War And Debt Economy

We are experiencing a great transformation in who holds economic, and therefore political power in America. This transformation is going on for the last 50 some years. There are now approximately 1000 billionaires in America. Our constitutional form of government, the government of checks and balances has been transformed. The three branches of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the executive were designed to hold each other in check and that is no longer the case. Executive power reigns supreme.

Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is capitalism, production for profit, and not for human needs. This is manifested in autocracy, the rule of the rich, and those with whom they are connected. They have popularly become known as the Epstein class. In tandem with the billionaire class in power in the United States, is this country’s decline in power as compared to China. China is soon to become the leading economic force in the world.

It is about to overcome the United States in this regard, while American governmental debt approaches $40 trillion, an amount worth more than the annual production of goods and services in the United States, this country has now turned to borrowing money from China to aid its economy.

Guest – Richard Wolff  is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of Understanding Capitalism. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist.  He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.

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Israel’s Practice of Assassination

World War II ended in 1945. Sixty million people had died. To prevent a recurrence the foundations of international law were laid. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals concluded in 1947. The guilty verdicts against the Nazi leaders were not seen as “victors’ justice“ but instead as a way forward based on three principles. The first was the illegality of aggressive war, the worst crime of all because it included within it all other crimes. The second principal consisted of violations of the laws of war, such as bombing civilians. The third was crimes against humanity.

Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of Defense, who has changed the name of the department and styles himself as Secretary of War, has denounced the very laws of war set up after Nuremberg. The third principal, crimes against humanity, includes assassinations which are political murders. The Israeli assassination program has become elaborate and ambitious. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the ethno- state has been an extremely aggressive violator of these three principles.

In developing political assassination as “an art form” in the words of an Israel leader, Israel has taken the lead along with its partner the United States in the dismantling of the international rules of law.

Guest –  Washington DC journalist Andrew Cockburn  is the author of many books and articles. His most recent book is titled Washington is Burning: Lies and Corruption in the Age of Trump. His Substack is titled Spoils of War. Mr. Cockburn’s latest article appeared on April 17, 2026 in the London Review of Books.

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Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town

Investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden has spent years on the front lines documenting extremism in America. In his new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town, Hayden tells the story of a quiet West Virginia town thrust into turmoil when a white nationalist organization moves its headquarters to a nearby 19th century castle.

At the center of the story are the neighbors who suddenly find their community reshaped by a VDARE, a group promoting conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement.” Hayden’s book provides a close look at how extremism is lived, contested, and resisted in real communities. As he embeds with locals, the line between observer and participant begins to blur, with personal and professional consequences. Our conversation comes as the Southern Poverty Law Center faces 11 federal fraud charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy. To money launder. The Justice Department alleges the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million dollars to informants tied to white supremacist groups like the KKK and Aryan Nations—while telling donors the funds were being used to fight those groups. The SPLC denies wrongdoing, saying the informant program was used to monitor threats.

Guest – Michael Hayden has worked as a politics writer for Newsweek and covered crime for VICE. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, ABC News, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He co-hosts the podcast Posting Though It, and is a three-time grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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Defending Rights And Dissent 

Donald Trump’s wholesale attack on the American democracy, in general, and on freedom of speech and the right to dissent, in particular has reached epidemic proportions. We could literally spend the next half hour simply listing all of the unconstitutional Executive Orders he has issued and the unlawful steps his co-conspirators have taken to implement his dangerous policies of punishing free speech, muzzling the free press, and destroying academic freedom.

Resistance to Trump and his MAGA ideology has been widespread. More than 700 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration in his second term, resulting in over 150 TROs, preliminary injunctions, and final judgments against the administration. And the response from the American people has been equally admirable, with a series of nationwide – indeed worldwide – protests, culminating in No Kings Day on March 28, with 3300 events in all 50 states, with an unprecedented 8 million people participating, making it the largest single day of protest in American history.

The resistance has been driven by scores of large and small pro-democracy organizations across the country. One of those is Defending Rights & Dissent, a national civil liberties organization that defends the American people’s right to know and freedom to act through grassroots mobilization, public education, policy expertise, and advocacy journalism.

Guest – Nathan Fuller is Communications Manager for Defending Rights & Dissent and former Executive Director of the Courage Foundation, a whistleblower and journalist defense organization, where he campaigned on behalf of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, Lauri Love, and several others. Nathan also led Assange Defense, the U.S. campaign to free WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was released from prison in 2024. Previously, Nathan was the courtroom reporter and press liaison for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, covering Manning’s entire court-martial in Fort Meade. Youtube Channel

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Donald Trump vs History

The article is titled, Donald Trump vs History: The Trump School of Falsification and it is not about Trump’s personal difficulties with telling the truth. The first paragraph of the article reads: “The rise to power of Donald Trump and his minions has sanctified and energized a campaign to revive the kind of triumphalist, exceptionalist version of U.S. history that reigned over both academic and public culture from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.”

The article goes on to say that “To drive that campaign forward, the Trump regime has now launched simultaneous assaults against schools, libraries, museums, the National Park Service, and even the National Archives.” In short, it is nothing less than the wholesale effort by Trump and company to dishonestly rewrite America’s history.

Guest – Bruce Levine is a retired history professor who has taught history at the University of Illinois and the University of California. He has written four books on the Civil War, including The Fall of the House of Dixie. His most recently published book is a biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican leader of the Civil War era and Reconstruction era. He’s now writing a study of democratic revolutions and Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

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U.S. Aids Israel’s Brutal Geopolitical Positioning 

We are living in a time of great peril to humanity. Two nuclear-armed countries, the United States of America and Israel, commenced a war of aggression against Iran, on February 28th. This war threatens to spread uncontrollably. It has already quickly become a regional war. A full world war could be triggered, creating the danger that the United States or Israel might use their atomic weapons. The radioactive fallout would bring about a nuclear winter.

The current war of illegal aggression reminds us that on September 1, 1939, Hitler sent his troops east to invade Poland. Six years later, the resulting world war ended with the United States using atomic weapons, for the first time, on Japan. Sixty million people died in World War II.

Israel seeks to make Iran into a failed state to achieve what it has always wanted, to become the region’s hegemon and only nuclear power. Getting the United States involved in a war against Iran has been the project of Benjamin Netanyahu for 30 years. American presidents and the military have long resisted this. But not Trump.

There are already 50,000 American soldiers in the region. 3000 Marines are headed towards Iran. The 101st airborne division has deployed paratroopers, just as they did in the illegal invasion of Iraq 23 years ago. At that time, President George Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The lie this time is that Iran will soon develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and the capability to deliver them.

Guest – Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, and the former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. Among his more than a dozen books are American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America; The Greatest Evil Is War; and A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine. Chris Hedges is also one of the contributors to the book titled From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, a book composed of summaries of interviews with guests here on the Law and Disorder radio show, and available for purchase at O/R Books.

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Gaza Genocide Relief Effort Launch

The war in Iran and Lebanon has pushed the war in Gaza off the front pages of our newspapers and from the screens of our televisions. But that war is still very real to the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the so-called “cease-fire,” Palestinians continued to be killed by Israeli forces. They continue to starve for lack of food and water. They continue to die for want of medical care. They continue to lack sufficient schools for their children to attend, or houses in which to live. And they continue to wonder what the future holds for them and if they will ever again be able to live a decent life in what is left of their homeland.

Meanwhile, supporters of the Palestinian cause continue to do what they can to bring aid and comfort to the people of Gaza. One of those people is our guest today.

Guest – Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves. She retired from the Army as a Colonel. Ann Wright has also served America as a diplomat for 16 years, having served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, among other counties of this world. She resigned from the U.S. government in March of 2003, in opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq. Since her resignation, she has been active in many peace and justice groups including Veterans for Peace, Women for Peace and Code Pink. Currently, she is a coordinator for the Gaza flotillas and has twice been imprisoned in Israel for participating in those relief flotillas.

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Countering With A General Strike

We the people face a certain immediate future of increasing hardship and increasing authoritarian repression. Many of us are hoping to vote Trump and his MAGA gang out of office seven months from now in the 2026 congressional elections. But will the elections take place? And if so, under what restrictions? The Voting Rights Act that protected Black people has been gutted. MAGA’s Safe Act makes it difficult for women to vote who have taken their husband’s last name and now need to provide passports to show their identity. A lot of people in this country don’t have a passport. Mail in voting is sought to be prohibited.

It is naïve to think that the detention camps being built from one end of the country to the other are only for undocumented immigrants. As September 29 of last year, Trump signed National Security Memorandum Number 7 which listed crimes of political opposition that he wanted a prosecuted. Then his then Attorney General Pam Bondi made another list of the possible laws that can be used for the prosecution. The criminal prosecution of political opponents who hold progressive ideas has yet to be carried out.

ICE’s budget is larger than the combined budgets of all the police departments and sheriffs’ departments in the country. ICE has started purchasing long rifles, not just pistols. What for? The people who are recruited by ICE are signed up in places like gun shows and offered $50,000 signing bonuses.

Economically things have gone south in a hurry. Because of the American/Israel aggressive war against Iran oil prices have shot up increasing costs like filling up your tank or putting it on the food on the table. We are in a recession and looking at a depression. Trump wants the military budget increased from $1 trillion to one and a half trillion dollars. He tells us that a government has no money for medical care, food, subsidies, education, firefighting or hurricane relief.

Guest – Kshama Sawant is a socialist economist who was elected to, and served 10 years on the Seattle, Washington City Council. Her election and her advancement of a strong progressive agenda on the Council was often national news. She contributed to the recently published Law and Disorder book From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style writing the last chapter on what is to be done.

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