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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 January 17, 2022
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Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Americans have very little understanding of their own history and the Right wants to make sure they never will. Laws are now being passed in a number of states forbidding educators from presenting an accurate portrayal of the racist past of the United States. Critical Race Theory, which is nothing more than a truthful accounting of U.S. history, is under attack.
The documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” has just been released in New York City and Los Angeles and will soon be available at theaters around the country. It has been featured at several film festivals and won many awards.
This film is an important contribution to U.S. history. People will be enlightened about their roots. They will gain a deeper understanding of what was done to them and how they survived. “Who We Are” arms us with knowledge which is crucial for human progress because it informs and encourages struggle.
When people understand their own history, they are empowered. That is what accounts for the tremendous popularity of Howard Zinn‘s book, “A People’s History of United States.“ “Who We Are” interweaves lectures, personal anecdotes, interviews, and shocking revelations. Like the Zinn book, it is also empowering.
Guest – Attorney Jeffery Robinson, is the central figure, writer, and narrator of Who We Are. Jeffery Robinson was a criminal defense lawyer in Seattle for decades before becoming a Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU National Office in New York. In 2021, he left the ACLU, completed the documentary, and launched “The Who We Are Project” to widely disseminate the true history of African-Americans and anti-Black racism in the United States.
As Jeffery Robinson observes, his documentary was made with the goal which was underscored by George Orwell, that “Those who control the present control the past, those who control the past control the future.” We talk with Jeffery about the movie and his collaboration with directors Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler. They previously made the widely-acclaimed documentary about their father, the great civil rights attorney William Kunstler. That film is called “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.”
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The Escalating Crisis in Ukraine Poses an Imminent Threat to World Peace
By way of introducing our discussion on the escalating crisis in Ukraine, and the imminent threat to world peace that it poses, I can think of no better way to do so than to read the short, opening two paragraphs of the January 2nd statement on the crisis issued by
The U.S. Peace Council. It reads, in part, as follows: “ For weeks, the US corporate media have been shrill in declaring that Russia, having positioned tens of thousands of Russian troops on the border, may be about to invade Ukraine. US State Department spokesmen have been threatening Russia with punishing economic sanctions if there is an invasion.” And a bit later it goes on to say: “The cold war with Russia, festering since 2014 and the US backed coup in Ukraine, may be potentially even more menacing than the new cold war with China. If the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and the Russian supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, becomes—by miscalculation or design—a conventional war between Russia and NATO, it could escalate into nuclear war.”
This week the two sides have been meeting to see if a peaceful resolution can be found. But this Thursday morning, as our show is being recorded, both Russia and the US announced the talks were at an impasse. What is causing this impasse? What are Russia’s key demands and what are those of the United States. And what is the likelihood of war breaking out?
Well, I can think of no one any better to discuss this topic with than our guest today, who is one of the authors of the US Peace Council’s statement.
Guest – Joseph Jamison is a long-time peace activist and a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council. He is also the Coordinator of the Peace Council’s Move the Money to Human Needs Campaign, and very active in his local Move the Money Campaign in New York City.
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Law and Disorder January 10, 2022
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Dark Money, Corporate Corruption And Right Wing Networks
We are at a pivotal moment in this country and the coming year may will decide whether we can right the course of history. Nancy MacLean’s important book Democracy in Chains revealed the Rights‘ decades long stealth campaign to reverse engineer America back to the days when the robber barons reigned supreme and rigged the legal and constitutional rules to work in their favor.
Professor MacLean wrote that “Trump and the forces of the right are actively trying to rig the conducting and counting of elections, state by state, as they create a frightening autocratic, post truth society few would have ever thought possible in America.”
The January 6th insurrection was a dress rehearsal for a Trump coup attempt in 2024. If he loses the election Trump and his far right supporters are laying the groundwork in state legislatures to take control of the electoral process to reverse the loss and claim a victory.
The alliances between the corporate state, Trump, and white nationalists have seen a flood of dark money to subvert free and fair elections, block climate and economic justice legislation, push for a constitutional convention to permanently guarantee the rule of the rich, and the crippling of the federal government’s ability to protect working families, the environment, and promote equity for all.
The investigative journalism published by the Center for Media and Democracy has exposed groups on the far right like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Heritage Action, and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) which are working hard to suppress the vote, tear down the firewall to protected our democracy in 2020 and put Trump acolytes in positions of power where they can subvert future elections.
Guest – David Armiak who is Research Director with the Center for Media and Democracy. He has conducted extensive investigations on dark money, corporate corruption, and right wing networks, and is responsible for filing and analyzing hundreds of public records request every year.
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The US Supreme Court And US Democracy Going Forward
The Supreme Court as presently constituted has six reactionary judges and three liberal minded ones. Progressive people are alarmed by its recent decisions and fearful of what it will do in the future.
