Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Truth to Power
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People’s Law Office Files Suit To Stop Paramilitary In Chicago
With less than 100 days to go before the November election Donald Trump is afraid, with good reason, that he is going to lose. He had planned to run on the strength of the American economy. But because of the widespread and spreading COVID-19 virus and the attendant tanking of the economy he can no longer do this. Trump has switched election strategies.
He calls himself a war president and is hoping to stir up peoples’ fear of anarchists socialists, people who he says hate our country and who he falsely claims are tearing it apart in rising crime ridden Democratic party controlled major cities.
Fear is his strategy. He won the last election despite losing the popular vote by raising the specter of fear of Muslim terrorists and Mexican rapists and murderers invading our southern border.
Using the pretext of an executive order issued to protect statutes and monuments Trump has marshaled para-military troops from six different Federal organizations including Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Patrol. Two weeks ago he sent them to Portland, Oregon where are largely peaceful protests have been ongoing.
The military forces were sent out to crush the demonstrations, to dominate the streets. Dressed in camouflage uniforms without identification they plucked protesters off the street, kidnapped and interrogated them, and then released them. They used teargas, pepper spray, and fired rubber bullets. They beat people severely with batons and focused their attacks on paramedics, National Lawyers Guild legal observers and journalists.
Trump has indicated that he plans to send his para- military forces to Chicago. Black Lives Matter in that city and several other activist organizations have banded together and sued Trump to prevent this.
Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. Taylor has litigated against police abuse in Chicago for over 50 years. He started out successfully representing the family of assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. He has represented many victims of police torture and has written the award winning book The Torture Machine: Racism and Violence in Chicago.
Guest – Attorney Christian Snow, associate of the Chicago civil rights law firm the Peoples Law Office. She is a leader of the prison abolitionist group Assata’s Daughters and has been active in the Black Lives Matter movement in Chicago protesting the racist murder of George Floyd.
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USPS Crisis During Pandemic: Update
In late May we reported that the United States Postal Service was projected to fun out of funds by September 2020. New forecasts give the USPS a few more months. But it can still run out of cash before the end of 2021 without long-term reform from Congress.
Former Postmaster General Megan Brennan in April asked the House Oversight and Reform Committee for a $75 billion relief package based on the earlier forecasts. The request was approved, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, package volume has actually increased. But experts say it’s not a matter of if the USPS will deplete its funds, but when.
Since we recorded this interview, the American Post Workers Union’s president has warned that recently enacted Postal Service procedures — which have led to nationwide delays in mail delivery — could affect mail-in voting for the November election.
Mark Dimondstein told CNN that postal workers and customers are reporting that mail delivery has slowed and “degraded.” The Union leader says it’s been “demoralizing and upsetting” to workers who have worked through the pandemic.
The new procedures, including cutting overtime, come from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a longtime Donald Trump supporter and fundraiser. Bins of mail ready for delivery have been left sitting in post offices due to scheduling and route changes, and carriers are sorting more mail themselves, increasing delivery times.
As Trump trails Joe Biden in the polls, he now claims that delays processing mail-in votes would undermine the legitimacy of the November election and has suggested delaying it.
Dimondstein expressed concern that the mail service is being politicized. He also criticized the Treasury Department’s agreement with USPS on the “terms and conditions” for $10 billion in the form of loans. He says the loan pushes the USPS further into debt.
APWU.org
Help save the USPS – USMailIsNotForSale.org / NationalRuralOrganizing
Guest – Chuck Zlatkin. Chuck is the legislative director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Police Unions Are Racist Power Brokers in Opposition to Movement for Black Lives
When they commit violence against civilians, abusive police in the United States are protected in various ways. The power elite, whose property police protect, have given them almost complete legal immunity from successful lawsuits for damages under the doctrine of qualified immunity. When a cop has illegally hurt someone he or she can count on what’s known as – the blue wall of silence – knowing that a fellow officer will not contradict their defense.
What is the role of police unions regarding the protection of police who have abused and even murdered citizens? Police unions act as power brokers in opposition to the rights of victimized citizens. They provide legal defense funds, public relations, and political pressure in defense of abusive cops. And they are a very powerful force in these respects.
The US Congressman from Chicago Bobby Rush has recently said that the Chicago police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, is “the number one cause that prevents police accountability, that protects police corruption, that protects police lawlessness. They are the organized guardians of continuous police lawlessness, police murder, and police brutality. They are the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness in the land and stand shoulder to shoulder with the KKK then and the KKK now.”
Guest – Attorney G. Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People Law Office in Chicago starting out over 50 years ago representing the family of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Who was assassinated by the Chicago Police Department with the help of the FBI. He has represented numerous police torture survivors during the past 33 years. Taylor was one of the lawyers involved in the struggle for reparations and has chronicled the decade long fight against Chicago police torture in his award-winning book “The Torture Machine : Racism and Violence in Chicago.
