CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails To Save Us From Pandemics or Itself
COVID-19 did not cause the current economic devastation to billions of people around the world. It triggered the crisis. It illuminated the inherent instability in the capitalist system itself. Capitalism exacerbates unemployment, inequality, racism, and patriarchy and threatens the health and safety of workers and our communities.
We are in the worst economic crisis since the great depression of 90 years ago. Half of the American population is poor or near poor. Twenty million people are unemployed. It is estimated that 400,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by the end of the year. Most of these people will be Black, Latino, the poor and the elderly.
The large corporations have bought out both the Republican and Democratic parties. Neither one of these parties has put forward an effective plan on what to do to get us out of this catastrophic situation.
Guest – Professor Richard Wolff, author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails To Save Us From Pandemics or Itself. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program of International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. His previous books are Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.
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Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
The decline of democracy and the rule of law, already advanced under Obama , has accelerated under Trump. By his own admission it is widely known that President Trump will not consent to leaving office if he loses the election. What is not so widely known is the case that he caused to be prosecuted against journalist and whistleblower Julian Assange.
Assange is being railroaded in the Old Bailey courthouse in London in an effort by US government, in collaboration with its British ally, to extradite Assange and send him to the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia to be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Assange told the truth about American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan back in 2010. He is 49 years old and in terrible mental and physical health. If he loses and is sent to the Eastern District of Virginia for trial and successfully prosecuted, which is a given, it will be the death of free journalism and a blow to the first amendment which is a keystone of our democracy because it involves the right to learn.
Assange Defense
@defenseassange – Nathan Fuller twitter
Defend.wikileaks.org
Guest – Attorney Nathan Fuller who has been attending Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London. He leads the London-based Courage Foundation and the director of the newly formed Committee to Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Update:
- Hosts Remember Attorney Kevin Zeese
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President Trump And The 2020 Election
What if President Donald Trump is voted out of office on November 3, 2020 but on January 20, 2021 when he is scheduled to vacate the White House he refuses to go. His lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen predicted this in his congressional testimony before he went off to prison.
President Trump is already casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election which is less than two months away. He says there will be massive voter fraud, that absentee balloting, which will be widely prevalent because of the Covid crisis, is easily open the fraud.
Can Trump send federal troops to Washington DC, or other cities? Can he deploy the National Guard of the various states? Can he suspend habeas corpus, arbitrarily detained people, or declare martial law? Can he investigate opponents, freeze their assets, control communications, initiate a foreign crisis, or get help from attorney general William Barr? What can we do about it?
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, the past president of the National Lawyers Guild and former professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.
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Detroit Will Breathe, et al, v. City of Detroit
Black Lives Matter protests have occurred in Detroit since May 29. For the first five days Detroit Police responded to the protests with excessive force. They used tear gas and rubber munitions, and freely using batons and shields to assault and beat protesters. In total, they arrested more than 400 protesters.
The local NLG chapter joined the Detroit Coordinated Legal Defense Coalition to provide legal support. The other groups are: The National Conference of Black Lawyers, Detroit Chapter; the Detroit Justice Center; the Neighborhood Defender Services; the Wayne County Criminal Defense Bar Association; and Michigan Liberation. As well, the protesters formed an organization called Detroit Will Breathe, which continues to hold daily protests.
On August 31 the Coalition filed a civil lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department to obtain injunctive relief from the use of unlawful violence against protesters. Detroit Will Breathe, et al, v. City of Detroit.
On Sept. 4 the court granted in part the plaintiffs’ motion for a Temporary Restraining Order. Police Chief Craig is continuing his public relations campaign and continuing to falsely claim that the Detroit Police have acted lawfully.
Guest – Detroit attorney Julie Hurwitz, a longtime National Lawyers Guild member based out of Detroit, Michigan.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era
Since Trump began his presidential campaign four years ago comedians have been complaining that because he is so preposterous it’s hard to satirize him, that he is self satirical. This has been true until recently with the publication of Marvin Kitman’s Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era.
At first Kitman assumed that Trump’s candidacy was a publicity stunt. After he realized it was serious, as a satirist he felt very lucky writing that ”I have never had such a good time observing and writing about the follies of our country.“
He began keeping a comical journal modeled after A Journal of the Plague Year where author Daniel Defoe described the great plague that hit London in 1665.
Guest – humorist and author Marvin Kitman is a former columnist at New York Newsday and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for criticism. He is the author of, among others, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly and The Making of the President 1789.
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American Spring: Unfolding Crisis
The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding.
The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites. This kind of broad solidarity was absent during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The demonstrations are in large part led by people of color, mostly young people. Elected officials and traditional civil rights leaders are not leading the current uprising. As the L.A. Progressive has written, “The gross underlying inequality, racially and more broadly economically, affects every aspect of life in the US. and is the root cause of the volcanic anger irruption against the veneer of obsolete institutions.“
Guest – Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report. Ford founded the Black Agenda Report and has edited it since 2006. He was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and he has delivered presentations at many colleges and universities.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance
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The Young Lords: A Radical History
Protests in the streets in the wake of police killings of Black Americans have sparked a multi-faceted societal reckoning with racism. Challenges to entrenched systems of inequality and white supremacy are taking many forms, from the tearing down of confederate statues, to calls for police reform and the defunding of certain police functions, to Merriam Webster dictionary expanding its definition of racism to include structural forms of bias.
Historically, the role of street protests is so intrinsic to reform in this nation enshrines protection for mass assemblies in the Bill of Rights. Yet one vibrant and impactful group of revolutionary activists in protest history has received virtually no attention, namely the Young Lords.
The children of poor and working class Puerto Rican migrants who had been massively displaced from the Island of Puerto the US mainland after WW II, the Young Lords grew up in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and East Harlem,. They were radicalized by the civil rights and black power movements and the Vietnam War. This generation of socialist youth make it their top priority to bring about revolution in the US and on the island of Puerto Rico.
Scholar and activist Johanna Fernandez’s new book, The Young Lords: A Radical History is the definitive history of this militant group of community organizers. In a presentation at Baltimore’s Red Emma worker cooperative bookstore in early 2020 Professor Fernandez discussed the long-lasting impact of their theatrical street initiatives. The Young Lords transformed the relationship between white people and people of color in the US, and made it acceptable to questions how the US government conducts foreign policy.
Their activism has been credited for the the passage of anti-lead poisoning legislation in the city and they drafted the first known patient bill of rights–they did no in concert with nurses, doctors, and hospital workers at Lincoln Hospital which they occupied 50 years ago on July 14, 1969, to protest healthcare for profit in America and the poor conditions in the delivery of healthcare to black American and Puerto Rican patients in that Bronx hospital.
As Professor Fernandez writes in her book, “The New York Young Lords formed part of a cohort of young working-class people–and people of color among them, in particular–whose unprecedented access to higher education sharpened their latent critique of society and afford them an infrastructure for dissent…..they challenged what many believed were old, soul-slaying social norms and standards of behavior that constrained personal freedoms in the U.S. Known collectively as the New Left, these diverse movements were built by a generation whose activism radically changed the cultural and political landscape of the United States.”
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Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking
As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project that is being operated by an Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city.
Michael Harrision, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, “There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk.”
The Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program is, by contract, limited to monitoring such felony crimes as robberies, car jackings, shootings and homicides. Images recorded are, in theory, to be used solely in criminal investigations and will be stored for 45 days. A first prong of the program was conducted covertly in 2016 under a different police commissioner.
The ACLU of Maryland calls this initiative the most comprehensive surveillance of a U.S. city in history. ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah said, “It’s the virtual equivalent of having a police officer follow a resident every time they walk out the door, and if that happened in real life, all of us would understand the huge privacy implications in doing that.”
Guest – ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more. In 2011 he was an inaugural recipient of the James Baldwin Medal for Civil Rights. David previously worked as a Senior Trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the US Dept of Justice, focusing on police misconduct and conditions in prisons, jails and other state institutions.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Democracy, If We Can Keep Keep It: The ACLU’s 100 Year Fight For Rights In America
The American Civil Liberties Union was formed 100 years ago in 1920 in a climate of fear in our country not unlike what exists today. Anarchists and socialists were scapegoated. They were rounded up, tried under the newly passed espionage act, and hundreds were deported or imprisoned, Eugene V Debs being the most prominent.
To mark a century of defense of the first amendment and the Bill of Rights, Ellis Close has written an important history of the ACLU titled Democracy, If We Can Keep Keep It: The ACLU’s 100 year fight for rights in America. The Los Angeles review of books recently featured an extensive appreciation of Closs’ book written by constitutional lawyer Stephen Rhode.
Guest – Attorney Stephen Rohde has been on the board of the southern California ACLU over 25 years. He has taught constitutional law and has written a number of books on civil liberties.
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Dakota Access Pipeline: Update
July has been a legal roller coaster ride with respect to efforts to shut down the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines. First, a judge invalidated federal permits saying that the Army Corps of Engineers failed to address the potential damage from oil spills in the Dakota pipeline. He ordered the company Energy Transfer to stop pumping crude oil through South Dakota. On the heels of that order, a federal appellate court temporarily blocked that shutdown.
As for KXL, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta Canada through Montana and South Dakota before reaching Nebraska, the Supreme Court in early July rejected the Trump administration’s request to allow construction of the KXL Pipeline by TC Energy. A Montana court ruling halting construction therefore still stands.
As listeners will recall, protesters and lawsuits against both pipelines cite the devastation that pipeline leaks would cause to the environment. In the case of tar sands oil, it is thicker, highly volatile, and more corrosive than conventional crude oil. This increases the likelihood of a leak. That renders it far more difficult, if not impossible, to clean up such a spill.
https://www.wecaninternational.org/divest-invest-protect
Guest – Attorney Natali Segovia is the Staff Attorney for the Water Protector Legal Collective – the organization that grew out of the legal tent at Oceti Sakowin camp in the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. She chairs the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Committee of the National Lawyers Guild and serves on the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Global Justice. She also serves on the Indian Law Section Executive Council of the Arizona State Bar.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Attorney Marjorie Cohn: Trump, Assange, Democracy And Rule of Law
Without democracy and the rule of law there can be no significant social change. However, much democracy was constricted by race and class before the attacks on September 11, 2001 and before Trump, democracy and the rule of law are now facing lethal attacks on many fronts.
Trump has successfully put 198 young, reactionary, and some ignorant judges on the federal bench. He has illegally called out troops to violently disperse peaceful protesters in the park in front of the White House. Trump has threatened the personnel of the International Criminal Court who are attempting to investigate US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include the crime of torture. These crimes, perpetrated under the Bush administration, went unprosecuted by President Obama who infamously said “we must look forward not backward.”
Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing and attempting to extradite truth telling whistle blowing journalist Julian Assange who 10 years ago released the “collateral murder” video showing the commission of American war crimes in Iraq, among other embarrassing information. Assange is confined in London’s Belmarsh prison. He is sick, in solitary, and has been psychologically tortured. He faces 175 years in prison in the United States if convicted under the old Espionage Act for activities protected by the first amendment.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught for 25 years. She is a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, a criminal defense attorney, a legal scholar, and a political analyst. She writes books and articles and lectures throughout the world about human rights, US foreign policy, and the contradiction between the two. She has testified before Congress and debated at the prestigious Oxford Union.
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