Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Bradley Manning Public Access Case: Amicus Brief Filed by Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press
- Southern Poverty Law Center Lawsuit Against Chemically Spraying Students
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Attorney Heidi Boghosian Speech: National Special Security Events – RNC / DNC
We hear a presentation by our own Heidi Boghosian. Heidi spoke at an event sponsored by station affiliate WSLR FM 96.5 – Sarasota, Florida. As the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, Heidi had coordinated and organized legal observers during the Republican National Convention in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. While in Florida, Heidi delivered a talk about the eroding civil rights of protesters during National Special Security events, pre-event surveillance and tactical strategies deployed by police.
Heidi Boghosian is the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association established in 1937. She has published articles on policing, protest and the First Amendment including Punishing Protest and The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent (North River Press, 2004). Her book reviews have been published in The Federal Lawyer magazine and the New York Law Journal.
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CCR Stop and Frisk Suit NYC: Floyd et al. v. New York City
Last month, a federal judge excluded portions of proposed testimony from New York City’s key witness in the Center for Constitutional Right’s Stop and Frisk class action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the defendants’ testimony untested and unreliable. The ruling supports that there isn’t evidence that the “Stop and Frisk” practice reduces crime.” said CCR Legal Director Vince Warren (quote) “The ruling soundly rejects the false choice propounded by the NYPD, between living in a safe city and being free of unconstitutional, racially discriminatory policing.”
In 2009 New York City, a record 576,394 people were stopped, 84 percent of whom were Black and Latino residents — although they comprise only about 26 percent and 27 percent of New York City’s total population respectively. Ten years of raw data obtained by court order from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) showed that stop-and-frisks result in a minimal yield of weapons and contraband.
Attorney Darius Charney:
- When we say “stop” were really talking about a detention of somebody’s liberty by the police. Frisk is a pat down of the outside of somebody’s clothing.
- For purposes of the 4th Amendment we are talking about a seizure when somebody is stopped, their liberty is taken away from them for a period of time and when they’re frisked, they’re searched.
- About 99.3 percent of the time the police find no gun.
- According the Supreme Court in a case they decided about 44 years ago, called Terry v. Ohio, for a police officer to stop someone on the street they have to have what’s called reasonable, articulatable suspicion.
- It has to be more than a hunch, or a whim or a subjective belief that somebody’s doing something wrong. It has to be articulatable specific facts that the officer is aware of that would cause him or her to reasonably believe that this person has committed a crime, is in the process of committing a crime or is about to commit a crime.
- If they have reasonable suspicion and they stop to ask you questions, you’re supposed to answer the questions.
- They may ask you for identification, that’s not against the law in New York state. You don’t have to provide it to them.
- You’re free to not answer but depending on what the questions are and if you don’t answer them, that may give the officer a basis to have probable cause to arrest you.
- For the officer to then put their hands on you, they have to have reasonable suspicion that you’re armed and dangerous.
- It can’t be that they think you have drugs in your pocket. Officers often get angry or irritated if you assert the rights that you have.
- What commonly happens in New York and other places is that somebody does assert their rights the officer may retaliate against them by issuing them a ticket for disorderly conduct.
- The person has a right to say “show me your badge” to a plain clothes police officer.
- Stop and Frisk has increased over 600 percent in New York City.
- In New York police are arresting 50 thousand people a year with small amounts of marijuana.
- The New York Police Department Stop and Frisk practices are literally going to be put on trial in a federal court in Manhattan this coming Spring.
- We were certified for a class action in May, so we have a website for class members. Stopandfrisk
- In order to fight crime you need to work together with the community and if the community doesn’t trust you, fear you, that’s not going to happen.
Guest – Attorney Darius Charney, senior staff attorney in the Racial Justice/Government Misconduct Docket. He is currently lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, and Vulcan Society Inc. v. the City of New York, a Title VII class action lawsuit on behalf of African-American applicants to the New York City Fire Department which challenges the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the FDNY.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
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The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History.
