Law

Senator Patrick Leahy Leahy, Champlain College student activists and a representative of Invisible Children discuss the KONY 2012 campaign, aimed at bringing African war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. A documentary on the issue, KONY 2012, has gone viral on the internet, netting nearly 50 million hits on YouTube since Monday, March 5. Leahy, chairman of the Senate’s budget panel for the State Department and Foreign Operations, is a longtime U.S. leader on issues relating to war crimes and criminals and the innocent victims of war and conflict. He recently included funding in the U.S. foreign aid budget to help Kony’s victims – many of them children -- and he has long supported efforts to capture Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has terrorized the people of northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa for more than two decades. The victim assistance funding secured by Leahy will be discussed in Leahy’s annual budget hearing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which will implement those efforts. Kony and his forces have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers and to kill and mutilate members of their own families. Adonga Quinto, a northern Ugandan who was kidnapped by the LRA, discusses his experiences. Also speaking, Sadie Stone, a Champlain College student who has joined the effort to bring Kony to justice.

Senator Patrick Leahy announces significant new funding for water quality, fisheries and ecosystem restoration work on Lake Champlain during the coming year. The federal dollars, just recently confirmed, are part of the FY2012 budget. Leahy is a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the funds he secures for Vermont have long been the main engine for cleanup efforts involving the Lake and its watershed.

Judge Ben Joseph hosts a conversation Professor Patrick Parenteau, Senior Counsel to the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic and Professor of Law at Vermont Law School, on the Vermont State appeal of the Vermont Yankee decision to allow the plant to remain open.

Are Corporations People? Citizens Respond to Citizens United is the topic. Discussing the issue are: John Bonifaz, Co-Founder and Director, Free Speech For People; Jerry Greenfield, Co-Founder, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc.; Anthony Iarrapino, Esq., Citizen Activist; VT State Senator Virginia “Ginny” Lyons; Moderator: Dr. Paul Olsen, Saint Michael's College

Sponsored by:
Clean Yield Asset Management - Common Cause of Vermont - Free Speech For People - Green Mountain Global Forum - Move To Amend Coalition - Peace & Justice Center - Saint Michael's College Department of Business Administration and Accounting - Saint Michael's College Edmundite Center for Peace and Justice - Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) - Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG)