HERMES America English

In Trump’s America, Your Privacy Is for Sale By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Unless you’re reading this column in a good old newspaper, odds are your internet service provider (ISP) knows what you’re up to. ISPs are the on-ramp to the internet; it is through these gatekeepers that we all access the internet. They set the price and the speed of your connection, but were legally prevented from sharing or selling details about your personal internet usage without your permission–until now. Through a resolution that narrowly passed both the House and the Senate on partisan lines, internet privacy protections implemented by the Obama administration will be entirely eliminated. Companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon now can sift through your personal information, your web browsing history, where and when you access the internet and what you do while online, and peddle that private data to whomever is willing to pay. President Donald Trump, while obsessed with the imagined invasion of his own privacy (as indicated by his tweeted charge that President Barack Obama wiretapped him during his campaign), is expected to sign this bill into law, stripping privacy away from hundreds of millions of Americans. “Americans pay for [internet] service. They don’t expect that information to be shared or used for other purposes or sold without their permission,” Laura Moy said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. Moy is the deputy director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. “Americans absolutely need internet connectivity in today’s modern era,” Moy continued. “You need to go online to search for a job. You need to go online to complete your education. You need to go online often to communicate with your health care provider or conduct your banking.” All of this communication, all of this internet use, can be conducted from the privacy of your home. But don’t think it is going to remain private. Your ISP can vacuum up your searches, your interests, what movies you watch online, your age, weight, Social Security number, medical conditions, financial troubles ... if you start searching online for a bankruptcy lawyer or for treatment for addiction, your ISP will add that to your profile. “We want people to use the internet, to view it as a safe space to communicate with others, to express their political viewpoints, to carry out these vitally important everyday activities, and to do so without fear that the information that they share with their internet service provider will be used to harm them in some way,” Laura Moy concluded. That was the hope. The internet privacy rules that are being eliminated fill 219 pages, and were worked on at the Federal Communications Commission for over a year, supported by over 275,000 comments from citizens and advocacy organizations. They were published in the Federal Register last December. The effort to eliminate them was championed by Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who chairs the subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC. As reported in Vocativ, Blackburn, during her 14 years in Congress, has received at least $693,000 in campaign contributions from companies and individuals from AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other industry members that stand to profit from the rules change. Blackburn’s willing partner in the repeal of the rules is the FCC’s new commissioner, Ajit Pai, who used to serve as associate general counsel for Verizon. He was one of the two Republicans on the five-seat FCC during Obama’s second term, and was promoted to FCC chair by President Donald Trump. According to the Los Angeles Times, Pai gave a speech last December in which he promised to “take a weed wacker” to another hard-won progressive victory, net neutrality. Immediately after the House voted to repeal the privacy rules, Free Press, the national media policy advocacy and activist organization, stated, “The broadband-privacy fight is the Trump administration’s first attack on the open internet. And now that it has a win on its hands, it’ll be pushing for another.” It is absolutely shocking that Donald Trump, in the midst of his accusations that his own privacy was invaded by illegal wiretaps, is signing into law permission to invade, sell, trade and monetize the most private, intimate details of every internet-connected American. This law is the ultimate hack: allowing corporations to take all of our information and sell it for profit. In Donald Trump’s America, the information isn’t stolen by hackers in the dark of night. It is taken with the government’s blessing. Unless people organize and fight back, the promises of the open internet will fade away.

The U.S. Rejected Refugee Anne Frank—Let’s Not Make the Same Mistake Again By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Anne Frank would be 87 years old had she not perished in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. What words of wisdom might she offer the Trump administration as it crafts its latest iteration of its Muslim and refugee ban? Anne Frank is known for her famous diary, written while she and her family hid from the Gestapo in a “secret annex” of a house in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. Long before the family went into hiding, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, desperately sought visas to bring his family to the United States. Like tens of thousands of other European Jews at the time, they were repeatedly denied. Anne Frank and her family were betrayed and sent to the concentration camps. Only her father, Otto Frank, survived. He went on to publish her writing as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has entered the canon of resistance literature. It should be required reading as Donald Trump and his coterie of xenophobes attempt to ban Muslims and refugees from gaining the same safe haven that the Frank family was denied 75 years ago. “Anne Frank was denied immigration at least twice. Otto Frank, her father, appealed to the Franklin Roosevelt administration, roughly between the periods of 1939 to 1941,” Stephen Goldstein told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. He is the executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. “Otto Frank ... was able to get communications very high up in the Roosevelt administration, saying, ‘Please, save my family. Save the Frank family.’ It didn’t work. FDR refused refugee Anne Frank.” This aspect of Anne Frank’s story was unknown until papers were discovered decades later and made public in 2007. The 81 pages document Otto Frank’s attempts to gain visas for his family for travel to the United States. Fanning flames of fear that Nazi Germany would be sending agents and saboteurs amidst the potential flood of refugees, anti-Semites in the State Department blocked as many refugees as they could, condemning tens of thousands to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. “Whether this kind of evil prejudice against refugees was perpetrated by a Democrat like Franklin Roosevelt or a Republican like Donald Trump, it is an unconscionable blot on the American national conscience,” Goldstein added. “That’s why, in the name of Anne Frank, we have an obligation to stand with Muslim refugees and to stand with all refugees to help them come into this nation.” Since President Trump took office, there has been a surge in threats and attacks against both Jews and Muslims. At least 69 bomb threats have been directed at 54 Jewish Community Centers across the United States since the inauguration. On Wednesday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks these threats, received a bomb threat at its New York City offices. In University Hills, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, more than 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery were overturned. As images of the anti-Semitic vandalism emerged, two Muslim activists—Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, and Tarek El-Messidi—launched a crowdsourced campaign to raise funds to repair the damage. They hoped to raise $20,000. Within 24 hours, they had raised more than $90,000. “Any remaining funds after the cemetery is restored,” they wrote, “will be allocated to repair any other vandalized Jewish centers.” Two weeks earlier, on Saturday, Jan. 28, the Islamic Center in Victoria, Texas, was burnt to the ground. The local Jewish community gave the Muslim worshippers the keys to their synagogue, saying there was room for them all to pray there. An online campaign was launched to rebuild the mosque. Within weeks, more than $1.1 million was raised. Construction is already underway. Jan. 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. President Trump issued a statement that was widely criticized for failing to mention Jews at all. Then, at a press conference held with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when asked by an Israeli reporter about the rise of anti-Semitism since his election, Trump responded by gloating about his election victory. When questioned several days later by a Hasidic Jewish reporter, again about the rise of anti-Semitism, Trump scolded the reporter, telling him to sit down, saying, “Quiet, quiet, quiet.” After widespread criticism over his failure to condemn the waves of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, President Trump finally called anti-Semitism “horrible” and “painful.” Then Vice President Mike Pence visited the Missouri cemetery that had been vandalized.

