CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Honoring the Legacy Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today on Law and Disorder we bring you a special hour-long program honoring the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Our listeners know all too well that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was shot on April 4, 1968–51 years ago. Not so well known is the radical Dr. King, who said in the last months of his life that:
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo.”
Joining us are special guests Ruby Sales, a colleague of Dr. King’s and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (F.O.R.). We’re also joined by author and activist Matt Meyer, a board member of the AJMI.
Dr. King began close ties with A.J. Muste and with the F.O.R. during the Montgomery bus boycott, when FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley came to Alabama to support local efforts nonviolently challenging racial segregation. Dr. King developed a special relationship with former FOR chairman A.J. Muste, whose absolute pacifism King had, as a theological seminary student, questioned.
Before heading F.O.R., Muste was a prominent labor leader, helping to found the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And Dr. King, of course, was killed exactly one year after taking a staunch anti-Vietnam war position and in the midst of supporting a significant strike of sanitation workers, linking—as he had been—issues of race, class, and violence as King deepened his critique of the roots of oppressive U.S. society.
Guest – Ruby Sales is the founder and director of the “SpiritHouse Project”, a national organization that uses the arts, research, education, action and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic and social justice as well as for spiritual maturity. A life-long organizer, scholar and public theologian in the areas of civil, gender and other human rights, she was a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and served as national convener of the Make Every Church A Peace Church movement.
Guest – Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson is the Executive Pastor of The Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, NY. She has combined pastoral ministry with the social justice community. The former Executive Director of the Children’s Defense Fund she is now the Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Guest – Matt Meyer is Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association, Chair of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Financial Advisory Committee, Africa Support Network Coordinator of the War Resisters International, and Senior Research Scholar at U-Mass Amherst. As current National co-chair of FOR and former Chair of the War Resisters League, he is second only to AJ Muste in holding the top post of those two historic US peace organizations. He is author of the recently published White Lives Matter Most And Other “Little” White Lies.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Habeas Corpus, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Money And Class In America – Lewis Lapham
We are especially pleased and honored to spend the hour with our guest Lewis Lapham. After graduating from Yale in 1956 he started out working as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and then in New York, where he currently lives and works. The editor of Harper’s Magazine for 20 years, Lapham has written 14 books. Currently, he edits “Lapham’s Quarterly.”
Lapham founded the quarterly magazine in an effort to further the consideration of history, which he calls “the advice and counsel of the past.” He sees history as “a guide to understanding and acting on the issues and ideas before us today.”
Major pillars of the rule of law have been defiled since 911. The edifice still stands, the promises remain, but as a nation, we have suffered huge losses. Last spring Lapham’s Quarterly addressed the topic, “The Rule of Law.” His 1988 book “Money and Class In America” was re-published by OR Books last year with a new introduction by Lapham and a forward by Thomas Frank. We speak with him in our studio today about the contradiction between the rule of the monied rich and the rule of law.
Guest – Lewis Lapham is editor and founder of Lapham’s Quarterlysince 2007 and editor of Harper’s Magazinefrom 1975 to 2006, Lewis H. Lapham is a member of the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He is the author of fourteen books, among them Money and Class in America, The Wish for Kings,Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, and Age of Folly. He produced a weekly podcast,The World in Time, for Bloomberg News from 2011 through 2013. His documentary filmThe American Ruling Class has become part of the curriculum in many of the nation’s schools and colleges. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Lapham has lectured at Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Michael E. Tigar On Challenges Lawyers Currently Face
Recently on Law And Disorder we interviewed Baher Azmy, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and National Lawyers Guild President Natasha Bannan. We were interested in their views of the challenges facing leftist lawyers and their movement clients face in these difficult times.
Attorney Jim Lafferty, the former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who has a program on our sister station in Los Angeles, KPFK, joins me in the studio to cohost. We are going to speak for the entire hour with human rights attorney Michael Tigar.
Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, our democracy, however restricted at the time, has been even further shrunk by the growth of the national security state and the all knowing surveillance apparatus that has been set up. Moreover, the President, as the head of the executive branch of the government, has gathered unto to himself an unprecedented amount of power over the judicial and the legislative branches of the government. tigarbytes.blogspot.com/
Guest – Michael Tigar, emeritus professor of law at Duke University and at Washington College of Law. He has been a lawyer working on social change issues since the 1960s. He has argued numerous cases in United States Supreme Court and many Circuit Courts of Appeal. His books include “Law and the Rise of Capitalism”, “ Fighting Injustice ”, and the forthcoming Mythologist of State and Monopoly Power.“
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, FBI Intrusion, Gaza, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Ray McGovern: Clinton Email Wikileaks Valid
The prevailing Russia-gate narrative is that Russia colluded with Donald Trump to swing the 2016 election his way.
Special prosecutor Robert Mueller has led a nearly 2 year investigation in search of proving this. Under American law when a crime is committed prosecutors search for the culprit . In this case, critics say, the search is for the crime.
