CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce
The great issues of our times are the return of fascism to the United States and Europe, climate change, and the stagnation of the world capitalist economy. These great issues are pressing and interconnected.
We used to think that the experience of World War II guaranteed that no politician would ever advocate the ideas of fascism.
But the election of Donald Trump a year ago has caused a serious reconsideration of fascism and it’s relationship to capitalism and to democracy.
The neoliberals paved the way for Trump. Now he and the forces aligned with him have put our democratic institutions under attack in order to protect the rule of the wealthy. The attacks include the right to vote, labor unions, public education, an independent news media, independent public universities, the privatization of much of traditional governmental functions and making it almost impossible to launch a new political party.
The election of Trump is a political development that for concrete sociological reasons allows us to see it for what it is, as a type of neo-fascism. Only by identifying the phenomena correctly can we effectively fight it.
Jack London wrote a century ago in his famous book The Iron Heel that “There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What is nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I want to say was this: You are in a perilous position.”
Guest – John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. He is the author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014), among many others.
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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
The spectacle of President Donald Trump and the palace intrigue in the White House has served daily to distract people from the political strategy and accomplishments of the radical right, which is taking over the Republican Party.
Over time, the GOP has been transformed into operation conducting a concerted effort to curb democratic rule in favor of capitalist interests in every branch of government, whatever the consequences. It is marching ever closer to the ultimate goal of reshaping the Constitution to protect monied interests. This gradual take over of a major political party happened steadily, over several decades, and often in plain sight.
Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean exposes the architecture of this change and it’s ultimate aim. She has written that “both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril”.
Guest – Professor Nancy MacLean, whose new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The author of four other books, including Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006) called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best,” and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan,named a New York Times “noteworthy” book of 1994, MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry
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Keep the Wretches In Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW
Before World War I, the government reaction to labor dissent had been local, ad hoc, and quasi military. Sheriffs, mayors, or governors would elevate strike breakers to deputies or call out the state militia, usually at the bidding of employers.
At the time, one of the nations largest unions was the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The IWW had members in critical industries across the country. In April 1917, when the United States entered the war, the government feared the threat of a labor strike from such a large number of workers that would put in danger or even hold up war production.
Officials in the relatively young Department of Justice determined that a more coordinated strategy would be necessary. To prevent stoppages, the DOJ embarked on a sweeping new effort – replacing gunman with lawyers. The department systematically targeted the IWW, resulting in the largest mass trial in US history. The first of four indictments named 166 defendants in September 1917. The Chicago trial started with 112 men accused, sitting on bleachers, with one small defense team and a judge and prosecutors who did not know their names or faces. As the case unfolded, it became an exercise in raw force, raising serious questions about its legitimacy and revealing the fragility of a criminal justice system under pressure from banks and industrialists who supported the war.
Guest – Attorney Dean A. Strang, criminal defense lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin, and an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia School of Law is author of the new book Keep the Wretches In Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW talks about how the case laid the groundwork for a fundamental different strategy to stifle radical threats and played a major role in the shaping of the modern Justice Department. He is also the author of Worse than the Devil: Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror
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Two Members Of MOVE 9 Released From Prison After 40 Years
After 40 years in prison, Janine Phillips Africa and Janet Holloway Africa were recently released from SCI Cambridge Springs in Pennsylvania after a long fight for parole. Members of the so-called Move 9, 63-year-old Jane and 68-year-old Janet were arrested and imprisoned for a crime they say they did not commit after a police siege of their home in August 1978.The two were the last of four women to be paroled or to die behind bars.
Listeners may recall that Move members lived in Philadelphia in a communal house with founder John Africa. Move championed equal treatment for African Americans and an abiding respect for nature and animals.
Their attitudes brought them into conflict with neighbors and police. After a siege lasting several months, on August 8, 1978 officers went in to clear the group from the property. In the melee, Officer James Ramp was shot and killed. Despite the fact that Move claimed they were unarmed and that Officer Ramp was killed by friendly fire, the five men and four women were each sentenced to 30 years to life.
Guest – Attorney Brad Thomson with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. Brad was one of the attorneys securing the women’s release. Brad’s work at People’s Law Office has focused on civil rights litigation against the Chicago Police, including suits for wrongful conviction, false arrest, police shootings and other cases of police brutality. In addition, he has represented prisoners and criminal defendants, focusing on cases of people charged with crimes based on their political activity.
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Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq War, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Daniel Ellsberg: Julian Assange’s Case And The Doomsday Machine
Two weeks ago the Trump administration announced it had indicted Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia on 17 counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Assange is currently in the Belmarsh prison hospital in London. If extradited, tried, and convicted he faces 175 years in prison.
The Espionage Act is a 102 year old law used initially to imprison the great socialist Eugene V Debs for an anti-World War I speech he gave in Canton, Ohio and also used to crush the industrial workers of the world, the IWW, a large antiwar union at the time.
