Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman: Recent Episodes
Democracy Now!
Goodman and Moynihan report each week on the people and places caught in the middle, the ones most directly affected by policy debates, war and social issues. The column breaks through the glib clichés, dogmatic language and overall static that has permeated mainstream media coverage. Goodman and Moynihan’s unrestrained commentary from the front lines resonates with a generation that has an uncanny ability to spot the inauthentic in any discourse. The energy and passion for the truth found in this column inspires and rouses readers young Goodman and Moynihan report each week on the people and places caught in the middle, the ones most directly affected by policy debates, war and social issues. The column breaks through the glib clichés, dogmatic language and overall static that has permeated mainstream media coverage. Goodman and Moynihan’s unrestrained commentary from the front lines resonates with a generation that has an uncanny ability to spot the inauthentic in any discourse. The energy and passion for the truth found in this column inspires and rouses readers young and old from across the political spectrum.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan One of Donald Trump’s recent federal court filings is truly Orwellian. Trump was trying to delay his trial by almost three years. The filing compares Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, to the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths who suffered one of the most notoriously racist judicial persecutions in U.S. history,
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan August 19th marked the 70th anniversary of the overthrow of the first democratically-elected prime minister of Iran. It was the first coup d’état in the modern era orchestrated by the U.S., launching decades of coups, assassinations and “regime change.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The climate crisis is not a looming threat; it is here now.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan From Henrietta Lacks to Porcha Woodruff, it is past time we recognize and reject racist abuses of technology.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The prosecution of the Newburgh Four was a political prosecution. They cannot recover the 14 years they’ve lost, they will still be on probation, subject to reimprisonment, and they will still be considered “felons” with all the burdens that designation carries.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Legal slavery ended in the United States on December 5th, 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, but its echoes painfully persist to this day.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan With the string of catastrophes striking the northern hemisphere, the science is unequivocal: the rapidly worsening climate crisis is making these weather events more frequent and more intense.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan A remarkable documentary called “Every Body” is now hitting theaters, exposing the extent of the abuse heaped on the intersex community, highlighting the vibrant movement for justice and human rights for intersex people growing worldwide.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan As threats to free speech and the teaching of our nation’s genuine history mount, it is worth recalling the answer Benjamin Franklin gave to a member of the public who asked him in 1787, about the new constitution he had just helped draft, “Do we have a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic madam, if you can keep it.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While recent economic numbers may give Biden reason to wax poetic, they also mask the suffering of millions of Americans shackled by poverty.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan All travelers, whether migrants or millionaires, deserve rescue. The global response to the Titan’s disappearance should be the model for how we respond to migrant vessels in distress.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan We should celebrate Juneteenth, but we must also remember the bloody history that led to that day in Galveston, and commit to fighting racism as it exists today.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The modern struggle for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people has been waged for over a century. Despite significant gains, the work is sadly far from over as Pride Month begins.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan One of the “poison pills” buried in the must-pass legislation fast-tracks the approval and construction of the controversial, 300-plus-mile-long fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Soccer is called “the Beautiful Game,” but the 2022 World Cup should serve as a reminder that for many in the world, the fight for human rights, workers rights and equality is not a game. It is deadly serious.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Biden should work for the immediate release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah and many more Egyptian political prisoners before granting Egyptian dictator President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi a plum White House meeting.
The world’s wealthy countries have so far refused to pay for “loss and damage.” But those who have been fighting for a just climate transition aren’t giving up hope.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Alaa Abd El-Fattah should be attending COP27, addressing world leaders – not on the edge of death in an Egyptian prison.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Political violence must be condemned, and countered with massive voter turnout.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Ralph Nader, the legendary consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate, has a message for the Democrats: Crush the GOP in 2022.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Unmitigated greed of private health insurers and drug companies is a major driver of inequality in our society. Medicare for All is a long-overdue prescription for our ailing healthcare system.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Can democracy survive in a society awash in guns as violence-promoting charlatans are increasingly embraced by Republican Party elites? It is the job of us all to see that it does.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Hundreds of African Americans in Elaine were slaughtered by the white mob, likely aided by law enforcement and federal troops. Historians estimate the number killed at no less than two hundred Black residents – men, women and children. No white participants were ever held accountable.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Climate and democracy are under enormous threat. Our ability to weather this storm depends on concerted action by the global majority who care, against increasingly difficult odds.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Using people fleeing desperate situations as political props and exacerbating their distress is cruel and dehumanizing.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan It has long been said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” referring to the United Kingdom’s colonies around the globe. Will the death of Queen Elizabeth II trigger further shrinking of the empire, as former colonies now in the British Commonwealth debate whether to permanently sever ties?
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The 2022 midterms and the 2024 general elections will profoundly impact the trajectory of our political system.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan It will take solidarity on a national level to overcome the triple, ongoing impacts assaulting the citizens of Jackson, Mississippi: racism, classism and the spiraling disaster of climate change.
August 24th marked six months since Russia launched its war on Ukraine. That same day marked the centennial of the late historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn’s birth. Zinn once noted: “War poisons everybody who engages in it.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Plots to assassinate a publisher, warrantless surveillance of private conversations and secret duplication of attorneys’ and journalists’ private electronic devices all echo the notoriously criminal conduct of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.
As governments prepare for the upcoming United Nations global climate summit to be held in Egypt in mid-November, developments in the fight against catastrophic climate change suggest that, against all odds, hope is not lost.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The scars of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are deep, spanning decades. The United States bears responsibility, and owes the survivors reparations, no less than has been pledged, belatedly, to U.S. veterans.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The Pope’s “penitential pilgrimage” across Canada should renew a complete accounting of the residential school system in pursuit of justice and reparations for its survivors and impacted indigenous communities.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Protecting pregnant people seeking abortions and their healthcare providers from anti-abortion extremists, whether they are lurking outside clinics or doctors’ homes, or inside state legislatures or the U.S. Congress, must be a priority for us all.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan A country that mounts coups should not be so surprised when someone attempts one at home. We need a uniform standard of justice, and a world free of coups.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Our uniquely American crisis of mass shootings and gun violence must be confronted with sustained, grassroots action, starting with an assault weapons ban.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Supreme Court decisions are not open to judicial review, but they can be countered by a force more powerful: the people.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The people of Colombia have given Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez an opportunity to pursue a different path forward for their country.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Single-payer, or Medicare for All, makes sense in normal times, but we are not in normal times. The global COVID-19 pandemic has ripped the scabs off of so many sectors of our society, exposing and exacerbating inequities and a lethal lack of preparation.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Victims and their advocates are pushing for genuine gun control in the wake of back to back massacres each committed by 18-year-old men with legally-purchased AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This corporate formula cartel profiting off babies’ bellies while feeding at the public trough must be reined in, constrained by effective regulation and empowered consumers.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan There is consensus on tightening gun laws here in the United States. Why won’t elected officials heed the electorate?
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Challenging racist violence demands an understanding of our true history. Instead, a vocal minority in our country are demanding not gun bans but book bans, trying to suppress the teaching of our country’s deep-seated, systemic racism.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The killing of journalists and media workers the world over – from Palestine to Mexico to Ukraine – all too often with absolute impunity, must end.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This wave of likely abortion bans will cause a cascade of harm, disporoportionately among poorer people, people of color and in other marginalized communities.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan As drug manufacturers make record profits, ensuring vaccine access around the world is not only a moral imperative, but a practical, achievable goal that protects us all.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Forty-year-old Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah has embarked on a hunger strike to the death, as the Egyptian government is doing all it can to silence him.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While BA.2 creates uncertainty in the course of the pandemic, one fact has become increasingly clear: COVID-19 has exposed significant disparities in how health care is delivered and accessed in our society.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan We need a uniform standard of justice to hold accountable perpetrators of war crimes, wherever they may occur.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” Ida B. Wells wrote. While Emmett Till’s murderers escaped justice, his short life, and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s tireless activism, charted the path forward for us all to permanently reject racist terror.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Harriet Tubman’s birth date is unknown, but some estimate it as March, 1822 – exactly 200 years before Judge Jackson’s historic Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and just over 200 years after the first Africans were sold into slavery in North America in 1619. The arc, 400 years long, is bending towards justice.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan If international law is to count for anything, it must be enforced equally.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan All too often, as men launch and fight wars, women and their children are the ones who suffer and die.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Russia’s invasion could trigger further catastrophes, including a meltdown of one of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors, or even the unimaginable, nuclear war.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Paul Farmer spent his life’s work transforming healthcare systems where, too often, access to care is reserved for the wealthy while the poor are left to die.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Valentine’s Day is when we’re supposed to give heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and flowers to those we love. For Manuel “Manny” Oliver, Valentine’s Day is something different.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Biden must grant long overdue clemency to 77-year-old Leonard Peltier after close to half a century in prison for a blatantly political prosecution.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The Nazi book burnings in the spring of 1933 were a harbinger of what was to come. The epidemic of book banning sweeping our country today must be confronted and stopped now.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Grassroots movements must demand peace and diplomacy, now, before the outbreak of war.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan A graduated wealth tax on people with $5 million or more would raise $2.5 trillion annually and could pay to contain the pandemic, invest in public health to prevent the next one, and lift millions out of poverty. Tax the rich.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan As we mark what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 93rd birthday, now is the time to demand that the U.S. Senate override the Jim Crow filibuster and pass meaningful voting rights legislation.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Democracy is under assault. President Biden must live up to his promise to support a free press, needed now more than ever, and drop the prosecution of Julian Assange.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan After helping to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu continued demonstrating and speaking out around the world for justice, peace, women’s equality, gay rights, in solidarity with Palestinians, and more.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Nobody saw it coming. Nobody in the whole world. Who saw it coming?” That was President Joe Biden speaking on ABC Wednesday about the COVID-19 Omicron variant. In fact, many people saw it coming. Global health experts and activists have been warning for more than a year that aggressive variants of the virus are essentially guaranteed as long as much of the world’s population remains unvaccinated. We are now entering the pandemic’s third year, with more than 277 million reported cases and 5.4 million deaths worldwide. The Omicron variant is spreading with unprecedented speed, infecting even the vaccinated and the boosted. Despite this, vaccination remains the best way to avoid serious illness or death by COVID-19. Yet vaccines remain out of reach for much of the world’s population. Many of the effective vaccines and treatments were developed using taxpayer money, with scientists at public health institutions and using other public resources. Nevertheless, pharmaceutical corporations are demanding top dollar for these life-saving products, withholding the vaccine formulas while millions continue to get sick and die. Greed should not determine the course of this pandemic. “No company, however powerful, should be able to dictate who lives and who dies, or exercise outsized influence over whether the global economy prospers or grinds to a halt. But Moderna is doing just that,” Diana Kearney, a Legal and Shareholder Advocacy Advisor at Oxfam America, said this week in a statement accompanying Oxfam’s complaint to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Central to Oxfam’s argument to the SEC is a dispute between Moderna and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Moderna filed a patent claim in July that listed only its scientists; the NIH says three of its own, publicly-financed scientists – John Mascola, Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett – played key roles in the vaccine’s discovery. If the U.S. can prove it belongs on the patent, Moderna would lose some control over how the vaccine gets manufactured and distributed. Oxfam bought stock in Moderna, and thus holds shareholder rights. As a publicly traded company, Moderna must submit extensive filings to the SEC, informing its investors and the public of the company’s finances and explaining any risks the company is facing. In its complaint, Oxfam alleges Moderna has been lying about the seriousness of its patent conflict with the NIH and the U.S. Department of Justice, and is hiding pending litigation that could cause a significant drop in its share price. Oxfam’s strategic use of securities law is part of a wider strategy to achieve vaccine equity. It’s part of The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a global coalition pressuring for development of COVID-19 vaccines as a common good, fairly distributed to everyone, everywhere, for free. Achal Prabhala, coordinator of AccessIBSA, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa, is a key organizer with the project. “Unless something dramatically changes with vaccine supply, we are condemned to repeat these horrific cycles of surges and infections and unknowns,” Prabhala said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He co-authored a recent report from AccessIBSA and Doctors Without Borders, describing over 120 manufacturers in Asia, Africa and Latin America with the technical requirements and quality standards to make an mRNA vaccine. “If the mRNA technology that Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna have developed and deployed…were to be shared with any number of these 120 companies, we could vaccinate the world in close to six months,” Prabhala explained. “It’s not theoretical. It’s based, in fact, on a model of existing partnerships that companies like Moderna have with very similar manufacturers, except they’re located in Spain instead of Bangladesh or Senegal or Tunisia.” According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, more than two-thirds of people in high income countries have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose; in low income countries, less than a tenth of the population has received one. There are still countries, mainly in Africa, where the vaccination rate is at or below one percent. Lifting patent restrictions “loosens Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech’s stranglehold on these vaccines,” Prabhala said. “It undercuts the massive tens of billions of dollars of profit and revenue that they can earn off selling to poor countries in the next couple of years, once they’re done with rich countries.” He offered a solution: “President Biden can bring Moderna to the White House, sit them across the table, say that we have laws that can force you to do what we are asking you to do, but we’d rather you just do it instead, work out that agreement, and then let it go and take credit for vaccinating the world.” Vaccinating the world is the way out of this pandemic. No one is safe until everyone is safe.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Devastating tornadoes hit Kentucky and neighboring states as darkness descended on Friday. The supercell thunderstorm tore a 200-mile path, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The National Weather Service had been issuing warnings and severe weather alerts for over 36 hours. At the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, workers on the evening shift were scared. NBC News reported that managers told them they’d be fired if they left to seek shelter elsewhere (a charge the factory owner disputes). Eight workers there were killed and many injured when a massive EF4 tornado flattened the factory. An Amazon warehouse in Illinois was flattened, killing six workers. The death toll across six states is now at least 90. The wreckage and loss of life from this storm is yet another symptom of how our fossil fuel addiction heats the planet and drives disasters. “The severity and the amount of time these tornadoes spent on the ground is unprecedented,” Deanne Criswell, the FEMA administrator, said on CNN. “This is going to be our new normal. The effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation.” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, reinforced that last point, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour: “This isn’t a natural disaster. This is a disaster exacerbated by human-caused climate change…There were winds measured at more than 300 miles per hour. Debris was found 30,000 feet up in the atmosphere, and it traveled nearly 200 miles, something we’ve never seen before.” As President Biden visited Mayfield on Wednesday, a massive wind storm swept out of the Rocky Mountains across the Plains states, blinding travelers in clouds of dust and overturning tractor trailers as they drove. Record high temperatures fanned the storm, leaving half a million without power and causing the first December tornadoes in Minnesota’s recorded history. Eight thousand miles away, in Kampala, Uganda, Vanessa Nakate is at the forefront of the global movement for climate justice. She founded Youth for Future Africa after joining in the Fridays for Future climate strike movement launched by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. A photo of Vanessa with Greta and other youth climate strikers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland was published with the four white teens pictured, but Vanessa cropped out. The Associated Press claims a house behind Vanessa made that side of the photo cluttered, but Vanessa saw it as another example of the racism deeply interconnected with the climate crisis. The title of her new book, “A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis,” was inspired by the incident. “This was the first time in my life that I understood the definition of the word ‘racism,’” she explained on a social media post, adding on Democracy Now! “Africa is the least emitter of carbon, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis. But you erasing our voices won’t change anything…we are not missing. We are just unheard.” Vanessa’s trajectory as an activist has been meteoric, from staging a small protest in Kampala in January, 2019 with five siblings and cousins to speaking before a hundred thousand activists at the COP26 protest rally in Glasgow in November. Her book is both a cri de cœur for climate action and a practical guide on how the climate justice movement can and must center the voices of those most impacted by the climate emergency. Throughout her book, on social media and in public speeches, Vanessa Nakate amplifies the names and voices of other young African climate activists, revealing a vibrant but largely unheard sector of the movement. “We cannot have climate justice if the voices from the most affected communities are continuously being cropped out,” she continued, on Democracy Now! “That doesn’t just erase my story or my experience; it…literally erases the existence of the challenges that I’m seeing in my country and the problems people are facing because of the climate crisis.” A key failure of the United Nations climate change negotiations that Vanessa writes about has been the failure of wealthy nations to deliver on their promised $100 billion per year to help developing nations develop renewably. Professor Michael Mann agrees. “We don’t want them to go through the fossil fuel stage of economic development. We can’t afford for that to happen,” Mann said. “So we have to provide them with the financing and the resources to develop clean energy technology. That means that the United States, the EU and other industrial countries need to ante up.” The global climate emergency is spawning catastrophes everywhere, from tornadoes in Kentucky to floods in Uganda. Stemming irreversible climate change is still possible, but only with urgent, coordinated and inclusive action by us all.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” - Pres. Dwight Eisenhower, 1961
As special interests in Washington, DC pared President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years, the $768 billion annual Pentagon budget sailed through the House of Representatives. That’s equivalent to about $8 trillion over ten years, significantly larger than Build Back Better, passed with bipartisan harmony. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is now in the Senate, where additional spending amendments are being pushed for this “must pass” legislation. If budgets indicate a society’s values, then it’s clear what’s important to the United States: weapons and war. The NDAA as passed in the House was actually $24 billion more than the Biden administration asked for, and, according to Politico, is “a key step in shedding aging weapons and helping the Pentagon pivot toward emerging technologies.” That news will bring joy to the military industrial complex. News accounts abound of high-tech weaponry being tested and deployed by Russia, China and other perceived adversaries. Russia just launched a satellite-killing missile, scoring a direct hit on one of its defunct satellites. China reportedly launched a “hypersonic” missile capable of delivering a surprise nuclear first-strike against the United States. “The U.S. spends 10 times what Russia spends, about 3 times what China spends,” Bill Hartung said on the Democracy Now! news hour. Hartung is the author of a new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden,” and of the book “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.” He added, “It has 13 times as many active nuclear warheads in its stockpile as China does. We’ve got 11 aircraft carriers of a type that China doesn’t have. We’ve got 800 US military bases around the globe while China has three. So this whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget. So far, unfortunately, at least in the halls of Congress and the Biden administration, that’s been successful.” The military budget includes the largest amount ever requested for research into novel weapons systems, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence and the development of killer robots. “Killer robots are a thing of the future but not the distant future,” Steve Goose, director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division and co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said on the Democracy Now! “It is not the human who decides what to target and when to pull the trigger but instead the weapon system itself does this through artificial intelligence and sensors and algorithms. This is not just a new weapon, it is a new form of warfare and not one that’s going to be nice to humankind.” The United Nations is hosting a Convention on Conventional Weapons conference in Geneva next week, where rules governing these killer robots will be discussed. The United States is “rejecting…prohibitions or restrictions on the development and acquisition of fully autonomous weapons,” Steve Goose said. At a conference this week, Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley said, “The nation state that masters artificial intelligence and integrates it into military operations, combines it with robotics…is going to have an extraordinary advantage.” He added, “Our ability to hit with long range precision fires is unprecedented. We can strike anywhere on the globe, at very, very refined levels of accuracy.” Sadly, perennial claims about precision “smart bombs” by the Pentagon and its boosters have been proven false again and again around the world, by the corpses of civilians – dehumanized as “collateral damage” – killed by U.S. weaponry. The New York Times recently reported on a March, 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, originally said to be targeting ISIS combatants. One 500-pound bomb was dropped on a gathering of women and children. Minutes later, survivors were targeted with two 2,000-pound bombs. The attack, ordered by a secretive U.S. Special Operations unit known as Task Force 9, killed an estimated 80 people. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a full review of the incident. Airwars, a non-profit organization that tracks military actions and civilian harm in conflict zones like Syria, Iraq and Yemen, has recorded almost 60,000 civilian deaths over the past 15 years, reflecting only officially reported airstrikes. “$770 Billion to the Pentagon just easily passed the house 363-70,” newly elected progressive New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman tweeted after the House passed the NDAA. “It is astounding how quickly Congress moves weapons but we can’t ensure housing, care, and justice for our veterans, nor invest in robust jobs programs for districts like mine.” Build back better or build more bombs? The choice is clear.
December 1st was World AIDS Day, marking forty years since symptoms were first reported. Over 36 million people have died worldwide from AIDS-related illnesses. The death rate is slowing as effective drug treatments gain wider distribution. But the inequity that long fueled the AIDS epidemic still exists, with punishing consequences, particularly for the people of southern Africa. The persistence and the vastly unequal impacts of the ongoing AIDS epidemic serve as a warning as the new Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus makes its way around the world. Little is currently known about this newly-identified SARS-CoV-2 variant, particularly whether it spreads more easily or if it can cause more severe COVID-19. What we do know is thanks largely to its rapid identification by scientists in Botswana and South Africa. Fatima Hassan, founder of Health Justice Initiative praised those scientists on the Democracy Now! news hour, saying, “I think they need to be celebrated for that because there wasn’t a cloud of secrecy around this particular variant.” Rather than being celebrated, though, the nations of southern Africa are being isolated. The United States quickly implemented a travel ban, barring anyone from eight southern African nations from entering the country. Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Iran and the U.K followed suit. “An uneven travel ban was slapped on many countries in southern Africa,” Hassan said. “It is actually quite racist.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the bans on Sunday, “The emergence of the Omicron variant should be a wake-up call to the world that vaccine inequality cannot be allowed to continue. Until everyone is vaccinated, everyone will continue to be at risk. Instead of prohibiting travel, the rich countries of the world need to support the efforts of developing economies to access and to manufacture enough vaccine doses for their people without delay.” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres slammed the travel bans as “travel apartheid,” which only serve to exacerbate the growing global divide caused by vaccine apartheid. In a recent opinion piece, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the hoarding of surplus vaccine doses by wealthy nations with populations that are highly vaccinated, including with booster shots, “morally repugnant and epidemiological madness.” It would be easier to vaccinate the world than to try in vain to block COVID-19 variants from crossing borders. Omicron is a case in point; as the New York Times detailed this week, the variant was already present in the Netherlands before its existence was announced in Africa. Travelers on airplanes from South Africa carried the variant to Europe, where the hodgepodge of conflicting national travel restrictions already in place and inadequate quarantine protocols led Dutch officials to force many potentially Omicron-positive travelers to depart for their final destinations, accelerating the new variant’s spread. Pharmaceutical corporations that are profiting off of the pandemic are slowing vaccination in poor and middle-income countries. With patents on the vaccines, companies like Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are using intellectual property protections to block the sharing of their secret vaccine formulas. Journalism professor Steven Thrasher sees a parallel between the role of Big Pharma now with COVID-19 and how the Global South, and primarily southern Africa, was and continues to be afflicted by AIDS: “Today there is no reason why anybody should be dying of AIDS. It is a slow-moving virus and so from the time we know someone is infected, we can give them all the support they need. We have the science for it. We have the medicine for it. It is merely a matter of protecting capitalism and the profits of pharmaceutical companies,“ Thrasher said on Democracy Now! “We are seeing very similar dynamics again now with COVID-19…we have the vaccines, we have medications that are very effective and they are again being held from the Global South to protect the profits of pharmaceutical corporations.” Over a year ago, South Africa and India proposed that the World Trade Organization temporarily suspend TRIPS, or Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, to speed COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide. President Joe Biden was applauded last May for supporting the waiver. Amnesty International, along with members of the U.S. Congress and many labor, health and other civil society groups delivered a petition signed by over three million people to the White House last week, noting, “six months later, in the absence of U.S. leadership to deliver a waiver deal, the European Union, on behalf of Germany, plus Switzerland and the United Kingdom have blocked progress.” People over profit must be the guiding mantra as we soon enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without immediate action, we could well be dealing with COVID, just as we still battle AIDS, for the next forty years.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Wampanoag. Massachusett. Nipmuc. Mohegan. Pequot. Narragansett. Passamaquoddy. Miꞌkmaq. These are just some of the indigenous nations of the land now called New England, the home of that original Thanksgiving dinner that occurred 400 years ago, in the fall of 1621. The myth of that shared meal has evolved over the centuries, depicting friendship and cooperation between the English settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Wampanoag people who had been there for at least 10,000 years. While that gathering was peaceful, it was at best a token respite from the European settler colonists’ genocide against native peoples that was already well underway. While families gather across the country for this year’s Thanksgiving celebration, frontline indigenous communities that have survived centuries of violence, displacement and systemic racism remain in resistance, defending land, water and their very existence. Those 100 or so early settlers, popularly referred to as “Pilgrims,” arrived on Wampanoag territory in 1620. After the first winter, wracked by disease and hunger, their number had dwindled to 54. Indigenous people came to their aid, teaching them how to cultivate local crops. By harvest time, the settlers managed to store enough food to survive the coming winter, so they organized a celebratory feast. The Wampanoag people had just suffered a multi-year plague that had decimated native populations across the region, and, historians believe, sought a strategic partnership with the settlers. English King James I was encouraging colonization, and even touted the benefits of the deadly contagion, calling it a “wonderful plague,” in a 1620 proclamation, leading “to the utter Destruction, Devastacion, and Depopulation of that whole Territorye.” That was the era that the late historian Bernard Bailyn, who died last year at the age of 97, described as “The Barbarous Years,” as the “Pilgrims” mounted increasingly savage massacres and military campaigns against those natives whose land they wanted. Later leaders would couch the ongoing genocide in more diplomatic language with colonial initiatives like “Manifest Destiny,” and the 1934 “Indian Reorganization Act,” that cemented the modern system of impoverished and neglected reservations. The Declaration of Independence lists among its grievances against King George III his encouragement of attacks against the colonists by “merciless Indian Savages.” From 1777 through 1868, the United States signed at least 368 treaties with native nations — and violated every one. Canada’s track record is comparable. Indigenous people have never stopped demanding that these treaties, and their national sovereignty, be honored. In the fall of 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, issuing a sarcastic manifesto demanding Alcatraz become a reservation as it bore all the hallmarks of one: it was isolated, had no running water, sanitation, access to education, healthcare or employment, and its occupants would be treated like prisoners. The 19-month occupation involved thousands of people and inspired indigenous people across North America to demand justice. The American Indian Movement was founded, leading to the 1973 activist occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, galvanizing international solidarity for indigenous rights. In 2016, indigenous resistance catapulted into global headlines as Lakota and Dakota people opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline established resistance camps at Standing Rock. After DAPL’s owner, Energy Transfer Partners, sicced dogs and beat native water defenders, the camps swelled to over 10,000 people, with over 200 indigenous nations and tribes represented. The pipeline was eventually built, but a new era of native resistance had emerged. Now, pipelines are being constructed to move the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, tar sands petroleum in western Canada. Indigenous-led resistance to Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota has been waged for years now. Anishinaabe leader Winona LaDuke has been on the frontlines there. She criticized President Joe Biden’s inaction on Line 3, and commented on the Democracy Now! news hour on Biden’s appointment of the first Native American cabinet member in history, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland: “Joe, if you appoint Indian people, don’t just make them pretty Indian people that sit in your administration. Let them do their job. Indigenous thinking is what we need in the colonial administration. That’s when change happens.” In British Columbia, Canada, the Wet’suwet’en sovereign nation has been resisting the multibillion-dollar Coastal GasLink pipeline being constructed by TC Energy. Just this week, Canadian federal police raided a multi-month blockade, smashing into a cabin with an axe and a chainsaw and arresting the land defenders inside. Police then burned the cabin to the ground. This myth of that abundant shared meal 400 years ago continues to mask misery, from poverty and substance abuse to the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. But native communities are resilient and organized, and rising up in resistance. For this, we should all give thanks.
“Wildly here without control, Nature reigns and rules the whole…”
Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns, wrote those lines in 1787. If only the delegates to COP26, the United Nations climate summit that wrapped up last Saturday in Glasgow, had heeded his words. The negotiations ended with a document dubbed the “Glasgow Climate Pact” which many climate activists called a failure. “We should call it the ‘Glasgow suicide pact’ for the poorest in the world,” Asad Rehman of the COP26 Coaltion said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It does not keep us below the 1.5 degree [Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] guard rail. In fact, it heads us closer to 3 degrees [C, or 5.4 degrees F]…They’re ramming through so many loopholes that it makes a mockery of these climate negotiations.” One draft of the climate pact included an historic first, calling for “the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.” Polluting nations and armies of fossil fuel industry lobbyists managed to dilute that down to “the phase-out of unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.” Thus, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, can still be burned with the promise that the resulting pollution will be “abated” with carbon capture and storage, an unproven technology. And the same fossil fuel corporations that have profited for so long while sowing disinformation about the climate will continue to enjoy lavish subsidies at taxpayer expense. “This summit was betrayal,” Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice activist from the Philippines, said on Democracy Now! “It is painful for me, knowing that the Philippines is such a vulnerable country for the climate crisis and that we know that we are hit year after year, month after month, with climate impacts.” The Philippines, described as the most storm-vulnerable nation on earth, has been hard hit by a succession of especially destructive, climate change-fueled typhoons over the past decade. “All countries,” she added, “should be phasing out the fossil fuel industry. That doesn’t just stop at coal, but also oil and gas, which the U.S. and the U.K. conveniently took out of the text.” Indigenous land defenders from the Amazon were also in Glasgow for COP26. The world’s largest rainforest is called “the lungs of the planet” for the vital role it plays in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “We must first change our relationship to nature, change the way we think about the world, and really put at the center of our thinking our connection to life and our commitment to future generations,” Domingo Peas, an Achuar indigenous leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, said on Democracy Now! “There are 30 indigenous nations and 30 million hectares of intact forest that are at stake. We must protect this…The forest is calling on us.” The United States and European nations built their enormous wealth by burning coal with abandon for over a century and a half, a cheap but dirty way to achieve growth. The U.S. remains the single largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, with close to twice the total that China has emitted, based on 2017 data. China is now by far the largest emitter globally. In recent years, the U.S., the U.K., and most European Union nations have been able to decrease their reliance on coal, shifting to oil, fracked gas, and renewable sources. Poor, developing nations haven’t contributed significantly to the overall climate crisis, but are suffering disproportionately. To recover from disasters, to adapt to the changing climate, and to build their economies responsibly toward a zero carbon future, these countries need money. COP26 was supposed to deliver on long-promised financing for these needs, but failed to do so. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the U.S. and other developed countries pledged $100 billion per year to developing and climate-vulnerable nations from 2020 through 2025. Only a fraction of those funds have materialized, much of it as loans, not as climate aid. Meanwhile, a consortium of African nations recently estimated that the true cost for them to effectively respond to climate change would be closer to $1.3 trillion per year. Polluters should pay, and the United States should lead the way. Robert Burns died in 1796, when the age of coal was in its infancy. The current National Poet of Scotland is Kathleen Jamie. Inspired by the River Clyde that flows through Glasgow, this week she penned “What the Clyde said, after COP26,” which ends,
“sure, I’m a river, but I can take a side. From this day, I’d rather keep afloat, like wee folded paper boats, the hopes of the young folk chanting at my bank, fear in their spring-bright eyes so hear this: fail them, and I will rise.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Global warming causes global swarming. In 2018, Indian Ocean cyclones hit Oman and Yemen, creating conditions for an outbreak of desert locusts. Swarms grew throughout 2019 and 2020, two of the hottest years on record. Swarms with 80 million insects have swept across Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, and, as of last week, Kenya, consuming enough staple crops that would otherwise feed 35,000 people, every day. Scientists have linked the growth of locust plagues to climate change. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, fossil fuel industry lobbyists are swarming the United Nations climate summit, known as COP26. This conference, called the “last, best hope” for the climate, is falling far short of what’s needed to avert irreversible catastrophe. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report, released just before this year’s COP, warns that, with the current pace of pledged emission cuts by the world’s nations, we are on track to see a 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average global temperature, far above the 1.5 degree C (2.7 deg F) target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. Critiques of COP26 from activists both inside and outside its walls range from business as usual to abject failure. The United Kingdom’s shambolic management of the event, its strict visa requirements and its failure to deliver on its promised, pre-COP vaccination plan for attendees from nations with low vaccine availability have made this summit the whitest, most privileged COP in its 30-year history. While widespread access challenges have prevented thousands from participating, over 500 oil, gas and coal lobbyists have been given the red carpet treatment. If they were a nation, according to a new Global Witness report, they would be the largest delegation at COP26. “Those trying to burn down the table should not have a seat at it,” Pascoe Sabido, Researcher and Campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, said to the press. “This is the same industry that has spent the last 50 years denying, delaying and blocking climate action, so how on earth are they still allowed in? The only way we’re going to leave these talks with anywhere near the ambition needed is if we kick these big polluters out.” Despite the presence of this army of fossil fuel lobbyists, some progress in the official proceedings is evident. A draft COP outcome document released on Tuesday included the word “coal” for the first time in 30 years, calling for nations “to accelerate the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.” Nigerian environmental leader Nnimmo Bassey, responding to the draft text, said on the Democracy Now! news hour, “Saying they should phase out coal, then only phase out subsidies for fossil fuel, means that this COP believes that fossil fuel use…should continue.” He added, “the tendency is that a draft document may be further watered down, so that final document may actually come out to say don’t phase out anything or remove subsidies.” Bassey was speaking on the 26th anniversary of the execution of renowned Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged with eight others on trumped up charges to silence their effective campaigning against Shell’s oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Another plague on the planet has been the murder of environmentalists, land and water defenders, and climate justice campaigners, with over 1,000 killed just since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester has long pointed out that, while the “climate glitterati” gather at the annual COPs and achieve little, the climate doesn’t negotiate. “If we are to deliver on the 1.5 degrees commitment that [U.S. President] Joe Biden made earlier this year, the math and physics tell us we have eight years for a good chance of 1.5,” Anderson said on Democracy Now! “The protesters and the civil society movements in their work, engaging more locally, all of that is much more in line with what science is calling for.” Outside the fortified convention center, the civil society Anderson praises has been swarming as well, with a massive march of over 100,000 people and a four-day countersummit with hundreds of panels and events across Glasgow and online. The COP26 Coalition’s lead spokesperson, Asad Rehman, was actually invited to address the COP. He tore up his prepared remarks in frustration with the lack of progress, and said instead, “The richest have ignored every moral and political call to do their fair share. Their broken promises across 26 COPs are no longer fooling anyone…We know it is ordinary people who change history, and we will change history.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The United Nations climate summit known as COP26 has convened in Glasgow, Scotland after being delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic. The COP is a proceeding of the UNFCCC–the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But the United Kingdom, hosting COP this year, has thrown up entry barriers that are proving insurmountable for many activists and observers from the Global South. Critics point out that this will be the whitest and most privileged COP since the first in 1992, due to vaccine apartheid and the UK’s obstructive visa requirements. An estimated 30,000 people have converged on Glasgow to attend the summit, and thousands of climate justice activists, mostly from Europe, are arriving to organize outside the summit compound, demanding action. “This climate summit has been billed as the 1.5 degree climate summit,” Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, which is organizing a large march and rally in Glasgow followed by a four-day counter summit, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The window is closing on that target, which, if breached, will spiral us into catastrophic climate change. But the reality is, world leaders, particularly from the richest countries, are coming with such weak pledges that this might as well be called the 3-degree summit.” “1.5 degrees” refers to the extent human-caused global warming will increase the average surface temperature of the earth, in degrees Celsius, over the pre-industrial era. The Paris Agreement’s principal goal was to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). If that goal is met, the science says, the impacts of climate change could actually be halted, and even reversed. If we cross that 1.5 degree threshold, the consequences will likely be irreversible. Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, is one of those activists for whom entering the UK for the summit proved nearly impossible. She spoke to Democracy Now! from Maputo, Mozambique: “The organization of this COP has been very deliberately done by the U.K. government to be this really exclusionary space. They know that if the progressive civil society from the Global South is not there to hold people accountable in the halls of power, it’s going to be a lot easier for them to get away with carbon markets, not putting the finance or emissions reductions on the table.” “Net zero,” according to a recent report from Friends of the Earth and others, is “a big con,” nothing more than “schemes…to mask inaction, foist the burden of emissions cuts and pollution avoidance on historically exploited communities.” Brianna Fruean, a 23-year-old climate activist from Samoa, spoke at the opening session of COP26, pleading for climate action to save her low-lying Pacific island nation from destruction by the rising ocean. “In the recent IPCC report [the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a consortium of thousands of climate scientists from around the world], the projections are that low-lying atolls have around a decade,” Brianna Fruean said on Democracy Now! “A decade is if we’re lucky, at the current trajectory that we’re on. For our smaller islands, it means the end.” At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced, to great fanfare, that wealthy nations would create a fund of $100 billion per year by 2020, to help poorer nations adapt to a changing climate and to build renewable-powered economies. “They’re coming with basically one-fifth of that on the table. Of that, 80% is in debt-creating loans,” Rehman said. “They’re moving the goalposts on finance.” He added, “We know change is coming. The only fight now is: What kind of change will it be?” The Paris Agreement doesn’t even mention coal, oil or gas, which is why a movement has been launched for a Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation treaty, modeled on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Much of the energy and direction in the climate justice movement is coming from young people around the world. Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swede who sparked the global Fridays for Future student strike movement, slammed the decades-old climate negotiations at a “Pre-COP” in Milan last month: “Build back better, blah, blah, blah. Green economy, blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050, blah, blah, blah....This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words that sound great but so far have led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises.” These global youth leaders, including Brianna Fruean from Samoa and Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, bring personal, frontline experiences with the climate emergency and a deep commitment to intersectional organizing and global justice to their work. “It’s now up to people,” Asad Rehman concluded. “People power is the only solution that’s left.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Hunger strikes are powerful acts of nonviolent protest. Mahatma Gandhi engaged in close to 20 public fasts over his lifetime. In 1917, 32 women suffragists protesting at the White House for the right to vote were arrested and subjected to brutal jail conditions. When some went on hunger strike, they were violently force fed. In 1981, ten Irish Republican political prisoners, among them Bobby Sands, died while protesting their treatment in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison as well as Britain’s ongoing occupation. Several of the seven Palestinians currently hunger striking in an Israeli prison are reportedly near death. Fasting is a difficult and personally dangerous tactic, denying oneself food to challenge the powerful who deny justice. Also currently on hunger strike are a group of young people who, like the suffragists of a century ago, are protesting in front of the White House. They are part of the Sunrise Movement, pressuring President Joe Biden to take drastic action on the climate emergency. “I’m on a hunger strike for my family and my future and the promises that the president made to young people who put him in office,” climate activist Kidus Girma said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He was speaking on day eight of his fast, just days after he was hospitalized with dangerously low blood sugar. “We need the president to put the children of the future, the children of today at the center of his agenda, and not Exxon officials and the representatives who fight for oil and gas billionaires.” Sunrise hunger striker Abby Leedy confronted Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic U.S. Senator from West Virginia, who has single-handedly stripped much of Biden’s renewable energy agenda from the reconciliation bill: Abby Leedy: I’m going to grow up in a catastrophic climate emergency if you continue to block the Civilian Climate Corps…The methane emissions… Sen. Joe Manchin: We’re changing the climate. The United States…Can I talk? Can I talk one second? Your name? Abby Leedy: My name is Abby. Sen. Joe Manchin: Abby, let me tell you, we’ve done more in the United States of America than any country. All the emissions coming from Asia — Abby Leedy: Joe Manchin, if the United States of America does not cut our emissions by at least 50%, I have to grow up in a nonstop climate emergency. I have been on a hunger strike for seven days. Sen. Joe Manchin: Call my office. Manchin is the single largest Congressional recipient of donations from the oil and gas industry, and has made millions of dollars from a West Virginia coal brokering company he founded, now run by his son. One of his largest donors is Energy Transfer LP, which owns the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Meanwhile, in downtown New York City, another group of hunger strikers are demanding change. Taxi drivers there have mounted a 24/7 protest outside City Hall, demanding relief from crushing debt from buying taxi medallions when the prices for these essential licenses had been artificially inflated by the city. Medallions that once cost as much as $1 million are now valued closer to $100,000, due largely to the flooding of the market with Uber and Lyft cars. Thousands of New York City taxi drivers are now buried in debt, and at least nine have died by suicide. “I’ve been on hunger strike for the 6,000 families affected by this medallion crisis,” New York cab driver Augustine Tang said on Democracy Now!, on day six of his fast. “These men and women have invested in the city and drove 20, 30, 40 years of their lives, just to have their retirement taken away from them and are about to lose their homes and their jobs, as well.” The protest was organized by the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance, which has developed a medallion debt restructuring plan that is backed by just about every elected official in metro New York, including Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortéz and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The taxi drivers have been joined in their hunger strike by New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who spoke on Democracy Now! about the impacts he’s felt after fasting for eight days.: “Inability to sleep, unrelenting hunger, moments of blurred vision, stress, headaches — the same consequences I heard drivers say are the physical realities of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, unable to take care of your family and seeing no way out.” Before he died in 1981 in Northern Ireland after 66 days on hunger strike, Bobby Sands said, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” Through this difficult act of denying themselves sustenance, activists around the globe are feeding the cause of justice.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While the pandemic slows through the U.S. (at least among the vaccinated), another deadly epidemic persists unchecked: police killings of men of color. A Washington Post online database reports 7216 people killed by police since 2015, with 914 killed so far this year. African Americans are two to three times more likely than whites to be killed by police. A movement is growing to hold these violent officers accountable. Progress is being made, as demonstrated by developments in the cases of Ahmaud Arbery, Roger Greene, and Elijah McClain. Nothing will bring them back, but accountability may prevent future deaths at the hands of police. “There is an arc of history that connects lynching’s past to policing’s present,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad wrote in his book, “The Condemnation of Blackness.” As devastatingly documented at the Legacy Museum and Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, lynching was central to terrorizing the African American population following emancipation from slavery. Ahmaud Arbery’s violent death on February 23rd, 2020, caught on video by one of the accused perpetrators, had all the hallmarks of those lynchings from a century ago. On that sunny Sunday afternoon in the suburbs of Brunswick, Georgia, Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael saw Arbery jogging, grabbed guns and pursued him in a pickup truck. Their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck, recording the video on a cell phone. The McMichaels claim they were attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of Ahmaud Arbery, who rightly resisted. Travis McMichael fired two shots, killing Arbery. The elder McMichael was a former Glynn County police officer and investigator for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit prosecutor, Jackie Johnson. She was recently indicted for directing police not to arrest Travis McMichael, and then steering the case to a sympathetic prosecutor. It was a third prosecutor, after the video evidence became public, who ultimately filed the murder charges against the McMichaels and Bryan. Jury selection is currently underway in their trial. In Louisiana, officers in a notoriously violent State Police division known as “Troop F” engaged in a high-speed pursuit of 49-year-old African American motorist Ronald Greene, on May 10th, 2019. Police reported that he died after crashing into a tree. They later said that he struggled with them, and that he died on the way to the hospital. More than two years later, the Associated Press published shocking police body camera footage of the encounter that painted a drastically different picture. “I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!,” Greene was pleading as police brutally beat, tased and dragged him while shouting threats and expletives at him. Not long after, he was dead. In a remarkable development, an African American Louisiana State Trooper, Carl Cavalier, went to the press last June, releasing notes from the officer who investigated the death. That officer had recommended that at least one of the troopers involved be arrested, and noted that senior State Trooper commanders intervened to block any arrests. Carl Cavalier, the whistleblower, has been suspended and reportedly has been fired, although the State Police say he’s still employed. As Cavalier told a Baton Rouge TV reporter, “We still have murderers, in my eyes, on the job.” Federal prosecutors are investigating the possible cover up, reportedly going up the chain of command. Elijah McClain was violently arrested by police in Aurora, Colorado on August 24th, 2019. He was walking home from a convenience store, when police stopped him and quickly escalated the encounter. Police tackled him. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, please,” Elijah pleaded. “I’m an introvert, and I’m different…I don’t even kill flies. I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian.” An Emergency Medical Technician injected McClain with a massive dose of the sedative ketamine, causing a heart attack. He never regained consciousness, and died several days later. He was 23 years old. His case went unnoticed until the racial reckoning following the police killing of George Floyd in May, 2020. Protests grew in Aurora, a Denver suburb. Colorado Governor Jared Polis empowered the state Attorney General to investigate, and in September, three police officers and two EMTs were charged with manslaughter, homicide and assault. This week, Aurora reached an undisclosed settlement with the McClain family. A tectonic shift is underway in public awareness of the pervasiveness of police violence, especially directed at young Black men. There is also a growing willingness to prosecute police who kill. Yet, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act died in the U.S. Senate, and just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court made it harder to hold police accountable with two opinions that strengthen the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” Despite the resistance of these powerful institutions, it will be an engaged citizenry, both documented and undocumented, that will end the epidemic of police killing.
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Star Trek” was in the news this week, as actor William Shatner, who played “Captain Kirk” in the classic 1960s TV program, blasted into space at the age of 90 as one of billionaire Jeff Bezos’ latest Blue Origin space tourists. In this remote region of west Texas, mere miles from Bezos’ gilded launch pad, a trek of another kind takes place every day, as migrants, many fleeing violence, the climate crisis and poverty attempt the difficult journey from Mexico to the U.S. While the spacecraft lifted its privileged passengers aloft, lost lives littered the Chihuahuan Desert floor far below. Travel by foot under the blazing hot sun is difficult through the sand, rock and cacti, made harder by the militarized enforcement of the broken U.S. immigration system. Thousands of migrants have died attempting this journey. Armando Alejo Hernandez was last heard from in early May. Armando’s disappearance in the desert has been addressed in this column before, also with a reference to the Blue Origin space facility in nearby Van Horn, Texas. In July, the heat of the desert was at its deadliest, and Jeff Bezos was locked in what has been dubbed “the billionaire’s space race” with Richard Branson, who flew with a small crew aboard his own spaceship to achieve a few minutes of suborbital weightlessness. Their brief trips received international acclaim. If only the media scrum would linger, and focus their cameras on the more perilous journeys of these earthbound desert travelers. Armando spent a decade in the United States, working and building a family, with two sons who were U.S. citizens by birth. Armando, though, never obtained legal documentation, and was deported in 2016. His older son, Derek, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, described the genesis of Armando’s fateful trip last May: “Not having him around was tough on me, because I grew up, pretty much my whole childhood…all the time with my dad,” Derek explained. “So, we were on the phone one day, and I asked him if he could come back, because I just wanted him around… I didn’t get to see him for four years.” Alexis Corona was in a small group of migrants traveling north with Armando. He recently told Telemundo TV, “Armando said he couldn’t walk anymore, and he wanted to see if he could be rescued…From where he stayed, maybe eight or nine miles ahead, the rest of us were caught by immigration agents. We explained where Armando was, that he couldn’t walk anymore, that he didn’t have enough water or food. The reaction was, ‘Well, if he stayed behind, he’ll just have to stay there.’” Derek was communicating with his father at that time. Armando sent recorded voice messages to his son, describing his clothing, that he had no water and felt he couldn’t go on. He sent a photo with a building high on a mountain in front of him. The photo clearly shows a U.S. government radar installation, placing Armando along the southern slope of Eagle Peak, in Hudspeth County, not far from El Paso. Border Patrol agent Alex Jara, interviewed for the documentary “Missing in Brooks County,” admitted, “We don’t call them people anymore. We call them ‘bodies.’ Because if you start calling them people, then it starts getting to you.” Brooks County is home to one of the inland Customs and Border Protection checkpoints, which drives migrants lacking documentation off of Brooks County’s single main roadway and into the desert to avoid capture. “The increase of migration has begun since the beginning of the Biden administration,” Eddie Canales, the director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, based in Brooks County, said on Democracy Now! “I have families here, representatives from different countries right now, that are still searching for their missing loved ones… the number has increased. There have been 99 recoveries of bodies and skeletal remains in Brooks County alone this year.” Average temperatures in the desert are cooler at this time of year, but unguided travel through the harsh environment is still perilous. Many more will needlessly die. Immigrant rights activists are pressuring the White House and Congress to ensure that a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents is included in the Build Back Better bill. The overall bill is being blocked by conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema, of another border state, Arizona, home to the equally dangerous Sonoran Desert. It is fine to gaze heavenward, to reach for the stars, inspired by the green-card-holding, Canadian actor William Shatner. But the crises that engulf us now will not be solved by spaceshots, but by people pulling together here on earth, with feet firmly planted on the ground.
By By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Facebook has grown into a planet-wide, $1 trillion company that allows people to connect online with family and friends, sharing photos and “liking” the posts of others. Beneath this benign façade lies a vast network where Facebook profits by promoting discord, violence, human trafficking and by driving young people, especially girls, into a self-loathing that can spiral into depression and suicide. Facebook knows all this. A trove of leaked internal Facebook documents led to a recent series of explosive exposés by the Wall Street Journal. On Sunday, the whistleblower who released the documents, Frances Haugen, appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” then, on Tuesday, went before a Senate Commerce subcommittee. “I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety,” Haugen testified. “Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat… this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people.” Facebook has an estimated three billion users around the world, and also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, social media applications with another combined three billion users. Instagram, popular with teens, encourages users to post selfies and videos. Metrics like the number of followers one has, or the number of likes, dislikes and shares that a post receives, weigh heavily on the psyches of many of these young users, often negatively. This exchange from Haugen’s “60 Minutes” interview illustrates the problem: “Scott Pelley: One study says 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse; 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse. Frances Haugen: What’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed, and it actually makes them use the app more. So they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just that Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers; it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.” Among the documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal was a leaked slide from a 2019 internal Facebook/Instagram presentation entitled “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive.” In it, company researchers admit, “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” A list follows, specifying how:
“Teens specifically call out the following as ways that Instagram harms their mental health:
— pressure to conform to social stereotypes
— pressure to match the money and body shapes of influencers
— the need for validation — views, likes, followers
— friendship conflicts, bullying and hate speech
— over-sexualization of girls
— inappropriate advertisements targeting to vulnerable groups”
Facebook’s targeting of teens has been compared to Big Tobacco covering up the harmful and addictive properties of cigarettes for decades while hooking younger and younger smokers. The destructive web of toxic content pushed through Facebook and Instagram goes much further. As the leaked documents reveal, Facebook has known for years that its platforms are used by criminal organizations. Mexican cartels have used Facebook to recruit young people to become killers, and to post videos celebrating their violent acts. Human trafficking organizations use Facebook to recruit domestic workers for assignments in the Middle East, then confiscate the passports of these workers, many of whom come from Africa, and then sell the work contracts. Workers are then often subjected to slavery-like conditions, some even shackled to prevent flight. In conflict zones, Facebook has played a central role in fanning the flames of racial and ethnic hatred, encouraging violence that has contributed to mass murder and ethnic cleansing against minority populations like the Rohingya Muslims in Burma and against the Tigrayan people in Ethiopia. Facebook has known that its platform was causing harm, but has refused to take action. CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has intervened, overriding company investigators who suggest fixes to these problems that might impact Facebook’s profitability. Facebook and Zuckerberg refuse to hire enough content monitors — especially in languages other than English, which make up the vast majority of users — or to adjust the secret algorithm that drives the company’s enormous profits. “The shocking part here is the number of bald-faced lies repeated over and over again,” Jessica González, co-CEO of the media advocacy organization Free Press, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It indicates clearly that Facebook is unfit to self-govern and that we need the U.S. Congress and the administration to step in and provide transparency and accountability.” We — our attention, our time spent on these sites and apps — are the product that Facebook sells to advertisers. We must demand accountability. Congressional and anti-trust action is needed now, to rein in this sprawling, global monopoly that profits off pain.
Guantánamo Bay, located on the southern tip of Cuba, is home to the notorious U.S. military prison known as “Gitmo,” where 779 men have been held, most without charge, and brutalized over the past twenty years. One of these prisoners, Yemeni-born Mansoor Adayfi, or “Detainee #441,” was held for 14 years, until 2016. He is now living in exile in Serbia, where the U.S. forced him to relocate despite having no connection to the country. Adayfi’s memoir has just been published. In it, he describes the horror of Guantánamo, and how he and his fellow prisoners maintained their sanity, built solidarity, and survived. Mansoor Adayfi spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour from Belgrade. He smiles and laughs throughout the conversation, despite having endured years of torture and arbitrary imprisonment. He picked up most of his nearly fluent English from the guards at Guantánamo. He described the remarkable diversity of the prison population into which he was thrust: “Imagine around 50 nationalities, 20 languages, different backgrounds,” Mansoor Adayfi said. “People who were at Guantánamo were artists, singers, doctors, nurses, divers, mafia, drug addicts, teachers, scholars, poets. That diversity of culture interacted with each other, melted and formed what we call Guantánamo culture, what I call ‘the beautiful Guantánamo.’” Mansoor Adayfi’s eloquent memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo,” is a deeply personal testament to the horror of the prison. It’s also a searing indictment of the brutality of the U.S. military and of those in charge there, including General Geoffrey Miller, a relentless torture advocate who would go on to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the string of Presidents/Commanders in Chief, from George W. Bush to Obama to Trump and now to Biden. “Please allow me to take you on a journey through Guantánamo,” Adayfi writes in the book’s introduction. “Buckle up and prepare yourself. I will be your guide, but don’t worry — you won’t have to wear the orange jumpsuit, shackles, or hood. You will be free every night to leave behind the fences and isolation cells and rejoin your life. But I think you will come back and join me again to see a side of Guantánamo few people have experienced, where yes, there is much pain, but there are also unexpected moments of beauty and joy that will take your breath away. This is my Guantánamo.” Born into a large family in rural Yemen, Mansoor did well in school and was sent to Afghanistan to help with a research project when he was just 18. He recounted what happened there: “One day, after 9/11, I was kidnapped by the warlords…American airplanes were throwing a lot of flyers [pamphlets] offering a large bounty of money. I was sold to the CIA as an al-Qaeda general, middle-age Egyptian, a 9/11 insider. I was taken to the black site, where I was tortured for over two months.” He’ll never forget what happened there: “No one knows how many people actually died there. There was no limitation to what they could do to you — hang on the ceiling all the time, upside down, even blindfolded, naked…Standing, and there’s no rest. Twenty-four hours, sleep deprivation, beating, waterboarding.” Shackled and hooded, he was flown 40 hours from Afghanistan to Guantánamo. His captors hung a “Beat Me” sign around his neck, and the guards on board obliged, beating him throughout the journey. At Guantánamo, the abuse continued. Eventually, the prisoners organized themselves, and began a hunger strike. “Our bodies were the battlefield, because Americans torture us, abuse us and beat us on our bodies; also, we were torturing our bodies by hunger strike, by trying to resist. It was a slow journey toward death.” While he suffered countless beatings and horrendous interrogations at the hands of the guards, he still felt compassion for those who returned from a combat tour in Iraq or Afghanistan: “I saw how the guards came back, many of them were mentally devastated. When you see a broken soul, it’s the most severe pain.” Another guard moved him deeply when she refused a direct order to drag Mansoor to an interrogation. “Hope, it was a matter of life or death. You have to keep hoping,” Mansoor reflected. “That place was designed just to take your hope away.” He defiantly wears an orange scarf, rejecting the warnings given him by a Guantánamo prison psychologist and an International Committee of the Red Cross representative, who said the color orange might trigger post-traumatic stress. “What I have learned at Guantánamo, I will never keep silent,” Mansoor Adayfi, Detainee #441, concluded on Democracy Now!, “keeping silent only gives the oppressor a means to oppress you more. So, I will never keep silent.”
Images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping Haitian asylum seekers as they waded across the Rio Grande River into Texas shocked the world this week. After as many as 15,000 refugees arrived, sheltering under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, President Biden responded with an aggressive deportation campaign. His administration invoked President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant “Title 42” public health deportation policy to send planeloads of people back to Haiti, despite political turmoil there following the July assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and a devastating earthquake last month. “What the hell are we doing here,” asked Democratic California Congressmember Maxine Waters at a news conference in Washington, DC on Tuesday, surrounded by members of the Congressional Black Caucus. “What we witnessed takes us back hundreds of years. What we witnessed was worse than…slavery, cowboys with their reins, whipping Black people, Haitians, into the water where they’re scrambling and falling down when all they’re trying to do is escape from violence in their country.” Waters was not alone in her criticism. On Wednesday morning, U.S. Special Envoy for Haiti Daniel Foote resigned his post in a letter obtained by PBS: “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,” Foote wrote. “Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed.” Foote’s scathing letter continued, “The people of Haiti, mired in poverty, hostage to the terror, kidnappings, robberies and massacres of armed gangs and suffering under a corrupt government with gang alliances, simply cannot support the forced infusion of thousands of returned migrants lacking food, shelter, and money without additional, avoidable human tragedy…The collapsed state is unable to provide security or basic services, and more refugees will fuel further desperation and crime. Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.” Reports also surfaced of Haitian migrants who had been shackled at their waist and feet by their U.S. captors, and that the pace of deportation flights was increasing, to as many as seven per day. Christopher Columbus made landfall on the island he named “Hispaniola” in 1492 and, on behalf of Spain, subjected the native Taino population to a brutal genocide while extracting as much wealth as possible. Spain imported enslaved African people to replace the indigenous people they killed. In 1697, France took control of the western half of the island, forming what would become Haiti, while the Spanish colony known as Santo Domingo, later to become the Dominican Republic, remained on the eastern half. The violence and oppression continued, while Haiti became France’s most profitable colony. With an estimated 85% of Haiti’s population enslaved, torture, whippings, and murder were used as regular instruments of control. Revolutions outside the country did not go unnoticed by the Haitians, with the successful rebellion against the British in the 13 colonies to form the United States followed soon after by the French revolution in 1789. In fact, Haitians actually fought in the American Revolution. Britain occupied Savannah, Georgia during the Revolutionary War, and, in 1779, George Washington’s rebel Continental Army laid siege to the city. France sent ships and troops to help, among them between 500 to 900 soldiers of color recruited from Haiti. The Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, as they were called, were mainly Haitian freedmen of African descent. They suffered significant casualties. A monument to these Haitian soldiers was unveiled in Savannah in 2007. Enslaved Haitians rose up against their French oppressors in 1791, and, fighting against what was then considered the greatest military on the planet, under Napolean, emerged victorious, founding Haiti as the first Black republic in 1804. The United States refused to recognize the new nation of Haiti, afraid that the successful slave uprising would inspire similar revolts in the United States. In 1825, Haiti was forced to pay France reparations, which hobbled the Haitian economy for well over 100 years. Since the 1950s, dictatorships, coups d’états, assassinations, political meddling and occupation by the United States and a series of earthquakes, hurricanes and drought have left Haiti the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Given the scale and duration of Haiti’s suffering, it is surprising that only 15,000 refugees have gathered under that bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The Biden administration has a chance to change direction, to put away the whips and shackles that Haitians have endured for over 500 years, and live up to the promise to the poor, huddled masses enshrined in that towering beacon, a gift from France, the Statue of Liberty.