Economics, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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An Economic State Of The Union: Professor Richard Wolff
President Donald Trump did not deliver the traditional State Of The Union address to the American people and Congress last week. Instead, for nearly two hours, he hosted what amounted to a MAGA campaign rally. Trump’s approval rating is under 40% and sinking. The two uppermost concerns of the American people are their increasing economic difficulties and their opposition to ICE and its reign of terror in major American cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He put both forward as huge successes.
Trump has secured a budget of billions of dollars to fund ICE, which has more money going forward than is in the combined budgets of all the state and local police departments in the United States. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is either building, or leasing, space for huge detention centers across the country. Trump has issued National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 (NSPM7) which targets critical thinkers. NSPM7 was then supplemented by a list of laws by Attorney General Pam Bondi, which she indicates will be used against these disobedient critical thinkers and activists.
Guest – Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of Understanding Capitalism. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist. He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.
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US-Israeli Attacks Against Iran, IEEPA Tariffs And Cuban Fuel Blockades
More than 1,000 Iranians — primarily civilians, including 180 students at a girls’ elementary school in Minab — have been killed in the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, that was launched February 28 by President Donald Trump and his accomplice, accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This aggression has destabilized the region and triggered Iran’s legitimate exercise of self-defense.
Trump claimed he attacked Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. But U.S. intelligence has found that Iran is not acquiring nuclear weapons. Before the February 28 U.S.-Israeli attack, the country of Oman had been brokering negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. and Israel insisted that Iran stop enriching uranium, limit its ballistic missile program, and end support for its “proxies” Hezbollah and the Houthis.
On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister said on CBS News that the negotiations had made significant progress, and a nuclear agreement was “within our reach.” Nevertheless, Trump maintained that diplomacy had been exhausted. The U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran the next day.
One month before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Trump issued an executive order aimed at tightening the U.S. noose around Cuba’s neck. Trump’s January 29 order preposterously declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” without providing a shred of evidence. He warned that he would impose punitive tariffs on states that deliver fuel to Cuba. Trump’s intention is to suffocate the Cuban people, who rely on oil for 80 percent of their electricity.
On February 20, however, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s massive tariffs because they exceeded authority delegated by Congress under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The IEEPA authorizes the president to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats. Later that day, in response to the court’s decision, Trump issued an executive order ending IEEPA-based tariffs, including those that would penalize countries that ship oil to Cuba. That order stops the collection of all IEEPA tariffs, including those threatened in his January 29 Cuba emergency order.
Trump’s attempt to tighten the fuel blockade of Cuba came on the heels of the U.S. oil blockade of Venezuela, which had supplied more than 50 percent of Cuba’s oil. Countries that provided Cuba with oil, particularly Mexico, halted their shipments after January 29. Oil shipments to Cuba have virtually stopped. The lack of electricity has led to widespread blackouts, impacting hospitals and essential services. Cuba’s oil reserves could be totally depleted by March.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, a former host on Law and Disorder is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law, and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory board of Veterans For Peace, she is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and serves as the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She writes a regular column for Truthout, including two recent ones about Cuba and Iran.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, genocide, Human Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
Civil liberties attorney Cindy Cohn is widely recognized as one of the leading voices on digital freedom in the United States. As she prepares to step down as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, she leaves behind a 25-year legacy at the forefront of the fight for online rights. Over the years, she has helped shape some of the most important debates around encryption, government surveillance, and freedom on the internet.
Cohn first rose to national prominence in the 1990s as lead counsel for the EFF and PhD student Daniel Bernstein in Bernstein v. Department of Justice. That was the landmark case establishing that computer code is protected speech under the First Amendment. During the height of the so-called “crypto wars,” that decision helped free encryption from government control and shaped the security of the modern internet.
As legal director, and then as executive director, at EFF, Cindy has led major legal challenges to NSA mass surveillance. She as defended independent security researchers, fought government overreach justified in the name of national security, and pushed back against expanding corporate data collection. A central voice at the intersection of law and technology she has shaped debates over encryption, privacy, online speech, and civil liberties in the digital age. Her new book, Privacy’s Defender, published by MIT Press, reflects on those battles and what comes next.
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Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
By all that is right and just, we will be rid of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States on January 20, 2029. But we will not be rid of the tremendous damage he is causing to our country. And we will not be rid of the cruel, populist, racist, White Christian, patriarchal, and nationalist MAGA New Right ideology that now dominates the Republican Party. Even after Trump decamps to Mar-a-Largo, MAGA will continue to pose an existential threat to our constitutional democracy.
