly – Leaders of countries lead them into disasterous courses, against advice and alternative policies.
- You can’t reduce it all to simple, rational calculations because there are other courses that they could do.
- How do you make it hot for Obama on the decisions that he’s made? How do you build the social movement.
- We’ve built quite a presence in the labor movement around Iraq.
- Almost spending 100 billion dollars a year in Afghanistan. You could create a lot of jobs, tax relief, stimulus systems.
- War good for economy? No. For every dollar spent on military spending, you create way fewer jobs than the same money spent on building roads, or turbines for wind farms.
Guest – Michael Zwieg, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he has received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. His most recent books are What’s Class Got To Do With It? American Society In the 21st Century and The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (2000). He was executive producer and co-writer of the documentary Meeting Face to Face: The Iraq-US Labor Solidarity Tour. (Center for Study of Working Class Life, 2006).
Professor Zweig received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the University of Michigan where, as an undergraduate, he was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and as a graduate student helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE).
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
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Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America
From the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to Prescott Bush’s ties to Nazi Germany, the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, digs into the hidden history of the Bush family. Author Russ Baker takes on the Bush legacy with powerful investigative journalism. One review states that the chapter on George W Bush’s private life is worth the price of the book alone. Baker also reveals George H Walker Bush’s connections with the CIA began in 1953, not when he publicly joined the agency in 1976. Bush’s oil companies were used as fronts for the intelligence agencies around the world with an agenda controlled by power brokers. Award winning investigative reporter Russ Baker also tells us why this insight into the Bush family is important to know now during the Obama administration.
Russ Baker:
- I was training investigative journalists in Yugoslavia 2002, and when I traveled Europe people were asking me what has happened to your country. I knew superficially what happened, but I didn’t know why it happened.
- From the son, I looked into the father,because had the father not been president, the son wouldn’t be president.
- George HW Bush had a secret past more than 20 years, preceding his appointment to the CIA in 1976
- George HW Bush, starts up offshore drilling companies that make no sense, very few customers, very few rigs, but he’s traveling all over the world. It’s perfect intelligence cover.
- They even put a rig in Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, they had Cuban exiles working there
- Ok, he’s working in intelligence, I assume that’s what he’s doing while he was a Congressman, an oil man, an ambassador to the UN. This is fascinating and also deeply troubling.
- I think what we’re looking at is a permanent construct of power.
- Journalists: I don’t think they’ll say so publicly but privately they’ll tell you how scared they are, whether for their personal safety or they don’t want to lose their job.
- The Bush dynasty was the ultimate triumph of the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower, a formal general had warned us about.
- Harry Truman speech on the CIA: I signed the Act that created the CIA, but they never told me the kinda things that they got in to.
- The Bush Family: You see them as the ultimate operatives on behalf of the coalition of powerful Wall St. interests, military contractors, resource extraction mining interests, going all over the world to bring back the plunder essentially.
- They (Bush family) are the representatives, they are not the bosses.
- Obama: It’s very difficult to go against these interests. Our economy runs on war, it’s very difficult to undo that.
- I, myself was naive, and I covered politics for more than 20 years, and I never understood the extent at which democracy is subverted.
- Power in America resides in pool of people about whom we’ve never even heard, the only way you find out is if you look at these Fortune 1000 lists. This is not a conspiracy, it’s just the way things work.
- Michael Smith: When I was starting out and learning how this country works, I was reading C.Wright Mills, Ferdinand Lunberg.
- Guest host Jim Lafferty: This is a matter of commonality of interests that run this country
- Whowhatwhy.com – specialized in doing deep politics investigation – historic epics that haven’t been properly explored.
- Everybody hated Kennedy except the people.
Guest – Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
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MondoWeiss: The War of Ideas In the Middle East
Did the recent bombing of Gaza and killing of 1400 Palestinians create a breakdown in the traditional Jewish American support for Israel? In the first of its kind, last month’s J Street Conference brought together 1500 people to the meeting aimed at ending the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically. The conference is a political arm of the pro-Israel pro peace movement that also lobbied more than 100 members of Congress to press forward with the peace process and two state solution.
