Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Death Penalty, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture
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Largest Human Trafficking Case In The US? Workers Lured To U.S. After Hurricane Katrina And Subjected To Abusive Conditions Seek Class Certification
In what may be the largest human trafficking case in US history, Indian guest workers are suing Signal International for human trafficking ad racketeering. Several law firms filed the lawsuit on behalf of seven plaintiffs representing 500 formers guest workers lured into the US after Hurricane Katrina. The guest workers were subjected to racial discrimination, forced labor and other abuse.
Signal is a multi million dollar marine fabrication company with shipyards in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama. They repair and build oil rigs and ships and subcontract with the Dept of Defense and multinational companies. After Hurricane Katrina, Signal’s workforce scattered and they used the government’s guest worker program to import employees as welders and pipe fitters. Between 2004 and 2006 hundreds of Indian men were paid up to 20 thousand dollars each for travel, visa and other fees after being told it would lead to good jobs and permanent US residency.
When the men arrived at Signal they discovered they would not receive green cards, but instead were given 10-month guest worker visas. Signal forced the men to pay $1,050 a month to live in overcrowded, unsanitary and racially segregated labor camps with no visitors allowed. To talk more about this case, we’re joined by Chandra Bhatnagar is a Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program and Sabulal Vijayan, a former guest worker involved in the lawsuit.
Chandra Bhatnagar:
- Signal used the opportunity of the storm to seek out new labor pools. Signal in partnership with an American labor broker, an American Immigration lawyer and an Indian recruiter, conspired to bring in a group of 500 men from India as H2B guest workers.
- The workers were promised green cards, permanent residency, and the opportunity for long term jobs.
- Sabulal Vijayan: I was working in the middle east, the United Arab Emirates, I saw the ad by Signal that said we would get permanent residency in America. I paid about 18 thousand dollars, I cut my wrists in fear, I tried to kill myself because I spent a bunch of dollars. I was in the hospital for 3 days. I couldn’t go back to my family in India with bare hands, because I spent all the money on this job. Not only me but 500 workers, sold all their land and houses for this job.
- The EEOC, brought a separate lawsuit against Signal, alleging racial and national origin discrimination and hostile work environment.
- Because Sabulal was one of the workers seeking his rights under the law, he was particularly targeted by Signal and rounded up in an early morning raid. The camp was built on a lead contaminated waste site.
- It’s not OSCHA compliant to have 24 guys jammed together in a temporary trailer.
- These are in the United States and in debt. The average income in India is 3000 dollars a year for a ship worker. To pay 20 thousand dollars, you have to sell your property, borrow money from loan sharks. You have to mortgage your whole life for the opportunity to come here. Signal also said if you file a lawsuit, we’ll send all of you back.
- Signal is a marine fabrication company, a multi-million dollar company. They repair and build oil rigs and ships. They have yards in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. They provide services to the Department of Defense and major corporations.
- It was a conspiracy between the Immigration lawyer, the Indian recruiter, the labor broker and Signal.
- Signal got this vulnerable pool of workers who they could throw away whenever they wanted to.
- You don’t have freedom of contract as a guest worker, you’re the disposable property of the employer.
Guest – Chandra Bhatnagar, ACLU Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program. He leads the domestic and international advocacy around racial profiling, affirmative action, and juvenile justice issues, and is engaged in federal court litigation and litigation in international tribunals involving the rights of low-wage immigrant workers, undocumented workers, and guest-workers.
Guest – Sabulal Vijayan, guest worker from India, who is involved in the case. Sabulal, a pipefitter, paid nearly 20 thousand dollars to work in the United States as a guest worker. He worked with others in slave labor-like conditions for Signal International.
