Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, U.S. Militarism
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Far Right Supreme Court Decisions Not Seen Since 1931
During its last term, the Supreme Court demonstrated that it is the most right-wing court since 1931. In cases involving reproductive rights, entanglement of church and state, the right to carry guns, and the ability of congressionally-mandated administrative agencies to regulate climate change, the high court’s conservative members handed down reactionary rulings. The court has agreed to hear a case next term that could radically change our electoral system.
Guest – Stephen Rohde is an author and social justice advocate who practiced civil rights and constitutional law for more than 45 years, including representing two men on California’s death row. He is the former chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and former national chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He is also a board member of Death Penalty Focus.
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ALEC: Five Decades of Government Influence
The United States underwent a “public interest” revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the first half of the ’60s, Congress passed precedent-setting environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Water Quality Act. And in just three years, from 1969 to 1972, the federal government adopted a raft of new environmental, public health, workplace and consumer protections and established new agencies to administer them, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
That revolution sparked a counterrevolution that is still reverberating today. Wealthy conservatives, corporations and libertarian foundations poured money into new think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Heritage Foundation and Charles Koch’s Cato Institute. A less-well-known group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was founded around the same time. It goes by its acronym, ALEC.
Unlike Heritage and Cato, ALEC—a network of nearly 300 corporations, trade groups, law firms, and libertarian foundations—operates at the state level. The group provides state legislators with a variety of ready-made bills that, among other things, roll back voting rights, thwart efforts to address climate change, and bolster corporate profits.
State lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC’s recommendations from 2010 through 2018, according to an investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 600 of them became law.
Lately ALEC has been coaching state legislators on how to spin the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. ALEC has also been working behind the scenes to amplify the false GOP narrative on voter fraud. Writer Elliott Negin has been following ALEC off and on for the last decade, and he recently posted an essay that explains in detail how ALEC turns disinformation into law. We are fortunate to have Elliott as our guest today.
Guest – Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national science advocacy organization. Prior to joining UCS in 2007, he was the Washington communications director for the Natural Resource Defense Council, a former news editor at National Public Radio, the managing editor of American Journalism Review, and the editor of Nuclear Times and Public Citizen magazines.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Torture, Truth to Power, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Extradition Of Journalist Julian Assange
On June 17, Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, ordered the extradition of journalist Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial on Espionage Act charges that could lead to 175 years in prison. The Obama administration, which prosecuted more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined, decided not to file criminal charges against Assange. But Donald Trump’s regime indicted Assange for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. And Joe Biden’s government is continuing to pursue the extradition of Assange to the United States.
Assange has been confined in the UK for more than a decade. If he is extradited to the United States, he will be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most conservative districts in the country. The judge to whom his case has been assigned jailed Chelsea Manning for refusing to appear before a grand jury investigating Assange.
Assange will appeal Patel’s decision. But if he is ultimately extradited, tried and convicted, it will pose a major threat to investigative journalism. People around the world are supporting Assange but the Biden administration is continuing Trump’s campaign to extradite Assange and try him in the United States.
Guest – Kevin Gosztola, an American journalist who writes about whistleblowers, WikiLeaks, national security and civil liberties. Kevin is managing editor of Shadowproof and he curates The Dissenter. He is producer and host of the weekly podcast Unauthorized Disclosure and co-author of Truth and Consequences: The US vs. Bradley Manning. Kevin has covered the Assange case extensively.
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Chicago Torture Cases Cost Taxpayers 210 Million
Sixty years ago, the great social satirist and comedian Lenny Bruce quipped that “Chicago is so corrupt, it is thrilling.“ Today the corruption may not be so transparent but the amount of money spent to protect and defend cops who kill and torture people is staggering.
A few years ago, the city of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private corporation even as it was closing public schools and mental health clinics ostensibly for lack of funding. But as of now and for the last 15 years, Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois has spent at least $212 million of taxpayer money for expenses in torture cases involving the infamous Chicago torturing cop, Jon Burge, and his crew. They operated in Chicago’s brutal Area 2 where they extracted false confessions from more than 125 African-American men through the use of torture.
$37.5 million of the $212 million has gone to what has been called “pinstripe patronage lawyers,“ who defended the police torturers. $19-1/2 million has been spent on special prosecutors in Cook County where Chicago is located. At least $38.7 million has been applied to pension payments for the offending cops, $7.9 million has been spent on the state Torture Commission and Court of Claims payouts, and finally, $108.2 million has gone for settlements, verdicts, and reparations. And the cases, and the payments, continue to this day and will continue into the future.
Guest – Chicago civil rights attorney Flint Taylor who led the litigation against Jon Burge and his torture crew. Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and has represented dozens of clients subjected to torture and other police misconduct. He is the author of The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. His most recent case involves the police murder of Joseph Lopez in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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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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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Twenty Years Later Guantanamo Is Everywhere
The George W. Bush administration used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to launch his so-called “Global War on Terror.” Under the guise of fighting terrorism, Bush illegally invaded two countries, instituted an unlawful dragnet of Arab men and boys in the United States, and opened a sinister prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January 2002.
