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Social Justice - A Conversation
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You're listening to local programming produced in K UNV studios.
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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.
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Good evening. My name is Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Boyd School of Law and the UNLV Honors College. My name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student. And this is social justice, a conversation, a conversation you
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Well, good evening, everybody. Welcome back. Charles Stanton was my co host. Kiera Kramer, want to welcome you to social justice a conversation. And
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you know, it's almost like a feast of bad things. You just don't know which to pick first and talk about absolutely, but I think we're going to get into the situation of appointments from the ex president, still president, will be President Donald Trump. I think that's a good place to start.
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And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, you know when we look at,
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when we look at the appointments of, you know, different presidents, I'm always reminded of president, President Bush Jr, where he was going to appoint Harriet Myers, I guess, to the Supreme Court. This was a number of years ago, and of course, she, you know, she lacked, I guess, the experience, or whatever it was, to do that. But when you look at the list of people who were nominated and the list of people who were appointed, you had a very high standard as to, you know, who could be a cabinet secretary who could be the secretary of defense, who could be the attorney general. And we've had some, we had some really great attorney generals. We had Nicholas Katzen back he was the attorney general
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to just name one.
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As far as secretaries of defense, we've had some very fine people as well.
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And you know, it's not about it's not about people agreeing with me or Kira, or any of those things from a political point of view, it's a matter of the competence of the person who takes that position. In other words, you might have a different idea than I do about, you know, how we deal with Russia, or how we deal with the Ukraine, what have you. But there's a certain given that that that particular person, say as a Secretary of Defense is is very well steeped in knowledge about our military situation, the military situation of our allies, the military situation of our enemies, what our capabilities are, what our resources are, all those things. And it would seem, in my thinking, that even if you were super conservative and super mega and what have you, you could find somebody in the Pentagon, or even even just in the regular still serving in the regular military who could be named the Secretary of Defense. Let's say they would have the experience, they would have the knowledge
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to do that, because I think at this point, any of those extremely educated and competent individuals that could be chosen by a conservative would still probably at some point in their political career as a cabinet appoint. With a cabinet appointment would probably say no to something that Trump would want somewhere down the line. And therefore, why would he choose them? Yeah, yeah. Because if they're smart enough to say no to him, then they're too smart. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing that's that's preeminently important is the knowledge base that the person has. In other words, you know, a lot of times you go into new situations, and obviously there's, there's a time of adjustment that you have to make.
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But in certain positions,
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the time of adjustment can't be too long, especially to be the defense secretary or to be the attorney general, you have to be pretty much a very quick study as to what's going on, what our capabilities are, what the capabilities of the other side is. And it would seem that, it would seem that you would not be picking a person to to be the secretary of defense whose primary occupation is to be a talk show host. That does not seem to me to be a.
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A very astute way to do things, but you compound that by having that particular individual basically settling with some woman who apparently accused him of sexual improprieties. Now, of course, you know what the truth of that is will will be determined, hopefully in the investigation or the vetting, or hopefully the hearings that the Senate holds for any and all of these people. But it also struck me that as a manager or even as a president, why would you want to appoint someone like that? Because if you think about it,
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maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg as to what they found out. Maybe the powers that be, maybe the people who are not our
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friends but our adversaries, may know a lot more about this person than we do, and they might have certain things that they know that could be used against that person who was the Secretary of Defense, or in the case of or in the case of the Attorney General's position, the same thing I think that, I think the case of the Attorney General was more egregious, though, this is like, apparently,
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A pattern of behavior that this gentleman engaged in, and
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how he was even nominated is beyond me. It's it just sends a message that women and children are second class citizens, that
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our safety, our security, doesn't matter. And it really I had an acquaintance of mine recently tell me that she was sexually assaulted, and she decided not to go forward to the police to anyone to do anything, and we were talking about it, and she was like, well, when your abuser can go on to become president or chief of staff, or name any one else that Trump associates closely with
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or honestly,
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anyone on this or not, anyone on the Supreme Court, but people on the Supreme Court
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when we don't care about Women to the point where we are able to disregard people's treatment of one another and allow them to take positions of power.
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That's when women become second class citizens. And I also wanted to add that his pick for
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the cabinet positions surrounding public health, I believe it'll be Robert F Kennedy Jr,
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as a public health student myself, I found this appointment to be really concerning, considering the amount of misinformation that he spreads in reading some articles this morning about him, he states that he's looking for data, And he's looking for data that specifically proves his point that vaccines and anything else that we would find good for public health
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is actually not good, and with so much data, public health data available to the public, now, I find it heinous that a person just openly wants to spread misinformation when actual information is available to everyone, but we would just rather believe in someone than believe in the truth. Yeah. Well, I think, I think it's interesting that there was a big article in the Times about it, how our standards of confidence competence have shrunk. There used to be when you would get these appointments, it was a person of some stature. They would have a long record in
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public health. They might have managed hospitals, I mean, a whole bunch of stuff, and you get a guy basically, who has no real practical medical experience at all, and you're going to put him in charge of health care. So if you think about it, you have the triumvirate of picks. You have a man without any experience and and wherewithal to be in charge of our health. You have a man who's been accused of sexual improprieties, to be in charge of administering our law and then to protect us our defense system, you have a man who's a talk show host. So those are not things that we'd want to have much confidence in
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in this administration, but again, but again this a lot of this stuff was known, though. It was known before the election. It was known that he was going to pick if, if not those particular people. He was going to pick people like that. And people just went with it. People just went with it. They just said, No, okay.
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It's okay, you know, he can pick her wherever he wants. And that's on us, that's on our society, that's on all the people who didn't vote, that's on all the people who are still getting, still trying to get to know who Kamala Harris is. You know, I mean, it's really,
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it's really insulting to the intelligence of any person who's who's informed as to how these people wound up there, or how this man got re elected. But you have, in many ways,
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an electorate that is not up one news on current events,
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then that their their news comes through social media. It may come to tick tock. It may come from a whole bunch of other places, but not legitimate news gathering. And, I mean, you can, you know, it's gotten to the point now, in the times where you have a new story every day about some, some, you know, crazy stuff that's either being done or corrupt stuff that's being done. And what's interesting is that, in many ways, it seems that the government has broken down too. In other words, and I mentioned this in the class, which I thought was interesting, that it used to be you had the FBI of a Justice Department and all these agencies that people looked up to. And you've had so many scandals, the scandal with Larry Nassar, with the gymnastics. I mean, there's, we could be here all day with scandals, but the thing about it is that people have lost faith in it, basically, and the people who are doing the investigations of the things that are wrong are of The Atlantic magazine of the New Republic or the Washington Post of The New York Times. But that's not really their function. Their function basically should be to report the news. It's not that they have they're actually making news themselves, because the agencies in our country have failed so completely that they have to find out, you know, what Google's doing. They have to find out what Elon Musk is doing. They have to uncover all this stuff. Where is, where is our law enforcement authorities? What are they supposed to be doing? Well, they're currently being gutted by Trump. Yeah, yeah. Although I, although I will say I found, I find it sad that Merrick Garland's tenure as
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Attorney General was not the aggressive
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get to the bottom of things expeditiously that it should have been. And I don't know what those reasons were why it wasn't, but all those cases that they had are, you know, basically out the window,
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and it will be interesting to see. It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court will allow or tolerate the president pardoning himself. I think that will be the final test
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as to whether
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the court has any
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neutrality about these things, or are they just going to go they're just going to go with the flow. But as in the immunity case, which was a complete repudiation of the Constitution, this would be the icing on the cake that a monarch, King, sovereign, however you want to put it, they can pardon themselves for anything they do. There's no it's like, what is the point of having laws at all? That's exactly right. And I think what's happened when you say that? I think that seeped down through the society. I think it's brought about a disrespect for the law. I think most people think that the law is a joke, that the laws are not fairly applied.
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And you know, certainly you know, racially and gender wise, of course, but also in other things too, what corporations can get away with. You know, they make these settlement decrees where they, they throw some money
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at everybody, and the actual people who are the perpetrators are never punished. You know, I think that one of the, one of the perfect examples of that is the opioid crisis, where they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew how to market and distribute all this stuff. And they make, they make a settlement with them. The vast majority of that money can be deducted off their taxes. I think that's one of the, I think one of the main things they would need to do in this country. I think they need to criminalize corporate misdeeds, and they need to hold directors and they need to hold officers of these companies criminally responsible. That's the only way you're going to change it. Absolutely it's not going to be changed to paying money or any of the rest of that stuff, because they that's because they lobby for the amount of money that they have to pay to be lowered. So the amount of money they have to pay if they do anything means nothing to them. Yeah, yeah. And of course, and.