Movements Matter as Andrew Puzder and Michael Flynn Are Forced Out By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “When the people lead, the leaders will follow” are the oft-quoted words attributed to Gandhi. This week, massive grass-roots organizing helped defeat the nomination of Andrew Puzder, a multimillionaire fast-food CEO, as Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. He was widely accused of running companies rife with wage theft and sexual harassment. His personal life was marred by accusations of hiring an undocumented immigrant, tax evasion and domestic violence. The push for his defeat was led by some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, and serves as a lesson in the importance and power of movements. Chaos and confusion have marked the first month of the Trump administration, Puzder’s withdrawal came in the same week as the forced resignation of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser. Leaks of classified intelligence revealed that Flynn had engaged in talks with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the transition period, while Barack Obama was still president. If Flynn was engaging in negotiations around the Russian sanctions with the ambassador, as is alleged, then his actions may well have been illegal. Flynn then reportedly lied about the conversations to Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department informed Trump in early January, but it was not until the media reported on Flynn’s behavior that Trump forced him out. Flynn is a well-known Islamophobe, who notoriously referred to Islam as “a cancer.” As soon as he was named as the national security adviser, protests erupted. However, that position is one of those that the president can fill without Senate confirmation, so Flynn was in the Oval Office on Day One. While the media firestorm around his Russian intrigue was the instant reason for his ouster, we cannot discount the impact the ongoing, vigorous protests against his overt bigotry had on the decision to fire him. For the past 16 years, Puzder has been the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. As CEO, Puzder has campaigned against the very labor laws and regulations that he would be trusted to enforce as labor secretary. Under Puzder, CKE was a poster child of fast-food-restaurant labor-law violations, with workers regularly suffering wage theft and sexual harassment. Carl’s Jr. advertisements employed hypersexualized imagery and the objectification of women, which many felt contributed to the persistent harassment at his restaurants. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) conducted a survey of CKE employees immediately after Puzder’s nomination in December. ROC was founded by restaurant workers in New York City following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The group fights for better wages and working conditions for restaurant employees, and has grown to 18,000 members in 15 states. The survey found: 66 percent of women at CKE Restaurants reported experiencing unwanted sexual behaviors at work, compared with 40 percent of women in the fast-food industry overall. Twenty-eight percent of respondents worked off the clock, and approximately one-third reported wage-theft violations, including not receiving required breaks and overtime pay. Seventy-nine percent of CKE Restaurants workers also reported that they have prepared or served food while sick, the highest rate that ROC has ever encountered. Puzder is opposed to the minimum wage, the fight for $15/hour, paid sick leave and the Affordable Care Act. He told Business Insider almost a year ago that he favored replacing workers with robots: “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age-, sex- or race-discrimination case.” Puzder also admitted to hiring an undocumented immigrant as a domestic worker in his home, and, further, didn’t pay the required taxes while she was employed. This has been enough to torpedo Cabinet-level nominations in the past, most notably with President Bill Clinton’s attorney-general nominees, Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird. Puzder also was accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife. Lisa Fierstein appeared in disguise in a 1990 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” describing the abuse she suffered. She said he told her: “I will see you in the gutter. This will never be over. You will pay for this.” Fierstein later recanted her accusations. The video was provided to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and was seen by other senators as well. By Wednesday, between four and 12 Republican senators indicated they would be unlikely to support Puzder, tanking his chances. Puzder then dropped out. The mainstream media credits a Republican revolt with the defeat of Andrew Puzder as labor secretary. In the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the media says it was leaks from the intelligence community that took him down. But the engine driving both ousters are movements of thousands upon thousands of people across the country, saying “no” to hate, bigotry and injustice.

Silenced Twice by the Senate, Coretta Scott King’s Words Live On By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was interrupted while reading the words of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor this week. Warren was reading a 1986 letter King wrote in opposition to the confirmation of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, then a U.S. attorney in Alabama, to a federal district judgeship. In a rare decision, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Sessions. Now, as the Senate debated a new confirmation of Sen. Sessions for the position of U.S. attorney general, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., silenced Warren shortly after she read Coretta Scott King’s words, invoking an obscure Senate rule against impugning colleagues. She was told to sit down and was barred from speaking further during the ongoing debate on Sessions. King sent the letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond, a fierce segregationist. She asked him to make the letter a part of the hearing’s formal record, but he didn’t. The 10-page letter was essentially lost until last month, when The Washington Post obtained and published a copy of it. “The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods,” King wrote in her testimony, adding, “I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made toward fulfilling my husband’s dream.” She wrote at length about Sessions’ record as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, aggressively prosecuting African-American voting-rights activists on charges of voter fraud in the case of “The Marion Three.” In that case, Albert Turner, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Turner’s wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue were all members of the Perry County Civic League in rural Alabama. Sessions prosecuted them, alleging they tampered with ballots of elderly African-American voters. The Marion Three faced well over 100 years in prison if convicted. Sessions was accused of selectively seeking cases to prosecute in “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, like Perry County, where a rising number of African-American registered voters threatened to eliminate the long-held political domination by whites. A federal judge threw out most of the charges, and a jury acquitted the three on the remaining charges. “Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box,” Coretta Scott King continued. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as federal judge.” By reading King’s words, Elizabeth Warren was accused of imputing “conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” After McConnell forced her to stop speaking, Warren replied, from the floor, “I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate. ... I ask leave of the Senate to continue my remarks.” After her request was denied, she was instructed to leave. She immediately exited, and, just outside the doors to the Senate chamber, read the entire King letter, broadcasting via Facebook Live. After 20 hours online, the 15-minute video had close to 10 million views. McConnell, speaking from the Senate floor, said of his decision to silence Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” His words created a firestorm across social media, with posts of solidarity with Warren marked by the hashtag “#ShePersisted.” Back on the Senate floor, several of Warren’s male colleagues read King’s letter aloud. None of them were rebuked by McConnell. In fact, in 2015, when fellow Republican Ted Cruz accused McConnell himself of being a liar, McConnell did not invoke the same Senate rule to bar Cruz from speaking. On Wednesday evening, the Senate confirmed Jeff Sessions as the 84th attorney general of the United States, despite receiving more no votes—47—than any attorney general in U.S. history. What also made history was a woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, bringing to life the words of another historic woman, Coretta Scott King, whose words will inform and inspire the resistance to Sessions as he assumes one of the most powerful positions in the Trump administration.

