Democracy Now! | Amy & David Goodman | Talks at Google

Hello, everybody. My name is Katina Johnson and I work in consumer operations at Google. I'm happy today to introduce to acclaimed and award winning writers. Many of you know Amy Goodman from the TV and radio show Democracy Now. It airs in more than 700 radio and TV stations around the world. And she's even broadcasting while they're on book tour. They started on the tour a couple weeks ago and will be running through June. So I'm happy that they've stopped at Google to tell us about their new book. David Goodman is an independent journalist. He has seven books, including Fault Lines, Journeys into the New South Africa. He's also a contributor to Mother Jones and many other newspapers. In regards to Standing up to the Madness, when we were having lunch, one of the folks that we were having lunch with was talking about the impact that this book has had on people and seeing that on book tour. And I would like to say for me, in terms of the impact, I'm really, really happy that they wrote something like this because I think it's kind of overwhelming when you look at what's going on in the world today and in our country. And it's nice to have examples of everyday people who've been able to challenge that and stand up for our rights. So with that, I'd like to introduce David Goodman.

Well, it's great to be here at Google and I couldn't resist saying since I'm here in the mothership, that you know about those images of my house on Google Earth. I have mowed the lawn since you guys took those pictures and I really need an update. Actually, I live in northern Vermont, which is a part of the world where there are not very good pictures at all. So we still remain in the very fuzzy zone of that. But we are, Amy and I are just at the beginning of about a 40 cities. I think we go to tour for Standing up to the Madness, which is our third book together. The first was the Exception to the Rulers came out in 2004. Static came out in 2006. Standing up in the madness came out three days ago. And I thought I'd start by just sharing a little anecdote. When I started here on Saturday, I flew out to Seattle and being an extremely cheap person, I never want to take a taxi and pay the full fare. So I ran to the curb and ran up to a guy who was just getting into a cab and I said, do you want to share the taxi into Seattle? So he turns to me and says in a British accent, oh, sure, you know, let's go. So naturally I asked what he was doing. He says, well, I'm a defense contractor from the uk. I said, oh, what were you doing here? He says, well, I was just at a conference in Ottawa and so he makes surveillance equipment. I said the obvious question, how's business? And he said, never been better. And I said, well, what were they talking about at the conference? He says, oh, you know, the increase in terrorist threats and the terrorism that's on the rise all around the world and the things we need to do to stop it. And I looked at him and I said, you believe that? And he looked at me, broke into a big smile. He says, pure rubbish. He said, what I think is going. And I said, what do you think is going on? He said, well, what I think is going on is they're just using that stuff as a cover to push through everything else that they want. Anyway, then we got chatting. I had not yet talked about some of the work that I do as a journalist. So he was very amused. And at the end he was extremely generous and instead of splitting the fare, paid the whole fare and turned to me and said, don't ever say that a defense contractor didn't do anything for you. So there's my full disclosure. I've been completely bribed by the guy with the tag. But as Katina said, we've taken a slightly different approach in this book. The previous two books have really been looking at the crackdowns, the repression, the invasions of privacies, the suspensions of civil liberty that have become a hallmark of the so called war on terror. But in the course of our travels on our previous books and Static, we did a 100 city tour. Well, one of the things you get out of this, besides losing a ridiculous amount of sleep, is you hear a lot of stories on the road and everywhere we would go, from the cities to the rural areas, we do these, you know, we sign books at the end and that's an opportunity for us. It often can take a long time. You know, we'll be there for an hour or more and people come up to us and tell us what's going on in their communities. And one of the things we have been struck by repeatedly is how the most unlikely people have been standing up to defend democracy in their communities. They are not the professional activists one might think, really quite the opposite. And so we want to now Amy Chronicles Many of these people like this on Democracy now every day. But we felt that it really was their actions are worthy and it's your actions, their actions because these are very much regular folks we're worthy of celebrating and honoring and primarily because this is what we feel is the real force behind our political our politics now. So we begin our book. When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag. This prophetic warning, variously attributed to author Sinclair Lewis and Louisiana Governor Huey Long, could have been written about post 9 11America. Using fear, electoral fraud and the smoke screen of terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has given us a lesson in how quickly a nation can be hijacked and core tenets of democracy trampled. Who would have imagined that once sacred principles of liberty, the right to a fair and timely trial, the checks and balances that keep our political leaders from becoming dictators, the freedom from arbitrary detention, the international prohibitions against torture and wars of aggression could be thrown on the scrap heap so quickly. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted the President's right to wield virtually unchecked power. They've used the tragedy of 911 to implement a radical political agenda, attempting to ram through a right wing wish list. From gutting Social Security to delivering tax cuts to the rich, to discarding basic civil liberties, our government now routinely invades the privacy of its own citizens, then pulls the cloak of national security over its operations to hide its deceptions and blunders from public view. The economy has been trashed. Inequality is now at levels not seen since the Great Depression. And at least 5 million more Americans live in poverty than did at the start of the Bush presidency. Many eminent historians and economists are concluding that George W. Bush has earned the distinction of being the worst president ever. Where is the outrage? The US corporate media and the Democrats complain politely and then resume their deferential posture to enable the next disaster. The media, so helpful in launching the Iraq war by acting as a conveyor belt for Bush administration lies, has shifted targets and now passes along White House propaganda about Iran. The damage to our society that has resulted from the actions and inactions of our political leaders runs deep. Some of the damage can be quantified. Thousands of American soldiers killed in a war of choice in Iraq. Tens of thousands wounded and maimed. And untold numbers of servicemen and women discarded by their own government and condemned to a lifetime struggling with post Traumatic stress disorder. More than a million Iraqis killed in a pointless and hopeless war and occupation. And a great American city destroyed first by Hurricane Katrina, then ravaged by racism and official neglect. Thousands of immigrants rounded up in midnight raids and deported. And the list goes on and on. Okay, that's the bummer part, as the nation's leaders have abdicated leadership, it has fallen to unlikely heroes to step forward and pick up the fallen torch of democracy. We have traveled the country to profile some of the movers and movements who are defending the core values of America. Well, and let me skip right to one of my favorite ones in the book, those great, fierce and terrifying guardians of our democracy. Librarians. In the course of our travels, we were alerted to now we knew that libraries have become, believe it or not, a front line in the war on terror. This place, this great sanctuary of ideas, of dissent, of free thinking, has of course been a great threat to a government that is intent on clamping down on those things.

And.

But it was in Connecticut where we found these four librarians who have been fighting very hard when the FBI came knocking at their door. What had happened was these librarians, the FBI was interested in. One email sent from a library computer from a library in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Well, the library networks, the 27 libraries, are linked up in a collaborative there. And so in order to find that out, the FBI demanded records, patron records of all 27 libraries for the day in question. They show up at the door of the. Actually, it's a computer collaborative that runs it, but it's run by librarians demanding the files. And the librarian who answers them very nervously and fidgeting says, I think that's unconstitutional. I'm not going to give you that. And these two burly cops go away. And so here's where we pick it up. Few Americans understand how draconian the Patriot act is unless it reaches out and touches them. When the four Connecticut librarians received a National Security letter, they were shocked to learn that it stripped away civil rights that they thought were inviolable. An nsl, as it's called, National Security Letter, can be issued by a judge, doesn't have to be involved. It's essentially an FBI agent, a corner cop can decide this and they can ask for everything. Where is the court order? Librarian Peter Chase asked fellow librarian George Christian. There is none, replied Christian. They said they didn't need one because they had an nsl. The librarians were being ordered to turn over records on their patrons simply because an FBI agent told them to. Alice Knapp, president of the Connecticut Library association, said, all of us as law abiding citizens, understand that when there's a subpoena and there's judicial oversight of the process, in the course of an investigation, library records may be subpoenaed. But what is of the utmost Concern to people is the lack of oversight in the Patriot act and that it can be used for a fishing expedition. Peter Chase, who was one of the librarians you spoke to, explained for us this is a very important principle. A court order protects you because you have a neutral third party, the court, and you must convince them that a crime has been committed. People come to us and say very confidential things to our reference librarians. They have medical issues, personal matters. What people are borrowing at a public library is nobody's business. For librarians, safeguarding the privacy of their patrons is a sacred trust. So for Connecticut's mild mannered librarians, there was no hesitation about how they would respond to this attack on the privacy of their patrons. They would fight like hell just to paint a little bigger picture. When Amy and I went to visit these librarians, they were every bit the stereotype you have of librarians. This mild mannered, very neatly dressed man who was after hour, he had his tie on and his badge that said library Director and his pocket protector and impossibly courteous and polite and very pained when we asked to break the rules by bringing our cup of coffee into his library, but whisking us downstairs because he didn't want to offend. These are the people who have been on the front lines here. So what followed? And it's worth reading the story because I mean it took our breath away to hear them describe what happened. They get this national security letter. They are, it's like being exposed to radioactivity. Upon reading the letter that has been addressed to you, you are immediately gagged. You can speak to no one, you can tell no one about it. The wording of the law is so sweeping they didn't even know if they could tell a lawyer about it. And one has to believe that all of this kind of gray area is by design. So these four people, this is the executive board of this little association of computer users now has been exposed to this radioactivity and the full weight of the national security state comes down on them. So they can tell no one, speak to no one, and yet they decide to fight and to commit their little organization, million dollar a year library consortium and to take on the US government. Their little non profit lawyer shows up and they show them this and she recoils and says this is way over my head. And in fact there's almost nobody in the country who's qualified to handle this. So it ends up the national office of the ACLU takes it in New York. And thus begins this odyssey. They file suit against the Attorney General. And it's not a. They're not going for a technical win. They are going to throw out. They take on the whole Patriot Act. So with the first hearing, America's four leading terrorists are considered so dangerous to America. They are the plaintiffs in this case. Let's remember they are not even allowed in the federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They are locked in a storage room in a courthouse in Hartford, two hours away, to watch on closed circuit tv. And they see two things there. They see that the man arguing the case against them is U.S. attorney Kevin O', Connor, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. This is a man who. Peter Chase, one of the four librarians, the fellow who I described with his pocket protector and everything, had debated on a number of occasions because Peter is the Intellectual Freedom Chair of the Connecticut Library Association. They have debated around the state in which the U.S. attorney promises people that, of course, the government is not spying on libraries. What do you think we're up to? And Peter Chase has gone around saying very earnestly and compellingly and articulately, well, in fact, they have the ability to do this. We hear they're doing this, and all the preparations have been made for them to do this. So this man who has essentially gagged his most powerful criticism in the state of Connecticut, they see something else in that courtroom. Word has gone out. These four librarians are dubbed John Doe Connecticut. They have lost their voice and their identity in this process. But word has gone out that librarians are under fire in Connecticut. And then a case is happening. And so they, in addition to seeing Kevin o', Connor, the attorney, they see a library in Bridgeport, a courtroom in Bridgeport packed with librarians from all around Connecticut and New York. They fight this court case. They win the first round, and the government immediately appeals. They're fighting to strike down this gag order. Why? Because right at that moment, U.S. congress was debating whether to reauthorize the Patriot Act. The real reason that they had to be gagged was that the victims have had no voice in the discussions about these various terrorism laws and whatnot. Their appeal goes to federal court in Manhattan. They are under the ACLU Attorneys explain to them, I mean, this gag order is deadly serious. Their identity cannot be revealed. Although, ironically, it's through government blunders that it is immediately revealed. They forget to redact all instances of their names in the court filings. So, in fact, their names do go out. So you have this theater of the absurd going on where people, some people know their names anyway. They are under orders to show up in federal COURT IN Manhattan. They are to enter separately. They are to look like lawyers, dress like lawyers. They are not to look at one another. They are not to look at their own attorneys. No one can find out your identity. There will be another person in the room who they are not to know the identity of. It is their co plaintiff. He is the. We think it's a he, a guy who's the head of a small Internet service provider in New York who has also been asked for records of his patrons. He has refused. He is John Doe New York. So John Doe New York and John Doe Connecticut are in the same room. They don't know who each other are, but once again they see in this courtroom it is packed with librarians now from all over the east Coast. That day during the hearing, librarians. The American Library association has staged a demonstration on the steps of the Capitol where librarians with gags that say NSL in their mouths are marching around. So the resistance has taken shape. It has mobilized these unlikely people. In the end, they fight and fight and fight. We detail the bizarre things that go on as their name is almost, you know, is leaked. The kids are finding out all these crazy things. The Patriot act is finally reauthorized in the spring of 2006. Six weeks later, the government suddenly has a change of heart and decides that they really don't care about these librarians. And so they drop the case. Mission accomplished. What was the mission? To keep the only people in America who could speak to what is really going how the Patriot act is really being used from speaking to Congress because they said explicitly in their court filings with we want to speak to Congress. That is what had to be stopped. So these kinds of stories and what it did to these librarians and how it struck this chord among librarians all over the place, I just think are really the kind of things that gives us. I mean these people have now their lives have been changed for forever to see their government go after them and they consider themselves the guardians of democracy. Well, another story we tell is the story of climates, of scientists, government scientists who have been censored and gagged. In our chapter, Some Don't Like It Hot, we write, as the 2004 presidential election approached, something strange began happening at NASA. The normally steady flow of news releases about glaciers, climate change, pollution and other earth sciences slowed to a trickle. An October 2004 news conference to present new information about ozone and air pollution from a new NASA satellite was ordered postponed until after the presidential election by Glenn Mahone, then the assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA. White House appointees instructed NASA's public affairs officers to shift the focus from Earth science to President Bush's stated desire to return a man to the moon and eventually to Mars. Political appointees at NASA had figured out a novel way to resolve the discrepancy between Bush administration rhetoric and scientific reality. They would just erase our planet, NASA scientist William Pastert said. All of a sudden, Earth science just disappeared. Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the nine or 10 planets. It was ludicrous. NASA's historic mission since its establishment in 1958 has been the expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomenon in the atmosphere and space, which is why global warming falls squarely within the agency's purview. From 2002 to 2006, NASA's mission statement read, to understand and protect our home planet, to explore the universe in search for life, to inspire the next generation of explorers, as only NASA can. In early February 2006, unbeknownst to most of the agency's 19,000 employees, the mission statement was quietly changed. The phrase to understand and protect our home planet disappeared. Instead, the mission became to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. Star Trek was in. Planet Earth was toast. Earth had to be erased for a reason. The science about Earth, namely the alarming and incontrovertible evidence of global warming, conflicted with the fantasy being spun by President Bush and his oil industry backers that climate change wasn't really happening. President bush declared in July 2001, My administration's climate change policy will be science based. He must have meant science fiction, because from the moment the Bush administration took power in 2001, officials set out to undermine, distort, and suppress science that didn't serve their political ideology and financial backers. Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear who was setting the environmental agenda when he huddled behind closed doors with his former colleagues in the oil industry and in early 2001, and virtually allowed them to write a new national energy policy to their liking. The result? The 2005 energy bill, which gave $16 billion in subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries, recommended opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and natural gas drilling, deregulated the electricity market, subsidized building new nuclear power plants, and dumbed down fuel economy standards for SUVs and light trucks. State Department documents from 2001 to 2004 reveal that the Bush administration thanked Exxon executives for their, quote, active involvement in determining climate change policy. Exxon officials, who called for More study and less regulation, insisted that the cost of joining the Kyoto Protocol would be unjustifiably drastic and premature, which is exactly the same line used by the Bush administration. The message from the White House was clear. It was politics and money above all else. If science conflicted with politics or threatened corporate profits, the science must change. Well, we go on to chronicle what became quite a dramatic battle between America's top climate scientist, Jim Hansen, and the people the Bush administration, which was trying to lock him down, muzzle him. And they gave him his own little political minder. A 23 year old kid who had lied on his resume and said he'd graduated from Texas A and M when he hadn't. But most importantly, he had worked in the Bush Cheney war room, as they called it in the 2004 election. This was to be the handler for our top climate scientist to make sure he didn't say anything that the government didn't approve. So this battle played itself out in a climactic hearing in Congress. And it's quite a drama in its own right that we document. But taking it to what it led to, the rebellious scientists have been emboldened by a worldwide movement against global warming. And activists are stepping up their efforts as the environmental crisis deepens. Arctic ice receded further in the summer of 2007 than at any time in history. And the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator warned in October 2007 that the world has seen a record number of floods, droughts and storms caused by climate change already this year. In April 2007, author and activist Bill McKibben spearheaded a remarkable national convergence called Step It Up Day. He began the effort with a half dozen students at Middlebury College in Vermont in the fall of 2006. We had no money and no organization, so we figured we'd be doing well if we could organize 100 of these things by April 14th. And that would have been about 100 more global warming rallies than there had been. Well, what happened shocked Bill and the students. They had over 1400 rallies take place last April. They followed it up this November where they had even more rallies and many politicians now felt it necessary to participate. And the pressure has been put on Exxon by something called the Expose Exxon Campaign. They have become the piggy bank of the global warming denial movement. And so pressure has been put on to where some of these groups are now being defunded and have lost millions of dollars. As Al Gore said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the future is knocking at our door right now. The next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask, what were you thinking? Why didn't you act? Or they'll ask instead, how did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve? We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will. But political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it and say together we have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose, we will rise and we will act. That spirit of resistance that Gore invoked for the climate change movement, it was also invoked by a group called the White Rose, which was a group of students and a philosophy professor in Nazi Germany who issued who saw what was going on around them, reacted to the muzzling and co optation of their major media by the government and began issuing pamphlets that they mimeographed and passed around all over Germany under Hitler. They were eventually Hans and Sophie Scholl were brother and sister. They were the first ones caught. They were tried by a people's court and beheaded on the same day as their verdict. But their words ring on. And what they said in one of their last leaflets was we shall not be silent. We are your guilty conscience. And we feel that the spirit of the White Rose is very much alive and well. It's documented in many of these stories. And that in fact we will come out of this time period with a politics that is more democratic, has and really reflects some of the grassroots power in this country that I think has done more than anything and more than any politicians to save our democracy. And with that, I give you my sister who every morning is on with Democracy now, chronicling many of these grassroots heroes.

How many of you have ever heard, watched, listened to Democracy now and do you do it online? How many do you listen to? KPFA in the area? Free Speech TV channel 9415 of Dish Network, link tv9410 video podcasted or audio podcasted. Democracy now have you ever read the transcripts of online? Well, Democracy now is the largest public media collaboration in this country. We began in 1996 as the only daily election show in public broadcasting and a couple dozen community radio stations and Pacifica stations. Right around September 11, we also moved to television, a public access TV station in New York, Manhattan, neighborhood network. And then the show just took off. Another public access station asked to air it. We would FedEx out the video because we had no way of transmitting it. And then a radio station in that town would say, can we air it as well? And before we knew it, hundreds of stations were airing Democracy now now. Over 702 to 3 news stations a week are picking up Democracy now increasingly on NPR and PBS stations. Our headlines are also available in Spanish at our website, democracynow.org, in transcript and audio form for any radio station to take is over 100 ADR in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Spain and around the world. But we all started at Pacifica Radio, and Today is the 59th anniversary of Pacifica. It was back in World War II, 1949, when a war resister named Lou Hill came out of the detention camps and said there has to be a media outlet that is run not by corporations that profit from war, but run by journalists and artists. And that's how Pacifica was born. Not run by corporations. As George Gerbner, former dean at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of the Cultural Environment Movement, says, not run by corporations that have nothing to tell and everything to say that are raising our children today. And so Pacifica was born. The first station, KPFA in Berkeley, 1949. Ten years later, 1959, KPFK in Los Angeles, 1960 my station in New York, WBAI radio, WPFW in Washington, went on the air in 1977. KPFT, the fourth Pacifica station, went on the air in 1970. Those are the five stations. KPFT in Houston is the only radio station in the country whose transmitter was blown up. That's right. In its first few months of operation in 1970, here is the small community station in Houston. The Ku Klux Klan straps dynamite to the base of the transmitter and blows it to smithereens. I don't know if it was its intention. Certainly KPFT did not have the money for advertising, but it blew it into the consciousness of the people of Houston. And when they got back on their feet and started transmitting again, the Klan blew it up again. But KPFT is strong and healthy. I'll be going there this Thursday as we continue our Standing up to the Madness tour. I don't know if it was the Grand Dragon or the Exalted Cyclops. I often confuse their titles. But he said that blowing up Pacifica was his proudest act, and I think it is because he understood how dangerous Pacifica is. Dangerous simply because it allows people to speak for themselves. And when you hear someone speaking from their own experience, whether it is a Palestinian child or an Israeli grandmother, whether it is a Venezuelan aunt or an Iraqi uncle, you think, that sounds like my baby, that sounds like my mother, my aunt. There is nothing more powerful and that is our job in the media, to provide a forum for people to tell their stories and when they can't, to tell their stories until they can tell their own. In the 1950s, the great scholar, actor, singer, activist, athlete, Paul. Paul Robeson whitelisted from almost every public space in this country except a few black churches, knew he could be heard over the airwaves of Pacifica Radio. Or there was Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil rights leader. We have the largest collection of her recordings in the Pacifica Radio Archive, tens of thousands of recordings in Los Angeles of the grassroots movement of the second half of the 20th century, right through to now. Rosa Parks, right after she sat down on that bus December 1, 1955. Yes, an interview with her. And in fact, in our book, Standing up to the Madness, yes, we tell the stories of people in all walks of life and professions who stand up, not planning to, but because of something extraordinary that happens in their lives to them or to someone in their community. As David described the librarians of Connecticut being handed a national security letter. NSO can't even talk about it, as over 100,000 people have in this country. Can't even mention that they've been handed this or they could wind up in jail. And there are so many other stories. This past summer in San Francisco, Democracy now came to town to chronicle the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. It was very interesting. It's the largest association of psychologists in the world and it is embroiled in an internal debate that has global implications. Should psychologists be involved in coercive interrogations in these military sessions that take place? Or CIA sessions at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at Bagram, or some CIA black site, we don't know where it is, somewhere in the world. It's an amazing story of a small group of dissidents, dissident psychologists within the APA, saying no to their leadership, saying there should be a moratorium or a ban on psychologists participation, that they are supposed to be healers, not breaking down personalities, not