CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power
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Amazon Ring Of Surveillance
When it comes to e-commerce, the multinational tech company Amazon.com has laid claim to a huge corner on the market. Now, it’s venturing into the business of surveillance.
Amazon is aggressively pursuing law enforcement partnerships. More than 400 police departments across the nation have already joined forces with the tech giant’s so-called smart doorbell program, called Ring. Part of Amazon’s outreach strategy in gaining new police partners is to play on fears of increasing property crime.
Ring doesn’t just show you who is at your door. It films and records any interaction or movement at owners’ doors, then alerts users’ phones. With partnerships between mega corporations and law enforcement to use new surveillance systems in the public–leaving out community input–come a host of civil liberties concerns, including racial profiling.
Guest – Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Matthew is a policy analyst working on issues of surveillance and privacy at the local, state, and federal level. He is a frequent contributor to the Freedom of Information-centered outlet Muckrock and his bylines have appeared in the Washington Post and Motherboard.
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North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five
North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five is the recent publication by our guest attorney Martin Garbus.
This case was one of the most significant ones in recent times. Attorney Len Weinglass had originally taken the case to appeal the matter for already convicted Cuban Five. The appeal was ultimately lost. Weinglass died and his dear friend our guest Martin Garbus stepped in to what looked like a lost cause. Four of the five men were in prison serving long sentences.
Cuba had been an American colony up until 1959 when the widely popular Cuban revolution succeeded in gaining the country’s independence from the USA.
To reverse this has been American policy ever since. The Helms-Burton Act was a counter- revolution as an American government policy written into American law.
Martin Garbus started representing Cuban Five member Gerardo Hernandez who at the time had then been found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage against United States sometime in the future as well as murder.
Hernandez and his four comrades had been sent from Cuba to Miami by the government of Cuba to spy, not on the United States, but on the counter-revolutionary Cubans in Miami who were launching terrorist activities from Florida directed at persons and property in Cuba, attempting to sabotage the Cuban tourist economy which was in bad shape when a new Russian government cut them off.
The Cubans gathered information on the Miami-based terrorists, compiling a lengthy dossier on their murders activities, and turned it over to the FBI. They asked the US government to stop the terrorists, who were targeting the Cuban tourist industry by planting bombs at the Havana Airport, on buses, and in a hotel, killing an Italian vacationer. But instead of stopping the terrorists the US government used the dossier to figure out the identities of the Cuban five. They were arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced long prison terms.
While the Cubans were in Miami, a group of counter-revolutionary Cubans calling themselves “Brothers to the Rescue” were provocatively flying small planes over Havana dropping anti-Castro leaflets. They were warned by the Cuban government that if they persisted the planes will be shot down. They persisted. The planes were shot down. Hernandez was convicted of murder although he had no prior knowledge about the shoot down.
Guest – Martin Garbus is one of our great trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court on leading First Amendment and constitutional law cases.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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- Updates: Host Reunion: Epstein Update
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CCR Update With Legal Director Baher Azmy
Three years ago Donald Trump ran on a racist nativist platform scapegoating Muslims and Mexicans. He lost the popular vote but won the election through the electoral college and began implementing his scapegoating. First he banned Muslims because the Supreme Court ignored his campaign statements and ruling that he had a right to do it under national security.
The Trump policy has been deliberately cruel, separating children from families, caging immigrants in cold cement floored cells, rightly called concentration camps, and now attempting to deny non-citizens who are here illegally, medical care and other benefits.
Guest – Attorney Baher Azmy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR is involved in a number of cases seeking to protect immigrants. We will also speak with Attorney Azmy about the current status of the offshore prison island in Guantánamo Bay Cuba and the men who are trapped there in limbo, who have yet to receive trials. Last, we will speak with him about the Al Shamari v. CACI case where the US government farmed out torture to a private corporation.
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Update: Venezuela Under Economic Embargo
In the midst of escalating U.S. aggression toward Venezuela, antiwar activist Gloria LaRiva recently spent a month in that country to observe firsthand the impact on its people.
Gloria joins us today to discuss the crucial issues facing Venezuelans: the U.S. economic sanctions, the U.S. media blockade, and the people’s organizing efforts to overcome the aggression. She’ll talk about the Bolivarian revolution, and how Venezuela is holding up under an economic embargo. https://www.answercoalition.org/
Guest – Gloria LaRiva is an American socialist activist with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Peace and Freedom Party. She ran for president in 2008 and again in 2016 with Eugene Puryear and Dennis Banks as her running mates. She has been a driving force in the campaign to Free the Cuban Five and a longtime friend of Law and Disorder. Liberationnews.org
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Truth to Power
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The Movie SKIN and One People’s Project
In the recently-released 2019 movie SKIN, skinhead Bryon Widner’s body is covered in racist tattoos, each marking a hate crime he committed. His parents Shareen and Fred “Hammer” Krager, run a kind of camp that recruits and trains young men—often lost and hungry–to become white supremacists.
Bryon meets and falls in love with single mother Julie Price. When he begins to realize he wants to give up his hateful habits, he faces a host of difficulties, one of which is the long and painful process of removing many of the hate tattoos that cover his body.