Nearly 800 men and boys were sent to Guantanamo, where many of them were subjected to torture and cruel treatment, and held indefinitely – many without charges, in violation of US and international law. Much of this mistreatment was documented in the “Guantanamo Files,” 779 secret files published in 2011 by WikiLeaks. It was documented as well in the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The 6,700-page report remains secret but the 499-page executive summary was published in 2014.
By locating the prison in Cuba, Bush sought to preclude any judicial review of the detention of the detainees. Most of them had no connection to terrorism. Locked away in Guantanamo for years, detainees lost hope. The only power they had was to refuse food. Many of them engaged in a hunger strike but were violently force-fed, a practice that amounts to torture.
The widely esteemed lawyer and co-founder of Law and Disorder, Michael Ratner, was Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights when the center filed the landmark case of Rasul v. Bush. It went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Bush could not prevent detainees from challenging the legality of their detention in US courts. But 20 years later, Guantanamo remains open and 39 men are still there.
We are fortunate to have Baher Azmy with us today to discuss Guantanamo and the “war on terror” which continues today, with very little pushback from the American public.
Guest – Baher Azmy is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he directs all litigation around issues related to the promotion of civil and human rights. He is also professor of law at Seton Hall University.
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Dangerous Influence of Right Wing Propaganda
Hosts examine the over-all current role of the corporate, mainstream media in America today, in particular the increasing power and danger of the right-wing media. And to do so we are very fortunate to have as our guest today, Jeff Cohen.
Guest – Jeff Cohen is a highly regarded progressive critic of the media. Indeed, he was recently quoted in an important article in the Washington Post about the disclosure that FOX News hosts were advising the White House during the January 6th insurrection. Jeff Cohen, along with Martin Lee, were the co-founders of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or “F.A.I.R.,” which is the anti-corporate media group that monitors and reports on the mainstream media’s bias, spin and misinformation. Jeff Cohen is also a lecturer on these matters and the author of the book, Cable News Confidential.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture
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Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
American society is in an ever deepening crisis. Half the population is poor or near poor. Three men including Jeff Bezos of Amazon own as much as all these tens of millions of people combined. Climate catastrophe threatens life on our planet. Equally threatening is a very real potential for a nuclear war. Democracy and the rule of law are in free fall.
A manifestation of this societal crisis is our system of mass incarceration. It is the largest in the world, warehousing well over 2 million people. It is, along with militarized police, the primary form of social control, especially for poor people of color, in de-industrialized cities where the poor have been abandoned and are treated little better than human refuse.
Black Americans have especially suffered. They are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans. Nationally, one in 81 Black adults in the U.S. is serving time in state prison. Wisconsin leads the nation in Black imprisonment rates; 1 of every 36 Black Wisconsinites is in prison. In 12 states, more than half the prison population is Black: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Seven states maintain a Black/white disparity larger than 9 to 1: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Chris Hedges has taught in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system for over a decade.
His new book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, is the story of a class he taught in East Jersey State Prison. His 28 students, who collectively had spent 515 years in prison, wrote a play about their lives called “Caged.”
The process of writing the play, which was eventually performed at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey to sold out audiences and was published by Haymarket Books, ripped down the emotional walls most erect in prison and allowed his students to express in heartbreaking detail the trauma, grief, loss and violence that marked their, as well as the institutionally racist structures, often unseen by those on the outside, which keep the poor poor. And yet, the play they wrote was, at its core, about radical love, the solidarity and bonds that keep them human outside and inside prison walls.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
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Censorship, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Impeachment, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Racist Police Violence, Right To Dissent, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Moving The Bar: My Life As A Radical Lawyer
Hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith interviewed some of Michael Ratner’s closest friends and colleagues as part of a special broadcast highlighting Michael Ratner’s legal work and mentorship. The special also marked the upcoming release of Michael Ratner’s autobiography Moving The Bar: My Life As A Radical Lawyer published by OR Books. In this one hour taken from the two hour fundraiser broadcast, we hear from attorneys including Eleanor Stein, Richard Levy, Ray Brescia, David Cole and Baher Azmy.
Michael Ratner’s pathbreaking legal and political work is unmatched. He provided crucial support for the Cuban Revolution and won the seminal case in the Supreme Court guaranteeing the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. Michael also challenged U.S. policy in Iraq, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Israel-Palestine. This book is a testament to his unflagging efforts on behalf of the poor and oppressed around the world.
– Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Michael Ratner personified lawyering that brought both radical and human values into challenges to the use of governmental power to violate the essence of the Bill of Rights. From the torture of prisoners after 911 to the massive racial profiling by the New York Police Department, Michael’s voice and vision continue to resonate. This book provides a powerful testament to the spirit of this extraordinary man.
– Attorney Bill Goodman
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