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, and welcome back to social justice conversation. I'm here with my co host, Kiera Kramer, and we're here to discuss events of domestic and international importance. And we, I guess, we're going to start this week with the whole situation with the Ukraine, and how it apparently seems that the United States and Russia want to basically decide what the peace plan is supposed to be without, of course, the input of the country that's been invaded, which is the Ukraine or the or the input from all the NATO countries that did a lot in supplying the Ukraine and are supposedly our partners in NATO. It was very interesting how Zelensky reacted to this. And he basically, he basically, you know, excluded himself from any kind of agreement that the United States had made with Russia. But it is, it is, it is very interesting how the president trusts Vladimir Putin so much. It's quite extraordinary when, when the track record of the the premier of Russia has been anything but trustworthy. Let's give our let's give our trust to him, and our belief in him, but not in not in the man who's the who's the ruler of the Ukraine, or our faith in the people of Ukraine, who, against overwhelming odds, have still maintained their independence, or all the countries in NATO that have been our partners for years and years, is is a disgrace. There's no other way to put it.

Kira Kramer 2:30
I agree. It's almost as if they think that they've won the war, and Ukraine has absolutely nothing to say about it, which is just not the case.

Charles Stanton 2:39
Yeah, yeah. Well, militarily, of course, they haven't won the war. They've lost. They've lost an enormous amount of men Russia and and the the incremental gains that they've made, considering what their aims were in the beginning, are very, very small. And I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to use, to try to use the United States, and they're trying to use the president to do at the negotiating table what they couldn't do on the battlefield, which is, which is defeat the Ukrainian army. And I don't know where our Congress is in all of this, especially the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, plus all the money that the government appropriated to to aid their war effort, plus all the money that the European countries gave. And it's just going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Because I don't think any of the, I don't think any of the the NATO countries want, want to agree to this, and he wants, he basically hides behind the idea that he doesn't want to really support NATO, that NATO is not contributing enough money, but he really, what he really is doing, what he's really doing is working with Putin, basically To serve Putin for whatever reason. You know that he has. And of course, you know the tragedy of it is that all these people now it seems at the late date in the war, are basically going to be disenfranchised. And you know that whether how that peace deal works out, whether it's just a peace deal to basically take the borders as they are now, with the Russian incremental gain, or would that be a, would that be a sort of temporary thing, and then, You know, Russia, of course, would be under no obligation, just to settle for that. They might try to, you know, expand on it later on. But I think certainly beyond the interest of Ukraine, which is important, it has to make all the allies of the United States and Europe Extra. Extremely, extremely nervous, extremely wary of where this what this guy wants to do. He seems to have the intention, basically, especially when dealing with dictators that we got to, we got to appease them, but not not worry about our allies in many years, and

Kira Kramer 5:20
him being so close to like his best friends are dictators, and so it makes you think, if water sinks to its own level, then we have our answer. But ultimately, at the end of the day, dictators are going to advance their own objectives, and if he is best friends with them, he's going to advance their objectives as well. And not only that, but apply those objectives to us. And ultimately, no dictator has any interest in keeping Americans safe, healthy and prosperous. And at the end of the day, it's very likely that Putin is just using his relationship with Trump to advance his own ends, yeah, and unfortunately, we just don't have an administration that sees that

Charles Stanton 6:07
well. The thing is that, the thing is that what kept, what always kept Russia under control was the fact that we had NATO, and we know that strength of unity between all those countries were certainly a discouragement to any of their, you know, Imperial aims, which is, which was, what I believe, what I believe is that he wants to recreate the old Russian Empire, the Iron Curtain empire of all those countries, Romania, Yugoslavia, what have you all of those countries, and he wants to do whatever he can do to weaken NATO, not just to weaken NATO, but to weaken these countries, confidence in us. Well,

Kira Kramer 6:54
ultimately, just global democracy. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 6:57
yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly that. You know, basically he believes that totalitarian regimes are the way of the future. And it's amazing how many countries there seems to be a rise in the affection of the voters.

Kira Kramer 7:16
Well, as we just see historically, the pendulum swings. It's never not swung. It swung both ways for millennia. And while post, I believe it was post World War, we saw FDR policies and we saw that swing towards the social safety net were not and we swung that far, which I'd argue isn't even that far. We are now swinging back the other way. But the 2026 or will it be, 2027 midterms will be coming up, 2026 2026 so the midterms will be coming up. And as is historical with American politics, we may see the pendulum swing in Congress, and which has been historically the case when there's been a Republican or Democrat president, Congress usually will fill in the gaps in the midterms. And so I think making sure to keep our eyes forward and moving towards what we can do to have strength in numbers when it comes to the midterms, to make sure that our voices are heard on the global stage as much as we can at this time.

Charles Stanton 8:27
Well, I think, I think there's a couple of things. One thing is we need, we need spokespeople for progressive views. But I think, I think at this point that, you know, it's not even about progressivism anymore. It's just about maintaining and saving the democracy. And there are people out there, such as Elizabeth Warren, such as AOC, such as Bernie Sanders, who are powerful voices for that resistance. The question is, between now and November of 26 what kind of a landscape will be left? I think that's, I think that's the concern from a lot of people. And you know, we have basically an emasculated Justice Department, an emasculated FBI. And one of the things that's interesting to me, though, which which I was thinking about, was the fact that the unemployment rate is going to is going to jump way up if he continues these mass firings, because he's literally going to be firing hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of people. How is that going to play out when all these people are out of work? The thing that's the thing that struck me in reading and listening to the the interview. Issues with people who had been chose to resign, well resign or were fired, or what have you. But the thing that struck me was the complete lack of disrespect for these people that they basically used the form letter. They basically concocted dismissal letters that basically questioned people's competence and a whole bunch of other things that there was no way they could have known that there was no, there was no actual proof of it. And then in a lot of the letters they were they were basically saying, well, the retention of this person as an employee would be against the public interest. What a terrible thing to say, especially if somebody like you know, you know, spent their whole life serving in one of these agencies against the public interest. What does that mean? It's almost like

Kira Kramer 10:54
when they say public, they mean corporate, and they mean themselves. Because my my own family members have worked in government agencies, and those who are currently still working there have received those threats, those letters, and they work for agencies like the Veterans Association. You want to tell me that the work that they do, the very difficult work that they do, is a threat to the public? No, it's a threat to them, period. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 11:21
yeah, and what, and what's, what's, what's crazy also is the removal of all these people is going to probably lead to privatization of a number of these agencies. But as we've seen in various parts of our country, when these agencies are privatized, particularly, you know, having to do with Penology and everything like that, the results are usually very, very bad. And it's also, it's also a direct attack on the civil service system. It's an attack on the civil service system because, not, not so much that the civil service system isn't efficient, but they want to stock the P they want to stock the government with people who are loyal to the president correct has nothing to do with confidence or ability or any of the rest of those things. And they want, basically, a bunch of serfs to be in these jobs. But the problem that you have is, and we're seeing it in a lot of these agencies is that a lot of these people that are working in these government agencies have a wealth of knowledge and experience. And it's really, it's really a fantastical idea to think is you can just bring somebody off the street and have them have that competence, people who have dealt with all these different problems, you know, especially like with the Veterans Administration, which is, which has always been a very complicated and difficult agency to manage for, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I don't think you, I mean, I don't think you would ever say, per se, that the VA was corrupt. It had problems with efficiency, obviously, and problems, I suppose, in responding to the needs of some of the service people that you know needed help, but I never heard of like claims of fraud or something like that, and everything, and everything that seems to this administration is there's fraud. We need to we need to see people. We need to get into Medicare. We need to get into Medicaid. We need to get into people's tax returns. This is all this. There's always

Kira Kramer 13:24
reality. They are the ones committing the most fraud, yeah,

Charles Stanton 13:28
yeah, yeah. Well, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how or where this money is going to come from. And then that's another major issue. They want to have this major tax cut, yes, the 4.5 trillion, yeah. Now I don't know whether they're cutting

Kira Kramer 13:44
these agencies, because essentially, they're gonna raise taxes on the poor in the middle class, but that will maybe get them like of the 4 trillion, maybe half a trillion, if that probably less. The where it's gonna come from is these federal agency cuts at the end of the day, this is what, like, the avenue they have to pursue in order to make up that $4.5 trillion tax budget. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 14:11
yeah, yeah. Well, I think the other thing too is that, you know, we live in America, and we have all these agencies, and we have all these different we have all these different, you know, entities in the government. I don't think people understand or appreciate the complexity, the complexity and the work that these people do that really keeps the government running. We sort of like take it for granted. Oh, we have all we have this agency or that agency, and things and things are going to go on, but we've never really, we've never really experienced we're starting to experience it now, and

Kira Kramer 14:47
I think one of the prime examples of this experience is we hadn't had a crash, in terms of airplane and aircraft crashes. We didn't have. A significant event until a since 2009 like there hadn't been a domestic or significant issue regarding airplanes or air traffic controllers since about 2009 and yet, in the last two months, we have seen an unprecedented amount of aircraft collisions, crashes and other types of malfunctions, to the point where it's almost on par statistically for you to die in a car accident as it is for you to die in a plane crash. We're slowly approaching that statistic. And why are we approaching that? Well, the current administration fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration. He fired the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee. He froze the hiring of all air traffic controllers, and he also fired the top 100 FAA security officers. And we wonder why this is not the only effects that we are going to feel as more and more of the people that make this country run, yeah,

