Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Uncategorized, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Chris Hedges: Israel’s Trojan Horse
The Israeli military is the fourth most powerful military in the world. In the last six months it has turned the Gaza Strip into a howling wilderness. Most of us 2.2 million inhabitants have been driven into a tiny corner in the south in the city of Rafa where they face an invasion planned by Israel with American support. Israel sent a delegation to Washington last week. The story spun by the Biden administration is that they are working with Israel to try to “moderate” Israel. This is perception management.
Meanwhile, in another PR move, the United States, announced that it is building a temporary pier on the Mediterranean shore of Gaza to facilitate the importation of food stuffs. But it doesn’t say that the pier will facilitate the export of Palestinians in to permanent exile.
Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. The United States is not serious about getting food for Palestinians. It continues to supply the Israelis with weapons, including opening up its weapons storage facility in Israel for the Israelis to freely use.
Contrary to American law, the Biden administration, has circumvented Congress 100 times to send even more weapons and bombs which have killed more than 32,000 people and injured another 70,000 while destroying most of the homes in Gaza, their hospitals, schools, mosques , water and sanitation plants, and electrical infrastructure.
Israel’s reaction to the judgment of International Court Of Justice, the highest court in the world, was to ignore their founding of “plausible, genocide“ and to ignore their decisions – taken together amount to a cease-fire. Israel’s goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it with their own people. Last week Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner gave his opinion on the subject calling the western shore of Gaza “good beachfront property“ most suitable for development now that the Palestinians have been driven out of their homes.
Defenders of Israel say that Israel is acting in self-defense, that Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon are behind Hamas, and that in any case the figures of death and injury of Palestinians are lies perpetrated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas.
Guest – Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and political writer. Chris Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 and served as the Times’ Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001 Hedges was one of the Times’ writers on an entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Prior to his work for the Times, he worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and the Dallas Morning News. His books include “Death of the Liberal Class”, “War on America”, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”, and his book “War Is a Force That Gives US Meaning”, which was a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction.
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Billionaires, Economies And Elections
There were 614 billionaires in America four years ago before the pandemic. Now there are 737. Their total wealth is more than $5 trillion. In the last four years they went from having 2,947,000,000,000 to having 5,529,000,000,000. The golden rule in the United States is that he who has the gold makes the rules. A corollary to this rule is – follow the money.
The immense concentration of wealth among a handful of billionaires in America has destroyed every institution in our country from education to politics. What effect does it have on elections? We have two parties. Both support capitalism which has resulted in having two parties of big money. They make it nearly impossible to challenge their hegemony by forming a third party.
The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United ruled that corporations are people. Thus, they can exercise their free speech rights and donate an unlimited amount of money to preserve and advance their perceived interests. In 1937 the great political journalist Ferdinand Lundburg analyzed wealth and class in the USA in his book America’s 60 Families. He wrote about how they functioned for the purpose of gaining and keeping political and economic power.
In 1968 Lundburg published The Rich and the Super Rich. It shows how the ruling elite controls the mainstream media and the US economy and have virtually uncontested influence over American political institutions. The infamous names of the ruling class back then were Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Melon, Dupont, Guggenheim, Whitney, and Astor. They made their money in oil, steel, chemicals, that is to say, basic industry. But their wealth was relatively small compared to today’s economic titans who have made their money in tech industries and speculation.
Guest – Patrick Martin, senior editor at the world socialist web site where he covers a range of political issues in the United States.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Chris Hedges Returns From Gaza
Israel is a long time strategic ally of United States in the Middle East If you look at a map of the area Israel is shaped like an aircraft carrier: that’s its use to the USA.
Israel is given $3.8 billion a year of taxpayer dollars to use to purchase American military weapons. It has just been granted a multi billion dollar military aid package to facilitate its war efforts. The 2000 pound bombs being used to destroy the tiny Gaza Strip making it into a parking lot are made in the USA, so are Israel’s tanks, planes, armored personnel carriers, bullets, grenades and artillery shells.
On October 7, several hundred young Palestinians of the resistance movement Hamas broke through the fence of besieged Gaza killing Israelis and taking hostages. This was illegal and inhumane, but understandable given Israel’s historical blocking of a peaceful solution. The Netanyahu government used the attack and hostage taking as a pretext and an excuse to begin a genocidal war against the 2.3 million people in Gaza. Their slogan was “finish the Nakba,” the catastrophe Israel inflicted on Palestinians on 1948.
Through the use of murder and terror they then drove out 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed 531 of their villages. The Zionist took 78% of their land. Now they want the rest. They hope to level Gaza and drive the Palestinians across the border into Egypt. The USA is facilitating this process and is complicit in the genocidal war. There may be a paradigm shift in the 100 year war on the Palestinians.
