Amy Goodman's Blog, page 4

This Thanksgiving, No Place for Refugees at the American Table

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, there has been a crushing backlash against refugees from the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. A cartoon has been circulating on social media showing a Native American man greeting a Pilgrim, saying, ���Sorry, but we���re not accepting refugees.��� As Americans prepare for one of the most popular national holidays, Thanksgiving, which commemorates the support and nourishment provided by the indigenous people to English refugees seeking a better life free from religious persecution, a wave of xenophobia is sweeping the country.

In the U.S. Congress, no less than six separate bills have been put forward to block any federal funding to resettle refugees from Syria or Iraq, and to empower states to deny entry into their ���territory.��� Imagine if all of a sudden we had 50 ���statelets��� creating their own border checkpoints, stopping all travelers, looking for anyone suspicious, i.e., any and all Syrians. So far, 31 state governors have essentially demanded this. Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback issued an executive order forbidding any agency of state government from cooperating in any way with Syrian refugee support efforts. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have called for a pause in the Syrian refugee program, with the support of Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer.

In Europe, similar policies are being proposed, with an announcement from Poland that it would pull back from the Europe-wide commitment to take in Syrian refugees. Far-right-wing parties in France and Holland have gained traction with their anti-immigrant rhetoric as well.

���It���s both morally reprehensible and factually wrong to equate these people with terrorists,��� Peter Bouckaert told us on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour. Bouckaert is the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, and has spent the past few months in the Balkans and Greece, closely monitoring the refugee crisis firsthand. ���They���re actually fleeing from the terrorists, and they���ve faced horrors of war in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan. Many of them are coming with their families, trying to bring them to safety and a better future in Europe. And they should be welcomed. They will contribute to our society, and they have a right to asylum,��� he said.

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Even War Has Rules

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

No one disputes that the United States military attacked a hospital in the city of Kunduz, Afghanistan, in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, Oct. 3. The airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders facility, the Kunduz Trauma Center, was devastating, with at least 30 people killed. Patients in the only intensive-care unit in the region were burned to death in their beds. Medical staffers were killed by shrapnel bombs that tore off their limbs. At least one person was decapitated. As people fled the burning building, the U.S. AC-130 gunship slaughtered them from above with automatic fire. Doctors and other medical staff were shot while running to reach safety in a different part of the compound.

The Kunduz Trauma Center had been in the same place, performing thousands of surgeries and treating tens of thousands of people in the emergency room, for four years. Doctors Without Borders, known internationally by its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, had repeatedly provided the exact GPS coordinates of the hospital complex to U.S. and Afghan government officials. ���As a precondition of opening the hospital, we negotiated with both the U.S., Afghan, NATO, as well as opposition forces, with the Taliban. We received the support of all of those groups to operate this hospital,��� Jason Cone, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders USA, told us on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour. ���Part of that was sharing our GPS coordinates with the various parties. We shared them as recently as September 29th.���

Sept. 29 was an important day in Kunduz. Battles for control of the city had been raging since April. On Sept. 28, a Taliban force reported to be only 500 strong routed 7,000 Afghan National Army troops, capturing Kunduz. This was the first major city that the Taliban had taken since the U.S invasion and occupation began in October 2001, when the Taliban were driven from power. MSF knew that the front line of the conflict had come to their door, and that there would be many more casualties flooding the hospital. ���It was probably the most well-lit structure in the entire city of Kunduz, which has about 300,000 people in it, because we were running generators that night,��� Cone said.

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It’s Always the Same War

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

���To understand the nature of the present war ��� for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war ��� one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive.���

��� ���1984,��� by George Orwell

Barack Obama originally ran for president as the anti-war candidate. Now, as his second term winds down, the two George W. Bush/Obama wars are winding up, with a third in Syria. U.S. military forces are deployed elsewhere around the globe, as in drone striking in Yemen and Somalia, adding to the global conflagration. The United States is engaged in endless war.

The crisis of war and the millions fleeing these infernos has reached levels unprecedented since World War II, prompting the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to issue what they called an ���unprecedented joint warning��� for states to end wars, respect international law and aid the 60 million refugees made homeless from recent conflicts.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: ���The continuing violence is a clear indication that a political solution to the conflict in Syria is desperately needed. The fighting must stop now. There is no military solution to the crisis, not in Syria or anywhere else. From Afghanistan to the Central African Republic, from Ukraine to Yemen, combatants and those who control them are defying humanity���s most basic rules.���

ICRC President Peter Maurer added: ���When humanitarian law and principles are disregarded, when humanitarian needs are trumped by political agendas, when access to the wounded and sick is denied, and when security concerns lead to a suspension of operations, people are abandoned, the notion of protection loses its meaning, and humanity is flouted. We ask that states reaffirm our shared humanity by concrete action and uphold their responsibility to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law.���

The joint plea of these leaders came shortly after U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter mentioned that the U.S. military would be engaging in ���direct action��� in Iraq and Syria. White House press secretary Josh Earnest confirmed in a briefing that troops had been deployed to Syria. He said, ���The president did make a decision to intensify that support by offering a small number of U.S. special operations military personnel to offer them some advice and assistance on the ground as they take the fight to ISIL.���

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Storming the Bastille at the Paris Climate Summit

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

World leaders will gather in Paris in just one month to hammer out a treaty to confront the global threat of climate change. It���s real, growing and, based on increasing scientific consensus, clearly caused by human activity. Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been dumping pollutants into the sky as if the atmosphere is a bottomless pit, able to absorb an infinite amount of our smoke and exhaust. These greenhouse gasses have been forming a blanket around the planet, trapping the heat of the sun.

The signs of the crisis are everywhere: 2015 is on course to be the hottest in recorded history. Hurricane Patricia plowed into Mexico last week as the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. It wasn���t only the power of Patricia, but the speed with which the hurricane formed, almost overnight transforming from a tropical storm.

In the Persian Gulf, scientists reported this week that ���certain population centers ... are likely to experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans owing to the consequences of increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.��� In other words, in cities like Doha in Qatar and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the daily high temperatures will simply be too hot for people to survive outside for more than a few hours at a time. In the polar regions, ice is melting at unprecedented rates, and the ocean is warming, causing the water to expand. Both phenomena are causing the sea level to rise, already impacting small island nations like Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Hundreds of millions of people will eventually have to flee the world���s coastal cities, scientists predict.

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Mississippi Yearning: Students Hope to Remove an Old and Odious Symbol

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Four months have passed since the massacre in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., left nine peaceful parishioners dead. Those bullets allegedly fired by white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof murdered many, but they may also have shot the roof off the Confederacy. Within days of the shooting, Confederate flags were taken down from the Alabama state capitol grounds. They disappeared from the shelves and websites of vendors like Wal-Mart, Amazon and Etsy. After 10 days, African-American activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole outside the South Carolina Statehouse, pulled down the flag and was quickly arrested. While the flag was put right back up, it almost took two more weeks for the Republican-controlled South Carolina Legislature to pass a bill, which was then signed into law by the state���s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, removing the battle flag of the Confederacy once and for all from South Carolina���s Statehouse grounds. It had flown there, either on the capitol dome or, later, beside the capitol at the Confederate war memorial, since 1961.

As Roof languishes in prison, awaiting trial on both federal and state felony charges, the movement that was sparked by the massacre continues to grow. Most recently, students at the University of Mississippi in Oxford have been organizing to force the removal from campus of the state flag of Mississippi. That state flag, alone among the 50, retains the actual design of the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. In the upper-left corner of the flag, this symbol of racist violence and secession still flies proudly.

On Tuesday night, the University of Mississippi���s Associated Student Body (ASB) voted on a resolution put forth by one of that group���s senators, a white student named Allen Coon, president of the University of Mississippi College Democrats, to remove the flag. The resolution passed by a vote of 33 to 15, with one abstention. I asked Coon why he took on the issue of the Mississippi state flag:

���After the tragic events in Charleston, there���s been this national movement to address Confederate iconography,��� he told me. ���Our campus is steeped in symbols of the Confederacy and symbols of white supremacy. I felt we ought to utilize this momentum to address these symbols. So, in late September, I contacted my allies in the NAACP on campus, and we decided to form a coalition and challenge ASB to take a stand.���

The resolution was supported by the campus NAACP, whose chapter president, Dominique Scott, told me, ���We want to institutionalize inclusion here at the university.��� The University of Mississippi was at the center of the civil-rights movement. In 1962, James Meredith became the first African-American to enroll there as a student, eight full years after the U.S. Supreme Court formally overturned all school segregation laws. President John F. Kennedy deployed the military to keep order; white segregationists rioted when Meredith entered the campus.

Even the university���s name is freighted with racism. The University of Mississippi is popularly referred to as ������Ole Miss.��� Scott explained the history of the nickname:

���Historically, the term ���Ole Miss��� is a term that slaves used to refer to the mistresses or matriarchs of their plantations. When the school was deciding on [its] nickname, one woman was quoted saying that ���Ole Miss���... used to refer to the mistress of their plantations. When the vote was passed to use the term ���Ole Miss,��� the runner-up was ���Ole Massa.��� The term is steeped within a history of white supremacy and racial oppression.���

Racism is still all too present on campus. As Scott recalled, ���In 2013, three individuals placed a noose around the neck of the James Meredith statue with the old Georgia state flag. They shouted racial slurs and ���white power,��� in a way to intimidate black students on campus.��� At the rally on campus to support the ASB resolution to remove the flag, a group of white supremacists staged a counter-rally, carrying the Confederate flag and shouting racist slogans.

University officials say they are proud of the stand the students are taking. But, as a state institution, the university says it is bound to fly the official state flag, though they encourage the state government to change it. Scott finds the official stance ���cowardly.��� Already, at least three other universities in Mississippi have taken down the flag, along with the cities of Greenwood and Oxford. Jackson, the state capital, is expected to follow soon. Allen Coon seconded the concern: ���It���s a nonbinding resolution ... the senior leadership of the university has the opportunity to listen to our voices, but we���ve been receiving indications that they may not necessarily take the flag down. ... We may have to do more.���

Education is a two-way street. The chancellor of the University of Mississippi should learn from his students: take the flag down now.

Casino Capitalism: Democrats and Republicans Gamble With Democracy

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

���We are live at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas!��� So opened the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 electoral season���that���s right, in a Las Vegas casino.

Five Democrats were given space on the stage at the casino: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Maryland Gov. Martin O���Malley, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. CNN, the network that hosted the debate, had a sixth podium at the ready, hoping that Vice President Joe Biden would jump into the ring in time to give its ratings a boost. He declined.

Democratic candidate Larry Lessig was available to use the extra podium, but he was banned from participating. Lessig is a Harvard professor and public intellectual who is running for president as a Democrat on a single-issue platform: the removal of money from politics. According to his campaign, Lessig raised $1 million in 28 days from close to 10,000 people, earned the support of voters from across the political spectrum, won 1 percent in the first national poll that his campaign conducted and spoke at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention with the other presidential candidates. Yet the Democratic National Committee has consistently ignored his candidacy. Chafee, by comparison, raised just under $28,000 in the first half of 2015.

Bernie Sanders has been the surprise candidate this year, attracting record-breaking crowds at campaign events, raising tens of millions of dollars in small donations and consistently rising in the polls against Clinton. He is a self-described socialist, which CNN���s debate moderator, Anderson Cooper, made an issue of from the start: ���You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?���

Sanders does not shy from the label: ���We���re going to win, because, first, we���re going to explain what democratic socialism is ... it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, that it is wrong today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.���

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Grace Lee Boggs: A Century of Grass-Roots Organizing

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Grace Lee Boggs died this week at the age of 100. ���She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,��� said her friends and caretakers, Shea Howell and Alice Jennings. Grace Lee Boggs was not only a grass-roots organizer, but a philosopher, a teacher and a revolutionary. She devoted her life to empowering the poor, the working class and communities of color, and was deeply involved with a constellation of movements, from civil rights and black power to labor, environmental justice and feminism. She lived for more than 60 years in Detroit, and witnessed that city transform from the world capital of the automobile industry, through social protest and unrest in the 1960s, to the post-industrial era, where, behind the crumbling facade of empty factories, myriad experiments in urban renewal and local self-reliance are incubating.

���You don���t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be, and you do choose how you want to think,��� she told a group of undergraduates in the film about her life, ���American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.��� This remarkable woman lived that credo for a full century.

Grace Lee Boggs was born in 1915, the child of Chinese immigrants, above the family���s restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. By 16, she was at Barnard College, and by the age of 25 had her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. I asked her how she became an activist:

���In those days, even department stores would come out and say, ���We don���t hire Orientals,������ she told me. With her doctorate in hand, she moved to Chicago, where, she said, ���I got a job in the philosophy library for $10 a week ... it wasn���t enough to get a place to live, other than [a] basement, rent-free. I had to face down a barricade of rats in order to get to the basement. That made me rat-conscious, made me join a tenants��� committee against rat-infested housing, which brought me into contact with the black community for the first time in my life, and enabled me to become part of the March on Washington movement organized by A. Philip Randolph.���

We should thank those Chicago rats for spurring her to action. The ���March on Washington��� she mentioned was not the well-known march from 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous ���I Have a Dream��� speech, but rather the 1941 March on Washington. The renowned labor leader A. Philip Randolph, along with the gay, black pacifist Bayard Rustin, both of whom would later lead the famous 1963 march, organized a similar march two decades earlier. In 1940, they saw that domestic war production was lifting hundreds of thousands of white workers out of the prolonged poverty of the Great Depression, but, as most production plants were segregated, was leaving black workers behind. The movement they built forced President Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the plants involved in building the arms for World War II. This helped spur the great migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrial cities of the North.

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No Papal Bull: Francis Hails Peace and the Activists Who Fight for It

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Pope Francis has left the building. His first trip to the United States created news at every turn.

On Thursday, Sept. 24, Pope Francis made his historic address to the joint session of Congress, the first time for a pope. When dealing with refugees, he said, ���Let us remember the Golden Rule: ���Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.������ To that assembly of lawmakers, a majority of whom support capital punishment, he called for global abolition of the death penalty. He also called for an end to the international arms trade, saying, ���Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood.��� Nevertheless, as he read his remarks aloud in a slow, careful English (his fifth language), he was frequently interrupted by rousing, bipartisan standing ovations.