Charles Stanton 15:58
yeah, are lost, yeah, well, of course. I mean, the response is the completely. Is the completely the wrong response? We know that in the best part of our country regarding aviation, that we're short of air traffic controllers. Yes, so much so that when I, when I, when I travel back east, that they're so short of controllers in Newark, they have had to give over to the Philadelphia airport a lot of the air traffic duties of the Newark Airport. So that's not really a very, very reassuring thing when you're flying on a plane and you have to get into an airport. But the problem, the problem also, is, in the first administration, at least, he had people working for him who were competent and who were able to tell him, Listen, you know, we need X, Y and Z. You're basically bringing in people. It's not so much even that they were appointed by him who are totally without the qualifications for these jobs, and you're bringing them into, like, very high, highly detailed work that you would have to have a lot of experience to be able to figure these things out. And we're seeing it throughout the government. The guy who's the head of the Secretary of Defense, it's a whole bunch of people, and a lot of this stuff, it's not like learning on the job. I mean, you really have to know what you're doing, you know? And there doesn't seem to be any accounting for that. It's just like, well, we could put anybody in this job. No, you can't. No, you can't. That's what those years of work from all these people who've served the government, who, especially who work in civil service, they know a lot about the mechanics of it. I remember when I was in the court system, in the justice system, and there were some people there who were, were prodigiously intelligent and and prodigiously informed as to all these different things. I knew. One guy in particular, I would, I would stock his knowledge of the law against probably anybody in the country. That's how, that's how up to 80 was, and you just bring somebody in off the street, you know, it's, it's

Kira Kramer 18:10
a disgrace to the it's a disgrace to those professionals who have spent their entire careers trying to do better for the country, yeah, and taking it upon themselves, the great responsibility that it is to serve the country, yeah,

Charles Stanton 18:25
yeah. What was you say? What was you say, of course, and it's, I completely agree with you, it's not about the country, it's not about the country. It's the same kind of it's the same kind of grift that you had when they did the original tax cut. It was just throwing money to the wealthy, and basically the middle class would get a few crumbs, and he could say he lowered the tax rate, but he actually, he actually did nothing for the middle class and the poor, and a lot of that is the fault of the people who voted for him, because they didn't keep themselves informed. They didn't keep themselves aware of actually how these plans would work, and that's that's what democracy is about. Democracy. Democracy is not a given democracy. Democracy is only enabled by the the interest and the involvement and the vigilance and the vigilance of all the people, of all the people in the country who want to keep our country a democratic country. And, you know, I think a lot of people, and you we, we've been discussing this, you know, throughout, throughout the, you know, the broadcast that we've done, a lot of people have tuned out. A lot of people, you know that they have their life, and you know they don't, they don't want to get involved in really getting into the details of what actually is going on in the government. But

Kira Kramer 19:50
I predict that that will be the case until they their lives have been so disrupted that they have no choice but to pay attention. Yeah. Well,

Charles Stanton 20:00
it's happening now. Is Happening for some Yeah? I mean, I don't think, I don't think yet we've seen any polling. Although the initial polling was low, the initial polling was 45% that's low for newly elected president. But we haven't seen yet the cumulative effect of all those job cuts and all those industries and all those, what shall we say, government agencies. And the other thing, of course, is, the other thing, of course, is, you know, the prices haven't been brought under control. The price of gasoline is going to go up again. The price of food hasn't gotten down. So what actually is it that he's supposed to do that he was running on

Kira Kramer 20:47
re, re Institute the $4.5 trillion tax cuts to his best friends, which have a sunset period of 2025, so he made sure to get those bases covered. Yeah, and for him, I suppose, immigration is a hot button issue, and he has taken some measures to threaten many people's lives and livelihoods and families. So that's been successful. Something else that is interesting is the Wall Street Journal, journal, which is typically conservative newspaper and reporting journal, issued a an article about the new pick for head of like the Department of Health and Safety. His Oh, my goodness, his name escapes me. Is it? RF, Kennedy, yeah. Kennedy, Oh, yes. Oh, my goodness, that is a name I've been blocking out of my head for as long as I'm

Charles Stanton 21:47
2626 secretary in the Health Department. Yes, supposedly, right.

Kira Kramer 21:51
So essentially, what's going on is in Texas, there is currently a measles outbreak among children. The Wall Street Journal issued an article about Kennedy, and they were advocating that his anti vaccine mindset and reform agenda that he wants to push out is extremely harmful to children and families, and especially to the current outbreak of measles among children in Texas who are hospitalized with this infectious disease. And as a public health major, this is extremely frightening, because these types of diseases are so preventable and so treatable, and the suffering that these children endure is needless.

Charles Stanton 22:46
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah. I mean, you have a person who was unfit for the job. Okay, that's number one. You have a person who's unqualified by knowledge. Number two, but the third thing that you have, you could have a person who who didn't know and they could learn. You could have a person who could call upon people who were experienced help that person. But when you appoint to an agency a person whose views are antithetical to the purpose of the agency, that's a terrific problem, especially, especially as a health secretary, because it's his job, or her job, as the case may be, to set policy for protecting the health of American citizens, and protecting that health is not having a person in power or charge who believes in fables or mythologies or all the rest of it. It's a person who's grounded in science, in facts, in health information that when they make these decisions, they are doing that to protect all of us, our families, our children, all of that, and your personal opinion may be something at variance. But since you're not a scientist and you're not a doctor and you're not a research person, your job is to carry that out. It's not to perpetuate all these fables about you know, well, this is gonna this is poisonous. That's poisonous. No, that's not what you're there for. And to to appoint such a man, it's really like criminally irresponsible, you know. And also, not just to appoint him, but to have the Senate go along with voting for him when you know the guy is completely unfit, not even getting into all the personal stuff, which you know, is a whole other issue, you know. But it seems, it seems that, it seems to me, it seems to me that there's an attempt to, in a sense, break the thing down. This is really what I believe is going on, that we're, we're going, what's going to happen is that even if, let's just say he's, he has to serve out his time. Harm, and somebody else comes in, it's going to be very difficult, because a lot of these agencies have been grievously harmed already. You're going to have to build the thing up in a lot of cases from the bottom up, and start all over with some very vital, important agencies that are protecting us.

Kira Kramer 25:16
But if he can be this aggressive in tearing down our institutions. I do know that it is possible to be that aggressive in the other direction, absolutely. But we the people, have to determine that that's what we want. Yeah. And in many ways, AOC talked about the fact that many of our institutions do need to be rebuilt, yeah,

Charles Stanton 25:34
yeah. Well, and so yeah, no, it's, it's a challenge for us. I mean, it's going to be a challenge. As I've said on the broadcast before. I don't see his actions as sustaining. I don't think this is going to I don't think this is going to continue for that long a period of time. I think there's going to be a major opposition to it. And

Kira Kramer 25:59
as we did see this past Presidents Day weekend, we did see protests across the country. And so I think it's important to remember that we still have the power to mobilize. There will always be more of us, and there are of them, right? And it's extremely important to focus on what people are doing to express dissent and to preserve our ability to dissent, right?

Charles Stanton 26:20
Right. I'm going to close on this note, which, and I agree with what you said. I'm going to close on this note though, that what kept our democracy together more than anything else, was the separation of powers, but it was also people's faith in the law and the people's faith in the courts. My concern is, what's going to happen if people get the idea that the courts have failed and the courts are not interested in promoting justice? That's my concern, and I hope, I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's a very big problem in our country that we have with the Supreme Court that has really lost credibility, and has basically bestowed the powers of a king on a person who's who's not a king, but basically, supposedly a servant of the people. And there will be a point where what he does will obviously be beyond his capabilities. And the quest in the test then is going to be, will the Supreme Court do anything? And my concern is, what's going to happen if they don't do anything? I've seen

Kira Kramer 27:26
predictions that the court won't be able to save us from this situation, and at the end of the day, it's very likely that Trump may stack the court for the next generation. Certain members may step down, and he'll put in much younger people, and that this Court will influence the next generation. However, we do have the hope of instituting a Congress that is much more cohesive, much more progressive, and with that would come Supreme Court reform, yeah. And so I think at the end of the day, there are still mechanisms that we can implement to change the course of history. I agree

Charles Stanton 28:01
and I and I hope that that will be the case, so

Kira Kramer 28:04
do I. All right, well, I think that closes our broadcast for today. Thank you all for listening, and I hope that you all stay informed. And thank you.

Charles Stanton 28:15
Thank you so much for listening on behalf of myself and my my partner, Kira Kramer, it's been a pleasure. We look forward to talking to you next week. Good night. Now. Good night.

Kira Kramer 28:34
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

Charles Stanton 29:03
we look forward to it.

Music 29:04
You.