We continue to look into the the Bradley Manning story, the biggest whistle-blower case in US history. Attorney Chase Madar joins us in the studio, he’s the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History. The book moves through Manning’s childhood and up to what led him to allegedly upload volumes of classified secret information to Wikileaks. Madar highlights the value of publicly exposing the endless criminal and immoral actions while government secrecy spins out of control, classifying 77 million documents a year. He also asks what can be done to protect Bradley Manning as a whistle-blower. Since his arrest 2 years ago, Manning’s formal court martial proceedings are not scheduled to begin until February 2013, and as many listeners know the most lethal charge is aiding the enemy.
Attorney Chase Madar:
- I worked as a staff attorney for many years at a great non-profit in Bushwick section of Brooklyn doing all kinds of low tech services for Spanish speaking immigrants.
- I quit that and have been writing about foreign affairs. I got put on the sight of Bradley Manning by Tom Englehart, who edits the great TomDispatch web project.
- So many important issues collide in this case, whether its the comparative risk to our security of secrecy versus leaks. How we judge threats, how we misassess threats. How we use solitary confinement as punishment, is it an acceptable punishment?
- What power does information have anyway? A lot of intellectuals think that information has an incredible catalytic effect.
- Bradley Manning enlisted in the Army in October 2007. He’s deployed to Iraq after all kinds of training in Army intelligence in 2009.
- He allegedly begins leaking things in early 2010 and he’s arrested in late May 2010 over 2 years ago now. He was held in solitary confinement, very strict punitive isolation in Quantico Marine Corp base in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011.
- We’re looking at 2.5 years of pretrial confinement.
- You can divide up the Wikileaks leaks allegedly supplied by Bradley Manning in 3 categories. Iraq material, thousands of war logs: raw reports file by soldiers, Afghan war logs, it’s a composite of a war that’s weirdly aimless.
- Obama did campaign as the whistle-blower’s best friend, and he has prosecuted twice as many as all previous administrations.
- Here’s one theory I find persuasive. It’s important for Obama to have the intelligence services on his side. This was a way for him to show the CIA that he would go along them.
- I would like to see a serious change in foreign policy which has gone off the rails.
- We haven’t the kind of course correction with Obama that many had hoped for.
- I hope Wikileaks do disrupt foreign policy more. There’s been all kinds of smack talked about Bradley Manning, he’s a weirdo, a malcontent, he did what he did because he’s screwed up, he did because he’s gay.
- His motives are very plain to see in the chat logs between him and the informant.
- The Manning chat logs – they read like a tragic novella.
- So much of our secrecy law is designed to keep the American public in the dark.
- I think we have badly confused being clueless with being safe.
- He comes across as an immensely thoughtful, courageous and very principled young man. In some ways he’s an extreme version of the millennial generation who have a lot of education and potential but find themselves not doing too well.
- His father was in Naval Intelligence and he’d grown up with a sense of patriotic responsibilities.
- What makes him turn on the inside and leak these things?
- He’s asked to look into the arrest and capture by the Iraqi authorities a group of non-violent Iraqi protesters who were handing out pamphlets that were all about corruption in Iraqi government.
- We are light years away from total transparency.
- The main thing is to make records of the court proceedings publicly available.
- I think a guilty conviction and a heavy sentence of at least 50 years is a foregone conclusion.
- The wages of government secrecy, not security but disaster.
- It looks like the court martial won’t begin until January or February.
- Go to the Bradley Manning support network website. Send him a postcard.
- It’s your patriotic duty to browse the leaks.
- Legal Atrocities – by Chase Madar
Guest – Attorney Chase Madar , a TomDispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books). Madar tweets @ChMadar. He’s a contributor to the London Review of Books and Le Monde diplomatique and the author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books).