We need to fully understand that there is an extensive, well-financed ideological structure made up of think tanks, publications, university institutes, and PhDs, that provide an intellectual patina to this dangerous movement. Unless the pro-democracy resistance exposes and dismantles the MAGA New Right, it will find replacements for Trump and will continue to wreck havoc, destroying the lives of people in the United States and around the world.
Guest – Laura K. Field is the author of the revealing new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Field holds a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin, and has written for The New Republic, Politico, and The Bulwark. Field’s exposure of the ideological foundations of the MAGA New Right is based on copious research and her own experiences while she was embedded in that movement. She says she is grateful she “extracted” herself from that world as she saw how untethered the mostly privileged male purveyors of MAGA’s dangerous tenets are from the everyday struggles of real people. She realized how dedicated they are to eliminating the hard-fought advances our pluralistic society has won based on the values of equality, compassion, and justice.
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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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Chris Hedges: Assessing The Political Landscape In 2026
What we are going to do in this segment of today’s Law and Disorder is learn the thinking of our guest on the following questions. Is there a meaningful ceasefire in Gaza? When will the Palestinians have their own sovereign nation? Is it reasonable to still designate America as a democracy? Is President Trump an authoritarian and would-be dictator? Is it quite possible that the 2026 mid-term elections will be cancelled or so demeaned as to be totally unrepresentative of the true will of the American people?
Guest – Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, and the former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. Among his more than a dozen books are American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America; The Greatest Evil Is War; and A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine. Chris Hedges is also one of the contributors to the book titled From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, a book composed of summaries of interviews with guests here on the Law and Disorder radio show, and available for purchase at O/R Books.
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Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand
Hitler’s fascist organization came to power in Germany. It employed the violence of Hitler’s storm troopers. There is a parallel today with President Trump’s administration and the MAGA people employing the violence of ICE to terrorize people in our large cities. Hitler tried unsuccessfully to distance himself from the violence of the storm troopers. He was not successful because of the brilliant cross examination by German attorney Hans Litten, who put Hitler on the stand and subjected him to a devastating three hour cross examination. Today we re-broadcast Law and Disorder founding cohost attorney, Michael Ratner’s interview with Benjamin Carter Hett, the history professor who wrote the book Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand.
Author Benjamin Hett outlines the fascinating and tragic story of a young lawyer Hans Litten in his recent book Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand. Before the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, they incited calculated violence among the working class in German taverns. Four Nazi stormtroopers were charged with firing randomly into a dance hall where a communist hiking club were holding a party. Three young men were wounded. Hans Litton was the advocate for the 3 men.
Hans Litten called Hitler to the witness stand to show that the Nazi party was a violent party, and by cross examining Hitler he tried to prove that. Litten forced Hitler to contradict himself, reducing him to humiliating rage that revealed his true intention. At that time, Hitler wanted to be a legal party in Germany and of course you couldn’t be a party that was extra-constitutional and legal but at the same time he didn’t want to disappoint the base of his party which was this violent working class aspect. Two years later, the Nazi Party rose to power.
What came after the Reichstag Fire was the arrest of about 5 thousand people across Germany who the Nazis have identified as opponents or potential opponents. Hans Litten was among them and sent to a concentration camp. Author Benjamin Hett describes a powerful narrative of Hans facing torture yet still telling stories and teaching art to other prisoners. Hans Litten was born in 1903 in Halle in Central Germany, his father was a law professor and Jewish but converted to German evangelical (Lutheran).
Guest – Benjamin Hett, author of Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand. Hett is a former trial lawyer, and now Associate Professor of History at Hunter College.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Immigration, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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How to Stop a Nuclear War – Part 2
Two weeks ago, we spoke with award-winning journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay about his upcoming documentary, How to Stop a Nuclear War. Scheduled for release in fall 2027, the film draws on in-depth interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and is narrated by Emma Thompson. It examines just how close humanity has come to nuclear catastrophe — and why Ellsberg’s decades-long warnings about nuclear policy and power remain urgently relevant today.
We ran out of time in that conversation, so we’re very glad to welcome Paul Jay back to the show to pick up where we left off. Today, we’ll continue our discussion about the ongoing nuclear threat, how it’s shaped by political and corporate interests, and what the public needs to understand in order to push for meaningful change.
Guest – Paul Jay, award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and founder of theAnalysis.news. Jay has spent decades investigating the inner workings of government, corporate power, and military policy, combining investigative rigor with a storyteller’s clarity. He is currently working on a new project, How to Stop a Nuclear War, a groundbreaking documentary set to be released in the fall of 2027 based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thomson. Through rare interviews and in-depth research, the film examines how close humanity has come to nuclear catastrophe—and why Ellsberg’s warnings remain urgently relevant today.
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New York City Council Member Organizes Against ICE Raids
We are at a turning point in the history of the United States. If the people in the city of Minneapolis, can defeat ICE, they will have demonstrated they can win anywhere. This is a strong momentum in rolling back fascism here in the USA. ICE, above all, is criticized as being a terrorist outfit with a purpose to terrorize the population. Yet in contrast, ICE claims to be looking to capture and deport illegal immigrant criminals. It has a massive budget of $179 billion for the next three years. They have sent 3000 agents into Minneapolis and outnumber the Minneapolis police force five to one.
Two weeks ago, Renee Good, a poet and mother of three children was murdered during a confrontation with ICE agents. The official claim is that she’d threatened an ICE agent with her car. Last week Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the VA hospital was murdered during an anti-ICE protest. Did Kristi Noem, the Trump appointed head of the Department of Homeland Security lied when she said that Pretti was out to massacre ICE agents? Both murders were filmed by people in Minneapolis and showed widely online and on television, exposing ICE for what it is, and the government for the false narratives it attempts to spread.
If they can get away with it in Minneapolis it will spread fear in Los Angeles and New York, or Philadelphia and Memphis, Washington DC and Portland, Maine, or everywhere and anywhere. Despite ICE’s huge budget of billions, it can be defeated. The actions of the people of Minneapolis have inspired communities with hope. And without hope, we tend to do nothing.
What can we do to resist and defeat ICE? The people of Minneapolis have shown the way. They’ve created a network of people working together, providing aid and support, block by block, Signal chat by Signal chat. They’ve provided food for those afraid to leave their homes, driven their kids to school, protested in the streets constantly, no matter how extreme the cold weather.
We speak today with New York City Councilwoman Alexa Aviles. She represents the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, New York, and has been organizing against ICE.
Guest – Alexa Aviles is a socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (the “DSA”). She was born in Puerto Rico, the youngest of seven children. She came to the United States as a young girl. Aviles attended Columbia University and recieved her Master’s degree in public administration. She’s the mother of two daughters. Before being elected to her position on the City Council in 2021, she worked for decades in social justice work. She was elected to the City Council five years ago and ran on a platform supporting affordable housing, workers’ rights, immigrants, and environmental health. She’s Chair of the Immigration Committee of the Council.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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How to Stop a Nuclear War
In 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the “Doomsday Clock” to draw attention to the existential dangers posed by human technology. The time was set to seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing destruction of life on Earth. Just two years before, in 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world saw firsthand the potential of a nuclear annihilation.
As World War II was ending, a different kind of conflict was underway: the Cold War. And over the next four decades, the United States and Soviet Union competed for nuclear dominance—not only through foreign policy and military strategy, but also on the home front, using propaganda and retaliation against critics. Throughout this period, people of conscience, like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the early 70s, repeatedly sounded the alarm. Ellsberg and others warned that there was no way to “win” a nuclear war. If one side launched a nuclear weapon, the other would inevitably respond, leading to mutual destruction.
Today, more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race continues. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, nine nations continue to stockpile nuclear weapons, including the US, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea.
Last January, a week after Donald Trump began his second term as president, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest humanity has ever come to global catastrophe. The Bulletin announced that it will update the time this week. Whether the clock is set closer to midnight or not, the question remains: Is there time and the will to change our trajectory, to learn from the past, and avoid a path to global destruction?
Guest – Paul Jay, award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and founder of theAnalysis.news. Jay has spent decades investigating the inner workings of government, corporate power, and military policy, combining investigative rigor with a storyteller’s clarity. He is currently working on a new project, How to Stop a Nuclear War, a groundbreaking documentary set to be released in the fall of 2027 based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thomson. Through rare interviews and in-depth research, the film examines how close humanity has come to nuclear catastrophe—and why Ellsberg’s warnings remain urgently relevant today.
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The Imperial Bureau: the FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the US National Security State.
The forces of American fascism are rapidly consolidating in our country. It is chilling to think that President Trump has only been an office for one year. American fascism is considered to be a unity of the MAGA forces around Trump and certain billionaire sectors of the capitalist class. Their project, like those of the Nazis in Germany, is what the Germans called “Gleichschaltung” meaning “bringing into line.”
In America,independent centers of power have been brought into line. Universities, the large law firms, the media and much of the court system. The Supreme Court is now subservient to the dictates of the Trump administration. President Trump is working to get more people and institutions to knuckle under. We talk today about the threat to crush the left with the recent issuance of his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. It is known as NSPM7.
The genius of the U.S. Constitution, which limited power by setting up a system of checks and balances, has been sidestepped as President Trump now essentially rules by executive order. The Supreme Court uses the shadow docket to avoid public consideration of cases involving liberty.
