Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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- Roe v. Wade Editorial by Attorney Jim Lafferty
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Paralysis In The US Antiwar Movement
The proxy war between the United States and Russia has been going on in Ukraine, according to some, since February. Others argue it’s been happening since 2014 with the U.S.-organized coup which overthrew the elected government of Ukraine and replaced it with a government more favorable to U.S. interests.
The corporate news media in the United States have downplayed the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, which brought fascists into a European country‘s government for the first time since World War II. At that point, the coup government launched a military action against the Russian speaking population of the eastern Donbas region which had declared its independence by a popular vote. This military action by Ukrainian forces resulted in 14,000 deaths.
It is the position of many antiwar activists in the United States that Russia initiated a war of aggression by invading Ukraine this past February. Other antiwar activists say that Russia acted in self-defense, considering what happened in 2014, the expansion of NATO and military bases up to Russia’s borders; they have refused to outright condemn the Russian invasion.
This disagreement has caused a paralysis in the U.S. peace movement. Moreover, the United States has supplied the Ukrainian government with billions of dollars worth of weapons and has demonstrated no inclination to support a cease-fire or a negotiated settlement.
Some have observed that the United States will fight the Russians to the last drop of Ukrainian blood.
The danger of a nuclear conflagration between the United States and Russia, the world’s two most heavily nuclear armed countries, increases daily. The United States has now articulated its goal in the war: to subjugate the Russians and overthrow the Putin government.
For its part, the Ukrainian government is under tremendous pressure from right-wing forces in the country (the same forces that participated with rifle fire in the 2014 coup) to refrain from engaging in peace discussions. The Ukrainian government is operating under martial law and has banned all opposition parties, including socialists and those advocating for negotiations and peace. Repression in Ukraine is being carried out by the SUB, the Ukraine political police, with advice from the CIA.
What will it take to mobilize antiwar Americans so they act together in a unified way? What demands should they raise?
Guest – Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She serves on the CODEPINK Board of Directors and has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. Described as “one of America’s most committed — and most effective — fighters for human rights” by New York Newsday, and “one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement” by the Los Angeles Times, she was one of 1,000 exemplary women from 140 countries nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the millions of women who do the essential work of peace worldwide.
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Free Speech And Censorship In The United States
We are taught from a very young age that one of the many blessings of living in an open and democratic nation is that we all have the right to say publicly what is on our mind; that free speech is one of the great hallmarks of our democracy. And yet, throughout our nation’s history there have been periods of time when the constitutional guaranty of free speech has been under serious assault. And this is one of those times. Less than 50% of students, as well as all other American adults, feel the right of free speech is fully secure in the United States today. And I’m afraid they are correct.
In recent years a number of public opinion surveys have disclosed that a goodly number of Americans believe people with hateful or very controversial views that might unduly excite people, or insult people, should not be allowed to express those views in the public arena. And this is true of both liberals and conservatives. At least one in four college students think it’s fine to ban highly controversial speakers from their college campus and, in fact, one in six students believe that if all else fails, they can resort to physical intervention to prevent them from speaking on campus.
Well, as the old adage about it not being legally permissible to shout “fire” in a crowded movie theater, what are the limits on free speech today? Should racist speech be allowed? How about misogynous speech? Or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel speech? Does the fact that our nation is very divided, very tribal today, inform the answers to such questions? Well, we’ve a lot to cover today. Let’s get started.
Guest – Attorney Nadine Strossen is the New York Law School’s John Marshall ll Professor of Law, Emerita. From 1991-2008 she served as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to do so. When she stepped down as ACLU president in 2008, three US Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell and tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Antonin Scalia. Her 2018 book, is “HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship,” and her earlier book, “Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights,” was named a “notable book of 1995 by the New York Times.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, U.S. Militarism, War Resister
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Federal Case Against Donald Trump
There is a great deal of speculation as to whether former president Donald Trump will eventually be indicted for crimes allegedly committed while he was the president. Well, in what might prove to be the most serious blow yet to Trump’s effort to stay out of jail, on March 28th, a federal judge ruled that both former president Trump and Atty. John Eastman who had advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election had most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The ruling represents a highly significant breakthrough for the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Judge David O. Carter found that the actions taken by Trump and Eastman amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The judge’s ruling may be the House committee’s biggest win to date, as it suggests that the investigators have already built a case strong enough to convince a federal judge of Trump’s culpability in the January 6th insurrection.
