Amy Goodman's Blog, page 15
November 6, 2013
Election 2013: A Grassroots Resurgence
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The cable news channels wasted no time before crowing over the landslide re-election victory of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. According to exit polls, Christie won a majority of both women and Latino voters, traditional Democratic voting blocs. The political chattering class is abuzz with Christie as the GOP’s great hope to retake the White House in 2016. But they miss a vital and growing undercurrent in U.S. politics: grassroots movements at the local and state level that are challenging the establishment, and winning.
Christie was expected to win, but he needed a major landslide to help him launch a 2016 presidential bid. That is where the special election came in. In June, Sen. Frank Lautenberg died at the age of 89. Christie ordered a special election to be held Oct. 16, three weeks before the general election. This decision cost the taxpayers of New Jersey an estimated $24 million in extra election costs. He could have let the voters decide the Senate race on the same day they voted for governor and everyone else, saving taxpayers millions.
Cory Booker was favored to win Lautenberg’s seat. For years, he had been the popular, African-American mayor of Newark and a rising star in the national Democratic Party. The Senate candidates would have been listed on the top of the ballot, since it was a federal office. Booker would likely have inspired a greater Democratic turnout on Election Day, and his position at the top of the ballot would likely have created a tendency for his voters to vote Democratic all the way down the ballot, hurting Christie. Without Booker on the ballot, Christie garnered a more substantial victory. When challenged about the cost, Christie boasted, “I don’t know what the cost is, and I quite frankly don’t care.”
What Christie and his party might care about are the substantial victories posted this election by progressive activists. In his own state, voters endorsed an increase in the minimum wage that Christie vetoed, raising it $1 an hour to $8.25, with annual cost-of-living increases.
Across the river in New York City, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor, the first Democratic mayor there in 20 years. “The challenges we face have been decades in the making, and the problems we set out to address will not be solved overnight,” he said in his victory speech. “But make no mistake, the people of this city have chosen a progressive path.” He supported Occupy Wall Street, got arrested protesting a hospital closure, and vows to raise city taxes on its wealthiest residents. De Blasio will start work as mayor alongside a supportive New York City Council, in what my “Democracy Now!” colleague Juan Gonzalez has called “perhaps its most progressive government in the past 50 years.”
Beyond New York and New Jersey, progressive populist movements bore fruit on Election Day. In Colorado, the state’s voters approved a plan to tax the retail sale of recreational marijuana, which was legalized statewide last November. The voters of Denver, Boulder and Littleton also approved city sales taxes on marijuana sales, further entrenching the shift from criminalizing pot to mainstreaming it. Three cities in that state also voted on banning hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fracking is the natural-gas drilling process that many believe pollutes groundwater and air, and even causes earthquakes.
October 30, 2013
The Rising Resistance to Obama’s Drone Wars
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
“I wasn’t scared of drones before, but now when they fly overhead I wonder, ‘Will I be next?’” That is the question asked by 8-year-old Nabila Rehman, from northwest Pakistan. She was injured in a drone attack a year ago, in her small village of Ghundi Kala. She saw her grandmother, Mamana Bibi, blown to pieces in the strike. Her brother Zubair also was injured. Their case has become the latest to draw attention to the controversial targeted killing program that has become central to President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and global war-making.
“We really just have a very simple message to the U.S.: How do you justify killing a grandmother? How does that make anyone safer?” Mustafa Qadri posed the question on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. Qadri authored a new Amnesty International report titled “‘Will I Be Next?’ U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan.”
Nabila and Zubair are unique among the growing number of drone-strike victims: They were able to appear before Congress, along with their father, Rafiq ur Rehman, to testify about the strike and the devastation it brought to their family. They are featured in a new documentary being released for free on the Internet this week, “Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars,” by Brave New Films. In it, Rafiq, a primary-school teacher, describes that day:
“People enjoyed life before the attacks. It was 2:45 on October 24th of 2012. After school finished I went into town to buy school supplies.” When he returned home, they told him his mother was dead. There was a crater where her garden was. She was picking okra with the children. “That’s where my mother was killed,” Rafiq continues. “My family has been destroyed since my mother was killed.” Nine children in all were injured, as this drone strike fit a typical pattern, with one initial strike, followed closely by another to hit the rescuers.
Before Congress, 13-year-old Zubair testified: “When the drone fired the first time, the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up. The air smelled poisonous. We ran, but several minutes later the drone fired again. People from the village came to our aid and took us to the hospital. We spent the night in great agony at the hospital, and the next morning I was operated on.”
Attacking rescuers is a war crime. Mustafa Qadri from Amnesty International explained: “For example, some laborers in a very impoverished village near the Afghanistan border, they get targeted, eight die instantly in a tent; those who come to rescue or to look for survivors are themselves targeted. In great detail, eyewitnesses, victims who survive, tell us about the terror, the panic, as drones hovered overhead. ... There’s a very high threshold for proving [war crimes]. With the secrecy surrounding the program, the remoteness of this area, we can only get the truth once the U.S. comes clean and explains what is the justification for these killings.”
October 23, 2013
Police Brutality, Mental Illness and ‘The Memphis Model’
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Elsa Cruz filed a federal lawsuit in New York this week, months after police shot her husband dead. Last May, Cruz called 911 asking for help with her husband, Samuel. She feared he hadn’t taken his medication while she was on vacation in her native country, the Philippines. Eight months, almost to the day, before Cruz was killed, not far away in Harlem, Hawa Bah called 911 to ask for medical help for her son, Mohamed. Rather than getting medical help, Mohamed Bah was confronted by the New York City Police Department. Within hours, he, too, was shot dead by police, hit eight times, once in the head. Mohamed’s sister, Oumou Bah, is suing the City of New York and unnamed police officers. While neither lawsuit will bring back the dead, they may prevent future deaths by forcing the New Rochelle Police Department and the NYPD to adopt an increasingly mainstream police practice for dealing with emotionally distressed people, called “The Memphis Model.”
In an exclusive interview Tuesday on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, I had the chance to interview Hawa Bah and Elsa Cruz. They were meeting each other in our studios for the first time.
Hawa Bah made annual visits to New York from the West African nation of Guinea to see her son, Mohamed. On her most recent visit, she was struck by Mohamed’s deteriorating condition. He had lost weight and had a cut above his eye. He was acting erratically. She suspected he was depressed, and wanted him to go to the hospital. Unable to convince him to go, she sought advice from friends, who suggested she call 911. She told me, “When I saw the police car, I see him, I say, ‘Hey, I don’t call police. I call an ambulance.’ He say, ‘No, ma’am, don’t worry. In New York here, when you call an ambulance, we will come first. We will look at the person and call an ambulance.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, he will be OK.’”
The NYPD never told Mohamed Bah that they were there at his mother’s request. Hawa Bah told me, “He didn’t tell Mohamed, ‘Your mom say go to the hospital.’ He just say, ‘Mohamed, open the door. I came for you.’” She begged the police to let her talk to her son. Her attorney Randolph McLaughlin explained what happened next: “They broke the door down, tasered, beanbagged and shot him eight times. The last bullet went into his head and had stippling around the entry wound, which says that that shot, which probably took his life, was at close range.”
Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.
October 17, 2013
Oil, Azerbaijan and the Strange Case of Rick Bourke
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Oil is the source of so much pain in the world. Around the globe, wherever oil is extracted, people suffer a constellation of injuries, from coups and dictatorship to pollution, displacement and death. Pipelines leak, refineries explode, tankers break up and deep-sea drill rigs explode. The thirst for oil disrupts democracies and the climate. Not far from the burgeoning fracking fields of Colorado, Frederic “Rick” Bourke sits in a minimum-security federal prison. His crime: blowing the whistle on corruption and bribery in the oil-rich region of the Caspian Sea.
October 9, 2013
Single-Payer Prescription for What Ails Obamacare
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
“We apologize for the inconvenience. The Marketplace is currently undergoing regularly scheduled maintenance and will be back up Monday 10/7/3013.” You read it right, 3013. That was the message on the homepage of the New York state health insurance exchange website this past weekend.
Yes, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare, is going through difficult birth pains, as the marketplace websites went live only to crash. The government is not giving out numbers, but informed observers speculate that very few people have succeeded in signing up for any of the plans so far.
The ACA rollout occurred as Republicans shut down the government in their attempt to defund Obamacare. But their strategy backfired. Had there been no shutdown, all of the attention would have been on the disastrous rollout. The fundamental issue, at the core of the health-care dispute, is typically ignored and goes unreported: The for-profit health-insurance industry in the United States is profoundly inefficient and costly, and a sane and sustainable alternative exists—single-payer, otherwise known as expanded and improved Medicare for all. Just change the age of eligibility from 65 to zero.
“When Medicare was rolled out in 1966, it was rolled out in six months using index cards,” Dr. Steffie Woolhandler told me Monday. “So if you have a simple system, you do not have to have all this expense and all this complexity and work.” Woolhandler is professor of public health at CUNY-Hunter College and a primary-care physician. She is a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, or PNHP. PNHP is an organization with 17,000 physicians as members, advocating for a single-payer health-care system in the U.S.
What is single-payer? Critics denounce it as “socialized medicine,” while ignoring that single-payer is already immensely popular in the U.S., as Medicare. A 2011 Harris poll found that Medicare enjoyed 88 percent support from American adults, followed closely by Social Security. Woolhandler explained that with a Medicare-for-all system, “you would get a card the day you’re born, and you’d keep it your entire life. It would entitle you to medical care, all needed medical care, without co-payments, without deductibles. And because it’s such a simple system, like Social Security, there would be very low administrative expenses. We would save about $400 billion [per year].” Dr. Woolhandler went on, rather than “thousands of different plans, tons of different co-payments, deductibles and restrictions—one single-payer plan, which is what we need for all Americans to give the Americans really the choice they want ... not the choice between insurance company A or insurance company B. They want the choice of any doctor or hospital, like you get with traditional Medicare.”
October 3, 2013
Herman Wallace, Free At Last
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
After close to 42 years in solitary confinement, Herman Wallace is free. Wallace is dying of liver cancer, with days if not hours to live at the time of this writing. In a stunning legal ruling, Judge Brian A. Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ordered Wallace’s release by overturning his 1974 murder conviction. As he lies dying, Herman Wallace knows that after a lifetime of enduring the torture of solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit, he is now a free man.
Herman Wallace is one of the “Angola 3,” along with Robert King, who was released from prison in 2001, and Albert Woodfox, who remains imprisoned in solitary confinement, despite having his sentence overturned on three separate occasions. These three men, all African-American, were locked up in what was considered America’s bloodiest prison, maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary, known simply as “Angola.” The sprawling prison is on the grounds of a former slave plantation, with 5,000 prisoners. It’s named for the African country of many of its earlier enslaved occupants. Prisoners toil in the prison’s fields, overseen by armed guards on horseback.
Wallace first went to prison for robbery. He, Woodfox and King formed one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party, organizing inmates to oppose the systemic violence and sexual slavery that pervaded the institution.
Wallace and Woodfox were then convicted of the 1972 murder of a young 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 fingerprints, was ignored by authorities. Wallace and Woodfox believe they were targeted by officials because of their organizing work. After their conviction in 1974, they were put in solitary confinement along with Robert King, who was being punished for another crime, also one that he did not commit.
September 26, 2013
Climate Change Protests Heat Up
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Last week, far out in the Arctic Ocean, the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise approached a Russian oil-drilling platform and launched a nonviolent protest, with several protesters scaling the side of the platform. They wanted to draw attention to a dangerous precedent being set. The platform, the Prirazlomnaya, owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom, is the first to begin oil production in the dangerous, ice-filled waters of the Arctic. The Russian government responded swiftly and with force, deploying special-forces soldiers, their faces masked by balaclavas, threatening the peaceful Greenpeace activists with automatic weapons, destroying their inflatable boats by slashing them, arresting 30 and towing the Greenpeace ship to the northern Russian port of Murmansk. At last report, the protesters faced a potential charge of piracy.
September 18, 2013
Americans Say No to Another Middle East War
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The likelihood of peace in Syria remains distant, as the civil war there rages on. But the grim prospect of a U.S. strike has been forestalled, if only temporarily, preventing a catastrophic deepening of the crisis there. The American people stood up for peace, and for once, the politicians listened. Across the political spectrum, citizens in the United States weighed in against the planned military strike. Members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, were inundated with calls and emails demanding they vote “no” on any military authorization.
The media credits Russian President Vladimir Putin with extending a lifeline to President Barack Obama, allowing him a diplomatic way to delay his planned attack. But without the mass domestic public outcry against a military strike, Obama would not have needed, nor would he likely have heeded, an alternative to war.
At center stage was Secretary of State John Kerry, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sept. 4. Antiwar activists from Code Pink sat silently behind him, their hands held high, painted red, symbolizing blood. Kerry asserted: “Now I remember Iraq. ... Secretary Hagel and I both voted in the United States Senate. Both of us are especially sensitive to never again ask any member of Congress to vote on faulty intelligence. And that is why our intelligence community took time, that’s why the president took time to make certain of the facts ... in order to scrub and rescrub the evidence and present the facts to the American people.”