Frederick Douglass: Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan The good news is that President Donald Trump opened Black History Month by mentioning the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The bad news is, he doesn’t seem to realize he’s dead. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” Trump said at his “African-American History Month Listening Session,” which he hosted at the White House. Whether it was a misstatement or genuine ignorance of who Frederick Douglass was, or, perhaps, one of Trump’s notorious “alternative facts,” is not clear. What is clear is that the spirit of resistance for which Frederick Douglass is best remembered is alive and well, and is directed squarely against the Trump administration. Frederick Douglass was born in either 1817 or 1818. As he wrote in his bestselling 1845 autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” he wasn’t sure which was the year of his birth, since “by far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” Despite the uncertainty, the life of Frederick Douglass is well-documented, from the violence he suffered as a slave, to his courageous resistance, to his escape to the North and work as an abolitionist leader and orator. He died on Feb. 20, 1895, at the age of 77. Protests against Donald Trump have been raging since his inauguration. Outside the ceremony itself, scores of people were arrested. A contingent of Black Lives Matter activists successfully blockaded an inauguration security checkpoint. The next day, one of President Trump’s first public acts was to denounce the indisputable fact that crowds at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration dwarfed attendance at Trump’s. Then, later that day, Insult to Trump’s ego only worsened, as attendance at the historic Women’s March on Washington was at least three times larger than at his inauguration the day before. More than 600 solidarity marches also happened around the world, with massive turnout stunning march organizers everywhere. Throughout Trump’s first week in office, protests continued, with disruptions of the ongoing confirmation hearings for his many controversial cabinet picks, to emergency mobilizations against a flurry of executive orders and memoranda intended to revive and expedite the building of both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. On Friday, Trump issued an executive order, “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” popularly known as Trump’s “Muslim ban.” The order prohibits entry to the U.S. of all refugees, and further excludes travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Customs agents began detaining people at airports almost immediately, provoking demonstrations at airports from coast to coast. By Saturday night, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn issued a nationwide stay against the executive order. Soon after, federal judges in California, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington followed with similar rulings. On Monday night, in a stunning development, acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates, instructed Justice Department attorneys not to defend the executive order in court. Within hours, Trump fired her. It was the first time since President Richard Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, that a president fired a U.S. attorney general. In a historic protest, more than 1,000 State Department officials have signed on to a “Dissent Channel” cable, expressing opposition to the order. Continuing protests and a slew of lawsuits have forced the Trump administration to backpedal, specifying that green-card holders are exempt. The broad resistance to Trump and his policies also has reached the congressional corridors of power. Democratic senators have boycotted key committee votes on several of Trump’s cabinet picks, delaying committee approvals for Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., Secretary of the Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin and EPA Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt. Even two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, stated that they will vote against Trump’s Department of Education nominee, billionaire school privatization activist Betsy DeVos—threatening her confirmation in the narrowly divided Senate. Despite presidential misconceptions, Frederick Douglass is dead. But he continues to inspire people around the world. Douglass worked on the front lines of resistance against oppression as an early practitioner of intersectional organizing, fighting slavery, but also advocating for women’s rights, and for liberation struggles outside the U.S. “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” he said in 1857. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Standing Rock Sioux to Trump: ‘Creating a Second Flint Does Not Make America Great Again’ By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan No longer just tweeting, President Donald J. Trump has been issuing a stream of executive orders and memoranda since his inauguration. On Tuesday, his pronouncements involved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Both projects were denied or delayed by the Obama administration, each after massive public protests. Now, with the Trump administration’s actions, buttressed by a servile Congress under Republican control, fossil-fuel megaprojects are getting the green light. But it will take more than the stroke of Trump’s pen to quash the vigorous resistance to these two pipelines, or the growing global demand for urgent action to combat climate change. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is the 1,100-mile long, $3.8 billion pipeline that would carry fracked oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois, where it would connect with another pipeline to carry the crude to the Gulf of Mexico. Opponents of DAPL fear a pipeline rupture could poison the Missouri River, which provides fresh water for 17 million people. The center of opposition has been at protest camps on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the pipeline is slated to cross the river. The proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline would carry the world’s filthiest fossil fuels, tar sand bitumen, from Alberta, Canada, across the border into the U.S., also down to the Gulf. On Nov. 6, 2015, after five years of protest against the KXL, President Barack Obama stated that it “would not serve the national interest of the United States,” effectively killing the project. On Dec. 5, 2016, in a second victory for grass-roots environmental activists, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the easement for DAPL to tunnel underneath the Missouri River, stopping that pipeline. “Trump’s executive order on DAPL violates the law and tribal treaties. We will be taking legal action,” Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman David Archambault II said in a press release after Trump’s actions. “Creating a second Flint does not make America great again.” Trump’s presidential memorandum on DAPL instructs the secretary of the Army to “review and approve in an expedited manner ... requests for approvals to construct and operate the DAPL.” The same language in the memo about the Keystone XL pipeline is addressed to the secretary of the Army, as well as to the secretary of state and the secretary of the interior. Trump’s secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson, was formerly the CEO of ExxonMobil, a company that would reap enormous profit from exploitation of Canadian tar sands oil. Trump’s energy secretary nominee, Rick Perry, was until recently on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of DAPL. Trump’s executive order, “Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals For High Priority Infrastructure Projects,” released alongside the two memoranda, includes the claim that “too often, infrastructure projects in the United States have been routinely and excessively delayed by agency processes and procedures.” Along with a fourth memo demanding—without the force of law—that pipeline construction and repair projects “use materials and equipment produced in the United States,” this flurry of fiats sets the stage for the fast-tracked revival of both pipelines. “It is pretty much a declaration of war against us all out here, not just against Native people, but against anybody who wants to drink water,” Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “He definitely wants to shove those pipelines down our throats.” Bobbi Jean Three Legs, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, began protesting DAPL before the first resistance camp was set up last April. She helped lead a 2,000-mile relay run for native youth, from the Sacred Stone Camp in Cannon Ball, N.D., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to their struggle against the pipeline. “Water is Life” is their guiding principle, “Mni Wiconi” [minny wah-chonee] in the Lakota language. “He is waking up a lot of people. A lot of people are really paying attention to the climate change now,” Bobbi told us on “Democracy Now!.” “We’re never going to back down.” Bobbi Jean Three Legs and Winona LaDuke worry about increased violence from the police and National Guard. Bobbi described the situation: “There’s still police brutality going on. People are still getting maced. They’re getting shot. ... There’s over 600 people that have been arrested so far, and it just keeps going up.” Her eyes welled up. “Right now I’m just asking all the youth around the country to stand up. I’m asking everyone around the world to stand up with us, wherever you are ... I’m afraid that they’re out to kill.”

Democracy Now! broadcast our daily show live from WHUT on the campus of the historically black university, Howard University in Washington, D.C., less than four hours before Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th president. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes, but he managed to win the Electoral College. He takes office as the least popular incoming president in at least a generation. We get an update from protests in Washington, D.C., and hear the speech Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore gave Thursday night, when nearly 25,000 people gathered in New York City to protest outside Trump International Hotel and Tower near Central Park. We are also joined live by Naomi Klein, journalist and best-selling author, whose most recent book is "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," and Lee Fang, reporter with The Intercept who covers the intersection of money and politics.

The Long Ordeal of Whistleblower Chelsea Manning By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan In April 2010, a classified U.S. military video was released through the website WikiLeaks, recorded from a camera aboard an Apache helicopter. It shows the massacre of civilians on a street in Baghdad, Iraq. The video, which WikiLeaks called “Collateral Murder,” documented in graphic, grainy black-and-white detail a helicopter gunship attack on July 12, 2007. The helicopter opens fire with machine guns on a group of men, including Reuters news agency photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh. Most of the men are killed instantly. Noor-Eldeen runs away, and the crosshairs follow him, shooting nonstop, until he falls dead. The radio transmission embedded in the video records the soldiers’ voices: “All right, hahaha, I hit ’em.” And then: “Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there.” Chmagh, seriously wounded, can be seen dragging himself away from the other bodies. A voice in the helicopter, seeking a rationale to shoot, says: “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... If we see a weapon, we’re gonna engage.” A van pulls up, and several men, clearly unarmed, come out and lift Chmagh to carry him to medical care. The soldiers on the Apache seek and receive permission to “engage” the van and opened fire, tearing apart the front of the vehicle and killing the men. With everyone in sight apparently dead, U.S. armored vehicles move in. When a vehicle drives over Noor-Eldeen’s corpse, an observer in the helicopter says, laughing, “I think they just drove over a body.” Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a Marine veteran who trained soldiers on the laws of war, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “Helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded ... that shooting was murder. It was a war crime.” For years, Reuters sought access to the video, but was denied. It was a young U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq who got ahold of it and released it to WikiLeaks. In addition to the video, the analyst also leaked hundreds of thousands of text-based records, from logs of military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan to U.S. State Department cables. Eventually, the analyst was betrayed by an online confidant and arrested. That soldier was known at the time as Bradley Manning. Manning was held in harsh solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia for close to a year, in conditions that prompted an investigation by Juan Mendez, who was then the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture. Mendez concluded, “I believe Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico.” Pvt. Manning was court-martialed, sentenced to 35 years in prison and transferred to the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Immediately after the verdict was announced, Manning stated publicly that she had begun a transgender transition and changed her name to Chelsea Manning. Manning has now served seven years of her sentence, experiencing extraordinary hardship as a person seeking gender-reassignment treatment while imprisoned by the U.S. military. She has fought for medical care, for transfer out of the men’s prison, and has attempted suicide twice. At Leavenworth, the punishment for attempted suicide is more solitary. A worldwide campaign grew, petitioning President Barack Obama to grant clemency to Manning, the longest-held whistleblower in U.S. history. Obama has issued more commutations and pardons than any president, mostly to nonviolent drug offenders. On Tuesday, he granted over 209 commutations and 64 pardons. Commutations reduce or eliminate the balance of a convicted person’s prison sentence, while a pardon wipes clean the individual’s record, removing the guilty verdict entirely. Presidential pardons and commutations cannot be reversed. Among those commutations granted Tuesday was one for Chelsea Manning. With just two days remaining as president, Barack Obama held his final news conference at the White House. The first question was about his decision to free Manning. It was posed by a Reuters reporter. Obama replied, “Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence. ... It has been my view that given she went to trial; that due process was carried out; that she took responsibility for her crime; that the sentence that she received was very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received; and that she had served a significant amount of time; that it made sense to commute and not pardon her sentence. ... I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.” Chelsea Manning is expected to be released on May 17.

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan The arc of U.S. history is on full display as the peaceful transition of power takes place from the administration of President Barack Obama to that of incoming President-elect Donald Trump. The first African-American president is about to hand the reins of power to the very man who led the racist “birther” campaign to delegitimize his presidency. As Trump continues to shock the world with his middle-of-the-night tweets, the flurry of Senate confirmation hearings exposed the hollow rhetoric of Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp.” Among the controversial and divisive cabinet nominees is his pick for attorney general: Jeff Sessions, the junior senator from Alabama. President Obama delivered his farewell address Tuesday night. “Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society,” Obama said. “For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s.” Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is named after his father and grandfather, but his first and middle names are steeped in the Confederacy: Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who, after resigning his post in the U.S. Army at West Point, oversaw the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, starting the U.S. Civil War. It wouldn’t be fair to hold Sessions accountable for his namesakes, the long-dead heroes of the Confederacy. But Senate confirmation hearings are an appropriate forum to hold nominees accountable for their own words and deeds. Opposition to Sessions is broad and intense, and goes back decades. Sessions was appointed U.S. Attorney in Alabama in 1981, where he prosecuted legendary voting-rights activists, who were ultimately acquitted. Then, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to a federal judgeship. At that Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said: “Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era, which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past. It’s inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a United States federal judge.” At the time, Sessions was one of the only people in the previous half-century to be denied an appointment as a federal judge by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He later used Sen. Kennedy’s damning words to help him win election in 1994 as the Alabama attorney general. In just two years in that position, he aggressively defended Alabama’s execution of more than 40 prisoners convicted, according to The New York Times, “in trials riddled with instances of prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination and grossly inadequate defense lawyering.” As U.S. senator, he voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and opposes comprehensive immigration reform, marriage equality and hate-crime protections for LGBTQ victims. He also is a fierce critic of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On the second day of Sessions’ current confirmation hearings, members of the Congressional Black Caucus packed the hearing room. For the first time in Senate history, a sitting senator testified against another sitting senator’s confirmation. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said, “Senator Sessions has not demonstrated a commitment to a central requirement of the job: to aggressively pursue the congressional mandate of civil rights, equal rights and justice for all.” Revered civil-rights activist and member of Congress John Lewis spoke eloquently of his youth in Alabama: “I was born in rural Alabama — not very far from where Senator Sessions was raised. There was no way to escape or deny the chokehold of discrimination and racial hate that surrounded us. I saw the signs that said ‘White Waiting, Colored Waiting.’... I tasted the bitter fruits of segregation and racial discrimination.” Lewis spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, and was an organizer of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to register African-Americans to vote. Lewis and the other marchers were savagely beaten by Alabama State Police on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. He represents the living history of the struggle for racial and economic equality. His words have weight. “The attorney general is expected to be a champion of justice for all people — not just the rich and the powerful,” Lewis closed. “It doesn’t matter whether Sen. Sessions may smile or how friendly he may be, whether he may speak to you. We need someone who will stand up and speak up and speak out for the people who need help, for people who are being discriminated against. And it doesn’t matter whether they are black or white, Latino, Asian or Native American, whether they are straight or gay, Muslim, Christian or Jews. We all live in the same house, the American house. We need someone as attorney general who is going to look for all of us, not just some of us.” Sen. Sessions has been consistent throughout his career. The Senate Judiciary Committee should be equally consistent and reject Sessions as attorney general, as it rejected him for a judgeship 30 years ago.

