Amy Goodman's Blog, page 7

A Century of Women Working for Peace

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—One hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, in these very violent times, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, saying “No” to wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Syria, not to mention the wars in our streets at home. They were marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist who co-founded the group a century ago, said the purpose of the original gathering in 1915 was to empower women “to protest against war and to suggest steps which may lead to warfare being an impossibility.”

Among the women here were four Nobel Peace Prize winners. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the prize in 2003 for advocating for human rights for Iranian women, children and political prisoners. She was the first Muslim woman, and the first Iranian, to receive a Nobel. Nevertheless, she has lived in exile since 2009, and has only seen her husband once since then. “Had books been thrown at people, at the Taliban, instead of bombs, and had schools been built in Afghanistan,” Ebadi said in her keynote address to the WILPF conference this week, “3,000 schools could have been built in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11—at this time, we wouldn’t have had ISIS. Let’s not forget that the roots of the ISIS rest in the Taliban.” She was joined by her sister laureates Leymah Gbowee, who helped achieve a negotiated peace during the civil wars in Liberia; Mairead Maguire, who won the peace prize in 1976 at the age of 32 for advancing an end to the conflict in her native Northern Ireland; and Jody Williams, a Vermonter who led the global campaign to ban land mines, and who now is organizing to ban “killer robots,” weapons that kill automatically, without the active participation of a human controller.

These four world-renowned Nobel laureates were joined by nearly a thousand deeply committed peace activists from around the globe. Madeleine Rees, the secretary-general of WILPF, recalled the history of the first gathering in 1915, and how it was organized: “It wouldn’t have happened, but for the suffrage movement,” she told me, “because you don’t just start a mass movement. You actually have to have an organizational structure to make that happen. That had started with the suffragette movement. ... Every single one of those women who went to The Hague ... were demanding the right to vote. They saw, quite rightly, that the absence of women in making decisions in government meant a greater likelihood of war.”

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

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Special Delivery for the Plutocrats

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” reads the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service. We now can add to that “nor a national security no-fly zone,” as demonstrated by mailman Doug Hughes. Hughes was doing what he felt was his duty, carrying letters. He had 535 of them: one for each member of Congress, and each signed by Hughes himself. He wrote about the corrupting influence of money in politics. Hughes chose a very high-profile method for delivering his letters, though. He piloted a bicycle-sized helicopter, called a “gyrocopter,” 100 miles from Maryland, and landed on the west lawn of the U.S Capitol, passing through restricted airspace.

Hughes could have been shot down. I asked him if it was worth it. “I’m a father, I’m a grandfather, and I can see the change over the decades as we slide from a democracy to a plutocracy. ... Yes, it was worth risking my life, it was worth risking my freedom,” Hughes responded, “to get reform so that Congress works for the people.” His letter opened with a quote from the secretary of state. Hughes wrote: “Consider the following statement by John Kerry in his farewell speech to the Senate—‘The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself. They know it. They know we know it. And yet, Nothing Happens!’—John Kerry.” His letter goes on with his analysis of the problem of money corrupting the work of members of Congress “before they are elected, while they are in office and after they leave Congress,” he writes.

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Click here to watch Democracy Now's interview with Doug Hughes

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Open Veins, Healing Wounds, in Latin America

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

For the first time in more than half a century, the presidents of the United States and Cuba have had a formal meeting. Barack Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro at the 7th Summit of the Americas, held this year in Panama City. Cuba’s participation has been blocked by the U.S. since the summit began in 1994. This historic moment occurs with some sadness, however: Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan writer who did so much to explain the deeply unequal relations between Latin America and the U.S. and Europe, died as the summit ended.

Galeano’s best-known book is “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” It was published in 1971, and was among the first to explain the impact of colonial domination of the hemisphere, across the broad sweep of history. Galeano himself was swept away by events as well. He wrote the book “in 90 caffeinated nights,” he said, “to interlink histories that have been before told separately and in this codified language of historians or economists or sociologists. I tried to write it in such a way that it could be read and enjoyed by anyone.”

The book’s success made him a target, as U.S.-sponsored coups toppled democratic governments in the region. He was imprisoned in Uruguay, then, after release, began a life in exile. He settled in Argentina, where he founded and edited a cultural magazine called Crisis. After the U.S.-backed military coup there in 1976, Galeano’s name was added to the list of those condemned by the death squad. He fled again, this time to Spain, where he began his famous trilogy, “Memory of Fire," which rewrites North and South American history.

And now, a piece of that history is being rewritten, between the United States and Cuba. President Obama has sent a State Department report to Congress, which recommends that Cuba be removed from the official U.S. government list of nations that sponsor terrorism. The peace group CODEPINK applauded the move, saying in a statement, “The infamous U.S. terror list includes only three other nations: Iran, Sudan, and Syria and curiously omits North Korea.

Many people around the world found it hypocritical for the United States to single out Cuba while ignoring support for terrorism by U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and Israel, especially since Cuba is known for exporting doctors, musicians, teachers, artists, and dancers — not terrorists.”

I asked a former Cuban diplomat in Havana, Carlos Alzugaray Treto, for his reaction to the critics of Obama removing Cuba from the terrorism list, like Republican Senator, and now presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American from Florida. Alzugaray said Rubio “should worry about having terrorists, a terrorist like Luis Posada Carriles, living in Miami. He has the terrorism not 90 miles from Florida; he has one in Miami. He doesn’t complain.” Luis Posada Carriles was a CIA operative who admitted to masterminding the bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet in 1976, killing all 73 people on board. Venezuela has long sought his extradition, but the U.S. government refuses to comply, leaving Carriles a free man living in Miami.

The U.S. embargo against Cuba, one of the most enduring and punishing relics of the Cold War, remains in place, however. This central pillar of a half-century of hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba is increasingly unpopular here. The U.S. business community is tired of losing out on opportunities that are enjoyed by investors from Canada, Europe, Japan and China. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hailed President Obama’s moves to normalize relations. Businesses like Facebook and Airbnb are in Cuba and planning on expanding, as soon as it is legal to do so. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said recently, “Our Cuba policy, instead of isolating Cuba, was isolating the United States in our own backyard.” And President Obama, when announcing his intention to normalize relations with Cuba last December, admitted, “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

The Summit of the Americas has ended, and the trajectory of U.S./Cuban relations is on a new course. When Obama first attended the summit, in 2009, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez handed him a copy of “Open Veins of Latin America.” If he hasn’t already, Obama should read the book. As British writer John Berger has said of Eduardo Galeano, “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious.”

R.I.P. Eduardo Galeano. There are probably few things that would make him happier than if the embargo were buried as well.

Click here for Democracy Now's archive of our interviews with Eduardo Galeano, as well as video of a 2006 public conversation between Galeano and Arundhati Roy.

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Capital Punishment? A Dead Policy Walking

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

A jury in Boston has returned a guilty verdict on all 30 counts against the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now the jury must deliberate on the punishment, which could be either life in prison or death. Capital punishment is outlawed in Massachusetts, but Tsarnaev was tried in federal court, where the death penalty is allowed. The jury will have to decide whether he lives or dies. The case provides a new reason to take a hard look at capital punishment, and why this irreversible, highly problematic practice should be banned.

Anthony Ray Hinton is alive today, a free man. But just last week he was on death row in Alabama, where he spent 30 years. Hinton was the 152nd person in the United States to be exonerated from death row, where he spent three decades for a crime he did not commit. He was accused of killing two fast-food restaurant managers in 1985. There were no eyewitnesses, nor fingerprints. Prosecutors alleged that bullets found matched a revolver belonging to Hinton’s mother. Hinton had ineffective counsel, and no money to mount a credible defense or to hire a genuine expert witness to challenge the ballistics.

“The American criminal-justice system ... treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” Bryan Stevenson told me. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and the attorney who eventually freed Anthony Ray Hinton.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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Hate Doesn’t Pay

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

The date was Aug.7, 1930. The place: Marion, Indiana. Three young African-American men were lynched. The horror of the crime was captured by a local photographer. The image of two hanging, bloodied bodies is among the most iconic in the grim archive of documented lynchings in America. Most associate lynching with the Deep South, with the vestiges of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. But this was in the North. Marion is in northern Indiana, halfway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, and about 150 miles from Chicago. But intolerance knows no borders.