Congress is not consulted about declaring war as President Trump ordered the secret bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of its leader and his wife. The Voting Rights Bill has been gutted. It’s not illegal for big corporations to contribute any amount of money they want. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are subservient to big capital. The old form of democracy, however, limited by race and class, has almost disintegrated.
In the recent months, the world has watched as ICE has terrorized populations in major American cities. Already its budget is $11 billion. They are seeking to hire another 10,000 recruits. The DHS vetting process has recently come under scrutiny revealing it as careless and negligent. Some are recruited from gun shows. Recruits are given a $50,000 signing bonus with salaries ranging from $49,000-$89,000 a year. NSPM7 supplemented by the Attorney General’s memorandum targets among others those who speak out against racism, war, injustice, misogyny, capitalism and white Christian nationalism.
Guest – Chip Gibbons has written about NSPM 7. Mr. Gibbons is the Policy Director of Defending Rights and Dissent. His organization has awareness of the perils of this memorandum. He edits the Gaza First Amendment Alert. He is also the author of the forthcoming book The Imperial Bureau: the FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the US National Security State.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age
Being homeless is not a reflection on the inadequacy of a person. It is not a moral issue even though right wing figures such as President Trump‘s former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Andrew Cuomo, the failed candidate for mayor in the 2025 election in New York City maintain that essentially cruel position. They were against giving people subsidized homes and treatment, if they required it, for health problems, addiction problems, or job training.
Homelessness is a consequence of housing affordability, inequality, systemic, racism and pro-capitalist government policies. It is more profitable for the real estate industry to build housing for the rich rather than the poor. There is more profit in luxury housing, not so much in working class housing. New York City is the greatest example of the homeless situation that exists throughout the USA. On any one night 130,000 people sleep in shelters. 90% of them are Black or Latino. One out of seven children in New York City public schools are homeless.
Guest – Patrick Markee has written a powerful, moving, common sense account of a social problem whose solution is entirely possible. His book Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age is an eloquent rendering of the plight of human beings who I don’t have a home, they don’t have a place in our world. Mr. Markee has had more than 20 years of experience working as an advocate for homeless people in New York City and his work with housing across the country. He is the former Deputy Executive Director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless., New York’s premier homeless advocacy organization and a member the Board of Directors with the National Coalition for the Homeless. He is the author numerous research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for The Nation and The New York Times book review.
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Hard Regime Change In Venezuela
Barely into the new year in the early morning hours of January 3 the Trump administration successfully and brutally and illegally attacked Venezuela kidnapping the president and his wife. 80 people were killed including 32 Cuban soldiers. They flew Nicolás Maduro and his wife attorney Celia Flores to a Brooklyn jail. The plan is to try them in an American court in lower Manhattan on the laughable pretext, they were drug runners whose country “stole” American oil. And further, according to President Trump, hordes of Venezuela killers and murderers and rapists were released across American borders to savage American citizens.
That next morning, we woke up to arrogant boastings of Trump and his his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, whose body is tattooed with a huge crusader cross, that they plan to “run” Venezuela, “make lots of money” reclaim “their “ oil and give it to the multi-national corporations such as ExxonMobil to exploit.The United Nations was organized after World War II to prevent precisely what has happened. Aggressive war was outlawed. The War Powers Act-was passed by the U.S. Congress, a half century ago, precisely to prevent secret aggression against foreign countries and required congressional approval, which was not sought or obtained prior to the invasion.
Protest against this invasion continue across the United States. People took the streets, remembering how the war on Iraq, which killed 1 million people was fought allegedly that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which is known to be a lie.
Guest – Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of the U.S. political party, Socialist Action and its candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2016 and 2020. He is a member of the Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and the Director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in Northern California. He was a national leader of the defense committees of Julian Assange and Lynne Stewart. Jeff was the Coordinator of the “Dialogue With Cuba” conference in 2000 at the University of California at Berkeley, the first institutionally-sponsored Cuba conference in U.S. history. Attended by 2000 U.S. social justice activists and leading scholars representing a broad range of academic and social fields, the dialogue saw 30 leading Havana-based Cuban scholars and social and political leaders exchange views with their U.S. counterparts.
Jeff is the author of some 20 books and pamphlets including “CIA/Crack in America,” a detailed history of the U.S. government and its agent, Oliver North, importing tons of crack cocaine from the Columbia Medellin cartel. to sell in Los Angeles to illegally raise funds for the Nicaraguan Contras. Other books and pamphlets by Jeff covered the Mexican Chiapas Rebellion, Ukraine, Syria, Nicaragua, Libya, the South Africa anti-apartheid struggle and, most recently a critique of the NYC Zohran Mamdani Democratic Party/DSA mayoral election campaign.
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