CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Truth to Power
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First Amendment Case: Food Not Bombs
In a remarkable victory for free speech, in late August three 11th Circuit judges held that the Ft. Lauderdale Food Not Bombs’ weekly outdoor food sharing is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. The Florida group is affiliated with the international organization Food Not Bombs, and engages in peaceful political direct action. It conducts weekly food sharing events at Stranaham Park in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, distributing vegetarian or vegan food free of charge. Their message is clear: society can end hunger and poverty if we redirect our collective resources from the military and war and that food is a human right, not a privilege, which society has a responsibility to provide for all. Providing food in a visible public space and sharing meals with others is an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message.
Guest – Keith McHenry, and seven friends founded Food Not Bombs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Keith has been arrested more than 100 times for making a political statement of sharing free food in San Francisco and he has spent more than 500 nights in jail for peaceful protest.
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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure.
Over the past five years or so, American colleges and universities have been dealing—quite publicly–with issues related to free speech on campus.
In a widely read opinion piece in the Atlantic in 2016, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that American students are being coddled as administrators cede to their demands for protection from offensive ideas and words. The authors wrote that requests to be shielded from offensive words and behaviors come at the expense of both intellectual rigor, and the First Amendment.
Two years later, professors are still eliminating controversial material from their classes to avoid facing Bias Incident Reports. College administrators are dis-inviting speakers whose viewpoints may make students feel “unsafe,” and many students are afraid to talk or write openly out of fear they will face public shaming.
Guest – Greg Lukianoff, teamed up with Jonathan Haidt once again in writing the newly-published book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. The book lays out the continued assault on free speech on U.S. campuses and the disservice it does by treating students as fragile. It also examines how conditions have worsened with polarizing politics. And the authors offer suggestions for change. Greg is also author of the 2014 book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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Attorney Angela Davis: Arbitrary Justice
“In the halls of justice”, it has been quipped, “the only justice you find is in the halls.” H. Rap Brown, a leader of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said that justice in America means “just us”. There are 2.3 million people in American prisons today. A great proportion of them are African-Americans. If you assume Europe has the same social situation that we do in America, it is a telling fact that we have seven times as many prisoners. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon, In addition to the racist nature of the United States of America, is the power that the American prosecutor has. It is the power to choose whom to prosecute and for what crime. It is the power to obtain convictions, not to seek justice. It is a power that is discretionary and open to abuse. This abuse is rarely reviewable or punished.
Guest – Attorney and Professor Angela J. Davis, author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. Her most recent book “Policing the Black Man” covers the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement. Angela J. Davis, professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, is an expert in criminal law and procedure with a specific focus on prosecutorial power and racism in the criminal justice system. Davis previously served as director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, where she began as a staff attorney representing indigent juveniles and adults. She also served as executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition and is a former law clerk of the Honorable Theodore R. Newman, the former Chief Judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals. Davis is the author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Michael E. Tigar On Challenges Lawyers Currently Face
Recently on Law And Disorder we interviewed Baher Azmy, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and National Lawyers Guild President Natasha Bannan. We were interested in their views of the challenges facing leftist lawyers and their movement clients face in these difficult times.
Attorney Jim Lafferty, the former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who has a program on our sister station in Los Angeles, KPFK, joins me in the studio to cohost. We are going to speak for the entire hour with human rights attorney Michael Tigar.
Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, our democracy, however restricted at the time, has been even further shrunk by the growth of the national security state and the all knowing surveillance apparatus that has been set up. Moreover, the President, as the head of the executive branch of the government, has gathered unto to himself an unprecedented amount of power over the judicial and the legislative branches of the government. tigarbytes.blogspot.com/
Guest – Michael Tigar, emeritus professor of law at Duke University and at Washington College of Law. He has been a lawyer working on social change issues since the 1960s. He has argued numerous cases in United States Supreme Court and many Circuit Courts of Appeal. His books include “Law and the Rise of Capitalism”, “ Fighting Injustice ”, and the forthcoming Mythologist of State and Monopoly Power.“
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Challenges Lawyers Face As Democratic Institutions Dismantled
What are the the challenges lawyers on the left face in this historic period? That is the concern of today’s show. Since 911 we have seen the consolidation of an authoritarian state. The radical right working over the last 30 years and funded by the Koch brothers and their billionaire allies, are strategic and have been very successful.
