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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 October 22, 2018
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Chris Hedges – America: the Farewell Tour
We are living in terrible times. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has said that “it feels like the end of the world.” Last week hurricane Michael destroyed much of the Florida Panhandle. Before that hurricanes decimated Puerto Rico and before that Houston and before that New Orleans. Climate scientists predict it will only get worse and that we are rapidly running out of time to hold the disaster.
Many people have observed that Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The insurgency in the Republican Party has installed a purposeful, strategic and successful ultra right into power in all three branches of the Federal government and in the legislatures of half the states.
The war in Afghanistan has been pursued for 17 years. Iraq and Libya have been destroyed. The military budget was increased by 10% and is now some $700 billion a year, half of what the government spends all together. Are we on the verge of climate catastrophe, a great economic crash, or the end of the American empire?
Guest – Chris Hedges has written 11 books including the recently published America: the Farewell Tour. Although he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, Chris Hedges was pushed out of the New York times where he was reporter for publicly criticizing the Iraq war. Pulitzer-Prize winning author and journalist. He was also a war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is ‘Death of the Liberal Class (2010). Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
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Law and Disorder October 15, 2018
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The Power of Public Outrage: Laquan McDonald’s Place in History
Jason van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who four years ago shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in the back, was found guilty on October 5th of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery by Chicago jury.
This was the first time in 50 years that a Chicago police officer has been found guilty of murdering somebody while he was on duty.
The McDonald murder was massively covered up beginning with the cops who were on the job with van Dyke, the commanding officers of the Chicago police department, up to the office of the Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Key to the conviction was video footage taken by a police car dash camera. This video was suppressed by the police, and the mayor for three years and only revealed after a massive campaign by a number of Chicago grassroots organizations. Nationally, there have been no convictions in the murders of Eric Gardner, Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin.
Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the USA. Recently 50 Chicago schools have been closed as well as many mental health clinics. Even the parking meters have been sold in a wave of divestment from the inner-city.
Guest – Attorney G.Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern Law School, is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, an office which has been dedicated to litigating civil rights, police violence, government misconduct, and death penalty cases for more than 40 years.
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Neo-Colonial Regime Kill Peaceful Ambazonian Protesters in Africa
Ambazonia is an English-speaking territory located between Cameroon and Nigeria in West Africa. Also known as the Southern Cameroons, for most of its recent history it has been under military occupation by the French neo-colonial regime in Cameroon. A majority of Ambazonians reject the legitimacy of this regime and its military control.
In violation of an agreement to create an equal confederacy between the two autonomous states, French Cameroon has been dismantling and defunding Ambazonian systems, and pillaging its resources since the country was created in 1961.
Since December 2016, French Cameroon military has responded to peaceful protests with force, killing over 400 civilians. 200 more have been disappeared and are feared dead. More than 90 villages burnt down, resulting in 60,000 people fleeing to neighboring Nigeria.
More than 2,500 activist and peaceful protesters imprisoned, some tried in military courts, a violation of international law, and some sentenced for terrorism and other unjustifiable charges. Prisoners include prominent nonviolence advocate Julius AyukTabe and 11 of his senior aides, arrested in January 2018, and unlawfully repatriated. Julius’s appeal hearing just happened last Thursday.
On January 26, 2018—with no extradition treaty between Cameroon and Nigeria, and without a presiding judge—Nigeria forcibly handed 10 of the prisoners and 37 other refugees to Cameroon. That was in violation of international law forbidding a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country where they likely face persecution. This action drew condemnation from Amnesty International, the UNHCR, the U.S. Department of State, and other leading human rights advocates. The Ambazonia Prisoners of Conscience Support Network, or APOCS, was recently formed to address this crisis.
Guest – Sphynx Eben, a founding member of APOCS and also a longtime media organizer with the Indymedia Africa Working Group. https://www.facebook.com/apocsnetwork/
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Law and Disorder October 8, 2018
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Regulation Designed to Tax Protesters For First Amendment Activity
The Trump administration has another first for America. It wants demonstrators to pay to use public parks, sidewalks and streets to engage in free speech. The effect of taxing protesters in the nation’s capital will be to restrict access for First Amendment activities to the very few who can afford it. Participatory democracy will be no more.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in August announced the White House’s rewriting of regulations governing free speech and assembly on public lands under federal jurisdiction.
The National Park Service will charge protesters for so-called event management expenses. Barricades and fencing that police may erect, trash removal, sanitation charges, permit application charges, salaries of personnel deployed to monitor protests, as well as cost deemed harmful to turf. The Park Service claims protest-related costs are burdensome, and said that last year’s Women’s March imposed “a pretty heavy cost” on the government.
Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee. co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia (involving targeting of political activists and false arrest by law enforcement based on political affiliation); and in National Council of Arab Americans, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (successfully challenging the city’s efforts to discriminatorily restrict mass assembly in Central Park’s Great Lawn stemming from the 2004 RNC protests.)
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U.S. Plans To Overthrow Venezuelan President?
Recently people in the Trump administration held secret meetings with certain military leaders of Venezuela to discuss plans to overthrow Venezuelan elected President Nicolas Maduro.
The White House said in a statement that it was important to engage in “dialogue with all Venezuelans who demonstrate a desire for democracy“ in order to “bring positive change to a country that has suffered so much under Maduro.” The economic situation in Venezuela has been dire. This has been exacerbated by a US financial embargo. It is estimated that 1,600,000 people have left Venezuela since 2015.
Guest – William Camacaro is a Venezuelan living in New York City and a senior research fellow at the Consul of Hemispheric Affairs, Washington DC best non-governmental organization founded in 1975. Camacaro is a cofounder of the Alberto Lovers Bolivarian Circle of New York, an organization founded in solidarity with Venezuela.
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