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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 November 24, 2020
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Human Rights Attorney Steven Donziger Faces Contempt Trial Without Jury, Before Federalist Society Judge
Since the inception of Law And Disorder Radio 15 years ago we have endeavored to chronicle the decline of democracy and the rule of law in our country. A low point has been reached with the prosecution of human rights ex-attorney Steven Donziger who goes to trial in January. He is charged with criminal contempt. He will be tried without the benefit of a jury before Federalist Society right wing pro-corporate Judge Loretta Presca in the Southern District of New York.
Three decades ago Donziger successfully brought a lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron which had contaminated in the area of Ecuador the size of Rhode Island. He won over $9 billion in an Ecuadorian court. Chevron has not paid a penny of the judgment nor has it cleaned up the area it ruined. Lives of thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians have been wrecked by the cancer causing pollution.
Donziger has been targeted by Chevron which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and used over 2000 lawyers to prevent the paying of the judgment and to victimize Donziger. It attempted to send a message to environmentalists that we will crush you if you try to protect yourself from us. When federal Judge Louis Kaplan, a former tobacco company attorney, found Donziger in contempt of court for refusing to turn over his computer and cell phone to Chevron’s attorneys on the grounds that it contained privileged information on his clients, Kaplan caused Donziger to be disbarred and put under house arrest. Kaplun assigned his friend Judge Presca to try the contempt case against Donziger without a jury. The trial starts in New York City in January.
Guest – Steven Donziger is a renowned advocate, writer, and public speaker with a focus on addressing human rights abuses and corporate malfeasance. He is part of the team working with indigenous and farmer communities in an area of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest suffering from high cancer rates and other health ailments related to the massive oil pollution caused by Texaco, now owned by Chevron. In 2011, the affected communities won a historic $9.5 billon judgment against Chevron for the environmental cleanup of what experts consider to be one of the worst oil-related catastrophes in the world. Known for his “Herculean tenacity” (Business Week), Steven has represented the affected communities since first visiting the region in 1993. Steven also founded Project Due Process, a legal advocacy group for Cuban detainees who arrived in the United States in the Mariel boatlift.
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The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
Two years ago a Yale School of Medicine professor and psychiatrist told Congress that President Trump is mentally unstable, could be dangerous, and could even be involuntarily committed. Bandy Lee argued in briefings that Trump should undergo a capacity evaluation to assess his fitness for duty. Lee argues that Trump may actually be a dangerous person—one who’s shown a “pattern of violent behavior and violent tendencies”—and she’s considered whether the president should be involuntarily committed to a hospital mental-health program. “We can forcibly commit somebody and could be held legally liable if we don’t when the signs are obvious,” Lee told the Atlantic Magazine.
In Trump’s case, the pattern of violent behavior” includes incendiary tweets, comments about groping women on Access Hollywood, his encouraging violence against protesters at campaign rallies, and his defense of white nationalists. Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of a dozen lawmakers who have met with Lee, proposed creating an independent commission to determine presidential capacity. “The framers foresaw a time when this could become an issue,” Raskin has said, referring to the 25th Amendment. “And we simply have to have the courage and sense of responsibility to implement the procedure they set up.” Lee has noted that this is a matter of human survival, and that psychiatrists “could be held legally liable if we don’t [speak out] when the signs are obvious.”
Guest – Professor Bandy Lee, forensic psychiatrist, an expert in violence, president of the World Mental Health Coalition and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”
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Law and Disorder November 16, 2020
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Election Aftermath Analysis: What Is To Be Done?
How should you live your life? There’s a joke going around that you should live your life in such a way that if you lose your job millions of people don’t go out dancing in the streets. What does the future hold? Are we really free of Trump and Trumpism? What will Biden do? And for us: The perennial question: what is to be done?
The head of Biden’s transition team has already told the press that “the cupboard is bare”. That is to say, the kind of social democratic programs that cost money, healthcare for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage, old age retirement, free education through college, all programs that have been secured in Europe for their populations, have been put beyond the pale. Centrist Democrats like Biden have since the remaking of the Democratic Party beginning with neo-liberal Clinton have not vigorously defended the social gains secured in the 1930s with the Rooseveltian New Deal. Even Social Security is on the table.
About 60% of the disposable federal budget goes to the military. The heads of the weapons manufacturers, corporations like Raytheon and Northrop Gruman are pleased with Biden’s election. They were interviewed in the Washington Post and stated that they have worked with Biden for 30 years and do not anticipate cuts in their arms contracts for new ships, supersonic weapons, nuclear bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Some 74 million people voted for Biden. More people than ever before voted in the election. It was Black people in major cities in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Latinx and Native Americans in Nevada and Arizona that give Biden the edge. This time Trump lost the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin and Michigan because he do not fulfill his promise of bringing jobs back. But Trump got 70 million votes. This was a record. White people in small towns and rural areas fear they’re becoming a minority and voted for Trump hoping to “make America white again.”
