with Ralph Nader
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
strugglevideomedia on Apr 18, 2014
Ralph Nader speaks at a meeting about whistleblowers in Yale Law School, April 1, 2014.
As Jim Shelton reported in the New Haven Register, “Political firebrand Ralph Nader tore into the Obama administration’s claims of transparency Tuesday at Yale University, saying government spying and unchecked executive authority leaves the U.S. teetering on the verge of being a police state.”
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Snowden’s Lawyer Speaks about Whistleblowers Under Fire
strugglevideomedia on Apr 7, 2014
Jesselyn Radack, legal counsel for Edward Snowden speaks at a workshop on the treatment of whistleblowers by the U.S. government, “Showdown for Democracy – Lawyers, Whistleblowers, and the National Security State.” She is introduced by Ralph Nader April 1, 2014.
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“This is the Authority to Kill Anyone on the Planet”
strugglevideomedia on Apr 18, 2014
Attorney Bruce Fein speaks at the April 1, 2014 conference “Showdown for Democracy: Obama’s Prosecution of Whistleblowers, Lawyers, and the National Security State.”
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What Should Law School be About?
strugglevideomedia on Apr 19, 2014
Yale Law School Professor Edgar Cahn speaks at the April 1, 2014 conference “Showdown for Democracy: Obama’s Prosecution of Whistleblowers, Lawyers, and the National Security State.”
see
Ralph Nader: Why Shake ‘em Up Harvard Law School?
Edward Snowden to EU: No Legal Means Exist To Challenge Mass Surveillance
Empire Under Obama, Part 2: Barack Obama’s Global Terror Campaign by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Ralph Nader: A Society That Has More Justice Is A Society That Needs Less Charity
Dandelion Salad 
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Gotta Love Jesselyn !
I watched Ralph on Democracy Now the other night. It gives us all a very faint light of hope that there are others , leaders out there that know the truth and want change. They have not all been assassinated-Yet.
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It’s time to stop kidding ourselves and acknowledge that the federal government AND the Constitution are abject failures. Abolish the federal govt. And when we say that we immediately acknowledge that they have too much power don’t we? But then we also acknowledge that they don’t serve the people, and a new federal govt won’t either.
What are the states doing time and again? Deciding more of their fate by the means allowed them –that of throwing off their (the federale’s) bogus legislation. Let the states decide their/our future. The federal govt will always be run by sociopaths and supported by blind command followers.
“My own view is that there has to be a dramatic rebirth and refunctioning of the universities…”
Afraid not, David. The last place that the necessary new ideas will come from is from academia. The primary function of learned truth is not to create new ideas but to legitimate old ones. There are notable exceptions of course, such as Michael Parenti in political science, and what happened to him, being blacklisted, is the usual kind of thing. Similar repression occurred to Veblen at the U of Chicago and Beard at Columbia, and Parenti lists many others in his books, such as DIRTY TRUTHS.
What is needed in the US is a spiritual revolution that sanctifies the earth’s people rather than the gods. This can be started with a revolution in social science conceptually similar to the scientific revolutions in the history of the natural sciences. The holistic conceptual structures innovated in 20th century American social science can develop a world-view that legitimates the simple truth about the past, present, and future persons of the earth.
But the last place it will reach will be academic social science.
True enough, which is why I’m suggesting a complete rethink + refit + retooling, literally “reinventing” the proverbial wheel of life. We definitely need a wiser praxis based on a different systemic rationale like you say, where law is a spiritual right.
There is an inherent paradox in what you describe though as “innovated in 20th century American social science,” because that comes straight out of academic discipline ~ which is actually fine, only it needs to be applied to the very context it originates from.
That is why I believe we need a re-conceptualized interpretation and model of society that is unrestricted spiritually, ie not dogmatic or distorted by “priests;” but proportionate, aesthetic, just & holistically up-to-date ~ so that education can be completely embedded as an experiential ecological ethos that serves both people and planet.
I’m not for throwing out the baby, only a cleverer use for the old water until we cotton on to a more agreeable method of bathing.
As an example of the imposition of fascism, Lo, Ukraine is a very ominous reality. US policy backed a Nazi takeover AFTER the president conceded the restriction of his powers, early elections, and, foolishly, the pulling back of police. Why? Because both EU countries, Germany, France, and Poland agreed with Russia to neutralize Ukraine.
The US is afraid of the allying of Western countries with Russia, since they have a strong common interest in trade. Instead of Nato keeping the US in, Russia out, and Germany down, the threat was Germany up, Russia in, and the US out. So the US in trying, successfully it looks like, to institutionalize a new Cold War between Russia and the West, to keep the Western alliance intact.
This is being done by supporting Ukrainian Nazism in alliance with the oligarchs there. If this works out well geopolitically, and it may, then America has oligarchs of its own that can ally with fascism in the US. And with the increase in inequality, it may have to.
