Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Targeting Muslims, Torture, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
—-
Economic and Political Fallout From British Exit
A domino effect has begun as banks and investment firms lose billions in the wake of Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. The value of the British pound has dropped more than 9 percent and global financial markets are in free fall. In a recent Truthdig article, 2008 All Over Again, by Chris Hedges, economist Michael Hudson blames the Brexit vote on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He says this a response to the US war policy in the Middle East and Ukraine that destroyed Libya, and turned over weapons to al-Qaida. Those weapons ended up in their war in Syria. The mass exodus of refugees into Europe fueled nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Meanwhile, countries such as France, Austria and the Netherlands are positioning to do the same as the UK. Many suspect the banks will again turn to governments for bail outs as they did in 2008. The question is: how will the American public respond to the effects of ever increasing inequality, destruction of the environment and trade deals that benefit the one percent?
Guest – Chris Hedges, author and journalist, who publishes weekly on Truthdig. He’s written 11 books, including New York Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Other books include “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). He’s a former war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
—-
Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Margaret Kunstler
For our Lawyers You’ll Like series we’re joined today by civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler. Throughout her career she has provided support and protected the rights of activists. She’s been a consultant to the Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous protesters. Her book Hell No: Your Right To Dissent in 21st Century America was co-authored with Michael Ratner and it remains a leading handbook for activists. Attorney Margaret Kunstler has advised Wikileaks, Bradley Manning supporters in connection with grand jury subpoenas.
Together with her late husband William Kunstler, the subject of the documentary Disturbing the Universe, Margaret worked on high profile cases including the Virgin Island Five, Attica and Wounded Knee. She is the founder of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice that works to combat racism in the criminal justice system. Margaret was a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild NYC Mass Defense Committee that provides legals observers at demonstrations and represents those arrrested. At the Center for Constitutional Rights, she worked as an attorney and educational director and authored the well known pamphlet “If An Agent Knocks.”
————————————————-
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Cuba, Death Penalty, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Gaza, Green Scare, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Hydraulic Fracturing, Impeachment, Iran, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
¡Michael Ratner Presente!
We hear excerpts from Michael Ratner’s public memorial held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Manhattan, New York. It would have been Michael’s 73rd birthday on June 13, 2016.
¡Michael Ratner Presente! was co-sponsored by Cooper Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Democracy Now!, National Lawyers Guild, The Nation Institute, Nation Magazine, Haymarket Books, and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Michael Ratner’s Politics – By Michael Smith
—————————————————————————–
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide
To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian presents a 60-minute documentary special titled “Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide.”
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Dallas 6 Trial: No Conviction, Ends In Mistrial
In April of 2014 we spoke with Chandre Delaney, an activist and the mother of Carrington Keys, one of the Dallas 6. The Dallas 6 are a group of inmates who in April 2010 protested the ongoing abuse from prison guards while locked in solitary confinement known as the Restrictive Housing Unit at SCI Dallas prison in Pennsylvannia. Abuse included tasering genitals, being hog tied, cutting off clothes and leaving inmates in cages for hours. The inmates protested by placing bedding over the window of their cell doors to attract attention of the prison administrators. Instead of receiving assistance, the inmates were brought up on riot charges.
The Dallas 6 are Andre Jacobs, Anthony Kelly, Anthony Locke, Dwayne Peters, Derek Stanley and Carrington Keys and were forced to stay in solitary confinement for up to 10 years.They presented testimony in December of 2013 describing the details of their abuse in solitary confinement. The trial for the remaining 3 of the Dallas 6 ended in a mistrial.
Guest – Attorney Michael Wiseman who is representing Dwayne Peters of the Dallas 6. Michael is a criminal defense litigator focusing on criminal and capital defense at trial, on appeal and in post conviction proceedings in state and federal court.
—-
21 States Introduce Anti-BDS Legislation
Israel advocacy groups and state law makers who support them have introduced anti-BDS legislation in New York California Florida and 19 other states across the United States of America, including the US Congress.
BDS – boycott , divestment, and sanction – is a peaceful tactic to pressure Israel to comply with international law and to influence public opinion and policy in the U.S. in favor of respecting the human rights of Palestinians.
The demands of the BDS movement are : Israels’ withdrawal from the territories of the West Bank which they have occupied since 1967 and the right of Palestinians expelled by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967 to return to their homes and equal rights for Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.
Support for BDS is now more widely rooted and impactful than ever before. Israel and its supporters in the USA are failing to slow down their gradually intensified isolation.
As a result we are seeing well-funded campaigns to silence Israel’s critics. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has called this “the greatest threat to free speech in the west.”
Guest – Attorney Rahul Saksena with Palestine legal, a group formed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild to defend the civil rights and civil liberties of critics of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
—–
Humanitarian and Economic Crisis in Puerto Rico
There is a humanitarian and economic crisis in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since it was invaded in 1898. Puerto Ricans are unable to vote for president or Congress, enter into trade agreements, control their own borders, issue tariffs, or, unlike any other state or city or corporation, they are unable to take advantage of a bankruptcy laws to restructure their debt. There are 3 million people living in Puerto Rico and their government owes $72 billion in bonds bought up by American citizens and corporations. For the last seven years there’s been a fire sale of Puerto Rican assets, including the sale to private interests of the largest airport on the island and the largest highway. Forty percent of the population are unemployed. Three weeks ago Puerto Rican governor Alejandro Padilla signed into law an emergency bill that would allow him to suspend the counties debt repayment. $422 million is due on May 1, 2016.
Guest – Attorney Linda Backiel – long-term National Lawyers Guild member. Linda practices law in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
——————–
Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Seeds Of Fascism In The United States
There has been much discussion in liberal and left circles about whether Donald Trump is a fascist and whether the country is in danger of becoming fascist. It is pointed out the Trump is a demagogue, lies, is for violence, is a racist against Muslims and Mexicans, and is misogynist with respect to women. He is for bringing back torture and and increasing American aggression in Syria.
Guest – Professor Paul LeBlanc, a professor of history at the La Roche College in Pittsburgh and has written and participated in the US labor, radical, and civil rights movement. Professor LeBlanc is the author of books on the European revolutionaries Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxembourg. With respect to America, he wrote “a short history of the US working class.” And co-authored with economist Michael Yates the highly acclaimed “freedom budget for all Americans: recapturing the promise of the civil rights movement in the struggle for economic justice today.”
—-
United States, Cuba Relations 2016
The Cuban revolution of 1959 was not just a political revolution. It was a social revolution. The 99% took over the resources of their own country and the 1% fled to Miami. In response United States began a blockade of Cuba in 1960. A memo written by a senior State Department official laid out American policy. It advocated “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads into denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the Castro government. ”
Last year United States reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba and last week Obama said in Havana that “I affirm that Cuba’s destiny will not be decided by the United States or any other nation. We talk about the US relations with Cuba and President Obama’s recent visit with Walter Lippman.
Guest – Walter Lippmann, editor of the Cuba News Yahoo News Group.
—-
8th Annual Brookyn Folk Festival
Co-hosts Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian are joined by Eli Smith to talk about the upcoming Brooklyn Folk Festival. Eli is a banjo player, writer, researcher and promoter of folk music. He’s a Smithsonian Folkways recording artist and produces two folk festivals annually, the Brooklyn Folk Festival in the Spring and Washington Square Park Folk Festival in the Fall.
—————————————————————
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
Co-hosts Heidi Boghosian And Katherine Franke Discuss Past Decisions By The Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
—-
An Evening of Solidarity: PAROLE FOR THE MOVE 9
We hear select presentations from the many speakers and performances at the Parole For The Move 9 event. In the summer of 2015 supporters of The Move Organization initiated a petition for United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch . The goal of the petition is to push the United States Attorney General to investigate the wrongful and ongoing imprisonment of The Move 9 who have been imprisoned since August 8th 1978. Last May marked 30 years since the unconscionable bombing and murder of the MOVE family by the U.S. government. Live Stream of the MOVE9 event.
Speakers:
Johanna Fernandez, Campaign to Bring Mumia Home
Civil Rights Attorney Lynne Stewart
Amina Baraka, Poet/NJ Activist/Movement Leader
James McIntosh, CEMOTAP
Imam Al-Hajj Talib, Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, Inc.
Harabic Tubman, Existence is Resistance
Calib Maupin, Press TV
Pam Africa, MOVE as Master of Ceremonies
Sponsored by: The MOVE Organization; Resistance in Brooklyn; NYC Leonard Peltier Support Committee; Pro Libertad Freedom Campaign; NYC Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal; Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network; Universal Zulu Nation; and many more.
————————————————–