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Professor John Ehrenberg: Class Warfare Update and Analysis
Returning guest, professor and author John Ehrenberg joins us in the discussion of where the last 3 years the Obama Administration has led the country. The United States is pouring trillions into multiple war theaters, unemployment continues to rise, CEOs of banks and corporations have been rewarded with taxpayer bonuses and bailouts, and a massive unequal distribution of wealth has polarize the country. Meanwhile, the very rights that protect organized labor and the benefits of workers are attacked and disassembled during one of the worst economic downturns to hit the United States. Corporations and the far right wing of the Republican Party are behind some of the union busting yet even President Obama turned his back on supporting union labor demonstrations. Most recent show with John Ehrenberg
Professor John Ehrenberg:
- The elephant in the room that nobody talks about is the role of the state and the role of the government.
- Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
- What you had since the 1980s is a policy pushed by the Republicans and acquiesced by the Democrats of undoing the Great Society. We’ve seen this in the union busting and refusing to tax the rich. It’s been happening because the Republican party is getting more radical.
- The villan in the room is governmental and fiscal policy.
- The top 1 percent of the population received more than a third of all the wealth created in the country from 1979 to the beginning of the recession. The top 1/10 of one percent, that’s one out of every thousand households, received over 20 percent of all the after tax gains between 1979 and 2005.
- It was a conscious policy. It began in the late 70s by business. If you look at the neo-conservatives of that period, their target is the Great Society.
- Basically in the late 60s and the early 70s, the traditional stimulus programs of the Democrats failed.
- Along comes Reagan and he takes on a radical restructuring of the economy.
- Which began this process of shoveling huge amounts of wealth to the rich, hoping that it would trickle down and you’d have sustained growth.
- Consider that Obama is going to raise a billion dollars for his reelection campaign. Where is he going to get it from?
- Look, anybody at this stage of the game who continues to trust the Democratic party to lead the country out of this mess, is a fool.
- The Democratic Party by itself is incapable of democratic initiative and progressive change unless forced to respond from pressure from outside.
- When do they have enough? The answer in 1100 pages of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is it’s never enough. That the logic of capital is to reduce everybody to starvation and take everything they have.
- This is the motor of the system, this has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers.
- Hopefully people are tired of being pushed around. American exceptionalism, meant that Americans were more tolerant of inequality, than were people from a stronger labor tradition.
- That American’s didn’t care so much if other people got rich as long as they got rich too.
- If you have a situation where Americans are misinformed about the distribution of wealth and are open to appeals to redistribute wealth in the name of fairness and equity, then this is the time for a redistributus Democratic party to step forward.
- If the Democratic Party is even a modicum of sanity in America, it’s because its going to have be pushed again. Pushed and pushed and pushed from outside.
- 55 percent of Republicans want higher taxes on the rich.
- There are local manifestations of outrage and rebellion, in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ft Lauderdale, around different aspects of the mal-distribution of wealth. – but nothing has been coordinated on the national level.
- There are as yet, no forces talking about the system as a whole, as a state.
- There are a lot of indications across the board that people have had enough.
- Go out there and join something and get involved.
- UNICEF publication. The Children Left Behind. Indices: Health, Education, Material Well Being. The United States is last of the 24 countries.
- If you look at the fall of any of the world’s empires, it was a combination of the over reach and the refusal of the rich to pay their share of taxes.
Guest – John Ehrenberg, author of Servants of Wealth, The Rights Assault on Economic Justice, he’s also professor of political science at Long Island University.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Green Scare, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Court Vindicates Prisoners in Right to Challenge Federal Experimental Isolation Units Restricting Communication
Last month, the Center for Constitutional Rights won the right for prisoners to challenge a violation of their constitutional rights. Prisoners in 2 experimental federal prison units called “Communications Management Units” or CMUs, will have their claims heard in court. About 70 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim men. Judge Urbina agreed that the prisoners raised serious constitutional questions about CMUs. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed Aref v. Holder in the D.C. District Court on behalf of current and former prisoners of the units in Terre Haute, IN and Marion, IL; two other plaintiffs are the spouses of those prisoners.
