Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Immigration, Right To Dissent, U.S. Militarism
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Leadership Failure Within The Democratic Party
The unfolding events in Los Angeles after Donald Trump called up the National Guard in violation of federal law and his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act are but his latest assault on democracy and the Constitution. Lawyers, social justice organizations, and watchdog groups are fighting back in over 245 lawsuits against the Trump administration winning over 180 injunctions. Last Saturday, thousands of NO KINGS rallies were held in every state of the Union.
But many are asking: Where is the Democratic Party in all this? Opinion surveys show the public is not impressed with Democratic leadership. What are Democrats in Congress and in state governments doing to oppose Trump and offer the American people an alternative? And what more should they be doing?
Guest – Alan Minsky, the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). Previously, Alan was the longtime Program Director at KPFK Radio Los Angeles and the coordinator of Pacifica Radio’s national political coverage. Progressive Democrats of America was founded in 2004 to transform the Democratic Party and our country. PDA seeks to build a party and government controlled by citizens, not monied interests, with policies that serve the public and the planet. PDA is proud to say that they transformed American politics by successfully drafting Bernie Sanders to run for President as a Democrat in 2016.
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Protests Erupt Over University and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Partnership
A controversy is brewing at St. John’s University in Queens in New York—an institution known for its Catholic and Vincentian mission to serve the poor, the immigrant, and the marginalized. A recently announced partnership between the university and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has sparked backlash among faculty, students, alumni, and human rights advocates. In dispute is a new Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies, a training center for homeland security professionals created in collaboration with CBP’s New York Field Office.
Since the announcement, more than 900 members of the St. John’s community have signed a petition calling for the immediate termination of the partnership. They contend that working with an agency accused of human rights violations—notably against immigrants and communities of color—is in opposition to the university’s core religious and moral code. The petition to university leadership, notes concerns about academic freedom, the safety of immigrant students and faculty, and the ethical implications of normalizing CBP practices on campus.
Like any controversy, there are many angles. Supporters of the partnership cite the benefits of real world training and federal job opportunities. However, our guest today will tell us about potential downsides.
Guest – Professor Gary Mongiovi’s main area of specialization is the history of economic ideas, particularly those of John Maynard KAYnes and Karl Marx, and non-mainstream approaches in economics. Recently he has been working on the ideological role that economics plays in society. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Review of Radical Political Economics since 1994. His writings have appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Catalyst, Critical Sociology, Social Research, Metroeconomica, and The Nation.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine.
The world looks on in horror as Israel continues its genocidal assault on the Palestinian people. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, “the only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told this to lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.” According to our guest today, Chris Hedges, the Israeli war in Gaza “marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians…matter.”
In a recent piece, Hedges claims that “the genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come. It puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles.”
Guest – Chris Hedges, the journalist and author spent two decades as a foreign correspondent serving as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of 14 books including War is a Force That Gives us Meaning, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he co-wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and The Death of the Liberal Class. His recent book is A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine.
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The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime
As V.I. Lenin observed, “There are times in history when nothing happens for decades and other times when decades happen within days” He should know. He was the leader of the Russian revolution which overthrew the feudal Tsar and changed the history of the 20th century. We are living in a time when history is unfolding very rapidly. Trump and his coterie of the upper 1/10 of 1 percent aligned with the mostly lower middle class MAGA movement have taken huge steps upending and overturning the kind of democracy, however, limited by race and class, that we have lived with since gaining independence from England 250 years ago.
We are experiencing the transition to a new absolutist executive. Trump and the ideologues who have shaped his MAGA movement is a president who acts on the premise that whatever he does is lawful. He claimed full power to close down departments like the Department of Education, impound congressionally authorized spending, deport people without due process, while ignoring the courts. This is what he calls “a unitary executive.”
The classic definition of fascism is that it is one of the political forms that capitalism may assume in its monopoly imperial phase. It has a material foundation in a tenuous alliance between sectors of the extremely rich monopoly capitalists and a mobilized lower middle class. The key to fascist rule is the privatization of large parts of the government on behalf of the monopoly class. This ideology now in ensconced in the White House.
The right wing is opposed to environmental governance, they don’t believe in climate change. They are against open borders, universal healthcare, and green energy. Those who advocate for these beneficial movements are called “cultural Marxists.”They refer in a derogatory way to all contemporary progressive political causes. They call it “woke.” They use the term as it means to belittle all social justice struggles against racism and inequality, Its most common usage is as a racist dog whistle.
These fascists want to secure their rule by getting control of the entire cultural apparatus of society, a process that the Nazis, the German fascists of their time,called “bringing it into line.” The current attack on universities is the most recent example.
Guest – John Bellamy Foster is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prominent scholar on ecology and the author of many books, including “Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce”. Professor Foster is the editor of the venerable socialist magazine “Monthly Review“ and the author of the article The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime in its recent May 2025 issue.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age
Homelessness in the USA has reached catastrophic proportions. In New York City alone 125,000 people are homeless. One out of eight children in public school are homeless. Shelters for homeless people are overflowing. Many sleep outside or in the subway system. Their conditions of life have driven many of these people over the edge.The problem is long-standing and quite evident.
There’s a lack of affordable housing. Why? Because building affordable housing is not as profitable as building luxury housing. How realistic is it to get money for affordable housing when the oligarchy in power lacks empathy and only seeks to enrich itself, shift money from the bottom to the top, and poor people have very little political clout in the two party system.
Guest – Patrick Markee is a prominent advocate and policy analyst known for his extensive work on homelessness in New York City. He worked at the Coalition for the Homeless for several decades. Markee’s forthcoming book Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age pinpoints systemic factors such as economic and equality, housing affordability, and policy decisions that have perpetuated homelessness since the regular administration 40 some years ago.
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Silencing Those Speaking Out Against The US-Israel War In Palestine
All across this country, academic freedom is under severe attack. Why? Well, at colleges and universities, professors and students who dare to speak out in defense of the Palestinian people and condemn Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people, have been censored, disciplined, fired, deported, and arrested. Universities are told who they can hire and what they can teach under the threat of the cut-off of grant money. This is so that, in our ever more authoritarian country, centers of opposition can be brought into line, as they were in Germany. And these attacks on academic freedom are not limited to actions by university administrators, but include those by the federal government, as well.
Visiting scholars, adjuncts and lecturers without tenure have had their contracts terminated, or haven’t been renewed. Some had their classes suddenly cancelled. Faculty members who espouse views contrary to official U.S. policy vis-a-vis the Israeli-U.S. war in Palestine have been criticized in ways that have trampled on their reputations and hurt their careers. As an excuse for this present-day McCarthyism, college and university administrators, and President Trump, often claim their censorious actions are undertaken only on behalf of ensuring their Jewish students feel “safe” on campus and to fight so-called “anti-Semitic speech and actions” on campus. But there is a distinct lack of evidence to support their claimed motivation. In fact, the largest pro-Palestinian actions on campuses are often organized by Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
We ask our guest Professor Alan Wald about McCarthy-styled witch hunts against academic personnel, and learn how federal law is being misused as a mechanism of political repression against academia. We’ll also discuss the role that controversy over slogans such as those condemning Zionism play in this new attack on academic freedom, and what strategies are best employed today by the opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza against these attacks, as the ever more deadly Israeli-U.S. war in Palestine continues.
Guest – Professor Alan Wald, the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan…which, I might add, is my alma mater. Professor Wald has authored nine books related to today’s topic. He has been a socialist scholar since the 1960’s, and is currently an editor of the journal Against the Current, as well as a member of the editorial board of Science and Society. Professor Wald is also a founder of the University of Michigan’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine committee.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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A New Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement Amid Tension
In 2015 the United States and Iran negotiated an agreement designed to allow Iran to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy, but not nuclear weapons. That agreement was terminated in 2018 during Trump’s first administration, and sanctions on Iran were re-imposed, sanctions that have proven to be very damaging to Iran’s financial well-being. Now, Trump has said his new administration is prepared to enter into a new nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran. But at the recent conclusion of what was the third round of U.S.-Iran negotiations on the issue, negotiations that appear to have gathered momentum, Israel’s Netanyahu has demanded that even Iran’s nuclear program for peaceful uses be dismantled, something Iran has steadfastly refused to consider.
Will Israel be successful in opposing Iran’s development of a nuclear program even if it is limited to peaceful uses? If Iran will not agree to give up its peaceful uses of nuclear energy, is a war between Israel and Iran inevitable? Meanwhile, the back-and-forth attacks by Israel on Iran and Iran on Israel continue. Just last week the Houthis, an Iran proxy, dropped a missile near Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. All of this raises the question, “Would the Trump Administration join Israel if it waged war on Iran, perhaps including its nuclear facilities and how would other Middle Eastern nations respond if war did break out between Israel and Iran and, perhaps, with the United States fighting alongside Israel?”
Guest – Richard Becker is the Western Regional Coordinator of the ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—Coalition, and the author of Palestine, Israel the U.S. Empire and of the book The Myth of Democracy and the Rule of the Banks.
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Entrenching Authoritarianism: Expanding the Terrorism Framework and the Infrastructure of Surveillance to Repress Expression and Stifle Dissent
Recently, the Center For Constitutional Rights along with a group of four human rights organizations together with legal clinics published a new report urging the United Nations to denounce the accelerated disintegration of democracy in the US. The report focuses on the US government’s increasing criminalization and repression of free speech, dissent, and protest under the guise of “national security.” The report was then submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is scheduled to formally review the United States compliance with its human rights obligations in November. The link to the report is above.
Guest – Attorney Nadia Ben-Youssef, the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights is quoted saying “Our hope is that the report sounds the alarm for the international community to act with greater urgency to challenge this administration and its belligerent efforts to dismantle constitutional protections and international law.” She directs all advocacy around issues related to the promotion of civil and human rights. Together with the legal, advocacy, and communication teams, Nadia identifies opportunities for the Center for Constitutional Rights to make strategic cultural and political interventions that shift public narrative and policy on our issues.