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Of course, as we're seeing every day now,
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the absolute power of the lobbies, though, that you have these people in the Congress. I'm not saying everybody. You know, Elizabeth Warren is a good person. Bernie Sanders is a good person. You know, Chris Murphy is a good person. There, there are good people there, but
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the vast majority of these people, they're not serving us. And it's not a question of, you know, people are, people are fooled into saying, Well, it's a Republican issue, or it's a Democratic issue. No, it's not. It's, it's, it's a national issue that involves all of us and has to do with all of us. The idea that, you know, mag is against the progressives. The Maga people are getting harmed as much as the progressive people are getting harmed and and they will be and when,
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when Elon Musk and everyone else that he's appointed to be in charge of the federal government starts cutting away at at social services like Medicaid and Medicare. These are the services that his constituents use, and the and the cuts will be felt. Yeah, by them directly. Yeah, of course. Well, I mean, we could, we could talk about, you know, they were saying, well, Kamala Harris didn't have a program. That was always the attack on Kamala Harris, but Kamala Harris had a very practical program, a program of helping a lot of couples and families and everything take care of elderly people and defraying the cost and the expense and expanding aid to the elderly. I don't hear that from the other side. And the crazy thing about it is that that people have deluded themselves into believing that this administration is going to do anything progressive for the average middle class person. Is a fantasy. It's a fantasy. The tax cuts that he he put through when he was president benefited the wealthy and the 100th or 1,000th or 1% the regular person got pretty much very little, very little. Biden actually was the one who put through the programs and the stimulus and everything. The problem with Biden, though, was Biden was not a salesman. Biden was not a guy who could sell what he did. He thought? He thought, well, I've done all these things. People are going to realize that people are going to appreciate it, etc, etc. But the problem was that people's attention span is very small, so you have to basically remind people, you know, we did this, we built these roads, we did infrastructure, all the rest of the stuff, actually a lot of the stuff that was promised by the previous administration but never done no and just to add on to that point, our own Republican governor in his term has paused services like respite care for families in Nevada, families like mine, where my parents are older, my parents care for a disabled member of our family, and we're not able to get anything from them. Not only that, but respite care in Nevada is about $125
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a month, which is pretty much nothing to be able to care for a disabled member or elderly family member in your family, when states like California are providing families with $600 a month granted. Are they paying more taxes? Yes, but are people seeing the services? Yeah. Well, I think, I think you can tie that in in the state of Nevada to the treatment of the homeless. I think there's a connection there you have all these people who are on the street
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and as, as I've said when I've lectured, it is not, it is not a crime
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to be to be poor, to be destitute, to be hungry, until the Supreme Court said it was, until the Supreme Court said it was,
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but
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as a state that's flourishing, as a state that's prosperous,
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I do not understand why these people are being, in a sense, stigmatized, not only stigmatized, but in Our city, you know, subject to arrest,
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when, when the resources exist to help them. The resources exist to help them from the businesses that exist in our city who are making billions and billions and billions of dollars through not merely casino revenue from traditional sources such as floor play and, you know, restaurants and clubs, but through the gigantic, enormous expansion of sports betting, they are taking in more money from that. I.
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Avenue than than all the other avenues. Now, it seemed to me, when you have these multi billion dollar corporations, people should get together and say, Listen, you know, we had this problem with the homelessness,
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even if, even if you were mercenary and unfeeling, you would say, well, it's not a good look for us. You know, we want this place to be looking a certain way. We have all these homeless people over. It may turn the tourists off. Let's try to build some housing for them. Let's try to build some of these centers, because shelters, whatever it is, and there's no there's no movement to do that, because people are people are. It's almost like they're remotely detached from what actually is going on in society. They don't want to get involved in it. It hasn't just don't see, like, the potential years of life and productivity lost. They don't see how, with every single life, we are losing a member of society that could have done something great for everyone else. Yeah, and they're, they're not seeing all of them, all of the people that with very little intervention, yeah, with very minimal and not costly intervention, could have done something great for everyone. Yeah. And that is how we approach people in public health. We look at how many years of potential, life lost and contributions that these people could have made? Yeah, well, I think in many ways, there was a football coach by the name of George Allen. This was many years ago, and he was very successful, but he was not he did not see the long plan. His his motto was the future is now, so that you know anything beyond his life capacity was not something that interested him. It was about what's going to benefit me at this particular stage. And I think that's what we're seeing. I think that's what we're seeing very much. So you know, especially when you raise the point of public health, which is, which is so important.
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I took when I was
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younger than I am now. I took care of my mom and I took care of my my dad, and I had other family responsibilities as well, and
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I don't know it struck me. It struck me in that experience, though, that there was more humanity in the people that I interacted with, trying to help them, then I think I would see now if they were still alive. I think there's been a there's been a radical change,
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especially toward people who don't otherwise have a voice in politics. And you mentioned, of course, you mentioned, of course, you know the situation that that you've gone through. And then you add to that, say, people who are elderly,
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women who are victimized, children who are victimized,
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and
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there's no kind of moral
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imperative that you want to help them. I mean, I was there was something in the there was something in the paper today about the social media platforms,
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you know, meta and all these other ones, how effective their lobby, as has become
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in not protecting and not passing laws to protect
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Children, 12 year old children, 13 year old children,
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be as an assessor. It shouldn't even have to be something that you would have to tell somebody about, that you would need to do. It would be something like, you know, we're concerned that your site is available to these kids or or however it would work, and we need for you to try to look out for them and protect them, etc, etc. Well, they have worked to impede any laws about this. This has gone on for a number of years now, even though the dangers are out there, and there's so many cases of parents who've lost their children,
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particularly in the aspect of of social media bullying, where these kids are victimized, and
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there's a tolerance for it somehow, on the, on the on the social media platforms, which is beyond my comprehension.
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But technology has a responsibility. Technology is not just you just unleash everything. And you know, it is what it is. Even more than technology, people have a response, absolutely, absolutely. It is the people that are controlling this. It's the people that are the only ones who are going to be able to do anything with it. Yeah, the tech is.
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And it's merely a tool, but how we use it, how you use it, absolutely, is very telling. We had a, I guess it was a couple of semesters ago. We had the we had the circle movie, oh yes, with, with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. And it was, it was about, a lot of that. It was about, you know, people who
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have all this power and all this influence.
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What's interesting, though, in many ways, as car I think it was Carlyle who said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That when you would, when you would, you would amass that whatever, with money or power and everything, one would hope that a person would say, you know,
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we need to we can use this to help people. We can use this to make things better for people.
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And
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there doesn't seem to be that feeling. It's just amassing amassing money. It's amassing power and in a never ending cycle. But there's no,
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no introspection from people as to how to benefit society, to make it better. That doesn't seem to come up and the society. And as you say, individuals who make up the society. They're okay with it. They don't seem to have any kind of,
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I don't know, conscience, if you want to use the word conscience about
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reaching out, you know, somebody once said, To whom much, so much, to those who much has been given, much is expected. You don't seem to they don't seem to see that. You don't seem to see a moral imperative.
Unknown Speaker 26:47
And I think it comes back as we started our program today. It comes back to people who are going to be nominated for these offices where it was always like a very high standard, and now, well, so you're accused of abusing somebody. I think what you say is very true, though there's been particularly in the gender thing, there's there's become a sort of an acceptance of it, and there's also become a defeatedness on the part of the people who have been victimized, almost, almost like resolved that. Well, it's not going to change. This is the way people are. We can't do anything. But I don't accept that. Though. I don't accept that there is something you can do about it. There is something you can do about it. What you can do about it is you can pass criminal laws that punish people who do things like that, and they go away to jail for a long time, and you you don't care whether the person's prominent or not prominent. And that's that. That's on our lawmakers, though too, absolutely. You know, at the end of the day, we just have to keep trying to reach people, to find people where they are, and to speak to them. And so I think that is the mission that we are trying to accomplish through this podcast. And I hope that after listening today, you decide to continue reading and educating yourself and others and staying involved in your community, right? Well, absolutely I think that. I think it's, it's, it's up to us now, more than ever before, that we have to, we have to reach out to people.
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You were mentioning this in the last broadcast, which I thought was, was, was was, was wonderful. We have to reach out to people who don't agree with us. And we have to, we have to inform them, and we have to stir something in them, for them to inform themselves and have people come together to solve the problems that far, that go far beyond progressive and Maga, but we both want to thank you for listening to us, putting up with us. Sometimes it may not be easy, but we do try to, we do try to spread the word of hope, and we look forward to speaking to you again
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going down the road. And I wish you all a pleasant Good night. Good night.
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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
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or Professor Charles Stanton at C, H, A R, L, E, S, dot, S, T, a n, t o n@unlv.edu,
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see you next time we look forward to it. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai