National • News & Public Affairs
Law and Disorder is a weekly, independent radio program airing on several stations across the United States. Law and Disorder gives listeners access to rare legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and the horrendous practices of torture exercised by the US government.
Law and Disorder is a weekly, independent radio program airing on several stations across the United States. Law and Disorder gives listeners access to rare legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and the horrendous practices of torture exercised by the US government.
This program examines the political forces and legislation that are moving the United States into a police state. Four of the top progressive attorneys and activists host the program and bring an amazing, diverse line up of guests from grassroots activists to politically mindful authors. Most importantly, Law and Disorder brings access to attorneys who give insights to some of the most controversial cases. Law and Disorder will sometimes be the generator of news within the radio echo-chamber throughout the country.
Program website – http://www.lawanddisorder.org/
Upcoming Episodes
May 20, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
The More Effective Of Two Evils and Early Detection: Catching Cancer When Its Curable
The More Effective Of Two Evils
The necessity for independent political action, independent of both the Republican and the Democratic parties, is the lesson many social activists are drawing. The journalist, Glen Ford, of the Black Agenda Report , coined the phrase the more effective of two evils in describing the Democratic Party. The Democrats are trying to beat people into their camp by haranguing about how horrible Trump is. That's true. But look at how effective Biden has been in supporting the Israeli genocide. It has only been the independent action of the courageous students that may succeed in tempering the onslaught. It has already had some effect. Activist are now focusing on the fact that it was the Democratic Party on a national and local scale that coordinated attacks on the Palestine solidarity encampments. Just as they did under Obama in closing down Occupy. The Democrats prevented Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. Had he not supported the Democrats and became an independent our movement would've been much more effective than his lobbing Biden. He has been reduced to the edge of relevance. Significant social change comes from organizing people independently. The rise of the CIO, the civil rights movement and the movement to end the war in Vietnam are illustrations of this truth. Guest - Chris Hedges, the journalist and author about the collapsing media landscape.
Early Detection: Catching Cancer When Its Curable
The war on cancer declared by President Richard Nixon over 50 years ago has been a failure. Mortality rates for victims of cancer have not decreased, except for the successful campaign against smoking. Most money spent on fighting cancer by big pharmaceutical companies goes into researching and developing medicines for late-stage cancers. These medicines have proven to only prolong life for several months. So, what is the answer to truly combating cancer? Early detection. And it must be quite early on. Funds currently misdirected could be used in this effort. Prostate, breast, colorectal, and lung cancers can be detected early. But too often they are not. Even when they are, many people dont follow up with treatment. A blood test has been developed to identify 50 different cancers. But what's missing is a massive program of education and organization to catch cancer in its early stages. Guest - Bruce Ratner studied science at Harvard, graduated from Columbia law school. He has initiated the Michael D. Ratner Center for Early Detection of Cancer.
May 13, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Free Speech: Protest Testing The Limits Of Protection
Free Speech: Protest Testing The Limits Of Protection
As controversy rages over protests, encampments, and arrests at hundreds of college campuses around the country, in reaction to the war in the Middle East, free speech is once again at the forefront of national debate. Time and again in American history, the nation has been gripped by the complex question of whether certain speech is or is not protected by the First Amendment. Recently, college presidents have been under fire for failing to protect free speech or for going too far in tolerating free speech. Some have been forced to resign and others have called in the police. Students have been attacked; others have been suspended; student political organizations have been banned. What's going on and where does the First Amendment fit into all this? Guest - Nadine Strossen, a leading expert on constitutional law and the First Amendment. Nadine Strossen is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 until 2008.
May 6, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Police, Politics And Violent Repression Against Pro-Palestine Student Protest and Legacy of Protest At Columbia University
Police, Politics And Violent Repression Against Pro-Palestine Student Protest
College administrators are calling local armed police "some in riot gear" to arrest and in many instances brutalize hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters in actions and encampments sweeping the nation. More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested over the last two weeks on campuses in states including Texas, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Connecticut, Louisiana, California and New Jersey. At UCLA, last week, after pro-Israel supporters carrying symbols of radical Jewish groups, not of student age, allegedly threw fireworks into a solidarity encampment, students defending the camp were attacked with stones and sticks. Yet, after an hour of violence, police standing nearby failed to intervene.
Guest - attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and the Center for Protest Law and Litigation in Washington, DC.
Legacy of Protest At Columbia University
One of the great events of the 60s is the Columbia student takeover of several key buildings on their campus in protest of the university's complicity in the war against the Vietnamese people. The takeover was also a protest to building a gym in a public park in Harlem adjacent to Columbia University, considered to be a racist act. The student actions at Columbia brought down a terrific repression. Hundreds of students were arrested and beaten. Our own Michael Ratner, a cofounder of Law and Disorder, and a law student at Columbia, was also beaten by the police. Guest - anti-Vietnam war activist Eleanor Stein, like Michael, she was a student at the law school. Eleanor Stein went on to become an attorney, she is a climate change, environmental justice and human rights activist and advocate.
April 29, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine and Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine
Around the nation, peaceful campus protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are spreading. And they're meeting with a rash of arrests by local police departments, dozens of school suspensions, and evictions from student dormitories. Many of those evicted have been students of colors, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. All this because they took part at the large protest. In an April 23 letter to the New York Times, nearly 60 parents of students at Columbia and Barnard, from a variety of religious faiths ad social backgrounds wrote that they find the actions taken by the administration deeply troubling and contrary to the principles of liberty, justice and academic freedom that are fundamental to the mission of higher education. Guest - Brian Becker is the director of the Answer Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.
Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Regarded by many as the greatest journalist of our generation for exposing American war crimes Julian Assange is about to be extradited at America's request to a federal criminal court in Virginia to be tried for his journalistic activities which exposed extensive murderous American crimes and embarrassed the US government particularly the CIA. WikiLeaks exposed American torture in Afghanistan. They published a video of an American gunship helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians, even children, and two Reuters journalists on the streets of Baghdad. Now the United States has succeeded in getting a compliant British court to extradite Julian , despite the law, preventing extradition of political prisoners, especially to a country that has the death penalty, and no guarantee of free speech for foreigners. Guest - Vincent De Stefano is the National Organizing Director of the U.S. Julian Assange Defense Committee. Mr. De Stefano is on the Southern California ACLU board of directors and executive committee and he has worked with Amnesty International for more than four decades.
April 22, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century. Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget the senseless slaughter of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it, Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
April 15, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm and Pro-Palestine Protestors Target of Covert Israel Campaign
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
In the last six months of the war by Israel against the Palestinian population of Gaza, a truth has become quite clear: The war is not one of self-defense. And moreover, the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel is being used by the Netanyahu government as a pretext for ethnically cleansing the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there, and get them out of the Gaza Strip. Israel, like America, is a colonial settlers state. It was built on top of an indigenous population whose removal was necessary to establish the new state of Israel. The Palestinians, who were the majority, never got their own state. Three quarters of 1 million of them were driven out, many ended up as refugees in the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States have crippled the United Nations and undermined international law. The International Court of Justice , the highest court in the world,ruled that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide. This ruling has been ignored by Israel and the United States. Guest - OR Books associate editor Jamie Stern Weiner author of the recently published book Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm.
Pro-Palestine Protestors Target of Covert Israel Campaign
Well, the cat is now definitely out of the bag. What many of us have long suspected, our guest today has now documented. It is that the Israeli government created a task force to plan and carry out a covert campaign to disrupt and punish pro-Palestinian protesters on the college and university campuses of the United States. And the plan is in full operation. It was first reported in the Israeli website Ynetnews, one of the largest and greatly respected media outlets in Israel. Guest - Professor William Robinson is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. He is also a member of the Affiliated Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies, all at the University of California, at Santa Barbara.
April 8, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Sexting Among Teens & No Business With Genocide
Part 1 – Should sexting among adolescents be a crime? In half of the states in this country, criminal laws classify the act of sexting among minors as a felony. But, teenagers who engage in sexting rarely realize the consequences of their actions.
Part 2 - April is Earth Month, a time to think twice about our relationship with -- and responsibility to -- our planet and the ecosystem we rely on, and of course, our fellow living beings. Thankfully, there are people like todays guest, to remind us that we, individually and collectively, have so much power to change the course of history and create a healthier world for future generations.
ListenApril 1, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Chris Hedges: Israel’s Trojan Horse and Billionaires, Economies And Elections
Chris Hedges: Israel's Trojan Horse
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. Guest " Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and political writer.
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. Guest - Patrick Martin, senior editor at the world socialist web site where he covers a range of political issues in the United States.
March 25, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader and Attorney Michael Deutsch on Repression of the Pro-Palestinian Movement
I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader
Where did capitalism come from? And what accounts for its great success? Where did racism come from? When was it implanted? Why are alternatives to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties so feeble? What did Malcolm X really stand for and what did he try to accomplish before he was assassinated at age 39? How does this contribute to the weakness of our movement? This weakness can be traced back most immediately to the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1940s and 1950s and the destruction of the left-wing; of our once powerful trade unions beginning in 1947. The danger that Malcolm X. presented to the powers that be are best understood by his internationalism, his reaching out to leaders in Africa, his desire to go to the United Nations to mobilize against American racism. Todays political activists are drawn to the works of historians to appreciate where we are at, how we got here, and what to do next. Guest - Gerald Horne has written about these profound events. His reader I Dare Say has just been published by OR books
Attorney Michael Deutsch on Repression of the Pro-Palestinian Movement
Historically, when the people of our nation rise up in massive opposition to policies and actions undertaken by their government that are deemed essential to its foreign or domestic policies, various governmental agencies invariably begin the process of trying to shut down or seriously weaken the peoples movements against those policies and actions. The U.S. House of Representatives initiated, and continues, an investigation of the pro-Palestinian movement; private employers have withdrawn job offers to students and others who joined the anti-Israel protests; and authors and speakers deemed too supportive of the Palestinian cause continue to be disinvited or banned from speaking at public forums. Often, governmental efforts to intimidate or undermine these peace and social justice movements include actions that are not visible to the general public. Secret actions. Actions such as sending undercover agents into the targeted protest groups in order to disrupt the group. Electronic spying on the groups and group leaders escalates. And, as the case with the movement now protesting Israel's actions in its war in Gaza. Guest - Michael Deutsch, a lawyer with the famed human and civil rights Peoples Law Office in Chicago, Illinois. Michael has also served as the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.
March 18, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
SCOTUS Oral Arguments Social Media Platforms and Robin Anderson on US-Israel Media Genocide Complicity
SCOTUS Oral Arguments Social Media Platforms
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about two different state laws that would regulate how large tech companies control what content can appear on their sites. The laws would compel companies to carry all users viewpoints and would preclude them from de-platforming political candidates. The Florida law at issue in Moody v. NetChoice and its Texas counterpart in NetChoice v. Paxton represent challenges by tech lobbying groups, NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Information Association. The plaintiffs claim the laws violate their First Amendment rights to make editorial choices about what content to permit or prohibit. Most members of the Supreme Court seemed to indicate that, in some contexts, the Florida and Texas laws likely violate the First Amendment rights of the social media firms. They also expressed concern that blocking the laws entirely might go too far. Guest " Attorney and Professor Zachary Wolfe at George Washington University in Washington D.C.
Robin Anderson on US-Israel Media Genocide Complicity
International humanitarian aid organizations have been documenting and warning that Israel was committing crimes of war after bombing Gaza after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Yet major media outlets and social media platforms have consistently ignored their on-the-ground reports. What factors have contributed to Israel avoiding moral and legal culpability for its acts of genocide? As it turns out, there are many, from Israel employing propaganda, falsifying evidence, to the censorship and silencing of US journalists and commentators as well as repression of dissident voices online and off. And powerful Israeli lobbying forces have effectively silenced any criticism of Israel. Guest - Robin Andersen is Professor Emerita of Media Studies at Fordham University. She writes media criticism for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and other outlets, and works with Project Censored as a contributor to the annual State of the Free Press book.
March 11, 2024 National, News & Public Affairs
Legal Analysis Of Recent Supreme Court Decisions and The Right To Boycott Israel
Legal Analysis Of Recent Supreme Court Decisions
The U.S. Supreme Court, securely under the control of a Super Majority of 6 conservative Republican justices, three of whom were appointed by Donald Trump, continues to play a decisive role in undermining our constitutional democracy. This ominous trend continues based on three recent key cases, which we'll be talking about today. All of these cases arise from the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of thousands stormed the US Capitol to prevent Joe Biden from being certified as President. That day, and for many months before and after, Donald Trump attempted to interfere with the constitutionally mandated process for the election of the President of the United States. Guest - Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar and activist.
The Right To Boycott Israel
The First Amendment gives citizens the right to boycott, as well as the right to free speech and assembly and the separation of church and state. The right to boycott is under attack by right wing anti-democratic forces. Anti-boycott bills have been passed in 37 states so far. The main organization behind canceling our constitutional right to boycott Israel for its horrific crimes against Palestinians is the American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC). The boycott started with the Boston Tea Party. The Montgomery Bus Boycott set off the civil rights movement in the south. The Grape Boycott supported Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers in California. The necessity of pushing back against Israel's genocidal practices has never been more evident. Guest - Felice Gelman is a coordinator of the Freedom2Boycott NYS Coalition, which has worked for a decade to defeat legislation penalizing boycotts in New York State and recently released a short film The Right to Boycott.