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, War Resister
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A Constitutional Crisis In The United States
America is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. More than 200 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration during his first 100 days in office, resulting in more than 100 injunctions and stays, as he lays waste to fundamental constitutional protections and laws passed by Congress.
On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump had the audacity to sign an executive order claiming he was “restoring freedom of speech.” Instead, his administration is systematically destroying the right to speak freely, to write freely, to dissent freely, and to protest freely.
Trump ordered the elimination of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies in both the public and private sectors and targeted several leading American universities, threatening to withhold federal funding for indoctrinating students with “woke” ideology, and for failing to combat antisemitism, by which he means criticism of Israel. He shut down the Voice of America and the Smithsonian Museum. He canceled the security clearances, government contracts, and access to federal buildings of several prominent law firms because he didn’t like the clients they represented. He even excluded the Associated Press from the White House because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.
In one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment, the Trump administration canceled foreign student visas and deported legal permanent residents, claiming their campus protests were contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.
Guest – Dahlia Taha, is a Policy Manager at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, where she leads the First Amendment and Civil Liberties work. Dahlia is a Palestinian-American Muslim. Prior to joining the MPAC team, she served as a Project Manager at The Texas A&M Foundation, where she researched and analyzed maternal health policy. At MPAC, Dahlia works to champion policies and initiatives that uplift and advocate for the Muslim Community nationwide, with a particular focus on protecting the First Amendment, academic institutions, and the next generation of American Muslims.
I am particularly pleased to have Dahlia with us today, because she and I are about to launch a podcast called Rapid Response, sponsored by MPAC, in which we will examine the struggle of students and community members – Muslims, Jews, and allies -, who have been targeted by the Trump administration for expressing political views in favor of Palestinian rights and sovereignty which the government is seeking to suppress.
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Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World
One of the most consequential pillars of U.S. military power is also one of its most overlooked: our vast network of overseas military bases. In his meticulously researched book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, author and anthropologist David Vine reveals how more than 800 U.S. military installations scattered across foreign lands are not merely symbols of strength—they’re often sources of harm. From the Pacific islands to the Middle East and Europe, these bases have become fixtures of American empire. However, they rarely receive the scrutiny they deserve from policymakers or the public.
Vine documents how this sprawling base network fuels geopolitical tension, fosters anti-American resentment, and props up authoritarian regimes. He shows how bases displace local populations, pollute ecosystems, and even affect the mental health and family lives of U.S. troops stationed abroad. And while Pentagon officials downplay the cost, Vine’s analysis reveals that maintaining these foreign outposts drains nearly $100 billion each year from U.S. taxpayers—money that could instead fund urgent domestic priorities.
Perhaps most troubling is how these bases have enabled decades of interventionist wars, making it easier for the U.S. to engage militarily across the globe without addressing root causes of conflict or engaging in genuine diplomacy.Our guest will discuss what a post-base foreign policy might look like, who benefits from the current system, and what’s behind the emerging bipartisan calls to rein it in
Guest – David Vine is a writer and political anthropologist. David was a professor of anthropology at American University for 18 years (2006-2024), He is also the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Right To Dissent, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, War Resister, worker's rights
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Oligarchs and Billionaires Reshape Economic-Political Landscape
We’re living at a time of profound changes in the institutions that previously governed our society. One hundred years ago V.I Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, observed that sometimes nothing changes for decades and at other times decades-long changes occur within several days.
This is what is happening now in America as the old institutions, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the universities, the media, the government, including Congress, governmental agencies, the elite law firms, educational institutions and most recently long-standing tariff policy are being reconfigured as instruments of authoritarian rule.
More than 800 billionaires form the upper crust in America. Three people alone own as much as the entire bottom, half of the population. Democracy, the rule of the people, however aspirational, no longer prevails. We have become an oligarchy, a majority of our people ruled by a relative handful. Our institutions have rapidly changed to reflect this new reality.
We are governed by an amoral man who’s only interest is in power and money, which is another form of power.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux, author of many books and articles, including most recently a piece in Counterpunch titled Abducting Bodies, Silencing Dissent : Mamoud Kailil and the Rise of State Terrorism. Professor Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies department and is the Pablo Frère, Distinguished Scholar in Creative Pedagogy. Henry Giroux has authored many books, most recently with Anthony DiMaggio, titled, Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy.
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Critical Media Update: War Made Invisible
With respect to the Israeli/U.S. war in Gaza, peace talks limp along; Israel has accelerated its war in Gaza and the West Bank; and recent remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Donald Trump, make it clear that both countries intend, if they can do it, to ethnically cleanse all of the Palestinian people from Palestine, thereby bringing about the expected end result of their genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
Meanwhile here in the United States, President Trump has seized upon the claim of rampant anti-Semitism on our nation’s college and university campuses to deport non-U.S. citizen leaders in the movement on the campuses in support of the Palestinian side in the war, and to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the campuses until they eliminate the “anti-Semitic atmosphere on our campuses.” And, according to our guest today, press reporting in the mainstream media on the war has been less than clear and balanced.
Guest – Norman Solomon is the co-founder of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and is, in fact, the author or co-author, of 12 books, most touching on today’s topic in either close or tangential ways. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The paperback edition of his latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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