Democracy Now
Weiner’s No Longfellow
“The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.”
These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem “Snow-Flakes,” published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin’s flubbing of the history of Revere’s famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin’s incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.
Pathetically, as well, the media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”? We need modern-day eco-Paul (or Paula) Revere to rouse the populace to this imminent threat.
Categories: Democracy Now
Two Reporters Arrested at Protest Against Gov. Walker's Union-Busting Bill
(Photo courtesy of Rebecca Kemble)
More than a thousand Wisconsin workers marched through Madison, Wisconsin, today to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s "budget repair" bill that slashes collective bargaining rights and funding for education, healthcare and seniors’ programs. During the march, police took into custody two credentialed journalists who were filming the protest.
Democracy Now! spoke with one of the reporters, Sam Mayfield, about 15 minutes after she was cited for disorderly conduct and released. Mayfield has been documenting protests in Madison since February for an upcoming documentary.
Click here to listen to the interview.
SAM MAYFIELD: Today there was this parade of maybe a couple of thousand people coming up State Street to the Capitol itself. The parade went around the Capitol building a few times, and then folks wanted to go inside to actually be part of the hearings that were taking place. I went inside, didn’t have any trouble getting inside. I’m press, and so I was able to just go in.
There was an officer there arbitrarily exerting authority, told me to leave. I told him I was with the press. This was after, I should say, after he pushed my body. Before he told me to leave or told me anything, he pushed my body, physically touched me. And then waved me past after I said I was press.
Today I was working with a young woman, also from Vermont. She was my assistant. He told her to leave. She also said, "I’m press," and she didn’t leave either. She stayed put to sort of film and document the police mistreatment of the protesters that were there. As people were coming into the Capitol, the police were sort of excessively forceful. I went into the rotunda, continued to film there. Someone brought it to my attention that my assistant was being arrested. I turned around, and I saw Alex being pulled and handcuffed. So I went to her just to see how she was. She was sort of in the elevator. We exchanged, you know, nonverbal communication with our eyes. Her camera was sort of dangling from her hand, and I grabbed the camera.
This large police officer, the one who had already pushed me and had already told me to leave, said, "Now you’re under arrest." He grabbed me and then let me go. And he tried to take my camera. I wasn’t going to give him my camera. Then he let me go. And so, I kind of—you know, we were looking for other people to just—to be documenting this and to be—you know, if there were just many people around. Then the cop called for backup, and then two other cops sort of corralled me. And then we all went downstairs in the elevator.
RENÉE FELTZ: Sam, we saw much larger protests go by in March where no one was arrested. Were you surprised that the police officers were making arrests today? And were you guys the only ones who were targeted?
SAM MAYFIELD: I was really surprised. I was surprised at the number of people that were arrested, and I was surprised at the excessive force that was exerted from the beginning. I didn’t see this happen in the times when I’ve been here in the past months. It really seemed as though this police officer was—he was ready to take any kind of action from the beginning, without even hearing what was going on. So that was a surprise.
There were, when I was in the basement of the police custody place there, there were four of us being processed. The cops seemed to be very interested in how many people were down here, what were they in here for. My feeling, from overhearing the police officers’ conversations, was that they were also surprised, and they were not happy with the number of people that had been arrested.
RENÉE FELTZ: And how about yourself? What’s your reaction to being cited and being taken out? And what’s your plans, moving forward?
SAM MAYFIELD: My feeling is that, you know, I’m frustrated that the cops are taking it to this level, that they’re arresting press as they’re documenting it. I mean, there weren’t a lot of—you know, documenting the action. There weren’t a lot of us documenting, and it was very obvious that I was press, after having presented myself as such. He knew very well that I was with the media. You know, it seems very unjust. People are being arrested at sort of—well, it seems like—it seems like sort of short notice. You know, this action happened this morning, this parade—or this afternoon, I guess, this parade. There have been—it’s been very quiet in Madison lately. So it sort of makes me nervous that this is the new—this is the new tactic. I hope that this is not the new tactic that the police are going to engage in.
RENÉE FELTZ: Well, thanks very much for your update and for your time, Sam.
SAM MAYFIELD: Yeah, for sure.
Categories: Democracy Now
Dr. Gabor Maté: More Compassion, Less Violence Needed in Addressing Drug Addiction
In part two of our interview about a new report declaring the so-called "war on drugs" a failure, Dr. Gabor Maté notes that "where violent suppression of drug activity increases, so does killings and violence related to drug use." The Canadian physician and author also relates the study’s findings to his own work in a drug addiction treatment clinic in Vancouver. "The causes of the addiction in their life have to be understood and addressed, and they have to be treated with compassion," says Maté.
Click here to listen to part one of the interview.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Dr. Gabor Maté, Vancouver-based physician, bestselling author. Among his books, well, his most recent, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
Tens of thousands of people have died in the war on drugs. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in this country and around the world. And yet, the war on drugs is a failure.
Now, as we speak, many are marching in Mexico because of the massive costs, both human and financial, of the war on drugs. And they’ll end up in Ciudad Juárez, where so many have died.
Dr. Maté, if it is such a failure, why does it continue.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, that’s always a very good question. When something is such a demonstrated failure on its own terms, one might then call it an honest mistake. But it’s no longer honest when they keep ignoring the evidence. And you have to ask, is somebody benefiting from this? And maybe it’s not a failure, except not on the stated terms, like other wars, which may have been failing on their publicly stated terms, but they’re very profitable to somebody nevertheless. So this is another war.
If you look at the origins of the phrase "war on drugs," it was initiated under the Nixon regime in the 1970s and at a time when Vietnam was coming to an end, and terrorists haven’t arrived on the scene yet. And America always needs an enemy. And so, the drug criminal becomes the enemy. And so, dutifully, Hollywood jumps on board, and movie after movie shows these people as deadened criminals, hardened criminals and danger to society. So, the fear factor, which in America always has to be projected on somebody, was then projected onto the drug users. And so, it has that social control aspect of maintaining fear and justifying a heavily security establishment—a heavily supported security establishment, that actually is allowed to intervene very harshly in the life of its own population, number one.
Number two, the security establishment—the police, the courts and so on—this is what keeps them going. I mean, without the drug war, their role in society would be very, very different indeed. So this is what they know how to do, and this is what they get the money for. And then, of course, the private jails and the whole jail system. And not to mention the corruption that inevitably goes along with this. There’s a lot of people making money on this who are not just in the criminal gangs, but who are their supporters and enablers within the legal system in the U.S., as in many other countries. And so, in Latin America, when there was a similar commission, they actually said that the drug war is a threat to the democracy, because of the corruption that it entails and the violence that it causes. So, people are benefiting majorly from this.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the addicts that you treat, the people in Vancouver, for example, what you find is the most effective form of treatment? What works? What doesn’t?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, again, if you look at the literature on addiction, what you find is that the biggest driver of addictive relapse is actually stress. So, whether you take animals or human beings and you infuse them with the stress hormone, cortisol, their consumption of drugs goes up. This is true for rats. It’s true for human beings. Now, there’s no better way to stress people than to criminalize them, marginalize them, and ostracize them, just as this commission points out. So when you’re stressing people, you’re actually promoting their drug use. So if I had to come up with a system to promote drug use, I would come up exactly with the system we have right now. Furthermore, if I had to come up with a system that promoted the profits of the cartels, I would come up exactly with the system we have right now.
So when it comes to treatment, you have to de-stress people. You have to give them less stress. That means you have to treat them humanely. That means you have to understand their histories, which I’ve talked about in previous interviews, about their childhood losses, their trauma, their post-traumatic stress situations. And that has to be addressed. In other words, the causes of the addiction in their life have to be understood and addressed, and they have to be treated with compassion. Then there’s some hope of redeeming large numbers of them. Under the present system, redemption is the exception rather than the rule. And the failure rates of drug programs in this country, as in my own country, are up in the 90, 95 percentile, or percentages.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re saying that if you wanted the systems to continue, you’d do exactly what this war on drugs is all about right now, individually for how addicts are treated. But then also, why does it promote gang warfare and gangs?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the studies presented by this commission actually show that where violent suppression of drug activity increases, so does killings and violence related to drug use. So if you look at Mexico, they’ve spent something like $3 or $4 billion over the last four years with this U.S.-backed and U.S.-inspired crackdown on drug traffic. The result has been 40,000 deaths in four years in Mexico. That’s 10,000 people a year. That’s many more—that’s eight times as many as American soldiers died in the entire Iraq war. And so that the more you increase the stress on people and the more you made difficult and the more you press these people, the more violent they’re going to be with each other and with the general population.
But it’s not the drug use itself that causes the criminality. It’s the criminalization that causes the criminality. There would be no benefit to the drug cartels if the drugs were to be decriminalized. In fact, it would knock most of their business out of their hands right away.
AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the people who are criminalized. There’s no greater use of drugs in the black and Latino community, yet they are in prison in by far greater numbers proportionately.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Absolutely, in California, which, you know, you probably carried this story a few ago, that the Supreme Court ruled California jails cruel and unusual punishment, because of the overcrowding. In California, actually, 34 percent of people in jail are Latino, and 30 percent are blacks, and 29 percent are Caucasians—quite out of proportion with their actual representation in the population. So the drug laws—and in New York state, which jails more people for marijuana possession than any other state, I think, at least percentage-wise, it’s disproportionately black youth who are incarcerated as a result.
AMY GOODMAN: Is it possible—let’s see, just some facts and figures. The estimated annual revenue that California would raise if it taxed and regulated the sale of marijuana is $1.4 billion.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Not to mention the money they would save by not jailing people anymore and putting them through the court system. So, there’s no argument to be made against the commission’s report. There’s nothing scientifically or evidence-wise that in any way would counter anything that they recommended.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about the environmental devastation of the war on drugs.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, again, the commission report points out that most people involved in the growing of marijuana and the growing of opium, coca plants and so on, are actually small farmers, very often in countries where other crops have been if not destroyed, then somehow made to be not so profitable anymore because of economic policies. And so, these people turn to these illicit drugs as a way of supporting their families. And then some local militia or army helicopters, usually provided by the United States, as in Colombia, comes in, and they poison spray the crops, causing tremendous environmental damage and the risk of illness to the population, and without in any way diminishing the volume of drugs being grown or sold.
AMY GOODMAN: You have been working with police chiefs and others as you write your books, do your research. What do they say is the effectiveness of catching people who are transporting drugs, selling drugs?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, unfortunately, there are two kinds of police chiefs: those that are still serving, and then they keep their mouths shut, and those that are retired, who no longer have the power. But so many, though, of the retired ones are—very many of them are very vocal in their opposition to the war on drugs. I was speaking to the head of the narcotics department of a major American city about half a year ago, and he said that around the world police efforts interdict maybe 10, at the very most 15, percent of traffic, of drug traffic, of drugs being moved. And of course, he says, if he was a large corporation with a multi-hundred-million-dollar business, he would gladly give up that percentage, write it down as a lost liter, so that the police efforts, for all the deaths and all the destruction of families and for all the wastage of human lives that it involves, they don’t make—they hardly make a minuscule dent in the international drug trade. And they can’t, because as long as there’s a desire, there’s always going to be a demand. As an American judge said, you can no more repeal the law of supply and demand than you can repeal the law of direct gravity.
AMY GOODMAN: So you have this international esteemed drug panel—
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN:—that’s talking about decriminalization, that’s talking about the war on drugs as a failure. The U.S., the White House, is saying, "No, it’s succeeding well," and they’re listing all of these facts and figures. Do you have the sense that the attitude has shifted with the weight of the facts? You have all these conservative Mexican presidents who are saying, "Decriminalize."
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah. The weight of intellectual opinion has shifted. And those people that are no longer—unfortunately, for the most part, it’s people who are no longer constrained by political considerations. They have openly now come out against policies that they were either silent about or were behind when they were in power. The problem is that within circles that still have the power there’s very little evidence of anything shifting. In fact, what you have is the case of Barack Obama, who before he gets into power is very vocal in his opposition to the war on drugs and points out its failure, and once he’s in power he supports it and furthers it. So, that shift hasn’t happened yet. But at least it’s highly encouraging that the conversation is taking place at such a high international level.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gabor Maté, Vancouver-based physician. Among his books, his most recent, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Thanks for joining us.
Categories: Democracy Now
Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt Dies in Africa
Former Black Panther Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt died in Tanzania on June 2. He was imprisoned for 27 years, until his case was overturned in 1997. Hear Democracy Now!’s Oct. 5, 2000 interview: http://ow.ly/594MV
Categories: Democracy Now
Coming Up on Friday: Seymour Hersh on "Iran and the Bomb"
Tune in Friday for an extensive interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh about his new article "Iran and the Bomb." Hersh writes: "There is a large body of evidence including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago–allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions."
Do you have a question you want to ask Sy Hersh? Email us at stories(at)democracynow.org or go to our Facebook page.
Categories: Democracy Now
Egyptians Fill Tahrir Square for a 'Second Day of Rage': "We Have Demands that Haven't Been Met Yet"
Last Friday, more than three months after former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power, tens of thousands of protesters poured into downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square for what they called a "Second Day of Rage." In the largest demonstration since Mubarak stepped down, protesters called for the ruling military to hand over power to a civilian council, draw up a new constitution, and postpone September’s parliamentary election until new political parties can organize. Democracy Now! correspondents Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar filed this report.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Tahrir Square, the heart of Cairo, is filled once again with tens of thousands of Egyptians for what’s being called the Second Day of Rage. Four months after the Egyptian revolution began, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is coming under growing criticism for its handling of the country since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
GIGI IBRAHIM: I’m Gigi Ibrahim. I am a political with the Revolutionary Socialists and the Labor Democratic Party. I’m here today because we didn’t feel change. Our revolution is being hijacked by the military council. And we have demands that haven’t been met yet, so we’re here to list them and basically apply pressure from the square for the Supreme Council to implement those demands.
NOOR AYMAN: My name is Noor Ayman. I’m a law student at Cairo University. I graduated political sciences at American University of Cairo. Basically this banner consists all the demands, the specific demands, that have a relative amount of consensus among the people on the street now, including the end of military trials for civilians; setting a minimum wage and maximum wage within a time frame, with a specific time plan; demanding that the police come back to the streets in large quantities but with judicious provision; a purification of the media in Egypt; as well as trying Hosni Mubarak for grand treason because of his actions during the revolution.
SALAH ABDULLAH ATIYAH KHADRAGI: [translated] My name is Salah Abdullah Atiyah Khadragi from Zagazig, Sharqiya. I’m 28 years old. I came to Tahrir Square just like any Egyptian coming to Tahrir today. We announced the Second Friday of Rage, and I’ll tell you why: because the demands of the revolution have not been realized.
GIGI IBRAHIM: We need an end, a complete end, to all military trials for civilians. It’s completely unacceptable. Until now, more than 7,000 people have been tried in four months, basically in military courts. Most of them are falsely accused, are peaceful protesters and so on.
Second demand is for minimum wage, maximum wage, to be implemented or even given a plan for. It wasn’t even addressed until this point. Many people that took part in the revolution essentially came out because they don’t have a decent wage; they don’t have a decent, dignified life; and they want social equality, they want a dignified life that would be given through implementing a minimum wage.
LOBNA DARWISH: I’m Lobna Darwish. I’m a peace protester. I’m here today because we came here to make very, very clear that the demands of the revolution are still up. From the beginning of the revolution 'til now, we're seeing both lines. State media is either like supporting Mubarak or supporting now the high military council. They’re all saying that like the army is the red line, Mubarak is the red line, whatever is a red line. So we’ve been seeing that every initiative came out of citizen journalism in Egypt. There is a lot of people who have been tweeting, putting on Facebook their statuses, putting information online, applauding videos. And that’s where we got most of our information during the revolution at this moment. So we thought that putting all these efforts of citizen journalism together would bring a new source of media in Egypt that’s dependable, that’s free.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] We are here because we haven’t felt any change. Everything that we have achieved, the army is seeking to destroy. How can we be at a sit-in, and the army comes and attacks us on March 9th? I was one of the March 9th detainees, and I was just released just five days ago. I had a younger brother. He was the youngest martyr in Tahrir Square. He was 13 years old. For all these people who were martyred, it’s unacceptable that they died for nothing.
MOHAMED EL DAHSHAN: Mohamed El Dahshan is my name. I’m an activist. I’ve been here since the—well, I’ve been taking part in the protests since the very first day. And we’re back here because essentially our demands have not been met. And one of the basic slogans that we’ve had since January 25th was "bread, freedom and human dignity." And we’re still demanding those three things, just that the culprits are no longer the police and their brutality, but now it’s the army. So, our demands are the same, so we’re still here.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: The calls for this protest have been going on actively for weeks. But one group is notably absent: the Muslim Brotherhood. They have been actively calling on people not to participate in today’s protest.
GIGI IBRAHIM: Many people thought that maybe because the Muslim Brotherhood are not joining that it’s not—the numbers are not going to be great. But just like you can see, it’s full. And we did that all on our own. There are liberal groups, socialist groups, independent groups, and activists and human rights and bloggers and journalists and just average citizens coming from all over. Transportation workers’ independent union is taking part. So there is a group from every—the Christians also [inaudible] protest, they’re also joining. So, a lot of different groups came out, because they feel that the change hasn’t come, and we need to push forward and have our demands met.
LOBNA DARWISH: Today, I think, was crucial, because through the last week, they have been treating, like, the whole country, like today is like the point we’re going to know whether the revolution is continuing or not. It became like this crucial moment that we know now that people can take the streets again. They can come out in big numbers, even though a lot of forces were not supporting today. Like, for example, Muslim Brotherhood were against today and are actually sending all these communiqués saying that people who are here today are against, like, the people of Egypt. And it’s really, really outrageous.
NOOR AYMAN: Lots of people call this a second revolution. No, it’s not. It’s merely a continuation of the first revolution, and it’s still not ended, still has a long way to go. This is just us finishing what we are trying to finish or continuing what we started.
SALAH ABDULLAH ATIYAH KHADRAGI: [translated] We want the price of the blood of the martyrs that was spilled on this square. I was asked once on TV about this square. I said it means freedom. And nothing is more precious to an Egyptian than freedom.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: It’s nighttime in Tahrir, and the square is still packed. Tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered here today to call for reform and to call for freedom, and to send a message to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that the revolution is still ongoing.
For Democracy Now!, I’m Sharif Abdel Kouddous, with Nicole Salazar, in Cairo, Egypt.
Categories: Democracy Now
Hope and Resistance in Honduras
While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century.
While he is no longer president, his peaceful return marks a resounding success for the opponents of the coup. Despite this, the post-coup government in Honduras, under President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, is becoming increasingly repressive, and is the subject this week of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, calling for suspension of aid to the Honduran military and police.
As the only U.S. journalist on Zelaya’s flight home, I asked him how he felt about his imminent return. “Full of hope and optimism,” he said. “Political action is possible instead of armaments. No to violence. No to military coups. Coups never more.”
Categories: Democracy Now
"Furkan Had a Huge Heart": Ahmet Dogan on His Son, Killed One Year Ago in Gaza Flotilla Raid
On the first anniversary of Israel’s deadly attack on the Gaza-bound aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, we feature an interview with Ahmet Dogan, the father of Turkish-American Furkan Dogan, the youngest of nine activists killed in the raid.
Furkan Dogan was born in Troy, New York, and moved to Turkey when he was two years old. An autopsy showed that on May 31, 2010, he was shot at close range, once in the chest and four times in the head.
For additional coverage, click here to search the Democracy Now! archive for "flotilla."
AMY GOODMAN: The father of an 18-year-old American citizen killed in an Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla last year is in the United States to call for an investigation into his son’s killing. Furkan Dogan was the youngest victim of Israel’s deadly May 31st raid on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the six-boat flotilla. Turkish autopsy reports revealed he was shot five times at close range by Israeli commandos. Eight other Turkish nationals were also killed in the attack. Last month, an Israeli inquiry absolved the government and military of any wrongdoing in the raid.
Furkan Dogan was an American citizen of Turkish origin. He was born in 1991, not far from here, in upstate New York, in Troy. His father, Ahmet Dogan, had come to the area from Turkey to study accounting at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI. The family returned to Turkey in 1993.
This week, Ahmet Dogan arrived in Washington in an attempt to convince U.S. officials to open an investigation into his son’s death. He arrived in New York last night and joins us here in our studio. We’re also joined by his lawyer, Ugur Sevgili, who will help with translation.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ahmet Dogan.
AHMET DOGAN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: My condolences on the death of your son.
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] Thank you very much for giving us your precious time.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about Furkan. How old was Furkan? How did he end up on the Mavi Marmara?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] He was graduated from the high school, while he was 18. Prior to his graduation, he found out that he received some—he was following the news about the situation, the horrible situation, in Gaza, so he was deeply interested. And one day, he saw the billboard, in the city of Kayseri, advertising the flotilla campaign. So he applied online; he made an applied application via internet. But indeed, prior to this campaign, his initial plan was to come to U.S. to visit the place he was born and to take language courses in Chicago. So, the Gaza flotilla was not in his mind.
AMY GOODMAN: How old was your son when he was killed?
AHMET DOGAN: In American style, he was 18. But we, in Turkey, we call it 19.
AMY GOODMAN: Your son was born here.
AHMET DOGAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: When did you move back to Turkey.
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] As soon as I received an MBA degree in 1993, we returned. I and the whole family returned to Turkey. At that time, Furkan was two years old.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did he get interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Why did he want to go on the Mavi Marmara?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] Furkan was the kind of boy having a huge heart, and he was very generous and always trying to help to the people that are in need. In his last two, three years, Furkan indeed already had some interest on the horrible situation in Gaza, especially. He was collecting news, op-eds, photos, video clips, through internet, about the horrible situation—humanitarian situation, poverty situation—in Gaza. And his idea was he always wanted to help to the people there, especially to the children. He was always telling myself that one day he will go and bring toys and documents, notebooks, books and food to those people, to the children, with his own hands.
AMY GOODMAN: Ahmet Dogan, what was your response, as his father, when he said he would go on this aid flotilla to Gaza?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] As was said, Furkan did his initial application via internet, and then he came to home, and he asked for our permission. And while he was asking that, he said that his initial idea—he said, "I know that I want to—first, my initial idea was to go to U.S.A., but I changed my mind. There is a flotilla going to Gaza, and I am deeply interested to go there. One can always go to U.S., but one cannot always go to Gaza." And upon such honorable request and moral positioning, I and my wife were not in a position to reject it. So we allowed him to go.
AMY GOODMAN: So your son went on the Mavi Marmara. What did you then hear? How were you monitoring what was happening, you and your wife?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] We sent our goodbyes to Furkan in the city of Kayseri, where we live, and our last contact with him was in the port of Antalya in the south region of Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast. It was night. And that was our last contact, via mobile phone call. And since then, we were just watching the flotilla via online or through live TV news.
AMY GOODMAN: And when did you hear he was killed?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] Obviously we didn’t know that Furkan was dead, and it took us three days to find out that he was dead. In that period of time, I personally had contacted Turkish authorities, minister of foreign affairs of Turkey in Ankara. And I also contacted the U.S. embassy in Ankara, as well as the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. But nobody knew where my child was. Nobody knew what happened to Furkan. So, on the 3rd of June, I was the first one who found out that—who has seen his body in the morgue, among these nine people.
We didn’t know that Furkan was dead, so when I left to the city of Istanbul to welcome my son in the airport, I brought new clothes, clean clothes, for my son, because I thought he had a horrible experience. So I never thought that something happened to him, but I kept on—in this period of time, I kept on calling the authorities. No responses arrived. Then, one morning, next morning, they called me. They told me that there are three unidentified bodies in the morgue, so they told me to check for them. But I still didn’t believe that Furkan was there. I did it as a matter of—I did it just to see, even though I didn’t believe, just to see if he is there. So I went to the morgue. I saw the body.
AMY GOODMAN: What has been the response of the Turkish authorities and of the U.S. government, since he was a U.S. citizen?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] There’s a criminal investigation going on by a Turkish prosecutor within Turkey. But after this date, I am not sure that there is an investigation in relation to the death of my son here in the U.S., so it is for that reason that I am here in U.S., to seek for justice on behalf of my son.
AMY GOODMAN: Did the U.S. embassy, ambassador, in Turkey call you? Did they talk to you about this American citizen who was killed?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] American authorities, the embassy, has learned of the death of my son through myself on the day that I had a live TV press conference to the public audience in Turkey. So I suppose that was the moment that the embassy authorities found out the death of my son. And subsequently, they have contacted me. And in their initial contact, they also stated their condolences for the death of my son.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the Israeli authorities?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] No Israeli authorities, and neither any Israeli citizen, has contacted me for the cause that they did and for the death of my son, unfortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you asking for here in the United States? You’ve come back to Turkey—is this the first time you’ve returned since you were—
AHMET DOGAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN:—a graduate student at RPI?
AHMET DOGAN: Yes, this is the first time.
AMY GOODMAN: And what are you demanding of the Obama administration?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] My son was killed on international waters in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers. He was first injured by three shots behind his back, and then another soldier came and shot him in the middle of his eyebrows—one here and one in his right nose. He was murdered by Israeli soldiers. Among all other passengers, he was there for humanitarian purposes, not more than that.
So, I want from the Obama administration to seek justice for my son. He’s a U.S. citizen. I want them—I want the committers or perpetrators of this crime to be prosecuted by the U.S. authorities. Not only that, I want the U.S. authorities also to claim compensation. I want U.S. authorities to push Israel to apologize to me and to the other victims of this flotilla incident.
On another note, Furkan, by the time Furkan was—during the incident, Furkan was shooting the incident, all the actions, with his own private video camera. So I want that back. I want the clothes of the moment that Furkan was shot. I want his mobile phone and all other of his personal belongings, especially the camera, the fact that it has a high value of evidence. I want them back, and I want the U.S. authority to push Israeli authorities to bring these—send those things back to us.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you learn exactly what happened to your son? Who told you? Who described the last moments of his life?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] While I was in the morgue, the doctor told me that Furkan was shot in point-blank range, one shot from his eyebrows, in between, and one shot on his right side of his nose. And secondly, the official autopsy report also explained this cause, the situation of death of my son. Thirdly, one of the—there was one of the injured person among these passengers. He also eyewitnessed how my son was murdered. He told me that he was injured—by the time he was injured, the soldiers were pulling the injured body of my son to the corner, and then one other soldier came and shot him in a point-blank range. And there are witnesses. And they also kicked my son while he was lying on the deck.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ahmet Dogan. His 18-year-old son Furkan, a U.S. citizen, was killed by Israeli force in the Gaza flotilla attack on the Mavi Marmara, shot five times, including four times in the head.
His translator is also his lawyer. He is Ugur Sevgili, a Turkish lawyer who’s come here. And Ugur, I was wondering if you can talk. You are representing a number of people on the Mavi Marmara. Talk about this case and what you’re doing here.
UGUR SEVGILI: OK. We represent the whole Turkish victims of the Mavi Marmara, of the Gaza flotilla.
AMY GOODMAN: How many?
UGUR SEVGILI: Approximately 350 Turkish citizens. But on another note, as you know, the Gaza flotilla was composed of mainly international victims, but we only represent the Turkish ones, as well as a Turkish NGO. What we did, we always cooperated with the prosecutor in Turkey. As you know, there’s an ongoing investigation. So we kept on feeding the prosecutor, sending him the evidence that we receive, sharing our thoughts. And I think very soon there will be an indictment in Turkey against the perpetrators of these crimes, most for [inaudible] the officials in Israel. And the case is in relation to universal jurisdiction in Turkey. We, the lawyers of this case, we also brought this international case before the International Criminal Court, under Article 15.3 of the Rome Statute. We want the prosecutor of the ICC, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo, to initiate an investigation and to prosecute the perpetrators of the crime.
AMY GOODMAN: The International Criminal Court.
UGUR SEVGILI: Yeah, International Criminal Court. Our claim, that in that flotilla, that they—that war crimes have been committed. And this claim has also been supported by the report of the United Nations fact-finding mission of the U.N. Human Rights Council. In parentheses, it was the report which was only objected by the U.S. government.
And after this, we also came to U.S. to represent our client here. In the last—since last Saturday we have been here in the U.S., and we have visited many officials, indeed, in Washington. They were very kind. They were deeply interested in our case, and they listened to us very carefully. But none of them told us whether there is an ongoing investigation or not. So we are not really sure what is happening behind the scenes.
But the picture that I have, that we have, is that the State Department is waiting the outcome of the—the result of the U.N. by U.N. panel of inquiry. And the DOJ, Department of Justice, is waiting the result of the investigation in Turkey, the criminal investigation in Turkey. So, maybe after these finals started on both sides, the U.S. will take some steps.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the Prime Minister, Erdogan, taken a stand?
UGUR SEVGILI: Yeah, definitely. He kept on calling him in person. He visited him.
AMY GOODMAN: You met with the Prime Minister of Turkey?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] He personally visited us at our home for condolences.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you met the Corrie family, Rachel’s parents? Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli military bulldozer on March 16, 2003. She was crushed to death as she was defending a Palestinian family’s home from being bulldozed.
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] Approximately two weeks ago, they came to Istanbul. They were invited by a theater organization in Istanbul. There was a performance in Turkey dedicated for Rachel Corrie, so they were the special invitees. So I was also invited to that meeting, to that event. So we had a chance to meet each other, and we discussed for hours and hours about the incident of both children.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did you take away from that? Was your wife there also?
AHMET DOGAN: No.
AMY GOODMAN: Just you.
AHMET DOGAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you have other children?
AHMET DOGAN: Yes, I have one daughter and one son.
AMY GOODMAN: How old is she?
AHMET DOGAN: Twenty-seven. My son is 23. Furkan was the youngest one.
AMY GOODMAN: And what effect has this had on them?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] No words can reflect their feeling.
AMY GOODMAN: And on your wife?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] She is doing fine.
AMY GOODMAN: You come here at a very unusual time, at a time of major upheaval in the Middle East, popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen. What are your thoughts?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] I always knew that the Gaza flotilla incident is a turning point of the horrible situation in the Middle East. It has a widespread effect. But I wasn’t expecting that the outcome of the flotilla incident would be that much quick. Especially, I was expecting something will happen in Egypt, the fact I knew that the people in Egypt were not happy with the political relation between the Israel-Gaza situation and Egypt. The people want to help the people in Gaza. The Egyptians want to help in Gaza, to the Gazan people. But because of the authoritative regime there, they could not. But today, because of the death of my son, because of what happened on Mavi Marmara, the whole Middle East—people in the Middle East are rising, fighting for their own freedom. And I support them by heart.
AMY GOODMAN: And as you leave the United States, what thoughts would you like to leave Americans with? What message do you have?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] My son was murdered. The way he was murdered is unacceptable. It was unhuman. No justice system can accept that. And besides, he’s an American citizen.
What happened to my son was obvious. The crime was obvious. So what I want the people in here, in U.S., is to seek justice on behalf of my son, to make pressure to the authorities, to political institutions here in U.S., to send letters, to do PR activities, and to push the Congress members, House of Representatives, to take action. But unfortunately, up to this day, no action has taken by the U.S. authorities.
Unfortunately, I see that the news, on the U.S. news, the situation on Mavi Marmara, what happened on Mavi Marmara vessel, what happened to my son, is not shown, is limited. Somehow, I have a feeling like it is being covered by the major press organizations. So I want the U.S. people to push these press organizations and to show it more.
So, it is for that reason that I highly appreciate for your invitation, and I thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: There is a ship of Jewish Americans that will go, like the Mavi Marmara, to challenge, an aid flotilla to Gaza that is leaving in the next months. What are your thoughts about this group?
AHMET DOGAN: [translated] After the Mavi Marmara incident, the blockade on Gaza is a bit softened, but there is still a blockade there. So such activities, such humanitarian aid campaigns to Gaza, is very important, because the outcome—there is no final—there is still blockade there. So, we have to lift the blockade there. And it is for that reason I am very happy that there are campaigns going on from U.S., especially from the U.S. and the Jews together. And they are really fighting for that, and I support them by heart.
I wish Furkan would be here. And I am sure if he would be here, he definitely will attend those campaign, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you very much.
AHMET DOGAN: Thank you.
Categories: Democracy Now
AUDIO: "A Return to Democracy in Honduras?" Amy Goodman Reports on Zelaya's Return to Honduras
Amy Goodman files her first audio report from Nicaragua on ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s historic return home. She filed this report from the airport in Managua where she interviewed Father Roy Bourgeois of SOA Watch.
FOR LATEST REPORTS ON HONDURAS VISIT OUR LIVE BLOG
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! We are in Managua, Nicaragua, for an historic event: the return of ousted president Manuel Zelaya of Honduras to Honduras. Two years ago, on June 28th, 2009, he was thrown out at gunpoint. The Honduran military threw President Zelaya out of the country. Now he is returning on May 28th, 2011.
The deal that was brokered in Colombia, called the Cartagena Agreement, was witnessed by the presidents of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and Colombia, President [Juan Manuel] Santos. The deal was worked out between ousted president Manual Zelaya and the current president of Honduras Porfirio Lobo. They have agreed on a number of points. Among them that President Zelaya and over 200 exiles can return safely home. That there will be a constitutional assembly that will be allowed to be set up. That the party that now Manuel Zelaya heads called the Resistance will be guaranteed to be able to be a legal political party. And that a Secretariat for Justice and Human Rights will be set up to deal with the terrible human rights situation in Honduras.
President Zelaya will soon be boarding the flight for the short trip between Managua and Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Democracy Now! will be the only American media organization on that flight. Among those who are going to be on that flight are Father Roy Bourgeois, long time head of the School of the Americas Watch. He founded the School of the Americas Watch. He’s joining me right here in Managua to talk about the significance of the fact that the Honduran military, the chief of staff of which, General Vázquez Velázquez, was trained at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which is why Father Roy Bourgeois is here to attend this moment.
FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: In the endless struggle for democracy, for justice and peace in the Americas, there come along every now and then, special moments, historic moments, this is one of them. The School of Americas Watch really is honored and humbled to be invited to return with the democratically elected president Zelaya who was forcibly kicked out of the country. We’re honored because really the SOA Watch movement, made up of thousands in the United States, has been trying to walk in solidarity with our sisters and brothers here in Honduras, who had been on the receiving end of these brutal soldiers with Battalion 3-16 and of course the two key players in this—the head of the air force, the head of the army, as expected, were graduates of the School of the Americas. Really this School has caused untold suffering and death in Honduras and throughout Latin America. And we are here really to say to the people of Honduras, that there are people in the United States—or in “the empire” as they often refer to us, and as we have been in the past in relation to Honduras and other countries— we are here representing many in the United States who are saying, “We are with you in your struggle for democracy, for sovereignty, for self-determination.”
AMY GOODMAN: Father Roy Bourgeois, you have been in Honduras protesting the current regime during this two year period.
FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: Yes, we came just a few days after the coup to meet with the resistance and what we found was very frightening. A lot of fear. The military took hold. They have killed really hundreds, teachers, especially the campesinos, the landless farmers, human rights activists, journalists among them. They do these acts of torture in disappearing and killing with impunity. We came back just last month actually to demonstrate once again, to meet with our counterparts, and our friends here to get updated, and we were shocked to see the intensity of the repression. And the fear is still here. But we also before leaving went before our US Embassy here in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to say that we are from the United States, representing many in our country and we are asking for the United States to stand in solidarity with President Zelaya, to be on the side of democracy and self-determination.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting that with the release of WikiLeaks of US government cables, among those cables was a cable that was sent by the US Ambassador to Honduras in July 24th, 2009. It was sent by Ambassador Hugo Llorens; the subject: Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup. And it said there was no doubt that the events of June 28th constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup. The Embassy described it as an “abduction”, a “kidnapping”. At first, President Obama did call this a coup, but then the US government seemed to back off, although the US joined in a UN General Assembly vote, with the first ever universal condemnation of a coup in a vote in the UN General Assembly. The OAS (Organization of American States) expelled Honduras for this illegal act. The United States did not fully sanction Honduras, in fact continued a relationship with Honduras, and many feel that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was working behind the scenes, and in front of the scenes, to restore Honduras to the Organization of American States. Clearly this has now been the motivation: Honduras’s readmission to the Organization of American States, the OAS, for this accord. President Porfirio Lobo wants Honduras in the OAS and right now, right now this is extremely significant, what is taking place.
I was just speaking to Ecuador’s ambassador to Venezuela who will be on this historic flight as well from Managua to Tegucigalpa today. He said, his name, Ramon Torres Galarza, that this is an historic moment. He said it’s also very important as this was worked out by Latin American countries together. This is a Latin American moment, he said. He said Latin America, especially he was addressing this to President Obama, he said Latin America is not just a market, it is a continent, it is a culture, he said we are peoples, we are societies, with dreams. Throughout Latin America there is tremendous excitement right now as there is in Honduras for this return. People are hoping this will be the return of democracy to Honduras but we will see.
We now await the flight as people gather from all over. When we arrived last night from the United States we met at the airport one of the exiles who had left Honduras four months after the coup. It was too dangerous to stay. He has been in Spain for the last 20 months, and he has returned. People are gathering here, extremely excited about this flight, about what they’re hoping is a return to democracy in Honduras.
I’m Amy Goodman, reporting from Managua, Nicaragua.
Categories: Democracy Now
LIVE BLOG: Democracy Now! Reports On Manuel Zelaya's Historic Return to Honduras
Amy Goodman is reporting today on the return of President Manuel Zelaya as he returns to Honduras after a 23-month exile following the coup d’etat that began June 28, 2009. It was the first military coup in Central America in a quarter century. Zelaya landed at the Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at about 4:30 p.m. EDT. Democracy Now! will report on Zelaya’s return to Honduras throughout the weekend and will post reports and updates on this page, our Tumblr page and on Twitter. Reports in Spanish will be available on the Democracy Now! en Español website.
Sunday, 9:40 p.m. Pres. Zelaya and family are at Radio Globo (one of the 300 stations that carries Democracy Now! en Espanol), for his first broadcast since his return yesterday. Crowds gathered outside the station, drumming, with flags and banners. For pictures, see our Tumblr page
Sunday, 6:40 p.m. Daughter of Pres. Zelaya, Pichu, showed us the back door of their home, riddled with bullets in the middle of the night on June 28, 2009. Pres. Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran military at gunpoint, in his pajamas, and flown to a U.S. base in Costa Rica. This weekend marks his return, with all charges against him dropped, as a result of the Cartagena accord, signed in Cartagena, Colombia. See a close-up photo of the bullet-riddled door here:
Sunday, 5:00 p.m. Pres. Zelaya holds a news conference at his home, with his family by his side. Pres. Zelaya said, "I have communicated with General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez several times. He said the people who planned this coup wanted you killed. When the military said no, they said they would hire paramiltiaries. He said the military still said no."
For photos of the nes conference and more photos of Pres. Zelaya’s return to Honduras, see http://demnow.tumblr.com
Saturday, 10:07 p.m. After meeting with Pres. Lobo and OAS Secretary General Insulza, Pres. Manuel Zelaya went to his home for the first time in close to two years. See photos of the homecoming on our Tumblr page
Saturday, 8:02 p.m. Ousted Pres. Manuel Zelaya, current Pres. Porfirio Lobo, and OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza are meeting in the Presidental Palace…among the topics they are likely discussing, is how the OAS can support the Cartagena Accord , beyond allowing Zelaya’s return, and possible readmission of Honduras to the OAS. Amy Goodman is downstairs, at the Presidential Palace.
Saturday, 7:00 p.m. After giving his first public address after returning to Honduras, Pres. Zelaya heads to Brazilian Embassy, where he resided for 129 days in 2009, against the coup government’s wishes. Amy Goodman and Andres Tomas Conteris provide context in this audio: Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:57 p.m. Amy Goodman reporting from inside the motorcade of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, as a mass crowd cheers. Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:40 p.m. Amy Goodman records the sounds of the crowd welcoming the return of Manuel Zelaya. Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:29 p.m. Audio report from Amy Goodman after the plane carrying Zelaya lands in Honduras. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:50 p.m. And the plane takes off. Listen to Audio
Saturday, 3:48 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:26 p.m. Amy Goodman files audio report from the the plane just before takeoff. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:15 p.m. Manuel Zelaya has boarded the plane to take him home to Honduras. See photo
Saturday, 3:05 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews former Honduran foreign minister Patricia Rodas on the tarmac of the airport in Nicaragua minutes before the plane takes off bringing Zelaya home. Listen to audio
Saturday, 2:39 p.m. See photo of Amy Goodman interviewing President Zelaya with his granddaughter
Saturday, 2:24 p.m. Former Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba is accompanying Zelaya on the trip back to Honduras. She says his return is "the triumph of politics over war." She was kidnapped by Colombian paramilitaries 10 years ago.
Saturday, 2:07 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews Xiomara Hortensia Zelaya, 26-year-old daughter Manuel Zelaya who is returning to Honduras for the first time in almost a year. Listen to audio
Saturday, 1:55 p.m. Exclusive: Manuel Zelaya speaks to Amy Goodman as he prepares to head back to Honduras. Listen to audio
AMY GOODMAN: We are in Managua, Nicaragua, across from the airport with President Zelaya. President Zelaya, to the people of the world, what do you say?
PRESIDENT ZELAYA: The road of the people after independence, after colonialism, there is no other answer other than democracy itself. Democracy. [Inaudible] It is not enough just to do elections. You have to have a good perception of the institutions of democracy, especially the justice department. When there is justice, then democracy is actually alive. As Benito Juarez said, the great Mexican, the respect for others means peace. When I say respect for democratic institutions is peace itself.
Saturday, 1:49 p.m. See photo of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya at airport in Nicaragua.
Saturday, 1:36 p.m. Honduran exile Rene Amador says he has "mucha esperanza"–much hope–that the savage repression will end in Honduras, that a constitutional assembly means real dialog and that he will soon see his family. He is returning from 20 months in exile.
Saturday, 1:12 p.m. Uruguayan Ambassador Julio Miguel Baraibar tells DN: “We reject the dictatorship in Honduras and support a democracy of those who can freely choose their leaders. We reject taking power by force.”
Saturday, 12:17 p.m. Amy Goodman has begun posting photos on our Tumblr page from the airport in Nicaragua of members of the delegation accompanying Manuel Zelaya back to Honduras.
Saturday, 12:01 p.m. Amy Goodman has just filed her first audio report from Managua, Nicaragua as she prepares to board the plane that will carry ousted president Manuel Zelaya back to Honduras. The report includes an interview with Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch. At least two of the Honduran coup leaders, Generals Vasquez Velasquez and Luis Javier Prince, trained the SOA. [Read partial transcript]
Saturday, 9:15 a.m.
Highlights from the Democracy Now! archives on Honduran coup. (Includes Video/Audio Podcast & Complete Transcripts)
Zelaya to Leave Honduras as Coup Leaders Cleared (January 27, 2010)
Categories: Democracy Now
AUDIO: "A Return to Democracy in Honduras?" Amy Goodman Reports on Zelaya's Return to Honduras
Amy Goodman files her first audio report from Nicaragua on ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s historic return home. She filed this report from the airport in Managua where she interviewed Father Roy Bourgeois of SOA Watch.
FOR LATEST REPORTS ON HONDURAS VISIT OUR LIVE BLOG
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! We are in Managua, Nicaragua, for an historic event: the return of ousted president Manuel Zelaya of Honduras to Honduras. Two years ago, on June 28th, 2009, he was thrown out at gunpoint. The Honduran military threw President Zelaya out of the country. Now he is returning on May 28th, 2011.
The deal that was brokered in Colombia, called the Cartagena Agreement, was witnessed by the presidents of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and Colombia, President [Juan Manuel] Santos. The deal was worked out between ousted president Manual Zelaya and the current president of Honduras Porfirio Lobo. They have agreed on a number of points. Among them that President Zelaya and over 200 exiles can return safely home. That there will be a constitutional assembly that will be allowed to be set up. That the party that now Manuel Zelaya heads called the Resistance will be guaranteed to be able to be a legal political party. And that a Secretariat for Justice and Human Rights will be set up to deal with the terrible human rights situation in Honduras.
President Zelaya will soon be boarding the flight for the short trip between Managua and Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Democracy Now! will be the only American media organization on that flight. Among those who are going to be on that flight are Father Roy Bourgeois, long time head of the School of the Americas Watch. He founded the School of the Americas Watch. He’s joining me right here in Managua to talk about the significance of the fact that the Honduran military, the chief of staff of which, General Vázquez Velázquez, was trained at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which is why Father Roy Bourgeois is here to attend this moment.
FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: In the endless struggle for democracy, for justice and peace in the Americas, there come along every now and then, special moments, historic moments, this is one of them. The School of Americas Watch really is honored and humbled to be invited to return with the democratically elected president Zelaya who was forcibly kicked out of the country. We’re honored because really the SOA Watch movement, made up of thousands in the United States, has been trying to walk in solidarity with our sisters and brothers here in Honduras, who had been on the receiving end of these brutal soldiers with Battalion 3-16 and of course the two key players in this—the head of the air force, the head of the army, as expected, were graduates of the School of the Americas. Really this School has caused untold suffering and death in Honduras and throughout Latin America. And we are here really to say to the people of Honduras, that there are people in the United States—or in “the empire” as they often refer to us, and as we have been in the past in relation to Honduras and other countries— we are here representing many in the United States who are saying, “We are with you in your struggle for democracy, for sovereignty, for self-determination.”
AMY GOODMAN: Father Roy Bourgeois, you have been in Honduras protesting the current regime during this two year period.
FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: Yes, we came just a few days after the coup to meet with the resistance and what we found was very frightening. A lot of fear. The military took hold. They have killed really hundreds, teachers, especially the campesinos, the landless farmers, human rights activists, journalists among them. They do these acts of torture in disappearing and killing with impunity. We came back just last month actually to demonstrate once again, to meet with our counterparts, and our friends here to get updated, and we were shocked to see the intensity of the repression. And the fear is still here. But we also before leaving went before our US Embassy here in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to say that we are from the United States, representing many in our country and we are asking for the United States to stand in solidarity with President Zelaya, to be on the side of democracy and self-determination.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting that with the release of WikiLeaks of US government cables, among those cables was a cable that was sent by the US Ambassador to Honduras in July 24th, 2009. It was sent by Ambassador Hugo Llorens; the subject: Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup. And it said there was no doubt that the events of June 28th constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup. The Embassy described it as an “abduction”, a “kidnapping”. At first, President Obama did call this a coup, but then the US government seemed to back off, although the US joined in a UN General Assembly vote, with the first ever universal condemnation of a coup in a vote in the UN General Assembly. The OAS (Organization of American States) expelled Honduras for this illegal act. The United States did not fully sanction Honduras, in fact continued a relationship with Honduras, and many feel that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was working behind the scenes, and in front of the scenes, to restore Honduras to the Organization of American States. Clearly this has now been the motivation: Honduras’s readmission to the Organization of American States, the OAS, for this accord. President Porfirio Lobo wants Honduras in the OAS and right now, right now this is extremely significant, what is taking place.
I was just speaking to Ecuador’s ambassador to Venezuela who will be on this historic flight as well from Managua to Tegucigalpa today. He said, his name, Ramon Torres Galarza, that this is an historic moment. He said it’s also very important as this was worked out by Latin American countries together. This is a Latin American moment, he said. He said Latin America, especially he was addressing this to President Obama, he said Latin America is not just a market, it is a continent, it is a culture, he said we are peoples, we are societies, with dreams. Throughout Latin America there is tremendous excitement right now as there is in Honduras for this return. People are hoping this will be the return of democracy to Honduras but we will see.
We now await the flight as people gather from all over. When we arrived last night from the United States we met at the airport one of the exiles who had left Honduras four months after the coup. It was too dangerous to stay. He has been in Spain for the last 20 months, and he has returned. People are gathering here, extremely excited about this flight, about what they’re hoping is a return to democracy in Honduras.
I’m Amy Goodman, reporting from Managua, Nicaragua.
Categories: Democracy Now
Press Advisory: Democracy Now! Host Amy Goodman reports from airplane returning ex-President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya
*PRESS ADVISORY*
Contact: Denis Moynihan
t: 001-917-549-5000
e: denis@democracynow.org
EXCLUSIVE: Democracy Now! Host Amy Goodman reports from airplane returning ex-President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya
*Goodman is ONLY U.S. journalist on the plane with Zelaya*
Zelaya’s return is a precondition for restoration of Honduras’s OAS Membership
NEW YORK, NY: Saturday, May 28, 2011—Amy Goodman, the award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now!, will report from the flight of the ousted former president, Manuel Zelaya, as he returns to Honduras after a 23-month exile following the coup d’etat that began June 28, 2009.
Zelaya is expected to return to Honduras on Saturday, May 28, 2011. In the first military coup in Central America in a quarter century, General Romeo Vasquez led the military coup in Honduras against the democratically-elected President Zelaya. On September 21, 2009, Mr. Zelaya returned to Honduras and entered the Embassy of Brazil in Tegucigalpa, hoping a popular rebellion would restore him to office. Democracy Now! reported from inside the Embassy of Brazil for the 129 days Zelaya remained there before departing Honduras January 27, 2010. (For video and transcripts of Democracy Now! reports, including an exclusive interviews with Zelaya, please see links below.)
Goodman, the only U.S. journalist on the plane with Mr. Zelaya during his historic return, will be available for interviews in Honduras.
Mr. Zelaya is expected to land at the Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM local time.
Democracy Now! will report on Mr. Zelaya’s return to Honduras from Saturday, May 28th through Monday, May 31, 2011 and will post reports and updates on its website and Tumblr page. High resolution photographs and audio will be available for download on the Tumblr page.
(CREDIT: DEMOCRACYNOW.ORG)
Democracy Now!
Democracy Now! on Tumblr
Reports in Spanish will be available on the Democracy Now! en Español website
ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW!
An independent, global, daily news hour, Democracy Now! is hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Democracy Now! is broadcast in English and in Spanish on more than 900 public television and radio stations around the world.
ABOUT AMY GOODMAN:
Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, syndicated columnist, author and the host of Democracy Now! Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media." The Independent of London named Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! "an inspiration"; pulsemedia.org placed Goodman at the top of their 20 Top Global Media Figures. Goodman is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her latest book, Breaking the Sound Barrier, proves the power of independent journalism in the struggle for a better world.
SELECTED DEMOCRACY NOW! REPORTS ON HONDURAN COUP
(Includes Video/Audio Podcast & Complete Transcripts)
Zelaya to Leave Honduras as Coup Leaders Cleared
(January 27, 2010)
Click here for more information and reports
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Categories: Democracy Now
LIVE BLOG: Democracy Now! Reports On Manuel Zelaya's Historic Return to Honduras
Amy Goodman is reporting today on the return of President Manuel Zelaya as he returns to Honduras after a 23-month exile following the coup d’etat that began June 28, 2009. It was the first military coup in Central America in a quarter century. Zelaya landed at the Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at about 4:30 p.m. EDT. Democracy Now! will report on Zelaya’s return to Honduras throughout the weekend and will post reports and updates on this page, our Tumblr page and on Twitter. Reports in Spanish will be available on the Democracy Now! en Español website.
Sunday, 9:40 p.m. Pres. Zelaya and family are at Radio Globo (one of the 300 stations that carries Democracy Now! en Espanol), for his first broadcast since his return yesterday. Crowds gathered outside the station, drumming, with flags and banners. For pictures, see our Tumblr page
Sunday, 6:40 p.m. Daughter of Pres. Zelaya, Pichu, showed us the back door of their home, riddled with bullets in the middle of the night on June 28, 2009. Pres. Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran military at gunpoint, in his pajamas, and flown to a U.S. base in Costa Rica. This weekend marks his return, with all charges against him dropped, as a result of the Cartagena accord, signed in Cartagena, Colombia. See a close-up photo of the bullet-riddled door here:
Sunday, 5:00 p.m. Pres. Zelaya holds a news conference at his home, with his family by his side. Pres. Zelaya said, "I have communicated with General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez several times. He said the people who planned this coup wanted you killed. When the military said no, they said they would hire paramiltiaries. He said the military still said no."
For photos of the nes conference and more photos of Pres. Zelaya’s return to Honduras, see http://demnow.tumblr.com
Saturday, 10:07 p.m. After meeting with Pres. Lobo and OAS Secretary General Insulza, Pres. Manuel Zelaya went to his home for the first time in close to two years. See photos of the homecoming on our Tumblr page
Saturday, 8:02 p.m. Ousted Pres. Manuel Zelaya, current Pres. Porfirio Lobo, and OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza are meeting in the Presidental Palace…among the topics they are likely discussing, is how the OAS can support the Cartagena Accord , beyond allowing Zelaya’s return, and possible readmission of Honduras to the OAS. Amy Goodman is downstairs, at the Presidential Palace.
Saturday, 7:00 p.m. After giving his first public address after returning to Honduras, Pres. Zelaya heads to Brazilian Embassy, where he resided for 129 days in 2009, against the coup government’s wishes. Amy Goodman and Andres Tomas Conteris provide context in this audio: Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:57 p.m. Amy Goodman reporting from inside the motorcade of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, as a mass crowd cheers. Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:40 p.m. Amy Goodman records the sounds of the crowd welcoming the return of Manuel Zelaya. Listen to audio
Saturday, 4:29 p.m. Audio report from Amy Goodman after the plane carrying Zelaya lands in Honduras. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:50 p.m. And the plane takes off. Listen to Audio
Saturday, 3:48 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:26 p.m. Amy Goodman files audio report from the the plane just before takeoff. Listen to audio
Saturday, 3:15 p.m. Manuel Zelaya has boarded the plane to take him home to Honduras. See photo
Saturday, 3:05 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews former Honduran foreign minister Patricia Rodas on the tarmac of the airport in Nicaragua minutes before the plane takes off bringing Zelaya home. Listen to audio
Saturday, 2:39 p.m. See photo of Amy Goodman interviewing President Zelaya with his granddaughter
Saturday, 2:24 p.m. Former Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba is accompanying Zelaya on the trip back to Honduras. She says his return is "the triumph of politics over war." She was kidnapped by Colombian paramilitaries 10 years ago.
Saturday, 2:07 p.m. Amy Goodman interviews Xiomara Hortensia Zelaya, 26-year-old daughter Manuel Zelaya who is returning to Honduras for the first time in almost a year. Listen to audio
Saturday, 1:55 p.m. Exclusive: Manuel Zelaya speaks to Amy Goodman as he prepares to head back to Honduras. Listen to audio
AMY GOODMAN: We are in Managua, Nicaragua, across from the airport with President Zelaya. President Zelaya, to the people of the world, what do you say?
PRESIDENT ZELAYA: The road of the people after independence, after colonialism, there is no other answer other than democracy itself. Democracy. [Inaudible] It is not enough just to do elections. You have to have a good perception of the institutions of democracy, especially the justice department. When there is justice, then democracy is actually alive. As Benito Juarez said, the great Mexican, the respect for others means peace. When I say respect for democratic institutions is peace itself.
Saturday, 1:49 p.m. See photo of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya at airport in Nicaragua.
Saturday, 1:36 p.m. Honduran exile Rene Amador says he has "mucha esperanza"–much hope–that the savage repression will end in Honduras, that a constitutional assembly means real dialog and that he will soon see his family. He is returning from 20 months in exile.
Saturday, 1:12 p.m. Uruguayan Ambassador Julio Miguel Baraibar tells DN: “We reject the dictatorship in Honduras and support a democracy of those who can freely choose their leaders. We reject taking power by force.”
Saturday, 12:17 p.m. Amy Goodman has begun posting photos on our Tumblr page from the airport in Nicaragua of members of the delegation accompanying Manuel Zelaya back to Honduras.
Saturday, 12:01 p.m. Amy Goodman has just filed her first audio report from Managua, Nicaragua as she prepares to board the plane that will carry ousted president Manuel Zelaya back to Honduras. The report includes an interview with Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch. At least two of the Honduran coup leaders, Generals Vasquez Velasquez and Luis Javier Prince, trained the SOA. [Read partial transcript]
Saturday, 9:15 a.m.
Highlights from the Democracy Now! archives on Honduran coup. (Includes Video/Audio Podcast & Complete Transcripts)
Zelaya to Leave Honduras as Coup Leaders Cleared (January 27, 2010)
Categories: Democracy Now
Single Payer Healthcare: Vermont's Gentle Revolution
Vermont is a land of proud firsts. This small New England state was the first to join the 13 colonies. Its constitution was the first to ban slavery. It was the first to establish the right to free education for all – public education.
This week, Vermont will boast another first: the first state in the nation to offer single payer healthcare, which eliminates the costly insurance companies that many believe are the root cause of our spiraling healthcare costs. In a single payer system, both private and public healthcare providers are allowed to operate, as they always have. But instead of the patient or the patient’s private health insurance company paying the bill, the state does. It’s basically Medicare for all – just lower the age of eligibility to the day you’re born. The state, buying these healthcare services for the entire population, can negotiate favourable rates, and can eliminate the massive overhead that the for-profit insurers impose.
Categories: Democracy Now
The Fight over Coal Mining is a “Fight About Democracy”: New Documentary with Robert Kennedy, Jr. Chronicles Campaign to Halt Mountaintop Removal
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: An explosive power the size of a Hiroshima bomb once a week.
MARIA GUNNOE: They just keep this process up until they literally reduce the mountain to rubble.
BO WEBB: Coal River Mountain is our last great mountain that hasn’t been blasted to ashes.
DR. ALLEN HERSHKOWITZ: Massey Coal, the single most destructive coal mining company in history.
ED WILEY: That’s your coal dust.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And that’s what the inside of the kids’ lungs are going to look like.
JOE LOVETT: People have had enough, and they’re standing up to the coal company.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: The fight over Coal River Mountain is a fight about democracy.
MARIA GUNNOE: Robert Kennedy, Jr., is lending his voice.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: How can Massey Coal have 60,000 violations, and nobody in the state came and stopped them?
ED WILEY: We want our kid in a safe, new school.
JENNIFER HALL-MASSEY: National average for a brain tumor is one in 100,000. And we have six that live side by side. The only thing we have in common is the fact that we all have well water.
DR. ALLEN HERSHKOWITZ: Mountaintop coal mining is literally threatening the water supplies of tens of millions of people.
MARIA GUNNOE: We live in a very intelligent country that has the ability to create energy without blowing up mountains.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: We’re looking at a proposal now to construct a wind farm in Coal River Mountain.
MARIA GUNNOE: That’s our last mountain. That’s the last one we have.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Corporations to not want democracy. They want profits.
BO WEBB: They’re bound and determined to knock the mountain down. We’re bound and determined to stop it.
JOE LOVETT: It’s either them or Massey, and Massey’s been winning for a long time.
MARIA GUNNOE: Coal is mean. Coal is cruel. And coal kills. The American people need to find their position. You’re connected to coal, whether you realize it or not. Everybody is connected to this. And everybody is causing it, and everybody’s allowing that.
UNIDENTIFIED: Let them hear your voice in that building back there!
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: If the American people could see it, there would be a revolution in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Coal mining in West Virginia. The film’s director is here, Bill Haney, as well as Robert Kennedy, Jr. He is the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and he is one of the people who is featured in this film. Very important today, as we see the latest report that’s come out on Massey, holding Massey Coal Company responsible for the terrible explosion that took place last year and took the lives of 29 miners.
Bill, let’s begin with you. First of all, talk about why you call your film The Last Mountain, and fit it into the context of this latest explosion of Massey.
BILL HANEY: Well, The Last Mountain is a film about the fight for the last great mountain in Central Appalachia between the mining company Massey, that wants to blow it up and strip the coal inside, and the locals, who want to stop them and build a wind farm on top instead. And it’s a story about citizen democracy. It’s about the extraordinary group of, you know, waitresses and former Marines and former coal miners, who have come together and enlisted the help of folks like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., to try to fight for their rights. And it’s a story about the future of energy, because the ugly paw of the coal industry lies heavy upon our political system and on our environment. So that’s why we called it The Last Mountain, because they’ve already knocked down, with explosives the size of a Hiroshima bomb being dropped on Appalachia every week—they’ve already taken 500 of these mountains down to rubble and dumped the residuals into the rivers, contaminating 2,000 miles of federal river, and there’s not much left.
AMY GOODMAN: And Massey, in particular, this coal company, one of the largest in the United States? And relate The Last Mountain to what—the Upper Big Branch explosion that took place.
BILL HANEY: Well, I think that Massey controls all the mountains in the Coal River Valley, including Coal River Mountain that’s at the center of our story. It’s the largest practitioner of this most egregious form of mining, mountaintop removal. And it’s been operated in a way that seems to be wildly beyond the bounds of federal constraint and state constraint for quite some time. So their history of safety violations and environmental violations is so long as to be dizzying. And they, you know, for many, many years appear to have decided that it was less expensive to pay the fines and sort out something with the political system than it was to actually comply with the environmental rules or the Clean Water Act or safety standards. And so, horrible as the Big Branch explosion was, it was utterly predictable. In fact, I was doing interviews right before it took place, and every interview I did, who were talking about the history of Massey’s safety violations, would say, "It’s going to happen again. It’s going to happen again soon." And literally months later, there it was.
The same thing with their environmental practices. You know, they had—the federal law says that if you violate the Clean Water Act, it’s a $31,000 fine. In a six-year period, they agreed that they had 60,000 violations, almost $1.8 billion in fines. The state EPA refused to do anything. The federal EPA took a very long time and ultimately agreed to a fine of $20 million, which was less than one percent of actually what was required by the federal statutes. And in the six months after that, Massey came up with another 4,000 violations. So it would appear to be a company that used its profits to buy political influence and to operate a system in a system that was almost entirely outside the law. So it’s an example—we see other examples in the coal industry, but it’s a particularly egregious example. And the brutality that they are bringing to the landscape of Appalachia and to the communities of Appalachia is extraordinary.
And they do it by talking about—that they’re going to protect jobs or they’re going to have domestic security—domestically secure energy sources. But there are, of course, wildly more cost-effective and healthy other domestic sources of energy, like wind and solar. And the employment that they provide is actually quite small. They’ve been probably the leader—the United Mine Workers would say the leader—in destroying the unions in the system. So, at the time the CEO is making $30 million a year—
AMY GOODMAN: Don Blankenship.
BILL HANEY: Don Blankenship—you know, there are miners working there who are getting a pathetic fraction of what they would have gotten even 10 years ago when they had protection with the unions. So, they’ve destroyed the unions, they’ve beaten up on the environment, they’ve violated federal health and safety standards, to what appears to be really the enrichment of a very small number of people, primarily the executives of the company.
AMY GOODMAN: Bobby Kennedy, you’re a major focus of this film because of your work in West Virginia taking on the coal companies. When did you go down originally? What have you been doing there?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: I’ve been involved in the industry, in the coal industry in West Virginia, on and off for 27 years. I was invited down about three or four years ago by the local group at Coal Mountain to help them in their battle to save this last mountain, as Bill says.
Massey Coal is the third largest coal company in the country, but it is by far the biggest practitioner of mountaintop removal mining. Over the past decade, they have leveled an area of the Appalachians the size of Delaware, 1.4 million acres. They’ve cut down 500 of the biggest mountains in the state. And they’ve buried, as Bill said, thousands of miles of rivers and streams.
They have to break the law to do this. They cannot survive in the marketplace without violating the law. They violate labor laws. They violate health and safety laws. And by their own records, they’ve had some 67,000 violations of just one of the environmental statutes. But they’re in violation of many, many other environmental statutes. Last year, I debated Don Blankenship in West Virginia in front of a statewide audience, a televised debate. And I asked him during the debate, "Is it possible for you to do your job without breaking the law?" And he said, "No, it is not." So this is a criminal enterprise, even by his own estimation.
As Bill says, you know, one of the things that they always say in West Virginia is, "Well, coal brings jobs and prosperity to the state." But this is one of the things that my father explained to me when I was 14 years old and he was fighting strip mining in Appalachia. He said, "This ought to be the richest state in the union because of the huge resources they have in West Virginia. But it’s the 49th poorest population, because the benefits of coal do not help the people of the state of West Virginia."
And if you look at the way that Massey operates, Massey doesn’t want to hire—it won’t hire unions. Its whole business plan has been to break the United Mine Workers, which it succeeded in doing in the state. When I was a little kid, there was 151,000 coal miners in West Virginia taking coal out of tunnels in the ground. Today there are fewer than 18,000 left in the state, and most of them aren’t unionized, because the strip industry isn’t, because Massey broke the unions. They’re taking more coal out of West Virginia than they were in 1968, but the money is not staying in the state for salaries or pensions or reinvestment in the community. It goes straight up to Wall Street. Ninety-five percent of the coal in West Virginia is owned by out-of-state interests. And Massey doesn’t like to hire—it won’t hire union labor, but not only that, it doesn’t like to hire people who have a union culture. So it won’t hire, if it can help it, West Virginians. So it advertises in Myrtle Beach, in the Atlanta Constitution, in USA Today, to bring people into the state. They work on these sites, cutting down the mountain. It takes about six years for them to cut down a mountain, and then they move someplace else.
They buy up the communities. They’ve bought up dozens and dozens of communities. They board up the houses. They make the people sign contracts saying that they’ll never come back within 20 miles of that community. And they empty the landscapes of people. So then, when they come to us and say, "Well, we’re bringing prosperity in West Virginia," what we say to them is, "Why is it that the places with the most coal in the state are the places with the poorest people? How can you bring prosperity to a community when you’re emptying the community?"
Well, this film is about a group of people in West Virginia who said, "We’re not leaving. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to protect our mountains." And they climbed up trees and built tree houses. They confronted the industry. They walked—they demonstrated in front of—they walked into the governor’s office. They had public demonstrations.
You know, one of the things that—one of the reasons that I’m interested in what’s happened in West Virginia and that Bill really got interested in doing the film here is that it’s not just about the destruction of the environment. It’s about the subversion of democracy. And wherever you see widespread environmental injury, you’re also going to see the subversion of democracy. And West Virginia is really the template for that dynamic. You’ll see the destruction of the public process at the local level, where people no longer have a say in the allocation of the public trust, the resources of the commons. You’ll see the destruction of transparency in government. You’ll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become—in West Virginia, the West Virginia DEP has become the sock puppet for the industry that it’s supposed to regulate. You’ll see the widespread corruption of public officials, which you’ve also seen. Virtually every relevant public official in the state of West Virginia is now an indentured servant for the coal industry. And you’ll also see the destruction of the press and the role of the fourth estate. And again, in West Virginia you see the press largely blind, holding a blind eye to this wholesale destruction of the landscapes and to the people whose lives are being destroyed in this process that’s making a few people rich by systematically impoverishing virtually everybody else in the state.
BILL HANEY: The way the industry justifies this, because it can’t justify taking 60 percent of the profits to themselves, and it’s difficult to justify the environmental devastation, it’s that it says it’s all about jobs. But in reality, all the economic studies show that West Virginia, for every dollar of benefit from the coal industry, localized benefit, they spend five dollars. Same study has been done in Kentucky, had the same result. We’re beginning a transition, so there’s natural gas jobs in West Virginia than there are coal jobs already, and there’s more wind jobs in America today than there are coal jobs. So the notion that we can’t move into renewables in a way that actually promotes job growth—you know, progressive, thoughtful job growth—is absurd. And it’s just part of a long set of disinformation campaigns that the coal industry practices, starting with the idea there’s such a thing as clean coal, which is a farce, and all the way back to the notion that they are actually involved in creating sustainable jobs in a long-term way, when in fact they’re investing in massive explosives to get rid of jobs. That is part of distracting the public from the simple issues, which are that the coal industry is 50 percent of the electricity in the country, 50 percent of the rail traffic in the country, but, broadly defined, spending a billion-and-a-half dollars every 10 years to make friends with politicians who will distort the regulatory and legal process to support them.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re talking, the coal industry, a powerhouse in lobbying—
BILL HANEY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN:—trains and utilities.
BILL HANEY: And the utilities have become—a small number of utilities, which are coal-burning plants, have become unbelievably profitable because when the environmental standards were passed in the '70s, all the plants, which were presumed to be going out of business soon, were exempt from complying with wide pieces of the Clean Air Act, and then, as a result, became wildly more profitable and have been kept going for 50 years as a result. And so, enormous pieces of the arsenic that's dumped into American families, the lead emissions that we pick up, the mercury that’s contaminating riverways across the country, the carbon dioxide emissions, sulfur, nitrous oxide, ground-level ozone, is coming out of this small number of coal-fired power plants, which are spending enormous money to prevent themselves from being regulated in a way that would force them to be on a level playing field with solar plants or wind power plants or geothermal plants, and therefore lose.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the power of the politicians in West Virginia? For example, Joe Manchin—and you feature him in the film—who was the governor, now the senator, of West Virginia.
BILL HANEY: You know, it’s a fascinating thing that even in the state of West Virginia, the politicians aren’t listening to the public. Even in West Virginia, with its long history of connection to the coal industry, and with the long history of the coal industry trying to wrap the flag of patriotism around the coal industry—so when I go to a coal industry rally to film, and I look like a progressive filmmaker, all the—what everybody’s being given is a bumper sticker saying "I love coal" and a flag. And the guy says to me, as I walk up, he goes, "Well, you know, you wouldn’t want these." And I said, "Well, I’d like the flag." But they don’t give out the flag without the coal mining sticker. So two-thirds of the people in the state of West Virginia, as presently polled, are against mountaintop mining. So, even within the state, the politicians are allowing the tyranny of the minority to actually overwhelm the democratic process.
AMY GOODMAN: And, you know, I’m thinking about John Grisham’s remarkable book The Appeal, which is based on the story of the buying of judges. Bobby Kennedy, what about judges in West Virginia and Massey Energy?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, again, you have virtually all of the political figures in the state who appear to have been corrupted by the industry now. I’m a practicing attorney, and I practice in front of the bar in West Virginia, and there’s ethical standards that prohibit attorneys from impugning sitting judges. But the Supreme Court itself has said—the United States Supreme Court has, in one of the few times in its history, remanded a case to the state of West Virginia because the appearance of corruption by West Virginia judges, particularly by Massey Coal’s influence on West Virginia judges. And in one case, one of the Supreme Court justices, Justice Benjamin, was the beneficiary of $3 million of private money spent by Massey CEO Don Blankenship to defeat his opponent, who had ruled against Don Blankenship in a dispute with another coal company. Blankenship then appealed in front of the judge that his money had helped elected and got that case reversed. Shortly—during the pendency of that case, Don Blankenship, again, the CEO of Massey, was photographed on the French Riviera on vacation with Justice Spike Maynard, who was another justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, who was also hearing that case. So there’s at least a strong, strong appearance of impropriety even within the judiciary in the state of West Virginia.
AMY GOODMAN: How is this legal? I mean, isn’t there something called conflict of interest?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, there’s conflict of interest. The problem—you know, what we see in the state of West Virginia is all of the democratic safeguards have been eroded. The press doesn’t do its job in West Virginia. The press essentially consistently publishes the talking points for the industry. The industry is so powerful in the state, and it’s been able to persuade many people in the state, even people who aren’t directly getting money from the industry, that the industry is vital to the future of West Virginia.
And one of the things that they’ve been able to do and one of the conflicts that you see in this film is the local people at Coal Mountain want to build a wind farm. The wind farm will bring in $1.6 or $1.5 million in tax revenue to their county every year. If they cut down the mountains, you can’t build a wind farm, because the wind is up on top of these mountains. If they cut down the mountains, the coal industry, for six years, will get $30,000 a year—give $30,000 a year in taxes, create almost no jobs locally. The wind farms will create large amounts of job and permanently, forever, give one-and-a-half million dollars in taxes.
So, West Virginia has a lot of alternatives. The problem is, the coal industry has consistently and systematically blocked other types of economic development from coming into the state, so that they can say to the people and to the press of the state, "We are your only alternative. The only thing a West Virginian can do to make money is to work for us in our coal mines. And you’re not even going to have a union to protect you." And in fact, mountaintop removal coal mining is incompatible with any other kind of economic development. Nobody is going to move their business to a coal field, when there are explosives going off that’s showering toxic dust onto your business, where you have the explosive power every week in the coal fields of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky that is the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week, that shake the earth, that break the foundation—shatter the foundations of these rivers, that cause cracks in the earth to appear, that dry up the rivers, that poison the water. None of—who wants to move to a state where that kind of stuff is going on? Of course, no business is going to do it. West Virginia is ideally located. It’s one of the most beautiful spots on earth, and certainly in this country. But it hasn’t been able to attract other businesses, and it’s mainly because of Big Coal.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a segment of the film with Joe Manchin. Explain what was going on. Then he was the governor.
BILL HANEY: Well, there’s two pieces. I mean, we actually tried to give the head of the West Virginia Coal Association an ample opportunity to explain their point of view, and I think I’ve reflected it fairly to you here. And Governor Manchin professes with enthusiasm, in a big public setting, that he is a friend of coal and that he can’t imagine how anybody could not be a friend of coal.
And then we watch as the locals come to protest. For example, the coal industry, when you mine the coal, you have to wash it. And the washing, you take some of the toxins out, so you ship the hydrocarbons to the power plants. The three biggest dams in our hemisphere—Hoover, Ixtapa Falls and Brushy Fork in West Virginia, holding 9.8 billion gallons of toxic metal sludge left over from coal washing in one of 300 of these pits all over West Virginia. One of these pits hovers above an elementary school. And so, in our film, a grandfather, who was a coal miner for Massey, his granddaughter lives next to this coal platform, and he’s getting really sick. And they’re worried that this leaking dam could come down and wipe these kids out. And these dams have broken before. He goes to the governor. And the governor, you know, meets him and glad-hands him and then says, "I’ll work on it. I’ll do the best I can." He says, "Well, what does that actually mean? I’ve been here three times over five years." And he goes, "Well, whatever the best I can, I’m going to do that." And he moved to get himself posed in the picture.
And we then go to see him talking to the environmental regulators in the state. So, there’s—as we discussed, the federal EPA creates laws and the regulatory standards, and the state is supposed to enforce them. And we see him talking to the DEP officials, and he says, "So the way we want to work this is, you know, you go out and talk to a business. If you find a violation, give them some suggestions and see if you can make it back sometime. And if it looks like they’re thinking about it or they’re trying, well, that’s good enough. I mean, they don’t have to actually do it. They just have to talk about doing it." So, Governor Manchin, you know, appears to be well connected to the coal industry, enthusiastic about supporting it, and less concerned about the needs of some of the people in the state.
And as you say, he’s now a senator, and he became elected senator, one of the—you know, in a close race. And the most important campaign piece he had was him firing a rifle shot into the cap-and-trade legislation, so that you saw environmental standards, progressive environmental standards, being blown apart in a militaristic display by the governor of the state of West Virginia.
AMY GOODMAN: And now talk about the new governor.
BILL HANEY: And the new governor doesn’t seem to be any different. He has just called, even in the wake of this horrible tale in Tucson, with national calls to tamp down the inflamed language that many think contributed to that tragedy, he’s just called for—there’s a call to arms in West Virginia to bring the coal miners up to face and to rally against people who are suggesting environmental standards ought to be thoughtfully applied to them. And I will say, some of the activists, including, for example, the waitress who is at the core of our story, made an appeal to the audience yesterday, or two days ago, saying, you know, she hopes people will write their congressmen because, frankly, she thinks people will be killed during these rallies, and she thinks she might be one of them.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Governor Tomblin.
BILL HANEY: This is Governor Tomblin. So the atmosphere of conflict—you know, when you have a period of economic vulnerability, you’re talking to miners’ families, and you’re telling them, "The only way you can make a living is mining. This woman right here is trying to stop you from mining and taking care of your children. And we have a call to arms against her," you know, that is certainly an inflamed environment.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of kids, let’s go to another clip in The Last Mountain. This is Bobby Kennedy.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: I have three sons who have asthma. We know that asthma attacks are caused by bad air, by ozone and particulates. And the principal source of those materials in our atmosphere are hundreds of coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It’s been illegal for 18 years. Under the Clean Air Act, they were supposed to remove those materials from their emissions 18 years ago. But in states where corporations can easily dominate the state political landscapes, they were not required to comply with the law, so there’s hundreds of them that are violating this critical law.
But this is an industry that donated enormous amounts to President Bush during the 2000 cycle. And one of the first things that the Bush administration did when it came into office was to abolish the new source rule. This was the most important rule in the entire Clean Air Act. It is the heart and soul of that statute. And that’s the rule that required those coal-burning power plants to clean up their emissions 18 years ago. So now I’m going to be able to watch my children gasping for air on bad air days, because somebody gave money to a politician.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bobby Kennedy talking about his children having asthma. Talk more about it. Bobby is right here with us.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, three of my sons have asthma. The single greatest trigger for asthma attacks is ozone and particulates that are emitted from coal-burning power plants. There are, according to EPA, between 20,000 and 60,000 Americans die every year as the result of ozone and particulates from coal-burning power plants. That’s 30 times the number of people who were killed in the World Trade Center attacks. But year after year after year, a million asthma attacks, a million lost work days every year. That’s one of the costs of coal that they don’t tell you about when they say that coal only costs 11 cents a kilowatt hour.
Today, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, which are the two research arms of the federal government, released a report last August that showed that every freshwater fish in America is now contaminated with mercury, with dangerous levels of mercury. There are no safe levels, that cause—it’s a potent neurotoxin, causes brain damage. So we’re living today in a science fiction nightmare in our country, where my children and the children of most Americans can now no longer engage in a seminal, primal activity of American youth, which is to go shipping with their father or mother in the local fishing hole and then come home and safely eat the fish—because somebody gave money to politicians.
In addition to that, you have the cost of acid rain. One-fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks is now sterilized from acidity from coal-burning power plants. The forests on the high peaks of the Appalachians have been destroyed from Georgia all the way up to northern Quebec, again because of acid rain. So these are all part of the cumulative costs of coal. And there’s an illusion that coal is a cheap fuel for America. But if you look at the true cost to our society, to our nation, it’s the most catastrophically expensive way to boil a pot of water that’s ever been devised.
AMY GOODMAN: This was from our headline right before Martin Luther King Day. This was from January 14th on Democracy Now! The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has revoked the permit for one of the nation’s largest mountaintop removal coal mines. The EPA said Arch Coal’s proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia would "use destructive and unsustainable practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian communities and the clean water on which they depend." It’s the first time in the last 40 years the EPA has revoked a coal mine permit under the Clean Water Act. The Spruce No. 1 Mine has been the subject of controversy and litigation for more than a decade.
BILL HANEY: Yes.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And that’s—you know—
BILL HANEY: Thank God.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Right. The Obama administration has actually—they’ve been criticized from both sides, but they’ve actually done—Lisa Jackson, who’s the EPA administrator, has—is probably the most courageous environmental administrator in the history of that agency. She has—she recently denied 79 permits for new mines to get started. But nobody really believed that they would revoke the permit for an existing mine, which is actually the largest mine in the state. And it’s a union mine, as well. Most of the mines, strip mines, are not. And so, people were kind of ready to leave that one alone. But she did something that was very courageous, because, in fact, it is going to destroy the local waterways. It’s going to destroy the local communities. It’s going to poison the people who live in that area. And the number of jobs that are actually created are very short-term, and then they move on to someplace else, and they leave behind a barren moonscape that promises eternal poverty to the communities in which it’s located.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Haney?
BILL HANEY: I think that one of the things that we’re trying to help illuminate in this story is the notion that the challenges of coal, the cost of coal, are somehow born—almost ghettoized in Appalachia: these small number of poor states that, you know, don’t hold a lot of the population of the country and having, some way, shape or form, chosen to bear this responsibility. Not only, of course, is that horribly unfair, but it’s also deeply untrue. So, when you discover that 50 percent of the rail traffic in the country—that means across the whole country—the heavy rail traffic is for coal, and if you turn to look—and there’s 600 coal-fired power plants around the United States, and if you look at a map of them, you know, if you live east of the Mississippi, you’re very close to one, and even west of the Mississippi, you’re likely to be close to one, and that they themselves, even at the power plant—there’s 150 billion gallons of toxic metal sludge next to waterways across America.
So there was a horrible spill in Tennessee two Christmases ago, and under the Bush administration, it was illegal for the EPA to even ask the utilities where they were storing the billions of gallons of sludge. After the horrible disaster in Tennessee, the EPA conducted hearings, on something that they had previously not been willing to regulate at all. They found out where 600 of these sites were. And the Department of Homeland Security saw the size and toxicity of these and how close they were to major waterways, and all of a sudden decided that 57 of them were such high-risk security terrorist sites, they couldn’t be disclosed. So, week one, we don’t need to know; they’re irrelevant. Week two, we can’t be told; they’re so dangerous. This is all across the United States. This is not in Appalachia. This is in households—risking communities all across the country.
AMY GOODMAN: A lot of people have wondered where grassroots movements are today. But, Bobby Kennedy, if you could address all of these grassroots movements, what some might call the new civil rights movement, the civil disobediences that have been taking place throughout West Virginia, groups like Climate Ground Zero, Appalachia Rising, leading the fight.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, in many ways, what we’re seeing is a reaction to what’s happening at the federal level and in state governments, where you’re seeing the erosion and the subversion of democracy everywhere you look. And that really, to me, is the biggest story in this film. This story, this film is about the subversion of American democracy.
And as you know, last year the Supreme Court passed the Citizens United, ruled—overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations of wealth that had created essentially a corporate kleptocracy during the Gilded Age, and Americans had forfeited their democracy during that time. It was said of the Pennsylvania legislature that every single member of it was owned by John D. Rockefeller, that he had done everything to the Pennsylvania legislature but refine it. And this was true of legislatures all over our country, that we had the very—the kind of feudalism that people had come to this country to escape in Europe, was being created by this new corporate aristocracy. For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing that kind of—those kind of economic concentrations return to our country.
At the same time, something really dangerous, we’ve seen the destruction of the American press as a formidable player in reinforcing the institutions of our democracy. The press has devolved, so that it’s—instead of informing us about the issues that are critical to us making rational decisions in democracy, it appeals now to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. So, Americans today are the best entertained and the least educated people, at least conformed people, probably on the face of the earth. And you can’t have democracy for very long if you don’t have an informed community.
And you have tremendous frustration, which you see in the Tea Party and elsewhere in this country, where people understand something very, very disturbing is happening to America. The great prosperity that began in the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt and the creation of the New Deal, which put a bit into the mouth of the big corporations and forced the creation of the middle class and strengthened unions in this country and strengthened the social safety net and gave people college educations and the GI Bill and healthcare and Medicaid and all of those protections, those safeguards for the middle class, are disappearing. And then the legal safeguards, which are supposed to reinforce our democracy, are also being subverted.
And so, I think that’s one of the reasons you’re seeing more and more people turn to civil disobedience and to grassroots activism, because there are fewer and fewer places to make your case. You can’t make it in the press anymore. If you’re not Britney Spears or Michael Jackson, the press really isn’t interested in your story. You can’t make it in the courts, because as we’ve seen in West Virginia, there’s more and more corruption and less and less access. And our political system now, because of the huge amounts of money that are pouring from corporations into Congress, into the state political landscapes, which are easily dominated by these big corporations, have not—are no longer a mechanism for expressing our democratic needs. And so, the erosion of all these institutions, I think, of American democracy has forced people who care about our country and who care about civic health into this box of civil disobedience and local activism.
BILL HANEY: You know, in this discussion about the attacks on our democracy that Bobby points out, that ultimately, the waitress and Marine and former coal miners, they beat their way through the governor’s door, and they got a new school for these kids. And ultimately, they pound on Massey long and hard, and they stop a big mine of Massey’s in Kentucky. It’s shut down. And ultimately, the same instincts for hope and change, and the same willingness to have a daring political action, which in part fueled the Obama campaign, you know, the combination of their enlisting Bobby Kennedy, Obama becoming president, Bobby going and making a case in Washington with tremendous effect, has been the reason that the 79 new permits were denied, has been the reason that the Spruce Mine has been stopped, so that it is true that there’s an attack on our democracy, and it is true that we have the modern-day Selma taking place in Appalachia right now, and hundreds of these kids, and adults, and 91-year-old grandmothers are being arrested and dragged out by the state police, but it’s also true they’re winning. They have been able to make the kind of change that it’s always taken ordinary Americans taking something on to make happen in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, as we wrap up and talk about the issue of American democracy, it’s a very emotional time for you, Bobby Kennedy. You’ve just returned from the funeral of your uncle, Sarge Shriver. It’s the 50th anniversary of another uncle, President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, also the 50th anniversary of your own father, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, heading up the Justice Department. Can you talk about all of this and what it means for you?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, you know, one of the things that I saw during the press coverage—and, of course, might know, everybody in my family is grateful for the attention and the high regard that’s been associated with those events in Washington the last couple of weeks, but one of the things that I saw in some of the press coverage was a celebration of the Kennedy administration because of its capacity to inspire the nation and to bring young people into politics and to get people to make a sacrifice for their country. But to me, the most important thing that John Kennedy did, and my father was trying to do, was to control the growth of the—to stand up to the military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower, President Eisenhower in his final speech just before my uncle took the reins of power, said this is the greatest threat to American democracy in the history of our republic, ever: the growth of a uncontrolled military-industrial complex in combination with large corporations and with influential members of Congress, who would slowly but systematically deprive Americans of the civil rights and the constitutional rights that made this country an exemplary nation. And I think my uncle, President Kennedy, saw that coming. He spent his three years, his thousand days, in the White House battling his own military apparatus and his own intelligence apparatus, and trying to make sure—trying to preserve the institutions that make us proud to be American.
And I think over the past 10 years, we’ve begun to do things—we built a intelligence apparatus in this country that is larger than anything anybody has imagined. There’s now 1,100 intelligence agencies in this country. There’s more people with top security clearance than there are citizens of Washington, D.C. There are 36,000 Americans employed in listening to a billion-and-a-half phone calls every day. And at the same time, you have people talking in the Tea Party and elsewhere about the dangers of Big Government. I believe that Big Government is a huge threat to American democracy, but not because it levies taxes on Americans. Taxes are a civic duty of our country. The real danger is a large government that’s large enough to come into your bedroom, to your home, to open your mail, to listen to your phone calls, to take people off the street and lock them in prisons for their lifetime, without an attorney, without charges filed, and to torture people, which Americans have never engaged in before. And all these things, to me, are frightening, and I think—you know, people talk about strict constitutional construction, that the conservatives are supposedly in favor of, but there’s been no more damage to our Constitution than there were—in our history, than there were during the eight years of the Bush administration, when we suspended habeas corpus. We got rid of the—you know, many of our due process laws. We started eavesdropping on people and all of these other things. And those are the things I think people should be most concerned about.
AMY GOODMAN: With the retirement of your cousin, Patrick Kennedy, it’s the first time in 63 years that a Kennedy is not representing Americans in elected office in Washington. Are you thinking about that?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Um...no, I’m not thinking about it at the moment. I’m thinking about making sure this film gets the publicity that it deserves and that the battle over Coal River Mountain and the sacrifices that these people have made in Appalachia get recognized, you know, in some—in public jurisdictions, in the public forum, because there are so few places for them to bring those grievances today.
AMY GOODMAN: And if there was a Kennedy in national office, certainly bringing those issues forward—
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: You know what? There’s a—I go to the Cape every summer with my cousins, and there’s 85 people, kids in the fourth generation, and all they talk about is politics. And so, I think you’ll probably see somebody in the future in Congress again.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bobby Kennedy and Bill Haney, thanks so much for joining us. The film is called The Last Mountain. We’re here at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Thanks so much.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Thanks for having us, Amy.
Categories: Democracy Now
Tonight: Celebrate 15 Years of Democracy Now! & Watch a Live Interview with Bill Moyers
Tonight Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez will interview Bill Moyers as part of a historic evening celebrating 15 years of Democracy Now!
You can watch a live stream of the interview on our website and see Bill Moyers talking about his extraordinary legacy in public broadcasting and his new book Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues.
As part of the event we are soliciting questions from our Facebook fans. Please keep your questions focused about his career and about specific interviews he did over the years. He is releasing a new book that chronicles many of these incredible interviews.
Post your questions on our Facebook page & tune in on our website for the live stream of the interview at 7pm EDT.
Categories: Democracy Now
Andrew Breitbart's 'Electronic Brownshirts'
Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of right-wing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors’ jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.
Categories: Democracy Now
"Electronic Brownshirts": Pt. 2 of Judy Ancel on the Right-Wing Attack on Labor Professors
We continue our conversation with University of Missouri professor and labor activist Judy Ancel about the growing right-wing attacks on public education and the atmosphere of fear they produce. "The attack on labor education is an attack on academic freedom," says Ancel.
Watch Pt. 1 of the interview here.
AMY GOODMAN: Put this in a broader context, if you will, the issue of what is happening in this country around labor, around academia.
JUDY ANCEL: Well, first off, let me say that these kinds of attacks are the equivalent of electronic brownshirts. They create so much fear, and they are so directed against anything that is progressive—the right to an education, the rights of unions, the rights of working people—I see, are all part of an overall attack to silence the majority of people and create the kind of climate of fear that allows for us to move very, very sharply to the right. And it’s very frightening.
AMY GOODMAN: And how this fits into the whole attack on public unions? You’re a labor professor.
JUDY ANCEL: I’m a public employee. I work for a public university. The labor education programs throughout the country are almost entirely in public universities. And of course they’re going to attack the most vulnerable parts of those universities as a way of getting at all of education. I really believe that.
Let me also just say that one of the really important organizations to defend us was the American Association of University Professors. They really understood that the attack on labor education is an attack on academic freedom, and they were the first to speak out about it.
AMY GOODMAN: The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has made public records requests for emails from the Labor Studies Departments at Michigan State University, also at Wayne State.
JUDY ANCEL: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: And the Republican Party in Wisconsin made similar requests of labor professors at the University of Wisconsin.
JUDY ANCEL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain all of this, what’s happened.
JUDY ANCEL: Yeah. Well, I know my colleagues at the University of Michigan were asked to produce all emails that mention the word "Wisconsin." And this is—not only is this a violation of their ability to do their jobs and their rights to privacy, I believe, but it is also a huge attack on their programs because of the amount of staff time it takes to produce the records requests. These kinds of records requests have actually been going on for a number of years, through requests by the Landmark Legal Foundation, which has been demanding that labor education programs produce all their records, all their financial records and what they do. And these are ongoing attacks. So, this is nothing new.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, didn’t Andrew Breitbart announce his intentions of what he was going to do? This according to Labor Notes—
JUDY ANCEL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN:—announced his intentions on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show April 18th, saying, "We are going to take on education next, go after the teachers and the union organizers."
JUDY ANCEL: That’s right. That’s right. I found that. Right after the attack, I started researching Breitbart, and I found that. And I said, "Oh, my gosh."
AMY GOODMAN: Is this going to make teachers afraid to do this kind of—
JUDY ANCEL: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN:—long-distance learning, where you are being—
JUDY ANCEL: It’s not just long-distance learning.
AMY GOODMAN:—sent through video conference, so that students can access you in different campuses.
JUDY ANCEL: It’s every classroom, Amy. And student with a flip camera can walk into a classroom and tape a teacher today and then edit the videos and do a similar kind of hatchet job. All teachers feel this. And that’s one of the reasons why faculty at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, after Don was fired, faculty began to organize. They may reinvigorate their AAUP chapter on campus just because of this incident. People are scared.
AMY GOODMAN: American Association of Union Professors.
JUDY ANCEL: Yeah, yeah, of University Professors.
AMY GOODMAN: Of University Professors.
JUDY ANCEL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Judy Ancel, thanks so much for being with us. Judy Ancel is director of the Institute for Labor Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City, longtime labor activist. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. And I should also say, longtime supporter of KKFI in Kansas City, and programmer, as well, the community radio station in Kansas City.
Categories: Democracy Now
Pt. 2 of Interview with Steve Earle: "Democracy is Something that is Contagious"
Singer-songwriter, actor and author Steve Earle joins us for an extended interview on the popular uprisings in the Middle East, and the connection he sees between his antiwar and anti-death penalty activism. The Grammy Award winner also performs "John Walker’s Blues," a ballad he wrote from the perspective of the captured American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Click here to watch the first part of his interview, in which he discussed his new album and novel of the same name, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re here with Steve Earle. Steve, continue with what you were saying about your dad.
STEVE EARLE: I’m writing songs for Joan [Baez], that Joan’s requested that I write. And I wrote "God is God" for that record, and I also wrote "I am a Wanderer." And then, when I started putting songs together for this record, simply because I thought they were—the songs were—I was really proud of them, I called Joan and asked if it would be OK with her if I recorded them myself. And she said, "Of course."
And then I was finishing the novel and didn’t know what the record was going to be called. The book was always going to be called I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. It’s about—it’s about a defrocked doctor living in San Antonio, Texas, in 1963, who’s a heroin addict, and he supports his habit largely by performing abortions. And 10 years earlier, he was traveling Hank Williams when he died, and Hank’s ghost has followed him to San Antonio and haunts him there. What else would you call a book like that? So it was sort of—I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive is the title of a Hank Williams song, the last record that he released. And the record—you know, I kept writing songs, and then when I sequenced it, I realized that the songs were about the same things that the book ended up being about, because most of the book was written since my dad died, too.
And, you know, when you’re—I’m old enough now, I’ve started to lose some friends. And then, when the generation before you passes on, you start realizing that you’re next, and you start thinking about—you know, I’ve had—it’s a lot about examining how we deal with death in this culture. You know, I think maybe that we have it—there might be other cultures that do a little better job of it than we do, that treat it a little more like part of life than we do. Sometimes I think our process of dying is more about people that don’t really have to die, and the person that’s left to do that, to make that big step, has to do it pretty much by themselves. And, you know, they say death and taxes are the only things that are inevitable. You know, you could not pay your taxes. I’ve done it. There are consequences, but, you know, you can elect not to pay your taxes. And death is the one thing we don’t get out of. And I just—I found myself thinking about it and writing about it. I don’t think in a morbid fashion. I’m hoping that my sort of left-of-center orientation to everything—pop, political, spiritual, everything else—that I’ll be—that I’ll be at least not completely and totally unprepared when it becomes my turn.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I wanted to ask you—earlier in the show, we were dealing with what was going on in the Muslim world, in Yemen and in Syria and Iran. When you see, over the last few months, these enormous uprisings—
STEVE EARLE: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ:—that have been occurring across the world, and yet here in this country still relative dormancy in terms of the American population, your sense for the future of art in this country, as well the future for the country?
STEVE EARLE: Well, I mean, I think it’s obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been. And, you know, assuming that—I think, in our society, we tend to be—you know, we live in what’s been the most powerful country in the world for a long time, and I think we overestimate our ability to control all of that and affect all of that. And the fact of the matter is, democracy does just fine, and probably better, without our interference. And I think that’s been proven over and over again. And I think everyone—I mean, you know, I’m not someone that grew up believing that we necessarily practice the purest form of democracy in the world here or anything closest to it. And I think every society has to arrive at that. You know, it’s not that we can’t comment on it. It’s not that we can’t have an effect on it, I think. You know, but you have to take culture into consideration. And I think these things—you know, we’ve spent all this money, all this time, all this power and all these lives trying to affect what’s going on in other countries, in the name of democracy. And then, you know, I think when the Soviet Union vanished off of the map, I think it surprised us more than it did anybody else.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Steve, from the Mideast to the Midwest, you were in Madison. You were in that uprising. You performed.
STEVE EARLE: Well, I didn’t actually go. I started—Tom Morello went. I was on call to go, and I never quite got there for a lot of reasons. But it—
AMY GOODMAN: Ah, I thought you went. But you are well known for also singing labor songs.
STEVE EARLE: Yeah, that—no, that’s the most important thing that’s going on in the life of our democracy right now. Every place else in the world but here, trade unionism is a fundamental component of democracy—every place that even claims to be democratic in the world. Here, we separated our trade unions from the rest of the world a long time ago, and we did it on purpose. And, you know, it’s catching up with us now. And this defines us in the future, I think. Figuring out whether we are going to allow people to collectively bargain is—determines the quality of our democracy, from this point forward.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you want to sing a labor song for us right now?
STEVE EARLE: Oh, I have labor songs. Let’s see. I have all kinds of labor songs.
I can blame this on TSA. Let’s do—this is about labor and democracy and heroes.
[singing "Christmas in Washington"] It’s Christmastime in Washington
The Democrats rehearsed
Gettin’ into gear for four more years
The things not gettin’ worse
The Republicans drink whiskey neat
And thank their lucky stars
They said, "He cannot seek another term
There’ll be no more FDRs"
And I sit home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
An uneasy feeling in my chest
And I’m wonderin’ what it means
So come back, Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now
Woody, [there’s foxes in the hen house]
Cows out in the corn
Our unions have been busted
Their proud red banners torn
But if you listen to the radio
They’ll tell you all is well
But you, me and Cisco know
It’s going straight to hell
So come back, Emma Goldman
Rise up, old Joe Hill
The barricades are goin’ up
They cannot break our will
Come back to us, Malcolm X
And Martin Luther King
We’re marching into Selma
While the bells of freedom ring
And come back, Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow.
AMY GOODMAN: Nice, nice, nice. Steve Earle. Steve, you’ve taken on the death penalty in a big way.
STEVE EARLE: It’s been—you know, you have to pick the fights you’re going to concentrate on, and I think it’s been my primary area of activism for—I mean, I got into a lot of antiwar stuff the last 10 years, because we’ve found ourselves in, you know, two-and-a-half wars. And it’s like, I think the issues are directly related, though. I think a country that didn’t have the death penalty would have never attacked a country that hadn’t attacked it simply because someone had to pay.
And that whole—I was glad I wasn’t in New York City the other night—I was in Chicago the night that Osama bin Laden was killed—simply because I—it makes me extremely uncomfortable to see kids jumping up and down chanting, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.," when anyone dies, because my belief is that diminishes us all. That’s my problem with the death—I’m not trying to save anybody on death row. I just really believe that it hurts—it’s toxic, and that it hurts all of us, when we teach retribution as a natural, legal remedy for violence. And I just wasn’t, you know, culturally raised that way when I grew up, and the people that sort of helped raised me as an activist and an artist.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, we remain one of the few countries in the world that still has the death penalty, and the American people, many of them, still are not concerned about that.
STEVE EARLE: Well, you know, in defense of us, we are getting better about it. I mean, the death penalty is dying of natural causes, just like it did in the '60s, right now. It's just been abolished in Illinois. I think it’s because—for economic reasons. And you know what? It’s one of the reasons to—not the fundamental reason I do, but it’s a perfectly valid reason to be opposed to the death penalty. It’s just really, really incredibly expensive, and the money could be spent on things that are a whole lot better for us than trying to figure out how to kill our own citizens.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Earle, could you wrap up with—well, you mentioned him at the beginning of the interview, and I think a lot of people have forgotten John Walker Lindh.
STEVE EARLE: Yeah, and it’s—I think it’s really important that we not forget John Walker Lindh. John Walker Lindh is—I know he’s 29 because my son’s 29. And a lot of the reasons the song exists is because I have a son exactly the same age. He’s in prison. He’s in a prison far away from home, which it was sort of promised that he wouldn’t be, that he wouldn’t be moved out of California, but he was. He’s in prison for—he’s serving 20 years, which he’s served less than half of, for something that no one’s proven that he did. He hasn’t been—we’ll never know what the agreement was. But, you know, he wasn’t even charged with treason, or anything else that carries this long a prison sentence. And, you know, he was there because he became a poster child, and he became something that people that were in power at the time felt like they could do to assuage a huge amount of anger and a huge amount of—it’s just this—it’s the cycle that we were talking about when we talked about the death penalty. It’s the idea of retribution and revenge. And he’s there paying for all of—he’s there for everybody that we couldn’t catch and everybody that we couldn’t kill at the time, which brings us to: what do we say to his parents now that Osama bin Laden is dead? What do we say to the parents of all of these kids that died in Iraq and Afghanistan, now that Osama bin Laden is dead? How do we justify this—you know, all of these guys and gals that we’ve got out there? It’s just—it didn’t make sense then, but with Osama bin Laden’s head on the proverbial platter, it makes even less sense now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, could you end by singing the John Walker Lindh song? John Walker Lindh, who was caught at the Sheberghan Prison in Afghanistan and remains in prison in this country. This is Steve Earle.
STEVE EARLE: And I like blame all these tuning issues I’m having on the TSA. They’re the people who last opened this guitar case.
[singing "John Walker’s Blues"] I’m just an American boy
Raised on MTV
I’ve seen all them kids in the soda pop ads
None of ’em looked like me
So I started lookin’ around
For a light out of the dim
The first thing I heard that made sense was the word
Of Muhammad, peace be upon him
A shadu la ilaha illa Allah
There is no god but God
If my daddy could see me now
These chains around my feet
He don’t understand that sometimes a man
Got to fight for what he believes
I believe God is great
All praise due to him
And if I should die
I’ll rise up to the sky
Like Jesus, peace be upon Him
A shadu la ilaha illa Allah
There is no god but God
We came to fight the jihad
And our hearts were pure and strong
When death filled the air
We all offered up prayers
And prepared for our martyrdom
But Allah had some other plan
Some secret not revealed
Now they’re draggin’ me back
With my head in a sack
To the land of the infidel
A shadu la ilaha illa Allah
A shadu la ilaha illa Allah.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Earle, thank you so much.
STEVE EARLE: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on your new CD, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, which comes with a DVD of the making of this film.
STEVE EARLE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And pictures of your baby.
STEVE EARLE: Yeah. That’s John Henry.
AMY GOODMAN: John Henry. Doesn’t have a hammer in his hand at the moment, but does clearly have the faders of the—
STEVE EARLE: He was scaring T Bone to death there, yeah. He was like that up on the console, no doubt about it.
AMY GOODMAN: And also author of the new book by the same title, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, and just about to get an honorary degree, which is where he’s wearing his suit today, so congratulations on that, as well.
STEVE EARLE: Thank you, appreciate it.
AMY GOODMAN: CUNY Law School. Steve Earle.
Categories: Democracy Now
Opposition to Military Trials of Civilians in Egypt Gains Momentum
Three months after the Egyptian military took the reins of power following the popular uprising that ousted former president, Hosni Mubarak, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is coming under growing criticism for its widespread use of military trials against civilians. On May 9, a press conference was organized at the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate in downtown Cairo for people to speak out against the military court system, which has been used to convict and jail more than 5,000 civilians since January 25, the first day of massive protests at Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Democracy Now! correspondents Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar filed this report.
Categories: Democracy Now
