Law and Disorder September 3, 2012

Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI Intrusion, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Targeting Muslims, Torture

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Updates

  • Michael Ratner: Update on Verdict – Corrie v State of Israel
  • Cardinal Dolan Who Approved Payoffs For Priests Accused of Sex Abuse To Leave Priesthood Gives Speech At RNC and Closing Speech for DNC

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Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic

In the last few weeks, 8 places of worship connected with South Asians or Middle Easterners have been targets in the United States. As many listeners know, six people were murdered at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin but later that evening a mosque in Joplin Missouri was burned down. Other targets recently included mosques in Rhode Island, Southern California, Oklahoma City and Dearborn, Michigan. These tragic events mark another wave of existential Muslim threats inciting fear and violence against Middle Eastern people while helping to justify the ongoing war on terror.

According to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism, since 9/11 to 2010 there have been 155 terror incidents in the U.S., and exactly two of them or 1.3 percent have been attributed to international Islamist terror groups. The majority of events involved individuals such as anti-abortionists, right-wing extremists, or extreme animal rights activists.

The Nation Magazine has highlighted the disproportional focus put on Muslim communities in a special issue titled “Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic.” We talk with journalist Lizzy Ratner and authors Deepa Kumar and Moustafa Bayoumi who contributed articles to the Nation Magazine special.

Lizzy Ratner:

  • The Nation did a special issue about Islamophobia. It came out in the beginning of July. You can still find the majority of the articles online. The real credit has to go to Abdeen Jabara whose idea this really was.
  • The civil rights attorney came to me last year and said the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim has reached fever-pitch.
  • So I began to do some research about what exactly was going on and very quickly compiled a massive roster of possible articles.
  • For the most part, the Left and Progressives have been far too quiet.
  • This bigotry that is flourishing right now has a real history, it’s not a just a product of 9/11 and the post 9/11 era.
  • Some of the seeds of bigotry have to do with the role of the United States historically in the Middle East.
  • Islamophobia served an agenda and a number of purposes.

Guest – New York City journalist Lizzy Ratner has written extensively for the Nation and Alternet on issues involving Islamophobia. Lizzy is also co-editor of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
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Moustafa Bayoumi:

  • I was happy to see that the Nation was happy to take on the question of Islamophobia for a double issue.
  • There’s been a shift in the last ten years from paranoia around security to a paranoia about the basic facts of Muslim life in the United States.
  • In a way you can say it’s a shift from security to culture.
  • At any stage, anything that has to do with a daily concerns about living a life as a Muslim American, somehow now becomes charged with sedition. Part of the funding of the anti-Muslim movement in the United States is basic conservative politics and extreme conservative politics.
  • And also due to the Israel-Palestine conflict. So people who want to come aboard Israel will make a very distorted picture of what Muslim life is like.
  • The NYPD has now a decade long history of “othering” the Muslim-American community.
  • The NYPD had been screening The New Jihad for its new recruits.
  • It’s a crazy film saying that all of the American Muslims are here as a fifth column ready to pounce. It’s a training film for new recruits. That’s true for the Pentagon and the FBI.
  • Muslim Americans are still seen as perpetual foreigners.
  • That Muslim American rights are different than everyone else’s rights.
  • You’re average American consumer of media does not relate to the victims of the Oak Creek massacre because they don’t see them as being part of the American family.
  • They asked American’s in this poll, and 62 percent of the population has never met a Muslim.
  • If you’ve never met a Muslim then it’s very easy to believe all these boogey man ideas. That’s why media plays an important role in this issue.
  • The FBI (training manual) said that it was in the nature of Muslims to try to take over this country.