As many listeners may know, these CMUs were secretly opened under the Bush administration in 2006 and 2007. They were designed to monitor and control the communications of certain prisoners and to isolate them from other prisoners and the outside world. The five plaintiffs in Aref were designated to the two CMUs despite having relatively or totally clean disciplinary histories, and none of the plaintiffs have received any communications-related disciplinary infractions in the last decade.
In addition to heavily restricted telephone and visitation access, CMU prisoners are categorically denied any physical contact with family members and are forbidden from hugging, touching or embracing their children or spouses during visits.
Attorney Alexis Agathocleous:
- We’re very troubled about policies and conditions at these units. A number of the restrictions imposed at the CMUs are severe. They are truly cutting people off from their loved ones, they’re community and the outside world
- Blanket ban on physical contact, unparalleled to any other single unit anywhere, including Supermax.
- We feel this needlessly impinges on their right to family integrity and their need to maintain these ties to the outside world.
- What we’re challenging is that there is no due process attached to designation to these (CMU) units.
- Without a disclosure of factual allegations that were used to designate them, without a demonstration of past abuse of communication devices, without a hearing, without an appeal. Once you’re there, no one is told how to earn their transfer to get out. Our clients have benign or in some cases perfectly clean histories.
- What is happening is that Muslim prisoners are being designated there, based on the discriminatory belief that as Muslims they inherently pose a great danger to institutional security, than do other prisoners.
- We’re very concerned also about a pattern of designation of political prisoners and specifically includes environmental and animal rights activists.
- We do believe these are acts of retaliation for protected First Amendment activity, such as speaking out on social justice issues.
- What we’ve asked for in the case is a thorough review of polices and practices in the CMUs.
- What’s next is we’re going into discovery, which is our opportunity to learn a lot more about the CMUs, about their inception, who was involved in designing them and why and about how designations are made.
- CMUs were opened quietly.
Guest – Alexis Agathocleous, staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and works on CCR’s Government Misconduct and Racial Justice docket. He is lead counsel in Aref v. Holder, challenging policies and conditions at the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Communications Management Units, and Doe v. Jindal, challenging a Louisiana law that requires individuals convicted of Crime Against Nature to register as sex offenders.
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Financial Regulators Failed: Crooks Go Unpunished
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday charged Goldman Sachs & Co. and one of its executives with fraud in a risky offshore deal backed by subprime mortgages that cost investors more than $1 billion. The SEC also contends that Goldman allowed a client, Wall Street hedge fund Paulson & Co., to help select the securities to be sold. Paulson in turn bought insurance against the deal and when the securities sank, losing nearly all value, Paulson then made a $1 billion profit.
While these are not criminal charges, the recently released 650-page report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis (PDF) had exposed the deceptive and risky practices within major financial institutions, that deceived clients and the public. New Economics Perspective Blog
Professor William K. Black:
- Many people still call it the subprime crisis, it would be far better to call it, the liar’s loan crisis.
- Roughly half of all subprime loans by 2006.
- Somewhere between a quarter and 49 percent of new home loans, were in the form of liar’s loans.
- The incidence of fraud when there have been independent studies has ranged from 90 to 100 percent.
- A liar’s loan is when there is no underwriting, no verification of what’s put into the loan application.
- Overwhelmingly, it was the lenders who put the lie is liar’s loans.
- You can sell these loans in the secondary market if they appeared to have 2 characteristics that finance has told us you can’t have simultaneously.
- A premium interest rate and low risk. You could have the best of both worlds. The way to do that was to gimmick two ratios. Debt to income ratio and loan to value ratio.
- Inflating the value of homes, covered up by industry. An honest secure lender would never inflate value.
- It makes perfect sense for a fraudulent company to inflate the value of the house so they can sell the loan on the secondary market for a higher profit.
- Then Attorney General Cuomo, now governor found this as a common practice at Washington Mutual, the biggest bank failure. WAMU had a blacklist of appraisers, you were blacklisted if you refused to inflate value of property. None of these people are being prosecuted.
- In 2004, the FBI testified there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis.
- The Savings and Loans debacle cost 150 billion, the current crisis is costing over 10 trillion.
