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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 February 11, 2019
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Venezuela Coup d’Etat
The last coup d’état the United States of America sponsored in 2009 in Latin America was under the Obama administration and supported by his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they overthrew a mildly social democratic president of Honduras. At that time the USA denied its role.
Today we are witnessing a quite open and blatant coup d’état in oil rich Venezuela against their recently and democratically elected socialist president Nicolas Maduro. The US boldly announced it no longer considered Maduro the legitimate president of his country.
In his stead the USA has recognized Jose Guida, an obscure legislator from the most right wing of the opposition parties after Vice President Mike Pence called him on the phone and gave him the blessings of United States government.
Venezuelan oil assets in the United States which amount to over $7 billion have been frozen. Likewise it’s $1 billion plus bank deposits in the United Kingdom have been seized. The United States has succeeded, in the infamous words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who engineered the coup against the elected Democratic Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11 of 1973, “ to make their economy scream”.
The Venezuelan economy is now half its former size and hobbling along at a depression level. Food and medicine there is increasingly scarce. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to leave their country. Nevertheless, President Maduro has retained popular support including the support of the Venezuelan army.
Guest – Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University and a Nation editorial board member, is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Empire’s Workshop; The Last Colonial Massacre; The Blood of Guatemala; and, most recently, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. His new book, forthcoming this spring, is The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
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United States Executive Authority in Declaring Emergency Powers
U.S. presidents have the discretion to declare a “national emergency.” As soon as he does, he can sidestep many existing limits to presidential authority. In fact, 100 or more special provisions become available to him. Some provide reasonable responses to real emergencies, while others seem to bolster the power of a so-called unitary executive who wants to amassing or retain power. The president can activate laws allowing him to, for example, shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the U.S. or to freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.
The rationale for having emergency powers is simple: The government’s ordinary powers may not be enough in times of crisis, and amending the laws to provide greater ones would take too long. Emergency powers are intended to give a temporary boost until the emergency passes or there is time to change the law through the regular legislative process. The problem comes when presidents don’t have the best interest of the country in mind.
Guest – Andrew Boyd, Counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. Andrew spent 7 years prosecuting senior Khmer Rouge leaders on behalf of the UN for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He also worked on cases resulting from the 1994 Rwandan genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
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Law and Disorder February 4, 2019
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Government Shut Down Impacts
President Donald Trump set a record for the longest-ever government shutdown in history lasting nearly 35 days. There are many ways that the public will feel the impact of a government shutdown. 800,000 federal workers were either barred from working or forced to work without pay. That, despite the continued operation of so called essential services – many of which relate to public safety – that continued to operate. In prior shutdowns these have included border protection, in-hospital medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, and power grid maintenance.
In 1996, for example, more than 10,000 Medicare applicants were turned away each day of the shutdown. In 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency halted site inspections to 1,200 different sites that included hazardous waste, drinking water, and chemical facilities. The Food and Drug Administration delayed almost 900 inspections.
We examine some of the lesser-reported impacts from the most recent government shutdown such as cybersecurity and food and chemical testing.
Guest – Attorney Melanie Benesh – As EWG’s Legislative Attorney, Melanie provides legislative and regulatory analysis of federal food, farm and chemical law. Melanie grew up in Omaha and received her B.A. from Marquette University. After college, she worked as a research assistant studying Fair Trade coffee in Chiapas, Mexico, and later as a community organizer for Voces de la Frontera in Milwaukee.
Guest – Larry Loeb has written for many of the last century’s major “dead tree” computer magazines, having been, among other things, a consulting editor for BYTE magazine and senior editor for the launch of WebWeek. He has written a book on the Secure Electronic Transaction Internet protocol. His latest book has the commercially obligatory title of Hack Proofing XML. Securitynow.com
Law and Disorder January 28, 2019
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Honoring the Legacy Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today on Law and Disorder we bring you a special hour-long program honoring the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Our listeners know all too well that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was shot on April 4, 1968–51 years ago. Not so well known is the radical Dr. King, who said in the last months of his life that:
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo.”
Joining us are special guests Ruby Sales, a colleague of Dr. King’s and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (F.O.R.). We’re also joined by author and activist Matt Meyer, a board member of the AJMI.
Dr. King began close ties with A.J. Muste and with the F.O.R. during the Montgomery bus boycott, when FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley came to Alabama to support local efforts nonviolently challenging racial segregation. Dr. King developed a special relationship with former FOR chairman A.J. Muste, whose absolute pacifism King had, as a theological seminary student, questioned.
Before heading F.O.R., Muste was a prominent labor leader, helping to found the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And Dr. King, of course, was killed exactly one year after taking a staunch anti-Vietnam war position and in the midst of supporting a significant strike of sanitation workers, linking—as he had been—issues of race, class, and violence as King deepened his critique of the roots of oppressive U.S. society.
Guest – Ruby Sales is the founder and director of the “SpiritHouse Project”, a national organization that uses the arts, research, education, action and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic and social justice as well as for spiritual maturity. A life-long organizer, scholar and public theologian in the areas of civil, gender and other human rights, she was a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and served as national convener of the Make Every Church A Peace Church movement.
Guest – Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson is the Executive Pastor of The Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, NY. She has combined pastoral ministry with the social justice community. The former Executive Director of the Children’s Defense Fund she is now the Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Guest – Matt Meyer is Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association, Chair of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Financial Advisory Committee, Africa Support Network Coordinator of the War Resisters International, and Senior Research Scholar at U-Mass Amherst. As current National co-chair of FOR and former Chair of the War Resisters League, he is second only to AJ Muste in holding the top post of those two historic US peace organizations. He is author of the recently published White Lives Matter Most And Other “Little” White Lies.
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