Amy Goodman's Blog, page 9

Fighting for the Climate in the Heart of the World

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Lima, the capital of Peru, has become a city of gustatory renown, attracting foodies from the world over to sample dishes from its famous ceviche to favorites from the Andean highlands. So it is an appropriate place, perhaps, for what has become a genuine movable feast, the world-roving series of summits organized by the United Nations to tackle the crisis of climate change. This year’s meeting, known as “COP 20,” the 20th Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, is the last high-level meeting with presidents and prime ministers before the December 2015 climate summit in Paris.

The Paris meeting is supposed to produce an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, a new, global, legally binding treaty that restricts global warming to an increase in average global temperatures to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). As such, all eyes are on Paris. But if the devil is in the details, it is here in Lima that the details are being worked out. You can’t spell “climate” without L-I-M-A.

First, it’s necessary to understand the setting, and who is at the table and who is not. Inside, the summit proceeds in an orderly manner, with U.N. police standing watch and a rarified air of diplomatic decorum. It is hard to feel any sense of urgency. This is astounding, as the science is clear: The world is warming rapidly, and without action, catastrophic climate change will soon become irreversible.

Click to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

Hands Up, Don’t Choke

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Another police killing of an unarmed man of color. Another grand jury deciding not to indict: Not for murder. Not for manslaughter. Not for assault. Not even for reckless endangerment. We live in a land of impunity. At least, for those in power.

This past summer, after covering the protests in Ferguson, Mo., I flew back to New York City and went straight to Staten Island to cover the march protesting the police killing of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old African-American father of six. This story was strikingly similar to the police killing in Ferguson, where Officer Darren Wilson gunned down unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown. Both cases involved white police officers using deadly force. Both of the victims were unarmed African-Americans. In both cases, local prosecutors, with close ties to their local police departments, were allowed to control the grand jury. There were some differences between the cases. Most notably, Eric Garner’s killing was captured on video.

If you look at the video closely, just as NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo puts him in an illegal chokehold, you see Eric Garner put his hands up, the international signal of surrender. He is then taken down by a gang of police officers. You hear him repeatedly say, “I can’t breathe!” He says it a total of 11 times before he goes limp and dies.

Where did this video come from? A young man named Ramsey Orta was standing near Garner on that July 17 afternoon when the police moved in. Orta flipped open his cellphone and videoed the whole thing. Pantaleo was caught red-handed. The evidence was there for everyone to see. Well, the grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo. Only two people were arrested in the wake of Garner’s death: Ramsey Orta, who shot the video, and his wife, Chrissie Ortiz. Chrissie told a local television station that since Ramsey was identified as the videographer, they had been subjected to police harassment. Ramsey was arrested the day after the city medical examiner declared Garner’s death a homicide. Chrissie was later arrested as well. I saw them at the Staten Island march that Saturday, standing near where Garner died. I asked them for comment, but they were afraid. They huddled on the same stoop that Ramsey was on when he filmed Garner’s death.

At that march on Staten Island on Aug. 23, while Ramsey and Chrissie chose not to speak, many did. “The Staten Island [district attorney] should not be prosecuting this case,” Constance Malcolm told me. “We need the feds to come in and take this case right now. We need accountability.”

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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Shaking the Heavens in Ferguson, Missouri

“As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption.” So said Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech on March 14, 1968, just three weeks before he was assassinated.

Michael Brown’s killing in August continues to send shockwaves through Ferguson, Missouri, and beyond. Last Monday night, Saint Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch unleashed a night of social disruption when he announced that no criminal charges would be filed against Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown. McCulloch inexplicably delayed release of the grand jury findings until nightfall. The prosecutor’s press conference deeply insulted many, as he laboriously defended the actions of Darren Wilson, while attacking the character of the victim, Michael Brown.

Soon after McCulloch’s announcement, Ferguson erupted. Buildings were set ablaze, burning to the ground. Cars were engulfed in flames. Aggressive riot police, ignoring much-touted “rules of engagement” agreements with protest organizers, fired tear gas canisters at outraged residents. Random gunfire rang out through the night.

“Black lives don’t matter,” said one young man protesting in the freezing cold in Ferguson on Monday night. Tear gas mixed with noxious smoke from raging fires nearby. Another protester, Katrina Redmon, explained her frustration with the failure to indict Darren Wilson: “He killed an unarmed black teenager. There is no excuse for that. A man was killed and somebody walked away ... we want answers. Because it seems like the only way you can get away with murder is if you got a badge.”

I was interviewing the demonstrators outside the Ferguson police station, which was ringed with riot police. We were not far from the spot where Michael Brown was killed, shot at least six times by Darren Wilson, and where his corpse was left in the road, face down and bleeding, for more than four hours under the hot August sun as horrified friends and neighbors looked on. After protests grew following Brown’s killing, state and local law enforcement unfurled a shocking array of military gear and arms, helping expose how the Pentagon has been quietly unloading its surplus war-making materiel from Iraq and Afghanistan to thousands of cities and towns across the country. Since 9/11, over $5 billion worth of this gear has been transferred. The United States now has an occupying military force: the local police.

The riot police and National Guard swarmed the white side of Ferguson, while the black side of town, along West Florissant Avenue, was ablaze. There were almost no cops there. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency a week before the grand jury decision came down, yet the National Guard troops he deployed were nowhere to be seen in this part of town. About a dozen businesses went up in flames. Why was West Florissant Avenue left unguarded? Did the authorities let Ferguson burn?

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Keystone, Climate Change and the Cold

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

It was a dramatic scene in the Senate this week. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren, presiding, announced the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, a Crow Creek Sioux man from South Dakota sang out in the Senate gallery. A massive people’s climate movement against extracting some of the dirtiest oil on the planet had prevailed ... at least for now.

It was a Democrat, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, representing oil interests, who tried to push the pipeline through. She hoped its passage would help her in the Dec. 6 runoff election against her challenger, Congressman Bill Cassidy, who sponsored a similar bill in the House. The Republicans have promised to reintroduce the bill when they take control of the Senate in January.

The coalition against the Keystone XL is broad-based. It includes environmentalists, indigenous activists, farmers and ranchers, concerned about both climate change and protecting their land. They are worried about an oil spill into the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world, which extends from South Dakota to Texas and provides water for millions of people. The name of one partner organization signals how unique this coalition is: the Cowboy and Indian Alliance. Out in the sandhills and great plains of the West, residents who in the 19th century were more likely than not to be adversaries have joined together to confront TransCanada Corp.‘s aggressive plan to force its pipeline through their land.

“The fight has just started,” Cyril Scott told me. He is the president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. “We have to gear up and be ready and start our own campaign to make sure we secure enough support to stop this black snake that’s going to harm not only Indian country, but the United States of America.”

The Keystone XL pipeline’s primary function will be to move oil from the tar sands region of Alberta to port facilities on the South Texas coast, for shipping to overseas customers. It will enable expanded extraction of the tar sands, a form of oil that is much more environmentally destructive than other types. Climate scientist James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in The New York Times, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” Hansen is one of more than 1,200 people who were arrested in front of the White House, protesting Keystone XL.

In years past, President Barack Obama claimed that if the Keystone XL pipeline were not approved, then TransCanada would build a pipeline that avoids the U.S. entirely, sending the oil through Canada, to either its east or west coast.

Naomi Klein says that argument doesn’t wash anymore. She is a climate activist and author of a kind of new-movement bible, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.” The day before the Senate vote, she told me, “The tar sands are really surrounded by opposition. Everywhere they try to build a new pipeline or expand an existing pipeline, they’re facing fierce direct action as well as legal challenges by indigenous people and by other interests. So, the idea that if you don’t build Keystone, they’ll get it out anyway, is absurd.”

TransCanada is clearly worried about the movement. Leaked documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that TransCanada has hired Edelman, the world’s largest public-relations firm, to wage a campaign against groups that are trying to block their pipeline projects.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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Tomas Young, Rest in Peace

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

There were 8,920,000 military veterans in the United States as of last June, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Sometime last Sunday or Monday, hours before Veterans Day began, that number dropped by one, when Tomas Young died at home in Seattle, with his wife by his side. He was one of many soldiers who were sent to Iraq and were grievously injured there.

The public may know more about Young than about most veterans, thanks to the remarkable documentary Body of War, directed and produced by legendary talk-show host Phil Donahue and filmmaker Ellen Spiro. His journey, his struggle and now his death follow an arc along the tragic U.S. wars and occupations in this post-9/11 world.

Like so many, Young was inspired to join the military after Sept. 11. He was surprised to learn, though, that he would be deployed not to Afghanistan, but to Iraq. On April 4, 2004, five days after Young arrived in Baghdad, he was shot in the spine, paralyzing him from the chest down. The injury rendered him a paraplegic, causing a cascade of additional complications. His breathing was labored. His body’s capacity to regulate temperature was impaired, occasionally requiring that he wear an ice-pack vest. Despite the enormous challenges, Young summoned tremendous strength and embarked on a path of antiwar activism.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

Watch the many interviews with Tomas Young on Democracy Now! over the years.

Maximum Progress on the Minimum Wage

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Elections in the United States are all about money—lots of it, increasingly from untraceable, “dark” sources. Ultimately, though, history is not made of money but of movements. The Republican sweep in this week’s midterm elections has been widely described as a wave, a bloodbath, a shellacking. Beyond the hyperbole, beneath the pronouncements of pundits, strong currents are moving, slowly shifting our society. One movement that shined through the electoral morass demanded an increased minimum wage. It prevailed, even in some of the reddest of states.

Going against partisan trends, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota approved ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, as they did in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. In Illinois and several Wisconsin counties, both states that elected Republican governors, significant majorities passed nonbinding ballot proposals to increase the minimum wage. Since the Republicans (and some Democrats) in Congress have consistently blocked an increase in the national minimum wage, people are taking control of the issue in their communities, and finding resounding support across the political spectrum.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, which, when adjusted for inflation, is less than it was in 1968. This translates into just over $15,000 per year for someone working a full-time job, which is below the poverty line for families of two people. Finally, President Barack Obama has made an increase in the minimum wage a central goal of his presidency. Last February, he issued an executive order that compelled employers that work under federal contracts to pay their employees a minimum of $10.10 per hour, because, he said in his State of the Union address two weeks earlier, “if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty.”

Legendary consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader has been pushing for an increased minimum wage for years. He joined the “Democracy Now!” 2014 midterm election-night coverage, linking the poor performance of the Democrats to their failure to embrace the issue of the minimum wage: “The president spent almost two weeks in salons from New York, Maine, San Francisco, and Los Angeles raising money for the Democrats,” Nader said, “not barnstorming the country on an issue that has 80 percent support—even Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have come out for restoring the minimum wage.”

Nader turned to one of the most closely watched Senate races of the night, in Arkansas, where incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor lost to Republican challenger Tom Cotton: “Pryor came to the U.S. Senate and he made sure that he was going to turn his back on the citizen groups, the liberal groups, the progressive groups. He was in charge of the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs. We couldn’t even get a meeting with him.” he said. “The Democrats have dropped the economic issue that won election after election for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.”

Arkansas, where the world’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart, is based, actually has the lowest minimum wage in the country, $6.25 per hour—lower even than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour (in such cases, employers are required to pay the federal minimum). The ballot initiative there, raising the minimum wage, passed with over 65 percent of the vote.

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

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The Republicans’ Profane Attack on the Sacred Right to Vote

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

There is a database housed in Arkansas with your name in it ... that is, if you live in one of the 28 states participating in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. It’s one of the growing components of an aggressive drive across the U.S. by Republicans to stop many Americans from voting.

Early voting has already begun in many states in the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. Control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance, as do many crucial governorships, congressional races and ballot initiatives. One question looming over this election is just how significant will be the impact of the wholesale, organized disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

I spoke with Dolores Internicola in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., ground zero for the voter-purge efforts of embattled Republican Gov. Rick Scott. She lost her husband, Bill, recently. He was in the news in 2012, when, at the age of 91, Bill received an official notice in the mail that his citizenship was in question, and he would have to prove it or be kicked off the voter rolls. As a World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the native New Yorker was upset to hear that he couldn’t participate in the vote that he helped defend against Nazi Germany. “It was terrible,” his widow recalled. Bill did get to vote in the 2012 elections, but millions are now threatened with similar, arbitrary disenfranchisement this year."

Investigative journalist Greg Palast, along with documentary filmmaker Richard Rowley, crisscrossed the country, documenting the impact of the Crosscheck Program. His critical investigative reporting of the now-legendary electoral debacle in Florida in 2000 helped expose how Florida’s then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris oversaw massive, erroneous voter purges there, giving the presidency to George W. Bush in what remains the most controversial presidential election in U.S. history.

“Now, it’s a decade and a half later, and I’m hearing the cry of ‘voter fraud. There’s a million people committing voter fraud.’ Is there really this big crime wave?” Palast asks in his two-part special on alleged “double voting” produced for Al Jazeera America.

Click here to read the full column posted at Truthdig.

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Ebola Czar? We Need a Surgeon General

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

The United States now has an Ebola czar. But what about a surgeon general? The gun lobby has successfully shot down his nomination — at least so far.

The Ebola epidemic is a global health crisis that demands a concerted, global response. Here in the United States, action has been disjointed, seemingly driven by fear rather than science. One clear reason for this: The nomination of President Barack Obama’s choice to fill the public health position of surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, is languishing in the U.S. Senate. You would think that an Ebola epidemic would move people to transcend partisan politics. But Vivek Murthy, despite his impressive medical credentials, made one crucial mistake before being nominated: He said that guns are a public health problem. That provoked the National Rifle Association to oppose him, which is all it takes to stop progress in the Senate.

Dr. Murthy’s statement on guns came in the form of a tweet: “Tired of politicians playing politics w/ guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of NRA. Guns are a healthcare issue,” he wrote in October 2012. A year later, the White House announced his appointment to the position of surgeon general, and on Feb. 4, 2014, he testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He received bipartisan support in committee, but his nomination has not yet come up for a vote in the full Senate, ostensibly because Sen. Harry Reid knows the vote would fail. Nominations only need a majority of 51 votes to win approval. Since the Democrats have a 55-to-45 majority in the Senate (at least for now), Murthy’s approval as surgeon general should have been routine.

Fear of the NRA’s perceived power, however, prompted several Democrats — those with tight re-election races in 2014 — to indicate they would not vote to support Murthy. Among those expected to vote against him were Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Begich of Alaska. These incumbent Democrats and others didn’t want to provoke the NRA before the midterm elections. So the U.S. has no surgeon general.

What exactly does the surgeon general do? The position dates back to 1798, when Congress established the country’s first publicly financed health service to care for ailing merchant sailors. Now, the surgeon general commands more than 6,500 healthcare workers in the “Commissioned Corps” who are tasked with protecting U.S. public health.

An equally important role of the surgeon general is to be “the nation’s doctor,” to use the position for public advocacy, to educate and inspire people to take health care seriously. So, while there is an acting surgeon general, Boris Lushniak, who is keeping the lights on at the organization, he hasn’t assumed the full public role that the position demands. In 1964, then-Surgeon General Luther Terry released a groundbreaking report, “Smoking and Health,” which prompted significant shifts in tobacco policies, like the printing of warning labels on cigarette packs and the banning of tobacco ads on TV and radio. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, advocated for education and action to combat HIV/AIDS, against the wishes of Reagan, who didn’t even utter the phrase “AIDS” for the first six years of his administration as thousands died of the disease.

We can only assume that, were Dr. Murthy confirmed as surgeon general, he would be a leading voice of reason in the national response to the Ebola epidemic. Instead, we get ill-informed talking heads demanding a travel ban to and from West African nations, which every public health official acknowledges would exacerbate the epidemic, ultimately driving more infected people to cross borders illegally, avoiding the checkpoints where they might be directed to care. This scenario would definitely result in more cases of Ebola in the United States.

And what if the surgeon general also stumped for common-sense, data-driven policies to reform our gun laws? The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (named after President Reagan’s press secretary, the late James Brady, who was critically wounded during an assassination attempt on Reagan) points out the scale of the problem with guns: On average, 128 Americans are killed or wounded by guns every day. More than 30,000 die from gun violence every year.

As far as we know, there are only two people in the United States currently with Ebola. There are 300 million guns. Ebola can be stopped with proper public health procedures and by rapidly deploying a massive influx of public health workers, equipment and other resources to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The Senate should immediately vote to approve the nomination of Dr. Murthy as surgeon general.

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.

© 2014 Amy Goodman / Distributed by King Features Syndicate

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A Force More Powerful in Jefferson County, Colorado

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

“Don’t make history a mystery” read one of the signs at a rally in Jefferson County, Colo. High-school students in this suburban district, referred to locally as “JeffCo,” have been walking out of class en masse this past week, protesting the planned censorship of the district’s Advanced Placement (AP) United States history curriculum by the local school board. The board proposed a committee that would review the course, and others, adding material to “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” as well as eliminating anything the board thought could “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” The student walkout coincided with several days of “sick-outs” by teachers. Ironically, the school board’s attempts to stifle teaching about the history of protest in the United States has provoked a growing protest movement.

School boards have long been an electoral target of the right wing in the U.S. In JeffCo, the current conservative majority won a narrow victory in November 2013, an off-year election with low voter turnout. “About 33 percent of the total population that could vote voted. Elections matter, and especially school-board elections,” John Ford said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. He’s a social-studies teacher at Moore Middle School and the president of the Jefferson County Education Association, representing more than 5,000 teachers, librarians, counselors and other employees of the district.

The power of school boards is often underestimated. “I’ve been paying attention to the school board for the past year, and I have been increasingly concerned about what’s been going on,” Ashlyn Maher told me. She is a senior at Chatfield High School who helped organize the student walkouts. Civil disobedience has a long and storied role in U.S. history. The Declaration of Independence itself, so cherished by conservatives and progressives alike, instructs “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Maher says that disobedience is “the foundation of our country. I took AP U.S. history myself, and all I was presented with were the facts. And then I made the opinions based on those facts. I was never told what to think.”

The teachers also have been battling the board majority since it took power. “We’ve had a long history of collaboration with the school board and the superintendent. And that’s all coming to an end,” Ford said.

A national, right-wing political group, Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, celebrated the conservative victory in the JeffCo school-board elections. Dustin Zvonek, the Colorado state director for the group, wrote last April that the election marked “an exciting and hopeful moment for the county and school district.” Exhorting the three-member majority “to strike while the iron is hot,” Zvonek may not be the best adviser, though. “Board members can and should begin exploring and debating such options with little fear of alienating the public at large,” he wrote.

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

We Need Medical Boots on the Ground Now

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The headlines shift hourly between Ebola and ISIS. The question is often asked, “Should we put boots on the ground?” The answer is yes—but not in the Middle East. We need tens of thousands of boots on the ground dealing with Ebola: boots of doctors, nurses, health professionals, dealing with this wholly preventable global health disaster.

Ebola is a small virus that is revealing very large problems with the world’s public health systems. The few known cases here in the United States have provoked a climate of fear and a growing awareness of just how vulnerable we are to a virulent illness let loose in our society. Imagine how people feel in the impoverished West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the number of cases is in the thousands, and the infrastructure is simply incapable of dealing with the burgeoning number of infected people.

“This is an international humanitarian and health crisis. It threatens the stability of the region politically, economically, and, of course, human health matters most,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Speaking on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, he said, “For the second time in the history of the United Nations, the U.N. Security Council called a health threat—AIDS was the first, Ebola is the second.” He was speaking as news arrived that a second health worker in Dallas tested positive for Ebola. “We should be mobilizing much, much more,” he said. “We should have done it earlier. We should do it now.”

The World Health Organization announced the latest Ebola outbreak in Guinea on March 23 of this year. The outbreak grew, spreading to neighboring countries and jumping over several to reach Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria. It killed tens, then hundreds, but largely stayed off the world stage until two white, American aid workers contracted the disease. Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol were separately flown back to the United States. With the first Ebola patients ever to set foot in the U.S. shrouded in isolation suits, the disease became the lead story across the country.

Remarkably, as people were dying en masse of Ebola in West Africa, these two Americans survived, treated to some of the few existing doses of the experimental drug known as ZMapp. These are positive outcomes made possible with a well-funded health-care system.

Enter Thomas Eric Duncan. He, too, had been infected by the Ebola virus. His illness progressed quite differently. His nephew, Josephus Weeks, summed it up eloquently in a piece published by The Dallas Morning News:

“On Friday, Sept. 25, 2014, my uncle Thomas Eric Duncan went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. He had a high fever and stomach pains. He told the nurse he had recently been in Liberia. But he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay for treatment, so within hours he was released with some antibiotics and Tylenol.”

Duncan went home to be cared for by his family, but got progressively sicker. Two days later, he went back to the hospital, where he was admitted with suspicion of Ebola. He rapidly declined and died on Oct. 8, as Weeks wrote, “alone in a hospital room.” Within days, we learned that one of his health-care workers, critical-care nurse Nina Pham, had contracted Ebola. Then another nurse, Amber Vinson, showed symptoms. Hours before she was diagnosed, she was on a plane with more than 130 people, flying back from Cleveland to Dallas. What if we had a health-care system that guaranteed thorough treatment, regardless of whether or not patients have private health insurance?

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