- The Office of Thrift Supervision, Chainsaw James Gilleran
- Instead of being embarrassed that they were working hand in glove with the lobbyists, they were proud of this and put this in their annual report.
- Geithner and Cuomo urged there not be investigations much less prosecutions of the elite financial frauds because he thought the financial system was too fragile.
- The Justice Department ruined an FBI initiative to try and investigate the elite frauds.
- If you are powerful enough, if you have enough ties, after citizens united, and make enough political contributions, you will not be prosecuted.
- You can’t have crony-capitalism and democracy either.
- Big finance is only supposed to be a middle man, it’s supposed to help the real economy, by simply allocating most efficiently capital to the most productive uses.
- Like any middle man you want absolutely minimal profits going to the middle man.
- Under some measures, finance has 40 percent of the total profits of all American businesses.
- This is the worst group of people you can possibly imagine having power.
- We’ve turned too many of our schools into fraud factories, where we train people how to gimmick accounting.
- Citizen’s United is a fragile case, it doesn’t make much sense in terms of the law.
- What these people are, engines for destroying wealth
- They only get 10 billion, they destroy 10 trillion dollars in wealth. They cost 10 million Americans their jobs.
Guest – William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City who has criticized the absence of any criminal referrals or national task force to effectively punish the elite fraudsters. Professor Black teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Muslim Peace Coalition and the United National Antiwar Coalition
Last week, activists took to the streets in a mass anti-war demonstration in the streets of New York and around the country. We talk with one of the organizers. Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, founder of the Muslim Peace Coalition who joins us to discuss his work as executive producer of Chicago’s Radio Islam. He’s among the most well-known Muslim activists in the country and has recently completed a 3 state tour having addressed dozens of mosques demanding an end to the ongoing attacks and spying on Muslim communities.
Malik Mujahid:
- 700 thousand Muslims have been interviewed by the FBI. Most of the mosques have been checked out for atomic bombs. What they think is a Muslim could be a brown skinned guy, who is Hindu, or could be Latino.
- Once you start doing injustice in one group, it doesn’t stay in one group. At this moment there’s quite a bit of inhumanity toward undocumented workers which are in larger numbers.
- The personal cost is very high. A Yale University research, says that 50 percent of Arab Americans have clinical signs of depression. Muslims are last to hired and first to be fired.
- People can get out of this when they realize there’s a criminalization in the inner city.
- Latinos the largest minority in this country lives in a state of fear, becaust they may be mistaken for undocumented and green card holder.
- 75 Pecent of Latinos stopped or arrested for suspect of documentation actually are quite legal citizens from several generations.
- The whole thing is based on a myth that Muslims were responsible for 911 and the continued terrorist attacks.
- War and terrorism are connected through occupation. We say that the hate in the country is rising, we’re becoming an unwelcoming nation. I visited the 1199 in New York and I was surprised how welcoming they were.
- 2.5 million Americans became new gun owners last year.
Guest – Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid is founding Chairman of Sound Vision Foundation, the leading producer of educational content on Islam and Muslims. He is also executive producer of the daily Radio Islam talk show on WCEV 1450 AM in Chicago. Imam Mujahid serves as Chair of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, the premiere interfaith organization in the world. He is former Chairperson of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.
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Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
We’re joined today by two of the three authors of book titled Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Joey Mogul, director of the DePaul Civil Rights Clinic and partner with the People’s Law Office, and Andrea Ritchie, a Police Misconduct Attorney. The criminalization of LGBT people is explained in the book with acute detail and historical research. The book reveals that continual targeting of queers by law enforcement is not an accident but part of a larger systemic issue. The cases covered in this searing book show how the legal system routinely discriminates against those identified as queers. But there’s more to it than that, other factors such as poverty, race and class also make them a target. We learn more about the book and how this discrimination is viewed within the mainstream gay community.
Attorneys Joey Mogul / Andrea Ritchie:
- The term trans-gender is an umbrella term, that is inclusive of gender identities. It encompasses people who are born with a particular genitalia, but whose gender expression or identity is different from their anatomy.
