Amy Goodman's Blog, page 8

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

In ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy, power derived from “demos,” the people. Well, the people of contemporary Greece have been reeling under austerity for five years, and have voted to put an end to it. In January, the anti-austerity Syriza Party was swept to power in national elections. Greece is a member of the so-called eurozone, the nations that joined together with a common currency back in 1999. Following the economic crash of 2009, the Greek economy was in shambles. In 2012, I interviewed economist and Syriza member Yanis Varoufakis, who is now Greece’s minister of finance, and is at the center of the current crisis in the eurozone.

Spain also has been wracked by the global recession, with 50 percent unemployment among young people. Bank foreclosures on homes are rampant, leaving people homeless but still required to pay the entire mortgage, leading to many suicides. In the midst of this financial ruin, a grass-roots movement grew, called by some “the Indignados,” the Indignant Ones. Thousands occupied a main square in Madrid, the Puerta del Sol, Gate of the Sun, demanding real democracy. Out of this grass-roots movement a political party was founded last May called “Podemos,” Spanish for “We Can.”

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

This week, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore released an order that no same-sex marriage licenses be granted in the state. He was responding to a decision by a federal district court that declared unconstitutional Alabama’s ban on gay marriage. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal of the ruling, the ban was legally overturned, and Alabama became the 37th state to allow marriage equality. That is, until Chief Justice Moore got involved. Now, the legality of same-sex marriage is in question, with some counties issuing marriage licenses, and some refusing.

Chief Justice Moore is a radical conservative, a strident evangelical Christian. Back in 2003, he made national headlines when he placed a massive granite block, on which were carved the Ten Commandments, inside the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. He defied a federal court order to remove the religious monument, and was removed from office. Despite being disgraced, he was re-elected in 2012. He recently suggested at an evangelical Christian event that the First Amendment only protects Christians, as, he claims, that was the religion of the nation’s founders. On the TV program “Good Morning America” earlier this month, he speculated what might follow were same-sex marriages allowed:

“Do they stop with one man and one man, or one woman and one woman, or do they go to multiple marriages? Or do they go with marriages between men and their daughters, or women and their sons?”

Defying Moore’s monumental intolerance, loving couples still wed in Alabama this week. The first couple to marry in Montgomery were Tori Sisson and Shante Wolfe, both of whom have adopted the surname Wolfe-Sisson. When I asked Tori how it felt to be the first couple married there after the Alabama ban was overturned, she said, “It feels like we need a nap.” (Watch their interview here.)

Shante explained their insistence on marrying in Alabama: “We said that we wouldn’t go anywhere else, because we work here, we pay our taxes here, and we’re not going to go to another state just to come back and our union not be recognized. We’ve had several people tell us, ‘Well, just go to New York, or just go somewhere else.’ But no, we had faith that Alabama would move in a positive direction. And it has.” Tori has been involved with organizing this historic victory, as the Alabama field organizer for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay and lesbian rights organization.

Inequality, racism, segregation. These injustices persist with remarkable tenacity.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

In January 2011, thousands gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, threatening for the first time the 30-year dictatorship of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Decades of suppressed dissent was finding an outlet in the streets and online as well. Six months earlier, in Alexandria, 28-year-old Khaled Saeed was dragged out of a cybercafe and beaten to death by police. Photos of his corpse, released by his family, went viral on the Internet, fomenting discontent. Wael Ghonim, an Internet engineer and activist, created a Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Saeed,” serving as a platform for hundreds of thousands to organize.

As the crowds swelled in Tahrir, the power of the Internet as a force for social change was being demonstrated hour by hour. In response, Mubarak shut down the Internet, as well as most cellphone service. Universal outcry forced him to turn it back on.

Which brings us to net neutrality: the fundamental notion that anyone on the Web can reach anyone else, that users can just as easily access a small website launched in a garage as they can access major Internet portals like Google or Yahoo. Net neutrality is the Internet’s protection against discrimination.

During the past two decades, as the Internet flourished and transformed our society, several major corporations have assumed dominant “gatekeeper” positions, threatening net neutrality. Among them, the large Internet service providers, or ISPs: AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast. These four phone and cable companies make massive, multi-billion-dollar profits while charging enormous fees and providing, at best, lackluster service.

In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission, under its then-chairman, Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, set forth principles for an “open Internet.” In practice, these favored those very corporations that profit from a regulatory “light touch.” Powell left office and became the head of the cable industry’s lobbying organization, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), demonstrating clearly the corrupt revolving door between federal regulators and the industries they are supposed to oversee.

Nearly 10 years later, President Barack Obama named Tom Wheeler, the former head of the NCTA, to lead the FCC. Wheeler was a major donor to Obama’s presidential campaigns. After a federal court struck down the “open Internet” rules, Wheeler announced that the FCC would be making new ones. Advocates for a free and open Internet were worried that this former lobbyist would end the Internet as we know it, handing the keys over to the major telecom and cable corporations.

This announcement sparked a massive protest movement. Led by organizations like Free Press and Public Knowledge, people camped out in front of the FCC for days. More than 4 million people commented on the rules, making this the largest response to any federal request for public comment in history.

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Click here to search the Democracy Now! online archive for our many reports about net neutrality.

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

PARK CITY, Utah—On March 21, 1915, a motion picture was screened for the first time inside the White House. President Woodrow Wilson sat down to watch D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” The film, considered one of the most nakedly racist of all time, falsifies the history of Reconstruction, depicting African Americans, freed from slavery, as dominant, violent and oppressive toward Southern whites. Wilson said of the film, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The film would serve as a powerful recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan.

One hundred years later, another film was screened at the White House, this time at the invitation of the first African-American president. The film was “Selma.” The film’s director, Ava DuVernay, watched it with the First Couple. I met DuVernay here at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where, in 2012, she was the first African-American woman to win the festival’s Best Director award, for an earlier film. We sat down for an interview at Sundance Headquarters, where she recounted her feelings after the screening: “It was beautiful to be in the White House in 2015 with a film like ‘Selma,’ knowing that in 1915 the first film to ever unspool at the White House was ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”

“Selma” is the story of one of the key moments in the civil-rights movement, the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, best remembered for “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, when the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was violently attacked by Alabama State Police. A young John Lewis, then a leader of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and now a long-standing member of Congress, was one of the march organizers. Police beat and bloodied him, fracturing his skull. DuVernay’s film puts that march into historical context. Said DuVernay: “‘Selma’ is a story of justice and dignity. It’s about these everyday people. That’s what I loved about it. ... It’s about the power of the people.”

The story is also about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who played a central role in organizing the marches that followed Bloody Sunday. DuVernay told me: “There’s been no major motion picture released by a studio, no independent motion picture, in theaters, with King at the center, in the 50 years since these events happened, when we have biopics on all kinds of ridiculous people. And nothing on King? No cinematic representation that’s meaningful and centered. So, it was just something I couldn’t pass up.”

“Selma” gained national attention, not only because the film is an Oscar nominee for best picture, but also because DuVernay was not nominated for best director, prompting a furor on social media under the Twitter hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite.” A 2012 survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times found Oscar voters are 94 percent white and 76 percent male, and the average age is 63 years old.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

“Imagine if we did something different.”

Those were just six words out of close to 7,000 that President Barack Obama spoke during his State of the Union address. He was addressing both houses of Congress, which are controlled by his bitter foes. Most importantly, though, he was addressing the country. Obama employed characteristically soaring rhetoric to deliver his message of bipartisanship. “The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong,” he assured us.

From whose lives has the shadow of crisis passed? And for whom is this Union strong?

“Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?” Obama asked. “Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?”

Oxfam, the international anti-poverty organization, weighed in on the question, releasing a report the day before the speech called “Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More.” Oxfam analyzed data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014 and the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires to determine some shocking facts about global inequality.

First, it found that, as of 2014, the 80 richest individuals in the world are wealthier than the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population. This bears repeating: The 80 wealthiest people, a group that could fit on a bus, control more wealth than 3.5 billion people. The wealthy are not only accumulating more wealth, but they are getting it faster. Between 2009 and 2014, Oxfam reports, the wealth of those 80 richest people in the world doubled. This, while the rest of the world was mired in the Great Recession, with rampant unemployment and people’s life savings wiped out. If current trends continue, Oxfam notes, by 2016 the richest 1 percent of the world’s population will control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent.

One way the wealthy manage to increase their wealth, Oxfam reports, is through lobbying. The report identifies two industries, finance/insurance and pharmaceutical/health care, as major sources of wealth for the richest, and as principal founts of political contributions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by these industries annually to shape public policy and safeguard profits.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and the subsequent killing of a policewoman and mass murder at the Hyper Cachet kosher market, shocked the world. Young fanatics with automatic weapons unleashed a torrent of violence and death, fueled by zealous intolerance. At the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satiric newsmagazine, 12 were murdered and 11 wounded. The victims were guilty of nothing more than expressing ideas. Certainly, true to the point of satire, many of the ideas were very offensive to many people — in this case, caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

In the wake of the violence, people from around the world expressed solidarity with the victims, and with the people of France. Among the world leaders who flocked to Paris to condemn the attacks were some of the worst perpetrators of repression of journalists, all too often Arab and Muslim journalists.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

This week marks the 13th anniversary of the arrival of the first post-9/11 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, the most notorious prison on the planet. This grim anniversary, and the beginning of normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, serves as a reminder that we need to permanently close the prison and return the land to its rightful owners, the Cuban people. It is time to put an end to this dark chapter of United States history.

