Tag Archives: Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! — Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016

Vanita Gupta summarizes the damning report on Baltimore Police Department. Image video still

A Justice Department investigation has concluded Baltimore police have carried out a practice of racially discriminatory policing by systematically stopping, searching and arresting black residents at a disproportionate rate. “BPD engages in a pattern or practice of making unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests; using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops searches and arrests of African-Americans; using excessive force and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally protected expression,” said Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta. The 163-page report revealed “supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest ‘all the black hoodies’ in a neighborhood.”

The damning report issued by the Justice Department this week about policing in Baltimore highlighted one African-American man in his fifties who was stopped more than 30 times by police. For more, Amy Goodman spoke with Maryland Congressmember Elijah Cummings and local activist Ralikh Hayes about their own experiences with police in Baltimore. Cummings says he has been stopped “many times”; Hayes says at least 20 times; meanwhile, reporter Baynard Woods, who is white, says he has never been stopped.

Further revelations about former Fox News chief Roger Ailes are surfacing, raising questions about how much the company was aware of his transgressions. Ailes has now been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, including Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and former anchor Gretchen Carlson. Earlier this week, another former Fox News host also accused Ailes of sexual harassment. Andrea Tantaros says she repeatedly reported Ailes’s harassment to senior Fox executives last year. She says she was demoted and then taken off air as a result.

Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair contributing editor, joined the show. Her most recent piece is an exclusive headlined “Inside the Fox News Bunker.” It exposes the existence of explosive audiotapes recorded by multiple women in conversation with Ailes. Sarah Ellison is also the author of “War at The Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/exclusive-inside-the-fox-news-bunker-roger-ailes

Before Roger Ailes headed Fox News, he was a top Republican operative. In 1988, he helped Vice President George Bush defeat Michael Dukakis in the presidential race. Managing Dukakis’s campaign was the feminist legal scholar Susan Estrich, who wrote groundbreaking works on sexual harassment and rape. To the surprise of some, she is now Ailes’s attorney, defending him in the sexual harassment lawsuit that led to his ouster from Fox News.

We are honored to offer this broadcast as part of our affiliation with the Pacifica Network. Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

Eric is busy creating the new 2016 Midyear Reading, BALANCE. Covering Jupiter in Libra and other forthcoming astrology, this exciting reading will carry you well into 2017. Get all 12 signs today for just $57. Image from the 2012 Blue Marble by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Democracy Now! — Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016

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Former CIA chief General Michael Hayden on CNN: “If someone else had said that outside the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now with the Secret Service questioning him.” Image: video still

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is being accused of inciting violence against his rival Hillary Clinton following remarks he made Tuesday during a rally in North Carolina. At the rally, Trump said, “Hillary wants to abolish—essentially, abolish—the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.” The comments were widely seen as a call to assassinate Hillary Clinton. The comments sparked widespread outrage from lawmakers, a former CIA chief and the New York Daily News, who wrote: “This isn’t a joke any more. When Trump hinted gun-rights supporters shoot Hillary, he went from offensive to reckless. He must end his campaign.”

David Cay Johnston began covering Donald Trump in the 1980s when he was working as the Atlantic City reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Johnston’s new book, “The Making of Donald Trump,” looks at a side of Trump seldom covered in the press: his ties to the mob, drug traffickers and felons.

In Brazil, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team has pulled off a historic feat, winning the team gold medal by the widest margin of victory since 1960. The five-member gymnastics team is the most diverse the U.S. has ever sent to the Olympics. Simone Biles and Gabby Douglas are African-American. New Jersey-born Lauren Hernandez is of Puerto Rican descent. Madison Kocian and Aly Raisman are white.

But Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas and Lauren Hernandez are far from the first American Olympians of color to make history. Today the show examines a new documentary that looks at the 17 African-American athletes who, along with noted track and fielder Jesse Owens, defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to participate in the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany. Since then, the story of Owens’s four gold medals has dominated the narrative of African-American achievement in the ’36 Games.

In upstate New York, the suspected suicide of 70-year-old prisoner John MacKenzie has drawn attention to how the state is refusing to release aging prisoners who have a low risk of recidivism. MacKenzie reportedly hung himself in his cell at Fishkill Correctional Facility after he was denied parole the previous week. It was his 10th denial of parole since he became eligible in 2000.

Amy Goodman spoke with Kathy Manley, a longtime lawyer and advocate for prisoner rights who represented John MacKenzie in his court case against the New York state Parole Board. And here in New York, Mujahid Farid is lead organizer with the Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) Campaign. He founded the group after he was released from prison in 2011, after serving 33 years on a 15-to-life sentence.

Democracy Now! — Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016

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Latif Khosa, a Pakistani attorney, speaks out about the bombing. Image: video still

Lawyers in Pakistan have begun a nationwide strike after dozens of attorneys were slain in a suicide bombing outside a hospital in the city of Quetta in Balochistan, the country’s poorest province. Authorities said at least 70 people died in the attack, including as many as 60 attorneys; 120 were injured.

The suicide bombing targeted lawyers who had assembled outside the hospital to mourn the assassination of Bilal Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, who was killed earlier on Monday as he headed to court. Kasi had strongly condemned recent attacks in the province and had announced a two-day boycott of court sessions in protest of the killing of a colleague last week. A faction of the Pakistan Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack and for the murder of Bilal Kasi. ISIS also claimed responsibility.

On Monday, protesters interrupted Donald Trump more than a dozen times during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club, in which Trump laid out his economic policies. During the speech, Trump vowed to slash corporate taxes and end the estate tax. He also said he would reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiate trade deals including NAFTA. Jacqui Maxwell, a crane operator and a member of the United Auto Workers, interrupted Donald Trump’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Monday.

This comes after Donald Trump announced his economic team, which includes 13 men, no women, several billionaires, an Oklahoma oil baron and one part-time professional poker player. For more on Donald Trump’s speech economic plan and his team, Matt Taibbi, an award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine, joins the show. He’s been closely following the Trump campaign. One of his recent pieces is headlined “A Republican Workers’ Party?”

Taibbi also discusses the news that British banking giant Barclays Bank has agreed to pay $100 million in a settlement with 44 U.S. states for rigging Libor, the interest rate which underpins trillions in global transactions. British and U.S. authorities have taken action against a number of banks over alleged rate manipulation since 2012. This was the first settlement between a bank and U.S. states.

Chicago is once again rocked by protests over police brutality, following the release of video showing the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager. The newly released video from police body cameras shows the moments before and after police killed 18-year-old Paul O’Neal on July 28. In the video, police are seen shooting repeatedly at the car O’Neal was driving, which police say was stolen.

The video then shows a police officer running over to O’Neal, who is lying face down in a growing pool of blood surrounded by other officers. The officers then handcuff O’Neal with his arms behind his back and search his backpack, as he continues bleeding. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office says he was shot in the back.

In New York City on Monday, over 100 people marched to protest the recent police killing of African-American mother Korryn Gaines in Maryland. On August 1, Baltimore County police killed the 23-year-old mother after what they say was an armed standoff. Police were at Gaines’s apartment to execute an arrest warrant related to a traffic violation. They initially said they entered Korryn Gaines’s apartment with a key obtained from her landlord. But court documents say police kicked down the door.

Once the police entered the apartment, Korryn Gaines was live-streaming the standoff via Facebook before her account was shut down. Police say they killed Gaines after she pointed a shotgun at them. Police also say they shot her 5-year-old son, Kodi Gaines, who suffered an injury to his cheek but survived.

Democracy Now! — Monday, Aug. 8, 2016

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Green Party presidential nominees Ajamu Baraka and Jill Stein at their convention in Houston, TX. Image: video still

In Houston, Texas, Dr. Jill Stein formally accepted the Green Party’s nomination for president at the party’s convention over the weekend. Interest in the Green Party has jumped in recent weeks since Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, defeating Bernie Sanders. In 2012, Dr. Stein ran on the Green ticket and won less than 1 percent of the national vote. But according to CNN’s Poll of Polls, Stein is now polling at 5 percent.