Meanwhile the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement gains momentum and Code Pink activists continue to protest, demonstrate in and around Gaza. As many listeners may know living conditions in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated. Salt water has contaminated a large percentage of drinking water and is damaging the kidneys of Palestinian children.
Philip Weiss:
- J Street is the alternative Israel lobby or alternative Jewish lobby because they identify themselves as a Jewish organization.
- They are taking on AIPAC, which has traditionally taken on the role to shape the US response to Israel.
- It was landmark moment in changing the original purpose of the Israel lobby to speak with one voice
- Here’s a lobby that says. . guess what? Jews are not going to speak with one voice, we’re going to have a lot of different voices that contend on this issue.
- Finally there’s a little bit of fragmenting of this reactionary force of AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
- 160 Congressmen were at the J Street Conference in Washington DC. You saw lefty-Jews with a spring in their step. The conference disappointed me in a number of ways, it only had Zionists, progressive Zionists. It condemned the Goldstone Report
- There were some bright lights at this conference. It’s not that different from AIPAC in a number of ways.
- There was a strong sense if you were to speak there (J Street Conf.) you had to be a Zionist.
- Zionist: I think it is support for a Jewish state. We need a Jewish state because we could be persecuted again and we need to go somewhere.
- Generally the rank and file of these people are old Jewish leftys. J Street represents a break in the heresy. The heresy is that we speak with one voice. This process of colonization continues in the West Bank, unabated basically.
- One state with an apartheid system and that’s going to be the struggle. I think if you scratch any Jew in this country he has some connection to Israel. For me it was the 9/11 thing. As they say.
- My brother said, I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, as I did, but my Jewish newspaper says the Iraq War could be good for Israel.
- I couldn’t avoid the issue anymore then when I confronted the issue I became this Palestinian Solidarity person.
- The desperation is heightened by the fact there’s so little recognition of that in the United States.
- Goldstone, a Jewish Jurist from South Africa who fought apartheid and Bosnian war crimes, that he could say. . look this is persecution . . and that can be so ignored, defied and stomped on in the United States. .it’s a horror.
- Our country can affect the situation ( In Gaza / West Bank)
Guest – Peter Weiss, longtime journalist and regular contributor to the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute Philip is the author of two books a political novel, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, and American Taboo, an investigative account of a 1976 murder in the Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga. His website is called Mondoweiss, it explores Middle East policy and Israel/Palestine issues. Philip attended the J Street Conference 2 months ago.
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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Economic Policy, Health Care and Historic Models: Professor John Ehrenberg
There are two US wars raging, unemployment has rocketed, and the US military has reported the highest number of recruits since 1973. Right now, there are 67 thousand US troops in Afghanistan, and 119 thousand in Iraq. The laws, practices and policy of the Bush Administration are still in place, that push the country dangerously further into a police state. We’ve recently watched the military attack civilians with sonic weapons in Pittsburgh, and the US Justice Department recently admitted to working with AT&T to spy on its citizens. Can any model of democracy work under these conditions and what are the similar historic narratives of where the United States is at now?
John Ehrenberg:
- My part of the panel was Marx’s political journalism from the 1840s when he’s talking about France.
- He’s observing the class struggle and revolution in France. How a dysfunctional political system was incapable of dealing with objective needs.
- Comparing where we are today, specifically health care, the president says if we don’t address this we will bankrupt the states
- One of the major drivers of the collapse of auto industry is the cost of health care.
- The political apparatus is so dysfunctional and paralyzed, and so beholden to a particular set of “special interests” that it can’t move forward.
- This is only the first of several instances that are coming down the road
- Another part of this is structural in the part of the system. This system was consciously designed to allow special interest to penetrate the political apparatus. Structured so that it is way more difficult to get anything done, anything comprehensive, than it is to block reform.
- The history of the country is filled with failed attempts to pass anything comprehensive. So it has made pieces of the state to be almost colonized by these special interests. Obama has big plans, but they’re systemic, trying to change an entrenched system. Unlike FDR who came into office as a tinkerer.
- It’s more than the role of the republican party, its bigger, the Republican party is shrunken into this southern male, undereducated white Christian.
- Elections don’t settle anything, they give a sense of the mood of the country but 65 percent of the country when polled wanted a public option, and we ain’t going to get it!
- We look to Obama to mobilize and he ain’t gonna do it. We have a structural crisis.
- The official structures of the state are increasingly unresponsive, political polarization.
- Political polarization is almost in direct proportion to levels of economic inequality.
- The more unequal in distribution of wealth, the more polarized and institutional dysfunction. Since 1980 Congress hasn’t gotten anything important done.
- We are the most unequal advanced country on the planet.
- It doesn’t matter what the president wants, there are these deep structures in the state that impose their imperatives on elected political leaders.
- Nobel Peace Prize not given to Obama but really to the American voter.
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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William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
We are excited to welcome Sarah and Emily Kunstler, daughters of the late radical civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, and the directors of a biographical documentary about their father, titled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. 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. By this time Bill Kunstler was famous. He later polarized the people by starting to choose high profile cases. He defended Mafia boss John Gotti, and Omar Abdel-Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. We are grateful to have a comprehensive personal history of this great man, friend, mentor and colleague preserved now in this film. Click here for screenings
Emily and Sarah:
- This is Emily, Sarah and I worked on this for 4 years but we think about it as if we started in our infancy. Really 30 years. We’ve been collecting footage and materials since we were children.
- Emily and I when we were children, when he was representing El-Said Nosir, when he was representing Larry Davis or Yusef Salem, one of the Central Park jogger defendants.
- We felt that he had a choice and we couldn’t understand why he was choosing those cases.
- He could have aligned himself with anybody, why did he want to stand next to people who were accused of such horrible crimes?
- We would answer the phone and people would say nasty things. My Dad had bullets sent to him in the mail.
- His work were our bedtime stories, he was a comic book hero to us.
- I don’t think he thought that he was inconsistent, it was the people around him that thought he was inconsistent.
- Our father thought that to align himself with the most unpopular people in society was important civil rights work because those were the moments where people’s civil rights were most likely to be violated.
- I think a defining moment for Emily and I was when we went to Tulia, Texas and made a documentary about a drug bust that netted over 20 percent of the African American population of a small town.
- By sharing that documentary with world, that’s when Emily and I understood documentary film as a tool for social justice.
- The title comes from the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The protagonist of that poem is struggling with action, whether or not to take action. Do I dare, Do I dare disturb the universe? Do I dare eat a peach?
- Do I rise up and do something or do I quietly go about and do normal things?
- For our father, he was obsessed with that moment. He thought everyone was faced with that moment to stand up and take principled action or do nothing.
- We saw him go out on the front stoop of our house and hold press conferences.
- It’s about Bill’s transformation, it’s about our transformation. It’s about people being transformed having witnessed government power and oppression.
- Dad really believed in people’s humanity and that goes to the heart of the criminal justice system, in the jury system.
- It was frightening for us to share the film with the world. The first 10 times we sat with the audience clenched our fists, couldn’t even look.
Guests – Emily and Sarah Kunstler, producers and directors who run the Off Center Media production company. Emily, a film major and former video producer for Democracy Now, and Sarah, a criminal defense attorney practicing in the Eastern and Southern districts of New York. 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, Censorship, Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (THE BOOK)
Today we welcome back Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts to discuss his new book titled Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. In his book, Rick 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.
Rick Wolff will give us an update on why the media claims the recession is over, he also tells us if there be another leg down as predicted in the September 21st interview. 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:
- The origin of the economic crisis goes deep into history. It’s one of the key things that people don’t understand or want to face. Roots of a System’s Crisis
- We were a country founded by foreigners coming here, they got rid of the indigenous population. They established a mix system. Capitalism on one hand, with employers and employees, and then self employed farmers and small crafts people, and in the Southern US, slavery.
- When the dust cleared, capitalism came through, it destroyed slavery and suboridinated the self employed to be small and on the margins.
- For 150 years – 1820-1970 the growth of capital was outrunning the available labor supply. Laborers had options, could go West.
- For 150 years, the goods and services a person could buy from an hour of their wages kept going up. It produced a strange and unusual notion that you were blessed, if you worked hard you would make more money.
- That Americans could have a dream like that. . their children could have a better life and deliver on the promise.