The investigation seems to be winding down with the expectation that he will soon issue his report. The major news media, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the intelligence community have conducted a drum beat with a nearly fact free assertion that the Russians helped steal the 2016 election.
Is this story true? Is there more to it? Donald Trump after all ran his campaign on a position of easing tensions with Russia.
Is it really in our interest to perpetuate a cold war with a nuclear armed power?
Did Russia use Wikileaks and it’s editor Julian Assange to reveal secrets about the Democratic party? What were the secrets? What danger to free journalism and to truth tellers and whistle blowers does the acceptance of the allegation of Russian interference in the US elections are we facing?
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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Defund Islamophobia Campaign
Fear and hatred of Arabs and Muslims existed in the United States especially after the first Gulf war, started by President George H. W. Bush a decade before the attacks on September 11, 2001.
This fear and hatred increased tremendously in the aftermath of those terrorist attacks. How could it be otherwise? It was used to stir up the American public in the ensuing devastating war against Iraq whose government was falsely linked to the attacks but wars were also fought simultaneously in six other predominately Muslim countries.
Anti-Muslim fear and hatred has been promoted in the United States by several groups and people including Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz.
It turned out that these people and the groups through which they operate were massively funded to the tune of millions of dollars by the United Jewish Appeal in New York City and other Jewish charities in Chicago and San Francisco.
Guest – Donna Nevel is a community psychologist, educator, and co-director of PARCO. She is a long time organizer for justice and is a founding member of Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism, Jews Say No!, and the Nakba Project.
Guest – Asaf Calderon is an Israel-American organizer and member of Jewish Voice for peace – New York City. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1991 and moved to New York in 2016. Asaf has a degree in history of the Middle East and Africa from the University of Tel Aviv, and he currently studies for his Masters of Social Work at Hunter College.
Islamophobia Report
BDSmovement.net / Endtheoccupation.org / JewishVoiceForPeace.org
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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How the Rats Re-Formed Congress
A fable is a short tale that anthropomorphizes animals. The animals personify human virtues and vices, and function as an instrument of moral instruction. We mention this because Ralph Nader joins us to discuss his new book How the Rats Re-Formed Congress. It’s a Fable about an invasion of rats in Congress that triggers a peoples’ political revolt. It begins when a Congressional reporter breaks a bizarre story: “Rats have invaded the toilet bowls” of the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader. A national news frenzy ensues.
Activists seize on the breaking story to organize for a populist agenda. Spontaneous rallies erupt. The activists see the rats upending “business as usual” routines on Capitol Hill as a symbol against lobbyists and corporate Congress. Millions flood into the nation’s capitol to take back Congress from Wall Street. Congressional offices are deluged with citizen rallies and meetings. Members are challenged in primaries. Incumbents join the movement.
Wall Street and its lobbyists warn of economic collapse and mass layoffs if the people’s agenda passes Congress. Corporate front groups are formed to disrupt peaceful crowds. Despite that, corporate lobbyists and think tanks can’t overcome the organized will of the determined citizenry. Tortmuseum.org
Listen to our past interview with Ralph Nader about the Tort Museum.
Guest – Ralph Nader, one of the nation’s most effective and well-known social critics. He has raised public awareness and increased government and corporate accountability. As a young lawyer in 1965 he made headlines with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, leading to congressional hearings and passage of a series of life-saving auto safety laws in 1966. His example has inspired a generation of consumer advocates, citizen activists and public interest attorneys. Full biography.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Death with Dignity
Seventy percent of Americans support the end-of-life option permitting qualified terminally ill people to end their lives through physician-prescribed medications. Despite this, forty-four states don’t have statutes outlining the procedure, and safeguards, for getting medications to hasten inevitable death.
Death with Dignity is a growing movement that works to ensure terminally ill Americans have the freedom to control their end-of-life options, including how they die. Its state-by-state campaign strives to change that.
California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia have assisted dying statutes. They allow mentally competent, terminally-ill adult state residents to request and receive a prescription medication enabling them to die in a place and time of their choosing.
Guest – Mark Glaze is a strategist in public affairs, advocacy and politics. His clients have included the Open Society Institutes, the American Federation of Teachers, the Human Rights Campaign and Amnesty International. Mark is the former executive director of Everytown for Gun Safety, the nation’s largest gun violence prevention group. After the Newtown mass shooting the Wall Street Journal called him “the face of the gun control movement.”
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Strongmen
The spectacle and recent emergence of the strong man leader has been seen in a number of countries across the world, not only in the United States. We have witnessed the rise of Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia. In the 1920s and 1930s fascist dictators emerged in Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. These men were monsters. The new kind of strongmen are not fascist dictators, but monsters nonetheless. We welcome professor Vijay Prashad who has edited and introduced the recently published book titled Strongmen. The book is a collection of five essays, some of them in the form of a fable, which explains the phenomena of the strong men.
Guest – Professor Vijay Prashad, is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author and editor of several books, the most recent is titled Red Star Over the Third World.