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, War Resister
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Updates:
- Maryland Law Allows Police To Collect DNA During Arrests
- Heidi Boghosian: National Lawyers Guild Monitoring RNC / DNC Demonstrations
- In Memory: Michael Nash
- In Memory: Alexander Cockburn
- In Memory: Professor John (Tito) Gerassi
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent Booklet
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Unrepentant Radical Educator: The Writings of John Gerassi
Professor John (Tito) Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek. He obtained his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a long time civil rights and anti-war militant and author / editor of ten books plus scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He was Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. Professor Gerassi discussed his book, Unrepentant Radical Educator: The writings of John Gerassi, edited and with interviews by Tony Monchinski (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education) Indypendent Book Review
The book joins personal narratives from Gerassi’s days of journalism and activism, featuring Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver and others of the era, with essays on figures such as Sartre, Camus, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One review writes, (Especially fascinating are the tales of deliberate misreporting by the major media outlets for which he worked, epitomized by the words of owner Henry Luce when Gerassi was hired: “We here at Time believe that objectivity is neither feasible nor desirable.”)
John “Tito” Gerassi:
- Time Magazine: I hear you’re coming aboard Mr. Gerassi. In the long run, it was great that I got kicked out
- Met Che Guevara in Uruguay, as a journalist for the New York Times, there was a fight with anti-Castro students, the police were scared, one man fired his gun in the air, it ricocheted and hit and killed a USIS Cuban.
- Che told me I don’t talk to the imperialist press. At the hotel, they had reserved a large table where all the left-wing characters sat around with Che. Argentines say chez vous, that’s how Che got his nickname Che.
- The Great Fear in Latin America – John Gerassi
- Che Where Are You? Eventually there will be many Che’s.
Guest – Professor John Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek, who obtained his PhD at LSE, is a long time civil rights and anti-war militant. He is the author or editor of ten books and scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Hydraulic Fracturing, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister
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Updates:
- Occupy Chicago Tribune Getting Sued Under World Property Intellectual Organization
- Julian Assange Applies For Political Asylum – Twitter @justleft / @wlcentral
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Austerity and Coalition Government in Greece
Last week we discussed the popularity of the Syriza Party, Greece’s skyrocketed unemployment and the huge military contracts Greece is locked into with France and Germany. In part two of our interview with Greek-American National Lawyers Guild attorney Eric Poulos we discuss the assembling of the coalition government in Greece and the economic implication.
Attorney Eric Poulos:
- New Democracy and Syriza’s the left wing coalition opposed to the bailout got the most votes. New Democracy got about 2 percent more which is the conservative center right party.
- Syriza got 27 percent. The Social Democrats did terribly and got only 14 percent.
- The fascist party the Golden Dawn unfortunately kept the same percentage. The one part that lost a lot of votes was the Communist Party.
- Almost 40 percent of the voters did not vote. I think people are just worn out.
- Everybody across the board has taken a 15 percent reduction in pay.
- New Democracy Party will be appointed Prime Minister.
- Fifty percent of the cops voted for the fascist party – Golden Dawn
- Greece is a country that was occupied by Hitler and caused untold loss and devastation.
- This coalition that ran Syriza is a coalition which is 12 or 13 different groups.
- The election is incredible in that it changed nothing, it changed everything, because the same parties will be ruling.
- The people of Greece continue to suffer, it doesn’t create one job. It doesn’t help to pay for one prescription.
- It’s not just Greece, it’s Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland too.
- I think the only hope is that they can hook up with other countries with united action to fight against the European Union policies.
- There has to be an upsurge in the fight against the fascists in Greece.
Guest – Attorney Eric Poulos, writer and National Lawyers Guild member.
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Reverend Billy and the Spectra Pipeline Protest Event
The plans to bring a 30 inch gas pipeline through the West Village of Manhattan is on the fast track with the support of Mayor Bloomberg. Spectra Pipeline is the company that will deliver the high pressure natural gas hydrofracked from the Marcellus Shale deposits. A heavily protested and contentious process itself. According to an expert radioactive waste this natural gas can contain radon 70 times above normal. Radon is a tasteless odorless gas created naturally during radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and radium. The EPA reports radon causes 21 thousand deaths from lung cancer each year. NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally
Reverend Billy:
- Our basic mission statement . . .stop shopping children. Our basic mission statement has remain the same over 10 years now. The project of Guiliani and Bloomberg to turn our great city into a suburb.
