Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. 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 April 8, 2024
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Sexting Among Teens, A Felony
Because teenagers spend a good deal of their time online and on social media platforms, awareness has risen about related risks such as cyberbullying, shaming, and online predation. But then there’s sexting, the sharing between teens of explicit images. A study in the Journal of American Medical Association revealed that sexting is common among adolescents, with at least 1 in 4 teens receiving explicit texts and emails.
What we don’t hear much about are the legal consequences of such communications. In half of the states in this country, criminal laws classify the act of “sexting” among minors as a felony. New York, California, New Jersey, and Michigan are among those states. Their laws consider the exchange, possession, distribution, or production of explicit images of minors through sexting as felony offenses under certain circumstances. The specific criteria and penalties vary from state to state.
Teenagers who engage in sexting rarely realize the consequences of their actions. Since teens are minors, sharing nude or explicit or suggestive photos of themselves or their friends is considered child pornography. That means that possessing or sending the photos may amount to criminal possession or distribution of child pornography. If convicted for one of these offenses, young people may face severe penalties and life-long consequences.
Guest – Attorney Andy Stengel is a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who has also worked in the executive and legislative branches of New York State government and for the Brennan Center for Justice.
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No Business With Genocide
April is Earth Month, a time to think twice about our relationship with — and responsibility to — our planet and the ecosystem we rely on, and of course, our fellow living beings. With technology and social media, we have unprecedented access to information and images from all over the world. But witnessing natural disasters, wars and other untold suffering can be debilitating. Thankfully, there are people like today’s guest, to remind us that we, individually and collectively, have so much power to change the course of history and create a healthier world for future generations.
Guest – Simon Billenness, an advocate for environmental sustainability, human rights, corporate governance, and social justice. Described by the New York Times as “a super-specialist” in human rights advocacy, Simon has, for more than two decades, advised investors, non-profits, universities, communities, and unions in holding corporations accountable. He is currently the Executive Director of the International Campaign for the Rohingya and for the coalition-led campaign, No Business With Genocide. He also serves on the Business and Human Rights Co-group of Amnesty International USA.
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Law and Disorder April 1, 2024
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Chris Hedges: Israel’s Trojan Horse
The Israeli military is the fourth most powerful military in the world. In the last six months it has turned the Gaza Strip into a howling wilderness. Most of us 2.2 million inhabitants have been driven into a tiny corner in the south in the city of Rafa where they face an invasion planned by Israel with American support. Israel sent a delegation to Washington last week. The story spun by the Biden administration is that they are working with Israel to try to “moderate” Israel. This is perception management.
Meanwhile, in another PR move, the United States, announced that it is building a temporary pier on the Mediterranean shore of Gaza to facilitate the importation of food stuffs. But it doesn’t say that the pier will facilitate the export of Palestinians in to permanent exile.
Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. The United States is not serious about getting food for Palestinians. It continues to supply the Israelis with weapons, including opening up its weapons storage facility in Israel for the Israelis to freely use.
Contrary to American law, the Biden administration, has circumvented Congress 100 times to send even more weapons and bombs which have killed more than 32,000 people and injured another 70,000 while destroying most of the homes in Gaza, their hospitals, schools, mosques , water and sanitation plants, and electrical infrastructure.
Israel’s reaction to the judgment of International Court Of Justice, the highest court in the world, was to ignore their founding of “plausible, genocide“ and to ignore their decisions – taken together amount to a cease-fire. Israel’s goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it with their own people. Last week Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner gave his opinion on the subject calling the western shore of Gaza “good beachfront property“ most suitable for development now that the Palestinians have been driven out of their homes.
Defenders of Israel say that Israel is acting in self-defense, that Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon are behind Hamas, and that in any case the figures of death and injury of Palestinians are lies perpetrated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas.
Guest – Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and political writer. Chris Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 and served as the Times’ Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001 Hedges was one of the Times’ writers on an entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Prior to his work for the Times, he worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and the Dallas Morning News. His books include “Death of the Liberal Class”, “War on America”, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”, and his book “War Is a Force That Gives US Meaning”, which was a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction.
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Billionaires, Economies And Elections
There were 614 billionaires in America four years ago before the pandemic. Now there are 737. Their total wealth is more than $5 trillion. In the last four years they went from having 2,947,000,000,000 to having 5,529,000,000,000. The golden rule in the United States is that he who has the gold makes the rules. A corollary to this rule is – follow the money.
The immense concentration of wealth among a handful of billionaires in America has destroyed every institution in our country from education to politics. What effect does it have on elections? We have two parties. Both support capitalism which has resulted in having two parties of big money. They make it nearly impossible to challenge their hegemony by forming a third party.
