Lee Hepner on Google Monopoly / Shayana Kadidal on Guantanamo Plea Deal

KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins” — “cornering the market” — does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001 “plunged the U.S.” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right: choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside U.S. law. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.

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