“The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable,” President Barack Obama wrote nearly six years ago, in one of his first executive orders, on Jan. 22, 2009. Despite this, the prison remains open, with 127 prisoners left there after Kazakhstan accepted five who were released on Dec. 30. There have been 779 prisoners known to have been held at the base since 2002, many for more than 10 years without charge or trial. Thanks to WikiLeaks and its alleged source, Chelsea Manning, we know most of their names.

Col. Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor in Guantánamo from 2005 to 2007. He resigned, after an appointee of George W. Bush overrode his decision forbidding the use of evidence collected under torture. Davis later told me, “I was convinced we weren’t committed to having full, fair and open trials, and this was going to be more political theater than it was going to be justice.” Obama did create a special envoy for Guantánamo closure, although the person who most recently held the position, Cliff Sloan, abruptly resigned at the end of December without giving a reason. In a just-published opinion piece in The New York Times, Sloan wrote, “As a high-ranking security official from one of our staunchest allies on counterterrorism (not from Europe) once told me, ‘The greatest single action the United States can take to fight terrorism is to close Guantánamo.’”

The United States has imposed a crushing embargo against Cuba for more than half a century, ostensibly to punish the small country for its form of governance. What kind of alternative does the United States show Cubans on that corner of their island that the U.S. controls? A 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.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

It has been just over 50 years since U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry released the groundbreaking report, “Smoking and Health.” The report concluded, “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.” The tobacco industry intensified its campaign to defend smoking, funding bogus groups and junk science. Now, a similar war on the truth is being waged by the fossil-fuel industry to deny the science of climate change.

“Doubt is our product,” states a 1969 memo from the tobacco giant Brown and Williamson, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” Brown and Williamson was a member of “Big Tobacco,” along with Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard Tobacco Company, U.S. Tobacco, Liggett Group, and American Tobacco. In 1994, the CEOs of these seven companies lied before Congress, claiming that nicotine was not addictive—even though secret research conducted by their corporations proved they knew otherwise. The image of the seven executives with their right hands in the air, swearing an oath to tell the truth, became an iconic image of a deceitful, deadly industry.

By the mid-1990s, states began suing tobacco companies to recover the billions of dollars they were spending to care for smoking-related illnesses. By November 1998, the cases had been settled under the “Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement,” in which the companies agreed to pay to the states $206 billion over 25 years. They also agreed, importantly, to stop marketing tobacco products to children. Much of the settlement has been spent to educate the public, especially children, about the life-threatening impacts of smoking.

In 1999, the federal government filed a lawsuit against Big Tobacco under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The Justice Department alleged that “defendants have engaged in and executed—and continue to engage in and execute—a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes.” Despite these domestic legal losses, Big Tobacco still thrives globally, using mechanisms like the World Trade Organization to defeat anti-smoking measures in other countries as impediments to “free trade.” And they are still researching ways to hook new smokers on nicotine, most recently with e-cigarettes.

Today, the fossil-fuel industry creates a smoke screen of doubt, just like Big Tobacco. Greenpeace USA published a report in 2013, “Dealing in Doubt,” that maps out the history of the climate-denial industry, with its key participants and its funders. Interestingly, there is a direct link between Big Tobacco and the climate deniers. Many of the older climate science denialists got their start as hired guns for Big Tobacco, arguing against the threats posed by secondhand smoke.

Click here to read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Mark Udall, the outgoing Democratic senator from Colorado, may be a lame duck, leaving office in less than a week. But his most important work in the Senate may still be before him. For the week he remains in office, he still sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He worked on that committee’s epic, 6,700-page, still-secret report, the “Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” otherwise known as the torture report. The intelligence committee has recently released a heavily redacted declassified executive summary of the report, in which new, gory details of the torture conducted during the Bush/Cheney administration have been made public for the first time.

Udall is angry about the U.S. torture program. He is angry about the heavy redaction of the executive summary, and the CIA and White House interference in the intelligence committee’s oversight work. He wants the full report made available to the public. While it is still secret, Udall could release the classified document in its entirety. To understand how, it helps to go back to 1971, the release of the Pentagon Papers and a senator from Alaska named Mike Gravel.

The Pentagon Papers were a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, written on the orders of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the analysts who worked on the project, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Ellsberg told me, “There were 7,000 pages of top-secret documents that demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates [including me] who had participated in that terrible, indecent fraud over the years in Vietnam, lying us into a hopeless war.”

The New York Times published its first Pentagon Papers story on June 13, 1971. A federal court then ordered The New York Times to cease publication, so Ellsberg sought a sympathetic U.S. senator who could enter the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. This would also make all the papers available to the public in their raw form, not just the excerpts selected by the Times and other papers. Ellsberg found Mike Gravel.

Gravel was opposed to the war in Vietnam. He had filibustered on the floor of the Senate to block the draft. Ellsberg had given a copy of the papers to Ben Bagdikian, an editor at The Washington Post, on the condition that he give a copy to Sen. Gravel. Bagdikian met Gravel at midnight and transferred the papers from the trunk of one car to another outside The Mayflower Hotel. In order to enter these classified documents into the Congressional Record, Gravel found a loophole, which he recalled to me recently on the “Democracy Now!” news hour:

“Since I was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, I could convene that subcommittee based upon the precedence of the House Un-American Activities Committee calling meetings on the fly as they went around the country to entrap people to testify. We called a meeting. ... By this time, it was 11:00-ish [p.m.]. And we were able to get a congressman from New York, [John G.] Dow, who came forward and testified. He wanted a federal building in his district. And I said that, ‘Well, I can appreciate that, and I’d be happy to authorize building a federal building in your district, but we don’t have the money. And the reason why we don’t have the money is because we’re squandering it in Southeast Asia, and let me read something about how we got into that mess.’ And so I proceeded to read the Pentagon Papers.”

Exhausted, emotional and unsure of the legal consequences of his actions, Gravel began reading into the record the horrors of the Vietnam War contained in the Pentagon Papers, then broke down in tears. While he couldn’t continue reading, it didn’t matter: Since he had read a portion of the entire document, the rest could be submitted to the public record. The efforts to get the Pentagon Papers to the public were not over, though. Gravel tried to have them published by Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association church, and the Nixon administration did everything they could to stop it, almost destroying the church. The multi-volume set would eventually come out, with Gravel’s face on the cover.

Dick Cheney was asked recently on “Meet the Press” about the use of torture. He said, “I would do it again in a minute.” Really? Waterboarding? Death by hypothermia or beating? Rectal feeding? Sleep deprivation? Maybe the former vice president would like torture to continue. But it is not up to him. It is up to the American people. And for that, they need information.

That’s where Sen. Mark Udall comes in. He can release the full torture report. As a sitting senator, he is protected by the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. He cannot be prosecuted. Mike Gravel has advice for Mark Udall. Since the secret report is already in the Congressional Record, Gravel says: “What he has to do is ... take this record of 6,000 pages, put a press release describing why he’s doing it, and release it to the public. It’s that simple."

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

The failed United States policy against Cuba, which has for more than half a century stifled relations between these neighboring countries and inflicted generations of harm upon the Cuban people, may finally be collapsing. On Wednesday morning, we learned that Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor convicted in Cuba for spying, had been released after five years in prison. Another person, an unnamed Cuban imprisoned in Cuba for 20 years for spying for the U.S., was also released. This has made global headlines. Less well explained in the U.S. media are the three Cubans released from U.S. prisons. They are the three remaining jailed members of the Cuban Five. The Cuban Five were arrested in the late 1990s on espionage charges. But they were not spying on the United States government. They were in Miami, infiltrating Cuban-American paramilitary groups based there that were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Cuban government.

By noon Wednesday, President Barack Obama made it official—this was not just a simple prisoner exchange: “Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba. ... I’ve instructed Secretary [of State John] Kerry to immediately begin discussions with Cuba to re-establish diplomatic relations that have been severed since January of 1961.”

It was President Dwight Eisenhower who severed relations with Cuba, on Jan. 3, 1961, two years after Fidel Castro took power. President John F. Kennedy then expanded the embargo. Months after Kennedy took office, the CIA invasion of the Bay of Pigs, intending to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, went awry. It is universally considered one of the greatest military fiascos of the modern era. Scores were killed, and Cuba imprisoned more than 1,200 CIA mercenaries.

Cuba became a flash point, most notably as the Soviet Union attempted to place short-range nuclear missiles on the island, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This episode is widely considered the closest that nations have come to all-out nuclear war. The U.S. also tried to assassinate Castro. While the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee identified eight such attempts, Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuban counterintelligence, uncovered at least 638 assassination attempts.

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