- It drew millions of immigrants from all over the world etc.
- Then after the 1970s capitalism reminded us that it is not a guarantee that if you work hard you will be rewarded.
- In the last 30 years wages have not anymore gone up. It’s a sea change in our culture’s history.
- Wages stayed the same for these reasons:
- The arrival of the computer that substituted people for machines on a mammoth scale
- The movement of corporations to other parts of the world to take advantage of cheaper labor.
- Women and immigrants moving into the paid labor force. This plunged the US economy into a disaster zone.
- The end of rising wages. Americans today work 20 percent more hours a week, than their counterparts in France, Germany or Italy. They are exhausted physically. The families are in disarray.
- Then to consume more, live the American dream, they borrowed on credit, the likes of which no working class in the history of the world has ever done.
- The average debt of US family in the 1920s equaled about 1/3 of its annual income. In 2007, the level of debt equaled 125 percent of annual income. At the same time, the last 30 years have been greatest boom of profitability of American corporations.
- Where did the money come from to lend unprecedented amounts? The money came from the boom in profits made possible by there no longer being a rise in wages. You not only get the profitability of a flat wage situation but you get the added income from the interest that comes from lending.
- The reforms and regulations we’ve seen, don’t work. The only thing that got Americans working again after a 10 year depression – 1929-1939, was not economic reform and regulation, it was something called WWII.
- Corporations used their profits to weaken reform laws, buy politicians, create army of Lobbyists.
- The American people MUST demand different responses to this crisis than what there was in the past.
- Handing corporations the citizen’s tax money as bail out is folly.
- We have 15 million adults looking for work, 10 million more are discouraged and have given up.
- The first thing this government should do is provide work for the unemployed.
- Not bailing out the banks. The private sector has failed in the United States.
- The government should support enterprises that workers run them, form them as their own enterprises in a collective way that is different from capitalist corporations
- Let workers choose if they want to work for an enterprise run by workers or capitalists. Let us as consumers choose from good and services produced in a non-capitalist way alongside the capitalist.
Guest – Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his new book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About, Rick 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.
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Amy Goodman: Breaking the Sound Barrier.
Today, we’re very pleased to talk with award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and the host/executive producer of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman. Her new book titled Breaking the Sound Barrier is a collection of wide-ranging articles reminding the reader of what true independent journalism can do. Amy’s style of journalism breaks through the corporate media noise with stories from community organizers in New Orleans to the brave soldiers resisting war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Truthout
Author and journalist Chris Hedges writes : “Amy Goodman is one of the most important voices in America. She defies the noise and clamor of celebrity gossip. She challenges the manipulation of information and dissemination of lies by the power elite. She refuses to pander to a culture where news is seen as another form of entertainment designed to bolster corporate profits. She holds steadfast to the core values of our trade. Her integrity and honesty remind us that a culture that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality dies.”
Amy Goodman:
- Picasso’s famous anti-war painting Guernica in front of the UN Security Council. When Colin Powell went to the UN and they had a press conference, this painting was the backdrop and so they shrouded it in a blue curtain. We have to rip that shroud every which way, we have to tear it, because that’s what journalism is all about.
- Most of the voices in these columns are the people we interview on Democracy Now. The media is ahistoric, it whites out history. How are young people supposed to figure out what to do when they have no sense of what came before? What are the models, what works, what doesn’t work?
- Look at the money shifting from those who least have it to those who most have it, whether we’re talking about the economic meltdown. Obama surrounding himself by the Goldman Sachs folks.
- The model of community organizing has to be adopted by people all over the country.
- It’s not going to happen because there’s one person in the white house.
- The people with money and power walking the halls of the west wing, whispering in the commander in chief’s ear, and he says, if I do that, they will storm the Bastille.
- If there’s no one out there that he’s pointing at, we’re all in very big trouble.
- Breaking the Sound Barrier is the name of the column I do every week and the column appears in more than a hundred newspapers around the country. I think it is very important for people who consider themselves activists in this country hold their leaders accountable.
- It’s the right for people to conduct their lives in this country without being spied on or infiltrated.
Guest – Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 800 TV and radio stations in North America. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press.
Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is also one of the the first recipients, along with Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone.
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