- It was WBAI project, Cornell West, Chris Hedges, we sang and were the house choir. The jury of those great peers found Goldman Sachs guilty of robbing from us and charged them with 87 billion dollars I believe.
- We sat down and lock arms in the old civil rights position. A nice circle of locked arms.
- Out of the 15 that got arrested, I was about the 8th to leave the fold. I think that eight of them will be the Blankfein 8. It’s a lifestyle change, if you’re really gonna go all the way with these . . . we weren’t blocking anybody. . it was symbolic.
- Those ziplock handcuffs they have, they yank on them. In the precinct house an hour later your hand is purple and I had a numb thumb for six months.
- Sometimes shopping is a chain store that buys sweat shop goods, and sometimes its our consumption of power. How do we heat? How do we use electricity?
- That of course is decisive in terms of climate change, which has increasingly become everybody’s politics.
- We’ve kept fracking out of upstate New York to some degree, but Cuomo is going to let it in to some degree.
- They want to come from the Far Rockaways with a pipe called the Constitution and they’re coming under the Hudson River and appearing into the Meat Packing district.
- It’s mysterious Cheney was able to keep the report of what those chemicals are from the American people.
- We have a 700 seat house there and we’re going to take the audience over two blocks to where the pipeline is to surface.
- I don’t think the consumer society makes prosperity.
- A lot of the communities in our country where people are watching television all day, eating sugar and fat and unable to operate, where the kids go into the pipeline of jail. . .needs the energetic compassion of change.
- We’re becoming our own third world here, we need to pay attention to our communities. Get those Wall Street companies out of our communities and ask ourselves what do we have that makes value here? Right under foot, right in my neighborhood.
- It begins with living on less money, but begins with finding value in what we do with our lives.
- You go up the counties where Cuomo is exploding their aquifers, this just makes it worse.
- Some people are going to get a 100 thousand dollar check. It reminds me of the wrong person winning the lottery.
- NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally
Guest – Reverend Billy, (Bill Talen) A student of the writers Charles Gaines and Kurt Vonnegut, Talen has staged experimental plays, published essays and poems in Philadelphia, New York and California. At Life On the Water, a theater in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Theater, Talen presented artists such as Spalding Gray, Mabou Mines, David Cale, B. D. Wong, Holly Hughes, William Yellow Robe, the Red Eye Collective, Reno, John Trudeau, and Danny Glover reciting the works of Langston Hughes. This experience in producing led him to the confessional monologue. After studying with the cleric Reverend Sidney Lanier, Talen invented “a new kind of American preacher.” Lanier, the cousin of Tennessee Williams and subject of the work Night of the Iguana, was familiar with the re-staging of biblical narratives
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Prosecution of the Bush Administration, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Nancy Hollander
In this week’s Lawyers You’ll Like series, we’re joined by attorney Nancy Hollander. Nancy has been a member and partner with Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Ives & Duncan P.A. since the early 80s. Her practice is devoted to mostly criminal cases including those involved with national security. Ms. Hollander has also argued and won a religious freedom case in the US Supreme Court. She’s served as a consultant to the defense in a high profile terrorism case in Ireland – and she represents 2 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
Attorney Nancy Hollander:
- I was a community organizer with JOIN, Jobs or income now.
- We organized Appalachian migrants to Chicago. I wrote a book that I co-authored with Todd Gitlin called Uptown.
- I became a photographer, I learned how to develop film in the basement of Jessie Jackson’s church. I was in Cleveland for a time and then came to New Mexico, became the Executive Director of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union, then went to law school.
- I worked as a riveter in a football equipment factory.
- It looked like that whole began when I met with Vietnamese women in Indonesia 1964. I met with women from North and South Vietnam.
- We all met at the embassy, and I thought, that was odd meeting, and that was the beginning of my CIA file.
