Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Supreme Court, worker's rights
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The Supreme Court Is About To Eviscerate The Right To Strike
Sixty-four years ago, workers and unions gained protection from state lawsuits while pursuing unfair labor practice claims with the federal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On January 10, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that threatens to unravel those protections. A company called Glacier Northwest is suing the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union No. 174, after 85 truck drivers walked off the job. If the high Court rules in favor of Glacier, unions will have to defend against costly lawsuits. And that will likely discourage them from going on strike. A Court decision is expected by the end of June.
Seventy-one percent of the U.S. public supports labor unions. That’s the highest number since 1965. And with an increase in economic inequality, union strikes are on the uptick.
Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.2 million workers in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien remarked that: “Workers in America have the fundamental right to strike, and American workers have died on picket lines to protect it.” In recent years, however, the ultra-right-wing Supreme Court majority has issued decisions systematically eroding these rights.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn is a legal and political analyst who provides commentary on local, national and international media. She is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” Marjorie Cohn at Truthout
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Free Range Kids
You may have heard about the shaming of parents who let their son or daughter walk to school by themselves, or ride public transportation alone. They’re often ridiculed on social media and cast as neglectful. But in some instances, the consequences have gone beyond public shaming.
In 2015 parents in Silver Spring, Maryland made national headlines they were investigated for child neglect for letting their children, ages 6 and 10, walk home from a park by themselves.
In another case Lenore Skenazy, a former New York Daily News columnist was called America’s worst mom after writing a column in 2008 about why she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway by himself.
Last year, Utah passed a law making it not a crime for parents to let their children play in a park without supervision or walk home alone from school. This is hopeful news for our guest Lenore Skenazy who has been advocating for so-called free range parenting laws for many years.
Under the law, neglect does not include allowing a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities such as going to and from school by walking, running or bicycling, going to nearby stores or recreational facilities and playing outside.
A recent U.S. Census showed that 7 million of the nation’s 38 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are left home alone on a regular basis, while the average time spent alone is six hours per week. Only a few states legislate an age under which kids may not be home alone.
Guest – Lenore Skenazy – New York City columnist-turned-reality TV show host got that title after letting her 9-year-old son take the subway, alone. In response to the enormous media blowback, she founded the book and blog, “Free-Range Kids,” which launched the anti-helicopter parenting movement. She has lectured internationally, including talks at Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House, and has written for everyone from The Wall Street Journal to Mad Magazine. Yep. The Mad Magazine. And she’s a graduate of Yale.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Cuba, Gaza, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Racist Police Violence, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Cars and Jails: Freedom, Dreams, Debt and Carcerality
What is the connection between cars and jails? Every day more than 50,000 Americans are pulled over by police officers while driving. Most of them will come away from this encounter owing money to the municipality or county in which they were stopped. Some will be arrested. They will join the nearly 9,000,000 Americans to cycle through our countries’ jails each year.
Police can choose from hundreds of traffic code violations to make a pretext stop and conduct a vehicle search. This may result in a fine or or an arrest.
American consumer lore has long held the automobile to be “freedom machine” consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility – the credit economy and the American carceral system.
Guest – Andrew Ross who along with his co-author Julie Livingston has investigated this paradox and written the book “Cars and Jails: Freedom, Dreams, Debt and Carcerality”. It was just published by OR Books. The book shows how the long arms of debt and the carceral state operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, and a social activist and analyst. He has authored and edited numerous books and has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, The Nation, and Al Jazeera.
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Remembering Michael Ratner
Hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith remember Michael Ratner as cohost, activist, radical attorney, author and close friend. In this show, hosts reflect on Michael’s work and listen back to several monologue updates. They include his work as co-counsel for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the Dahiya Doctrine, SNAP- Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, NSA survelliance in the Bahamas and Guantanamo Bay prisoner exchange.
Michael Ratner (1943-2016) was president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Michael worked for decades, as a crusader for human rights both at home and abroad litigating many cases against international human rights violators resulting in millions of dollars in judgments for abuse victims and expanding the possibilities of international law. He acted as a principal counsel in the successful suit to close the camp for HIV-positive Haitian refugees on Guantanamo Base, Cuba. Michael Ratner has litigated a dozen cases challenging a President’s authority to go to war, without congressional approval. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Center has focused its efforts on the constitutionality of indefinite detention and the restrictions on civil liberties as defined by the unfolding terms of a permanent war. Among his many honors were: Trial Lawyer of the Year from the Trial lawyers for Public Justice, The Columbia Law School Public Interest Law Foundation Award, and the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award.
Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Uncategorized, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change
Today we speak with University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy about his new book “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.” The United States of America has been governing the globe now for 80 years, since World War II. This is about to end. By 2030, China will have the world’s largest economy and hold more riches than the U.S., which is deeply in debt.
