Social Justice - A Conversation

Wesley Knight 0:00
This is a Kun V studios original program. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Charles Stanton 0:15
Good evening. My name is Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Boyd School of Law and the UNLV Honors College.

Kira Kramer 0:22
My name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student.

Charles Stanton 0:28
And this is social justice a conversation, a conversation.

Well, good evening, everybody. Welcome back to social justice conversation. I'm here with my partner, Kara Kramer, always a pleasure to work with her. We have a full, as they would say, in the legal world, full docket today of all kinds of different and interesting stories having to do with the the situation in our country. I guess what I'd like to start with is what happened on Friday, February 28 because I think that that bears some kind of commentary, the meeting between President Zelensky and President Trump and assorted hangers on, primarily JD Vance as vice president, was an astounding breach of diplomatic protocol to begin with. Number one. Number two, the idea that on such sensitive matters regarding foreign policy, trade policy, military policy, that anyone except the National Security Advisor or and Zelensky and Trump should have been anywhere near that room. Nobody else should have been in that room except those three people. And it was, it was really a clown show. It made a mockery of of what our country is supposed to stand for. It made a mockery of the kind of diplomatic relations between two supposed allies are supposed to be. And I think David Remnick, the editor of the New York The New Yorker magazine said it was a televised mugging. And what it did, basically, I think, has completely withered the confidence that the rest of the members of NATO have in us, which was already receding at a very high rate. And since that date, obviously they have, there have been exchanges between Zelensky and the NATO allies as to how the NATO allies can can help him. But I think it, I think it goes beyond that. It goes to Taiwan. It pretty much goes to any of the people that were supposedly sharing the same values with and they were basically sold down the river. That's the best way I can put it.

Kira Kramer 3:05
Absolutely, I we've never seen in the history of our country anyone portray or act in such a way in diplomatic, foreign relations and but I at the same time, I'm not surprised in the slightest. It's also horrifying to see how he aligns with dictators and how he has shifted the sentiment, or is trying to shift the sentiment, really, of the American people, to sway them towards Russia, which is outrageous, considering he thinks he can rewrite history of what the American people know happened in this war, and it's foolish and ultimately dangerous and irresponsible. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 3:49
well, I think, I think what's also terrible is the support of the Republican Party, people who had gone to a breakfast meeting with him a couple of hours before this meeting occurred, Senator wicker of Mississippi was one of them, but there were others, and they were very supportive of Zelensky. And then this meeting happens, and then all those, all those messages and tweets are deleted, showing, once again, that none of these people have any real, true beliefs. I think it was very interesting. Also, when you watch that interaction between Zelensky and Trump, was how, when he told Trump basically that you think you're immune because there's a big ocean, and that really set Trump off. I think the obvious, you know, resentment that Trump has for Zelensky is the fact that Zelensky cooperated with the House committee regarding, you know, the attempt to extort Ukraine and Zelensky and try to try to get stuff on Joe Biden, basically, like holding up aid unless they would give information. About Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's son, Hunter Biden his son, and all the rest of that. But it was really, it was really demoralizing. It was, it was just really demoralizing to watch, and it was also demoralizing in the fact that so few people in the Congress really spoke out about it, and I think that's become a pattern since he became the president again, and I think, I think that more to come, you know, and so that was one thing, then the other thing that really was, was really bizarre, was how they still have not worked up a protocol for the flu vaccines that are supposed to be issued next fall. And that is another amazing puzzlement to me. And the puzzle, of course, the puzzle is obviously, why would you appoint a man who had no qualifications for their job to be secretary of health, but in such a severe and serious health matter, I was very surprised there was relatively low reaction to it.

Kira Kramer 6:13
I honestly don't know how much of that word has gotten out that the FDA has canceled their meeting to pick the strands of the flu that will be the most relevant for this year's flu season. And ultimately, I find the whole ordeal really ironic. Because I'm not sure if this statement is accurate, but it may be the case that perhaps older generations are more in favor of Trump. I know he has like or at least of the Republican Party in general. And and while there are like, he has his group of younger supporters, supporters, the flu season is particularly dangerous for anyone who is older. And so when you target your voter base, and quite frankly, you could wipe your voter base out with a flu season that is that virulent and or dangerous? It just it doesn't make any sense. But ultimately, the World Health Organization is one of the groups that we could have used to be able to understand and inform the choices that need to be made for the pharmaceutical industry as to which strains they develop and focus on. But of course, we are no longer associating with the World Health Organization, so I honestly don't know what can be done. I hope that private industry steps up and steps in that the private because, because they're going to go after their profits no matter what, and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't like being told that they can't make a profit, either, so, and those are one of the things that is a regular profit bringing product in for them. And so I am very curious as to whether or not private funding will be crowd sourced or crowdfunded for the conversation and research that needs to be had around the flu vaccine, it remains to be seen. But I personally am just waiting for private entities to step up and step in in a variety of ways. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 8:16
yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's interesting how. It's interesting how all the things that have done he's done since he's become the president, taking out ideology, have weakened the country. They've weakened the country with our relations with with foreign leaders. They've weakened the country with the removal of so many civil service workers in the government infrastructure that in many cases, won't be able to be replaced, because you can put another person there, but it's replacing the expertise and knowledge and experience of many decades. So that's making the country weaker as well. The tariffs are also making the country weaker as well. It's not that it's just affected the stock market. It's alienated Mexico. It's alienated Canada. For what purpose?

Kira Kramer 9:07
Well, I'd like to also bring up the fact I'm echoing Elizabeth Warren, who spoke this morning, but she stated and Trump, as Trump himself, has stated one of his biggest campaign promises while on the campaign trail last year was that he would bring prices down for Americans day one, day one, and since day one, they have only skyrocketed. And so I hope that when the middle class, working family is paying $13 for eggs, we're just not buying them at all, but they realize what exactly is happening here, because none of what he's doing actually brings down American prices. Yeah.

Charles Stanton 9:49
Well, I've always thought. I've always thought that a lot of the supporters of him, I call it wishful fulfillment, delusion, where they. Have this bizarre belief that a man, basically, who's totally transactional, would do anything to help anybody but themselves is totally is totally ludicrous. It's about him and his own, you know, profit or ego, or whatever you want to call it, but at the same time, at the same time, it's also about the health of the country that's being affected. It was very interesting to see over the last four or five days how Jeff Bezos, the guy that's the Amazon entrepreneur, and also the owner of The Washington Post, he wants to change the nature of the Washington Post, vis a vis to make it more, you know, non partisan. But you see, the interesting thing about that is, you know, there's partisanship and there's truth. There's a difference between partisanship and truth. Now, in the case, in the case of the Washington Post, which, which he, which he's the owner of and the man who ultimately controls it, all of the things that were found out about Trump were done in investigations by people who worked for him. None of this stuff was made up. What was put on the front page of the paper was not, you know, you know, I don't like Trump for X, Y and Z reasons. These were investigations that were done about what he had, what he had been doing and what he is doing now. But Jeff Bezos is a businessman, and this is the problem that you have, because when, when Trump was the president, previously, his company was up for a huge cloud contract that was worth 10 billion and they didn't get that contract. They went instead to Microsoft. So he's afraid, as almost all these people are afraid in the banking industry, all the rest of that stuff, of all the things that he could do to them, whether it's banking regulation or what have you. So basically, he has all these people frightened into silence. I mean, that's that's really what, that's really what you're seeing. And of course, the other aspect of it is too that while these things are going on, you have Elon Musk, who is basically the non cabinet cabinet member, who appears that these functions as almost like a co president. And you know, no one elected this man, as far as I know, and it seems that, it seems that the amount of money that these, these individuals gave him basically obligates him to do whatever they they want done. Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know, I don't know what else, I don't know what else I don't know what else to say on that score. But it's, it's very it's very scary, because their their business and their interests, many of the time, are not the interests of our country, you know. And I don't know. I don't know, as you were saying, how you rein that in, you know?

Kira Kramer 12:50
I mean, at the end of the day, it'll take destroying this country and rebuilding it to change. And I echo AOCs ideas when she says that we have been corrupted to the point where it needs to be, like, torn down and it needs to be rebuilt, and someone needs and we need to be there for the rebuilding of it.

Charles Stanton 13:11
Yeah, I don't know it's, it's, it's one of those things where you have to try to figure out where you start. There was a large article in the paper, I guess was a couple days ago about the increase in police shootings. And this is, this has been going on for a few years, but they talked about, they talked about Chicago, Illinois, and they talked about St Louis, Missouri. And in Chicago, Illinois, in a police related action regarding a person who's black or a person of color, they're 30 times more likely to be killed than a white person. In St Louis, Missouri, it was 10 times as much. And, you know, people were talking about like, you know, there's like, this big, what shall we say, reaction against affirmative action and dei and all the rest of this stuff. But the basic premise of the society, whether you have dei or you don't have Dei, is that the law is administered fairly and equally when you when you have statistics. And these weren't statistics put out by progressives. These are statistics put out by, you know, police organizations and you know people who monitor, you know, police shootings and everything, if you have a 30% more likely chance to be killed in an interaction with police over 30 times another ethnicity, there's wrong there. I mean, you can, you can try to explain it or rationalize it, or what have you. I think a lot of the problem in our country is, though our country is has always, I suppose, maybe even from the beginning, been in denial of who we are. And by that, I mean to say that, you know, we we want to ban books, we want to do all these things to restrict knowledge. But the truth is, what it is, the

Kira Kramer 14:57
influence of money and power has been at. The mo it's been the most important priority since the founding of this country. They believe that those who had so much money that they didn't have anything better to do with their time had an obligation to be civically engaged, and those were the people who ended up in power, and sure, we might look at them as heroes for founding our country, but they weren't. They also didn't advocate that people should know what was going on in the White House. I'm currently with the Honors College taking a modalities of citizenship course, and we are diving into the history and founding of civic involvement in our country. And the Founding Fathers actively did not want people to know what was going on behind closed doors, and they felt that people were too easily influenced by their emotions and too easily manipulated by people in power with money. And while this may be the case in terms of people being manipulated with money. Nevertheless, we should have been, or at least they should have advocated for transparency, because a lack of transparency is what plagues this country. Well,

Charles Stanton 16:13
it's a lack of it's a lack of transparency. It's a lack of telling the truth. You know, in all these different situations that have to do in the business world, in the world of politics. I mean, if you look at, if you look at when President Trump was, was the president the first time, and all these people at one stage or another, resigned. They didn't want to stay working for him. And you see in your state, see today where there's been so many resignations at these different agencies, there needs to be an explanation from the people as to why they're leaving, and that explanation needs to know be known by the people who are the voters and citizens of this country, particularly, particularly if the reason is that The person who they're working for is unfit, and they know they're unfit. And, you know, it's one of the, it's probably one of the big boons of the publishing industry, that, after all these things go on, somebody writes a book. But the answer is not writing a book. The answer is that when the thing is, when the thing is going on, that there's a response from, you know, from the society, as to why the person left, and there's been, there were so many people who had resigned in the first term as and involving foreign policy, involving a whole bunch of things. The other thing that's, that's, that's disturbing, of course, is when people, when people did, you know, discuss the reasons why they didn't want to, you know, be there anymore. And this, this information was made known to the public, a lot of people just blew it off. You know, they'd say, Oh, it's P data. He did. They don't like him, or this partisanship, or all the rest of stuff. But there's certain basic principles that a person has to have if they want to hold the office of presidency and and that seems to have, that seems to have gone out the window somewhere a while, a while ago. And you know, when you look at when you look at the country now, you know there's so many things happening every day that that really are almost causing an internal chaos in the in the voting block, no matter who you voted for, because every Dave is some new thing. It's tariffs, it's trade policy, it's, you know, Ukraine, Gaza, I mean, and, and, and, they just go from day to day. There's no like plan as to what, what we're going to do. They had the was very interesting. They had the Saudi, one of the Saudi, not ambassador, but one of the people who had been in the Saudi royalty for years. And he was, it was very interesting, what he was, what he was saying about our policies over there. And he really, he really talked like is, logically, in common sense as to, you know, where, where we were going. But it seems, it seems like, in so many areas, our foreign policy is basically for sale, depending on, you know, how friendly you are with him, or whatever. Rest of the stuff which shouldn't be, which shouldn't be, you know, it, it shouldn't be something that, what are the interests of the United States, you know, and what are the interests of our allies, you know? And he's alienated pretty much everybody you know. He's alienated France. He's England, Spain, you know, the whole, the whole deal. And he's a better than he's embedded in it, by the by the by the Congress, and I think, and I've said it before in this program, and I'll say it again by the Supreme Court, primarily, primarily by the Supreme Court. I think, I think of all and my experience as an attorney, and I'm sure you, you know, from, you know, studying the law yourself and going, you're going to be going into Boyd's law. School, I think the single most disastrous decision in the history of all of the decisions that the Supreme Court made, that's including Citizens United, the repeal of Rome. He made all of it because it basically enables a person to be a dictator. And that's that's the bottom line here. And I think you can see, even compared to the first term he was in office, a lot of stuff that's clearly off the off the table, and there's no involvement in the justice system, you know. And the other problem that you have, too, and this has been a problem for a long time, is you're trying to sell to the vast majority of people that were just and were honest and were fair and people are treated equally, and yet everything we see is completely the opposite. So people, at a certain point say, you know, well, why should I trust that? Why should I believe in that? And you were saying, you know, we got to start from scratch. I've been saying this for a long time. I think I even said it in the class one day. I think we need a new constitutional convention. I think we need to bring together all the different groups of people, even if, even though they may hate and despise each other, have them stay with one another in a communal setting, and get people just to talk about what can be done, and just put all the meat on the table, as my mother used to say, as to racism, sexism, whatever it is, everything and then and then, and then, make a new start. Because I don't think this is sustainable. I don't think this regime is sustainable. I mean, I think it, I think it's going to fall of its own weight, and it's going to leave a lot of damage to our country. You know, they were talking, I guess it was this morning, about the elimination of Medicaid, the illumination of basically, Obamacare. Well, essentially,

Kira Kramer 21:39
what he's doing is he's destroying everything in our country so that he can come in and say, now he's going to fix it, and he's going to fix it with fascism, and that is his band aid over all that he is destroying in this country

Charles Stanton 21:51
well. And of course, of course, it has a monetary element, because the amount of money that they want to cut from Medicaid and all the rest of those things will be, will be the pouch where they are able to give the tax cut to all these people who are, you know, in the donor class that gave them all this money. And you know it, the money's got to come from somewhere. Now, of course, the the ironic thing is, I wouldn't say the majority, but certainly a large part of the people who are going to be harmed are the people who voted for them, especially in these, in these, in these rural communities where Medicare, where Medicaid, and, of course, good health care, are at a premium. So if you're going to take that away from people, then you're going to have a, you're going to have a catastrophic situation on your hands. You know that that, that, I think is, again, is a guarantee Absolutely.

