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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 March 25, 2019
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U.S. Peace Council Returns From Venezuela
The Trump administration is attempting to illegally overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela and its president Nicolas Maduro.
The effort is being led by Trump’s recently appointed envoy Elliot Abrams, the notorious convicted perjurer who was complicit during the Reagan Administration in the massacre and cover up of the mass slaughter of indigenous people in central America.
John Bolton is working alongside Abrams. He recently showed the American government’s intent by flashing a hand written sign on a yellow pad stating “5000 troops to Venezuela.“ Showing his contempt for international law, he famously said that if the top part of the United Nations building was lopped off it would not make any difference.
So far the United States has been unable to topple all the Venezuelan government. Unable to win over the Venezuelan military the United States is now embargoing Venezuela, which is a form of a medieval siege, aimed at depriving Venezuelans of food and medicine. The U.S. government and its ally Great Britain have frozen Venezuelan assets held abroad and prevented trade with the country, whose economy has shrunk dramatically.
The United States has secured support for it’s coup attempt from the right wing governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile as well as the countries of the European Union.
Guest – Ajamu Baraka has recently returned from Venezuela. He is on the steering committee of the US Peace Council, which organized the trip. Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, writes for the Black Agenda Report, and was the 2016 Green party candidate for vice president.
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Reprieve: UK Human Rights Group
A year after the death penalty was abolished in the United Kingdom, in 1999, human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith founded the nonprofit organization Reprieve. Smith has represented over 300 prisoners facing the death penalty in the southern United States and has helped secure the release of 65 Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and others internationally who claim that the United States government has tortured them.
Reprieve currently works to represent 15 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, as well as an evolving caseload of death row clients around the world. It investigates international complicity in extraordinary renditions, and has recently started working in Pakistan with the Foundation for Fundamental Rights to begin discussions on the use of drones there.
Guest – Katie Taylor, a Deputy Director at Reprieve who coordinates the Life After Guantanamo Project. Katie has worked at WarChild UK and in Palestine on human and childrens’ rights issues for several local and international agencies.
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Law and Disorder March 18, 2019
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The aggressiveness of United States war machine has killed 500,000 people since 911, caused millions of people to be displaced, and all this at a cost of some $6 trillion.
President Trump has said that “all options are on the table” regarding sending troops to Venezuela. His National Security Adviser John Bolton said that Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are part of the “troika of tyranny ” – in the US’s gun sites. After first promising to withdraw troops from Syria, Trump has reversed himself. Troops are still fighting in Afghanistan after 19 years. Iran remains the ultimate target in the Middle East. How did our country get to the state? What was done 50 years ago in the Vietnam era by millions of American citizens which help end in 1975 the American war in that country?
March 18 marks the 51st anniversary of the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Their American troops murdered 504 Vietnamese women, old men, children and babies. It marked a turning point in the American peoples’ revulsion and consequent mobilization against the war.
Guest – former Navy Lieutenant Susan Schnall of Veterans for Peace. She became famous in 1968 when she dropped antiwar leaflets from an airplane on navy ships in San Francisco Bay.
Guest – Mac MacDevitt – is an associate member of Chicago Veterans for Peace and Committee Chair of the My Lai Memorial Project. He is an artist, storyteller and educator who came of age and was forever changed during the Vietnam War. He was radicalized by witnessing the wounded fellow protesters, beaten by US Marshals as night fell after the March on the Pentagon in 1967. In 1981 Mac did a social work internship at the VA Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont in the psych department where he experienced vets dealing with ghosts from Vietnam and earlier wars.
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Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics
The United States is unique among advanced countries in having the greatest inequality, highest poverty rate, highest portion of its population imprisoned, and highest proportion lacking healthcare.
Victor Wallis’ new book Democracy Denied offers a succinct history of several traits unique to the nation.
It came out of a lecture series in China and presents a historically grounded perspective on these traits, including chapters on “American exceptionalism,” on U.S. imperialism, the trajectory of African-descended people in the United States, efforts to develop a socialist alternative to the dominant institutions, and the current configuration of U.S. politics.
Guest – Victor Wallis is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. For twenty years he was the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. He is the author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (2018) and of many articles on topics related to environmentalism, social justice, and radical politics. Victor’s activism dates from the 1960s and encompasses issues ranging from U.S. foreign intervention to prisoners’ rights.
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Law and Disorder March 11, 2019
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The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago
Although torture is illegal under both American law and international law the USA has practiced torture for the last half century from Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Guantánamo Cuba, and here at home in Chicago, Illinois.
President Obama refused to prosecute the torturers of the Bush era. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney greenlighted the torture saying we must go over to the darkside.
President Trump, who approves of waterboarding and worse, said during his campaign that torture works. It doesn’t. Tortured people will say anything to relieve their agony.
Over 100 Black men in Chicago were tortured in the 1970s and 1980s. They confessed to crimes although many of them were innocent. But in Chicago, unlike under President Obama who refused to enforce the law saying that “we must look forward not backward”, something was done about it.
Our guest attorney Flint Taylor, his office the People’s Law Office, many groups in the community, several dedicated journalists, law students, and even Amnesty International worked together and won an historic victory.
What they did and how they did it is the story told in Flint Taylor‘s new book, a tour de force, published by Haymarket Books, called The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
For the first time in American history reparations were paid to Black persons. The torture ringleader Police Commander John Birge was sent to prison. Every Chicago public school student is now taught about what happened in their city. A monument for the victims has been put up and free college tuition and psychological counseling are available to the victims.
Guest – Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. He was one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past 30 years, and was also trial co-counsel in the landmark civil rights case against the KKK, Nazis, and Greensboro, North Carolina police in the murder of five anti-Klan demonstrators.
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Eugene V Debs: A Graphic Biography
Eugene V. Debs, the greatest American Socialist and the foremost agitator for socialism that we have ever had , is back in the public guy eye again after a century. Back then, with Debs as it’s outstanding spokesman, socialism began for the first time to get a hearing in this country.
Debs talked about a new social order based on cooperation and comradeship. He and the newspaper “Appeal to Reason“ for which she wrote inspired a whole generation of native radicals with the great promise of socialism.
Socialism is no longer a dirty word. Google reports that the word “socialism“ got more hits than any other word last year. A 2016 poll showed Democratic primary voters “in every age group, every gender, and every race view socialism favorably.“ Candidates are openly advocating for socialism and getting elected.
In 1894 Debs, though not yet a socialist but an militant beloved labor leader, was jailed for six months after leading the nations railroad workers in a failed strike against the powerful railroad owners. He was defended by the magnificent attorney Clarence Darrow.
In 1919 Debs was again convicted, this time for violating the Espionage Act which was used against war war one antiwar activists. He was incarcerated for a second time at age 63. He was given a 10 year sentence of hard labor in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. His crime was making a speech opposing America’s participation in World War I.
It is the Espionage Act which will be used against WikiLeaks publisher and truth teller Julian Assange if United States Government is Able to arrest him and London where he has been granted political asylum in the embassy.
Deb’s Socialist Party of America was formed in 1901 and heralded a wave of broad popular support for the ideas of socialism. We see this phenomena currently unfolding in these dire times of permanent war and austerity.
Paul Buhle along with Attorney Dave Nance are authors of the just published by Verso Press book Eugene V Debs: a Graphic Biography.
Guest – Paul Buhle, formally a senior lecturer at Brown University, produces radical comics. He founded the journal “Radical America” and co-edited with Dan Georgakas and Mari Jo Buhle, the invaluable “Encyclopedia of the American Left”.
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