Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Racist Police Violence, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Legal Challenges Leading Up to Mid-term Election
Prior to our mid-term elections, scores of lawyers for the Republican Party prepared lawsuits in preparation to challenge the outcome of the elections around the country. And, in response, lawyers for the Democratic Party prepared to defend against all such lawsuits. Leading up to the elections, the Trump Administration sent federal agents to knock on potential voters’ doors, challenged mail-in ballots in court, and lost, and carried on a campaign to convince the American people that the elections would be unfair without the federal government’s pre-election threats and lawsuits. Along the way Trump, on several occasions, suggested he might even declare martial law or take other steps to prevent the elections from taking place. He is on record as saying he wants to “control” the mid-term elections and will only honor the outcome if he judges them to be fair.
We will examine some of the many actions and threats coming from the Trump Administration in the lead-up to, and conduct of the elections, as well as possible challenges to the results of the elections once they have concluded.
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. His latest book is titled Requiem for Gaza.
—-
Chicago Wrongful Murder Convictions Case Awarded 260.8 Million
Our guest today is Chicago civil rights attorney Anand Swaminathan. In October 2026, the Chicago City Council authorized payment of $260.8 million, that is over a quarter of $1 billion dollars, in compensation to 17 men who each spent decades in prison for wrongful murder convictions. These men were represented by Anand Swaminathan and his law firm Loevy & Loevy.
They altogether served nearly 400 years in prison for murders of which they were falsely convicted. Attorney Swaminathan and his partner Steve Art litigated their civil cases for 13 years. The false convictions of murder were arranged by Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevarra. He was responsible for some 50 wrongful convictions which he accomplished by using false witness statements, and false coerced confessions.
The victims lived in the heavily Latino community of Chicago’s Northwest side in the 1980s and 1990s. The victims were all young men ages 14 to 28.
Detective Guevara is retired. He lives on a Chicago Police Department pension of $91,000 a year and will likely never be held accountable. The passage of time and the unavailability and death of witnesses has so far, got him off the hook. When Anand deposed Guevara, Guevara took the fifth Amendment some 200 times.
At the same time detective Reynaldo Guevara was sending innocent Latino men to prison in the Humboldt Park area his counterpart Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge was torturing Black men on the south side into confessing falsely to an array of crimes.
This was exposed through decades of community activism and litigation by civil rights attorneys from the People’s Law Office. People’s Law Office attorney Flint Taylor wrote about it in his book titled “The Torture Machine.” Burge was ultimately convicted of perjury and sent to prison. In 2015, the City of Chicago passed a landmark ordinance that among other things paid reparations to Burge’s victims.
Comedian Lenny Bruce used to say “Chicago is so corrupt it’s thrilling.” Is it possible to reform the police? What part does racism play? How much money have the citizens of Chicago been forced to pay by the actions of the police department? Will this gargantuan settlement actually bring about reforms? Do the powers that be in Chicago really want reforms? The most fundamental reform would be community control of the police instead of allowing them to terrorize the Black and Latino Community.
Guest – Anand Swaminathan grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of immigrant Indian parents who were professors . He attended Harvard law school, where he had more cases in its legal aid efforts than any previous student at the school. Swaminathan is a partner at a law firm of Loevy and Loevy, where he has worked for the last 16 years.
—————-
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Immigration, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Gaza Rising: Voices From the Rubble
As Israel continues to perpetrate its genocide in Gaza and atrocities in the West Bank, support for Palestinian liberation and sovereignty is growing around the world and in the United States. In July, Pew Research Center survey found unfavorable views of Israel at 62% among Americans and a recent Gallup Poll found for the first time, that US sympathy now leans toward the Palestinians (41%) compared to Israel (36%). This trend is due in great part to the unrelenting and outspoken defense of the Palestinian cause from prominent voices such as our guest today Dr. Ramzy Baroud. Dr. Baroud is a Palestinian author, historian, and academic whose work focuses on Palestinian history and liberation. He is the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle, which he has led since 1999, and has spent decades developing an alternative historical narrative centered on lived Palestinian experience rather than elite political frameworks.
Dr Baroud holds a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter. He has taught mass communication at Curtin University and serves as a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. His scholarship bridges journalism and academia, and his work has appeared in numerous academic journals and edited volumes.
He is the author of eight books. He has just published two new books, Before the Flood (from Seven Stories Press), which reconstructs Gaza’s modern history through family memory and intergenerational testimony, and Gaza Rising: Voices From the Rubble.(from Clarity Press). His earlier works include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, The Last Earth, and These Chains Will Be Broken. He is also the co-editor, with Ilan Pappé, of Our Vision for Liberation.
Guest – Dr Ramzy Baroud’s writing has been translated into multiple languages and widely published internationally. His work combines historical analysis, oral history, and political interpretation, contributing to global debates on settler colonialism, resistance, and liberation movements. He has lectured extensively at universities, research centers, and public institutions across North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, contributing to global discussions on Palestine, decolonization, media, and popular resistance. His public scholarship places academic research in conversation with civil society audiences, activist communities, and policy forums.
—-
Buffalo Activist Coalition Demands Uniland Developer Not Lease Space To ICE
In Buffalo, New York, a coalition of activists, community organizations, and small businesses is taking on powerful real estate developer Uniland over its decision to lease space to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The coalition, Evict ICE from 250 Delaware, is demanding that Uniland end ICE’s lease at a downtown building. Federal immigrations operations there include detention holding rooms and the coordination of arrests and deportations across much of New York State outside New York City.
The campaign is also challenging the local business establishment that profits from these arrangements. Last week, activists took their protest directly to a Buffalo Business Hall of Fame banquet, where Uniland executive chairman Carl Montante was being honored. Some campaign members entered the banquet as guests and confronted the proceedings, while others held a parallel “Hall of Shame” protest outside.
The coalition’s demand is straightforward: ICE out of 250 Delaware when the lease expires in March 2027. But the campaign raises larger questions about corporate responsibility, public subsidies, immigration enforcement, and what ordinary people can do when powerful institutions refuse to listen.
Guest – Holly Verrett, Lackawanna resident, revolutionary activist, and gardener, Holly is committed to building stronger communities and fostering a love of nature. She is also the proud wife of Tony and mother to their daughter, Alice.
———————–
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Iran, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Younger Generations Of Jewish People No Longer Identifying With Israel
Phil Weiss started Mondoweiss 20 years ago to provide a critique of Zionism and the suppression of Palestinians, which in those days was very much minority view. Today, Mondoweiss is widely read and respected for accurate reporting. Things have changed. A great number of Jews no longer identify with Israel. This is especially true of young people. Israel, because of its continuous genocide against the Palestine people in Gaza, it’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it’s bombing of Lebanon and its partnership with the United States in its disastrous illegal war against Iran has become the most detested country on the planet.
Guest – Philip Weiss, was a successful professional journalist 20 years ago before he launched Mondoweiss. He had contributed articles to places like the New York Times magazine. He grew up in a family of six children, the son of a microbiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He attended Harvard and started off as a crime reporter in Philadelphia.
—-
Wages of War In Iran and Gaza
Tuning in to international news today is more confusing than ever… with political alliances shifting daily, and the Trump administration provoking new challenges to peace, decency and world order. With the barrage of “breaking news” headlines perpetuating chaos on the mainstream news, we can forget to take some time to breathe, and critically think about the history of how we got to this moment, and how we might use that wisdom to avoid the doomsday scenarios that some believe to be inevitable.
With that purpose in mind we will focus today on the U.S. war with Iran and its impact throughout the Middle East. How far will the war spread? When will the war end? Will the increased flow of Mid-East oil help bring about an end to the Iran war?
Guest – Richard Becker is an expert on history and U.S. policy in the Middle East. Mr. Becker is the Western Regional Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition. He is the author of numerous political writings, including his book, Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. Empire and his book, The Myth of Democracy and the Rule of the Banks. Mr. Becker is also a leader in the Party for Socialism and Liberation. LiberationNews BreakthroughNews
—————–
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
For more than two years, the world has witnessed not only a devastating war in Gaza, but also a fierce battle over how that war has been covered in the media. We’ve seen headlines repeated before facts were verified. We’ve seen civilian deaths described in passive language that obscures responsibility. We’ve watched journalists, students, doctors, and even U.N. officials dismissed or marginalized when their accounts challenged official narratives – sometimes costing their lives.
All the while, independent reporting and social media footage taken by individuals on the ground show a different reality than the Israeli and US government narratives that dominate corporate media coverage. So what happens when the press stops acting as a watchdog and instead becomes an amplifier for state power? How can the public make informed moral decisions when reporting is shaped by concentrated political and corporate interests? And what obligations do journalists have when governments are pushing narratives in times of war?
Guest – Robin Andersen is a professor, media critic, and longtime scholar of war propaganda and political communication. Her new book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, examines how major U.S. media institutions covered the war after October 7th, 2023 and how corporate journalism helped manufacture public consent for catastrophic violence while, at the same time, narrowing the scope of speech and debate.
—-
The Future Of Cash Bail Reform
The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has stood at the center of the criminal legal system in the United States for centuries. But in the real world, enjoying freedom before a trial has often depended less on guilt or innocence — and more on money. According to the Prison Policy Initiatives, among other sources, at least 400,000 people are in jail awaiting trial. In other words, they are legally innocent and have not been convicted of a crime, but remain behind bars. Many are there because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Supporters of the cash bail system claim it ensures people return to court for their trial, and therefore protects public safety. Critics, including our next guest, point to the unfairness of cash bail: it punishes poverty, pressures people into guilty pleas, tears apart families, and deepens racial and economic inequality. Out of this evolving debate, the bail reform movement was born. And on April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court gave the bail reform movement the fortification it needed.
In the closely watched case In re Kowalczyk, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed constitutional limits on pretrial detention and expanded on earlier rulings that challenged wealth-based incarceration. The decision is already being viewed as one of the most significant state court rulings on bail and pretrial liberty in recent years — with possible implications far beyond California.
Guest – Carson White is a supervising attorney at Civil Rights Corps, where she raises systemic challenges to the criminalization of poverty. She currently leads CRC’s California Writ Project, which trains public defenders statewide and has litigated hundreds of pretrial habeas petitions raising the issues ultimately decided by In re Kowalczyk. Carson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Texas at Austin.
——————–
Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Right To Dissent, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Guilty of Genocide
For decades, activists in the United States have argued that racial violence, political repression, and systemic inequality are not simply domestic issues. They’re also violations of international human rights law. A new collection, Guilty of Genocide, revisits that argument through the lens of the 2021 International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples. The book gathers testimony, legal analysis, poetry, artwork, and organizing documents from a landmark people’s tribunal convened by the Spirit of Mandela Coalition.
After hearing testimony on policing, incarceration, political prisoners, environmental racism, and colonialism, an international panel of jurists delivered a sweeping verdict finding the United States guilty of multiple human rights abuses.
Guest – Matt Meyer an internationally recognized peace educator, author, and activist. He was nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the International Peace Research Association in recognition of his lifelong commitment to nonviolence and global peace education. Author of more than a dozen books, including Guns and Gandhi in Africa, Matt has played a major role in building international peace studies and justice networks across Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.
—-
A Look Back At The Inception Of New York City’s Panopticon
When Law and Disorder first interviewed privacy activist Bill Brown in 2005, the landscape of surveillance in New York City — and across the United States — was already alarming. Bill was warning us about hundreds of NYPD cameras going up in Brooklyn, federal Homeland Security dollars flooding into local surveillance infrastructure, and the proposed “ring of steel” around lower Manhattan modeled on London’s vast camera network. What seemed like a dire warning then looks almost quaint today.
In the years since, mass surveillance has expanded in ways that would have been difficult to imagine. Amazon’s RING doorbell cameras, now installed on tens of millions of private homes, have become a vast, crowd-sourced surveillance network — with police departments across the country routinely requesting footage from residents, sometimes without a warrant. Meanwhile, a newer and perhaps even more insidious technology has taken hold: FLOCK Safety cameras, license plate readers now deployed in thousands of communities, logging the movements of ordinary Americans going about their daily lives and making that data available to law enforcement across jurisdictions. Add to this the explosion of facial recognition technology, social media monitoring, and AI-driven predictive policing tools, and the surveillance state Bill Brown cautioned us about has arrived in full force.
But Americans are pushing back. Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have won outright bans on government use of facial recognition in cities including San Francisco, Boston, and Portland. Community organizers have successfully blocked FLOCK camera contracts in several cities after exposing how the data is shared and retained. And a growing movement of digital rights advocates, tenant organizations, and privacy activists continues to fight surveillance expansion at the local, state, and federal level — carrying on exactly the kind of work Bill Brown was urging listeners to take up all those years ago.
Since 2006, New York City’s surveillance infrastructure has evolved from a fragmented network of video cameras. It’s now an integrated, intelligence-driven system powered by the Domain Awareness System (DAS) and advanced biometric tools. The NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism budget quadrupled from $83 million in 2006 to $349 million in 2021, enabling the deployment of technologies originally designed for counterterrorism to monitor routine street crime and protests. These include facial recognition software, license plate readers, and mobile X-ray vans.
The scale of physical surveillance has expanded dramatically. By 2021, Amnesty International estimated more than 15,000 police cameras in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn alone, up from roughly 2,400 visible cameras in Manhattan in 1998. This network is further augmented by cellphone surveillance tools like Stingray trackers and cell tower dumps. Those allow police to identify individuals at protests or public gatherings without warrants.
This evolution has created a surveillance state that disproportionately impacts communities of color. There’s a well-documented correlation between surveillance density and higher rates of stop-and-frisk incidents in minority neighborhoods. Police maintain that these tools are essential for solving crimes and preventing attacks — but the lack of public oversight and the use of data scraped from social media have intensified debates over privacy rights and racial bias in policing.
————-
U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
War And Debt Economy
We are experiencing a great transformation in who holds economic, and therefore political power in America. This transformation is going on for the last 50 some years. There are now approximately 1000 billionaires in America. Our constitutional form of government, the government of checks and balances has been transformed. The three branches of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the executive were designed to hold each other in check and that is no longer the case. Executive power reigns supreme.
Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is capitalism, production for profit, and not for human needs. This is manifested in autocracy, the rule of the rich, and those with whom they are connected. They have popularly become known as the Epstein class. In tandem with the billionaire class in power in the United States, is this country’s decline in power as compared to China. China is soon to become the leading economic force in the world.
It is about to overcome the United States in this regard, while American governmental debt approaches $40 trillion, an amount worth more than the annual production of goods and services in the United States, this country has now turned to borrowing money from China to aid its economy.
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.
——-
Israel’s Practice of Assassination
World War II ended in 1945. Sixty million people had died. To prevent a recurrence the foundations of international law were laid. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals concluded in 1947. The guilty verdicts against the Nazi leaders were not seen as “victors’ justice“ but instead as a way forward based on three principles. The first was the illegality of aggressive war, the worst crime of all because it included within it all other crimes. The second principal consisted of violations of the laws of war, such as bombing civilians. The third was crimes against humanity.
Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of Defense, who has changed the name of the department and styles himself as Secretary of War, has denounced the very laws of war set up after Nuremberg. The third principal, crimes against humanity, includes assassinations which are political murders. The Israeli assassination program has become elaborate and ambitious. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the ethno- state has been an extremely aggressive violator of these three principles.
In developing political assassination as “an art form” in the words of an Israel leader, Israel has taken the lead along with its partner the United States in the dismantling of the international rules of law.
Guest – Washington DC journalist Andrew Cockburn is the author of many books and articles. His most recent book is titled Washington is Burning: Lies and Corruption in the Age of Trump. His Substack is titled Spoils of War. Mr. Cockburn’s latest article appeared on April 17, 2026 in the London Review of Books.
——————–
