Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
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 June 5, 2023
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The Alliance of Families for Justice
The Alliance of Families for Justice (“AFJ”) was founded seven years ago by attorney Soffiyah Elijah. Its headquarters is in Harlem, a community heavily impacted by mass incarceration. AFJ also has satellite offices in Albany and Ithaca.
AFJ seeks to heal families and individuals who suffer from their own imprisonment or that of a loved one. It seeks moreover to organize and empower them to challenge and change the system of mass incarceration. AFJ’s legal support unit provides free legal representation to incarcerated people and their families. AFJ holds weekly community organizing meetings and family empowerment circles, and monthly healing circles for formerly incarcerated people. Its organizing and advocacy unit spearheads various campaigns including one to #Shutdown Attica and another to end felony disenfranchisement. AFJ’s Youth Empowerment Project has serviced over 400 NYC young people ages 16-24 in its 3yr tenure. All of AFJ’s services are free.
In New York State and most places nationwide incarcerated people lose their voting rights. This is both un-democratic and, because most incarcerated people are Black or Latinix, it is a racist policy and a vestige of Jim Crow laws that permeated New York and most states. The loss of voting rights remains a significant obstacle to criminal justice reform.
Guest – Attorney Soffiyah Elijah, knows intimately what happens to families whose loved ones are put in prison. She has been able through AFJ to support, motivate and educate these families to become advocates for civil rights and justice reform. Attorney Elijah has headed legal clinics at the City University of New York School of Law and has served as the Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University, under Professor Charles Ogletree. She was the first woman and first Black Executive Director of the 170yr old Correctional Association of New York where she helped expose and bring to justice several Attica prison guards for brutally beating a man almost to death.
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Dark Money And Conservative Courts
When Donald Trump became president in 2016, one of the most terrifying prospects was that he could signal a new era for the Supreme Court of the United States – where vacancies would be strategically filled to create one of the most conservative courts in nearly a century, which could roll back constitutional rights and liberties we’ve been taking for granted. Indeed, even though Donald Trump was not re-elected in 2020, the conservative 6-3 majority that exists, and the havoc they are wreaking, could last for decades. While I’m sure Donald Trump would like to take all the credit, the battle to buy Supreme Court influence and push votes to the right long precedes his tenure as president.
Guest – Andrew Perez, has devoted his life and career to exposing the money, influence and secret transactions made among the most powerful people in the world to control the United States laws, government and people. He is an investigative reporter and senior editor for The Lever, which was just awarded the 2023 Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in the independent media by Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College for its relentless work “exposing the corrupting influence of corporate power on government and both major parties.” In announcing the award, the Center for Independent Media highlighted Andrew’s work for exposing the largest known political donation in U.S. history — Chicago businessman Barre Seid’s $1.6 billion dark money transfer to conservative operative Leonard Leo who served as Donald Trump’s judicial advisor – and guess who Leonard Leo appears to ready to back now … Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.
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Law and Disorder May 29, 2023
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The Nakba Didn’t End in 1948, It Continues to Impact Palestinians Daily
On May 15, Palestinians marked the 75th anniversary of al-Nakba, which means “the catastrophe” in Arabic. On that date in 1948, Israelis ethnically cleansed nearly 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and destroyed more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages. In addition, on May 15, for the first time ever, the UN General Assembly officially condemned the Nakba.
May 15 was also the day that Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad agreed to a ceasefire brokered by Egypt to stop the violence that resulted in the deaths of 33 Palestinians and 2 Israelis. The Israeli assault on Gaza was the sixth such attack since 2007, when Israel imposed a permanent siege on Gaza, controlling the ingress and egress of Palestinians.
Israel maintains an illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. And the United States enables this occupation by providing $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel each year.
Guest – Michel Moushabeck, is a Palestinian American writer, editor, translator and musician. He is the founder and publisher of Interlink Publishing, a 36-year-old, Massachusetts-based, independent publishing house. Michel wrote the article titled, “The Nakba Didn’t End in 1948, It Continues to Impact Palestinians Daily,” which was recently published by Truthout.
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Junior ROTC In High Schools: Pressure To Join
On her first day of high school, Andreya Thomas and several other freshmen at Detroit’s Pershing High School learned they were enrolled in a class called J.R.O.T.C., or Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. School administrators told them the program was mandatory.
Funded by the U.S. military, the program required students to wear military uniforms in class, recite patriotic declarations, and obey orders from an instructor who often yelled at them. When several tried to drop the class, school officials refused permission, even though the Pentagon says that requiring students to take the programs runs counter to its guidelines. The New York Times recently learned that thousands of public-school students were enrolled in J.R.O.T.C. either as a requirement or through automatic enrollment. Most of the schools with high enrollment numbers were attended largely by nonwhite students and those from low-income households.
Critics of Junior ROTC say that the program’s militaristic discipline prioritizes obedience over independence and critical thinking. And as we reported earlier on Law and Disorder, and now noted by the Times, the program’s textbooks often rewrite or downplay the failings of the U.S. government. With its concentration in schools with low-income and nonwhite students, some claim J.R.O.T.C. encourages students to enlist in the military rather than explore other routes to college or jobs in the civilian economy.
Guest – Rick Jahnkow works for two San Diego-based anti-militarist organizations, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, or YANO, and the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft. We spoke earlier with Rick about YANO’s J.R.O.T.C. textbook review project.
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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Law and Disorder May 22, 2023
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American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom
America was not founded as a Christian nation. Church and state were separated. The founding fathers were mostly deists, not Christians. They did not believe in a personal all powerful God that knew everything and intervened in human affairs
They separated church and state because they understood from European history that bad and bloody results resulted when the government acted in the name of God.
All this is changing in America now under the thumb of a right wing activist politicized majority on our Supreme Court. They were put there by an extremely well funded well organized conglomeration of ultra right wing figures and organizations. They have an agenda and they are carrying it out.
The newest Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett had a message for new lawyers. She said being a lawyer “is but it means to an end. … and the end is building the kingdom of God.“ This ascendant ultra-right wing can best be described as white Christian nationalists. These white Christian nationalists have won significant victories and are on roll. Taking away a woman’s right to control their own bodies in the recent overturn of Roe versus Wade is just the latest example. They have stacked the federal courts and particularly the Supreme Court where they have a 6 to 3 majority.
Guest – Andrew Seidel, author of American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. He is a constitutional attorney with more than a decade of experience arguing about religion and law as a vice president at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation He is the author of “The Founding Myth” the definitive book which demonstrates that America’s not founded by Christians as a Christian country.
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John Pilger: The Coming War With China
Is China a threat to (the United States)? Is the fear being stirred up about China legitimate? We speak with 83-year-old renowned journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker John Pilger from his home in Australia about his most recent article The Coming War With China.
China has the second largest economy in the world. It will soon be the first. In response to China’s commercial threat the United States of America has responded militarily by surrounding the Chinese industrial heartland with 400 bases in what has been called “a noose“. The USA has some 1100 bases around the world, China has six.
President Obama initiated a multi trillion dollar vast nuclear buildup. This was coordinated with what he termed “a pivot towards Asia.” Most of the U.S. Navy now patrols the waters off of China. Tensions have been exacerbated with respect to who governs Taiwan.
The US Government has shored up it’s military alliances with the surrounding countries around China of South Korea, Japan the Philippines, and Australia, The USA is selling billions of dollars worth of nuclear submarines to Australia.
We live in a country whose government has been in a perpetual war the last 3/4 of a century, except with a brief interlude after its 20 year old war Vietnam ended in defeat. 3 million Vietnamese died in the American war.
Guest – John Pilger covered that war as a young reporter and understood that it was based on the lie that Lyndon Johnson told falsely stating that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. Another 1 million people died in the Iraq war That war was based on the now well known lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was going to use against us and that he was responsible for 911. A similar campaign of fear mongering is going on now about China. The major news media parrot the government’s fact free line that China is our enemy. In his article “The Coming War With China” John Pilger wrote “a US war against China beckons and we have a responsibility to speak out. We know what is coming. Silence must be broken.”
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Maria Hall
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