The film follows writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film of the same name. In the narrative version, actor Mike Colter plays the film’s true hero, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who has devoted his life to helping people escape neo-Nazi groups.
Guest – Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of One People’s Project, is able to join us in the studio today. Since 1988 Daryle has been documenting and writing about right wing individuals and organizations even back while he was serving as a police officer in the U.S. Air Force. In 2000, he founded One People’s Project out of a counter-protest to a rally in Morristown, NJ. The organization quickly gained the reputation of publicly documenting hate groups and their activities.
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Reforming Sex Offender Laws
The U.S. legal system and sentencing practices rely too often on emotion rather than facts when it comes to defendants with developmental disabilities charged with sex offenses. Sentences for possessing child pornography are severe, and don’t take into account a defendant’s lack of awareness or inability to understand the societal values being punished. This is true for individuals on the autism spectrum whose social intelligence quotient may lag their intelligence quotient.
Two professors want to change that.
St. Francis College professor Emily Horowitz and co-editor and law professor Larry Dubin make the case for reform in their book Caught in the Web of the Criminal Justice System: Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Sex Offenses.
Guest – Professor Emily Horowitz discusses her book and work related to sex offender laws in the United States. Dr. Horowitz is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis. She is the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us and founder and co-director of the St. Francis Post-Prison program. Her research on the sex offense registry been widely cited.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce
The great issues of our times are the return of fascism to the United States and Europe, climate change, and the stagnation of the world capitalist economy. These great issues are pressing and interconnected.
We used to think that the experience of World War II guaranteed that no politician would ever advocate the ideas of fascism.
But the election of Donald Trump a year ago has caused a serious reconsideration of fascism and it’s relationship to capitalism and to democracy.
The neoliberals paved the way for Trump. Now he and the forces aligned with him have put our democratic institutions under attack in order to protect the rule of the wealthy. The attacks include the right to vote, labor unions, public education, an independent news media, independent public universities, the privatization of much of traditional governmental functions and making it almost impossible to launch a new political party.
The election of Trump is a political development that for concrete sociological reasons allows us to see it for what it is, as a type of neo-fascism. Only by identifying the phenomena correctly can we effectively fight it.
Jack London wrote a century ago in his famous book The Iron Heel that “There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What is nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I want to say was this: You are in a perilous position.”
Guest – John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. He is the author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014), among many others.
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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
The spectacle of President Donald Trump and the palace intrigue in the White House has served daily to distract people from the political strategy and accomplishments of the radical right, which is taking over the Republican Party.
Over time, the GOP has been transformed into operation conducting a concerted effort to curb democratic rule in favor of capitalist interests in every branch of government, whatever the consequences. It is marching ever closer to the ultimate goal of reshaping the Constitution to protect monied interests. This gradual take over of a major political party happened steadily, over several decades, and often in plain sight.
Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean exposes the architecture of this change and it’s ultimate aim. She has written that “both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril”.
Guest – Professor Nancy MacLean, whose new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The author of four other books, including Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006) called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best,” and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan,named a New York Times “noteworthy” book of 1994, MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy.
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Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Data Collection Experiment: Google’s SideWalk Labs In Toronto
Last year Law and Disorder featured a segment on Sidewalk Labs, a data-oriented smart city in Toronto. Sidewalk Labs is a firm owned by Google parent company Alphabet. We covered critics’ concerned about residents’ privacy and how data would be used.
Last week, Sidewalk labs has released a 1,500-page development proposal for its planned “smart” neighborhood. They claim it will integrate physical, digital, and policy innovations to take on affordability, sustainability, quality of life and generate economic opportunity. Critics assert, this is an experimental model for a surveillance state and covert data collection.
Sidewalk Lab’s plan is a radical departure from the principles that have guided city planning in Canada since citizen participation and accountability came to the fore in the era of renowned Canadian-American urban planner Jane Jacobs.
Mariana’s recent article.
Guest – Mariana Valverde, Professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She’s an urban studies scholar whose research interests include public-private partnerships, governance and infrastructure.
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Impeachment Analysis Of President Donald Trump
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s May statement on his investigation and report revived calls to impeach President Donald Trump. Such calls rest on solid legal ground. There is already more than adequate evidence supporting at least seven articles of impeachment – four more than President Richard M. Nixon would have faced had he not resigned in 1974.
Trump obstructed the administration of justice by attempting to fire Mueller, to curtail his investigation; he ordered White House counsel Donald McGahn to falsify the record to conceal these attempts. He fired FBI Director James B. Comey because of “Comey’s unwillingness to publicly state that Trump was not personally under investigation. He also sought to protect himself from an investigation into his campaign,” because he knew it would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that Trump could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”
He tried to dissuade Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and other witnesses from cooperating with the government. The non-cooperation of Manafort and Stone made it impossible to establish the exact nature of the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
All of those are violations of Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has violated Articles II through VII, as well.
So the internal debates are not about the legal grounds. They pertain to strategy. And these debates are fracturing alliances among liberals and the left.
Guest – Attorney Abi Hassen is a criminal defense attorney, technologist and co-founder of the Black Movement-Law Project. He was formerly the Mass Defense Coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild and a union and community organizer. His podcast is Against the Law. Against The Law Podcast Link
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