CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal
In the overburdened U.S. criminal justice system, with its burgeoning prison population, we hear a lot about felony convictions. Felonies are crimes usually punishable by a term of more than one year, or the death penalty. What we don’t hear much about are misdemeanors, low level offenses punishable by fines or short terms of imprisonment in local jails.
With ten million petty cases filed annually, most U.S. convictions are misdemeanors. Unlike felonies, however, their processing is typically informal and deregulated. Much like fast-food justice, they have high-volume arrests, weak prosecutorial screening, an overtaxed defense bar, and high plea rates. There is often little meaningful scrutiny to see if convictions are supported by evidence. Innocent people who can’t afford bail often plead guilty just to get out of jail.
What the result of misdemeanor convictions? It’s pretty serious: stigma of a criminal record, misdemeanants are often heavily fined, incarcerated, and/or lose jobs, housing, and educational opportunities. Petty convictions are more frequent and burdensome even as we devote fewer institutional resources to ensuring their validity.
The misdemeanor phenomenon has profound systemic implications. It invites skepticism about whether thousands of individual misdemeanants are actually guilty. It reveals an important structural feature of the criminal system: that due process and rule-of-law wane at the bottom of the penal pyramid where offenses are pettiest and defendants are poorest. Misdemeanor processing is the way poor defendants of color are swept up into the criminal system with little or no regard for actual guilt.
In her new book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, Law Professor Alexandra Natapoff takes an in-depth look at the misdemeanor process is an institutional gateway that explains many of the criminal system’s dynamics and dysfunctions.
Guest – Alexandra Napatoff, University of California Irvine law professor and a member of the American Law Institute. She’s also a former federal public defender, a community organizer, and the recipient of an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship.
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Kings Bay Plowshares 7
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 missile’s carrying four or more warheads of at least 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 14 kilotons. Each submarine thus has the distructive power of at least 500 Hiroshima bombs.
The plowshares seven face up to 25 years in federal prison. Their trial is coming up in the next month. 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 – Carmen Trotta, Kings Bay Plowshares 7 co-defendant, activist and volunteer with the New York Catholic Worker.
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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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