Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution
The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world. Interpreters of the Constitution are faced with the challenge of how, over time, to read a document that’s not only old but also inflexible.
In his new book Fidelity & Constraint, by Oxford University Press, Lawrence Lessig, one of the nation’s leading legal minds, explains that a fundamental approaches to interpreting the constitution is a process he calls translation. In fact, some of the most significant shifts in constitutional doctrine are products of the evolution of the translation process over time. In each new era, judges understand their translations as instances of “interpretive fidelity,” framed within each new temporal context.
Throughout American history, there has been a second fidelity in addition to interpretive fidelity: what Lessig calls “fidelity to role.”
In each of the cycles of translation the role of the judge — the ultimate translator – has also evolved. Old ways of interpreting the text now become illegitimate because they don’t match up with the judge’s perceived role.
When that conflict occurs, the practice of judges within our tradition has been to follow the guidance of a fidelity to role. Ultimately, Lessig not only shows us how important the concept of translation is to constitutional interpretation, but also exposes the institutional limits on this practice.
The first work of both constitutional and foundational theory by one of America’s leading legal minds, Fidelity & Constraint maps strategies that both help judges understand the fundamental conflict at the heart of interpretation whenever it arises and work around the limits it inevitably creates.
Guest – Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig serves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund, and on the advisory boards of Creative Commons and the Sunlight Foundation.
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Free Range Kids
You may have heard about the shaming of parents who let their son or daughter walk to school by themselves, or ride public transportation alone. They’re often ridiculed on social media and cast as neglectful. But in some instances, the consequences have gone beyond public shaming.
In 2015 parents in Silver Spring, Maryland made national headlines they were investigated for child neglect for letting their children, ages 6 and 10, walk home from a park by themselves.
In another case Lenore Skenazy, a former New York Daily News columnist was called America’s worst mom after writing a column in 2008 about why she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway by himself.
Last year, Utah passed a law making it not a crime for parents to let their children play in a park without supervision or walk home alone from school. This is hopeful news for our guest Lenore Skenazy who has been advocating for so-called free range parenting laws for many years.
Under the law, neglect does not include allowing a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities such as going to and from school by walking, running or bicycling, going to nearby stores or recreational facilities and playing outside.
A recent U.S. Census showed that 7 million of the nation’s 38 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are left home alone on a regular basis, while the average time spent alone is six hours per week. Only a few states legislate an age under which kids may not be home alone.
Guest – Lenore Skenazy – New York City columnist-turned-reality TV show host got that title after letting her 9-year-old son take the subway, alone. In response to the enormous media blowback, she founded the book and blog, “Free-Range Kids,” which launched the anti-helicopter parenting movement. She has lectured internationally, including talks at Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House, and has written for everyone from The Wall Street Journal to Mad Magazine. Yep. The Mad Magazine. And she’s a graduate of Yale.
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Censorship, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Attorney James Goodale On Julian Assange Arrest
Last week, at the behest of the U.S. government, police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested Julian Assange on charges of espionage. This case promises to threaten the First Amendment rights of all journalists. We’re honored to have one of the nation’s foremost authorities on First Amendment law, Attorney James Goodale. In the April edition of the Atlantic, he wrote an article titled, Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment Protection.
Listeners may recall that last fall, a court filing inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretly indicted for conspiring with his sources to publish classified government material and hacked documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee, among other things.
Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 to provide a place for newsworthy information to be confidentially released. The site came gained prominence when Assange obtained thousands of classified documents relating to the Iraq War from US Army soldier Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning.
Guest – Attorney James C. Goodale has represented The New York Times in four of its cases to go to the Supreme Court: the Pentagon Papers case (The New York Times Co. v. The U.S.), The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (libel), Branzburg v. Hayes (see below) and The New York Times Co. v. Tasini, (digital rights). He developed the argument that the Espionage Act does not apply to publishers or the press.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Government could not stop the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, holding that prior restraints were barred by the First Amendment unless the publication “will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people.” He became known as the “father of the reporter’s privilege.” A prolific writer, he has written two books on the First Amendment, The New York Times v. The U.S. and All About Cable, and approximately 200 articles, particularly on the role of the press in the Information Revolution.
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Al Otro Lado and the Border Crisis
United States President Donald Trump said that we have a “crisis” on the border. He called it an “infestation” and said that “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Last week he fired Kirstjen Nielsen who as the head of the Department for Homeland Security pursued the most aggressive enforcement strategy of any secretary in the history of the organization. Nielsen and the Trump administration has separated children from their parents and instituted an illegal turn back policy using tactics to restrict the numbers of asylum-seekers who want to access the asylum process at points of entry like Tijuana and El Paso.
Tactics used by the administration include lies, intimidating coercion, verbal abuse, physical force, out right denial of access, unreasonable delay, threats, and family separation. The Center for Constitution Rights is currently representing Al Otro Lado, a legal and human rights organization that helps migrants at the border. They are challenging the U S. Customs and Border Patrol on its turnaround policy in a pending lawsuit.