Guest – Attorney Jim Lafferty. He is the director emeritus of the largest National Lawyers Guild chapter in the country in Los Angeles and the former Executive Director of the organization.
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Jerome Wright Talks About His Friend David Gilbert: An Interview By KPFA Producer Ken Yale
We hear part of an interview with Jerome Wright, hosted and produced by Ken Yale at KPFA in Berkeley California. This powerful and moving interview with Jerome Wright offers harrowing insights into the trauma of long-term imprisonment during our era of global pandemics. But it is also an inspiring story of the potential for deep personal transformation. And it is an urgent demand to end the paradigm of punishment that threatens the life of every prisoner as COVID-19 rages on.
Jerome Wright spent over 30 years in New York prisons and in solitary confinement for a crime he committed as a teenager. During his incarceration, he befriended David Gilbert, one of the longest held political prisoners in the U.S. They reached across differences in race, class, and age to develop a pioneering AIDS peer education program that has since become a model throughout New York prisons.
Jerome and David’s friendship, and their organizing work together, were transformational. Jerome was paroled 12 years ago. Today he is the statewide organizer for the Campaign For Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, the chief sponsor of a pending bill to end solitary confinement in New York. Jerome is also the founder and director of the Mentoring And Nurturing (MAN) Program, which supports released prisoners and at-risk youth to live productive lives.
Meanwhile, David Gilbert is serving his 40th year of a life sentence. In 1981, he participated with a Black liberation group in a robbery that turned tragically fatal. David was unarmed and did not shoot anyone. But he was convicted for his role as a getaway driver under New York’s felony murder law. Now his only paths to freedom are a governor’s clemency or passage of the proposed Elder Parole bill.
But this interview is much more than just the story of Jerome and David. Jerome Wright is eloquent in describing the terrifying conditions faced by thousands of Jeromes and Davids of all genders who are incarcerated during this deadly pandemic. He also discusses his time in prison with revolutionary musician Gil Scott Heron, whose inspirational songs are woven throughout the interview.
This interview was conducted by Ken Yale, a radio journalist for Pacifica’s KPFA, and a producer for the national radio program, “Covid, Race, and Democracy.” He has been a K-12 and university educator for over 30 years, and is a lifetime social justice activist. To support David Gilbert’s campaign for clemency, please go to friendsofdavidgilbert.org. To reach Jerome Wright or learn more about the campaign to halt solitary confinement, go to NYCAIC.org. That’s the New York Campaign For Alternatives To Isolated Confinement. Jerome also encourages people to get involved with elder parole and other decarceration campaigns. He especially recommends Releasing Aging People In Prison, at rappcampaign.com, and Justice Roadmap at justiceroadmapny.org.
Law and Disorder November 9, 2020
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Democrats, Republicans, Vote Counts And The Green Party
We are recording this interview with Margaret Kimberley on November 4th, the day after the election. Over 90 million people voted early. Their ballots are still being counted. Trump doesn’t want them counted and is relying on the Supreme Court to back him up just like the Supreme Court in the year 2000 stopped the counting of ballots in Dade County Florida, thus allowing George W. Bush to steal the election. Trump wants to be able to say, as former Nicaraguan dictator Somoza bragged, “It is true you won the voting. But I won the counting.” The overwhelming consensus on the left was to hold your nose, vote for Biden, and then attempt to influence him when he takes office. Biden kept a low profile during the campaign. He didn’t have much to say programmatically. His strongest appeal was that he was not Trump, whom Noam Chomsky called the most.
The eco-socialist Green Party led by Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker got very little attention from neither the main stream press nor the left of center media. His campaign was vilified with critics stating that a vote for the Greens was tantamount to a vote for Trump. The Democratic Party in Wisconsin went so far as to help successfully prevent Hawkins and Walker from staying on the ballot in that state after Walker changed her home address after her papers were filed. Regardless of how people on the left voted, the immediate question, which is always the key political question, is what are we to do next?
Guest – Green Party supporter Margaret Kimberley, senior editor at the Black Agenda Report and the author of the widely read book ”Prejudential”.
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Pre-Election Unrest and Aftermath
Days before last week’s November 3 presidential election, businesses across the nation boarded up storefronts in anticipation of violent protests. Cities prepared for election-related unrest as activists get ready for what could be weeks of sustained street actions, depending on how the vote count goes and how President Donald Trump acts after his repeated refusals to say if he will accept election results.
At the time of this recording, not surprisingly, results from several states were still pending.
We can be sure, however, that even if Joe Biden is declared the winner, Donald Trump will challenge the results as fraudulent, laying the groundwork for a series of protracted legal battles. But a larger issue remains: While mass uprisings in the streets have altered the social discourse around racism, several larger issues are still at play, determined to keep Donald Trump in office.
Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Mara is one of the nation’s pre-eminent authorities on the policing of First Amendment protected activities including the right to peaceably assemble and associate.
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