Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
U.S. Judge Sides With Chevron, Blocks $9.5 Billion Judgement, Donziger Arrested.
In 2012 the Ecuadorian Supreme Court ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages to five indigenous tribes of the Amazon rain forest. It was one of the largest judgments in history.
The court ruled that Chevron systematically contaminated a patch of the Amazon forest the size of Rhode Island. The people there are suffering from cancer and other diseases and forced to drink toxic water and grow crops on poisoned land.
Chevron retaliated. They sued in federal court in the Southern District of New York, got Judge Louis Kaplan, an extremely pro corporate judge, who sided with the second largest oil company in the world, blocked the judgment from being enforced, and instead had the peoples’ attorney Steven Donziger charged with racketeering arrested, confined to his home, forced to wear an ankle bracelet, and suspended from the practice of law.
On March 4, 2019 the judge declared the judgment null and void. He said it was the fruit of an illegal shakedown, the result of “a five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron.“ Donziger responded saying that the judge was an accomplice in “the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history.“ He told Rolling Stone magazine that “Chevron has spent over $2 billion trying to wear us out and shut us down.”
The oil companies sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorian ex-judge named Alberto Guerra. They gave him $2 million, got him American citizenship, and installed him and his family in a home in the United States.
ChevronToxico.com
ChevronInEcuador.com
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of three pro bono lawyers representing Donziger in an attempt to get his law license restored.
Guest – Paul Paz y Miño, Associate Director at Amazon Watch since 2007, and a professional human rights, corporate accountability and environmental justice advocate.
—-
McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks By Raymond Caballero
Clinton Jencks was a decorated World War II hero, who in 1950 led a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in the famed Empire Zinc strike. It was memorialized in the blacklisted 1954 film Salt of the Earth—in which wives and mothers replaced strikers on the picket line after an injunction barred the miners themselves. Jencks was also a target of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist hysteria in which thousands lost their jobs, careers and reputations, even though none had committed a crime. Three years after the strike, Jencks was arrested and charged with falsely denying that he was a Communist. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
The Supreme Court in Jencks v. United States (1957), overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that mandated providing an accused person any previously hidden witness statements so that cross-examinations could be effective. In the new book McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, scholar Raymond Caballero reveals for the first time that the FBI and the prosecution knew all along that Clinton Jencks was innocent.
Jencks’s case typified the era, exposing the myriad of injustices many suffered at the hands of McCarthyism. His journey for justice offers a new window into the McCarthy era’s oppression, which irrevocably damaged the lives, careers, and reputations of thousands of Americans.’
Guest – Raymond Caballero, author of Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary. Human rights attorney Michael E. Tigar wrote the introduction to McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks.
————————-
————————-
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Case Update October 2019
In our society, nuclear weapons that can destroy all creation are taken as a normal, even an inevitable part of life. In a dramatic action to break what they call “the crime of silence” seven Catholic peace activists entered the Kings Bay trident submarine base in Georgia last April to perform an act of symbolic disarmament. They used hammers to follow the prophecy of Isaiah “to beat swords into plowshares” and poured blood to make holy what was evil in a sacramental action. Kings Bay is homeport to six ballistic missile trident submarines, each of which deploy 16 trident missiles carrying four or more warheads of at least 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 14 kilotons. Each submarine thus has the destructive power of at least 500 Hiroshima bombs. The plowshares seven face up to 25 years in federal prison. Their trial is coming up. Theirs was the latest of 100 plowshares actions around the world since 1980.
Guest – Martha Hennessey, Kings Bay Plowshares 7 co-defendant, activist and volunteer with the New York Catholic Worker.
Guest – Patrick O’Neill, Kings Bay Plowshares 7 co-defendant, activist and volunteer with the New York Catholic Worker.
—-
Flint Water Crisis Case and Michigan Private Prisons Update
The notorious Flint, Michigan poison drinking water case has been in litigation for more than three years. Detroit constitutional attorney Bill Goodman joins us to give an update on the case.
Former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, high-ranking former members of his staff and other state employees are the target of a federal civil rights lawsuit over the city of Flint’s water crisis. The lawsuit, which also targets the city, alleges that the officials tried to balance the City’s budget through a pattern of devious and race-based activity that targeted the people of Flint. It claims that these public official lied to the people of Flint by continuing to mail water bills to Flint residents, which they allege fraudulently misrepresents that the city is providing safe, clean water to its residents.
A group of Flint residents filed the lawsuit on behalf of all the citizens of Flint seeking financial compensation for injuring virtually every adult and child in that beleaguered city – for lead poisoning and brain damage to the kids, for severe skin ailments and hair loss for everyone, for death from Legionnaires disease, and countless other injuries; in addition, there had been tremendous psychological injury to the entire population. Beyond that, people in this community have sustained massive property damage, loss of business, and financial losses. In addition to compensation, they demand life-time future medical care.
This case asserts that this disaster was caused when a multitude of public officials decided to change the source of water from clean safe water, to dangerous, untreated water, knowing – at all times of the danger – and yet lying to the public and claiming that they water was safe when they knew that it was dangerous and poisoned.
We will also speak with him about his lawsuit against a private prison corporation for negligence in allowing a gang execution in one of the private prisons it owns. Attorney Goodman is counsel to the inmates at the Wayne County, Michigan jail in the oldest jail conditions case in the United States going back to 1971. Detroit is in Wayne County.
Guest -Attorney Bill Goodman is the former Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. He is the attorney for a number of victims of water poisoning in Flint, Michigan.
———————————-
———————————-
Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Human Rights, Iran, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
When at Times the Mob Is Swayed, A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic
Trump was elected by about 25% of the eligible voters. Half of the voters who could have, didn’t vote. He lost the popular election by 3 million votes. Since then, this appalling man has proceeded to aggrandize his power. Backed by large corporations to whom he gave huge tax breaks and for whom he cut regulations, the military to which he just gave a $750 billion budget, a Republican Supreme Court and the right wing media such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News he has maintained a steady base of support in the population.
Increasing a sense of dread has spread across our country, it appears possible that Trump may get reelected. Democracy and the rule of law are increasingly threatened.
Guest – Constitutional Lawyer, Burt Neuborne is the former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and has argued many cases before the US Supreme Court. Attorney Neuborne’s book “When at Times the Mob is Swayed” has been recently published by the New Press. He is currently the Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties at NYU School of Law.
—-
Prominent Environmental Activist Maggy Hurchalla Loses Appeal Of 4.4 Million Dollar Jury Verdict
Issues of the environment, citizen advocacy, and the public’s right to know are converging in two South Florida court cases. One involves 78-year-old Maggy Hurchalla, a former Everglades Coalition’s Conservationist of the Year and winner of a National Wetlands Award from the Environmental Law Institute. Now she owes a developer $4.4 million for speaking out about a critical local environmental issue.
In 2012 Hurchalla learned that Lake Point Restoration was considering conveying water to West Palm Beach for a fee. She complained about the company’s operation in emails to Martin Country commissioners and after Lake Point lost out on some contracts. Lake Point claims Maggy lied and was intent on hurting the company.
In a second related case, the nonprofit Everglades Law Center requested a transcript of a closed door meeting of South Florida Water Management’s governing board. The response? They were hauled into court, with Maggie Hurchalla added to the lawsuit.
Guest – Professor Richard Grosso, director of environmental and land use practice at NOVA Southeastern University. Professor Grosso is a widely recognized legal expert, practicing attorney and policy advocate, with over 30 years of experience litigating and advocating on statewide and south Florida environmental issues.
——————————
——————————
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Movie SKIN and One People’s Project
In the recently-released 2019 movie SKIN, skinhead Bryon Widner’s body is covered in racist tattoos, each marking a hate crime he committed. His parents Shareen and Fred “Hammer” Krager, run a kind of camp that recruits and trains young men—often lost and hungry–to become white supremacists.
Bryon meets and falls in love with single mother Julie Price. When he begins to realize he wants to give up his hateful habits, he faces a host of difficulties, one of which is the long and painful process of removing many of the hate tattoos that cover his body.
The film follows writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film of the same name. In the narrative version, actor Mike Colter plays the film’s true hero, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who has devoted his life to helping people escape neo-Nazi groups.
Guest – Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of One People’s Project, is able to join us in the studio today. Since 1988 Daryle has been documenting and writing about right wing individuals and organizations even back while he was serving as a police officer in the U.S. Air Force. In 2000, he founded One People’s Project out of a counter-protest to a rally in Morristown, NJ. The organization quickly gained the reputation of publicly documenting hate groups and their activities.
—-
Reforming Sex Offender Laws
The U.S. legal system and sentencing practices rely too often on emotion rather than facts when it comes to defendants with developmental disabilities charged with sex offenses. Sentences for possessing child pornography are severe, and don’t take into account a defendant’s lack of awareness or inability to understand the societal values being punished. This is true for individuals on the autism spectrum whose social intelligence quotient may lag their intelligence quotient.
Two professors want to change that.
St. Francis College professor Emily Horowitz and co-editor and law professor Larry Dubin make the case for reform in their book Caught in the Web of the Criminal Justice System: Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Sex Offenses.
Guest – Professor Emily Horowitz discusses her book and work related to sex offender laws in the United States. Dr. Horowitz is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis. She is the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us and founder and co-director of the St. Francis Post-Prison program. Her research on the sex offense registry been widely cited.
—————————
—————————
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
—-
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.
————————-
————————-
Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht
It’s been four years since a jury found that then 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht guilty on charges related to operating a Dark Website called the Silk Road that sold, among other things, illicit drugs.
The case was a high profile one, and Rosshad come to be known by some as the face of the Dark Web. He was convicted on seven charges—including a “kingpin” charge—and now-retired Judge Katherine Forrest imposed two life sentences and 40 years… Ross is a young, non-violent, first-time offender serving two life sentences, plus forty years, without parole. He was not convicted of selling drugs or illegal items himself, but rather of creating an e-commerce website that others chose to use for that purpose. No victim was named at trial, and prosecutors had not even sought such a long sentence.
Corruption, abuse, evidence tampering and multiple violations of Ross’s rights cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of Ross’s conviction and sentence within the legal community and with the public.
In a 2016 appeal, defense attorneys outlined a litany of improprieties and abuses in the investigation and trial. Perhaps most serious was that the court precluded information about two corrupt federal agents investigating Silk Road who are now both serving prison sentences for corruption. Last year the Supreme Court denied to consider the case.
Guest – Ross’s mother, Lyn Ulbricht joins us to talk about a petition for clemency to President Donald Trump. Free Ross Ulbricht.
—-
Attorney Client Privilege
What is the attorney-client privilege? And to whom does it apply? Generally speaking, the privilege is owned by the client and unless the client waived her rights her lawyer is barred not only from revealing any information about the client but even revealing who the client is.
An exception in the case of the FBI raid and Donald Trumps attorneys Office, Home, and hotel room was made on the grounds that there is a fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege. Defenders of the attorney-client privilege, even if it has to do with protecting Donald Trump, have argued that it is illegal and unprincipled for the Justice Department to get a search warrant from a federal magistrate and violate the principle.
Guest – Minneapolis Attorney Carla Kjellberg, has worked with victims of child sexual assault who have sued priests, litigated sensitive family law matters, and worked with unions and political activists.
——————————–
——————————–