In the photo, beneath the towering maple tree in Marion’s Courthouse Square, stands the white mob who lynched the men. Some are smiling for the camera. One man points at the hanging corpse of Abram “Abe” Smith, hanging next to Thomas Shipp. The third victim actually survived. James Cameron was the youngest of the three, and was beaten and dragged to the base of the tree, beneath his dead friends, and had a noose put around his neck. He was, for some reason, not killed. He went on to found four local NAACP chapters, as well as the America’s Black Holocaust Museum. He would also serve as Indiana’s director of civil liberties.

Indiana certainly doesn’t want to be remembered for this terrible crime, or for being a bastion of hatred. So why did Indiana Gov. Mike Pence legalize a new wave of intolerance by signing into law Indiana’s controversial “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA)?

The law’s supporters claim it protects religious freedom. Opponents call it a thinly veiled attack on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The law allows individuals and businesses to refuse service to LGBT people, solely based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. It has provoked a national backlash, with prominent people, large corporations and city and state governments condemning or boycotting Indiana.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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The Costs of War, the Price of Peace

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

What price would you pay not to kill another human being? At what point would you commit the offenses allegedly perpetrated by Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was charged Wednesday with desertion and “misbehavior before an enemy?”

Bowe Bergdahl was a private when he left his post in Afghanistan, under circumstances that are still unknown to the public, and was captured by the Taliban. They imprisoned him for five years, until he was released in a controversial prisoner swap negotiated by the Obama administration. Five Taliban members who were held for years at Guantánamo Bay were released to house arrest in Qatar in exchange for Bergdahl. He now faces a court-martial and potentially life in prison. Meanwhile, the architects of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain untried, while a new report asserts that up to 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the first 10 years of the so-called war on terror.

The report is called “Body Count” and is published in the U.S. by Physicians for Social Responsibility. “It has been politically important to downplay Allied forces’ responsibility for the massive carnage and destruction in the region,” writes San Francisco doctor Robert M. Gould in the report’s foreword. He told me: “We need to take full responsibility for the true cost of war as we are preparing to continue our involvement in Afghanistan and deepen our involvement in Syria and Iraq. There’s great anger throughout the region about our involvement and the underplaying here of what the true costs are in terms of death and destruction.”

This report was released just as Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, was welcomed at the White House by President Barack Obama. Obama announced that he is slowing the planned departure of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, leaving 9,800 soldiers at least through the end of 2015. “It is my judgment, it’s the judgment of General [John] Campbell and others who are on the ground, that providing this additional time frame during this fighting season for us to be able to help the Afghan security forces succeed is well worth it,” Obama said. America’s longest war continues, with no end in sight. Ghani visited the Pentagon during his time in Washington, as well as Arlington National Cemetery, where he laid a wreath of flowers to honor the fallen U.S. soldiers.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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Flush the TPP

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

President Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress are united. Yes, that’s right. No, not on Obamacare, or on the budget, or on negotiations with Iran, or on equal pay for women. But on so-called free-trade agreements, which increase corporate power and reduce the power of people to govern themselves democratically, Obama and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder. This has put the president at loggerheads with his strongest congressional allies, the progressive Democrats, who oppose the TPP, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the most far-reaching trade agreements in history. TPP will set rules governing more than 40 percent of the world’s economy. Obama has been negotiating in secret, and the Democrats are not happy.

The battle lines are being drawn over the TPP and TPA. If you are confused, well, that is exactly what many of the most powerful corporations in the U.S., and around the world, are counting on. Trade policy is arcane, complex and long the domain of economists and technocrats. But the real-world implications of these dry texts are profound. President Obama wants to pass the TPP, which is a broad trade agreement between the U.S. and 11 other countries in the Pacific Rim: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. In order to expedite the process, President Obama is seeking the second acronym, TPA, or Trade Promotion Authority, also called “fast-track.” Fast-track gives the president authority to negotiate a trade deal, and to then present it to Congress for a yes-or-no vote, with no amendments allowed. A growing coalition is organizing to oppose TPP and the president’s request for fast-track. The outcome of this conflict will reverberate globally for generations to come.