Kira Kramer 22:48
I also want to, if I may, pivot the conversation to some of the things that we can do to get involved in our communities and get familiar and up close and personal with what we're doing. I also so I am a part of a group called indivisible. It's a national mobilization group. And interestingly enough, indivisible has actually been tweeted out by Elon Musk, and he has tweeted pictures of the two people who are responsible for the indivisible national movement, and he has stated that they are orchestrating all the blowback congressional Republicans, and that those Republicans are getting at all of these town hall meetings, and that People are speaking up and that they're mobilizing. And what's really fascinating is that he knows that it's effective. He knows that when people mobilize, that people have power, and we have to keep making sure that our voices are heard. And so some of concrete actions that we all can take to make sure that our voices are heard. Is your local mobile mobilization group, not even just local, but also national. Las Vegas now has an indivisible coalition, and so there will be protests specific, more specifically, there will be Tesla protests coming up in Las Vegas that you can attend, you can send letters of support to President Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders to make sure that they hear the voices of the American people and they understand that this is not us. It's imperative that during the month, the month of March, while your representatives are returning home from Washington DC, that you are demanding town halls. You are demanding from your democratic representatives, from your Republican representatives, that not just are your democratic republic or sorry, democratic representatives supposed to be voting against Republican initiatives, but they need to be calling a spade a spade. They. Need to be vocalizing and actively working to make sure that these agendas and their true effects on the constituents throughout the United States are heard and understood. And it's not just enough to vote, it is not and so furthermore, you can also take part in some calls and letter writing for Susan Crawford, she's up for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and it's really important that we stack the courts with the voices that will represent us. Furthermore, if you're local to Vegas, I would recommend celebrating tofu teas. It's a, I actually believe that this is a UNLV student, and they are a grassroots 24/7 inclusive food pantry and garden. They are a black owned business, and they founded their the owner is actually 16 years old. And so, I guess not a UNLV grad, but hopefully eventually they will come to UNLV, but they started their activism as an eight year old, and so they are doing what they can in the community to make sure that we are not food insecure and that our community has a safe place. And so please, they're going to be having a event supporting Black History Month and dei on Sunday, March 9, from noon to 4pm on Fremont. It'll be 1028, Fremont Street, and you can go and support your local businesses. Furthermore, the indivisible group is organizing Tesla Tuesdays, where in various Tuesdays throughout the month, we'll be going to various Tesla locations and protesting Elon Musk. Other rallies will be scheduled throughout the year, so it's important to keep your eye on those. Furthermore, if you don't already know, you can reach out to the Clark County Elections department and make your voting information private. So if you don't want the public to have access to your address or your phone number, please make sure to do what you can to remove your personal information from your voting record.

Charles Stanton 27:12
I think that says it well. I think that says it well, but again, it's our participation in the process of saving our democracy, basically,

Kira Kramer 27:24
and it's working. The mobilization efforts are working. They see and hear us, and they need to not stop seeing and hearing us, because their power is perceived power, and our power needs to be resilient, and our power needs to not panic. We have to keep fighting them every single day in whatever individual way that you

Charles Stanton 27:50
can agree, agreed, well, we want to thank you for for listening. We hope that some of these thoughts, you know, were thoughts that you also had, and basically, you know, the most important thing is Kira is always saying is that we need action, we need perseverance, and we need we need to spread the word to other people. We need to engage other people, even many times if they're not people who hold the same views that we have. But nevertheless, by spreading these ideas and ultimately making people think about what's going on maybe one of the best ways we can to ensure that our democracy is retained. Yes,

Kira Kramer 28:29
thank you for joining us for this week's episode, and I hope that you all remain safe, healthy and remain educated.

Charles Stanton 28:38
Thank you all again, and good night. Thank you.

Kira Kramer 28:50
Thank you for listening to this broadcast. And if you have any questions or ideas for future discussion topics, please contact myself at K, R, A, M, E, K, two@unlv.nevada.edu.

Or Professor Charles Stanton at C, H, A, R, L, E, S, dot, S, T, a n, t o n@unlv.edu, see you next time we

Charles Stanton 29:20
look forward to it. You.