The same poll finds Clinton at 45 percent, Republican Donald Trump at 35 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson at 9 percent. Neither Stein nor Johnson will be invited to take part in this fall’s presidential debates, however, unless they top 15 percent in national polls. For more, we hear excerpts of Dr. Jill Stein speaking at the Green Party convention. CNN’s Poll of Polls shows Stein polling at 5 percent—five times more than the 1 percent of the national vote she won in 2012.

The Green Party nominated human rights activist Ajamu Baraka to be Dr. Jill Stein’s vice-presidential running mate during the party’s convention in Houston, Texas, over the weekend. Baraka is the founding executive director of the US Human Rights Network and coordinator of the U.S.-based Black Left Unity Network’s Committee on International Affairs. He has served on the boards of Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Africa Action.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke via video stream at the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, over the weekend. Assange has been confined to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for more than four years, fearing that if he were to attempt to leave, he would be arrested by British police and ultimately extradited to the U.S., where it is believed there is a sealed indictment against him over WikiLeaks’ release of documents.

Assange was speaking with former Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb. He began by speaking about WikiLeaks’ release of 20,000 internal DNC emails; then he also spoke about his book “When Google Met WikiLeaks” and the relationship between Hillary Clinton, the State Department and the internet giant Google. He also predicted that attacks against Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein would surge ahead of November’s election.

Democracy Now! — Friday, Aug. 5, 2016

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Doonesbury cartoon from 1987, prophetically suggesting Drumpf had presidential ambitions. Image: video still

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau has been writing about Trump and a possible run for the presidency for nearly 30 years, prompting Trump to call him “a third-rate talent,” “a sleazeball,” “a jerk” and “a total loser.” Trudeau is the creator of the popular comic strip “Doonesbury” and the first cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize.

In September 1987, Trudeau published a series of comic strips that now seem prophetic. In one strip, reporters ask Trump a series of questions about his political ambitions to run for Congress, and Trump responds, “President, think president.” Trump has remained a frequent character in “Doonesbury” ever since, giving Trudeau a chance to make fun of everything from Trump’s hair to his ego to his rampant use of insults. His cartoons have just been collected in a new book titled “Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump.”

More than 10,000 athletes across the world have convened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Rio is the first South American city ever to host the Games, which come as Brazil is battling an economic recession, a massive Zika outbreak and the recent ouster of its democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. Human rights organizations have also expressed concern about the impact of the Games on Rio’s most vulnerable communities.

Residents of Rio’s favelas have spoken of battles against forced evictions, police violence and wasted spending. About 85,000 police, soldiers and other security officials will patrol the city during the Games. We get the latest from Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine and author of “Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy.”

Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine, says protests highlighting racial and economic injustice are expected from athletes attending the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, such as tennis champion Serena Williams and players from the NBA, WNBA and other countries. Polls show more than 60 percent of Brazilians think hosting the Games will hurt their country. He says that ahead of today’s opening ceremony, residents of heavily policed and displaced neighborhoods plan a major march to Rio’s “Olympic City.”

Democracy Now! — Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016

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A candidate with actual integrity? Image: video still

The Green Party’s national convention opens today in Houston, Texas, and Dr. Jill Stein is expected to win the party’s nomination. But will she win the support of former Bernie Sanders supporters? Last week, Democracy Now! hosted a debate between the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about the presidential race. Hedges has endorsed Jill Stein. Reich is backing Hillary Clinton after endorsing Bernie Sanders during the primaries. Reich served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet as labor secretary from 1993 to 1997.

Six years ago, President Obama warned the nation that foreign corporations could soon pour money into the U.S. election system thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision. Now, direct evidence has emerged for the first time showing a foreign company has indeed donated money to a federal campaign. Documentation obtained by The Intercept shows a company owned by Chinese nationals donated $1.3 million to Jeb Bush’s super PAC after receiving advice from a prominent Republican The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who co-wrote the multi-part series “Foreign Influence,” joins the show.

Democracy Now! — Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2016

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New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton (left) has announced his resignation. Image: video still

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton has announced he is resigning next month. Bratton was a lead advocate of the so-called broken windows theory that called for officers to crack down on minor infractions in an attempt to decrease more violent crime. Over the past four decades, Bratton has served as New York police commissioner twice as well as the head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. Supporters of Bratton credit him with lowering crime rates, but critics say broken windows policing unfairly targets communities of color.