The increase in economic inequality can only be maintained over historical time by an increase in political violence. Both the inequality and the violence can only be legitimated by deceit, delusion, ideological repression, and irrationality.
And this is occurring in an era where nuclear weapons are spreading, and it is to the military interest of America to legitimate them. At a time when the West is rapidly losing world power, its economics is stagnating, and it is being challenged politically, economicially, and culturally all over the world.
I don’t like spreading doom and gloom, but unless we understand historical reality, we can’t change it.
I also share your concerns folktruther.
Money worship and the degradation of the natural world has corrupted everything in America, and nothing will advance in the US until those with sufficient moral courage and intelligence continue to speak out with authority, to challenge the present set-up that is so obviously undermining the public interest and ruining our universal/global ecology.
In Europe, the fading aura of the Marshall Plan still inflects the political instinct ~ the ghost of a philanthropic benefactor (Uncle Sam) who reins in the old demons and puts things to rights ~ but there is in my view a chronic disconnect between Europe’s over-centralized political bureaucracy and its vast diversity of regional realities.
This is a “union” of 28 countries after all, with complicated entangled histories and cultural identities.
Political discourse here is increasingly & very stupidly often reduced to de facto economic “pragmatism” American style, at the expense of indigenous community resilience, cultural openness and the need to be intelligently responsive to global flux, technological change and bio-cultural innovation.
Urgent bureaucratic reform is long overdue, and this needs to address pervasive creeping issues of corruption and the deep old world legacies of “organized crime” and the religious abuses of sinister, elite covert influence..
Russia and its satellites have never been very far “outside” Europe. This eruption of the extreme right and the type of primitive violence associated with it may be an endemic risk that needs to be managed psychologically rather than completely suppressed or eliminated.
There is not much to separate traditional crime from organized violence; and the only thing distinguishing the latter from endemic abuses of the state ~ or more exactly, the prevention of such abuses ~ are professional standards; the offices and institutions charged with responsibility to regulate and oversee the way things are done, transparently through proper legal accountability.
In the USA the judiciary itself has been compromised, while in Europe the US has far overextended its influence and power through the twin agencies of NATO & its spurious underlying rationale ~ the insidious “neoliberal” economic dominance of “free” markets.
The great danger is that when all this breaks down, criminal fascist coalitions can and do seize the advantage.
My own view is that there needs to be a dramatic rebirth and re-energizing of the function of the university as a dynamic ecological microcosm of society, a hothouse of continual cultural renewal. We need a fresh recognition and reaffirmation of what the justly revered Canadian intellectual and pedagogue Northrop Frye, described as the engine-room of society.
This can only happen if universities reinvent themselves as the embedded reflexive heart of communities, not some kind of grafted on after-thought endowed by privileged elites with perverse ideological agendas.
One can see the times a changing when legal experts speak as forcefully as these.
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The kind of fascism being imposed in the US is different, so far, from the world war 2 fascism, especially Nazism. Instead of mobilizing the people around nationalism and racism, what might be called Freedom fascism DE-MOBALIZES the population to prevent us from uniting against anti-people power. The point was made in DEMOCRACY, INC in a politically scientific way by a political scientist whose name escapes me.
It is historically a new form of oppression, which occurs because the coalition of billionaire oligarchs cannot be subordinated by the ineffectual and dysfunctional government that we have inherited. However if weren’t for the glory of the thing, I would just as soon forgo it. And it is by no means impossible that Freedom fascism will morph into the traditional form. The Nazi party in the Ukraine, Svoboda, is usually translated as ‘Freedom.”
That’s my concern as well, folktruther. Corporate fascism today, totalitarian fascism tomorrow.
What Jesselyn Radack says is just mind-blowing ~ really shocking; an extraordinary indictment of a system spun out of control. Obama really is a big zero ~ Captain America?! I don’t think so. Biography of a modified bolognese robot more like..
What a remarkable woman Jesselyn is. Talk about heads-up!
All I can add is I hope some people in the right places are listening very carefully to her, because if they are not, (as Ralph Nader aptly reminds us of what Heraclitus so wisely denoted) true to its perverse character, the US will have already set a course that is irreversible ~ thus obdurately and precipitously orchestrating its own, fatal, catastrophic demise.
Bruce Fein….astonishing!!
I’d like hear Professor Cahn’s views about blackmail, venal corruption and corporate conflicts of interest in the Supreme Court.
Thanks for watching the videos and commenting, David. I especially thought Bruce Fein’s talk was very important.
Amazing, forthright, lucid, morally unequivocal…truly “exceptional.”..
Thank you, David, you are a much better writer than I am. Words do not come easily to me, so that’s why I have others write the blog posts here fortunately.
‘Teetering’??? It already is and just getting worse.
I knew someone would comment about the title. Nader has been speaking out about this for a very long time.