Trump Homeland Security Choice: Even More Mass Arrests, Deportations? On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by Juan Jose Gutierrez, the director of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, to discuss Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security. 00:00 / 00:00 Trump has selected retired General John Kelly, a role that would have him oversee the building of Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexico border. What does his selection mean for the struggle for immigrants’ rights? Trump looked to score a public relations victory this week when he took credit for persuading the Carrier corporation not to outsource 1,100 jobs. Chuck Jones, the President of United Steelworkers 1999 who represents workers at the plant, says this isn’t exactly true. The fightback against neoliberalism continues in Brazil as the country’s Supreme Court blocks the suspension of the President of the Senate who was accused of embezzlement. Brazilian-British journalist and activist Victor Fraga joins Becker to talk about the latest.

John Pilger: "The Coming War On China" Loud & Clear On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker speaks with John Pilger, a prolific filmmaker whose new documentary is "The Coming War on China". As Donald Trump doubles down on his anti-China rhetoric following President Obama's so-called pivot to Asia, could a coming escalation between the US and China actually lead to a war? The Syrian Army advances in Aleppo with the vast majority of the city now under its control. Opposition forces in the city all but acknowledged defeat as they propose a 5-day ceasefire — will they ever recover? Brian discusses these developments with Syrian journalist Kevork Almassian. Fidel Castro was buried over the weekend, but his legacy continues to live on in the Cuban Revolution. Yanela Gonzalez joins the show to look at how the revolution brought about tremendous progress for Cuba's Black population and the country’s contribution to Africa's liberation struggles.

Dripping With Hypocrisy: Obama Brags About Eight Years of War On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by political commentator Catherine Shakdam; by Jeremy Kuzmarov, an Assistant Professor for the Henry Kendall College of Arts & Sciences at The University of Tulsa; and by former CIA agent turned political activist Ray McGovern. President Obama gave his final major National Security speech at Central Command in Tampa, Florida last night in which he outlined his administration’s counterterrorism approach, or as he explained it “how he's worked to keep the American people safe at home and abroad”. But is the Obama legacy of endless war and drone strikes really about keeping Americans safe or about maintaining the dominant position of the U.S. Empire? Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201612071048257392-dripping-with-hypocrisy-obama-brags-about-eight-years-of-war/

Trump Doubles Down on Anti-China Rhetoric After Taiwan On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Walter Smolarek fills in for Brian Becker and is joined by writer and columnist Patrick Lawrence to discuss the controversy surrounding Donald Trump's phone call with the President of Taiwan. Donald Trump's phone call with the President of Taiwan. 00:00 / 00:00 Donald Trump talks tough against China days after a historic phone call with the President of Taiwan that marked the first direct communication between leaders of the two countries since 1979. Is Trump set to inflame tensions with China further after taking office? Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has resigned after being trounced in a referendum on political reforms. The turbulence in Europe continues with this vote, as well as controversy over the Austrian election and debt relief for Greece. Smolarek talks to John Wight, host of Radio Sputnik's Hard Facts. Donald Trump said that “almost all” of his cabinet positions will be filled this week. However, his picks so far are starkly at odds with much of the populist rhetoric he campaigned on. Anoa Changa, host of the weekly radio show The Way with Anoa, talks about the significance of Carson's appointment and the administration Trump is building. Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201612061048204647-trump-doubles-down-on-anti-china-rhetoric-after-taiwan-phone-call/

Are Miami Cubans as Anti-Castro as Mainstream Media's Portrayal? Brian Becker From the streets of Havana, Cuba, Loud & Clear talks with Andres Gomez, a leader of Cuban-Americans in Miami who have defied the mainstream media's caricature of their community by opposing the US blockade of Cuba. Read more: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/

Dakota Access Pipeline CEO Kelcy Warren Should Face the Music By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Barack Obama foreshadowed more complications for the Dakota Access pipeline this week, as he told an interviewer that “right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline.” With hundreds arrested in recent weeks at the Standoff at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the movement to halt construction of this 1,200-mile, $3.8 billion oil pipeline only builds. Musicians are increasingly joining the fray, striking an unexpected chord: pressuring oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the pipeline. Warren also owns a small music label and recording company, and is the founder and driving force behind the Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Texas. Many musicians, including folk/rock legend Jackson Browne, are banding together to confront Warren and help stop the pipeline. In a statement published in September by Indian Country Today Media Network, Jackson Browne wrote: “I met Kelcy Warren on one occasion, when I played at the Cherokee Creek Music Festival, held at his ranch. Later his company, Music Road Records, produced an album of my songs. Though I was honored by the ‘tribute’ and think highly of the versions—which were done by some of my favorite singers and songwriters, I had nothing to do with producing the recordings or deciding who would be on it.” Jackson continued: “I do not support the Dakota Access pipeline. I will be donating all of the money I have received from this album to date, and any money received in the future, to the tribes who are opposing the pipeline.” The album Browne referenced is titled, “Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne.” Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, better known as the folk duo the Indigo Girls, have been to the Standing Rock resistance camps, where thousands have been facing off against an increasingly violent, militarized police force that is facing down the Native American water protectors with attack dogs, armored personnel carriers, pepper spray, concussion grenades and deafening acoustic cannons. In addition to raising awareness and funds for the land and water protectors at Standing Rock, the Indigo Girls are organizing musicians to challenge Kelcy Warren directly. “Kelcy Warren also happens to be a passionate music lover and owns a festival, Cherokee Creek music festival,” they wrote in a recent Facebook post. “Indigo Girls have played the festival and had a song on the [Jackson Browne] tribute record. When we participated in those events, we had no idea about Kelcy Warren’s connection to big oil and its imminent threat to the Standing Rock Sioux. Now we know.” They wrote a letter to Warren, which was co-signed by Jackson Browne, Shawn Colvin, Joan Osborne, Keb’ Mo’ and others. It read, in part, “We realize the bucolic setting of your festival and the image it projects is in direct conflict with the Dakota Access pipeline ... this pipeline violates the Standing Rock Sioux Nations’ treaty rights, endangers the vital Missouri River, and continues the trajectory of genocide against Native Peoples.” The letter concluded, “We will no longer play your festival or participate in Music Road Records recordings. We implore you to stop construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.” Kelcy Warren is a Texas oil billionaire several times over, and might not be easily deterred by a threatened boycott. In fact, when global oil prices began dropping, “Nobody was happier about the crash than Energy Transfer Chairman and CEO Kelcy Warren,” Bloomberg Markets reported. All his competition, Warren gloated, “vaporized.” He, like many analysts, anticipates that oil prices will rise, fracking in the Bakken shale region will boom again, and his Dakota Access Pipeline will be the only conduit to carry the crude oil to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining and export. “You must grow until you die,” Warren told Bloomberg. Jackson Browne also wrote in his statement: “I intend to support public resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline as much as I can. To quote a song of mine: ‘Which side? “—the corporations attacking the natural world, drilling and fracking, who do it with the backing of the craven and corrupt? “—Or the ones who fight for the earth with all their might, and in the name of all that’s right, “Confront and disrupt?’” In the press release about the Jackson Browne tribute album from Music Road Records, Kelcy Warren wrote, “I don’t know of anybody that admires Jackson more than me.” As Browne and other musicians rally with the land and water protectors at Standing Rock, and as President Obama signals post-election action on the pipeline, it’s time for Kelcy Warren to face the music.

AT&T, Time Warner and the Death of Privacy By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan It has been 140 years since Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words through his experimental telephone, to his lab assistant: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” His invention transformed human communication, and the world. The company he started grew into a massive monopoly, AT&T. The federal government eventually deemed it too powerful, and broke up the telecom giant in 1982. Well, AT&T is back and some would say on track to become bigger and more powerful than before, announcing plans to acquire Time Warner, the media company, to create one of the largest entertainment and communications conglomerates on the planet. Beyond the threat to competition, the proposed merger—which still must pass regulatory scrutiny—poses significant threats to privacy and the basic freedom to communicate. AT&T is currently No. 10 on the Forbes 500 list of the U.S.‘s highest-grossing companies. If it is allowed to buy Time Warner, No. 99 on the list, it will form an enormous, “vertically integrated” company that controls a vast pool of content and how people access that content. Free Press, the national media policy and activism group, is mobilizing the public to oppose the deal. “This merger would create a media powerhouse unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. AT&T would control mobile and wired internet access, cable channels, movie franchises, a film studio and more,” Candace Clement of Free Press wrote. “That means AT&T would control internet access for hundreds of millions of people and the content they view, enabling it to prioritize its own offerings and use sneaky tricks to undermine net neutrality.” Net neutrality is that essential quality of the internet that makes it so powerful. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality.” After the Federal Communications Commission approved strong net neutrality rules last year, Wu told us on the Democracy Now! News hour, “There need to be basic rules of the road for the internet, and we’re not going to trust cable and telephone companies to respect freedom of speech or respect new innovators, because of their poor track record.” Millions of citizens weighed in with public comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality, along with groups like Free Press and The Electronic Frontier Foundation. They were joined by titans of the internet like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Arrayed against this coalition were the telecom and cable companies, the oligopoly of internet service providers that sell internet access to hundreds of millions of Americans. It remains to be seen if AT&T doesn’t in practice break net neutrality rules and create a fast lane for its content and slow down content from its competitors, including the noncommercial sector. Another problem that AT&T presents, that would only be exacerbated by the merger, is the potential to invade the privacy of its millions of customers. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company was secretly sharing all of its customers’ metadata with the National Security Agency. Klein, who installed the fiber-splitting hardware in a secret room at the main AT&T facility in San Francisco, had his whistleblowing allegations confirmed several years later by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. While that dragnet surveillance program was supposedly shut down in 2011, a similar surveillance program still exists. It’s called “Project Hemisphere.” It was exposed by The New York Times in 2013, with substantiating documents just revealed this week in The Daily Beast. In “Project Hemisphere,” AT&T sells metadata to law enforcement, under the aegis of the so-called war on drugs. A police agency sends in a request for all the data related to a particular person or telephone number, and, for a major fee and without a subpoena, AT&T delivers a sophisticated data set, that can, according to The Daily Beast, “determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.” Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and “vertically integrated,” sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers. We can’t know if Alexander Graham Bell envisioned this brave new digital world when he invented the telephone. But this is the future that is fast approaching, unless people rise up and stop this merger.

On Strip Searches and Press Freedom in North Dakota By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Monday was a cold, windy, autumnal day in North Dakota. We arrived outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan to produce a live broadcast of the “Democracy Now!” news hour. Originally, the location was dictated by the schedule imposed upon us by the local authorities; one of us (Amy) had been charged with criminal trespass for Democracy Now!’s reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline company’s violent attack on Native Americans who were attempting to block the destruction of sacred sites, including ancestral burial grounds, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Pipeline guards unleashed pepper spray and dogs on the land and water defenders. Democracy Now! video showed one of the attack dogs with blood dripping from its nose and mouth. The video went viral, attracting more than 14 million views on Facebook alone. Five days later, North Dakota issued the arrest warrant. When responding to an arrest warrant, one must surrender to the jail by about 8 a.m. if one hopes to see a judge that day and avoid a night in jail. So we planned to broadcast live from 7-8 a.m., then head to the jail promptly at 8 a.m. to get processed through the jail and fight the trespass charge in court. To our surprise, as we landed in Bismarck on Friday, we learned that the prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, had dropped the trespass charge, but filed a new one: “riot.” We were stunned. In an email to both the prosecutor and our defense attorney, Tom Dickson, Judge John Grinsteiner wrote, “The new complaints, affidavits, and summons are quite lengthy and I will review those for probable cause on Monday when I get back into the office.” We were told by several lawyers familiar with North Dakota criminal law that judges almost never reject a prosecutor’s complaint. The arraignment was set for 1:30 p.m. local time, Monday. We spent the weekend reporting on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, with the threat of the riot charge never far from our minds. The 1,100-mile-long, $3.8 billion pipeline is designed to carry almost 500,000 barrels of crude oil from the fracking oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois, then onward to the Gulf of Mexico. That is why thousands of people have been at the resistance camps where the Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to cross under the Missouri River. If the pipeline leaks there, the fresh-water supply for millions of people downstream will be polluted. Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier runs the jail in Mandan and is responsible for how people are processed there. As the protests have mounted during the past six months, Kirchmeier and the local prosecutors have been leveling more and more serious charges against the land and water protectors, with an increasing number of felony charges. More than 140 people have been arrested so far. Those we spoke to told us a shocking detail: When getting booked at the jail, they were all strip searched, forced to “squat and cough” to demonstrate they had nothing hidden in their rectums, then were put in orange jumpsuits. The treatment was the same for Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Dave Archambault, to a pediatrician from the reservation, Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, to actress Shailene Woodley, star of the films “Divergent” and “Snowden,” among others. I asked Chairman Archambault if strip searching was common for low-level misdemeanors. “I wouldn’t know, because that was the first time I ever got arrested,” he replied. Dr. Jumping Eagle remarked, “It made me think about my ancestors, and what they had gone through.” Shailene Woodley told us, “Never did it cross my mind that while trying to protect clean water, trying to ensure a future where our children have access to an element essential for human survival, would I be strip searched. I was just shocked.” As we prepared to enter the courthouse for the 1:30 p.m. arraignment on Monday, 200 people rallied in support of a free press, demanding the charges be dropped. A row of close to 60 riot police were lined up in a needless display of force in front of a peaceful gathering, threatening to arrest anyone who stepped off the curb. Then word came from our lawyer: The judge had refused to sign off on the riot charge. The case was dismissed, and we marked an important victory for a free press. The free press should now focus a fierce spotlight on the standoff at Standing Rock—a critical front in the global struggle to combat global warming and fight for climate justice. Indigenous people and their non-native allies are confronting corporate power, backed up by the state with an increasingly militarized police force. Attempts to criminalize nonviolent land and water defenders, humiliate them and arrest journalists should not pave the way for this pipeline.

Putting Their Bodies on the (Pipe)line By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Hurricane Matthew has come and gone, leaving devastation in its wake. So far, at least 1,000 people are reported to have died in Haiti, and at least 39 have died throughout the southeastern United States. In North Carolina, the rivers are still rising. In this election year, given the destruction, you would think climate change would be a major issue. In the presidential debates, which tens of millions watch, there has hardly been a mention. It is what is happening outside, at the grass roots around the country, that gives us hope. The movement to combat climate change is growing dynamically and unpredictably, and is facing increasing repression from the fossil-fuel industry and government authorities. There is perhaps no better example of this than the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe has made treaties with the United States for more than a century and a half, and every one of them has been broken by the federal government. So it should come as no surprise that a panel of federal judges ruled against the Standing Rock Sioux, allowing construction of the controversial $3.8 billion oil pipeline to continue. To add insult to injury, the decision came, surprisingly, on a Sunday, on the eve of Columbus Day, which many indigenous people view as a day celebrating the start of the genocide against native peoples in the Western Hemisphere. “The Standing Rock Sioux tribe is not backing down from this fight,” Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said in a statement. “We are guided by prayer, and we will continue to fight for our people. We will not rest until our lands, people, waters and sacred places are permanently protected from this destructive pipeline.” In a break with history, though, and despite the court’s order, the U.S. Army, along with the departments of Justice and the Interior, issued a statement as well, saying: “The Army will not authorize constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline on Corps land bordering or under Lake Oahe. We repeat our request that the pipeline company voluntarily pause all construction activity within 20 miles east or west of Lake Oahe. We also look forward to a serious discussion during a series of consultations ... on whether there should be nationwide reform on the Tribal consultation process for these types of infrastructure projects.” It is on that Army Corps of Engineers land that the main resistance camps have been set up, where thousands, mostly indigenous people from more than 200 tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America, have gathered to protect land and water from the pipeline. This is Lakota-Dakota ancestral land, taken without tribal consent by the U.S. Army. In August, these protectors — they don’t call themselves “protesters” — put out a call for international prayers and solidarity. Each day, creative acts of nonviolent direct action are happening, up and down the 1,200-mile length of the proposed pipeline. On Wednesday, in Keokuk, Iowa, 31-year-old Krissana Mara locked herself to an excavator at the site where the Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to cross the Mississippi River. The growing resistance there, called #MississippiStand, seeks to block the pipeline from traversing that river, as the Standing Rock actions are blocking the pipeline from going under the Missouri River. Meanwhile, in a stunning coordinated action, nine climate activists were arrested Tuesday for attempting to shut down all tar-sands oil coming into the United States from Canada by manually turning off pipelines in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington state. One of the protesters, Leonard Higgins, said on a video later posted online from the pipeline site in Coal Banks, Montana: “We’re in a state of emergency to protect our loved ones and our families, our communities. We need to step up as citizens and take action where our leaders are not. That’s what I’m prepared to do when I close the valve.” Also among the nine arrested was Ken Ward. In 2013, Ward and Jay O’Hara anchored a small lobster boat off the coast of Massachusetts, blocking a ship from delivering 40,000 tons of coal to the Brayton Point power plant, one of the region’s largest contributors to greenhouse gases. In a remarkable turn of events, their prosecutor, local District Attorney Samuel Sutter, dropped the criminal charges against the men, saying: “Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced. In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been gravely lacking.” Perhaps leadership from the top has been lacking. But from a small boat bobbing in the ocean to the growing resistance camps in North Dakota, the climate movement is on the rise.

