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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder August 24, 2020
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USPS, Election Integrity and the U.S. Postmaster General
Hours after Democrats asked Postal Service officials to testify on Capitol Hill about new policies posing “a grave threat to the integrity of the election,” Nancy Pelosi cut short the House summer recess. Representatives will vote on legislation to block new changes at the USPS that voting advocates assert will undermine casting mail ballots during the pandemic.
As we’ve been reporting, the new postmaster general Louis DeJoy—a staunch Trump supporter—wasted no time enacting such changes as ending overtime pay and removing some sorting machines. Not surprisingly, these changes have created great delays in service. In response, the White House chief of staff has indicated openness to provide emergency funding to help the USPS deal with a surge in mail-in ballots.
DeJoy has significant and personal financial interests in the Postal Service’s corporate rivals and contractors. The November election is expected to bring in up to 80 million ballots by Americans nervous about in person voting because of COVID 19. The Postal Service notified states in July that it might not be able to meet their deadlines for delivering last-minute mail-in ballots. As a result, state attorneys general are considering suing the administration.
President Trump has unabashedly criticized mail voting as vulnerable to fraud. At the same time he requested an absentee ballot from his now home state of Florida.
Guest – Chuck Zlatkin, legislative director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union.
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Politically this is a time of great opportunity and great peril. The economic, racial, and health crisis we have been put in will deepen in the coming months. As the pandemic spreads, the depression gets worse and racist police brutality does not go away. There has been a massive corporate bail out disguised as a stimulus package. It has left millions of people jobless, broke, sick, and facing homelessness.
Trump and his Republican Party, venal and incompetent, have given up trying to contain the pandemic, ameliorate the economic catastrophe, or rein in the police. The Republicans left Washington two weeks ago refusing to pass an economic package that would aid the unemployed, which now number more than 30 million. 175,000 people have already died from COVID-19 and millions face eviction.
The massive demonstrations in the streets, black led with the support of the majority of whites, has been an insurgency unprecedented in American history.
Guest – Ajamu Baraka was the 2016 vice presidential candidate of the Green Party. He is a leader of the Black Alliance for Peace, a contributor to Black Agenda Report and an activist in the Black is Back Coalition.
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Law and Disorder August 17, 2020
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Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era
Since Trump began his presidential campaign four years ago comedians have been complaining that because he is so preposterous it’s hard to satirize him, that he is self satirical. This has been true until recently with the publication of Marvin Kitman’s Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era.
At first Kitman assumed that Trump’s candidacy was a publicity stunt. After he realized it was serious, as a satirist he felt very lucky writing that ”I have never had such a good time observing and writing about the follies of our country.“
He began keeping a comical journal modeled after A Journal of the Plague Year where author Daniel Defoe described the great plague that hit London in 1665.
Guest – humorist and author Marvin Kitman is a former columnist at New York Newsday and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for criticism. He is the author of, among others, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly and The Making of the President 1789.
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American Spring: Unfolding Crisis
The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding.
The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites. This kind of broad solidarity was absent during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The demonstrations are in large part led by people of color, mostly young people. Elected officials and traditional civil rights leaders are not leading the current uprising. As the L.A. Progressive has written, “The gross underlying inequality, racially and more broadly economically, affects every aspect of life in the US. and is the root cause of the volcanic anger irruption against the veneer of obsolete institutions.“
Guest – Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report. Ford founded the Black Agenda Report and has edited it since 2006. He was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and he has delivered presentations at many colleges and universities.
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Law and Disorder August 10, 2020
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The Young Lords: A Radical History
Protests in the streets in the wake of police killings of Black Americans have sparked a multi-faceted societal reckoning with racism. Challenges to entrenched systems of inequality and white supremacy are taking many forms, from the tearing down of confederate statues, to calls for police reform and the defunding of certain police functions, to Merriam Webster dictionary expanding its definition of racism to include structural forms of bias.
Historically, the role of street protests is so intrinsic to reform in this nation enshrines protection for mass assemblies in the Bill of Rights. Yet one vibrant and impactful group of revolutionary activists in protest history has received virtually no attention, namely the Young Lords.
The children of poor and working class Puerto Rican migrants who had been massively displaced from the Island of Puerto the US mainland after WW II, the Young Lords grew up in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and East Harlem,. They were radicalized by the civil rights and black power movements and the Vietnam War. This generation of socialist youth make it their top priority to bring about revolution in the US and on the island of Puerto Rico.
Scholar and activist Johanna Fernandez’s new book, The Young Lords: A Radical History is the definitive history of this militant group of community organizers. In a presentation at Baltimore’s Red Emma worker cooperative bookstore in early 2020 Professor Fernandez discussed the long-lasting impact of their theatrical street initiatives. The Young Lords transformed the relationship between white people and people of color in the US, and made it acceptable to questions how the US government conducts foreign policy.
Their activism has been credited for the the passage of anti-lead poisoning legislation in the city and they drafted the first known patient bill of rights–they did no in concert with nurses, doctors, and hospital workers at Lincoln Hospital which they occupied 50 years ago on July 14, 1969, to protest healthcare for profit in America and the poor conditions in the delivery of healthcare to black American and Puerto Rican patients in that Bronx hospital.
As Professor Fernandez writes in her book, “The New York Young Lords formed part of a cohort of young working-class people–and people of color among them, in particular–whose unprecedented access to higher education sharpened their latent critique of society and afford them an infrastructure for dissent…..they challenged what many believed were old, soul-slaying social norms and standards of behavior that constrained personal freedoms in the U.S. Known collectively as the New Left, these diverse movements were built by a generation whose activism radically changed the cultural and political landscape of the United States.”
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Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking
As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project that is being operated by an Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city.
Michael Harrision, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, “There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk.”
The Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program is, by contract, limited to monitoring such felony crimes as robberies, car jackings, shootings and homicides. Images recorded are, in theory, to be used solely in criminal investigations and will be stored for 45 days. A first prong of the program was conducted covertly in 2016 under a different police commissioner.
The ACLU of Maryland calls this initiative the most comprehensive surveillance of a U.S. city in history. ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah said, “It’s the virtual equivalent of having a police officer follow a resident every time they walk out the door, and if that happened in real life, all of us would understand the huge privacy implications in doing that.”
Guest – ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more. In 2011 he was an inaugural recipient of the James Baldwin Medal for Civil Rights. David previously worked as a Senior Trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the US Dept of Justice, focusing on police misconduct and conditions in prisons, jails and other state institutions.
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