In a statement, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi told Democracy Now!, “William Bratton is the key architect of programs that have terrorized our communities for decades. His implementation of broken windows theory has wreaked havoc on communities from Los Angeles to New York City and beyond.” Bratton resigned just one day after hundreds of activists gathered outside New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department and his firing. Protests against William Bratton have been escalating ever since the police killing of Eric Garner two years ago.

Bratton has also served as head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. But Bratton’s resignation doesn’t mean he’s retiring. His next job will be at Teneo Holdings, a global private consulting firm with controversial ties to Hillary Clinton. Bratton will be the chairperson of a new branch of the company called Teneo Risk.

When you woke up this morning, chances are your morning routine was touched in some way by a private equity firm. From the water you drink to the roads you drive to work, to the morning newspaper you read, Wall Street firms are playing an increasingly influential role in daily life. So says a compelling new article in The New York Times, “This Is Your Life, Brought to You by Private Equity.”

Imprisoned Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning faces new charges after she tried to commit suicide last month. The Army reportedly told Manning she is being investigated on administrative charges that include having prohibited property in her cell and resisting being moved out of the cell. If convicted, Manning could face indefinite solitary confinement and additional time in prison. It could also hurt her chance of parole.

Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and denied medical treatment related to her gender identity.

In a newly published interview with Amnesty International, Manning said, “I am always afraid. I am still afraid of the power of government. A government can arrest you. It can imprison you. It can put out information about you that won’t get questioned by the public—everyone will just assume that what they are saying is true. Sometimes, a government can even kill you—with or without the benefit of a trial.”

Democracy Now! — Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2016

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The widely broadcast video filmed just before Kinsey was shot, presumably for Caring For Autistic Guy While Black. Image: video still

In North Miami, the city’s police department is facing growing criticism after one of its officers shot an African-American behavioral therapist who was attempting to help an autistic man. At the time of the shooting, behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey was helping to calm Arnaldo Rios Soto, a 26-year-old autistic man, who had wandered away from a group home. Police responded after receiving a 911 call about a man who was possibly holding a gun.

Police soon surrounded Rios Soto and the therapist, Charles Kinsey. The video shows Kinsey lying on the ground with his hands in the air. He told police no one was armed. In a cellphone video of the shooting, Kinsey can be heard telling police, “All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavioral therapist at a group home.” Rios Soto’s family says he has been traumatized by the incident and still wears the blood-soaked jacket he had on the day his friend, caregiver and therapist was shot by police. Meanwhile, Kinsey now walks with a cane and cannot stand on his leg for long.

While all eyes have been on the Republican and Democratic platforms decided at the national conventions earlier this month, a broad coalition associated with the Black Lives Matter movement has released a platform of its own, demanding reparations and an “end to the wars against Black people.”

The list of demands from the Movement for Black Lives platform also includes the abolition of the death penalty, legislation to recognize the impacts of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and employment programs. The publication comes just a week before the second anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked months of protests and catalyzed a national conversation about police killings of unarmed African-American men.

On Monday, hundreds of activists gathered at New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department, the firing of New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and reparations for victims of police brutality. Democracy Now!’s Charina Nadura and Andre Lewis were at the park speaking to protesters.

As Donald Trump continues to attack Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim U.S. soldier who died in Iraq, we turn to a side of the Khans few have seen. In 2008, the couple were filmed visiting the grave of their son in the HBO documentary “Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery.” An excerpt fro the film is aired.

The U.S. military carried out two airstrikes in Libya against ISIS fighters on Monday in the latest escalation of the U.S. war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The strikes took place in the city of Sirte. Pentagon officials said the campaign would continue until ISIS has been driven from the city, which it took over last year.

Libya has been engulfed in fighting after a U.S.-backed military intervention ousted longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The Pentagon said Libya’s Western-backed unity government requested the airstrikes. The so-called unity government is one of three competing governments that claim legitimacy in the country.