We also hear a letter to the children of Gaza written by Chris Hedges, read by Eunice Wong, a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association: www.eunicewong.actor
Guest – Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaking former middle east bureau chief at the New York Times. Chris Hedges has just returned from Doha broadcasting on the crisis in Gaza for Al Jazeera as well as being in Egypt where he covered the war. Hedges spent 20 years as a war correspondent and reported on the past two Palestinian “intifadas”, or uprisings. He is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity school and the author of 14 books. Many people consider him not only a journalist, but a moral philosopher. His work can be found on chrishedges.substack.com
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Goodman – In Remembrance
William (Bill) Goodman died in his home in Detroit on November 16, 2023. He was 83 years old. Bill was the son of Ernie Goodman, who was one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild and a partner in the first racially, integrated law firm in the United States
Bill was a past national president of the NLG, one of the founding officers of the NLG National Police Accountability Project, the former Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice,
He worked until his death and was a partner in the Detroit civil rights firm, Goodman, Hurwitz and James where he fought for the rights of victims of government and corporate abuse. Bill was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Wayne State Law School, where he taught Constitutional litigation.
Bill has successfully litigated numerous police and government misconduct cases as well as other high-profile cases on behalf of prisoners, toxic tort victims, the wrongfully convicted and victims of racism, always in the pursuit of constitutional, social and economic justice.
Host Attorney Julie Hurwitz: Bill was my law partner in Goodman Hurwitz & James and a former long-term partner in life – we knew each other a long time! In this interview, which we did last year, we will discuss two cases that we brought to confront the unconstitutional and inhumane conduct of individual police officers, but more importantly, the historically unconstitutional and inhumane ways in which police departments institutionally tolerate, promote and reward such behavior by their officers.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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The Greatest Evil is War
United States has been at war almost continuously over the last 80 years. Chris Hedges has titled his latest book, The Greatest Evil is War. He is our guest today. What is the driving force behind this nearly a century of war? Who is responsible? What are the institutions in United States that carry it on? What is to be done about it?
What forces in our country can stop the slaughter and the constant waste of resources that is consuming us and threatening us with the possibility of nuclear war, which would wipe out all life on our planet. Today we will explore the economic, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of the American war machine. We will talk about the military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. We will talk about its handmaidens, the media, Congress, the universities and the think tanks which advocate for war.
We will talk about the political consequences of permanent war and the fascist direction America is increasingly going in. Most profoundly we will talk about capitalism and fascism from which it springs. And finally we will talk about the social forces necessary to stop and reverse war.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
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American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has served 40 years Is Pennsylvania’s harshest prisons-16 of them on death row -for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer which he did not commit
The judge who convicted him was overheard promising“I’m going to help fry the N-word“.
Mumia is an important figure in African-American history. Before his 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 it’s notorious Police Chief and then Mayor Frank Rizzo.
He 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 masters degree and is working on a PhD in history.
On October 26, 2022 Mumia’s attorneys appeared in court in an effort to get him a new trial. His defense petition included newly discovered evidence that had been buried in the prosecutor’s files. This evidence documented a key witness receiving promises of money for their testimony and evidence of favorable treatment of another in a criminal case. The petition also documented the unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.
Judge Lucretia Clemons preliminarily denied his constitutional right to present this information. She is likely to finalize this ruling on his upcoming court date in Philadelphia on December 9, 2022.
Guest – Noelle Hanrahan is the director of Prison Radio, a multimedia production studio that brings to the public the voices of incarcerated women, men and children. She seeks to honor the agency and humanity of prisoners by bringing their uncensored essays into mainstream discourse. She has produced over 3,500 multimedia recordings from over 100 prison radio correspondents, including the critically acclaimed work of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1995, she brought out of prison his first book, Live From Death Row (Harper Perennial), which became a best seller. In 2013, she co-produced the theatrically released feature documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary (Street Legal Cinema/First Run Features). She received her BA in Gender, Race and Class in the 19th and 20th Centuries from Stanford University, and an MA in Criminal Justice from Boston University. She also holds private investigator licenses in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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Chris Hedges: Social Change And Democracy 2022
You can’t have organized activity for social change without democracy. Social change and democracy are bound up with one another. But America is not a democracy. This is by design. It was never intended to be. The founding fathers – there were no founding mothers – wrote a document 245 years ago in Philadelphia that excluded more Americans than it included.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations are people entitled to free speech rights. So they can give as much money as they want to political campaigns. Last month an industrialist gave $1.6 billion to the Republicans. Like Bob Dylan wrote, “money doesn’t talk it swears.“ It is impossible to have a democracy in a country like ours with such vast income and wealth disparity.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have a lock on the political process. It is nearly impossible to start a third-party. When Ralph Nader ran the Democrats did everything they could to stop him, launching many lawsuits trying to knock him off state ballots.
