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Social Justice - A Conversation
Unknown Speaker 0:00
You're listening to local programming produced in kunv 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
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name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student. And this
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is social justice, a conversation, a conversation you
Unknown Speaker 0:43
Good evening. Hi. This is Professor Charles Stanton. I want to welcome everybody to the third year of social justice a conversation. And it's a great pleasure to have as my new partner for this for this year, a very fine student that was in my class at the Honors College. Her name is Kira Kramer, and she and I will be trying to figure out what's wrong with the world in half an hour and solve all its problems, which we probably never will do. But it's great to have her with us, and like to have her say a couple of words about, you know, her expectations of what we can do this this year.
Unknown Speaker 1:25
Hello. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor to take your class and to be a partner with you on this podcast. And what I'm really looking forward to during our conversations is to really bring up and get into some of the details of what we're observing in politics today and in our world, as well as what someone who is a pre law student, a public health student who cares about the state of the world and the direction in which it's going, and how to cope with that, and how to problem solve in a generation that looks for quick solutions and shortcuts, as well as a generation that's become accustomed to living with the status quo and the status quo, I don't believe serves everyone equally, and it's really important to have these conversations, and we have the beautiful ability to do so in this country. And so that is what we are here to do today, is to express our rights, to have free speech and to explore all that there is to discuss in the US. Well,
Unknown Speaker 2:37
I think that. I think that's beautifully put. I think we could get the ball rolling when we can have little discussion about your reaction and your feelings about the debate that happened several days ago between the ex president and Kamala Harris. I thought that she presented herself in an excellent way. I think she gave, pretty much to all the people who listened a very good picture of who she was as a person. I was particularly moved by her description of the abortion situation and what could happen that has happened to many women who are in that position. And she really, she really got to the heart of that, and she spoke to it with a great deal of empathy and truth about actually the predicament that a lot of women are facing today. Yes,
Unknown Speaker 3:35
I felt like her rhetoric was spot on when she contrasted Trump's phrasing around the idea that we all wanted the issue to be taken down to the states, and when she contrasted that language by saying we as in women who are experiencing the adverse effects, both women who want children and those who Do not, but both women, women who are in partnerships, who have always wanted children their entire life are not able to get the health care that they need in order to have a healthy or safe pregnancy. And when she really went into those individual cases of women that she's met, of stories that really testify what we, the people, have experienced as a result of abortion being thrown onto the states. She contrasts Trump ideas that this is what we wanted, and it really calls into the question of who is the we that he is referring to? Yeah, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 4:38
I think it's, I think it's quite amazing, and in a bad way, that basically, more than 50% of the population in the year 2024 are still fighting for the right to have bodily autonomy. I think there's something really pathetic about that. I. And I think that the country really has closed their eyes, I think, for a long time, as to these, the injustice, the injustice of that, but also the misogyny and a lot of the mistreatment of women that has become accepted in the society that's, that's the boys will be boys. And, you know, all the rest of this stuff, which I think, which I think her to pay debate opponent, has really fostered, yes, and I think that the media and to a large degree, a lot of the social commentators, have almost not an acceptance of the right of what he's saying, but basically saying, Well, you know, that's just the way he is, as an excuse for all these tropes that he's been peddling for the last 10 years.
Unknown Speaker 5:54
Right? I think many people think that it's appropriate, or even acceptable to hold their nose and vote for him just because a few things that he does or says they find distasteful, but not distasteful enough to cast their vote to tell the country what it is that is acceptable of a leader of our nation and what is not also something interesting about the abortion argument, kind of contextualizing it in what has happened in recent years. I find the bodily autonomy argument to be fascinating, because when covid happened, and I'm a public health major, so of course, we had many of these discussions around covid, the bodily autonomy argument was very profound throughout the nation. It was my body, my choice. I will decide whether or not I will get a vaccine, and the nation has a history of mandating vaccines of removing bodily autonomy, such as during the smallpox epidemic and pandemic. And that did, in fact, lead to the full eradication of smallpox from our globe, and that was for the betterment of humanity. And so I think comparing those situations of things like things that drawn to question an American's ability to have bodily autonomy, we see that we can't restrict bodily autonomy in terms of a medication or a vaccination, yet for a similar medical procedure that lies in the world of treatment and Medic and medicine, it suddenly becomes that the government now has the ability to mandate what a woman can or cannot do, what a person can or cannot do, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 7:33
yeah. Well, I had a very interesting experience several years ago in one of my classes, or one of the women who was in the class, she had a child, and she was expecting a second child, but she her medical condition was such that she couldn't fly, so she had to travel by car, and she came to me, and I worked out with her, as crazy as this sounds, an itinerary for her to return to Minnesota, and where she could go and what state she could travel through, because if she did have a medical emergency, considering her condition, and there might be the chance that the child might have to, you know, have an emergency procedure, or something like that, many of Those states would not give her medical care. So I think that that's that's an interesting thing. I think at the heart of a lot of it, though, is we have a paternalistic society. I think that's why a lot of these, what shall we say? Things go on? Why they continue, because the people in power want them to go on is they want women to be they want women to be at a secondary capacity, and women, I think, need to be more united to oppose this. I think it goes beyond like saying, Well, you know, I'm a Democrat or Republican. Before all that, you're a woman, and although you may have certain qualms about other women and you know their political views, that could be you in a certain situation, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 9:18
one of the most terrifying things that I've heard circulated about the possible consequences of the overturning of Roe v Wade is what happens if, in certain states, or in all states, God forbid, that having an abortion, whether it be a medical procedure that is necessary during a Pregnancy or not. What would happen if that sentence was a felony charge, and we do know that if you are sentenced with being a felon that you lose the right to vote, and if many women are being monitored for whether or not they or all women in this country are. Being monitored for whether or not that they have to undergo this procedure for whatever reason. That means that a half of this country could be losing the right to vote, which we fought so hard for. Yeah, and while that's a lot of assumptions in one statement, I think it can't be left out of the realm of possibility. Should mindfulness and careful attention to the consequences of this issue be monitored?