One of the liberals on the court is Steven Breyer. He’s 83 years old. Should he retire, it would give the Democrats the opportunity to try to appoint a replacement who is not a reactionary. This will be an uphill battle, but it is a fight well worth it.
A right-winger will certainly get the job if a Republican president and a Republican controlled Senate in the year 2024 choose a successor to Breyer if he dies or retires
When Barack Obama was president, he hinted to the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was 80 years old and a two-time cancer patient, to step down but she declined. Ginsburg died while still serving as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Republicans in the Senate would not allow a vote for Judge Merrick Garland, whom Obama had nominated for the Supreme Court seat. Ginsburg was then replaced by the young right-winger Brett Kavanaugh who joined two other young right-wing Trump judges.
The Trump-dominated Republican party is well aware that to topple democracy they must take over the courts. The current Roberts Court has for more than a decade consistently leveled this attack on democracy by eviscerating the Voting Right Act, unleashing unlimited corporate monies into elections, allowed clearly partisan gerrymandering of elections, and is now training its sights against reproductive choice by severely restricting abortion rights.
Yale historian Jason Stanley has recently written, “There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the simplest of democracy to crumble as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered republican state houses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.”
Guest – attorney Martin Garbus, a constitutional litigator who has represented Steven Donziger, Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Lenny Bruce.
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Law and Disorder January 3, 2022
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Code Pink: U.S. Military’s Unwarranted Influence
In 1961, President Eisenhower warned America of the “unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. Later in the ‘60’s Senator J. William Fulbright spoke of what he named the “military-industrial-academic complex.” And he was both prescient and wise to do so, for today colleges and universities in America receive nearly 200 Billion dollars annually from the Department of Defense to do research and development for the military. And this money plays an oversized role in how our colleges and universities are funded today.
Indeed, as you will hear in a few moments from today’s guest on this topic, the influence of this DoD money on what is researched and taught at America’s colleges and university is profound. And it contributes greatly to our pro-war politics while denying money and research for addressing problems like climate change, and curing new diseases, or finding new ways to fight poverty, or better educate our children. And with this year’s Pentagon budget topping $768 billion, this should concern all who seek a more peaceful world and a world where economic and social justice prevail.
Currently, 2,500 of the main institutions of higher learning in America receive this DoD’s blood money for military related research. And often little is known by way of just what is being researched and developed for the military on our campuses; of knowing what new ways to kill people are on the drawing board. For example, I must confess that in preparing for today’s show I learned, to my utter disgust, that the University of Michigan, my undergraduate alma matter, ranks 2 or 3 among the American universities receiving money from the Department of Defense.
Guest – Marcy Winograd is the Coordinator of CODE PINK CONGRESS, Co-Chair of the Progressive Democrats of America’s End Wars and Occupations Team, and herself a former candidate for Congress. She is an expert on the military-industrial-academic complex, as well as a long-time activist for peace and social justice.
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The U.S. Military And Climate Change
Although the U.S. military has called climate change an “existential” threat to national security, its actions belie its words. The U.S. military is the largest institutional source of greenhouse gases in the world. But due to a loophole in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, it is not required to disclose the extent of its pollution. Moreover, the 2021 budget calls for the Pentagon to report on the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions for the past 10 years. But the Pentagon missed its July deadline.
In 2020, the U.S. military emitted 51 million tons of carbon dioxide, primarily from fuel and the maintenance of over a half million buildings, according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University. Significantly, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan emitted 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017. Those wars cost U.S. taxpayers $8 trillion and killed 900,000 people.
But the U.S. government’s commitment to reduce emissions falls short of the goals of the Paris agreement. The U.S. efforts were rated “insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker. If other countries follow suit, the temperature would rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, which would prove disastrous.
In November, more than 100,000 people participated in demonstrations at the United Nations Climate Change Convention (COP 26) in Glasgow, Scotland. Upwards of 500 delegates to the convention had ties to the fossil fuel industry. The watered-down statement that came out of COP 26 called for a “phase-down of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” rather than the “phase-out of fossil fuels.”
Dr. Jim Rine is an adjunct professor of geology at Wayne State University, who for decades has published his research on marine geology, environmental geology, and the potential interactions of the U.S. petroleum industry to climate change. In 2019, he helped form the Veterans for Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism National Project. The project helped draft H. Res. 767, which Rep. Barbara Lee (California) introduced in the House of Representatives in November.
Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis Take Action
H. Res. 767, which has 31 co-sponsors, calls on the Defense Department to report on its emissions, to set “clear” annual emissions reductions targets, and to pledge to conduct “strict, transparent, and independently verified reporting” on emissions. The resolution also incorporates the House version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that says, “DoD should lower its emissions to prevent exceeding an increase in global temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
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