Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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Homelessness, Free Speech Cases Before U.S. Supreme Court
Today we look at two issues coming before the Supreme Court in its just opened 2023-24 term. First, we’ll discuss two cases whose outcome will determine the future of free speech online, when it considers the constitutionality of laws passed in Texas and Florida that, if allowed to stand, will severely restrict social media companies from removing certain political posts or social media accounts.
We then take up the matter of whether or not the Court agrees to hear a case where California’s Governor Newson, and officials from other states, ask the Supreme Court to overrule Martin-v-Boise, a Federal Appeals Court case protecting the rights of the unhoused to sleep outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.
Guest – Stephen Rohde, a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom and the book, Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, TruthDig, and a leader in the national campaign to free imprisoned investigative journalist, Julian Assange.
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Right Wing Billionaires Want New US Constitution
Our current Constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787. It could be replaced by something draconian. We are in eminent danger of the curtailment of the federal government’s ability to protect the environment, consumers and civil rights. This includes barring Congress from delegating rule making to federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and placing caps on federal spending that would trigger massive cuts.
Now right wing billionaires such as Charles Koch, a fossil fuel industry giant, and right wing foundations, think tanks, and organizations have been steadily organizing at the state legislative level to call a new Constitutional convention and replace what we’re living under now with something very bad.
If this happens, such a convention would allow an unelected, unaccountable delegates free reign, to rewrite our Constitution – imposing an extreme right wing agenda on the entire nation, with no recourse or oversight
This could all happen by 2025. All it takes is 2/3 of the states to declare they want a new Constitutional convention. The right wingers are only six states shy at this point.
Guest – David Armiak is research director with the Center for Media and Democracy. David joined CMD in 2015 and has conducted extensive investigations on dark money, corporate corruption, and right-wing networks. He is responsible for filing and analyzing hundreds of public records requests every year.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Supreme Court, worker's rights
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Economic Update: Banking Collapse Contagion?
On March 10, 2023, the Silicon Valley Bank, the most important bank in Silicon Valley, failed. This bank held the money of some of the wealthiest people in the world, venture capitalists who invested in tech businesses.
The government bailed it out hoping to prevent the crisis from becoming a nationwide contagion like the one in 2008 when even larger banks failed. As a consequence in 2008, 8.7 million people lost their jobs. Unemployment jumped to 10%. There was a 1/3 drop in the value of homes and 10 million people lost their homes. The government did nothing to help them.
After the Silicon Valley Bank crashed the Signature Bank in New York crashed followed by the Republic Bank and then Credit Suisse. We speak with the economics professor Richard Wolff on why the economy was threatened with collapse and what must be done to protect us from the unstable banking system.
Guest – Richard Wolff is emerita professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts where he taught for for 35 years and a visiting professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the Nee School University, NYC. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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Upcoming Supreme Court Cases
The ever more conservative and activist Supreme Court has already heard arguments this term in a number of cases of vital importance. The cases involve the legality of President Biden’s student debt relief plan, the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other independent agencies, and the liability of social media cites where it is claimed that Google’s algorithms sent people to a hateful site that the plaintiffs in the case claim led to an Islamic State attack that killed their child.
Also of concern is the Supreme Court’s refusal to take an appeal from a lower count opinion upholding the State of Kansas law forbidding the State from doing business with any company that refuses to certify it does not support the boycott, divestment and sanctions, or “BDS” movement against Israel. And there is the Helaman Hansen case that addresses the question of whether the First Amendment permits criminal punishment of speech that merely encourages a noncitizen to remain in the United States, without any requirement of intent to further illegal conduct, and when remaining in the United States unlawfully is itself not a crime.
Julian Assange Movie – Ithaka
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Guest – Attorney Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom, and of Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is a regular contributor to TruthDig as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is a leader in the national campaign to free the imprisoned investigative journalist, Julian Assange.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself
We all know almost instinctively that there is a connection between politics and economics. Today we talk with Professor Richard Wolff about that connection. We live in a world in economic turmoil, all the more so because of the US and NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
At home in the United States, we have the greatest wealth disparity and income disparity in a century. When Standard Old,now Exxon, owner John D. Rockefeller died he was worth $3 billion. Now Jeff Bezos is worth about $180 billion. There has not been a national increase in the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in decades. Half the people in America are poor or near poor.
There has been a dramatic increase in labor militancy by American workers not seen since just before and just after World War II. US world hegemony is starting to fray even as the military budget increases.
This month Congress passed a budget bill with half of it going to the military. The military received 45 billion dollars more than they even asked for. What is going on? What are the prospects for political action independent of these two capitalist parties?
Guest – Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, NYC. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show Economic Update. His latest book is The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself, which can be found along with his other books Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism at www.democracyatwork.info.
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Israel’s Far Right Agenda
As reported in the New York Times, less than two weeks into its tenure, Israel’s new and extreme neo-fascist right-wing government has already undertaken a wave of items from its far-right agenda. Items that are designed to weaken the judiciary, entrench Israel’s control of the West Bank, and bifurcate the military’s chain of command so as to give far-right ministers greater control of matters related to Israel’s occupation.
It is likely to have profoundly negative implications for the Palestinian people, as well as profound implications for the already dismal chances of finding a peaceful resolution of the decades long Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Even a great numbers of Israelis have grave concerns about its new government and what its announced plans may mean for them.