Specifically, the ruling means that the House committee will now receive more than 100 emails related to the legal strategy proposed by Eastman to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from swing states when Congress convened on January 6, and thus to not certify the electoral vote. In making his ruling Judge Carter said, “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.”
Just how significant is this federal court ruling? What would a federal prosecutor need to show a judge and jury to be able to hold Trump liable for his actions around January 6th? And what about other actions by the former president while in office that many criminal law experts claim were illegal? And, of course, what role will politics ultimately play in determining whether Trump ever stands trial and is convicted by a jury?
Guest – Attorney Michael Tigar. Michael Tigar has been acting professor of law at UCLA, the Jos. D. Jamil Chair of Law at the University of Texas, and the holder of an endowed professorship at Washington College of Law. He is the author of numerous books, including Thinking About Terrorism: The Threat to Civil Liberties in Times if National Emergency and most recently, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change. He has also represented such notable clients as The Washington Post, Rep. Ron Dellums, and Lynne Stewart.
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Russia, Ukraine War Analysis
And now to the matter of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the role of a free press in war time. Today, much is made of the fact that in Putin’s Russia, little or no accurate news of the war is reaching the Russian people. Instead, what they read in their newspapers or hear on their radios and see on their televisions is no more or less than what Putin wants them to read or see or hear. Meanwhile, here in the United States, the American people are provided with virtually non-stop newspaper and live eve-witness television coverage of the war in Ukraine; “coverage” that comes from reporters and others, often in real time, and on the ground in the middle of Putin’s war. Surely the dramatically contrasting way in which the Russian people and the American people are experiencing the war via the media must play a major role in how the two peoples feel about the war. So, too, how the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered by the US media must have played a role in how we, the American people, felt about those wars. Well, today we look at the role a nation’s media can play in shaping public support for or against a war that is being fought by that nation.
Guest – Norman Solomon is truly one of America’s true champions of a free and honest press, free and honest in war time as well as in peacetime. Mr. Solomon is one of the founders of F.A.I.R., or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which has proved to be a powerful watchdog of the US media. Norman Solomon is also the co-founder of the internet news and opinion source, RootsAction.org. He is, of course, the author of too many articles to recite here. He is also the author of a number of books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death;” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Supreme Court, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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The Effects Of War On Our Economy
The US government is seeking regime change in Russia. According to Biden, they want to get rid of Putin and impose the most draconian sanctions ever on Russia after its illegal war of aggression on Ukraine, a war that the US-led NATO provoked. Once again, as it did in Afghanistan, the United States got Russia involved in a war and now hopes to bleed and bury her. For this ignoble end, the US military will fight Russia in this proxy war with every last drop of Ukrainian blood.
It is the opinion of many historians and economists that the American empire is on the way out. They think its exit has been accelerated by the sanctions it has imposed on Russia, that these sanctions have boomeranged and that the unipolar world headed by the United States is about to be fragmented.
What will be the effect of the sanctions on the US dollar, which is now the currency of international trade, if the United States loses its place as the unipolar power on the planet? How will the US economy be affected if the dollar is no longer used as the only reserve currency for international trade and what will the consequences be for Americans?
How will the war affect those who depended on Ukraine as the breadbasket of the world for its massive production of wheat? What about its effect on Europeans, who depend on Russian natural gas and oil?
Guest – Economist Richard Wolff assesses the catastrophic effect of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Richard Wolff is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, where he was the chairman of the economics department. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and the author of numerous books. He is presently a visiting professor at the New School in New York City.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Ethical Conflict Of Interest
In an ethics bombshell for the legal community, the Washington Post recently broke the story of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia (or “Ginni”) Thomas’s text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
In her texts, Ginni Thomas urged Meadows to do anything he could to subvert the democratic voting result and to fight, in her words, for good over evil. The goal was to frustrate Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power.
Ginni Thomas has been a persistent voice on behalf of tea party activism. She founded Growdswell, a group of far-right activists, nonprofit heads, journalists, and others who reportedly meet weekly at the offices of Judicial Watch to strategize in order to advance a right-wing agenda. A New York Times Magazine investigation revealed that Thomas oversaw Groundswell’s project of a “30-front war” to “exchange and amplify hardline positions on immigration, abortion, and gun control.”
Ginni Thomas also sits on the board of the action arm of the Center for National Policy, a secretive, right-wing entity that helped advance, according to the Times, the “Stop the Steal” movement. Thomas was thus greatly involved in efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
Advocacy on these and other issues that come before the Supreme Court, without Ginni Thomas’s husband recusing himself, threaten to further erode Americans’ trust in this legal pillar of democracy.
Guest – James Sample is a professor at Hofstra Law School. Professor Sample regularly comments on ethical issues for leading media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Law Journal, Slate.com and The Huffington Post, and he is a frequent presenter at national conferences.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Russia, Deescalation And Nuclear Disarmament
If the U.S. nuclear policy doesn’t change immediately and rapidly we are in a lot of trouble. Seventy-seven years ago, the United States became the first, and so far the only, country to use nuclear bombs when we destroyed the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki to frighten the Russians and secure an immediate and unconditional surrender of Japan in World War II. The dropping of these bombs was the first move against Russia that would devolve two years later in 1947 into the Cold War.
The threat of nuclear war has never eased and it is now imminent with the fighting in the Ukraine which could draw the U.S. and NATO into a direct conflict with Russia. We are now in a new stage of this war. It has become hot and so perilous it threatens all of humanity, all of earth’s creatures, with annihilation. Any mistake, any miscalculation would quickly and irretrievably doom us all. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis where nuclear war was avoided, according to scholars, by luck and decent leadership.
What has been the history of attempts to contain and roll back the threat of nuclear war? What has been tried and what is failed? What will it take to get the nine countries who possess nuclear weapons to give them up?
The Veterans for Peace organization spelled it out clearly. There should be a “no first use” policy and nuclear missiles must be taken off hair trigger alert. The United States should rejoin the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, from which George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew, respectively. The U.S. should sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Our country should initiate negotiations to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the U.S. is a party.
To start, there must be a cease-fire in the Ukraine, the withdrawal of Russian forces, and guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty and Russian security.
Peter’s recent article – Beijing should help mediate to end the Russia-Ukraine crisis
Guest – Peter Kuznick is a professor of history at American University and directs the Nuclear Studies Program. at that institution. Peter and Oliver Stone wrote The Untold History of the United States and also produced a showtime documentary series based on the book.
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World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule Of Law
In 1945, following World War I and World War II, wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world enacted the United Nations Charter “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense after an armed attack by another state or when the Security Council approves it. The five victors of World War II, who became the permanent members of the Security Council, agreed to the Charter because they each received a veto over matters of war and peace.
The United States is a party to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, it continues to violate the provision of that treaty that requires the parties to move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Although he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama’s administration advanced a policy, which Donald Trump and Joe Biden continued, to develop leaner and meaner nuclear weapons. The proposed U.S. budget calls for nearly $2 trillion over the next 30 years to build two new bomb factories, missiles, planes, submarines and redesigned warheads. In spite of the UN Charter and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we are now facing the most dangerous threat of nuclear war in the last 60 years.
Guest – James Ranney is a retired Adjunct Professor at Widener Law School, co-founder of the Jeanette Rankin Peace Center, a legal consultant to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and a board member of the Project for Nuclear Awareness. Professor Ranney has written a book called “World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule of Law.” In this book, he calls for arms reduction, including the abolition of nuclear weapons, and global alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, with enforcement mechanisms.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change
Today we speak with University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy about his new book “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.” The United States of America has been governing the globe now for 80 years, since World War II. This is about to end. By 2030, China will have the world’s largest economy and hold more riches than the U.S., which is deeply in debt.
The America we know will change drastically as a world power just as the previous world powers, the British, and before them the Dutch, and before them the Spanish and the Portuguese, all saw their empires end.
Climate change will upend the world. It has already started. The effects of climate change on the population of the world, especially China, will be catastrophic. The great coastal city of Shanghai, where 18 million people reside, will sink, uprooting millions of the 400 million Chinese people in the North China Plain.
What can we learn from the demise of the great world powers in the past? Where is the United States headed and how soon? What might be done to ameliorate this dire future? Only a prodigious historian could undertake to answer these questions.
Guest – Alfred W McCoy holds the Fred Harvey Harrington chair of history at the University of Wisconsin. He has written 20 books, including “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” for which he became well-known, and recently, “In the Shadows of the American Century.”
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Encroaching Fascism In The United States
An American form of fascism is unfolding in our country. What exactly is it and what can we do to fight it?
We see a massive political effort to legitimatize and normalize white minority rule. Things are happening rapidly. A year ago our capital was attacked pursuant to a plan to reverse the results of the election. Soon the Supreme Court will likely overrule the almost 50 year precedent set by Roe v Wade on the question of a woman’s right to control her own body. Voting rights have been and will continue to be extremely restricted particularly in communities of color. Irrational and magical thinking has been legitimatized. More than 900 thousand people have unnecessarily died of Covid. There has developed in our country a culture of cruelty manifested by Trump, but initiated in CIA torture and detention camps for Muslim men and boys in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
It didn’t start after 9/11 with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. It goes back further than that. America has been prosecuting wars abroad during our entire lifetimes. The provocations against Russia regarding NATO military encroachment on its borders are the latest chapter in almost continual and seemingly endless wars. A lesson of history since Greek and Roman times is that you can’t have imperialism abroad and democracy at home.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University chair for a Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has written many books, most recently The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Facism.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Right To Dissent, Supreme Court, U.S. Militarism
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Encroaching Fascism In The United States
An American form of fascism is unfolding in our country. What exactly is it and what can we do to fight it?
We see a massive political effort to legitimatize and normalize white minority rule. Things are happening rapidly. A year ago our capital was attacked pursuant to a plan to reverse the results of the election. Soon the Supreme Court will likely overrule the almost 50 year precedent set by Roe v Wade on the question of a woman’s right to control her own body. Voting rights have been and will continue to be extremely restricted particularly in communities of color. Irrational and magical thinking has been legitimatized. More than 900 thousand people have unnecessarily died of Covid. There has developed in our country a culture of cruelty manifested by Trump, but initiated in CIA torture and detention camps for Muslim men and boys in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
It didn’t start after 9/11 with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. It goes back further than that. America has been prosecuting wars abroad during our entire lifetimes. The provocations against Russia regarding NATO military encroachment on its borders are the latest chapter in almost continual and seemingly endless wars. A lesson of history since Greek and Roman times is that you can’t have imperialism abroad and democracy at home.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University chair for a Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has written many books, most recently The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Facism.
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The Inauthentic Opposition Within The Empire
The January 6th event last year was a peculiar kind of coup, not one that would install an authoritarian figure, but one that was designed to keep him in his job. It almost worked, but not quite. Trump had support but not enough in the right places. There wasn’t enough support for him in the military, the national security establishment, nor in the corporate elite, nor in the media. That doesn’t mean that we are out of danger.
We are seeing the success of a creeping homegrown Christianized form of fascism in our country. A particular American form. 150 million people live in red states. The far right has seized local politics. The majority of legislatures and the governorships in 22 states as compared to 15 by the Democrats. Thirteen are divided.
Nineteen states have passed voter suppression and voter nullification laws as documented by the Brennen Center at NYU School of Law. In the face of this the Democratic Party has been supine. They will not mobilize the American people. The late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has called the Democratic Party “the Inauthentic Opposition.“ The Democrats function as a junior partner of the Republicans.
As Noam Chomsky has stated, the January 6 events show that the “limited political democracy that still exists is hanging by a delicate thread.“ The Republicans have rejected democratic, with a small “D”, politics. What are the reasons for The growth of Christian fascism? What might be in store for us? What is to be done?
Guest – Roger D. Harris is closely affiliated with the Task Force on the Americas and The US Peace Council. He is a leader of the California Peace and Freedom Party, the only socialist party in the state to hold ballot status.
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