Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Human Rights, Surveillance
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Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
California has a water crisis that is rooted in racism. About 1 million Californians in 130 communities still do not have access to clean, safe drinking water. Most of these people live in rural areas primarily populated by farmworker families.
This inequality can be traced to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North at the beginning of the 20th Century. Met with discriminatory real estate practices, they were forced to build or rent homes in colonias with no water mains, sewer lines or lighting.
That racist legacy continues to plague people (primarily of Mexican descent) who live in San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. Growers who pump large amounts of water from the soil are at the top of the chain when it comes to water access. Next come residences and businesses. At the bottom of the water access chain are the residents of the colonias.
But the people are organizing and they have achieved a victory in their decade-long struggle for equal access to water.
Photojournalist David Bacon has documented this shameful inequality and the legislation the people have secured in his article, “The Color of Water,” which was published in April by The Nation and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Guest – David Bacon is an author, political activist, and former union organizer who has focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor. He is Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute and the author of several books and numerous articles. His most recent book is “More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro” which documents the communities on either side of the Mexico/U.S. border in photographs and journalism.
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Disturbing Shift Away From Passwords And Into Biometric ID Systems
Are passwords becoming obsolete? Recently our own Heidi Boghosian published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on the disturbing shift away from passwords to fingerprints, eye scans, and other biometrics authentication systems. A consortium of businesses is working with security experts to develop more secure ways to access online accounts. Each year the United States loses TRILLIONS of dollars from avoidable data breaches. And that figure is growing. Compromised login credentials are responsible for at least one fifth of all these breaches.
Enter the FIDO Alliance, or “Fast Identity Online.” Alliance members Google, Apple and Microsoft are working on enabling a password-free world, suggesting users switch to a simple verification of their fingerprint or face—or biometrics.
What are the benefits and risks of such a transition? Heidi is here to fill us in on some biometrics basics, and to demystify how new password-less systems might work, and when we can expect to see them.
Guest – Attorney Heidi Boghosian is executive director of the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a charitable organization providing support to activist organizations. Before that she was executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her book is coming out in July 2021(Beacon Press). She received her JD from Temple Law School where she was editor-in-chief of the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review. She has an MS from Boston University’s College of Communication and a BA from Brown University. Heidi is the author of the 2013 book, Spying on Democracy, and the recent book I Have Nothing to Hide”: And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
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Censorship, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights
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Right Wing Donors Fund Recall Of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin
Two years ago, attorney Chesa Boudin was elected by the people of San Francisco to reform the criminal justice system in their city. He was specifically chosen to begin reversing the mass incarceration which has been happening since the 1970s. This mass incarceration was a reaction by right-wing forces to the Civil Rights movement. By the time Chesa Boudin was elected, 2.3 million US citizens were behind bars across the country and another 6 million were on probation or parole. The United States has the highest per capita number of people incarcerated and under governmental supervision than any country in the world.
Chesa promised to begin to reverse this outrage. As an opponent of mass incarceration, his campaign emphasized that 75% of the people arrested in San Francisco are either addicted to drugs or mentally ill or both. He developed diversion programs. He got people into drug rehabilitation and/or psychiatric counseling. He emphasized caring not only for those arrested for crimes but especially for their victims.
He sought to and succeeded in making San Francisco a safer city. Now, after two years of Chesa’s service, crime in San Francisco has largely decreased. As Chesa promised, his office has prosecuted police for misconduct and corporate criminals for white-collar crimes.
Right-wing big money forces from outside San Francisco are attempting to recall Chesa Boudin. The vote will take place on June 7 and early voting has already begun. Rich people who don’t even live in San Francisco have played a big role in the campaign. The right-wing strategy for the recall is the use of fear: Fear of change. Fear of crime. Fear of minorities. Fear of unsheltered people living in the streets.
ChesaBoudin.com
Chesa grew up while both of his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin (who died on May 1st), were in prison serving long terms. He was raised by friends of his parents, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two professors who adopted him and welcomed him into their blended family. As a young boy, he would fly alone to visit his parents and go through the prison metal detector to have a few hours with them in the visiting room. Chesa is one of a number of progressive DA’s in the United States. The right understands that toppling him is critical in their effort to stop and roll back the movement for criminal justice reform.
Guest – District Attorney Chesa Boudin was sworn in as San Francisco District Attorney in January 2020. He’s a Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Yale Law School. After obtaining his law degree, he worked as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and later for the Honorable Charles Breyer of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
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Alternative Media Under Censorship And Oppression
PayPal, YouTube, and Facebook are quashing non-main stream reporting and opinion about the war in Ukraine. Alternative media is in danger of even more extensive suppression. Archival videos of Chris Hedges’ RT show “On Contact“ were removed from YouTube after RT was banned. This included two interviews Hedges did with cohost of Law And Disorder Radio Michael Smith, another covered Law And Disorder Radio founder Michael Ratner‘s memoir. Consortium News, founded by veteran journalist Robert Parry in 1995 and currently run by Joe Lauria, was banned by PayPal in May. This was also done to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks years ago after they revealed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Consortium News apparently offended the big tech company, possibly with US government connivance, by being critical of US policy in Ukraine. PayPal will not reveal its reasons for the ban. Specifically, Consortium News wrote about NATO’s eastward expansion as well as the US role in the violence in the 2014 Maidan Square overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and replacing it with one more friendly to US interests.