Guest – Sandra Tamari is a Palestinian organizer and the Executive Director of Adalah Justice Project. She was the Co-chair of the Steering Committee for the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights from 2015-2018 and a lead organizer of the Palestinian contingent to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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Chris Hedges: Social Change And Democracy 2022
You can’t have organized activity for social change without democracy. Social change and democracy are bound up with one another. But America is not a democracy. This is by design. It was never intended to be. The founding fathers – there were no founding mothers – wrote a document 245 years ago in Philadelphia that excluded more Americans than it included.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations are people entitled to free speech rights. So they can give as much money as they want to political campaigns. Last month an industrialist gave $1.6 billion to the Republicans. Like Bob Dylan wrote, “money doesn’t talk it swears.“ It is impossible to have a democracy in a country like ours with such vast income and wealth disparity.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have a lock on the political process. It is nearly impossible to start a third-party. When Ralph Nader ran the Democrats did everything they could to stop him, launching many lawsuits trying to knock him off state ballots.
Since its founding, the ever-growing effects of unlimited money in elections, the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts, the fraudulent removal of poor and minority voters from voter registration rolls, reduction in the number of voting locations in minority districts, the unfair advantage given to Canada is favored by corporate America, including America’s corporate media, all combine to leave us with a very unfair and very undemocratic system of governance in America
Guest – Chris Hedges, the most penetrating journalist we have. He once worked for the New York Times and even won a Pulitzer Prize. But he was forced out. He had a show on our RT which was closed down by our government and some 600 of his show “On Contact” were taken off of YouTube.
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The State of Labor Unions And Recent Worker Strikes
For decades now only about 11% of workers in America have been members of unions, whereas previously more than 35% were union members. Various pieces of pro-management legislation and court opinions caused this diminution in union membership and, as a consequence, a weakening of the rights of American workers. But in recent years, as a result of militant fight back efforts by exploited workers in many industries, unions have once again been having some success in organizing efforts at various workplaces, like Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and Trader Joe’s.
But federal and state laws still create an up-hill fight for those seeking to organize workers into unions, and to win good labor contracts. So today we ask: do these few but growing number of recent labor union victories truly represent a new day for American workers and the unions that serve them? Do these localized labor victories suggest that more and bigger victories for workers are now within reach? Or, have these recent victories been simply exceptions to the still dismal overall state of union organizing in America? Are either of the two capitalist political parties sufficiently committed to advancing the right of workers to organize unions, or is an independent political movement or party needed to make significant union/worker gains? And what about the pending threat of a nation-wide railway worker’s strike? And if the railroad companies and their workers cannot reach a negotiated settlement acceptable to the railway workers, could President Biden step in and use the Railway Labor Act in an effort to prevent a railway strike with its devastating consequences for the U.S. economy?
Guest – Alan Benjamin, long-time union organizer and workers’ advocate. A leader in his own union, he has served on the Executive Council of the San Francisco AFL-CIO Labor Council. He is also one of the principal organizers of the organization known as Labor and Community for an Independent Party, or LCIP.
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Crony Capitalism, Supreme Court, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Trump Affidavit Contains Broad-Based Probable Cause of Three Federal Crimes
On August 8, FBI agents seized 33 boxes, containers or items of evidence with more than 100 classified records from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound. They included information classified at the highest levels. The Department of Justice had applied for the search warrant after Trump stonewalled them for seven months.
A federal judge found probable cause to believe that agents would find evidence of three federal crimes at Mar-a-Lago. They include a violation of the Espionage Act, which has recently been used to prosecute whistleblowers, publishers and journalists who publicize evidence of government wrongdoing.
Trump claims that the documents are his but in fact they belong to the National Archives. He is seeking the appointment a special master to review the documents for possibly privileged material. Attorney General Merrick Garland will use the seized documents to inform his decision about whether to indict Trump and/or his associates.
Guest – Law and Disorder co-host Marjorie Cohn, A former criminal defense attorney and professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Marjorie does frequent written and broadcast commentary about these and other legal and political issues.
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Nationalizing The Fossil Fuel Industry
Thomas Hanna has been Research Director for the Democracy Collaborative since 2015, after working for five years as a research assistant to Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and well-known historian and political economist. The Democracy Collaborative was founded in 2000 as a research center at the University of Maryland, to develop a theoretical and historical framework for building a truly democratic society, based on the principles of democratic economy, community wealth building and the democratization of ownership.
Hanna’s areas of expertise include public ownership, privatization, local government, democratic ownership and banking. He is the author and editor of a number of books, articles and reports, including Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States which was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.
Hanna’s recent article, The Supreme Court is Gutting the Regulatory State. Let’s Look at our Other Options, published in In These Times, provides a fascinating analysis of the historical evolution of the regulatory system in the United States. Since the New Deal and the end of World War II, the use of regulatory legislation has been used to protect capitalism, based on the notion that “the excesses and injustices of capitalism can be ameliorated primarily through state regulation of private enterprise, rather than large-order shifts in the ownerships of these enterprises.” In his article, Hanna articulately explains how these historical attempts to regulate capitalist power within the context of capitalism is destined to fail because of its own structural limitations.
In the wake of the “existential threat of catastrophic climate change and rising tide of right-wing extremism,” we are seeing – predictably – the explicit dismantling of that regulatory system. Hanna explores the recent rulings from the new right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court, particularly the case of West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court literally kneecapped the agency’s ability reduce the devastating effects of corporate pollution in order to protect private profit and “free enterprise.” Hanna explores an alternative vision of creating a system of economic and political democracy based on public and collective ownership of important assets, enterprises and services, including the fossil fuel industry.
Today’s show is hosted by Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn, and Julie Hurwitz
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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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