- I represent 2 people (in Guantanamo Prison) one is Mohamado Ould Slahi, he’s a Mauratanian citizen, he was there from almost the beginning.
- We won his habeas case, the judge ordered him almost immediately released.
- After ten years, the government said they didn’t have the preponderance of evidence to keep him.
- The government appealed, the case got remanded, and we’re essentially starting over.
- They changed what they accused him of continuously. He’s never been tried, he was tortured.
- The rule of law has become the law of changing rules.
- I got a security clearance and learned about SEPA and OFAC, the Office Of Foreign Asset Controls.
- We originally represented the Holy Land Foundation in its fight against the designated and some other civil litigation.
- They were charged and convicted of providing charity.
- The law is very fluid and lawyers have a lot of power. Our power is to make change and to create miracles in some cases. There have been something like 100 terrorism cases tried in New York alone since 9/11
Guest – Attorney Nancy Hollander has been a member of the firm Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Ives & Duncan, P.A. since 1980 and a partner since 1983. Her practice is largely devoted to criminal cases, including those involving national security issues. She has also been counsel in numerous civil cases, forfeitures and administrative hearings, and has argued and won a case involving religious freedom in the United States Supreme Court. (see decision) Ms. Hollander also served as a consultant to the defense in a high profile terrorism case in Ireland, has assisted counsel in other international cases and represents two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Nancy is co-author of WestGroup’s Everytrial Criminal Defense Resource Book, Wharton’s Criminal Evidence, 15th Edition, and Wharton’s Criminal Procedure, 14th Edition. She has appeared on national television programs as PBS Now, Burden of Proof, the Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, CourtTV, and the MacNeill/Lehrer News Hour.
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The Moral Challenge of ‘Kill Lists’ by Ray McGovern
The Obama Administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several countries, killing civilians and a US citizen. Critics point out that as the Obama Administration assassinates its’ suspects, it also avoids the legal complications of detention. In last week’s New York Times, authors Jo Becker and Scott Shane expose the priest-like role of counter terrorist adviser John Brennan as he provides Mr. Obama with the moral justification for extrajudicial murder. The framing of John Brennan’s role of priestly adviser caught Ray McGovern’s attention. His recent article The Moral Challenge of Kill Lists, dissects the New York Times story.
Ray McGovern:
- There has been a geometric increase in the number of drone strikes against Pakistan and of course Somalia and Yemen.
- London based bureau for investigative journalism estimates that about 830 civilians including women and children may have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan. 138 in Yemen, and 57 in Somalia. It’s incredibly naive to think that this helps in any way in the war on terrorism.
- This wonderfully insightful and dangerous New York Times article a week ago talked about the conundrum of aligning these activities with US legal and moral principles. Conundrum? That’s an impossibility.
- The Fifth Amendment prevents this sort of thing if you take the interpretation we’ve always had.
- As the New York Times article mentions 1 out of 30 assassinations that are known about just one escaped assassination and was brought before a court. It’s much easier to kill them.
- If you wanted to learn about al-Qaeda, don’t you think Osama Bin Laden could’ve told us some stuff about al-Qaeda?
- Any military aged male in the area of a “bad guy” is fair game.
- Maybe I can draw from my own experience in the CIA, I know about lists. I know that when there was a coup attempt in Indonesia in 1965, that there were lists given to the Indonesian authorities of communists. How many communists on that list? A million. How many were killed, were murdered? 500 thousand plus. How many were put in prison? The other 500 thousand.
- The drones are really accurate but the target information is notoriously inaccurate.
- I love Fordham and I hate to see the administration and the very wealthy trustees who have lots of money to give to Fordham, determine who comes in to give the commencement address.
- I think that you have to have some kind of personal involvement with innocent suffering. I think that you have to have some sense of the injustice others suffer to let your heart be touched by this direct experience.
- Obama’s fallen in with a rough crowd.
- I was attracted to getting outside of my Catholic walls. There’s a small church down in Washington DC called the Church of the Savior.
- I found out they were doing wonderful things like preventing housing from being gentrified so poor people can still live there. Healthcare, jobs, addictions, a hospice for people to sick to be on the street.