According to Lauria, Consortium News has about 10,000 listeners a day. Sometimes this spikes to 40,000. Their PayPal account had allowed listeners to click on a support button and thus conveniently give money to the organization. PayPal recently informed Joe Lauria that Consortium News has been permanently banned. It would not discuss why.
Are we facing a dystopian future of big tech and government suppression of alternative journalism? Journalist Matt Taibbi has written that “going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect.” This, he added, is “especially true” for “the alternative media world, where money has been notoriously tight.”
Guest – Joe Lauria, Consortium News editor-in-chief. He is a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for The Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a 19-year-old stringer for The New York Times.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Human Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Russia, Deescalation And War Crimes
The Nuremberg tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime” because it contains within it all other crimes. German Nazi leaders were tried, convicted, and hung at Nuremberg for the German war of aggression they began in September of 1939 when they invaded Poland and started World War II.
The guilty verdicts at Nuremberg were not merely “victors’ justice.” Its precepts were incorporated into the UN Charter. The Charter, which is a treaty ratified by the countries of the world, established a process for keeping the peace and “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” War is outlawed with the only exception being self-defense after an armed attack or with the permission of the Security Council.
Russia is guilty of aggression against Ukraine. But that being said, 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 – Peter Kuznick is a professor of history at American University and directs the Nuclear Studies Program. at that institution. Peter and Oliver Stone wrote The Untold History of the United States and also produced a showtime documentary series based on the book.
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Ukraine Invasion Economic Analysis
Horrific images of the war in Ukraine and the now more than 2 million displaced persons streaming over Ukraine’s border continue to emerge. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling for a no-fly-zone over Ukraine and the corporate media is hyping more punishing sanctions against Russia.
So far, Joe Biden has resisted calls for a no-fly-zone, apparently mindful that enforcing a no-fly-zone would mean the US Air Force shooting down Russian planes and bombing Russian ground installations that provide Russian forces with anti-aircraft support. That could well devolve into a nuclear confrontation.
The United States and other Western countries have imposed sanctions against Russia, including expelling some Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, essentially barring them from international transactions and effectively blocking Russian exports and imports, as well as banning imports of Russian oil and gas. But these sanctions harm not the Russian oligarchs, but the Russian people while raising gas prices for people in the United States.
The prospect of cyberwarfare lurks in the background, which could redound to the detriment of people around the world, including those of us in the United States. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies continue to send massive armaments to Ukraine, to the delight of the huge military contractors.
While Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine constitutes illegal aggression prohibited by the UN Charter, it is necessary to analyze the history and geopolitics as well as the role NATO has played in the region, in order to understand both the context for the conflict and how it could have been prevented.
Guest – Corinna Mullin, an organizer and professor of political science and political economy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Brooklyn College-CUNY in New York. Corinna is also a member of the steering committee of the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Truth to Power, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change
Today we speak with University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy about his new book “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.” The United States of America has been governing the globe now for 80 years, since World War II. This is about to end. By 2030, China will have the world’s largest economy and hold more riches than the U.S., which is deeply in debt.
The America we know will change drastically as a world power just as the previous world powers, the British, and before them the Dutch, and before them the Spanish and the Portuguese, all saw their empires end.
Climate change will upend the world. It has already started. The effects of climate change on the population of the world, especially China, will be catastrophic. The great coastal city of Shanghai, where 18 million people reside, will sink, uprooting millions of the 400 million Chinese people in the North China Plain.
What can we learn from the demise of the great world powers in the past? Where is the United States headed and how soon? What might be done to ameliorate this dire future? Only a prodigious historian could undertake to answer these questions.
Guest – Alfred W McCoy holds the Fred Harvey Harrington chair of history at the University of Wisconsin. He has written 20 books, including “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” for which he became well-known, and recently, “In the Shadows of the American Century.”
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Encroaching Fascism In The United States
An American form of fascism is unfolding in our country. What exactly is it and what can we do to fight it?
We see a massive political effort to legitimatize and normalize white minority rule. Things are happening rapidly. A year ago our capital was attacked pursuant to a plan to reverse the results of the election. Soon the Supreme Court will likely overrule the almost 50 year precedent set by Roe v Wade on the question of a woman’s right to control her own body. Voting rights have been and will continue to be extremely restricted particularly in communities of color. Irrational and magical thinking has been legitimatized. More than 900 thousand people have unnecessarily died of Covid. There has developed in our country a culture of cruelty manifested by Trump, but initiated in CIA torture and detention camps for Muslim men and boys in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
It didn’t start after 9/11 with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. It goes back further than that. America has been prosecuting wars abroad during our entire lifetimes. The provocations against Russia regarding NATO military encroachment on its borders are the latest chapter in almost continual and seemingly endless wars. A lesson of history since Greek and Roman times is that you can’t have imperialism abroad and democracy at home.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University chair for a Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has written many books, most recently The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Facism.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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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.”
En-ROADS
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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