Since its founding, the ever-growing effects of unlimited money in elections, the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts, the fraudulent removal of poor and minority voters from voter registration rolls, reduction in the number of voting locations in minority districts, the unfair advantage given to Canada is favored by corporate America, including America’s corporate media, all combine to leave us with a very unfair and very undemocratic system of governance in America
Guest – Chris Hedges, the most penetrating journalist we have. He once worked for the New York Times and even won a Pulitzer Prize. But he was forced out. He had a show on our RT which was closed down by our government and some 600 of his show “On Contact” were taken off of YouTube.
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The State of Labor Unions And Recent Worker Strikes
For decades now only about 11% of workers in America have been members of unions, whereas previously more than 35% were union members. Various pieces of pro-management legislation and court opinions caused this diminution in union membership and, as a consequence, a weakening of the rights of American workers. But in recent years, as a result of militant fight back efforts by exploited workers in many industries, unions have once again been having some success in organizing efforts at various workplaces, like Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and Trader Joe’s.
But federal and state laws still create an up-hill fight for those seeking to organize workers into unions, and to win good labor contracts. So today we ask: do these few but growing number of recent labor union victories truly represent a new day for American workers and the unions that serve them? Do these localized labor victories suggest that more and bigger victories for workers are now within reach? Or, have these recent victories been simply exceptions to the still dismal overall state of union organizing in America? Are either of the two capitalist political parties sufficiently committed to advancing the right of workers to organize unions, or is an independent political movement or party needed to make significant union/worker gains? And what about the pending threat of a nation-wide railway worker’s strike? And if the railroad companies and their workers cannot reach a negotiated settlement acceptable to the railway workers, could President Biden step in and use the Railway Labor Act in an effort to prevent a railway strike with its devastating consequences for the U.S. economy?
Guest – Alan Benjamin, long-time union organizer and workers’ advocate. A leader in his own union, he has served on the Executive Council of the San Francisco AFL-CIO Labor Council. He is also one of the principal organizers of the organization known as Labor and Community for an Independent Party, or LCIP.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Ukraine, Russia, NATO and United States Conflict Analysis
As attacks escalate in Ukraine, the push for a no-fly zone over the country grows stronger. However last week there were indicators that top Ukrainian negotiators are moving toward a cease-fire deal. This comes as we’ve reported last week that the United States has baited the Russian bear repeatedly, starting in 1990 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. At that time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the US-led NATO organization would not move “one inch” east towards Russia. This promise was broken.
The Russians were betrayed.Since then, NATO has recruited 11 former Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact countries into its military organization. Led by the United States, NATO is an organization has played an aggressive role, having carried out the bombings of Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Libya.
NATO has placed missiles in Poland within 100 miles of the Russian border. Missiles on the long border between Ukraine and Russia could hit Moscow in 10 minutes making it impossible for Russia to defend itself. Russia’s attempts to make United States understand that they have crossed a red line has been consistently rejected.
This is not to defend Russia’s actions but to place them in historical context. The world now has come to the edge of an abyss. A nuclear war could easily be started, annihilating all of humanity. The rule of law must be restored.
Russia must honor a cease-fire and withdraw. The United States must forswear arming Ukraine and recruiting the Ukraine into NATO. Ukraine must go forward as a neutral country like Austria or Finland.
Guest – Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign correspondent, 15 of them with The New York Times, covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia. He learned overseas that the evils of empire are the external expression of white supremacy, just as mass incarceration, which he describes as the civil rights issue of our age, is the most brutal internal expression of white supremacy. Prisons , he writes, are the modern iteration of slave plantations. Hedges is the author of 14 books, The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, a graduate of Harvard Divinity school, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. chrishedges.substack.com
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Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
Assata Shakur is an inspiration to many young Black and brown activists today. She was a Black Panther Party member in New York in 1968 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said that the Panthers were the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.“ Hoover launched the Cointelpro program to eliminate the Black Panthers.
When the Panthers broke up, Assata became a member of the Black Liberation Army. She was seriously wounded and apprehended in 1973 by state troopers in a shoot-out on a New Jersey highway. She was tried and convicted of murdering a state trooper even though the medical evidence showed that she was badly injured and could not have fired a gun.
Assata escaped from prison in 1979 and five years later, she was given political asylum in revolutionary Cuba where she lives today. The FBI has put a $2 million bounty on her head. She has a target on her back inasmuch as she is wanted dead or alive.
Guest – Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Murch, who specializes in African-American and US History, Black Radicalism, and History of Mass Incarceration, is known as the historian of the Black Panther Party. She has recently written the book “Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives” published by Haymarket Books. In it, she analyzes the forces giving rise to Black Power and Black radicalism, mass incarceration, the militarization of the police who target people of color, and the genesis of Black Lives Matter.
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