Humans Threaten Extinction of One Million Species and Other News of Quite Significant Note: ‘BradCast’ 5/6/2019

Our lead story on today’s BradCast makes everything else seem quite small by comparison. (And, no, that story is not the new royal baby. You’re welcome.) Unfortunately, those other stories aren’t small at all. In fact, they are almost all unprecedented as the nation continues its dark plummet into an historic Constitutional crisis under this Presidency. [Audio link for today’s show is posted at end of summary.]

We cover quite a bit of ground on today’s show, by necessity, if not choice. Among the stories covered…

• A landmark, 1000+ page report compiled by some 450 researcher working with a U.N. agency, based on the data from 15,000 scientific and governmental reports warns that 1 million of the planet’s 8 million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction — many within decades — thanks to human activity. The report finds that, more than at any other time in human history, nature itself is threatened due to human development and consumption that leaves land species finding “insufficient habitat for long-term survival” and oceans species in similar peril. While the report’s authors stress there is still time to act to reverse this alarming trend, we break down some of their critical findings at the top of the show, since they are likely being overshadowed today with so much other insane news emanating from our nation’s capitol and reverberating around the globe;

• Beyond that disturbing new study, world markets opened on an alarming note on Monday — including an initial 450-point plunge on the Dow — following Trump’s weekend tweets threatening to impose a 25% tariff on all goods imported from China by week’s end. In “>his tweet, he included at least two lies, including that “China has been paying Tariffs to the USA” and “These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results.” In fact, Americans pay those taxes, not China. And, as even honest conservatives who we cite on today’s show point out, Trump’s continuing trade war has harmed, not helped the economy, and the trade deficit with China has only gotten worse, not better, for the US in the bargain;

• Posing an additional threat to the world economy is the Trump Administration’s chest-thumping against Iran, including threats of sanctions against any nation (including allies) who purchase Iranian oil and the deployment over the weekend of an aircraft carrier battle group and a bunch of bombers toward the Persian Gulf;

• Setting aside the Trump-caused foreign-policy and market crises, there’s the Constitutional crises that he’s continuing to exacerbate today here at home, where some 400 former federal prosecutors — both Republican and Democratic, some who served as long ago as Dwight D. Eisenhower — issued an open letter today proclaiming that, were it not for the Dept. of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, Trump would have been charged on multiple felony counts of obstruction of justice, based on the information detailed in the redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report;

• In related news, the House Judiciary Committee announced plans on Monday for a vote on Contempt against Trump Attorney General and “fixer” William Barr after the nation’s top law enforcement officer’s repeated failure to hand over to Congress the full Mueller Report and its underlying evidence, as per a Congressional subpoena;

• Similarly, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the Treasury Department will also rebuff a Congressional request from the Ways and Means Committee to produce six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, as per long-standing federal statute. Both incidents — both unprecedented — will almost certainly now be forced into federal court for adjudication;

• Meanwhile, in New York, Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for Trump who predates Trump co-opting of the nation’s Attorney General for that purpose, offered a public statement to media before heading off to federal prison for three years on Monday. Cohen will be serving time for, among other things, lying to Congress and carrying out hush-money payments to two women with whom Trump had affairs, a criminal conspiracy “directed” by Trump, according to prosecutors, in violation of federal campaign finance laws. In his statement, Cohen said: “I hope when I rejoin my family and friends that the country will be in a place without xenophobia, injustice and lies at the helm of our country.” In other words, he hopes that voters will remove Trump from office next year, highlighting the fact that as a federal inmate in New York he will not be allowed to vote in that election. But if the man who federal officials say “directed” the conspiracy — who would also have been charged on multiple obstruction counts had he not been the President (thanks, in no small part, arguably, to those unlawful hush-money payments made just before the 2016 election) — gets to not only vote, but run for re-election next year, shouldn’t Cohen have a vote as well?;

That brings us to our guest today, attorney and longtime BRAD BLOG contributor ERNEST A. CANNING, who penned an insightful op-ed today arguing that the notion of “inmate vote is not a radical idea”. On Friday, Republican state lawmakers in Florida enacted a measure that would undermine Sunshine State voters who approved a Constitutional measure in November, with a nearly 65% majority, that would restore voting rights to most former felons in the closely divided swing-state, one of just three in the nation — along with Iowa and Kentucky — to ban former felons from voting for life, even after serving their time.

But the idea of inmates voting, while still in prison, has been a matter of discussion and growing debate following the ACLU’s recently-launched “RIghts for All” campaign, in which they seek to get 2020 candidates on record regarding, among other things, the right to vote by those still in prison. Currently, 48 states, other than Vermont and Maine, ban the practice. But, as Canning explains, “21 other democracies, including Canada, Sweden and Israel, allow all prisoners to vote.” So, why should inmates lose their right to vote in the nation that incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other?

Canning, a Vietnam vet who also worked as a Senior adviser to VetsForBernie.org, explains the injustice and hypocrisy of barring inmates from voting, citing its lack of deterrent effect and noting that luminaries such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. penned his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and that Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison, would go on to become the formerly-apartheid South Africa’s first black President and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his article and on today’s program, Canning also offers a compelling response to critics, like the President and many in his party (and in the Democratic Party, as well) who, as Trump’s spokesperson recently charged, find the notion of inmate voting “deeply offensive”, because it would allow the likes of the Boston Marathon Bomber and the perpetrator of the Charleston Church Massacre (both of whom have been sentenced to death), to cast a vote before being killed.

It’s a long-overdue — and interesting — conversation that Americans of all political stripes, but certainly progressives, should have in “the land of the free”, where First Amendment rights are still allowed for prisoners. So why isn’t the right to vote?…

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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_ExtinctionReportUN_ConstCrisisDeepens_ErnieCanning-InmateVoting_050619.mp3]

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