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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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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The Fall Of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest Of A Progressive Bastion And The Future Of American Politics.
For decades Wisconsin was known as a laboratory of democracy, the birthplace of labor and environmental movements, and home to the cherished “Wisconsin idea“, which championed expertise in the service of the public good. All this has changed under Republican Governor Scott Walker and the Republican state legislature.
There are two themes central to Walker’s success. He turned public opinion against well meaning public servants through absurd caricatures and trumpeted that far and wide through the almost limitless financial backing of right wing zealots like the Koch brothers. He also divided the labor movement, conquering it by splitting some workers from others. First he broke the public sector unions, and then, over a weakened opposition, passed a Right To Work law crippling the private sector unions. Huge amounts of dark money, gerrymandering legislative districts, voter suppression, and voter ID laws made this all possible. Over time, big money wrote legislation which was enacted into law. Eventually Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s electoral votes, making him the president.
Guest – Dan Kaufman, is a Wisconsin native and the author of The Fall Of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest Of A Progressive Bastion And The Future Of American Politics. He has written for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.
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Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council
With it’s Janus versus AFSME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council) decision the Supreme Court’s activist rightist majority has overturned a 40 year old precedent that allowed public-sector unions, like private sector unions, to charge non-members – who they are required by law to represent – a fee for that representation.
A strategic campaign organized by the State Policy Network(SNP) think tanks nationwide included a multi-state effort to reach 5 million teachers, librarians and other public sector workers affected by the Janus decision.
In Texas the State Policy Network is funded by the Koch brothers, Koch industries, AT&T, Verizon, Exxon mobile, Coca-Cola, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. The Texas SPN like others across the country is leveraging the Supreme Court decision as a means of starving unions of funds and eventually disbanding them all together.
They recently sent out a mailing, claiming government unions have undue political influence and stating that “by 2020 SPN aims to empower our interstate freedom network to rescue nearly 1,000,000 people from forced government union musician. This strategy could remove one billion dollars per election cycle from union budgets.”
Guest – Attorney Dean Hubbard, has been an attorney, organizer, educator and artist for workers’ rights and environmental and racial justice for more than three decades. Dean is the longtime Chair of the National Lawyers Guild Labor and Employment Committee. He is currently a strategic consultant to unions and social justice organizations. Among other movement gigs, he was Director of the Labor and Economic Justice Program at the Sierra Club, he was Senior Counsel to the Transport Workers Union of America and its NYC Local 100, he held the Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy and Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College, and he co-founded the progressive workers’ rights law firm Eisner & Hubbard, P.C. He has published widely, and has organized and led investigations, tribunals and delegations on labor and human rights issues worldwide.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Targeting Muslims, War Resister
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First Amendment: Separation of Church and State
On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan said that conservatives are “weaponizing the First Amendment” and turning it into a sword.”
Many on the left who once held absolutist views on free speech are realizing that certain court victories may actually bring harm to women, or gay and lesbian couples and others, rather than advancing their causes. The same is true with some cases involving religious freedom.
The Washington DC-based group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reads, in part on its website that: “Religion is often uses as an excuse to discriminate against LGBTQ people, women, religious minorities, non-believers and others. Some want to use their religious beliefs as as excuse to deny health care, refuse to provide goods and services, and disobey laws protecting Americans from discrimination.”
Guest – Attorney Richard Katskee, Legal Director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Richard has litigated First Amendment cases in appellate and trial courts throughout the country, including challenging creationism in the public schools, religiously based discrimination against same-sex couples and much more.
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Alternative 4th of July celebration in NYC commemorated Frederick Douglass
Last week an Alternative 4th of July celebration in NYC commemorated Frederick Douglass an his Independence Day Speech at the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-slavery Society in 1852.
The event was organized by poet Raymond Nat Turner, who has been a guest on Law and Disorder, and held at the NY Chapter of the National Writers Union on July 3, 2018.
The celebration included performances by UpSurge! NYC, solidarity poems, and Frederick Douglass readers Ralph Poynter of the Lynne Stewart Organization and the New Abolitionist Movement, Margaret Kimberly from the Black Agenda Report, Diane Ward form the NWU Steering Committee and our own Heidi Boghosian. We are pleased to bring you some of the music, poetry and the readings.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Legislation Criminalizing Protests
Throughout the nation, a rash of new bills are being introduced that increase the criminal penalty for the act of protesting. They have been in part inspired by the high-profile protests at Standing Rock, and also by model legislation drafted by the conservative and influential American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC’s bills are designed to protect corporate interests. A new report from Greenpeace USA reveals how Energy Transfer Partners or ETP, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, with the fossil fuel industry, lobbied for legislation aimed at restricting and criminalizing protest. The report finds abuses on human rights, freedom of speech and faulty operations from the company.