- We use the term criminal legal system because the system has produced anything but justice for people who fall under the umbrella of LGB or T.
- Sometimes its a cop writing you a ticket for disorderly conduct, because they perceive your expression in a public space to be disorderly.
- Once they get to the police precinct and they don’t know which box to check, that can result in being searched. Not for any lawful purpose as contraband, weapons but to determine what your anatomy is because they feel like that’s relevant in which box to check for you.
- What we’re seeing nationwide is police officers unsure of someone’s identity, police stations nationwide have no guidelines in determining someones gender. What we’re seeing is these genital checks.
- There have been transgender women who’ve been searched in San Francisco, who’ve not only experienced these humiliating strip searches but then have been forced to dance or masterbate, in front of these officers.
- They want to humiliate and punish based on their gender identity.
- Really things are getting better for a small minority of LGTB and the vast majority end up facing these patterns of criminalization. In the court systems, we’re seeing individuals whose sexual orientations or gender identity is being used against them.
- Archetype of queers as a security threat. We talk about prisons as queer spaces in that, we see prisons being used as a tool to say that gay people are the predators.
- My home is the People’s Law Office. The work I do is police and government misconduct cases and I do death penalty cases. But I’m queer. I do hold myself out to the queer community and I do get these cases.
- Walking While Trans. One encounter with a cop can change your whole life.
- It’s really important for us to reach out to Guild Members, this is state sponsored homophobia and trans-phobia.
Guest – Attorney Andrea Ritchie, is a police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City.
Guest – Attorney Joey Mogul, a partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University’s College of Law. She focuses on civil rights cases involving police misconduct, criminal cases brought against individuals engaged in street demonstrations and other forms of First Amendment expression, and capital defense cases.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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New York City Rent Laws Set To Expire June 15, 2011
Rent and tenant protections for half of all New York City renter households plus thousands more are set to expire on June 15, 2011. These laws have been the foundation for affordable rental housing for middle-class and low-income New Yorkers. If the rent laws are not renewed, it could lead to unprecedented evictions and homelessness could spiral even further out of control. It’s explained in the above linked article by Patrick Markee Senior Policy Analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, titled Tell Albany: Renew and Strengthen Rent Laws.
Patrick Markee:
- Two out of three households in New York City are renters. Half of all New York City renters are protected by rent and eviction protection laws that go back 60 years to the New Deal era.
- Right now the stakes are as high as they could be and the political environment is as bad as it can be.
- We have a governor who’s been strongly supported financially by the real estate industry.
- Fortunately we have a state assembly there that is strongly pro-tenant. Half of all New Yorkers are rent stabilized apartments which means rent increases are regulated each year.
- The fundamental protection for tenants is they can’t be evicted except for just cause.
- Those protections have been weakened by vacancy destabilization. Because of that we’ve lost 300 thousand rent stabilized apartments over the last decade and a half.
- Right now we have 39 thousand people including 16 thousand children bedding down in the municipal shelter system.
- Just this past month we’ve reached the highest census in the shelter system since the city has been keeping records. Forty percent more people are cycling through the shelter system than when (mayor) Bloomberg took office in 2002
- We’ve had a perfect storm, loss of affordable rental housing across the country, due to Bush Administration cut backs, at the same time, we get the economic recession, and unemployment, add on top of that the foreclosure crisis. 3 out of 4 homeless people are families with kids.
- New Yorkers have a state constitutional right to shelter.
- Contact Governor Cuomo, contact your state legislator.
Guest – Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless and writer of many of the fine articles on the Coalition For the Homeless website.
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The Goldstone Report Now Belongs to the World
Lead author of The Goldstone Report, detailing the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza has changed his position on the issue of targeting civilians. In an editorial by the Washington Post, Judge Richard Goldstone said, “Civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy.” And then Israel has called on the United Nations to retract the report on Operation Cast Lead, the war that led to the death of about 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis. Earlier this year, Law and Disorder talked with co-editors of the book titled, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
Phil Weiss:
- Our book came out 2 years after the Gaza conflict and people said why now, who cares about this? Now we see why.