The TPP negotiations have been held in secret. Most people know what little they do because WikiLeaks, the document disclosure and whistle-blower website, released several chapters more than a year ago. Members of Congress also have been given limited access to briefings on the negotiations, but under strict secrecy rules that, in at least one instance recently, include the threat of imprisonment if details leak.

The TPP would be an expanded version of earlier trade agreements, like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, involving the U.S., Canada and Mexico. NAFTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, and was so harmful to the culture and economy of the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico, that they rebelled on that very day, in what is known as the Zapatista Uprising. Attempts to create a global trade deal, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, provoked one of the largest protests against corporate power in history, in Seattle in late 1999. Thousands of protesters locked arms and literally blocked delegates from getting to the ministerial meeting. As unexpected solidarity between union members and environmentalists flourished in the streets, despite widespread police violence, the WTO talks collapsed in total failure.

The TPP, if passed, would implement trade rules that make it illegal for governments to create and enforce regulations on everything from environmental standards, to wage and labor laws, to the duration of copyrights. A law prohibiting the sale of goods made in sweatshops in Vietnam could be ruled illegal, for example, as a barrier to trade. Or certification requirements that lumber not be harvested from old-growth forests in Malaysia could be overturned.

Grassroots activists are organizing against the TPP and fast-track ... Now people must raise their voices, in unison, and demand to be heard.

Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch program is one of the leading critics of TPP:

“It’s a delivery mechanism for a lot of the things [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and the Republicans like. So, for instance, it would increase the duration of patents for Big Pharma and, as a result, give them windfall profits but increase our medicine prices. It could roll back financial regulation on big banks. It could limit Internet freedom, sort of sneak through the back door the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA,” Wallach explained. “It would give special privileges and rights for foreign corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S. government to raid our treasury over any environmental, consumer health law that they think undermine their expected future profits, the so-called ‘investor-state’ enforcement system. Plus, it would have the NAFTA-style rules that make it easier to offshore jobs, making it easier to relocate to low-wage countries.”

The TPP, she went on, “was negotiated with the assistance of 600 corporate advisers, official corporate trade advisers in the U.S. The agreement has been the initiative of the Obama administration. It was started by [President George W.] Bush, but instead of turning it around and making it something different, the Obama folks picked it up and, frankly, have made it even more extreme.”

Grassroots activists are organizing against the TPP and fast-track. They work on diverse issues ranging from human rights and Internet freedom to fair trade, labor rights and the environment. The moneyed interests in Washington have the ear of the president, so they need only whisper. Now people must raise their voices, in unison, and demand to be heard.

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

(c) 2015 Amy Goodman / Distributed by King Features Syndicate

In Selma, Memories of Bloody Sunday Spur Action Today

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Fifty years have passed since Bloody Sunday, that seminal event in United States civil-rights history when African Americans and their allies attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, demanding the right to vote. As soon as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they were violently attacked by the Alabama State Police, beaten with nightsticks and electric cattle prods, set upon by police dogs and tear-gassed. They were chased off the bridge, all the way back to Selma’s Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the march began. News and images of the extreme and unprovoked police violence, in contrast to the conduct of the 600 marchers, who practiced disciplined nonviolence, spread across the globe. Within months, President Lyndon Johnson would sign the 1965 Voting Rights Act, responding to the public outrage and to the pressure applied by a skillfully organized mass movement.

The march that would become known as Bloody Sunday was organized in response to a killing by the police of a young man. That history, and how it relates to today, was recounted last Sunday in historic Brown Chapel. The sanctuary was filled to capacity with civil-rights icons, Obama administration cabinet secretaries and members of Congress.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke, making a connection to the spate of high-profile police killings of unarmed young black men today. This commemoration happened just days after the Justice Department released its scathing report on systemic racism in the police departments of Ferguson, Missouri, and surrounding municipalities.

“Spurred by the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, an unarmed young black male,” Holder said from the podium. He paused and then repeated: “an unarmed young black male.” And then again: “an unarmed young black male.” He intoned that phrase three times, looking out over a crowd that included his own teenage son, Eric Holder III, as well as his probable successor, Loretta Lynch, who will be the first African-American woman to be attorney general (if and when the Senate confirms her nomination).

“An earlier movement began, and citizens began a march from Selma to Montgomery, across a bridge that was named for a former Alabama senator, Confederate general and grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.” He was talking about Edmund Pettus.

On Saturday, March 7, President Barack Obama spoke at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Estimates put the crowd gathered in Selma that weekend as high as 80,000 people. Special invited guests included the parents of Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teenager shot and killed last August by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. I asked Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, what she thought should happen in Ferguson. She was unequivocal: “Being honest, I don’t think there should be a Ferguson Police Department anymore.”

Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, added: “It’s not clear to me that this town of 21,000 people needs its own police department. There are 90 jurisdictions in St. Louis County. We need to begin to look at some regional policing issues, so that we can get some quality control. You cannot get your hands around all of those tiny jurisdictions.”

Since the DOJ report came out, many Ferguson officials have been forced out, including two police officers, a court clerk, a municipal judge and, most recently, Police Chief Thomas Jackson.

The weekend in Selma, the 50th-anniversary commemoration, was a remarkable look back at living history, with many of the surviving participants there, still speaking, still marching, still organizing. It was also a moment to remember the martyrs of the civil-rights movement — not only Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was represented by his son Martin, who spoke at Brown Chapel, as well as by his daughter Rev. Bernice King, but also the lesser-known martyrs. Congressman John Lewis, who led the march 50 years ago, opened his Saturday remarks at the foot of the bridge by saying: “We, as a nation, have a great deal to be thankful for. Jimmie Lee Jackson — Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose death inspired the Selma march, along with so many others, did not make it to see this day.”

Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five. Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopalian seminarian. and James Reeb, a Unitarian minister. These three, all white, were killed in or near Selma, along with many others, for supporting the struggle for voting rights. As I interviewed people on the anniversary march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, their names were recalled with reverence.

Most recent martyrs also were remembered. Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown. Lesley McSpadden, surrounded by a sea of people waiting for President Obama’s arrival at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, eloquently summarized both the spirit of the day and the sadness of her loss, saying, “My son would have been able to vote had he still been alive.”

The Bloody Sunday 50th anniversary commemoration was massive, with participation far exceeding expectations. The movements for racial justice, voting rights and against police brutality are coalescing, bringing together past and present to shape a new future.

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From Crispus Attucks to Michael Brown: Race and Revolution

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

March 5 marks an important, but oft-overlooked, anniversary. On a winter’s day 245 years ago, in the year 1770, an angry crowd formed in Boston, then the capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. People were enraged by the extortionate taxes imposed by the British Parliament. In order to quell the public furor, the British sent troops, who violently quashed dissent. On that cold day, people had had enough. Word spread after a British private beat a young man with the butt of his musket. By late day, hundreds of Bostonians gathered, jeering the small crowd of redcoat soldiers arrayed with muskets loaded. The soldiers fired into the crowd, instantly killing Crispus Attucks and two others. Attucks was a man of African and Native American ancestry, and is considered the first casualty of the American Revolution. It took the indiscriminate murder of a man of color, by armed agents of the state, to launch the revolution. Which brings us to Ferguson, Missouri.

“Nearly seven months have passed since the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in opening his press briefing Wednesday. He was detailing the findings of two Justice Department investigations in the killing of the unarmed African-American youth by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. “The facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case. Michael Brown’s death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.” With those words, the outgoing attorney general laid to rest any prospect of a criminal trial sought by so many seeking justice for Michael Brown. But Brown’s death continues to send shock waves, through his community, and beyond.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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TV Meteorologists Should Say It Loud and Clear: Climate Change Is Here

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

President Barack Obama issued the third veto in his more than six years in office, rejecting S.1 (Senate Bill One), the “Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.” This was the new congressional Republican majority’s first bill this year, attempting to force the construction of a pipeline designed to carry Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. ports in Texas for export. A broad international coalition has been fighting the project for years. Climate scientist James Hansen, the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in The New York Times that if the pipeline gets built, “it will be game over for the climate.”

This vote and veto came as much of the U.S. was gripped by extreme cold weather, with cities like Boston reeling from historically deep snowfall and Southern states like Georgia getting snowed in. Meanwhile, most of California braces for even more drought. The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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