They now hold the reins of power in 33 states, the Senate, House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. Their ultimate goal is to “dismantle the administrative state“, which is their formulation for taking away every social benefit that we have earned since 1930s. To prevent us from fighting back they have restricted democracy with voter suppression and gerrymandering. The right wing Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people and have the right to unlimited amounts of corporate dark money. Our access to information has also been constricted. Five major corporations own all the major media. New algorithms by Google and Facebook restrict access to people looking for alternative media, like Law And Disorder Radio.
We are also seeing the dismantling of programs that benefit people and the hollowing out of the democratic rights necessary to defend them. Racism and dehumanization are employed to divide and conquer. But at the same time we have seen the growth of social movements with our movement attorneys right in there fighting as important auxiliaries. Since 911 and the passage of the Patriot Act government surveillance of our private lives and political affiliations has become pervasive.
Guest – Attorney Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, President of the National Lawyers Guild.
Guest – Attorney Baher Azmy, the litigation director at the center for constitutional rights National Lawyers Guild – Chicago 1937 as an alternative to the all white American Bar Association. It’s gotten principle was announced: human rights over property rights. The center for constitutional rights was founded by civil rights attorneys who had been active in the south in 1966 including William Kunstler, the attorney for Martin Luther King.
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Julian Assange And Political Asylum In Danger
WikiLeaks founder the truth telling publisher Julian Assange is in certain and imminent danger of being sent from England to America where he would likely be tried for espionage, a crime that carries the death penalty.
Assange and WikiLeaks have revealed American war crimes in the middle east, CIA global machinations , and the work of Clinton Democrats in preventing the popular Bernie Sanders from heading up the party ticket.
Assange is presently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was granted political asylum six years ago by past leftist president Rafael Correa. But now, with the change of presidents in Ecuador, Assange has been cut off from the outside world. He has no phone, no computer, and no visitors.
The fresh offensive against him occurred the day after American General Joseph DiSalvo, the head of the US Southern Command, the Pentagon’s arm in Latin America, visited the new right wing Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno. Irene was told that if he did not cooperate he would not get an International Monetary Fund loan. Moreno has said that Assange is “an inherited problem” and is seeking s better relationship with the United States government, to whom he has already granted a military base.
Guest -Attorney Renata Avila has represented International human rights lawyer and digital rights advocate. In her practice, she represented indigenous victims of genocide and other human rights abuses, including the prominent indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum. She also represented awarded journalist Julian Assange and Wikileaks since 2009. Avila sits on the
Board of Creative Commons, is a trustee of the Courage Foundation, – an organisation set up to assist whistleblowers at risk – and is an advisory board member of Diem25, a movement to democratise Europe launched by Yanis Varoufakis. Her book Women, Whistleblowing Wikileaks” was published by OR Books. She is currently writing a book on Digital Colonialism and regularly writes for several international newspapers.
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Academic Freedom, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
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Mark Crispin Miller – Julian Assange, Voter Fraud and Fake News
WikiLeaks founder the truth telling publisher Julian Assange is in escalating danger of being sent from England to America where he would likely be tried for espionage, a crime that carries the death penalty.
Assange and WikiLeaks have revealed American war crimes in the middle east, CIA global machinations , and the work of Clinton Democrats in preventing the popular Bernie Sanders from heading up the party ticket.
Assange is presently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was granted political asylum six years ago by past leftist president Rafael Correa. But now, with the change of presidents in Ecuador, Assange has been cut off from the outside world. He has no phone, no computer, and no visitors.