Where is Climate Change in the Debates? By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President Barack Obama made a brief statement in the Rose Garden Wednesday, announcing that the global accord to combat climate change, the Paris Agreement, had achieved enough signatories to enter into force. “This gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got,” Obama said. At that moment, about 1,200 miles due south, Hurricane Matthew, as reported by Weather Underground, was “reorganizing” and “restrengthening” over the Bahamas, after pounding Haiti and Cuba. Millions along Florida’s east coast and many more in South Carolina were battening down their homes and evacuating. Nature’s fury raged onward, unmoved by the diplomatic efforts to tame her. The Paris Agreement is a clear measure of the limits of diplomacy. Facing a global threat of almost unimaginable proportions, the best the world’s nations could muster was a voluntary agreement. In pursuit of the goal of limiting the average planetary temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) over preindustrial levels, or, failing that, to limit the increase to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), the agreement includes, Obama said, “a strong system of transparency that allows each nation to evaluate the progress of all other nations.” The voluntary emission reduction pledges that each nation makes will allow countries to “carbon shame” those that don’t behave. Last week, Robert Watson, the former chair of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with a group of climate scientists, released a paper titled, “The Truth About Climate Change.” The scientists state that “current pledges ... are far from sufficient to put the world on a pathway to meet the 2 degrees C target,” adding, “the 1.5 degrees C target has almost certainly already been missed because of the lack of action to stop the increase in global GHG emissions for the last 20 years.” What are the consequences of this rapid warming of the planet? The severe impacts can be seen everywhere. “Climate change is happening now, and much faster than anticipated,” Watson and his colleagues write. “The evidence is what most have been experiencing as unusual weather events, such as changes in average rain patterns leading to floods or droughts, more intense storms, heat waves and wildfires, among other daily examples.” It is not just natural disasters that we have to worry about either. Many have traced the roots of the civil war in Syria, in part, to a persistent drought there. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, meanwhile, have found that “warming trends since 1980 elevated conflict risk in Africa by 11 percent.” Climate activist Bill McKibben writes in the New Republic: “A World at War: We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.” He is the co-founder of the group 350.org, named after the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in parts per million (ppm), that many feel is the highest safe level. Last year, as reported by the Mauna Loa Observatory, “the annual average carbon dioxide concentration was 400.8 [ppm] — a new record, and a new milestone.” McKibben told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “If you look at how America mobilized during World War II, the industrial might that we brought to bear, and then you do the calculations, it’s at the outside edge of possible that we could, in the short time that we have, build enough solar panels and wind turbines. But it’s going to take the same kind of focused effort.” Following the only U.S. vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, said: “Yet again, tonight’s debate moderator dropped the ball on climate change. Silence is another form of denial, and the TV networks are doing the public a great disservice by ignoring the issue, especially when there are such clear differences between the candidates.” Her point could not have been more timely. The VP debate was held in Virginia. Governors throughout the Southeast were declaring states of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. “While Donald Trump has received all the climate-denying attention recently, Governor Mike Pence is equally guilty of attempts to refute the science on climate change,” Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. “From refusing to implement the Clean Power Plan as Indiana governor to claiming global warming is a myth, Governor Pence’s aggressive attacks on science should be nowhere near the White House. A Trump-Pence combination would be catastrophic for this country, and for its critical role in making global progress on climate change.” Robert Watson’s paper opens with a quote by Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Climate change is real, and it is worsening. That it should play a central role in the U.S. elections is undebatable.

Solidarity From Solitary: The National Prison Strike Amy Goodman Grass-roots organizing, the hard work of building movements, can be grueling. Pay is often low or nonexistent. Success is never assured. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But it doesn’t bend itself. Right now, under some of the most repressive circumstances that exist in the United States, a national movement is growing for prisoners’ rights. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This movement is rippling out from a solitary-confinement cell inside the Holman Correctional Facility in rural Atmore, Alabama. “These strikes are our method for challenging mass incarceration. The prison system is a continuation of the slave system,” a man named Kinetik Justice told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour last May. He was using a contraband cellphone from inside solitary confinement in Holman, where he was being held as punishment for his organizing. He and fellow prisoners around Alabama launched a 10-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day, refusing to engage in prison labor. “The reform and changes that we’ve been fighting for in Alabama, we’ve tried petitioning through the courts. We’ve tried to get in touch with our legislators. ... We understood that our incarceration was pretty much about our labor and the money that was being generated through the prison system.” Kinetik Justice co-founded the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), to organize prisoners against exploitative prison-labor programs. Despite having no access to the internet, they have a website with a downloadable book by FAM co-founder Melvin Ray that details their plight in the Alabama prison system and how they are organizing. Ray, also incarcerated, opens the book with the lines: “FREEDOM ... Make no mistake about it ... That’s the business of Free Alabama Movement. At some point, we (prisoners) have got to get to the point where not only have we had enough of the inhumane and unconstitutional living conditions that we are confined in, but we also have got to get to the point where we are ready, willing, and able to do something about it. This ‘something’ is a statewide shutdown on Free Labor in the form of a Non-Violent and Peaceful Protest for Civil and Human Rights.” Their organizing continued after the May Day strike, and went national. On Sept. 9, prisoners in at least 24 states participated in a coordinated strike, marking the 45th anniversary of the 1971 prison uprising at New York state’s infamous Attica prison. Today’s striking prisoners are protesting long-term isolation, inadequate health care, overcrowding, violent attacks and slave labor. Pastor Kenneth Glasgow of Alabama founded T.O.P.S., The Ordinary People Society, which supports prisoners and ex-convicts. An ex-prisoner himself, he told us: “Those who are incarcerated are looking at the fact that people that have paid taxes for them to be rehabilitated, for them to be educated, for them to be trained, in order to come out into society — because 98 percent of the people in prison are coming out, and in order for them to come out and be able to be productive citizens, they need to have these skills and education and all. ... And yet, the taxpayers are paying anywhere from $31,000 to $80,000 per year, depending on what state you’re in, for them to get this rehabilitation and education, and they’re not getting it. What they’re getting is being used for free prison labor.” Last Saturday night, the Holman prisoners were joined in their strike by some unlikely allies: the prison guards themselves. Almost all the guards refused to show up for their 12-hour shift. On Sept. 1, Alabama Corrections Officer Kenneth Bettis, 44, was stabbed at Holman. He died two weeks later. Kinetic Justice spoke out on “Democracy Now!” again this week, and explained: “For weeks we’ve been communicating back and forth. This administration really has no regard for human life. And [the guards] are beginning to see that it’s not just directed at the men that are incarcerated here, that the violence that they’ve created actually spills over to the officers, as well. And a lot of them are terrified of what’s going on.” The national scope of the prisoner strike, with actions in 40 to 50 prisons around the U.S., is truly historic, as is the solidarity demonstrated between the prisoners and the guards at Holman this week. Shut behind walls, denied access to the internet and even telephones, and prevented from easily communicating with media outlets, these prisoners are leading their own movement, with solidarity from thousands outside. “Slavery dies hard in the South,” Melvin Ray writes in his book. Through their organizing, though, these striking prisoners are bending that arc of the moral universe, ever closer to justice.