In 1971 it was famously used against Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon papers to the New York Times and other media outlets. Lately the Espionage Act has been used against many truth telling whistleblowers during the Obama and Trump administrations.
This is the first time it is being used against a journalist.
Wikileaks Defense Funds:
Guest – Daniel Ellsberg, educated at Harvard and Cambridge and has been an activist since the 1970s. Ellsberg’s latest book, The Doomsday Machine, is an extensive study of nuclear theory and nuclear policy. In 2018 he was awarded the Olaf Palme prize for his “profound humanism and exceptional moral courage.
From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Two MOVE9 Members Released From Prison
- Julian Assange Update
- Never Get Rid Of Newspapers…The Headlines Alone Make Them Worth Keeping
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Suicide Increase In The United States
Suicide ranks among the top ten leading causes of death in the United States. As rates have generally fallen in other developed nations, the number of suicides per 100,000 rose over 30 percent between 1999 and 2015.
Those in midlife had the largest uptick in suicide. Researchers find that two social factors have contributed to this trend: the weakening of the social safety net and increasing income inequality.
One study of suicide in the U.S. found that the rising rates were closely linked with reductions in social welfare spending between 1960 and 1995. Such expenditures include Medicaid, a medical assistance program for low income persons; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children; the Supplemental Security Income program for the blind, disabled and elderly; children’s services including adoption, foster care and day care; shelters; and funding of public hospitals for medical assistance other than Medicaid.
While their suicide rates are on the decline, three European nations still have rates higher than the U.S. They are Belgium, Finland and France.
Guest – Stephen Platt, Emeritus Professor of Health Policy Research at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on the social, epidemiological and cultural aspects of suicide, self-harm and mental health. He is an adviser on suicide prevention research and policy to NHS Health Scotland and the Scottish Government, the Irish National Office for Suicide Prevention and Samaritans.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Cuba, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Venezuelan Embassy Protected Against Staged Attacks In DC
Democracy and the rule of law are being rapidly unraveled in our country by President Trump, his advisers, especially convicted war criminal Elliot Abrams, who was put in charge of policy in Venezuela, and John Bolton, who said that if the top 10 floors of United Nations building were lopped off it wouldn’t make any difference, and with the support of the rightist insurgent Republican Party.
The latest example is the American government’s failed attempt military coup in Venezuela and its support of the ongoing attack on the Venezuelan embassy here in Washington DC.
On April 30th, the United States tried and failed to overthrow the democratically elected Venezuelan president Nikolai Maduro. They fail to supplant him with Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed a president who’s only real power is outside of Venezuela and comes mostly from the Trump administration.
Back home in Washington DC right wing counterrevolutionaries in support of Juan Guaidó have so far failed in their attempt to take over the Venezuelan embassy. Under centuries of international law the embassy is considered the property of Venezuela itself.
Last week the Washington DC utility company, undoubtedly at the request of the US government, turned off the building’s water electricity supply. Washington DC police and the Secret Service are preventing people from bringing food and water into the embassy. A number of American citizens, acting in support of democracy in Venezuela, entered the building to protect it against an invasion by coup supporters. They are also demonstrating outside of the building. The embassy protectors are being represented by attorney Mara VerhaydenHilliard of the Washington DC Partnership For Civil Justice.
Popular Resistance, Answer Coalition, Code Pink
Guest – Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard has in the past successfully sued both the Washington DC police department and the New York City Police Department for their abuse demonstrators. She is co-chair of the Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee. co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia.
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Lawyers For The Left: In The Courts, In the Streets And On The Air
Lawyers For The Left: In The Courts, In the Streets And On The Air is the title of the just published book by our own Michael Steven Smith. It profiles the some of the nation’s most effective agents of social change. Michael discusses how he came to write this book and previews several of the lawyers profiled therein.
As Chris Hedges quotes “The lawyers in this book valiantly fought the erosion of justice and assault on the court system.”
Portside Review by Bill Ayers:
Now open Michael Steven Smith’s smart and compelling Lawyers for the Left, and you’ll find yourself plunged into the contradictions and swirling through the vortex where that question—what is the law?—is on everyone’s mind all the time. It takes on a unique urgency and a fresh vitality as it’s debated case by case and issue by issue by these committed advocates battling against a system they see as deeply and unfairly stacked against their clients—Black freedom fighters, Puerto Rican independistas, Indigenous and immigrant rights activists, women warriors, anti-war militants, water defenders, dissidents and radicals. None of the lawyers you’ll meet here holds fast to the traditional view that the law is simply a civilized mechanism for resolving disputes in an intelligent and reasoned way. They agree, rather, that any honest analysis of the law begins elsewhere, noting that in all times and in all places, the law is constructed in the service of whatever social/economic system created it. In other words, the law is a mechanism of control that works to protect and perpetuate existing social relations.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Political Prisoner, War Resister
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Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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