- There’s been one major change for the good in this country. That is Occupy.
- When you look for proof that Occupy has incredible potential, look no farther than what the president and the top senators thought necessary to inject into the NDAA on New Year’s Eve, which allows them to use the US Army of all things to wrap us all up without charge, without court proceedings.
Guest – Raymond L. McGovern, retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents in the past 27 years. Ray’s opinion pieces have appeared in many leading newspapers here and abroad. His website writings are posted first on consortiumnews.com, and are usually carried on other websites as well. He has debated at the Oxford Forum and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Newshour, CNN, and numerous other TV & radio programs and documentaries. Ray has lectured to a wide variety of audiences here and abroad. Ray studied theology and philosophy (as well as his major, Russian) at Fordham University, from which he holds two degrees. He also holds a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University. A Catholic, Mr. McGovern has been worshipping for over a decade with the ecumenical Church of the Saviour and teaching at its Servant Leadership School. He was co-director of the school from 1998 to 2004. Ray came from his native New York to Washington in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Law and Disorder Tip of the Hat Award – EPIC – DHS Words
- Julian Assange Case Update – Extradition In Sweden – Hillary Clinton Going To Sweden
- Bradley Manning Support Committee
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Wisconsin Governor Recall Election
As many listeners may know, it’s a crucial week for Wisconsin and perhaps the country. Since February of last year, Wisconsin’s left leaning capitol city has been filled with demonstrations, mass mobilization, and amazing citizen activism that has led up to the Governor’s recall election this week. This also comes after 30 thousand volunteers throughout the state gathered more than a million signatures on recall petitions. It’s been framed by United Wisconsin, the group who organized the recall, as the ability of the people in Wisconsin to control their own destiny versus money from millionaires outside the state. Governor Walker has made deep cuts to public education, he’s taken away public worker bargaining rights, and has moved to take away state legislature open meetings.
Ruth Conniff:
- What’s going on here is a grassroots rebellion of a corporate take over of our state.
- It’s been a really dramatic time here beginning Walker in his own words, dropped the bomb by ending public employees collective bargaining rights, etc.
- It’s been out and out war on society here.
- What we’ve seen in response to this very right wing radical take over is a democratic movement that is almost unprecedented. Hundreds of thousands of people in these mass rallies a year ago and now this grass roots petition drive
- There was so much pressure from grassroots volunteers and neighbors to gather signatures, to recall our governor and now we’re going to have an election.
- Governor Walker actually wrote a piece of legislation for pharmacists to decide whether to dispense birth control to women.
- He’s pushed through a variety of his agenda items that include closing Planned Parenthood clinics across our state which provide basic healthcare, very often the only healthcare provider to rural women in Wisconsin.
- He’s criminalized abortion doctors whose patients fail to jump through some onerous hoops which has made medical abortion a thing of the past in Wisconsin.
- He rolled back our pay equity law here.
- I think women in particular have been hurt by Walker’s agenda, and have led a lot of the rebellion against Walker.
- A lot of these are ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council bills that are being pushed nationally and in states across the country. Walker himself was a member of ALEC, where we have a number of state legislators who are members of ALEC so its been quite aggressive.
- There’s a sense that the grassroots is really dragging the leadership along on this.
- This is really about a fight over democracy and whether citizens have a voice in their democracy.
- We’re expecting a turnout on par with a presidential election on this recall race.
- It’s a battle between the citizen uprising and the incredible power of all this money. It’s a multi-front attack, the electoral part is a piece of it.
- There was a really spontaneous thing that happened, it wasn’t such a coordinated, planned event and it was incredibly thrilling to be part of it with my kids and their teachers.
- By re-opening the Las Vegas loophole in Wisconsin which allows corporations to hide their profits out of state and pay no corporate income tax, our state has lost the same amount of money that Walker took out of our technical college system.
- We (Wisconsin) are transferring wealth to corporations. Undoing the damage in Wisconsin is going to take a lot of time.