Guest – Author Moustafa Bayoumi wrote Fear and Loathing of Islam joins us, his book : Being Young and Arab in America, won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for non-fiction. He is also a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

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Deepa Kumar:

  • As of late the anti-Muslim statements coming from Michelle Bachmann, Joe Walsh, all of whom are Republicans, there is a sense of which it is the Republicans who are responsible for Islamophobia, for the demonization of Muslims and so on.
  • This brand of the war on terror gets hatched and part of that was language developed in the 1990s, called the Clash of Civilizations. It was a man named Bernard Lewis who first penned this term.
  • It’s not so much we’re going to carry out revenge on Osama Bin Laden but that we’re going to rescue Afghan women. In the case of Iraq, we’re going to bring democracy when no weapons of mass destruction were found.
  • This rhetoric has a long history it goes back to the 19th century.
  • Both presidents need Islamophobia. They need to generate this fear and hatred of the “Muslim other.”
  • Operation Boulder
  • The Jonathan Institute holds this conference in Jerusalem . . Islamofacism, the roots are sown at that conference.
  • The idea of this menacing Muslim enemy is not new. It was not something created after 9/11 but in fact it goes back a millennium.
  • It’s about political goals but religious rhetoric gets used. Same thing with the re-conquest of Spain.
  • The Islamophobic rhetoric is one that’s mobilized by the elite.
  • I hold both Republicans and Democrats responsible. These rabid right wingers get their confidence from mainstream figures like Walsh, like Bachmann and others.
  • The sad reality is that the Democrats have done nothing to counter this.
  • The Democrats are not an ally in this fight.
  • I take inspiration from 2 movements in the sixties, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. I think these 2 strategies need to come together in fighting Islamophobia.
  • We have to take on both the far right and challenge the priorities of empire and bring together a multiracial coalition that can actually change a generation.
  • It was President Clinton with Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996 which made it legal to actually deport people with secret evidence. We know this lays the basis for the Patriot Act. This has really been a bipartisan project in the interest of empire.

Guest – Deepa Kumar, an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era–neoliberalism and imperialism. Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press, 2007), is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism.

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Law and Disorder August 27, 2012

CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Torture

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Updates:

  • Michael Ratner: Update on Julian Assange

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Attorney Martin Garbus and the Cuban Five

Earlier this summer we talked with renowned First Amendment and civil rights attorney Martin Garbus about joining the Cuban Five’s legal defense team. He recently filed an affidavit in the Miami Federal District Court based on US government misconduct of paying Miami journalists during the Cuban Five’s prosecution 14 years ago. As many listeners may know, these paid reporters covered the Cuban Five case in an almost hysterical fashion. The affidavit supports Cuban Five defendant Gerardo Hernández’ habeas corpus appeal and seeks the overturning of his wrongful conviction.

Attorney Martin Garbus:

  • We’re saying that every person involved in the payments, the government, Radio Marti, the persons who received the payments. The journalists also violated the law.
  • I think it is jury tampering. We’re saying that every dollar that was paid is a violation of the integrity of a jury trial. There were many millions of dollars.
  • We’re saying that the jury trial was destroyed by a propaganda machine.
  • The government then says, well you have to prove that. There are several different allegations.
  • There is Radio Marti. In 1996, just about the time of the shoot down Radio Marti moves from Washington to Miami.
  • It’s the only Voice of America station if you will that doesn’t operate out of Washington.
  • It shows that the government was willing to give the Cuban exiles control over Radio Marti.
  • In 1996, its recognized that Radio Marti is totally internal to effect the Cuban exile population in Miami.
  • They then go to the newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Nuevo Herald and they (Radio Marti) start to give those journalists money.
  • We filed an 80 page affidavit with hundreds of pages of exhibits.
  • We’ve gone through relentlessly of payments made by Radio Marti by the government to journalists. We’ve come up with 11 journalists who have received close to a million dollars.
  • The articles that they wrote should be read fairly carefully.
  • They make the argument that the people who are being tried in the case were the early landing force for a Cuban invasion.
  • American money is being given to writers who are then attacking America which has prosecuted people who have killed Americans.  We’re trying to vacate the conviction.

Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of the country’s leading trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court and the highest state and federal courts in the nation. Time Magazine has named him “legendary . . . one of the best trial lawyers in the country.” He’s also known as the most prominent First Amendment lawyer.

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Washington DC Court Ruling on CO2

In April 2007, the US Supreme Court handed down its first decision related to climate change issues. The case was Massachusetts v. EPA and the high Court held that the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions IF the agency determined that these emissions posed a danger to human health and welfare.  The EPA did in fact make such an “endangerment” finding, and then proceeded to begin the process of adopting regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The initial lawsuit was brought by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, which includes a range of petroleum-based industries, and supported by several states, including Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia.  The EPA, on the other hand, was joined by California, New York, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island, Washington and New York City.  These three rules were challenged on various grounds – in the end the Court upheld the EPA’s action and resoundingly affirmed the agency’s authority and obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Law Professor Eleanor Stein:

  • Rolling Stone: The New Math of Green House Gas and Warming.
  • Greenhouse gases are chemical substances, usually referred to a basket of six which contribute to the warming of the Earth because as they accumulate in the atmosphere they prevent the refraction of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth and back into space.
  • Of these six substances the one often discussed is carbon dioxide which is the most plentiful, methane is among the most potent.  Recent court case – The Coalition For Responsible Regulation Against the EPA – it was decided in the D.C. circuit a month ago.
  • The Massachusetts case at the Supreme Court was about specifically regulation of emissions from new motor vehicles.
  • Once the court ordered the EPA to do its endangerment investigation, it did so and made an endangerment finding in 2009. It found that greenhouse gas emissions were a danger to human health and welfare.
  • The EPA was then required to regulate emissions of new motor vehicles. They did that adopting a set of rules known as the Tailpipe Rules.
  • The EPA went on to adopt a set of rules for stationary sources ie, coal powerplants, those rules are known as the Timing and Tailoring Rules.
  • Endangerment Finding / Tailpipe Rule / Timing and Tailoring Rule
  • The current ruling of the D.C. court upholding the three rules – is a tremendous affirmation of current climate science, its a rejection of a lot of climate denial and other industry.
  • The most extensive discussion is their analysis of the Endangerment Finding, which is the EPA’s analysis of the climate science.
  • The Tailpipe Rule went into effect January 1, 2011. This will make a contribution to reducing emissions.

Guest – Law professor Eleanor Stein teaches a course called the Law of Climate Change: Domestic and Transnational at Albany Law School and SUNY Albany, in conjunction with the Environmental  and Atmospheric Sciences Department at SUNY.

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Pan African Solidarity Hague Committee Serves The ICC

In June of this year, the Pan-African Solidarity Hague Committee delivered a petition to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, Netherlands demanding they prosecute the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and NATO for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya, Cote d’lvoire, Haiti and the US. This campaign began in May of last year when thousands gathered to protest the US/NATO bombing of Libya, attacks on Zimbabwe and the racist assault against African-Americans in the United States. The evidence presented made a prima facie case of crimes committed and was the basis of the petition served this year.

Attorney Roger Wareham:

  • The United States was very involved in the process of setting up the ICC.
  • There are approximately 116 countries that have signed on at this point. Which means there are about one third of the countries in world who have not signed on.
  • After 10 years the court came forward with its first conviction. It was a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo convicted of crimes against humanity.
  • It’s record has been really a court to prosecute Africans.
  • Of the cases that are in front of it now, all of them are Africans.
  • It’s as if people who’ve violated human rights don’t exist outside the African continent.
  • As one observer had said this is really an African criminal court and not an international criminal court.
  • With the international criminal court, non governmental organizations can bring charges, bring communications saying we think there’s enough evidence to begin an investigation and prosecute.
  • The ICC had taken out a warrant against Khaddafi saying he was a human rights violator, committed crimes against humanity, war crimes.
  • In May 2011 when it was clear they were trying to effect regime change and assassinate Colonel Khadaffi we began a campaign to expose that.  We saw the same pattern in terms of what happened to President Aristides in 2004.
  • After the August 2011 rally we had the people’s tribunal in January 2012.
  • In June 2012 we hand delivered the petition to the ICC. We asked to speak to the chief prosecutor. She declined to meet with us for some reason.
  • They don’t want to deal with prosecuting anybody from the West.
  • A communication was brought to the ICC for the war crimes from Operation Cast Lead. Two years later the ICC declined the petition. I think their technicality was Gaza wasn’t a state.
  • There is a campaign by the West to re-colonize the African continent for its resources, to remove those heads of state that are obstacles Western re-penetration.

Guest – Attorney Roger Wareham, a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations, particularly police terror. Wareham is also the International Secretary-General of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization that has consultative status before the United Nations.

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Law and Disorder August 13, 2012

Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister

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Updates:

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The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History.

We continue to look into the the Bradley Manning story, the biggest whistle-blower case in US history. Attorney Chase Madar joins us in the studio, he’s the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History. The book moves through Manning’s childhood and up to what led him to allegedly upload volumes of classified secret information to Wikileaks. Madar highlights the value of publicly exposing the endless criminal and immoral actions while government secrecy spins out of control, classifying 77 million documents a year. He also asks what can be done to protect Bradley Manning as a whistle-blower. Since his arrest 2 years ago, Manning’s formal court martial proceedings are not scheduled to begin until February 2013, and as many listeners know the most lethal charge is aiding the enemy.

Attorney Chase Madar:

  • I worked as a staff attorney for many years at a great non-profit in Bushwick section of Brooklyn doing all kinds of low tech services for Spanish speaking immigrants.
  • I quit that and have been writing about foreign affairs. I got put on the sight of Bradley Manning by Tom Englehart, who edits the great TomDispatch web project.
  • So many important issues collide in this case, whether its the comparative risk to our security of secrecy versus leaks. How we judge threats, how we misassess threats. How we use solitary confinement as punishment, is it an acceptable punishment?
  • What power does information have anyway? A lot of intellectuals think that information has an incredible catalytic effect.
  • Bradley Manning enlisted in the Army in October 2007. He’s deployed to Iraq after all kinds of training in Army intelligence in 2009.
  • He allegedly begins leaking things in early 2010 and he’s arrested in late May 2010 over 2 years ago now. He was held in solitary confinement, very strict punitive isolation in Quantico Marine Corp base in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011.
  • We’re looking at 2.5 years of pretrial confinement.
  • You can divide up the Wikileaks leaks allegedly supplied by Bradley Manning in 3 categories. Iraq material, thousands of war logs: raw reports file by soldiers, Afghan war logs, it’s a composite of a war that’s weirdly aimless.
  • Obama did campaign as the whistle-blower’s best friend, and he has prosecuted twice as many as all previous administrations.
  • Here’s one theory I find persuasive. It’s important for Obama to have the intelligence services on his side. This was a way for him to show the CIA that he would go along them.
  • I would like to see a serious change in foreign policy which has gone off the rails.
  • We haven’t the kind of course correction with Obama that many had hoped for.
  • I hope Wikileaks do disrupt foreign policy more. There’s been all kinds of smack talked about Bradley Manning, he’s a weirdo, a malcontent, he did what he did because he’s screwed up, he did because he’s gay.
  • His motives are very plain to see in the chat logs between him and the informant.
  • The Manning chat logs – they read like a tragic novella.
  • So much of our secrecy law is designed to keep the American public in the dark.
  • I think we have badly confused being clueless with being safe.
  • He comes across as an immensely thoughtful, courageous and very principled young man. In some ways he’s an extreme version of the millennial generation who have a lot of education and potential but find themselves not doing too well.
  • His father was in Naval Intelligence and he’d grown up with a sense of patriotic responsibilities.
  • What makes him turn on the inside and leak these things?
  • He’s asked to look into the arrest and capture by the Iraqi authorities a group of non-violent Iraqi protesters who were handing out pamphlets that were all about corruption in Iraqi government.
  • We are light years away from total transparency.
  • The main thing is to make records of the court proceedings publicly available.
  • I think a guilty conviction and a heavy sentence of at least 50 years is a foregone conclusion.
  • The wages of government secrecy, not security but disaster.
  • It looks like the court martial won’t begin until January or February.
  • Go to the Bradley Manning support network website. Send him a postcard.
  • It’s your patriotic duty to browse the leaks.
  • Legal Atrocities – by Chase Madar

Guest – Attorney Chase Madar , a TomDispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books).  Madar tweets @ChMadar. He’s  a contributor to the London Review of Books and Le Monde diplomatique and the author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books).

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Law and Disorder July 23, 2012

Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power

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Updates:

  • Bradley Manning Trial Update: System of a Star Chamber
  • Julian Assange Extradition / Asylum
  • Occupy Chicago Tribune WIPO Lawsuit Update:
  • Donating to Wikileaks

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Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Filed Over Boycott of Israeli Goods

We follow up on the Olympia Food Co-op lawsuit filed over boycott of Israeli goods earlier this year. For listeners unfamiliar with the case,  a judge in Olympia, Washington dismissed a lawsuit tailored to force the Olympia Food Co-op to rescind its boycott of Israeli goods. The judge ruled that the lawsuit brought by opponents of the boycott violated a Washington State law designed to prevent abusive lawsuits which are aimed at suppressing lawful public participation. Interestingly, an investigation by ElectronicIntifada had unearthed that the lawsuit against individuals with the Olympia Food Co-op Board was also planned in collusion with a national anti-Palestinian organization called StandWithUs that was working with the Israeli government. Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that the lawsuit qualified as a SLAPP, that stands for – – Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.  SLAPPs are lawsuits that target the constitutional rights of free speech and petition in connection with an issue of public concern.  Recently, the five Olympia Food Co-op members who had sued to overturn the store’s boycott of Israeli goods must pay $160,000 in damages.

Attorney Barbara Harvey:

  • The judge had before him the issue whether to assess a single statutory penalty of 10 thousand dollars on behalf of all 16 co-op members who served on co-op board members who were sued by the defendants, or would the judge order each individual statutory penalties to each defendant.
  • He decided to order individual statutory penalties to each defendant for a total 160 thousand dollars.
  • The plaintiff sued 16 board members past and present. Standwithus produced a youtube video of the five plaintiffs just before they filed the litigation.
  • The five co-op members didn’t look upset given the judge’s decision. If they’re not upset, why not? – which suggests the costs will be covered but we really have no way of really knowing that.
  • This victory discourages the opponents of the movement for Palestinians to engage in this kind of litigation.
  • TIAA-CREF which manages financial assets of 470 plus billion dollars announced that they had decided to remove Caterpillar from their Socially Responsible Investing Accounts.
  • That’s because Caterpillar supplies Israel with these militarized bulldozers that are sold under Department of Defense contracts to Israel which are used to tear down civilian homes in Palestine.
  • Caterpillar is the poster child of divestment and boycott and TIAA-CREF has done that.
  • All other customers that use that SRIA account will be divesting from Caterpillar.
  • Our campaign is to persuade companies like TIAA-CREF to divest from companies around the world that profit from the occupation.

Guest – Barbara Harvey,  a Detroit attorney who has worked with BDS activists and a former JVP Board Member
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Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism PART 1

Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism is the title of Professor Rick Wolff’s new book.  After more than a dozen interviews with Rick Wolff since 2008, the theme is consistent, beyond the corrupt banks and stock markets is a flawed economic system. A system that at worst needed to change direction in the 1970s when wages stopped increasing and the cost of living continued to rise.  As we look around, the collapse has been coming down in steps, and many have been trying to dial back, save and prepare. This, as millions have lost their jobs, 401ks, pensions, and homes.  Overseas, the waves of austerity continue to push through Europe as protests have erupted again in Spain.

Professor Rick Wolff:

  • The book is an interesting venture for me, it’s done with David Barsamian, with Alternative Radio.
  • He did 3 major interviews with me, the response was so heartwarming, we published a written version of them.
  • The book is an overview of how we got into this mess, why it’s lasting so long, why it’s hurting so badly, why government policies have in fact, not succeeded.
  • A number of the economies in Europe are on the edge of major breakdown. Spain is already in that situation, Italy is right on its heels. This is not like Greece or Portugal, Ireland or Hungary who are smaller economies, these are major economies.
  • There is active debate in the highest circles of Europe, both critics of capitalism and its leaders, questioning whether the European Union can survive . . its a measure of how serious the problem is.
  • China, by its own announcing running at a rate of growth of 7- 8 percent which is half of what it had very few years ago.
  • It can’t also escape the effect of Europe which is its second most important market.
  • China is trying to reorient the economy away from their dependence from exports to the rest of the world because frankly that’s not a reliable situation for them. To give you one index.
  • As wages in the United States stagnated, wages in China have gone up 20 percent.
  • The slow downs in India, very sharp. The slow downs in Brazil, very sharp.
  • The consensus is what Bernanke said. Things are very poor, very weak and we really have to be alert.
  • The situation is only going to deteriorate over the rest of 2012 and into early 2013.
  • When a capitalistic economic system begins to unravel. . . we’re in the fifth year of this crisis. It officially began in December 2007.
  • Every major government program, the bailouts, the stimulus has not achieved the goals it said it could and would.
  • The biggest capitalist institutions in this country at this time, the banks. . .are in such trouble are so worried about their own prospects in an economy in such difficulty that what they are doing is taking excessive risks, pushing the envelope of what’s ethical and moral and crossing the thin and blurry lines of legality.
  • LIBOR – London Interbank Offered Rate – Starting in the 1980s, London which had been the financial center of the world economy realized what we all understood at that time which was the world economy was becoming dependent on credit.
  • Every corporation was borrowing money all the time, every government was borrowing money on a scale we’ve never seen before, the really innovative thing was the development of consumer credit.
  • The LIBOR became the benchmark for the world.
  • Everyday the British Bankers Association polls the 16 biggest banks who have offices in England, what they are charging each other.
  • It takes an average and it announces that. That number is a standard number for example, variable rate mortgages in the US where the mortgage goes up and down those are based on LIBOR.
  • It’s factored into everybody’s borrowing. If you’re going into store to buy a pair of pants, that store also borrowed money which is also shaped by a relationship to LIBOR.
  • These banks are the biggest holders of debt instruments. Derivatives of all kinds, mortgages of all kinds. You are relying on information from somebody who has an active interest in the information they’re supplying.
  • What we now know is these banks often reported an interest rate different from what they were actually charging.
  • There was no oversight.
  • The world of superbanking is a very cozy world. Barclay’s had admitted to reporting a number that was actually the case. . . and had paid fines now totalling 450 million dollars to both US and British authorities.
  • To be blunt they screwed everybody to save themselves.
  • How could we defend private banking on this scale ever again?
  • The big ones are Bank America and Wells Fargo.
  • Both of them have both agreed to pay fines. Bank of America – 300 million. Wells Fargo 175 million.
  • Here was what their fine was for. They went and charged African American and Hispanic families more interest for mortgages than they did for whites who had identical credit scores.
  • Five of the biggest banks in the world Barclays, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and JP Morgan Chase have all admitted major breaches of minimal ethics, minimal morality, legality all to advantage themselves at the expense of the public.
  • Private monster banks are an unsafe way for any society to manage the credit that has now become central to the economy.  It is inappropriate for us to have banks that have more money than the government supposedly regulating them.

Guest –  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 in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.

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Law and Disorder July 16, 2012

CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture

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Updates:

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Campaign To Release Russell Shoatz From Solitary Confinement Into General Population

Last year, the National Lawyers Guild called on Superintendent Louis Folino to support the Program Review Board’s recommendation to release Russell Maroon Shoatz into the general prison population at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. As many listeners may know, Russell Maroon Shoatz has been held as a political prisoner under intense lockdown spending no more than one hour a day outside of his cell for the past 21 of those years. He was locked up in 1972 for his activity as a member of the Black Liberation Army. We follow up on the international campaign to release Shoatz. The effort was launched in New York City and London and sponsored by the Scientific Soul Sessions.

Theresa Shoatz:

  • He goes before the Program Review Board every 90 days, its about 68 visits since he’s been in solitary confinement. He hasn’t had any infractions in 30 years.
  • If you look at that, they don’t intend to release him into general population.
  • It’s a check-off, how has response been around the guards? What’s your response when you’re taken to the shower?
  • Russell had become disappointed with the Program Review Committee and said “I’m not going anymore.”
  • I called the Program Review Committee at SCI Greene, and said we’re getting tired of this no-movement forward.
  • They said they look down on that as not cooperating with the prison. We look at as they’re not cooperating with all the rules they set forth. There is a step down program, they don’t use it as much as they should.
  • When you talk about holding one person in solitary confinement, he has to be transferred, whatever his movement, to the shower, to the one hour cage, it takes two guards.
  • SCI Greene released at least 20 prisoners from solitary confinement who they had no intention of releasing but because the state budget is in jeopardy now.
  • They left Daddy back there. Daddy’s approaching 70 years of age, he hasn’t had an infraction in 30 years, you would’ve thought he’d be the perfect person for this step down program, and we questioned that.
  • When I talk to the staff in solitary confinement, they all say he needs to be general population.
  • Superintendent Folino retires in 2 years and I think he may want to slide out without releasing him into population.
  • Russell escaped in 1977, in the 80s, he was in population at SCI Pittsburgh.
  • He had been voted the first black president of the Lifers Association.
  • Folino states that he is a leader and he is to remain in solitary. The director of the Program Review Committee actually stated that he is a leader. Obviously Theresa, you don’t know he’s a leader?
  • Outside of him being a leader, he’s been able to withstand this 23 hour a day lockdown.
  • I do see there are some changes with Russell. I’m talking emotionally, he’s very distraught now.
  • I’m shocked that he hasn’t totally broken down.
  • He gets a lot of mail. He’s busy with letter writing.
  • I found there have been a lot of suicides in SCI Greene’s solitary confinement unit. Boys in their twenties hanging themselves. You don’t hear about it.
  • This is torture. In 2005, there were 80 thousand people in solitary confinement.
  • Juan Mendez’s report on Russell Maroon Shoatz
  • My focus is on getting Maroon into population. I’m concerned with stopping the expansion of prisons being built. It costs millions of dollars to build new prisons, instead of using that for education for prisoners being released.
  • Put that money back into public schools instead of building new prisons.
  • We’re being assaulted by this present day prison system and our government nor our state seems to mind locking up folks or taking away money from our public school education and putting it into prisons.
  • Congressional Hearing on Solitary Confinement
  • hrcoalition.org / Russell Maroon Shoatz

Guest – Theresa Shoatz,  a Philadelphia-based prison justice activist and the daughter of Russell Shoatz.

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Glenn Greenwald:  Challenging the Surveillance State, Breeding Conformists

Glenn Greenwald,  author and contributor (columnist and blogger) to Salon.com. During his book tour for the release of With Liberty and Justice for Some, (paper back release) he gave a impactful speech in Chicago titled Challenging the Surveillance State.

 

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Law and Disorder June 25, 2012

Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Hydraulic Fracturing, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Updates:

  • Occupy Chicago Tribune Getting Sued Under World Property Intellectual Organization
  • Julian Assange Applies For Political Asylum – Twitter @justleft / @wlcentral

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Austerity and Coalition Government in Greece

Last week we discussed the popularity of the Syriza Party, Greece’s skyrocketed unemployment and the huge military contracts Greece is locked into with France and Germany.  In part two of our interview with Greek-American National Lawyers Guild attorney Eric Poulos we discuss the assembling of the coalition government in Greece and the economic implication.

Attorney Eric Poulos:

  • New Democracy and Syriza’s the left wing coalition opposed to the bailout got the most votes. New Democracy got about 2 percent more which is the conservative center right party.
  • Syriza got 27 percent. The Social Democrats did terribly and got only 14 percent.
  • The fascist party the Golden Dawn unfortunately kept the same percentage. The one part that lost a lot of votes was the Communist Party.
  • Almost 40 percent of the voters did not vote. I think people are just worn out.
  • Everybody across the board has taken a 15 percent reduction in pay.
  • New Democracy Party will be appointed Prime Minister.
  • Fifty percent of the cops voted for the fascist party – Golden Dawn
  • Greece is a country that was occupied by Hitler and caused untold loss and devastation.
  • This coalition that ran Syriza is a coalition which is 12 or 13 different groups.
  • The election is incredible in that it changed nothing, it changed everything, because the same parties will be ruling.
  • The people of Greece continue to suffer, it doesn’t create one job. It doesn’t help to pay for one prescription.
  • It’s not just Greece, it’s Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland too.
  • I think the only hope is that they can hook up with other countries with united action to fight against the European Union policies.
  • There has to be an upsurge in the fight against the fascists in Greece.

Guest – Attorney Eric Poulos, writer and National Lawyers Guild member.

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Reverend Billy and the Spectra Pipeline Protest Event

The plans to bring a 30 inch gas pipeline through the West Village of Manhattan is on the fast track with the support of Mayor Bloomberg.  Spectra Pipeline is the company that will deliver the high pressure natural gas hydrofracked from the Marcellus Shale deposits. A heavily protested and contentious process itself. According to an expert radioactive waste this natural gas can contain radon 70 times above normal. Radon is a tasteless odorless gas created naturally during radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and radium. The EPA reports radon causes 21 thousand deaths from lung cancer each year. NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally

Reverend Billy:

  • Our basic mission statement . . .stop shopping children. Our basic mission statement has remain the same over 10 years now.  The project of Guiliani and Bloomberg to turn our great city into a suburb.
  • It was WBAI project, Cornell West, Chris Hedges, we sang and were the house choir. The jury of those great peers found Goldman Sachs guilty of robbing from us and charged them with 87 billion dollars I believe.
  • We sat down and lock arms in the old civil rights position. A nice circle of locked arms.
  • Out of the 15 that got arrested, I was about the 8th to leave the fold. I think that eight of them will be the Blankfein 8.  It’s a lifestyle change, if you’re really gonna go all the way with these . . . we weren’t blocking anybody. . it was symbolic.
  • Those ziplock handcuffs they have, they yank on them. In the precinct house an hour later your hand is purple and I had a numb thumb for six months.
  • Sometimes shopping is a chain store that buys sweat shop goods, and sometimes its our consumption of power. How do we heat? How do we use electricity?
  • That of course is decisive in terms of climate change, which has increasingly become everybody’s politics.
  • We’ve kept fracking out of upstate New York to some degree, but Cuomo is going to let it in to some degree.
  •  They want to come from the Far Rockaways with a pipe called the Constitution and they’re coming under the Hudson River and appearing into the Meat Packing district.
  • It’s mysterious Cheney was able to keep the report of what those chemicals are from the American people.
  • We have a 700 seat house there and we’re going to take the audience over two blocks to where the pipeline is to surface.
  • I don’t think the consumer society makes prosperity.
  • A lot of the communities in our country where people are watching television all day, eating sugar and fat and unable to operate, where the kids go into the pipeline of jail. . .needs the energetic compassion of change.
  • We’re becoming our own third world here, we need to pay attention to our communities. Get those Wall Street companies out of our communities and ask ourselves what do we have that makes value here?  Right under foot, right in my neighborhood.
  • It begins with living on less money, but begins with finding value in what we do with our lives.
  • You go up the counties where Cuomo is exploding their aquifers, this just makes it worse.
  • Some people are going to get a 100 thousand dollar check. It reminds me of the wrong person winning the lottery.
  • NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally

Guest – Reverend Billy, (Bill Talen) A student of the writers Charles Gaines and Kurt Vonnegut, Talen has staged experimental plays, published essays and poems in Philadelphia, New York and California. At Life On the Water, a theater in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Theater, Talen presented artists such as Spalding Gray, Mabou Mines, David Cale, B. D. Wong, Holly Hughes, William Yellow Robe, the Red Eye Collective, Reno, John Trudeau, and Danny Glover reciting the works of Langston Hughes.  This experience in producing led him to the confessional monologue.  After studying with the cleric Reverend Sidney Lanier, Talen invented “a new kind of American preacher.”  Lanier, the cousin of Tennessee Williams and subject of the work Night of the Iguana, was familiar with the re-staging of biblical narratives

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