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First Amendment Auditor: Big Nick South Florida Accountability
Most of the populace, some police officers and federal employees may not realize that its every photographers right to take photos and video of federal buildings on public property. The easing of restrictions began when the New York Civil Liberties Union had looked into several cases of people who were wrongly harassed, detained and arrested by federal agents while photographing or shooting video of federal buildings from public plazas and sidewalks.
In 2010, the NYCLU brought a suit against the US Department of Homeland Security in federal court to end this practice. In October of 2010, a judge actually signed a settlement where the US government agreed that no federal statures or regulations bar people from photographing the exterior of federal buildings.
The US government agreed to issue a directive to members of the Federal Protective Service on photographer’s rights. A decade later, the rights attained in this decision are recently being put to the test in what’s known as First Amendment audits.
Guest – Nick Freeman – First Amendment Auditor with millions in view counts joins us to talk about his work in Fort Lauderdale being part of a long emerging trend to educate local law enforcement about the right to photography and subsequent issues such as police accountability.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Police Spy On Social Media
In late 2016, a trove of emails revealed that law enforcement had been monitoring the social media accounts of Black Lives Matter protesters. One police sergeant in Memphis, Tennessee even opened a fake Facebook account to impersonate a black activist, infiltrate online black protest spaces, and gather intelligence on hundreds of activists. In Minnesota, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force used a confidential information with access to private social media communications about a BLM protest and fed that information to local police.
It turns out that such tracking is routine among local and federal police agencies. They use it in criminal investigations and to keep tabs on lawful First Amendment protected activities of dissent.
And as we’ve seen in other areas of surveillance, police watching persons online usually impacts historically over-police communities. It also has a chilling effect on free speech and online communications.
The Brennan Center in New York has issued a comprehensive report on social media monitoring. It shows how personal information gleaned from social media posts is used to target dissent and subject religious and ethnic minorities to increased vetting and surveillance.
Guest – Harsha Panduranga is counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program. His work has been featured in numerous press outlets including the Atlantic, Slate, Daily Beast, and Just Security. Harsha received his BA and JD from the University of Michigan.
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Co-conspirator For Justice: The Revolutionary Life Of Dr. Alan Berkman
After battling recurrent cancer for half his life Dr. Alan Berkman died in a New York City hospital on June 5th, 11 years ago. It was not the worst struggles of his life.
Alan was first struck by cancer when he was in prison, accused and then convicted for his political work in the political underground. He was a leader of the small May 19th movement, an offshoot of Prairie Fire then controlled by those in the Weather Underground. While hidden from public view,Alan and his comrades did non-lethal bombings of political targets, including an FBI office and the U.S. Senate, to protest American imperial and racist atrocities, and did armed robberies, which they called “expropriation‘s“, to support themselves.
Caught in 1985, Alan served eight years in some of the worst prisons in America, nearly half that time in solitary. He had two rounds of cancer, but the authorities stalled again and again on giving him adequate medical care. They hated him for being a socialist, a Jew, a doctor, and a supporter of black, Latin and Native American peoples and those harmed by American imperialism around the globe. The authorities labeled him a terrorist.
Alan came of age in the 1960s, but really did not become political until he went to medical school. He left a prestigious medical residency, on track to become a research scientist, to become a community doctor for 10 years in New York’s poorest neighborhoods throughout the 1970s. He was forced underground for years because he wouldn’t give up the name of the woman he treated for a gunshot wound she got in a failed Brinks armored truck robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard in Rockland county, just outside New York City.
After eight years in prison, amazingly, radical attorney Ron Kuby prevented New York state from not renewing his medical license. Alan, having learned about AIDS in prison, started working as an AIDS doctor in the South Bronx. In a year he became the medical director of the program.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Alan increasingly was horrified by the failure to provide treatment for HIV/AIDS patients in the Global South. He helped form Health GAP (Global Access Project) with the help of ACT UP and Housing Works. They fought big Pharma, which controlled manufacturing and distribution of the anti-viral AIDS medicine “cocktail” which cost $10-$15,000 a year, an exorbitant price guaranteed to them by their ownership of medical patents, their intellectual property. People could not afford the drugs, especially outside the United States, and thousands died needlessly.
Dr. Alan Berkman helped change that, not having the requisite respect for private property in a public health crisis. He got sick people drugs that were produced generically and brought the cost of the drug down to $87 a year. Some 4 million people in the global south took the medicine, prolonging or saving their lives
Michael Smith’s review of Susan’s book – The Revolutionary Life Of Dr. Alan Berkman
Guest – Susan Reverby, author of the recently published Co-conspirator for Justice: the Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman. She is the Marian Butler MacLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and It’s Legacy, and other books on gender, race, health, nursing, and medicine.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Host Updates:
- In Memoriam – Perry Rosenstein Law and Disorder warmly remembers Perry’s legacy. He passed on April 3rd, 2020 in Teaneck, New Jersey.