The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United ruled that corporations are people. Thus, they can exercise their free speech rights and donate an unlimited amount of money to preserve and advance their perceived interests. In 1937 the great political journalist Ferdinand Lundburg analyzed wealth and class in the USA in his book America’s 60 Families. He wrote about how they functioned for the purpose of gaining and keeping political and economic power.
In 1968 Lundburg published The Rich and the Super Rich. It shows how the ruling elite controls the mainstream media and the US economy and have virtually uncontested influence over American political institutions. The infamous names of the ruling class back then were Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Melon, Dupont, Guggenheim, Whitney, and Astor. They made their money in oil, steel, chemicals, that is to say, basic industry. But their wealth was relatively small compared to today’s economic titans who have made their money in tech industries and speculation.
Guest – Patrick Martin, senior editor at the world socialist web site where he covers a range of political issues in the United States.
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Law and Disorder March 25, 2024
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I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader
Angela Davis once stated “radical simply means grasping things at the root.” This makes understanding possible. What are the roots of our present dilemma? Where did capitalism come from? And what accounts for its great success? Where did racism come from? When was it implanted? Why are alternatives to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties so feeble?
What did Malcolm X really stand for and what did he try to accomplish before he was assassinated at age 39, the same age that his contemporary Martin Luther King was assassinated five years later? How does this contribute to the weakness of our movement?
This weakness can be traced back most immediately to the anti-Communist witchhunt of the 1940s and 1950s and the destruction of the left-wing; of our once powerful trade unions beginning in 1947.
The danger that Malcolm X. presented to the powers that be are best understood by his internationalism, his reaching out to leaders in Africa, his desire to go to the United Nations to mobilize against American racism.
Today’s political activists are drawn to the works of historians to appreciate where we are at, how we got here, and what to do next.
Guest – Gerald Horne has written about these profound events. His reader I Dare Say has just been published by OR books. Cornell West called Gerald Horne is “one of the great historians of our time.“ Horne approaches his study of history as a politically engaged scholar with an insightful and necessary partisan stance. He graduated from both the University of California law school and Columbia University where he got his PhD in history. Horne has been active as a leader of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and is the author of 40 books as far reaching as the origins of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, boxing and jazz. He is currently a chaired professor of African-American history at the University of Houston.
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Attorney Michael Deutsch on Repression of the Pro-Palestinian Movement
Historically, when the people of our nation rise up in massive opposition to policies and actions undertaken by their government that are deemed essential to its foreign or domestic policies, various governmental agencies invariably begin the process of trying to shut down or seriously weaken the peoples’ movements against those policies and actions. That’s what happened in the 1960’s and early ‘70’s, during the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. In the ‘60’s when the movement for civil rights was so active in our nation. Or more recently in response to the movement on behalf of immigrants’ rights. And so it is not surprising that the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, which in the wake of how Israel is conducting its war in Gaza, has exponentially increased in size and in public view, would immediately become the focus of renewed governmental, as well as private, repression in America. Colleges and universities shut down groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace; college presidents were called to testify before Congress about what they were, or were not, doing to combat alleged increases in anti-Semitism on their campuses; the U.S. House of Representatives initiated, and continues, an investigation of the pro-Palestinian movement; private employers have withdrawn job offers to students and others who joined the anti-Israel protests; and authors and speakers deemed too supportive of the Palestinian cause continue to be disinvited or banned from speaking at public forums.
Secrets And Lies: The Persecution Of Muhammad Salah
Often, governmental efforts to intimidate or undermine these peace and social justice movements include actions that are not visible to the general public. Secret actions. Actions such as sending undercover agents into the targeted protest groups in order to disrupt the group. Electronic spying on the groups and group leaders escalates. And, as the case with the movement now protesting Israel’s actions in its war in Gaza, a war backed by the United States both politically and militarily, various U.S. policing agencies are now consulting with, visiting with, and working in concert with governmental agencies in Israel.
Guest – Michael Deutsch, a lawyer with the famed human and civil rights People’s Law Office in Chicago, Illinois. Michael has also served as the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. In the course of his career, he has been a criminal defense lawyer for the rebelling prisoners at Attica, and later was a coordinator in the Attica civil lawsuit where, after two decades of litigation there was a settlement of 12 million dollars in damages. Mr. Deutsch has also represented Black Panther Party members, Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners in the 1950’s, who won an unconditional sentence commutation from President Carter in 1979; and more recently Michael represented Rasmea Odeh, the Deputy Director of the Arab-American Action Network, a former Palestinian prisoner and torture survivor.
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