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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 April 24, 2023
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Workers’ Rights And Leadership Moving Forward
Ex-president Donald Trump was indicted three weeks ago in New York City by progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg on 34 separate counts for paying hush money to two women before the 2020 election. The charges are serious and provable. These are the first; there will likely be three even more serious indictments in other jurisdictions. Although Trump looks like the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, the accumulation of charges against him will both narrow but harden, invigorate, and mobilize his political support.
Trump is the most prominent figure in what has quite accurately been described as an American version of fascism called white Christian nationalism. These forces have captured half the state houses in the country, many courts, and many local governments all the way down to school boards. Bertold Brecht, the great German playwright and political thinker, observed during the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany that in order to understand fascism you must understand capitalism from which it springs.
Under a viral form of capitalism. known as neoliberalism, inequality of wealth has reached enormous proportions. Half the population of our country are poor or near poor. Healthcare, education and housing go abegging with 15 million people about to lose their health care and hundreds of thousands of others sleeping on the streets
Sections of the American working class are fighting back. Workers are organizing in Amazon and Starbucks. 9000 of them are on strike at Rutgers University. United Automobile Workers are gearing up for a strike. Polls show that most working people would like to be in a union.
But Americans are fighting back with one hand tied behind their backs. They have no independent working class party that defends their interests Both the Republican and Democratic parties are Corporate capitalist parties. In fact, last year, the Democratic Party received more massive dark money than Republicans.
Fascism is characteristically antiworker, anti-democratic, racist, nationalistic, misogynist, and violent. It is irrational. It believes in a make-believe past when America was once great.
Guest – Paul Street, historian and activist has written 10 books, most recently “ This Happened Here : Neoliberalis, Amiericaners, and the Trumping of America”. He wrote the introduction to “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA“ co-edited by Law And Disorder cohost Michael Steven Smith. He writes regularly for “Counterpunch“ and manages “The Paul Street Report” on Substack.
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Mumia Abu Jamal’s New Trial, Exculpatory Evidence
American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served over 40 years in Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons; 16 of them on death row -for the murder of a
Philadelphia police officer that he did not commit. His trial was a sham from day one. The judge who convicted him was overheard promising, “I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Before Mumia’s conviction, he was a nationally broadcast, award winning radio journalist, and the head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He reported on the murderous racial violence of the Philadelphia police department and its notorious Police Chief, and later Mayor, Frank Rizzo. Mumia had been a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. While in prison, Mumia has written 13 books and had a weekly radio show, “Live from Death Row“. He holds a master’s degree and is working on a PhD in history.
Most recently, Mumia’s attorneys have sought a new trial for him based on their discovery of exculpatory evidence clearly supporting his innocence. The newly discovered evidence had been wrongly kept from Mumia’s lawyers at the time of his trial, being deliberately buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented that key witnesses had received promises of money and favorable treatment in their own criminal cases, in exchange for their perjured testimony in Mumia’s original trial. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
But sadly, despite the obvious significance of this newly discovered evidence, his petition for a new trial has been denied.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan, is a Pennsylvania attorney and longtime supporter of Mumia, and the producer the long-running radio show, “Prison Radio“. She was in the courtroom when the newly discovered evidence was presented in support of Mumia’s petition for a new trial, and again when it was recently denied. Prison Radio
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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Law and Disorder April 17, 2023
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Law and Disorder April 10, 2023
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UN Report Sounds Alarm On Climate Change
A new flagship United Nations report on climate change shows that harmful carbon emissions have never been higher in human history. And that this is proof that the world is on a fast track to disaster, with scientists arguing that it’s now or never to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Indeed, the report’s scientists claim that at the dismal rate matters to address climate change are now going, the world has but ten years—ten years–until catastrophic climate change is irreversible.
Or as the UN’s General Secretary Gutierrez puts it, the planet is now “nearing the point of no return.” In a Washington Post op-ed article, Gutierrez described the latest IPCC report as a “litany of broken promises,” which revealed a “yawning gap between climate pledges, and reality.” Indeed, the reality is that despite ever-increasing awareness of the consequences of climate change and the central role humans play–given our continuing use of fossil fuels, in bringing the change about–the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere every year continue to rise every year and are each year greater than the prior year. For as Gutierrez wrote, corporations and high-emitting governments have not just turned a blind eye to the problem, “they are adding fuel to the flames by continuing to invest in climate-choking industries.”
Already millions of the world’s people have been displaced by climate change, and the world now experiences a greater and greater increase in severe storms, unprecedented heat waves, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.
Guest – Eleanor Stein, professor of law at Albany Law School, where she teaches Transnational Environmental Law is the author of Ecological Sensitivity and Global Warming: An International Human Rights Violation? For ten years Eleanor Stein served as an Administrative Law Judge at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, New York, where she presided over and mediated New York’s Renewable Portfolio Standard proceeding, a collaboration and litigation of over 150 parties, authoring in June 2004 a comprehensive decision recommending a landmark state environmental initiative to combat global warming with incentives for renewable resource-fueled power generation.
NY Times ON CLIMATE newsletter with Somini Sengupta, climate writings in NYT by David Wallace-Wells; NOT TOO LATE by Solnit and Lutunatabua; FALTER by Bill McKibben and all his current writings (and his breakthrough 1989 book on climate, The End of Nature and its sequel, EAARTH); Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker; Websites of WEACT (We Act for Environmental Justice), www.weact.org; UPROSE (United Puerto Ricans of Sunset Park), www.UPROSE.org, NYC-EJA, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, www.nyceja.org.
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CCR Lawsuit: Louisiana’s Cancer Alley
The call it “cancer alley.” It is the 135 mile long strip along both sides the Mississippi river between Baton Rouge, Louisiana south down to New Orleans
In an environmental racism case, three Louisiana organizations sued on March 21 in Federal District court in New Orleans against the Parish Council of St. Jame’s Parish. A Parish is a county in New Orleans and the Parish Council is their government.
The predominantly white Parish Council granted a permit for a company to build $9 billion petrochemical plant to make plastics. The plant is expected to spew 6000 tons a year of cancer-causing chemicals into the atmosphere.
The lawsuit seeks to protect Black neighborhoods and is asking for a moratorium on the building of more hazardous petrochemical plants where people live and breathe and where Black people are getting sick and dying in disproportionate numbers.
Guest – Attorney Astha Sharma Pokharel of the Center or Constitutional Right where she specializes in international human rights law and in challenging racial and environmental injustice. In the “cancer rally“ lawsuit she represents the Mount Trump Baptist Church and inclusive Louisiana. A project at the Tulane law school represents RISE St. James. These are the three Black neighborhood organizations that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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