- Navy Secretary’s Flight To Aircraft Carrier To Bash Fired Captain Cost Taxpayers $243,000
- 10,239 Elderly Prisoners in New York State – Governor Cuomo’s Office – 518-474-8390
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Reevaluating “Normal” Once Again
We are into a new economic and political period.The economic crisis has been looming and was predicted. But the COVID-19 pandemic triggered it. There will be no going back to “normal.“
Arundhati Roy has written that “historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
As Reverend William Barber recently wrote, “this virus is teaching us that from now on living wages, guaranteed healthcare for all, unemployment and labor rights are not far left issues, but issues of right versus wrong in life versus death.“
That there will be changes when this crisis has passed is a certainty. The pendulum will not swing back to what was called “normal.” What is uncertain is what kind of changes will take place and will they be done to us or by us and for us.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, where she is she is the director of the New Internationalism Project and works on anti-war, US foreign policy and Palestinian rights issues. She has worked as an informal adviser to several key UN officials on Palestinian issues. Her books including Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
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A Victory In The Greensboro, North Carolina Case of Marcus Deon Smith
On March 25, 2020 North Carolina federal judge Loretta Biggs allowed a civil rights lawsuit over the hogtying death of Marcus Deon Smith to move forward.
Smith, a young black man, was killed by eight Greensboro police officers and several emergency medical technicians during the 2018 North Carolina Folk Festival.
Hogtying is when a persons’ hands and feet are tied together behind their back. Smith’s hogtying was ruled a murder by the state medical examiner.
The Smith family is being represented by North Carolina attorney Graham Holt and Ben Elson and Flint Taylor of the PLO, The People’s Law Office, based in Chicago.
“This is an outstanding and long-awaited victory for the Smith family“, said Taylor. “It recognizes that the use of brutal hogtying of defenseless persons is a clear violation of their constitutional rights and that the Greensboro police were woefully and inadequately trained in using restraints which were a direct cause of Marcus‘s death.“
Marcus‘s mother Mary Smith thanked the judge for allowing the case to go forward. His father said in tears that he will forever be haunted by seeing his son taking his last breath on the street pavement.
Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, one of the premier police abuse lawyers in the country. Attorney Taylor is the author of the recently published book “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.“ Flint Taylor, welcome back to Law And Disorder.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iran, Supreme Court, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Human Rights Attorney Michael Tigar
As we enter into the new decade we look back at where we have been, legally speaking, and where we are headed.
2020 began with President Donald Trump illegally and recklessly ordering the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Suleimani who was on a peace mission in Iraq at the time he was killed by a US drone.
Although assassination has been secretly used by the US government since the formation of the CIA in 1947, Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, began the illegal extra-judicial open assassination of people in what was called “targeted killings.“ This included American citizens.
With regard to deportations, the Obama administration set a record by deporting more than 3 million people. Trump has continued massive deportations but also has illegally frustrated and prevented people fleeing political repression from seeking asylum in America, separating children from families and caging them in a process that continues.
The Authorization for the Use of Military Force was voted on shortly after 9/11 to justify the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. The AUMF has been used illegally to justify the presence of American troops in the Middle East since then. It was recently renewed.
The Patriot Act has also been renewed, allowing for massive US government surveillance of American citizens in the illegal derogation of their Fourth Amendment right to privacy democratic rights and the rule of law are in obvious, unprecedented, serious jeopardy.
Truth telling whistle blowing Australian journalist Julian Assange, in the most important first amendment civil liberty case, is about to be extradited from London to Virginia where he faces espionage charges. The issue is his right to be a journalist and our right to know. If convicted he will go to prison for life destroying investigative journalism in areas the government deems “national security.“
The peoples’ constitutional right to impeach a president is also in jeopardy. The Democratic party’s attempt to remove Donald Trump from office is sure to fail because of Trump and the Republicans’ refusal to honor the constitution and allow for a fair trial in the Senate.
Trump has appointed hundreds of reactionary judges to the federal trial and appellate benches. A woman’s right to control her own body, decided in the famous case of “Roe vs Wade”, will be decided by the Supreme Court whose ranks have been bolstered by two additional reactionary judges, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
The separation of church and state and the separation of powers are also in jeopardy.
Guest – Human rights attorney Michael Tigar, a veteran of 1960s activism. He’s appeared many times before the Supreme Court, taught law at three schools and has written numerous books including the now classic, Law and the Rise of Capitalism and most recently Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power.
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