Guest – Ruth Conniff, Political Editor of the Progressive Magazine, a native of Madison, WIsconsin, she first joined the magazine when she was hired as a summer intern by the late Erwin Knoll after her sophomore year at Yale. Shortly after graduating from college in 1990, she came to work as Associate Editor for the Progressive, becoming Washington Editor and opening the Progressive’s Washington, DC, office in 1997. During the 1990s, Conniff covered welfare reform in Wisconsin and around the country, as well as the drug war in Colombia, and other topics, including women’s sports (an avid runner, Conniff coached her old high school track and cross-country teams at Madison East High School for many years).
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ACLU Tries To Halt Single-Sex Classes In Maine
Single-gender classes may violate federal law by relying on gender stereotypes. That’s what the ACLU is saying in several states, including Massachusetts, Indiana, Idaho, Washington, Illinois and Maine. The Maine ACLU is calling for the Sanford school district to stop offering single gender classes which they say may violate Title IX, the federal law that addresses gender equity in federally funded education programs.
Examples of improper gender stereotypes include sixth-grade girls discussing current events over cocoa while boys create an exercise area in the classroom and earning points toward prizes from the National Football League.
The ACLU has asked for public request requests public records requests and is reviewing records or has pending requests in other states, including Alabama, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
Zachary Heiden:
- All children are entitled to equal access to education regardless of their sex, that’s what the law says, that’s what the Constitution says.
- These same sex classrooms have a danger of reinforcing stereotypes about learning. They separate kids out by sex, and then apply these outmoded stereotypes.
- In terms of how they conduct those classes, and that does a terrible disservice to both boys and girls.
- In the boys program, the boys have signed up for this exercise program called NFL experience where the boys could do exercise in the morning and earn different points, depending on how much exercise they do. In the girls class, no NFL experience the girls have hot cocoa, read the local newspaper and discuss current events.
- There’s a national organization that’s been promoting these same sex programs around the country. They have this totally unscientific idea about how their brains develop and the scientific literature is very clear, that same sex classes don’t actually connect well with the physiology of boys or girls.
- We’re seeing it play out across the country, where people object to these program, because they are being excluded, and that’s what Title IX says – you can’t exclude students from educational programs on the basis of sex.
- I think what we are seeing, the large trajectory of public education in this country has been toward breaking down these stereotypes, of more opportunities for girls who have been traditionally excluded because of these stereotypes.
- In Wood County WV, for example, the girls sit in their class room in circular tables and the boys sit in rows – then you look at the reasoning why they do that.
- Boys apparently if they have to look at each other in the eyes, they will become aggressive.
- Girls don’t learn well under pressure, they don’t respond well to deadlines.
- You start telling girls from a young age you don’t respond well under pressure, guess what they’re not going to learn how to deal with pressure as well, and that is dangerous.
- ACLU – Women’s Rights Project
Guest – Zachary Heiden, Legal Director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the Maine state affiliate of the ACLU. He received his A.B. from Bowdoin College, his M.A. in English from the University of Florida, and his J.D. from Boston College Law School, where he was the managing editor of the International and Comparative Law Review.
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Quebec Students Protest Against Tuition Hikes and Bill 78
Austerity is taking its toll in many countries, as public services are cut, federal jobs are slashed and tuition hikes are pushed onto the younger generations. Canada is no exception. For the past 3 months, students in Montreal, Quebec, Canada have poured into the streets waging a massive strike against rising college tuition fees. Last week, the government proposed an offer to end the strike but student leaders have so far refused to recommend the deal to students.
Meanwhile, the Quebec government introduced an emergency legislation Bill 78 – the bill would suspend the academic year and make demonstrations of more than 50 people illegal unless police had been served with an itinerary 8 hours in advance. The new law, however hasn’t stopped the unpredictable pots and pans demonstrations as protesters on balconies around the city make noise to express solidarity in opposing tuition hikes.
Guest – Beatrice Vaugrante, Amnesty International Canada, Francophone Branch Director.
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