The fresh offensive against him occurred the day after American General Joseph DiSalvo, the head of the US Southern Command, the Pentagon’s arm in Latin America, visited the new right wing Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno. Moreno has said that Assange is “an inherited problem” and is seeking s better relationship with the United States government, to whom he has already granted a military base.
Guest – Mark Crispin Miller who is a professor of media studies at New York University. Professor Miller has frequently spoken about media propaganda, the engineering of consent for empire, fake news, and the destruction of the independent press. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the humanities and is a vigorous defender of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
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CCR Delegation To Israel
Like the USA, Israel is a colonial-settler state which, beginning in 1948, 70 years ago, expelled 750,000 native Palestinians, took their land, homes and businesses, and reduced those who remained to abused second class citizens, not unlike what was done to native Americans by white settlers in the USA. Their land was stolen, their tribes uprooted, and their culture practically destroyed.
In 1967 Israel expanded further, militarily occupying Palestinian territories to their north, east, and south, including East Jerusalem.
Last month Attorney and Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the CCR, along with Attorney Vince Warren, the CCR’s Executive Director, headed up a 20 person delegation of American activists who traveled to Israel to report on the human rights situation there. Franke and Warren never made it past the airport in Tel Aviv. They were stopped, questioned , detained for 14 hours, and then deported back to the USA. Franke was told she could never return.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Franke, is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. She is the author of Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. Her next book will be coming out from Haymarket Press in the spring: Repair: Slavery’s Unfinished Business makes the case for racial reparations in the U.S.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Iran, Iraq War, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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Middle East Round Up: Brian Becker
Iran and Gaza are at both at critical and potentially catastrophic junctures. Iran faces new challenges due to because of Donald Trump’s denunciation of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and the re-imposition of sweeping sanctions. As well, recent elections in Iraq pushed Iran’s allies in Iraq’s Shia militias–the Popular Mobilization Forces—into second place by nationalist Moqtada al-Sadr.
The element within the Republican Party with deep pockets is the Republican Jewish Committee. They support Netanyahu and his Likud party. The RJC supported both the blowing up of the Iran deal and the move of the Embassy to Jerusalem. Now they support Netanyahu’s crushing of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Iran also risks being diplomatically out-maneuvered. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Moscow recently, aligning his interests in Syria with Vladimir Putin’s. In what is becoming routine coordination, Israel forewarned Russia of its attacks on Iran. Viewed from Tehran, Russia, Iran’s ostensible brother-in-arms in Syria, is more and more unreliable. Its Saudi foes are greatly encouraged by Trump’s offensive.
Guest – Brian Becker, the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition and a leader of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Brian has been a central organizer of the mass anti-war demonstrations that have taken place in Washington, D.C. in the past decade.
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Stories From Trailblazing Women Lawyers
Before the Civil War there were six women lawyers in the entire United States of America. By 1890 there were about 200 and by 1900 about 1000. Women then could not even vote.
It was nearly impossible for a woman to get admitted to a law school or find a job when she graduated. Things did not qualitatively change until the late 1960s and 1970s.
By then, as a consequence of a number of factors including the great civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the empty law school seats created by drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War, women were able to fight discrimination and win law school admission first by protesting in the streets and then through legislation, court decisions, and the actions of a few forward looking politicians.
Now half of the students in American law schools are women. They are professors in those very same places, indeed, the deans of the two most prestigious law schools in America, Harvard and Yale, are women. They are partners in law firms, hold important positions and governmental agencies, and are judges on the bench.
They have made a difference in the measure of social justice obtained by people in this country by advancing peoples’ and women’s rights in education, healthcare, employment, discrimination, family life, and violence against women.
Guest –Jill Norgren, the author of the just published book Stories From Trailblazing Women Lawyers. Ms. Norgren is Professor Emerita of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of several books including Rebels at the Bar.
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