Unknown Speaker 10:31
Yeah, well, I agree with that. I agree with that. I think that, I think that that's that's really one of the questions that we're going to have to deal with regarding the election is whether or not the people who run the country are going to run, continue to run it the way they've been running it, or whether the people who, I believe are the majority of the people, are going to assert their right to the vote and elect somebody who's responsive to them. I think one of the problems you have in our country today is that in the last two elections, and probably the third one as well, coming up, the majority of people, their voice hasn't been heard on all these major issues. And with the Supreme Court now basically ruling the roost. As we would say, it's gotten worse. One of the interesting things about the Supreme Court now is it used to be that you had to have standing to be able to make appeals before the Supreme Court. That's sort of gone out the window, and you actually have individuals coming before the court with their own particular gripes and grievances, even though they're not actually involved in litigation. And this is what's happening. So you can see, like, not just with abortion, but with voting rights, with student loan, thing you know. And all those decisions, all those decisions, are a a thread of denial of rights, affirmative action, women's rights, rights of students, etc. And this, this is a trend that's that's been exacerbated since you have the majority of the court of being Republican. Now, it's not a question to me. You know, everybody has their prejudices. There's nobody out there who is is unbiased politically on a lot of these issues. But the problem that you're having, basically, is, is they're inventing laws, though they're coming up with law that does not exist or even lacks precedent, particularly the immunity case, allowing the ex president, or, or, even more worrying, any, any successor of his, to basically be immune from any kind of justice at all. And he could do, or she could do whatever they want to do, and they'd be, they'd be immunized, which I think is insane, because if that's going to if that's what's going to happen, then you know what could happen. But have a dictatorship when no one's accountable correct,
Unknown Speaker 13:09
and that the precedence that they fabricated for that case is taken from legal scholars who take a more traditionalist view of the Constitution. However, one of the most important concepts in law is that law is interpreted in its plain and ordinary meaning in context. I think it is imperative that, as a pre law student, everything that we evaluate is taken within its context. Now the Supreme Court currently evaluates cases that are of constitutional issue in a traditionalist light. And I believe that there needs to be questioning about whether or not the traditionalist interpretation of the Constitution is logically justifiable as laws are meant to be interpreted in the context in which they will be applied. Therefore, does their logic actually follow?
Unknown Speaker 14:13
Yeah, yeah. That's well put. That's well put, yeah, well, I think, I think what's happened too, though, is the court now, as constituted, has no restrictions on them. Now, what's interesting, as you know, as a law student to be is all the other federal courts in our country have ethical restrictions. The only court that does not have ethical restrictions, of course, is the Supreme Court. They have a voluntary they have a voluntary ethics code, where all the other courts have a mandatory ethics code. Very interesting article recently about the fact that everybody, it seems on the Supreme Court, is writing a book. So. Well, there's nothing wrong with writing a book. I mean, you know, I guess we wouldn't be here if we weren't we weren't readers. But what was interesting is that two of the justices had their books published by Random House, and of course, they got very large fees for it. Okay, no problem with that, but they were actually sitting on a case that involved Random House, and then, and then, instead of recusing themselves, they heard the case, and then they said later that they didn't know that Random House was involved as a defendant in one of the cases. Now, how could that be? You read these briefs, you make a decision based on a tremendous amount of scholarship,
Unknown Speaker 15:44
hopefully, well, it's just a violation of the principles of being a lawyer. Yeah, that's what it is like deep down, you cannot sign onto a lawsuit unless you acknowledge that everything before you is true to your knowledge. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 15:57
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, I think you know, when I was going to law school, you know, being the dinosaur creature that I am, well, it was a no brainer. I mean, like you knew that you didn't take anything of value. You knew that, you know, you had an ethical standard where, if you had involvements with plaintiffs or defendants, that was a disqualifier. And you would, you would, you would remove yourself voluntarily. And now what you have, basically is people, and we know who these people are, who are living like kings and kings and queens from all the goodies that they've been getting. They're traveling around the world, that they're getting r u vs they're getting trips, they're getting all the rest of this stuff. And recently,
Unknown Speaker 16:52
I don't know if you heard that there was they ruled that bribes are justifiable if they happen after, like, if the bribe is paid afterwards as a gratuity for their work,
Unknown Speaker 17:10
yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you hear about that? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. And
Unknown Speaker 17:14
so it's just we're observing the slow degradation of the integrity of the court, and that's genuinely terrifying. But something to keep in mind is that the court has never been truly lacking in partisanship from its origins. Very likely there has existed partisanship within the court, but I think there was this acknowledgement that partisanship would be put aside to the best possible degree by those serving on the court, and that they would try to interpret the court and the decisions brought before the court with the most reasonable and logical judgment, whereas today, I think partisanship has truly defined what the court chooses as a case that they will select and rule on of the 1000s of cases that they get every year. And I think partisanship has a great deal in what is chosen, but also how it's reviewed and how the decision plays out. And ultimately, in terms of Supreme Court reform, I think partisanship will likely not go away in this country. I don't see, I don't foresee partisanship lessening. So what can we do? We can address the partisanship that exists within the court. We can redesign the court, not by stacking necessarily, but by acknowledging the partisanship and by changing the way the appointment process to be more flexible and to account for partisanship. Because if partisanship is the new normal, then we need to redefine what is and is not acceptable.
Unknown Speaker 18:53
Yeah. Well, I think as well you mentioned the bribe situation. I think there's been a change in the country, and this is, this is my take on it. There's always been greed. You're never gonna, you're never gonna change that. They're always people trying to benefit from their position. But I think the greed today, not not just on the court, but the corporate greed, is more on varnished. It's more. It's more. It's quite called Naked greed. In other words, it's not just taking a couple of bananas. It's like taking the whole tree with you. And this is, this is a societal problem that we're facing now. We see it in corporate America all the time. One of the, one of the things that hit me was one of the major corporations in this country. They had a huge amount of income, a huge profit, and they had the shareholders meeting, and they, I don't know it was, it was in the billions of dollars. So the man comes up who runs the company, he's, he's the head honcho, I guess you'd say. Me. And he says, Well, he says, we had, we did pretty well. We did pretty well, but we had, we had a couple of bad we had a couple of bad divisions that didn't really fulfill our needs. So the person who's at the who's at the meeting there says, Well, how much money did we lose? And he says, oh, no, we didn't lose any money we made three or $4 billion with the one company and three or $4 billion with the other company. So the so the stockholder says, well, then what was the problem? He says, Well, the problem was we didn't have the profit margin we should have had because the government passed some new law where we basically had to pay a minimum wage to a lot of the people who were in the railway division of our company. And I'm thinking to myself, that is messed up when you when you have billions and billions of dollars and you're complaining about people making the minimum wage. But we see that all we see that all around us with, you know, they had a huge article the other day about Starbucks, they brought some new guy in. I guess he was from Chipotle, and he's supposed to, he's supposed to, I don't know what he's supposed to do, revived him, or whatever it is, but you see, the working conditions of the workers and the way they're treated. My thing about that is, and I would push this as a law if I were in Congress, because Starbucks, Starbucks is not a franchise. Starbucks is a chain. And what I would say is, if one part of that chain is unionized, then all the other parts of the chain should be unionized too, and everybody should have union protection. And somebody, one time, said they said, Well, why are you so much for unions? And I said, I'm so much for unions because I worked in a lot of places that didn't have one. Yeah, you know, no
Unknown Speaker 21:44
and that that's devastating, and it's one of the few ways that workers in this country can advocate for their rights when currently, much of our corporations have been monopolized, and we see industries like the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, owning several companies. When you have conglomerates that large, an individual workers ability to advocate for themselves, themselves is it's just significantly decreased, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 22:17
well, it's, I mean, we're seeing it now in this, in this huge case, probably one of the biggest cases ever in the food industry, whether, whether Kroger Smith's can can take over Albertsons, and I am still waiting to see, going back to eon days, a merger that truly benefits the Public, either price wise, or product wise, or service wise. What happens, basically, is these, these stores are taken over. They shed pretty much, maybe a third or a half of the stores. They get rid of all the people. Prices jack up because there's no competition, no
Unknown Speaker 22:57
which. Connecting it back to the debate, I find it really interesting that both candidates talked about food prices and how their respective plans will lower benefit food prices. Yet what is remains to be seen is what will actually be done to check the corporation setting the food prices. How will either of them address the idea that when one big company owns everything and produces everything and sells everything, distributes all of it. Who is stopping them from not price gouging every American, when every American's only option, and especially for many, many Americans who cannot afford food that is healthy or fresh produce that's affordable and accessible to them
Unknown Speaker 23:46
exactly. Well, that's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. I think, I think, though, that the monopolistic part of it has gotten a lot worse. Yes, you know, and I don't think we have, unfortunately, in a lot of these industries of diversity, we should have. I think the corporations really run the country. That's what I've always believed and and in this particular election, we know who they're supporting. And a very interesting thing about about Boris had meats? Oh yes, this is just, you know, relatively recent, back to the jungle, yeah, well, well, that a number of years before this whole thing came out about the listeria, they were warned by the the government, the Food and Drug Administration and all that stuff, that they had unsafe conditions in their plants in Virginia. And you know, they were supposed to be those conditions were supposed to be remedied. But what happens? You see, see, part of the problem that you have in the United States, which is really interesting, is we have a whole bunch of laws, and we have a whole bunch of agencies, and we have a whole bunch of places that are supposed to do certain tasks. But. One of the problems is we don't have the personnel to do it.
Unknown Speaker 25:03
Not only that, we allow like through congressional approval, we allow the inspectors to work for the company exactly, and that undermines our ability to truly create a checks and balance system on our corporations and in our government. I
Unknown Speaker 25:18
think that's true. I think in line with that, how many people who you know work, say, in the investigatory part of regulatory agencies for so many years, and then like, like, poof, like Aladdin and the genie coming out of the lamp, the next thing you know, they're working for the same people they were supposed to be investigating. Yeah, so and you can, you can also, you can also throw that into, you can also throw that into how our congress works and our Supreme Court. And our Supreme Court, Congress, Congress, particularly in this past year passed, I know it was only 20 laws, or 21 laws, some ludicrously low number all these guys and gals who work there. They're there for a number of years. I'm not even going to get into when I got, even getting into this show about term limits for, you know, senators and people in House of Representatives. But they work there, then the next thing you know, they leave and they're working for a lobbying company so and and in a lot of cases, the laws that we have are written by the companies. The bills are written and they give them to the congress people as it was their bill, when it's actually the bill of the of the entity itself. Correct? So how do you, how do you change that? You see, that's another thing you know. I don't, I don't know, system overhaul? Well, yeah, system overhaul, yeah. But I think it's, I think it's time now, if she becomes the President, to really reevaluate a lot of the things that are going on, at least with how the federal government works and how they can carry out their missions, actually, to serve us and not to serve themselves. You see, I think this become almost sort of like an acceptance, the acceptance of the greed, the acceptance of the fraud, as you were pointing out quite astutely, the situation with the bribes, well, people are going to take no, they're not going to take anything. You have laws set up and you enforce them. You know, that was one of the things that I didn't understand about, you know, the, you know, the whole thing with the hush money conviction, why the judge, why the judge didn't pass sentence? I don't get that. I don't get that. And I don't I even more, I don't understand why the prosecution did not present to the judge their position on it. They just said, Well, you know, you can do it, whatever you want to do, but that was sort of a betrayal of their office. I thought, yeah, in my in my opinion, you know, but I think the upcoming months are going to be very, very challenging. Very much so. And I unfortunately, think that if the election is it goes in her favor, it will not go in her favor peacefully. I believe that they were going to have a replay of what happened the last time, except I think it's going to be the opposition is going to be a lot more organized and a lot more violence. So I hope that our government, our security agencies, our Justice Department, is preparing for what, for what could happen down the line. Because I really think that, you know, it's, it is something to be concerned about. You know, yes, yeah, well, we're sort of wrapping up our initial program here. We hope that you've enjoyed it and it stimulated thought and conversation about these issues. We humbly say that we don't have all the answers, but at least we try to identify the problems. So I want to thank Kyra for her helping me as my partner in this first broadcast, and we look forward to speaking to you again next week and be safe.
Unknown Speaker 29:09
Thank you, and we really hope to see you next time. Have a good rest of your week.
Unknown Speaker 29:14
Good night. You.
Unknown Speaker 29:22
Music. 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
Unknown Speaker 29:52
look forward to it.
Unknown Speaker 29:53
You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai