Amy Goodman's Blog, page 2

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Islamic State militants attacked a European city this week, setting off three bombs in Brussels that killed 31 and injured 260. In the United States, the response was immediate, first with the outpouring of support from the public, then, unsurprisingly, with a flurry of bellicose pronouncements from most of the remaining major-party presidential candidates.

The violence overshadowed what might well be one of the most enduring and significant accomplishments of the Obama presidency: the reopening of relations with Cuba, cemented when he became the first president in 88 years to visit the island nation.

After the bombings in Brussels, Republican candidate Ted Cruz said, "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Donald Trump told NBC regarding Salah Abdeslam, the suspect in the November Paris massacre who was captured in Brussels last Friday, "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding." On CNN, Trump said, "He may be talking, but he'll talk faster with the torture." Give Trump credit for calling it what it is, torture. But actually advocating for torture?

Speaking from Brussels, writer Frank Barat, president of the Palestine Legal Action Network, told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour, "We either continue the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth war and more revenge-type of things that have led to nothing but more terrorism on the ground ... or we decide to stop and start to ask the tough questions that need to be answered." Barat continued: "It came out of radicalization through what's happening in Syria, which is actually key to understand the creation of [Islamic State]. What's happened in Syria in the last few years is a total betrayal, on the part of the Western world. People rising to fight its oppressor and the West sort of turning its back on them, allowing slaughter, this created so much anger, so much rancor."

Barat went on, "When you put this on top of the failure of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism, when you put this on top of the sort of ambitions of the West in terms of oil, in terms of trade routes and in terms of supporting dictators and Israel, it creates a powerful and very dangerous mixture that then manifests in the form of [Islamic State] or al-Qaida or any other terrorist organizations."

He suggested an alternate response: "In Norway, after the attacks of Anders Breivik in 2011, which killed more than 70 people, the prime minister of Norway said that Norway's response to terror would be more openness, greater political participation and more democracy. It's words we don't hear nowadays."

Across the Atlantic, President Barack Obama was making history with his state visit to Cuba. In a public address, he said, "I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas." Yet the official embargo against Cuba remains in place until the intransigent U.S. Congress votes to end it.

President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro held a joint news conference on Monday. "We continue, as President Castro indicated, to have some very serious differences, including on democracy and human rights," Obama said.

What kind of alternative does the United States show Cubans on that corner of their island, Guantanamo Bay, that the U.S. controls? There, the U.S government maintains its hellish military prison beyond the reach of U.S. laws, where hundreds of men have been held, most without charge, and many beaten and tortured. Ninety-one remain there. Thirty-six have long been cleared for release.

On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Maj. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, USMC (Ret.), submitted a statement. He was the officer tasked with building the current prison. He ran it for its first 100 days, and received its first prisoners. "Guantanamo was a mistake," Lehnert wrote. "History will reflect that. It was created in the early days as a consequence of fear, anger and political expediency. It ignored centuries of rule of law and international agreements. It does not make us safer, and it sullies who we are as a nation. That in over a decade we have failed to acknowledge the mistake and change course is unforgivable and ignorant."

The horror in Brussels is unforgivable. Few can deny, though, that some of the worst policies of the U.S. and its allies serve as recruitment tools for [Islamic State] and other groups. We need a uniform standard of justice. We can start by closing Guantanamo, and ensuring that torture is permanently purged from the policy prescriptions of those who would be president.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," goes a saying that is widely attributed to the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. In 1935, Lewis wrote a novel called "It Can't Happen Here," positing fascism's rise in the United States. We were taught that fascism was defeated in 1945, with the surrender of Germany and Japan in World War II. Yet the long shadows of that dark era are falling on the presidential campaign trail this year, with eruptions of violence, oaths of loyalty complete with Nazi salutes and, presiding over it all, Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," the 20th-century philosopher George Santayana wrote. He lived in Europe through both world wars, and witnessed Italian fascism firsthand. Fascism was the violent political movement founded by Benito Mussolini, who took control of Italy in 1922. Mussolini had his political opponents beaten, jailed, tortured and killed, and ruled with an iron fist until he was deposed as Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943. He was known as "Il Duce," or "The Leader," and provided early support to the nascent Nazi movement in Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s.

Why is this relevant today? It was Donald Trump who recently retweeted one of Mussolini's quotes: "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep." When NBC confronted Trump for retweeting the fascist's words, he replied, "Sure, it's OK to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. ... It's a very good quote, it's a very interesting quote."

If only the fascist comparisons were limited to his tweets. His rallies have become hotbeds of violent confrontations, consistently fanned by Trump's heated rhetoric from the podium. After a Black Lives Matter protester was kicked and punched at one of his rallies, Trump said, approvingly, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." At a rally in Las Vegas in February, after an anti-Trump protester disrupted the event and was escorted out, Trump bellowed: "You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks." He went on, "I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you that."

Weeks later, a protester was punched in the face at a Trump rally. Rakeem Jones, a 26-year-old African-American man, was being led out of a stadium event by security guards in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when John McGraw, a white Trump supporter, sucker-punched Jones in the face. The local sheriff's deputies then wrestled the man to the ground���not McGraw, who threw the punch, but Jones, the victim. The TV program "Inside Edition" interviewed McGraw immediately after the assault.

"The next time we see him, we might have to kill him," McGraw said. He was arrested the next day. Trump has personally pledged to pay the legal defense bills for any rally supporter charged with violence against protesters, including those of McGraw's. Trump also waffled when asked to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan and its onetime Grand Wizard, David Duke.

"Donald Trump shows a rather alarming willingness to use fascist themes and fascist styles. The response this gets, the positive response, is alarming," said Robert Paxton on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. Considered the father of fascism studies, he is professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University.

Paxton gave a short history of the rise of fascism in Germany: "In the election of 1924, [Hitler] did very poorly, for a marginal party. Then you have the Depression in 1929 and 1930. ... There's this huge economic crisis with tens of millions unemployed, and there's also a governmental deadlock. You cannot get any legislation passed." Paxton continued, "The German Weimar Republic really ceased to function as a republic in 1930, because nothing could be passed. ... So, between 1930 and 1933, President von Hindenburg ruled by decree. And the political elites are desperate to get out of that situation. And here's Hitler, who has more votes by this time than anybody else. He's up to 37 percent. He never gets a majority, but he's up to 37 percent. And they want to bring that into their tent and get a solid mass backing. And so ... they bring him in."

The partnership that the German elites forged with Hitler and his Nazi Party didn't work out quite the way they hoped. He took power by subterfuge and by force, arrested and killed his opponents, and plunged Europe into the deadliest war in human history.

Donald Trump is fanning the flames of bigotry and racism. He is exploiting the fears of masses of white, working-class voters who have seen their economic prospects disappear. Should the Republican nominating process end in a contested convention this summer in Cleveland, Trump told CNN Wednesday morning, "I think you'd have riots. I'm representing ... many, many millions of people."

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Sen. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Michigan, defeating Hillary Clinton ... and all the pollsters. Election statistician Nate Silver wrote that Sanders��� Michigan victory ���will count as among the greatest polling errors in primary history.��� Imagine if we had an election season without polls. Instead, the energy, investigation and money should be spent delving into candidates��� records, whether they���re a businessman like Donald Trump or they���re politicians like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This will lead to a better informed, more engaged electorate.

Why should it matter who our neighbors are voting for, or people who live across the state? Let each person make his or her decision on how to vote not on polling numbers, but on the actual positions staked out by the candidates. Primaries, caucuses and Election Day are the ultimate polls. These are the reliable numbers, hard data, on how actual, hopefully well-informed citizens voted. Then the pundits, rather than speculating on how imaginary voters might act, can discuss reality.

It is astounding that Bernie Sanders is where he is today. Look at the Tyndall Report���s summary of Campaign 2016 coverage. Andrew Tyndall has offered an independent daily analysis of the flagship evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC since the late 1980s. For the calendar year 2015, Tyndall writes, these networks produced more than 17 hours of reporting on the presidential campaigns. That���s over 1,000 minutes of national broadcast television airtime. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage.

Bernie Sanders received just 20 minutes. Hillary Clinton got 121 minutes of campaign coverage, six times the amount Sanders received. In one striking example of the disparate coverage, ���ABC World News Tonight��� aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Sanders.

The commercial networks have an inherent conflict of interest as well. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by the campaigns and by countless super PACs, buying advertising time to promote their candidate or issue. The more reporting the networks do, the less the candidates will feel the need to buy ad time to inform potential supporters of their positions. Since television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, this conflict of interest creates a major barrier to an informed public.

The primaries determine the candidates of the two major parties. Put aside for the moment that the almost absolute blackout on reporting on third parties all but guarantees that these candidates, whether from the Green Party or from the Libertarian Party, for example, will have almost no traction in the national elections. Voter turnout in this year���s primary elections has been historically high but, in a real sense, dismally low. The Pew Research Center reports that, in this year���s first 12 primaries, Republicans have turned out 17.3 percent of eligible voters, while Democrats have turned out 11.7 percent. These are record-high numbers, according to Pew, but consider just how low they are: More than 82 percent of Republicans and more than 88 percent of Democrats didn���t vote.

Certainly, new impediments to voting, like requirements to have specific forms of photo identification, decrease participation. Indeed, some argue, many new laws were designed specifically to deter participation of poor people and people of color in the electoral process, thus favoring Republican candidates. ���We always do well when the voter turnout is high,��� Sanders said at a large campaign rally on Tuesday night in Miami, before learning of his victory in Michigan, ���and we do poorly when the voter turnout is low.���

Networks generally have a policy of not releasing exit-polling data until polls close in order not to discourage voters from participating. Exit polls might indicate that a candidate is trailing or far ahead, and people might then feel that their vote wouldn���t make a difference. We should extend this policy to the entire election.

We need a vigorous debate in the country about war and peace, the growing inequality between the rich and the rest of us, about immigration, education, mass incarceration, racism and so much more. And we need an engaged electorate, empowered by information and enabled to vote. Our democracy demands no less.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Now that Super Tuesday is behind us and the field of presidential candidates is narrowing with the suspension of Dr. Ben Carson's campaign, a potentially paradigm-shattering general election looms ever closer. "The stakes in this election have never been higher," Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in her speech after she had been declared the victor over Sen. Bernie Sanders in seven of 11 Super Tuesday states. As Donald Trump, piling victory upon victory on top of insult upon insult, edges closer to clinching the Republican nomination, the GOP is in chaos, with some predicting a historic split in the party. The presidential race to date has been well-characterized by a line of closed captioning text from a recent Republican debate: "unintelligible yelling." The circuslike atmosphere masks deeply troubling statements made by several candidates that fan the flames of racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. It also deflects attention from a critical, and worsening, deficit in our democracy: the attack on the right to vote, and in particular, the wholesale disenfranchisement of close to 5 million Americans, mostly people of color.

Race has been a defining issue in the 2016 election season. On the Republican side, there are overtly racist statements by front-runner Donald Trump, railing against Mexicans as "rapists" and refusing to denounce the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke after Duke endorsed him. Trump said of an African-American protester who was attacked by Trump supporters at one of his rallies, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." Trump also is a proud retweeter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. When asked by NBC's Chuck Todd if he wanted to be associated with a fascist, Trump replied, "I want to be associated with interesting quotes."

Republicans fear that a Donald Trump candidacy will cost their party not only a shot at the White House, but also control of the Senate and House of Representatives. That is where the torrent of restrictive voting laws comes in. The American Civil Liberties Union has noted that 10 states will be implementing new restrictive voting laws that will impact up to 80 million voters, and could decide the assignment of 129 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win the election. Dale Ho of the ACLU writes, "These laws range from new hurdles to registration to cutbacks on early voting to strict voter identification requirements."

Denial of the right to vote for those who have been convicted of felonies is another way that voter participation is suppressed on a massive scale. With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Laws vary from state to state. Maine and Vermont actually allow prisoners to vote, but, as of 2014, according to The Sentencing Project, every other state and the District of Columbia have some form of disenfranchisement as a consequence of a felony. In 12 states, the right to vote is stripped permanently. That means even when people have served their sentence and paid their debt to society, they can never vote again. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming.

According to a 2002 study by sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, "If disenfranchised felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Democrat Gore would certainly have carried the state, and the election." The Sentencing Project, in a 2014 report, summarized, "Nationwide, one in every 13 black adults cannot vote as the result of a felony conviction, and in three states���Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia���more than one in five black adults is disenfranchised."

Ari Berman, author of "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," said on the "Democracy Now!" news hour: "More than 5 million Americans can't vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws. Voter disenfranchisement is another legacy of Jim Crow that we are still wrestling with today."

This is just one of the many devastating impacts of mass incarceration in the United States. And Republicans aren't the only ones responsible. That is why Black Lives Matter activists have been interrupting Democratic presidential campaign events. During a recent private fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Charleston, South Carolina, Ashley Williams held up a banner reading "We have to bring them to heel," a reference to controversial statements Hillary Clinton made in 1996 about some youth, whom she called "superpredators." Williams confronted Clinton, saying, "I am not a superpredator." She was quickly whisked away. On Super Tuesday, a young Somali-American woman confronted Clinton in Minneapolis about those same comments.

The struggle for racial justice and voting rights are inextricably linked. In this year's race for the White House, race is indeed central.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. ���Quite a birthday gift,��� Woodfox told us on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour, in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal-justice system.

Woodfox was in his early 20s when he was imprisoned for armed robbery in 1971. He was sent to the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, a sprawling prison complex with 5,000 prisoners, located in rural Louisiana on the site of a former slave plantation. It gets its name, ���Angola,��� from the country of origin of many of those slaves.

Conditions in Angola in 1971 were so violent and appalling that Woodfox, along with another prisoner, Herman Wallace, formed one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were charged with the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. No physical evidence linked the men to the crime. A bloody fingerprint at the murder scene, which matched neither Wallace���s nor Woodfox���s, was ignored by authorities. Robert King, another prisoner who joined their Black Panther chapter, was charged with a separate crime in the prison. The three were sent to solitary confinement, where they remained for decades, always maintaining they were innocent of the charges.

Albert Woodfox recalled those early days of organizing inside of Angola when we spoke with him just days after his release: ���The saddest thing in the world is to see a human spirit crushed. And that���s basically what happened with these young kids that was coming to Angola. And we decided that if we truly believed in what we were trying to do, then it was worth taking whatever measures necessary to try to stop this.���

Even back then, the Angola 3, as they became known, were well-aware of the potential impacts of solitary confinement. Woodfox recalled during our interview, ���When we were first put in CCR [closed cell restriction] in ���72, myself, Herman Wallace and Robert King, we knew that if we had any chance of maintaining our sanity and not allowing the prison system to break us, that we had to keep our focus on society and not become institutionalized.��� When I asked Woodfox what he read in prison, he told me, ���History books, books on Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin.���

A movement grew, globally, to free the Angola 3, with Amnesty International and other organizations calling for their release. Documentaries were made about the case. In one, the widow of Brent Miller joined the call, saying in 2010, ���These men, I mean, if they did not do this���and I believe that they didn���t���they have been living a nightmare for 36 years.���

Two major impediments to their freedom were prison warden Burl Cain and Louisiana Attorney General James ���Buddy��� Caldwell. Cain was the key decision-maker in keeping the men in solitary. In a 2008 deposition in Woodfox���s case, Cain admitted, ���I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism.��� And while Woodfox���s case was overturned on three separate occasions, with a federal judge ordering his release, Attorney General Caldwell insisted on repeatedly retrying the case. Cain resigned in December, facing state ethics violations and a criminal probe for business dealings during his reign as the longest-serving warden in Angola���s history. Caldwell lost re-election to fellow Republican Jeff Landry, who allowed Woodfox to leave prison on the condition that he plead ���no contest��� to manslaughter.

Woodfox squinted into the camera lens as he spoke on ���Democracy Now!.��� The years of confinement in a 6 by 9 foot cell had damaged his vision. He is proud of his activism. ���We���ve put this solitary-confinement issue before American people, before the people of the world, and it just started building,��� he said. ���It got to the point where it wasn���t just about the Angola 3, but it was about solitary confinement.���

Robert King was released in 2001, his conviction overturned after serving 29 years in solitary confinement. Herman Wallace was freed in 2013, only after a federal judge threatened to jail Cain if he refused to release him. Wallace died one day later of liver cancer. On Monday, we asked Albert Woodfox about his future plans: ���I���ve been locked up so long in a prison within a prison. So, for me, it���s just about learning how to live as a free person,��� he told us. ���I���m just trying to learn how to be free.���

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder���s successive emergency managers are now gone from Flint, but the wreckage of their rule there still pollutes many homes. The crisis in Flint is, on the surface, about water. In April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system, which it had used for more than 50 years, to the Flint River, ostensibly to save money. The Flint River water made people sick, and is likely to have caused disease that killed some residents. The corrosive water, left untreated, coursed through the city���s water system, leaching heavy metals out of old pipes. The most toxic poison was lead, which can cause permanent brain damage. The damage to the people of Flint, the damage to the children who drank and bathed in the poisoned water, is incalculable. The water is still considered toxic to this day.

The Flint debacle also is about democracy. As a team of us from the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour traveled to Flint last weekend to report on the crisis, we received a text message from a native son of that city, Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. ���Lead isn���t the poison in Michigan. Fascism is,��� Michael wrote. ���How do u toss a democratic election in the garbage and get away with it?���

Moore had just visited Flint to help organize a rally calling for the arrest of the governor. Rick Snyder ran for governor in 2010 as a fiscal conservative, and won in the tea-party wave of electoral victories that year. He pushed for a strengthened emergency-manager law, which would give him broader powers to take over city governments and school districts that were deemed (by a board that Snyder appointed) to be in a state of ���financial emergency.��� The governor could then appoint an emergency manager with sweeping powers, overriding elected city councils and mayors, imposing severe austerity measures, selling off public assets and breaking existing contracts with labor unions. He did this primarily in black communities.

���We don���t have just a water problem. We���ve got a democracy problem. We���ve got a dictatorship problem,��� Claire McClinton told me in Flint. She is a lifelong resident of the city, from a union family, and a lead organizer with the Democracy Defense League. She and her group were meeting just across the Flint city line at a restaurant in Flint Township, which never switched off the Detroit water. As they met, a woman approached them. Kawanne Armstrong was visibly upset, desperate to get clean water for her newborn grandson. Audrey Muhammad, one of those attending the meeting, offered her water that she had just bought for herself, which she had in her car. These two women, both, like 60 percent of Flint���s residents, African-American, walked into the bitter cold to move gallon jugs of water from one car trunk to another. ���It���s for my grandson. He was born February 6. ... That���s my concern,��� Armstrong told us.

We left that meeting and went to a Catholic church in Flint, where scores of people were preparing to head out, canvassing door to door to distribute water and water filters, and to assess the needs of each household. Union members from Detroit, social workers and plumbers from Ann Arbor, and many Flint residents were volunteering their time on a bitter-cold winter Saturday afternoon.

Last October, under enormous pressure, the governor was forced to switch Flint���s water back to the Detroit source, but the damage to the pipes has been done, and toxins continue to leach into the water. Melissa Mays was in the church, as a founder of Water You Fighting For, an activist group. ���All three of my sons are anemic now. They have bone pain every single day. They miss a lot of school because they���re constantly sick. Their immune systems are compromised,��� she told us. She, too, is sick. ���Almost every system of our bodies have been damaged.��� Despite her illness, she was out helping others.

The emergency manager is now gone, and the people of Flint have elected a mayor, Karen Weaver, who can actually represent them. She immediately declared a state of emergency, focusing national media attention on the crisis. She has demanded $55 million to jump-start the immediate repair of Flint���s water system. Gov. Snyder has countered with a fund of $25 million, and insists that it be spent on contractors of his choice���conditions that Weaver rejects. ���We���re going to get rid of these lead pipes one house at a time, one street at a time, one neighborhood at a time, until they are all gone,��� Mayor Weaver said. ���We cannot afford to wait any longer.���

Two parallel investigations, state and federal, are underway in an attempt to determine if any crimes have been committed. The first step to healing Flint has been taken, though: the restoration of democratic control. All else will flow, like water, from that.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Super Bowl 50 was perhaps the most political in pro football's history. Not for the game itself, but rather the remarkable halftime show with its powerful performance by musical superstar Beyonc��. This sporting extravaganza, more than any other, sits at the apex of U.S. commercialized sports and celebrity, with an estimated 110 million viewers around the world. Beyonc�� brought to that huge audience a tour de force of political song and dance that far outshined the game itself. The song she performed, "Formation," has already been heralded as an anthem of black power for a new generation, confirming for any who wondered that the Black Lives Matter movement endures, with renewed vigor.

Beyonc�� was not the headliner of the show. The top billing went to British band Coldplay, whose pop tunes from earlier years were saccharine in contrast to what followed. Amidst pyrotechnic explosions, clad in a black military-style jacket and fishnet stockings, Beyonc�� erupted into center field accompanied by about 25 backup dancers, African-American women dressed with similar outfits and black berets, evoking memories of the Black Panthers of the 1960s. Driving home the symbolism, her dancers formed into a large "X" on the field, as if to commemorate the black-power icon Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965.

The Super Bowl was on Feb. 7. Beyonc�� released the song on video the day before, and on Feb. 5, which would have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, the African-American high-school student killed by white vigilante George Zimmerman four years ago, Beyonc�����s husband, Jay Z, announced that his streaming music service, Tidal, would be donating $1.5 million to a foundation for distribution to a number of social-justice organizations that are inspired by or support the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"People should watch the video. There are more indelible images in the five minutes of this video than any Hollywood film I've seen in memory," sports journalist Dave Zirin told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. "It's radically audacious. ... This is a video that's rooted in Southern black experience, and it's not only about the Black Lives Matter movement, it is about hundreds of years of black women resisting state violence with a centered approach that's about mothers protecting their children and also about queer black women stepping up to be able to say, ���We are here. We matter, too.'"

The video of "Formation" includes images of a flooded city, reminiscent of New Orleans after Katrina, with Beyonc�� singing atop a partially submerged police car. The video ends with a camera panning to a wall graffitied with the words "Stop shooting us." Zirin lauded Zandria Felice Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Memphis, for her explanation of the imagery in the video: "Layered in and through the landscape of a black New Orleans still rigorous and delightful, past and present, the black southern signifiers and simulacra are unrelenting here," Zandria wrote in "New South Negress," her blog. Beyonc��, she continues, "becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space."

The Super Bowl was founded in 1966, the same year as the Black Panther Party. The championship game has thrived, growing to be the signature event of the NFL, which has annual profits estimated at more than $7 billion. The Black Panthers, conversely, were targeted by the FBI in its notorious COINTELPRO program, its members harassed, arrested, imprisoned and, in some cases, killed. COINTELPRO was the FBI's "counterintelligence program" that engaged in illegal activity under the direct supervision of the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover. This is the same program that sought to undermine Martin Luther King Jr. by manufacturing evidence of infidelity, then pressuring him to commit suicide to avoid embarrassment.

After Beyonc�����s groundbreaking performance, Black Lives Matter activists managed to give a handmade sign to several of her dancers. The sign read, "Justice 4 Mario Woods." A video and photo of the dancers holding the sign, with their fists upraised in the black-power salute, went viral. Mario Woods was an African-American resident of San Francisco who was shot and killed by San Francisco police on Dec. 2, 2015. Police claimed he was armed with a knife and lunged at them, a claim which was debunked by eyewitness cellphone video of the shooting. In response to community outrage after no charges were filed against any of the officers involved, the U.S. Justice Department is launching an "independent and comprehensive review."

Amidst the unrelenting commercial fanfare surrounding Super Bowl 50, a raw and undiluted expression of a powerful social movement made its way onto center field. Echoes of another era found artistic rebirth, reaffirming, in this election year, that Black Lives Matter.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Super Bowl 50 was perhaps the most political in pro football's history. Not for the game itself, but rather the remarkable halftime show with its powerful performance by musical superstar Beyonc��. This sporting extravaganza, more than any other, sits at the apex of U.S. commercialized sports and celebrity, with an estimated 110 million viewers around the world. Beyonc�� brought to that huge audience a tour de force of political song and dance that far outshined the game itself. The song she performed, "Formation," has already been heralded as an anthem of black power for a new generation, confirming for any who wondered that the Black Lives Matter movement endures, with renewed vigor.

Beyonc�� was not the headliner of the show. The top billing went to British band Coldplay, whose pop tunes from earlier years were saccharine in contrast to what followed. Amidst pyrotechnic explosions, clad in a black military-style jacket and fishnet stockings, Beyonc�� erupted into center field accompanied by about 25 backup dancers, African-American women dressed with similar outfits and black berets, evoking memories of the Black Panthers of the 1960s. Driving home the symbolism, her dancers formed into a large "X" on the field, as if to commemorate the black-power icon Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965.

The Super Bowl was on Feb. 7. Beyonc�� released the song on video the day before, and on Feb. 5, which would have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, the African-American high-school student killed by white vigilante George Zimmerman four years ago, Beyonc�����s husband, Jay Z, announced that his streaming music service, Tidal, would be donating $1.5 million to a foundation for distribution to a number of social-justice organizations that are inspired by or support the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"People should watch the video. There are more indelible images in the five minutes of this video than any Hollywood film I've seen in memory," sports journalist Dave Zirin told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. "It's radically audacious. ... This is a video that's rooted in Southern black experience, and it's not only about the Black Lives Matter movement, it is about hundreds of years of black women resisting state violence with a centered approach that's about mothers protecting their children and also about queer black women stepping up to be able to say, ���We are here. We matter, too.'"

The video of "Formation" includes images of a flooded city, reminiscent of New Orleans after Katrina, with Beyonc�� singing atop a partially submerged police car. The video ends with a camera panning to a wall graffitied with the words "Stop shooting us." Zirin lauded Zandria Felice Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Memphis, for her explanation of the imagery in the video: "Layered in and through the landscape of a black New Orleans still rigorous and delightful, past and present, the black southern signifiers and simulacra are unrelenting here," Zandria wrote in "New South Negress," her blog. Beyonc��, she continues, "becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space."

The Super Bowl was founded in 1966, the same year as the Black Panther Party. The championship game has thrived, growing to be the signature event of the NFL, which has annual profits estimated at more than $7 billion. The Black Panthers, conversely, were targeted by the FBI in its notorious COINTELPRO program, its members harassed, arrested, imprisoned and, in some cases, killed. COINTELPRO was the FBI's "counterintelligence program" that engaged in illegal activity under the direct supervision of the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover. This is the same program that sought to undermine Martin Luther King Jr. by manufacturing evidence of infidelity, then pressuring him to commit suicide to avoid embarrassment.

After Beyonc�����s groundbreaking performance, Black Lives Matter activists managed to give a handmade sign to several of her dancers. The sign read, "Justice 4 Mario Woods." A video and photo of the dancers holding the sign, with their fists upraised in the black-power salute, went viral. Mario Woods was an African-American resident of San Francisco who was shot and killed by San Francisco police on Dec. 2, 2015. Police claimed he was armed with a knife and lunged at them, a claim which was debunked by eyewitness cellphone video of the shooting. In response to community outrage after no charges were filed against any of the officers involved, the U.S. Justice Department is launching an "independent and comprehensive review."

Amidst the unrelenting commercial fanfare surrounding Super Bowl 50, a raw and undiluted expression of a powerful social movement made its way onto center field. Echoes of another era found artistic rebirth, reaffirming, in this election year, that Black Lives Matter.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, ���Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms ... the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.��� In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative ���(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.������ Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.

Michigan has one of the most severe ���emergency manager��� laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a ���financial emergency.��� Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.

In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint���s water source from Detroit���s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River. Flint residents immediately noticed discoloration and bad smells from the water, and experienced an array of health impacts, like rashes and hair loss. In October 2014, General Motors decided it would no longer use Flint city water in its plants, as it was corroding metal car parts. Later, trihalomethanes, a toxic byproduct of water treatment, were found in the water. Despite that, the water was declared safe by officials. At the same time, as revealed in an email later obtained by Progress Michigan, the state began shipping coolers of clean, potable water to the state office building in Flint. This was more than a year before Gov. Snyder would admit that the water was contaminated.

Ongoing activism by Flint residents whose children were sick attracted the involvement of water researchers from Virginia Tech, who found that 10,000 residents had been exposed to elevated lead levels. It took out-of-state researchers from Virginia to travel all the way to Michigan to conduct the comprehensive tests needed. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha then got involved. She is the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Children���s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan State University. She discovered an alarming connection between rising blood lead levels in Flint���s children with the switch to the Flint River as a water source.

���The percentage of children with elevated lead levels doubled in the whole city, and in some neighborhoods, it tripled,��� she told us on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour. ���And it directly correlated with where the water lead levels were the highest.���

Rather than going after the problem she identified, the state went after her. ���We were attacked,��� she recalled. ���I was called an ���unfortunate researcher,��� that I was causing near hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers, and that the state data was not consistent with my data. And as a scientist ... when the state, with a team of 50 epidemiologists, tells you you���re wrong, you second-guess yourself.��� Within weeks, state authorities were forced to admit she was right. Soon after, she was standing at the governor���s side, and has just been appointed to run a new public health initiative to help those exposed to the contamination.

A chorus of Flint residents and allies are demanding immediate action to ensure safe, clean water to the people of Flint. Many are calling for Gov. Snyder to resign, or even to be arrested. The FBI and the Justice Department are now investigating to see if any laws were broken. This week, the House held a hearing on the crisis, during which Houston Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee compared the poisoning of Flint residents to the 1978 mass suicide and murder in Jonestown, Guyana. There, cult leader Jim Jones ordered his 900 followers, 300 of them children, to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Those victims died instantly. In Flint, the tragedy will unfold over decades.

Amy Goodman is the host of ���Democracy Now!,��� a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of ���The Silenced Majority,��� a New York Times best-seller.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, ���Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms ... the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.��� In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative ���(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.������ Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.

Michigan has one of the most severe ���emergency manager��� laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a ���financial emergency.��� Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.

In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint���s water source from Detroit���s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River. Flint residents immediately noticed discoloration and bad smells from the water, and experienced an array of health impacts, like rashes and hair loss. In October 2014, General Motors decided it would no longer use Flint city water in its plants, as it was corroding metal car parts. Later, trihalomethanes, a toxic byproduct of water treatment, were found in the water. Despite that, the water was declared safe by officials. At the same time, as revealed in an email later obtained by Progress Michigan, the state began shipping coolers of clean, potable water to the state office building in Flint. This was more than a year before Gov. Snyder would admit that the water was contaminated.

Ongoing activism by Flint residents whose children were sick attracted the involvement of water researchers from Virginia Tech, who found that 10,000 residents had been exposed to elevated lead levels. It took out-of-state researchers from Virginia to travel all the way to Michigan to conduct the comprehensive tests needed. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha then got involved. She is the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Children���s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan State University. She discovered an alarming connection between rising blood lead levels in Flint���s children with the switch to the Flint River as a water source.

���The percentage of children with elevated lead levels doubled in the whole city, and in some neighborhoods, it tripled,��� she told us on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour. ���And it directly correlated with where the water lead levels were the highest.���

Rather than going after the problem she identified, the state went after her. ���We were attacked,��� she recalled. ���I was called an ���unfortunate researcher,��� that I was causing near hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers, and that the state data was not consistent with my data. And as a scientist ... when the state, with a team of 50 epidemiologists, tells you you���re wrong, you second-guess yourself.��� Within weeks, state authorities were forced to admit she was right. Soon after, she was standing at the governor���s side, and has just been appointed to run a new public health initiative to help those exposed to the contamination.

A chorus of Flint residents and allies are demanding immediate action to ensure safe, clean water to the people of Flint. Many are calling for Gov. Snyder to resign, or even to be arrested. The FBI and the Justice Department are now investigating to see if any laws were broken. This week, the House held a hearing on the crisis, during which Houston Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee compared the poisoning of Flint residents to the 1978 mass suicide and murder in Jonestown, Guyana. There, cult leader Jim Jones ordered his 900 followers, 300 of them children, to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Those victims died instantly. In Flint, the tragedy will unfold over decades.

Amy Goodman is the host of ���Democracy Now!,��� a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,300 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan, of ���The Silenced Majority,��� a New York Times best-seller.