Last month CCR’s chairwoman of the board and Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke met six students in Tijuana Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, to advise migrants on what they will face in the hands of US legal authorities.
- Al Otro Lado provides essential legal support to migrants to prepare them for the asylum process in the U.S. You can support here.
- Santa Fe Dreamers also provides free legal support to immigrants, with a particular focus on transgender immigrants.
- Please visit this site if you are interested in contributing to the parole/bail fund for detainees.
- If you are interested in serving as a sponsor for an asylum seeker.
- This video offers a very good portrait of the situation at Chaparral where La Lista is maintained and asylum seekers wait for their number to be called.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Franke, is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project (Formerly the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project). She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
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Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Truth to Power
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Updates:
Attorney Chesa Boudin: Prison and Cash Bail Reform
Recently we have seen people who are progressives run for the office of prosecutor in cities across the country. This is an office which many people associate with police departments with whom they closely work. The new crop of reform minded prosecutors are saying that the criminal justice system is broken, that it is costly, classist, and racist. They say it is ineffective in keeping people safe and that 2/3 of the people convicted wind up back in prison in a few years.
Guest – Attorney Chesa Boudin who is currently an Assistant Public Defender in San Francisco. He is running for the office of district attorney in that city. The ideas for reform in the criminal justice system that he has put forward in his campaign are receiving wide attention and considerable support. Boudin was instrumental in getting the discriminatory practice of cash bail eliminated in San Francisco.
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OxyContin Epidemic And the Sackler Family
In March, the maker of OxyContin and the family that owns the company, reached a $270 million settlement with the state of Oklahoma over the painkiller’s role in the nation’s opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma is based in Stamford, CT and is controlled by the Sackler Family.
The money will go toward creating a National Center for Addiction Studies and Treatment at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. The deal comes two months before Oklahoma’s lawsuit against Purdue and other pharmaceuticals blamed for the crisis was set to go to trial.
Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin more than two decades ago, marketing the highly addictive drug aggressively to physicians. It has made billions of dollars from the drug but faces approximately 2,000 lawsuits from state and local governments trying to hold the company responsible for deadly epidemic.
The Centers for Disease Control reports the prescription opioids like OxyContin were a factor in a record 48,000 deaths across the U.S. in 2017.
Purdue Pharma has settled other lawsuits over the years, and three executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2007. But this is the first settlement to come out of the current coast-to-coast wave of litigation that focuses on the company’s more recent conduct and threatens to drive it to bankruptcy.
Guest – Liz Whyte, an award-winning reporter for the investigation news organization the Center for Public Integrity. Politics of Pain Report. She is a reporter for the Consider the Source state politics team, where her investigative work has won awards from the National Press Club, Editor & Publisher, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the New York Press Club and local chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Misuse of Grand Juries And The Prosecution Of Chelsea Manning
The Trump administration wants to prosecute the news organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. In order to do so they have recently jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who has been in solitary confinement since March 8th, 2019 in hopes to squeeze her to get testimony that could be used against Assange. Prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture.
Chelsea Manning has refused to answer questions of the Government Prosecutor in front of a grand jury. In 2010 Chelsea Manning, then in the Army, released documents to WikiLeaks known as the Iraq War Logs. One of them was a video showing a U.S. Apache attack helicopter killing 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, two children and a passerby who stopped his van to rescue the wounded. She maintains that there’s nothing new to be learned and that she’s already given full testimony.
Chelsea Manning was convicted and served 7 years of a 35 year sentence before her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama. The prosecution of WikiLeaks for accepting leaked secret documents is a threat to press freedom and would criminalize journalism. The government is trying to frame Assange charging him with actively colluding with Manning, not just being a passive recipient of the leak. Historically grand juries have been misused in order to suppress political dissent.
Write to Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement:
Chelsea Manning
Ao181426
William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center
2001 Mill Rd.
Alexandria, VA 22314
Guest – Attorney Michael Deutsch, an expert on the misuse of grand juries. He is a partner in the Chicago law firm The People’s Law Office and a former director of litigation at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He has represented political activists and victims of government repression. Among his clients have been the Attica prisoners in the 1971 uprising, Puerto Rican independence fighters, members of the black liberation movement, grand jury resistors, and Palestinians falsely accused of terrorism.
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The Brooklyn Folk Festival April 2019
In the political radicalizations and social upheaval’s within the United States of America in the 30s and again in the 60s, we saw an increased interest in folk music. This phenomenon is repeating itself today. We speak today with Eli Smith, the producer of the Brooklyn Folk Festival. He is a banjo player, a folklorist, and a member of the string band The Downhill Strugglers. The Brooklyn Folk Festival is the largest of its type in the country and is now in its 11th year. It takes place in Brooklyn Heights at the historic Saint Ann’s Church this April.
Guest – Eli Smith, a musician, producer and activist from Brooklyn, who has helped organize the event. Eli Smith is also a folklorist and music producer who organizes the annual “Brooklyn Folk Festival.”
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U.S. Appeals Court Opens Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Case
In 2016, the United States appeals court re-instituted the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case against a private military contractor CACI. Since that time, the plaintiffs have had multiple victories.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is representing the abused prisoners. CCR‘s legal director Baher Azmy said “There is no question that torture is unlawful under domestic, military, and international law. The only issue in this case is whether CACI Will be held accountable – or treated with impunity – for its role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Now, the case is set for trial in Alexandria, Virginia on April 23.
Guest – Attorney Katherine Gallagher filed the case nearly 11 years ago and she is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Katherine works on universal jurisdiction and international criminal law cases involving U.S. and foreign officials and torture and other war crimes, and cases involving private military corporations and torture at Abu Ghraib. Her major cases include Al Shimari v. CACI, the international U.S. torture accountability cases, and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) v. Vatican, seeking accountability for the crimes against humanity of sexual violence by clergy and cover-up.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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U.S. Peace Council Returns From Venezuela
The Trump administration is attempting to illegally overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela and its president Nicolas Maduro.
The effort is being led by Trump’s recently appointed envoy Elliot Abrams, the notorious convicted perjurer who was complicit during the Reagan Administration in the massacre and cover up of the mass slaughter of indigenous people in central America.
John Bolton is working alongside Abrams. He recently showed the American government’s intent by flashing a hand written sign on a yellow pad stating “5000 troops to Venezuela.“ Showing his contempt for international law, he famously said that if the top part of the United Nations building was lopped off it would not make any difference.
So far the United States has been unable to topple all the Venezuelan government. Unable to win over the Venezuelan military the United States is now embargoing Venezuela, which is a form of a medieval siege, aimed at depriving Venezuelans of food and medicine. The U.S. government and its ally Great Britain have frozen Venezuelan assets held abroad and prevented trade with the country, whose economy has shrunk dramatically.
The United States has secured support for it’s coup attempt from the right wing governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile as well as the countries of the European Union.
Guest – Ajamu Baraka has recently returned from Venezuela. He is on the steering committee of the US Peace Council, which organized the trip. Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, writes for the Black Agenda Report, and was the 2016 Green party candidate for vice president.
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Reprieve: UK Human Rights Group
A year after the death penalty was abolished in the United Kingdom, in 1999, human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith founded the nonprofit organization Reprieve. Smith has represented over 300 prisoners facing the death penalty in the southern United States and has helped secure the release of 65 Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and others internationally who claim that the United States government has tortured them.
Reprieve currently works to represent 15 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, as well as an evolving caseload of death row clients around the world. It investigates international complicity in extraordinary renditions, and has recently started working in Pakistan with the Foundation for Fundamental Rights to begin discussions on the use of drones there.
Guest – Katie Taylor, a Deputy Director at Reprieve who coordinates the Life After Guantanamo Project. Katie has worked at WarChild UK and in Palestine on human and childrens’ rights issues for several local and international agencies.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Iraq War, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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My Lai Memorial Exhibit
The aggressiveness of United States war machine has killed 500,000 people since 911, caused millions of people to be displaced, and all this at a cost of some $6 trillion.
President Trump has said that “all options are on the table” regarding sending troops to Venezuela. His National Security Adviser John Bolton said that Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are part of the “troika of tyranny ” – in the US’s gun sites. After first promising to withdraw troops from Syria, Trump has reversed himself. Troops are still fighting in Afghanistan after 19 years. Iran remains the ultimate target in the Middle East. How did our country get to the state? What was done 50 years ago in the Vietnam era by millions of American citizens which help end in 1975 the American war in that country?
March 18 marks the 51st anniversary of the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Their American troops murdered 504 Vietnamese women, old men, children and babies. It marked a turning point in the American peoples’ revulsion and consequent mobilization against the war.
Guest – former Navy Lieutenant Susan Schnall of Veterans for Peace. She became famous in 1968 when she dropped antiwar leaflets from an airplane on navy ships in San Francisco Bay.
Guest – Mac MacDevitt – is an associate member of Chicago Veterans for Peace and Committee Chair of the My Lai Memorial Project. He is an artist, storyteller and educator who came of age and was forever changed during the Vietnam War. He was radicalized by witnessing the wounded fellow protesters, beaten by US Marshals as night fell after the March on the Pentagon in 1967. In 1981 Mac did a social work internship at the VA Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont in the psych department where he experienced vets dealing with ghosts from Vietnam and earlier wars.
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Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics
The United States is unique among advanced countries in having the greatest inequality, highest poverty rate, highest portion of its population imprisoned, and highest proportion lacking healthcare.
Victor Wallis’ new book Democracy Denied offers a succinct history of several traits unique to the nation.
It came out of a lecture series in China and presents a historically grounded perspective on these traits, including chapters on “American exceptionalism,” on U.S. imperialism, the trajectory of African-descended people in the United States, efforts to develop a socialist alternative to the dominant institutions, and the current configuration of U.S. politics.
Guest – Victor Wallis is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. For twenty years he was the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. He is the author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (2018) and of many articles on topics related to environmentalism, social justice, and radical politics. Victor’s activism dates from the 1960s and encompasses issues ranging from U.S. foreign intervention to prisoners’ rights.
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