Pope Francis framed his talk around four Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and two lesser-known figures, two Catholics, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. ���These men and women, for all their many differences and limitations, were able by hard work and self-sacrifice���some at the cost of their lives���to build a better future. They shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.���

Lincoln and King need little introduction. Dorothy Day was a crusading 20th-century activist who is formally being considered for Catholic sainthood.

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The People’s Pope in the Land of the Dollar

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 78-year-old Argentinian known to the world as Pope Francis, made his first trip to the United States this week, bringing his uniquely progressive papal perspective. Almost a quarter of the U.S. population identifies as Catholic, but as a global religious leader, the pope���s influence extends far beyond the Catholic community. The pope has been frank in his criticism of much of the core of U.S. society: capitalism, consumerism, war and the failure to confront climate change. Pope Francis is widely adored, but his visit is also not without controversy, as he maintains age-old Catholic dogma regarding women in the priesthood, contraception and abortion. He also has provoked the ire of many indigenous people, as he reopens wounds inflicted during the violent Spanish colonization of California more than two centuries ago.

When he became pope, Francis surprised many, shunning the typical trappings of the highest position in the Catholic Church. He chose to reside in the Vatican���s guest quarters instead of the Papal Apartments in the ornate Apostolic Palace. He wears simple white vestments instead of the gilded robes of his predecessors. He rode the bus on his trips through Rome. It became apparent that this pope was walking the talk, as the first pope from the global south and the first non-European since a Syrian held the post in 741. He chose the name, Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, the early 13th-century cleric who embraced a life of poverty and revered nature.

Pope Francis made clerical history last May with the release of a papal encyclical on the environment and climate change, which he called, in Latin, Laudato Si, meaning, ���Praise Be to You.��� He took those words from his namesake Saint Francis, and opened the encyclical with the words ���Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life. ... This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.���

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Don’t Just Fire Officer James Frascatore—Arrest Him

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

New York City Police Officer James Frascatore has given new meaning to the Grand Slam of tennis. Last week, he violently assaulted retired tennis champion James Blake in front of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, tackling Blake as he was waiting for a ride to watch the U.S. Open. Blake, a 35-year-old African-American, was formerly the top men���s tennis player in the United States, was fourth in the world and has scores of trophies from around the globe. Blake didn���t know what hit him.

If the New York Police Department had taken previous charges against Frascatore seriously, Blake would have never been attacked. Frascatore is white and has been with the NYPD for four years, and in that short time has provoked multiple lawsuits alleging police brutality and excessive force, as well as numerous complaints to the police oversight Civilian Complaint Review Board. So, while James Blake has long excelled on the court, James Frascatore excels at being sued in court. Frascatore has a clear pattern of racist violence against innocent citizens. It is only because he assaulted a man of means, a celebrity, captured on video, that his conduct is under scrutiny. Both Police Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio have called Blake and apologized.

Warren Diggs is still waiting for his calls of apology from the two men. On Jan. 13, 2013, he was riding his bicycle home in the neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. As he reached his driveway, he told us, speaking on the ���Democracy Now!��� news hour: ���I go down the driveway, and on the way down, I hear somebody yell to me, ���Stop! Where are you going? Where are you going?��� So, I���m not sure if it���s for me, because, you know, there���s no reason for it, but there���s nobody else outside at this time.���

He went on: ���Officer Frascatore, two other officers come running down the driveway. ���Where you going? Where you going?��� I said, ���I���m going home. What���s the problem?��� They said, ���What���s your name? Do you have any ID?��� I said, ���My name is Warren. Yes, I have ID, but I don���t have it on me. It���s inside.������

Diggs slowly pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the two doors to his home. ���As soon as my second foot reaches the landing, Frascatore grabs me, tries to pull me out and just spins me around,��� he continued. ���I asked him, like, ���What���s the problem?��� The other officer grabs my other arm, and they both yank me out into the driveway. So I���m saying, ���What is the problem? What is this about?��� Frascatore punches me in the side of the head. The officer that was behind me, he grabs me around my waist, picks me up, he slams me on the ground.���

It was dark, and no one was around to witness the beating. Warren Diggs choked up with emotion as he continued to recount his ordeal: ���Frascatore drops down on me. The guy behind me hits me in my back. I���m getting hit all in my side. I see two other cops come down the ramp. And I���m getting hit, I���m getting hit. I���m asking, what are they doing, what are they doing? Nobody���s saying anything to me, so I start screaming for my girlfriend to come outside. I���m calling her, calling her, calling her, and she doesn���t respond. So I just start screaming, ���Help! Help! Help! Help!��� over and over again, louder and louder, as loud as I could.���

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