ETP practices are destructive for the planet, for communities and for the health of democracy in the US. They have hired private security firms that surveil and infiltrate activist groups, advocated for laws that restrict the right to protest, or moving forward with pipeline projects against the will of Indigenous people and landowners, ETP is the poster child for unchecked corporate power. Annie Leonard, Executive Director at Greenpeace USA calls their projects lightning rods for controversy.
The report, Too Far, Too Often: Energy Transfer Partners’ Corporate Behavior On Human Rights, Free Speech, and the Environment, details how ETP lobbied for anti-protest legislation. It also shows how the company uses the courts and Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) to intimidate opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline project. In August 2017, ETP sued Greenpeace entities and others for USD $900 million, using RICO laws to claim that a collection of environmental groups and Indigenous allies constituted a criminal enterprise.
Guest – Attorney King Downing, seasoned civil liberties lawyer who has worked with activists for decades. King is the National Mass Defense Coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild.
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Big Pharma 101 and Affordable Prescriptions Made by Advancing the CREATES Act
It is estimated that the United States spends more than $500 billion dollars on prescription medicines each year. Total spending on drug therapies is about $371 billion dollars, including over-the-counter drug remedies, valued at 31 billion. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 76% of Americans overall – and across party lines – say their top health care priority is ensuring that high-cost drugs for chronic conditions, such as HIV, hepatitis, mental illness and cancer, are affordable.
In a long overdue move, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee recently voted to advance the CREATES Act. It would prevent prescription corporations from abusing regulatory rules to deny generic medicines and biosimilar manufacturers access to product samples that allow these groups to obtain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval and bring affordable products to market.
Corporations have long used this practice to delay the introduction of price-lowering generic and biosimilar competition. Brand-name manufacturers use it to inappropriately extend their monopolies. The Act aims to curb these abuses and promote competition. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office claims the Act will save $3.8 billion over the next 10 years.
Americans overwhelmingly support disciplining Big Pharma to help rein in pharmaceutical prices. The DC based group Public Citizen says that the CREATES Act begins to do that and cites it as a key structural reform that we can pass this year. It urges Congress should pass this legislation without delay.
Guest – Steven Knievel, Steven Knievel is a researcher and campaign organizer with Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. He works with governments and public interest groups around the world to promote the use of flexibilities in patent and trade rules to promote access to medicines for all. He also works to mitigate the deleterious effects of corporate influence in trade negotiations on public health.
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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.
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Nancy Stearns
In 1970, an unusual legal team came together in what would become a landmark case challenging New York’s restrictive abortion ban. The case was Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, and the team consisted of all women, many of whom had just a few years of legal practice. The premise was equally unusual at the time: its critical testimony came directly from women who had had illegal abortions, lack of contraceptive access, and painful experiences either from adoption or forced motherhood.
One of those attorneys included Nancy Stearns. After the Abramowicz case influenced the state’s passage of the nation’s most liberal abortion law before Roe v. Wade, Nancy would go on to bring successful challenges to abortion laws in NJ, CT, RI and MA.
Nancy attended law school after working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta. For 12 years at the Center for Constitutional Rights she worked on a number of significant civil rights cases, including challenging New York City’s mandatory pregnancy leave policy in Monell v. Department of Social Services that resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that municipalities are liable for damages under 42 U.S.C. 1983. She represented members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in a federal criminal conspiracy prosecution arising from anti-war protests, and she litigated to reunite families separated by the Babylift, in which Vietnamese infants and young children were brought to the U.S. for adoption at the close of the Vietnam War, despite having living parents.
Nancy is also an accomplished cabaret singer, making the circuit in New York City. She is a longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild; in fact the Guild’s Chapter is honoring Nancy and her exemplary career at its annual Spring Fling on June 8, 2018.
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Cryptocurrencies
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, the first and most prominent cryptocurrency, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. While cryptocurrencies have become an international phenomenon, and many are aware of their importance, yet they are still not completely understood by large financial institutions, governments and much of the public. There are currently more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies, and the list continues to grow.
The general definition of cryptocurrencies are digital currencies using encryption techniques, hence the prefix crypto, to regulate the generation of unites of currency and verify the transfer of funds. This system operates independently of a central bank to create and outlet for personal wealth beyond restriction and confiscation. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced that it will be requiring digital asset exchanges to registers with the agency.
Guest – Professor Angela Walch teaches at St. Mary’s University School of Law. Her research focuses on money and the law, blockchain technologies, governance of emerging technologies and financial stability. She is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies of University College London. Walch was nominated for “Blockchain Person of the Year” for 2016 by Crypto Coins News for her work on the governance of blockchain technologies and her influential article in American Banker arguing that the coders and miners of public blockchains should be treated as fiduciaries.
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