The America we know will change drastically as a world power just as the previous world powers, the British, and before them the Dutch, and before them the Spanish and the Portuguese, all saw their empires end.
Climate change will upend the world. It has already started. The effects of climate change on the population of the world, especially China, will be catastrophic. The great coastal city of Shanghai, where 18 million people reside, will sink, uprooting millions of the 400 million Chinese people in the North China Plain.
What can we learn from the demise of the great world powers in the past? Where is the United States headed and how soon? What might be done to ameliorate this dire future? Only a prodigious historian could undertake to answer these questions.
Guest – Alfred W McCoy holds the Fred Harvey Harrington chair of history at the University of Wisconsin. He has written 20 books, including “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” for which he became well-known, and recently, “In the Shadows of the American Century.”
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The Federalist Society, Charles Koch, The Bradley Foundation and The U.S. Supreme Court
The nation is still reeling from the Trump administration’s assaults to the rule of law, and their ripple effects on democratic institutions. But these attacks were the result of strategic planning over decades, and the handiwork of networks of well-funded think tanks and lobbyists. Some of the country’s richest and most conservative individuals are, with so-called Dark Money, anonymously supporting these efforts.
Chief among these forces is the Federalist Society. Not well known until recently, the Society has worked quietly since the Reagan administration to overhaul the Supreme Court into a bastion of conservatism. Enriched with Dark Money, it’s had an outsized impact on the composition of the federal and the Supreme Court. Recently, we’ve witnessed how hard-fought social gains of the 20th century have been taken away from Americans, and landmark Supreme Court decisions have been overruled such as Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to reproductive freedom, and Lemon v. Kurtzman, guaranteeing the separation of church and state.
Guest – Attorney Lisa Graves, is the founder, director, and editor-in-chief of True North Research. Her analysis of such research has been cited by every major newspaper in the country. She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of government. Lisa served as chief counsel for the US Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. She was also a career deputy assistant attorney general the US Department of Justice. Lisa has spent the past 12 years examining the impact of dark money on judicial selection.
Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith, Marjorie Cohn and Heidi Boghosian
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Supreme Court, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Time is running out for humanity to avoid a catastrophic planetary tipping point. The globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul it’s on nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations and thrown into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary environment is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.
The United Nations international panel on climate change, the IPPC, predicts that as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases by the year 2050 there will be 1 billion climate refugees. Temperatures must be held within a 1.5 Celsius increase. If it goes up, as predicted, an increase of 4 degrees would end civilization.
The crises we are in our multiple. Species extinction, ocean acidification, sea level rise depletion of soil, forest fires, broiling heat waves, hurricanes and drought have plagued us in the last few years. One third of Pakistan was underwater.
Guest – John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review magazine and a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written many books including The Robbery of Nature“ and “The Return of Nature. His most recent book is Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution.
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Impending Threats To American Democracy
In a recent New York Times article, by David Leonhardt, titled A Crisis Coming: The Two Twin Threats to American Democracy, Leonhardt, after first identifying the first threat being that things are now in place where for the first time in U.S. history, a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office, he identifies the second threat, as follows: “The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: the power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion. The run of Supreme Court decisions—both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular—highlight this disconnect. Although the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight elections, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees seems poised to shape American politics for years, if not decades.”
And another headline in a recent edition of the New York Times reads, “Three Huge Supreme Court Cases That Could Change America.” And that article is simply one of many, of late, warning of how the ever-more conservative, indeed one could say, “reactionary” Supreme Court, in its just opened fall term, may well change America in a number of vastly different ways…and ways inconsistent with the majority political views of the American people.
Guest – Steve Rohde is the past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace. He is a widely recognized expert on the U.S. Constitution, as well as a political activist. He is a prolific author. His books include American Words of Freedom and the book Freedom of Assembly. He has written numerous book reviews and articles on civil liberties and constitutional law, and his book reviews can be found frequently in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Supreme Court, War Resister
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A Unified Movement of Peace
The world today is threatened with war, poverty, displacement and hunger like no other time since 1937 when World War II began with the Japanese invasion of China. Within four years the war had spread leading to the death of tens of millions of people. This included 50 million Russians, 400,000 Americans and finally hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in 1945 when the US initiated the nuclear age with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrating American power to the Russians. This initiated the Cold War which is now in a second stage. It must be stopped.
The American wars in Vietnam and Iraq were based on lies. We were told in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson that the Vietnamese had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a lie. In 2003 we were lied to by President George W. Bush who told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is based on the ubiquitous lie that the Russians were unprovoked. It threatens to spin out of control. Why are we again in this situation and what can we do about it? What is desperately needed is a unified American peace movement.
Guest – Ray McGovern former CIA intelligence analyst, Ray briefed President George H. W. Bush every morning on intelligence matters, particularly with respect to Russia. He is a founder of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and a contributor to the blog Common Dreams.