Days earlier, Kerry used the phrase “we know” close to 30 times in his Aug. 30 case for war against Syria. “So now that we know what we know, the question we must all be asking is what we will do,” Kerry said, reminiscent of similar pre-war ramblings of Donald Rumsfeld, who actually said: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time,” Abraham Lincoln famously quipped, “but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” After 12 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands dead, tens of thousands maimed and trillions of dollars spent, the U.S. public won’t take the rehearsed oratory of an appointed official as sufficient grounds for war. Citizens of the United Kingdom weighed in, pushing their Parliament to vote against a military strike.
September 12, 2013
Kerry, Kissinger and the Other Sept. 11
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
As President Barack Obama’s attack on Syria appears to have been delayed for the moment, it is remarkable that Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting, on Sept. 11, with one of his predecessors, Henry Kissinger, reportedly to discuss strategy on forthcoming negotiations on Syria with Russian officials. The Kerry-Kissinger meeting, and the public outcry against the proposed attack on Syria to which both men are publicly committed, should be viewed through the lens of another Sept. 11 ... 1973.
On that day, 40 years ago, the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was violently overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. Gen. Augusto Pinochet took control and began a 17-year dictatorial reign of terror, during which more than 3,000 Chileans were murdered and disappeared—about the same number killed on that later, fateful 9/11, 2001. Allende, a socialist, was immensely popular with his people. But his policies were anathema to the elites of Chile and the United States, so President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state and national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, supported efforts to overthrow him.
Kissinger’s role in plotting and supporting the 1973 coup in Chile becomes clearer as the years pass and the documents emerge, documents that Kissinger has personally fought hard to keep secret. Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive has been uncovering the evidence for years, and has recently updated his book, “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” Kornbluh told me that Kissinger was “the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human-rights violations that followed.” He said that Kissinger “pushed Nixon forward to as aggressive but covert a policy as possible to make Allende fail, to destabilize Allende’s ability to govern, to create what Kissinger called a coup climate.”
The Pinochet regime was violent, repressive and a close ally of the United States. Pinochet formed alliances with other military regimes in South America, and they created “Operation Condor,” a campaign of coordinated terror and assassinations throughout Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Operation Condor even reached onto the streets of Washington, D.C., when, on Sept. 21, 1976, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. during the Allende government, Orlando Letelier, along with his assistant, a U.S. citizen named Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a car bomb planted by Pinochet’s secret police on Embassy Row, just blocks from the White House.
Eventually, under increasing global condemnation and growing internal, nonviolent resistance, the Pinochet regime was forced to hold a plebiscite, a national vote, on whether Pinochet would continue as Chile’s dictator. With a resounding “No!” the public rejected him, ushering in the modern, democratic era in Chile.
Read the rest of the column published at Truthdig.
September 5, 2013
Obama and Putin: Time For Diplomacy on Syria
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
“Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake. War begets war, violence begets violence.” So said Pope Francis, addressing the crowd on Sunday in the Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Square. He was speaking about the crisis in Syria, as President Barack Obama ramped up a planned military strike there. “I exhort the international community to make every effort to promote clear proposals for peace in that country without further delay, a peace based on dialogue and negotiation, for the good of the entire Syrian people,” the Pope said.
The distance from St. Peter’s Square to St. Petersburg, Russia, parallels the gulf between the pope’s hopes and the president’s plans. Obama, attending the G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, will lobby world leaders to support a military strike against Syria so that the United States is not acting alone. What a squandered opportunity for doubling down on diplomacy, with this global summit set in Russia, the Syrian regime’s main sponsor.
Diplomacy prospects were diminished from the outset, when Obama canceled a planned bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was to take place immediately after the G-20. Obama was enraged by Russia’s decision to grant temporary political asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. This G-20 meeting is the first major gathering of world leaders following Snowden’s revelations of massive spying by the United States. Many G-20 members have been targeted by the NSA’s myriad spy programs.
With the decision by the British Parliament against supporting the military strike (the first time the House of Commons voted against a prime minister’s request for military authorization in more than 150 years), Obama will be isolated in his quest. You could say he is up against a wall of “BRICS,” as the planned strike is opposed by the five member nations of the BRICS coalition: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
On the home front, President Obama surprised many when he said he would seek congressional approval to strike Syria, though he said he is not bound by its decision. Obama’s frontman for the effort is Secretary of State John Kerry. Before both the Senate and House Foreign Relations committees, Kerry made the case for a “limited” military authorization. One consistent concern voiced by congressional members of both parties is the possibility that U.S. troops would be drawn into the civil war.
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