- This statement by him (Judge Goldstone) was immediately seized upon as a disavowal of the report by many supporters of Israel.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel immediately called on the UN to withdraw the report.
- The US State Department came out and said this just shows there were no war crimes committed during the Gaza conflict.
- What remains in the Goldstone Report? Geneva Convention: Principle of Distinction and Disproportional Attack
- Other important crimes noted in the report: using white phosphorus, targeting infrastructure, destroying a water treatment facility, destroying a flour mill, destroying food production.
- Even you have a military target, you have to attack that proportionately. One Israeli commander said, we don’t want a hair of our soldiers to fall here.
- This (Gaza) is the size of the Bronx and Queens put together
- The central case that Goldstone based his reconsideration was one of the most horrific cases during the war.
- That took place on January 4, 2009 in a village outside of Gaza City.
- The Israelis were trying to secure parts of Gaza City from the east. They seized this area as a strategic base. They had herded 120 members of an extended family into one house. They had forced them to stay there for a couple of days.
- In the midst of this operation, on that morning, helicopter gun ships came and shelled that house, killing 29 people. In the report Goldstone offered this as another case of targeting civilians.
- I would say “because” this report came out, Israel has produced evidence that the helicopter gunship guys misread drone images. Showing men carrying firewood back to this house as being men carrying rocket launchers.
- Goldstone is saying, I accept the Israeli version here, I think that it was out of negligence or a mistake.
- This reconsideration has got more attention than the whole report.
- This fall the UN General Assembly could vote to establish to make Palestine, a Palestinian state.
Guest – Philip Weiss, founder of the blog Mondoweiss, longtime journalist and regular contributor to the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute Philip is the author of two books a political novel, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, and American Taboo, an investigative account of a 1976 murder in the Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga. Weiss is one of the editors of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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In Memory of Attorney Leonard Weinglass
Hosts remember one of the great civil rights attorneys, Leonard Weinglass from his early years as a lawyer in the Air Force to his big cases. Michael Smith shares a great anecdote. Len vigorously defended a black soldier and upset the Air Force brass. They sent him to Iceland for 2 years. Much later in the late fifties, he moved to Newark, NJ, set up a one man office and represented black people in police abuse cases.
The remarkable and heroic progressive lawyer Len Weinglass died on March 23. Among his cases were the Chicago 8, the Ellsberg case and the Cuban 5. He was our close comrade and will be missed by his friends and all those seeking a better world. – Michael Ratner.
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A Poem for Len Weinglass by Linda Backiel
Almost Ready
“I have everything almost ready for the spring,”
you said. Brush cut, brambles cleared, new trees
planted. A lop-sided smile flit across your silver
stubble beard, a late winter field momentarily lit
by a break in a fleet of migrating clouds.
click for more
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Universal Jurisdiction: Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck
Co-host Michael Ratner interviews attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, German civil rights attorney and General Secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. They discuss the effectiveness of Universal Jurisdiction cases. The cases that helped international human rights prosecutions. Specifically the cases in Argentina against corporations that profited from dictatorships and human rights abuses and how Argentina can be used as a model to bring cases against other powerful leaders or corporations. Optimism overcomes cynicism, Wolfgang says its not easy, it’s work bringing cases against the powerful of the world.
Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck:
- I have the privilege to work on behalf of Germans and Argentinian victims of the Dirty War between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina.
- The Argentinian cases and the Chilean cases were the most important phase in universal jurisdiction.
- We filed cases in Germany, Italy and France.
- The idea to file Argentinian and Chilean cases in European courts was not to try Argentinians and Chileans in Europe but to impose accountability in Chile and Argentina.
- That’s what people call the Pinochet Effect.
- In 2005 and 2006 when the amnesty laws were abolished. If you go to Buenos Aries now you will observe military junta tribes from Monday to Friday and you will police officers, military leaders, torturers, guards.
- At this point, special prosecutors and parts of the civil society are demanding an investigation and prosecution into crimes committed by corporations who aided and abetted the dictatorship, or who profited from the dictatorship.
- The history in Argentina, 30 thousand people disappeared, 100 thousand were tortured.
- The human rights movement in Argentina was so strong, that they maintained a certain presence, a certain public attention.
- For us, Argentina is like the blue print. They inspired the human rights movement not only in Europe
- I filed a case at Mercy Dispense because in Buenos Aires, 15 trade unionists were disappeared. We filed the criminal case in Germany against a German-Argentinian manager who had duel citizenship which allowed us to bring the case in Germany. Then we filed a case in the US, an alien tort claims which is still pending. We filed a case in Argentina which is still pending.
- One line is to blame the torturers and the torturer leaders, we want to talk about why these human rights violations have been committed. Why the Argentinian military took the decision to oppress their populations and our explanation is that they wanted to install a political and economic system which needed the extermination of the trade unionists.
- Actually to demand accountability and do these investigations is trauma work. Society that hasn’t dealt with its past has some problems in the present. Argentina is worth studying as an example.
- Universal Jurisdiction is showing its limits. So far it was very difficult to bring cases against the powerful of the world.
- The suspicion that the criminal justice system is just another tool of the powerful against the powerless,
- We have to try to bring cases against the powerful, Russian, China, the US, or Sri Lanka or Israel, who all undertake actions to avoid prosecution.
- We are very optimistic that some investigation will be carried out in Spain but some people are over-pessimistic, because even now, we achieved that several former US officials, or from the CIA or from the Army, or politicians can’t travel anymore, without running the risk to be arrested.
- We achieved something, I’m also not satisfied from it but still its more than we thought possible.
- President Bush wanted to go to Switzerland.
- It’s always an argument against those cynical people who say nothing is possible. Yes there is, something is possible. We do have to struggle to maintain this, the whole international criminal justice system is at stake.
Guest – Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, a German civil rights attorney. He is also the General Secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. On November 14, 2006, Kaleck sought criminal prosecution charges in German court against a number of US officials and military personnel in connection with alleged human rights abuses at the prison facilities at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay on behalf of eleven plaintiffs. Approximately 30 human rights activists and organizations participated as co-plaintiffs
Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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“Operation Libya” and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa
The US and allied air strikes on Libya will have far reaching geopolitical and economic implications. Libya is the among the world’s largest oil economies with near 3.5 percent of global oil reserves, twice that of the United States. What’s going here? As Professor Michel Chossudovsky writes in his article “Operation Libya” and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa.” there is no such thing as a just war. This is part of US imperialism as drafted in the 2000 Report of the Project of the New American Century entitled “Rebuilding Americas’ Defenses.” One of the main components of this military agenda is: to “Fight and decisively win in multiple, simultaneous theater wars”. Libya counts as the fourth theater of war along with Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq. In all of this the mainstream media has used a massive disinformation in justifying this military agenda.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky:
- This is not a humanitarian intervention. It is a carefully planned military operation. This was on the drawing board of the Pentagon, well before the protest movements in Egypt.
- It is a war theater, and should be viewed in the broader context of the war theater, namely Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. It opens up a new area of militarization in North Africa. It has devastating consequences and is part of a global war.
- The object of coming to the rescue of civilians by bombing with cruise missiles is an absurd proposition. They’re bombing civilian infrastructure. The same agenda as the previous war theaters, they have a list of targets and go ahead and bomb. This whole notion of responsibility to protect is nonsense.
- They’re getting away with it because the media is lying through their teeth.
- Clearly there are Al-Qaeda elements that are supported by the CIA. Two years ago, the Gaddafi government made a deal with the CIA. We know that Al-Qaeda is an intelligence asset. It can be used precisely to create these conditions of insurrection as occurred in Bosnia and in Kosovo. We have to investigate a little more, who is behind the insurgency. The insurgency is not there to win a civil war, the insurgency is there to create a pretext for an intervention.
- I suspect this opposition is heavily divided in any event. Obama has ordered drone attacks in Pakistan.
- The Chinese have sizable interests in Libya. This is also directed against France and Italy, its France and Belgium that are being shoved out of Central Africa.
- Libya borders on Niger, its the entry into central Africa. Niger is important because it has large reserves of Uranium, which is in the hands of a French conglomerate.
- The conquest of Libya is the battle for oil, the same logic as Iraq.
- I estimated that Muslim countries have about 65-75 percent of global oil reserves. That is why we’re demonizing Muslims, they happen to inhabit.
- Bahrain and Yemen peaceful protesters getting hit with nerve gas.
Guest – Professor Michel Chossudovsky, director of Global Research.ca , Center for Research on Globalization. An independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
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Community Service Society Report: Black Youth Unemployment
Unemployment in a jobless economic recovery has hit young African American men the hardest according to a recent report by the Community Service Society. PDF The highest unemployment rate in 2009 was among men 16-24 years of age—their overall unemployment rate hit 24.6 percent during the recession. Breaking it down by race, young black men had the highest unemployment rate in this group at 33.5 percent. While only one in four black men ages 16-24 have a job in the city, that figure drops to an astounding one in ten for young black men without a high school diploma.
“The recession has created a landscape of the unemployed and underemployed with particular catastrophic consequences for young African American men,” said David R. Jones, president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York. “We have long known the struggles of the more than 200,000 youth in New York City who are out of work and out of school. Now young black men between 16 and 24 years have become the banner of hopelessness, particularly here in New York City.”
David R. Jones:
- Those who’ve never made the connection to work or those who’ve ceased trying. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people involved here. African Americans constitute about a third of New Yorkers.
- I think people have to recognize we’re in something totally new.
- At least anecdotally, the Great Depression didn’t have this kind of impact on the black community that this recession is having on them.
- New York in the Great Depression was a segregated city, were working exclusively in black communities or trades that were circumscribed.
- You get pullman porters and restaurant work which were the reserves for African Americans before the civil rights movement hit. The homeless of New York were white on Bowery.
- While we’re seeing a better recovery, the number of long term unemployed is actually greater than New York than other municipalities.
- The trouble is you start to lose job skills, you lose hope, all sorts of with friends and employment start to disintegrate.
- We did a report on security guards and I went back to look at it. There are 63 thousand security guards in the city of New York and virtually none of them are unionized, their average wage was $10 an hour, no health insurance, no paid sick leave.
- New York has an usually high concentration of the working poor.
- We’ve been focusing all our efforts, in terms of how we deal with poverty on the issue of on this nexus between work and getting to a position where they can support themselves and their families.
- This is not limited to the South Bronx or Crown Heights, this is a national phenomenon.
- We know when we did our report on disconnected youth, we had 200 thousand disconnected youth in New York, there were nearly 5 million disconnected youth scattered across the country before the recession.
- We’re never going to go back, to the unemployment levels that we found unacceptable in New York of 5% again. That we’re going to back down from the 9.5 %.
- It was always the expectation, if you worked really hard, there’s was going to be a way, sort of a seat at the table here. New York has one of the highest recidivism rates, we’re doing a couple of things, we’re making it impossible to get work, once you’ve been incarcerated.
- We are going to get a group of young people who feel betrayed.
- I think this scapegoating that has taken on a really powerful voice, is partially because people want to blame someone for why they can’t get employment.
Guest – David Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Community Service Society of New York , a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that promotes economic advancement and full civic participation for low-income New Yorkers.
Mr. Jones, an outspoken advocate for low-income New Yorkers, writes bi-weekly newspaper columns in the New York Amsterdam News and El Diario/La Prensa and a weekly blog on the Huffington Post website that serve to educate the public and government officials on issues of importance to minority and poor communities.
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