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Doctors Lose Licenses For Properly Prescribing Opioids
The CDC wrongly thought pain management doctors were over prescribing opioids. The CDC issued guidelines in 2016 put limits on the amount of opioids doctors could prescribe thinking that high doses of Oxycontin lead to addiction and death. These guidelines were disastrous for chronic pain patients. Many were driven to buy illegal drugs on the street which were laced with poisonous fentanyl. In 2021 this led to 100,000 deaths in the United States.
Several insurance companies encouraged the CDC to impose limits on doctors prescribing Oxycontin and to taper their patients. Opioids are very expensive. The insurance companies were fortified in their erroneous belief by the efforts of a certain organization of doctors who are not pain management specialists.
When the CDC guidelines were exceeded, the Department of Justice threatened to indict doctors and got them to stop practicing medicine. The doctors gave up their medical licenses and licenses to prescribe narcotics. Some were prosecuted. Some went to prison. Some endured large fines. Seventeen hundred out of 6000 pain management doctors were removed from the practice of medicine.
Doctors who refused to taper were victimized. These doctors correctly believed that their patients were dependent on high dosages of opioids but were not drug addicts. These doctors understood that denying their patients high dosages of opioids would lead to suicides and deaths by overdose from street drugs.
The United States Supreme Court recently ruled in the case of The United States v Ruan that doctors have the right to treat their patients as they see fit without government interference, they ruled 9 to 0 that doctors who prescribed opioids in good faith did not have the requisite mindset, mens rea, to be found guilty of over prescribing.
Guest – Kelly Dineen Gillespie is a professor of law and the Director of the health law program at Creighton University School of Law. She teaches health law and bioethics. Dr. Gillespie holds a PhD in health care ethics as well as a law degree. Before attending law school she worked as a nurse in neurosurgery and transplant ICUs. She co-wrote two friend of the court briefs in the significant Ruan v United States case on behalf of professors of health law and policy before the US Supreme Court regarding criminal distribution under the Controlled Substance Act as applied to doctors‘ prescriptions. In June 2022, the Supreme Court adopted much of the reasoning advanced in these briefs in a unanimous decision supporting doctors.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Supreme Court
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Analysis: States Respond To Overruling Of Roe v. Wade
Since June, when the right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and retracted the constitutional right to abortion, many states have enacted onerous restrictions or outright bans on abortion. In states like California, the right to abortion has been safeguarded by legislation and judicial interpretations of the California Constitution. But if in the future, Republican governors in California appoint a majority of conservative “justices” to the state supreme court, the right to abortion will be imperiled.
On November 8, voters in three states – California, Michigan and Vermont – will decide whether to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions. People in Kentucky will vote on an amendment that specifically excludes the right to abortion from constitutional protection. In August, Kansas voters rejected a similar amendment that would have explicitly said that its constitution does not provide the right to abortion.
Guest – Law and Disorder co-host and legal scholar Marjorie Cohn discusses why it’s crucial that states amend their constitutions to protect the right to abortion. Marjorie is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, who writes a regular column at Truthout called “Human Rights and Global Wrongs.” She has published several books and does political and legal media commentary for local, national and international media outlets.
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Attorney Deborah LaBelle: Planned Parenthood v. State of Michigan
Deborah LaBelle is a Michigan attorney and writer whose work centers on constitutional and civil rights in class actions and community representation utilizing a human rights framework. Ms. LaBelle has been lead counsel in over a dozen class action lawsuits that have successfully expanded the civil and constitutional rights of her clients in both federal and state courts, including before the U.S. Supreme Court and in international fora.
Ms. LaBelle has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Lawyers Guild’s Law for the People Award, the National Trial Lawyer of the Year Award from Public Justice Foundation, and the Federal Bar Association’s Wade McCree Jr. Award; Michigan ACLU Civil Libertarian of the Year Award; as well as several others too long to list here.
She is currently co-counsel (with me and others) on the Flint Water class action litigation – a case in which we successfully argued to the Michigan Supreme Court that our state constitution has embedded within it the fundamental due process right to bodily integrity.
What brings her here today, is Ms. LaBelle’s most recent involvement in the historic case of Planned Parenthood v. State of Michigan. This case was triggered by the nation-wide crisis created by the U.S. Supreme Court in its reversal of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson. Dobbs awoke a long-dormant 1931 felony statute in Michigan which criminalizes all medical and legal actions taken to support a person who seeks or needs an abortion. This month, in the Planned Parenthood case, the Michigan Court of Claims issued a historic state-wide injunction against that criminal law, holding that it violated the now-recognized Michigan constitutional right to bodily integrity. While this injunction is still in effect (and inevitably on its way to being appealed), we have seen another pro-choice victory in Michigan, that is, successfully getting Proposition 3, a constitutional amendment referendum, on the ballot that would explicitly recognize the constitutional right to abortion in Michigan.
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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