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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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Dark Money, Corporate Corruption And Right Wing Networks
We are at a pivotal moment in this country and the coming year may will decide whether we can right the course of history. Nancy MacLean’s important book Democracy in Chains revealed the Rights‘ decades long stealth campaign to reverse engineer America back to the days when the robber barons reigned supreme and rigged the legal and constitutional rules to work in their favor.
Professor MacLean wrote that “Trump and the forces of the right are actively trying to rig the conducting and counting of elections, state by state, as they create a frightening autocratic, post truth society few would have ever thought possible in America.”
The January 6th insurrection was a dress rehearsal for a Trump coup attempt in 2024. If he loses the election Trump and his far right supporters are laying the groundwork in state legislatures to take control of the electoral process to reverse the loss and claim a victory.
The alliances between the corporate state, Trump, and white nationalists have seen a flood of dark money to subvert free and fair elections, block climate and economic justice legislation, push for a constitutional convention to permanently guarantee the rule of the rich, and the crippling of the federal government’s ability to protect working families, the environment, and promote equity for all.
The investigative journalism published by the Center for Media and Democracy has exposed groups on the far right like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Heritage Action, and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) which are working hard to suppress the vote, tear down the firewall to protected our democracy in 2020 and put Trump acolytes in positions of power where they can subvert future elections.
ALECExposed.org
Guest – David Armiak who is Research Director with the Center for Media and Democracy. He has conducted extensive investigations on dark money, corporate corruption, and right wing networks, and is responsible for filing and analyzing hundreds of public records request every year.
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The US Supreme Court And US Democracy Going Forward
The Supreme Court as presently constituted has six reactionary judges and three liberal minded ones. Progressive people are alarmed by its recent decisions and fearful of what it will do in the future.
One of the liberals on the court is Steven Breyer. He’s 83 years old. Should he retire, it would give the Democrats the opportunity to try to appoint a replacement who is not a reactionary. This will be an uphill battle, but it is a fight well worth it.
A right-winger will certainly get the job if a Republican president and a Republican controlled Senate in the year 2024 choose a successor to Breyer if he dies or retires
When Barack Obama was president, he hinted to the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was 80 years old and a two-time cancer patient, to step down but she declined. Ginsburg died while still serving as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Republicans in the Senate would not allow a vote for Judge Merrick Garland, whom Obama had nominated for the Supreme Court seat. Ginsburg was then replaced by the young right-winger Brett Kavanaugh who joined two other young right-wing Trump judges.
The Trump-dominated Republican party is well aware that to topple democracy they must take over the courts. The current Roberts Court has for more than a decade consistently leveled this attack on democracy by eviscerating the Voting Right Act, unleashing unlimited corporate monies into elections, allowed clearly partisan gerrymandering of elections, and is now training its sights against reproductive choice by severely restricting abortion rights.
Yale historian Jason Stanley has recently written, “There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the simplest of democracy to crumble as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered republican state houses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.”
Guest – attorney Martin Garbus, a constitutional litigator who has represented Steven Donziger, Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Lenny Bruce.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Gaza, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Professor Richard Falk
If we are ever to have a world not threatened by catastrophic climate change and devastating nuclear war we will need a world governed by respect for the rule of law, democracy, and the democratic right of peoples to self- determination. After the World War II, the United Nations was established in 1945 in an effort to prevent future wars. In this it has failed. The United States of America has been at war almost every year since its beginning and almost every year since the 50’s starting with Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Today the United States has 800 bases abroad in 80 countries. It spends $753 billion a year on the military, which is 53 cents out of every tax dollar.
Michael Ratner, a founder of Law And Disorder Radio and who practiced human rights law internationally, used to say that you cannot have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. He said it was a truth established by the decline of both the Greek and Roman empires thousands of years ago.
Guest – International Law Professor Richard Falk who is still teaching and going strong at age 90. He has recently had published his magnificent memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Professor Falk is a leading international law professor, prominent activist, public author, and a pioneer thinker dedicated to peace and justice. He taught at Princeton University for 40 years and was active in seeking an end to the Vietnam war, a better understanding of Iran, a just solution for Israel/Palestine, and improved democracy everywhere. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. He has written 50 books. Since 2009 he has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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In Defense of Whistleblowers: Attorney Sarah Alexander
James Glenn was working for NetDesign, a Cisco Systems reseller in Denmark when he came across a vulnerability in software made for a line of Cisco’s video surveillance cameras. The flaw made it easy for would-be hackers to access the systems running the devices and to penetrate the systems on a deeper level after gaining entry. Glenn made the discovery after taking part in his company’s “own medicine” initiative, where staffers test equipment and software for security holes. In 2008 he reported the issue to his employer and to Cisco, assuming that he’d be praised for finding the problem. Instead, he was fired.
Cisco Systems is one of the world’s leading information technology and networking companies. With a market cap of close to $195 billion, Cisco dominates the networking and communications devices industry. Glenn notes that he learned the cameras and software were still being used by the Los Angeles International Airport, and in 2010 he spoke with law enforcement personnel about his concerns regarding LAX. According to court filings cited by Glenn’s attorneys, Cisco failed to fix the vulnerability until an updated version of the software was released in 2012. It then took the company 3 more years to release a security advisory to companies using the previous, flawed version of the software.
Stories like this are all too common. Whistleblowers frequently lose their jobs and suffer significant personal hardships as a result of coming forward on behalf of the public’s interest.
Guest – Attorney Sarah Poppy Alexander of the law firm Constantine, Cannon. Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in so called “qui tam” lawsuits in both federal and state court, as well as under the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower programs. Poppy has been selected to the Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Before joining Constantine Cannon, Poppy was an associate attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, where she worked to ensure prisoners received appropriate medical and mental health care and adequate accommodations for disabilities in jails and prisons. Poppy graduated from Harvard Law School and holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale College.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life And The Battle For Change
We are going to spend the entire hour with attorney Michael Tigar to discuss his just published magnificent memoir Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life And The Battle For Change.
By the time he was 26, Michael Tigar was a legend in legal circles well before he would take on some of the highest profile cases of his generation. In his first US Supreme Court case, at the age of 28, Tigar won a unanimous victory that freed thousands of Vietnam war resistors from prison. Tigar also led the legal team that secured a judgment against the Chilean Pinochet regime for the 1976 murders of dictator Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronnie Moffit in a Washington, DC car bombing.
He then worked with the lawyers who prosecuted Pinochet for torture and genocide. A relentless fighter of injustice, Tigar has been counsel for Angela Davis, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H.Rap Brown). Tigar the Chicago Eight, and leaders of the Black Panther Party, to name only a few. His book is about stories, people stories of injustice, struggle, and sometimes vindication as he put it. Michael Tigar is a magnificent storyteller with a dry wit and a prodigious memory. Monthly Review link to Sensing Injustice
Guest – Constitutional attorney Michael Tigar, professor emeritus from The Washington College of Law and has taught at the University of Texas and Duke University. He has practice before the Supreme Court, arguing his first case when he was 24 years old. Tigar has written or edited more than a dozen of important books including “Law and the Rise of Capitalism.“ He has worked for over 50 years with movements for social change as a human rights lawyer, law professor, and writer. Since 1996 he has practiced law with his wife Jane B. Tigar. Michael Tigar’s blog Tigarbytes.
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