misusing the knowledge they have of how personalities are shaped and function, but they are there to heal. It is a story that has been going on for a few years now, and it has culminated in this epic battle. There is a large contingent of military psychologists within the psychological association, unlike the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric association, that do ban their members for participating. The APA never has. And so this summer it rose to a higher crescendo as an amendment, a proposal was put forward for a moratorium. It was beaten down but interestingly, in this last few months, the leading dissident psychoanalyst named Dr. Steven Reisner, New York psychoanalyst, has decided to run for the presidency of the American Psychological Association. First he has to get enough nominating votes. And in the last few weeks that election that voting took place and he got the highest number of nominating votes, over 1,000 votes in the association. He is one of the top five vote getters. The real election will take place in October and they will find out who will be the new head of the American Psychological Association. At just about the same time we are voting for President of the United States. We can only hope that this issue of torture is central to both elections. But going back in time, as we look at the students who perform an anti war play or attempt to on their stage in Wilton High School and Connecticut and are told by their principal they can't do it there. But simply by that act of censorship, story gets out of this group of young actors and actresses, seniors and juniors and freshmen and sophomores in high school. And the New York Public Theater and the Culture Project invite them to perform their play on the New York stage. A play that simply consists of the voices of soldiers who've returned from Iraq and or active duty writing letters home. They piece their play together from those letters. These acts of resistance make up a greater resistance movement in this country. We chronicle these as well as the soldiers who have said no to war, who have refused. Like Lt. Aaron Watada, the first officer to say no to deployment because he feels the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal. But we also chronicle turning points in history. David mentioned the White Rose Collective that issued pamphlets through Germany. Just students and their professor, a sister and brother named Hans and Sophie Scholl, simply to get information out so the Germans would never be able to say we didn't know. Well, there are others like Rosa Parks. And I think it's illustrative of how the media works today. Rosa Parks died last year. We all know her story. The media has told that story. And we learned it in the history books of the woman who on December 1, 1955, sits down in the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. And in so doing, in so refusing to stand up for a white male passenger to sit down. She stood up not only for African Americans, but for all of us. Because if one person is diminished, we are all diminished. And the story is told well of her launching a movement. Her friend and activist, Joanne Robinson, that night mimeographed 35,000 pages to send out to people to launch The Montgomery bus boycott to end segregation in Montgomery. A year later, their victory would be complete with a U.S. supreme Court ruling. Five days later, Rosa Parks goes to court. On December 5, 1955, the Montgomery Improvement association has their mass meeting and they elect a young new minister in town to be their spokesperson. His name is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And in a sense, you could say Rosa Parks helped to launch Dr. Martin Luther King. Yes, activists come out of movements and they inspire movements. Rosa Parks story is not told correctly in the media. When she died, the media said that she was simply a tired seamstress. She was not a troublemaker, they said. But that's where they got it wrong. Rosa Parks was a first class troublemaker. She had dedicated her life to ending segregation in the south, to fighting racism. The media denigrates activism when in fact, what could be more noble than dedicating your life to making the world a better place? It's exactly what Rosa Parks did as secretary of the naacp. And Montgomery worked under Ed Nixon, came out of radical labor politics, and together they were challenging those laws. It wasn't even the first time Rosa Park Parks had sat down. But it was the magic moment when things came together. And that is a key point, especially in this absolutely key year, and that is laying the foundation. You never know when that magic moment will occur, but you can determine which direction that change will take when you help to form a foundation, a path for a new way. So that's Rosa Parks. And to show how brave she was, just a few months earlier, in the summer of 1955, a Chicago mother named Mamie Till sent her son Emmett Till to Money, Mississippi for the summer to be with family. Emmett is now a famous name in US History. He was sent down to Money, Mississippi with his family. And he was not even clear today exactly what happened. They said he wolf whistled at a white woman, but he ended up in the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. The case, not even adequately investigated for half a century, looked like two white brothers, Klansmen, who attacked him, mutilated, tortured him. When his body was sent up to Chicago for the funeral, for the wake, Mamie Till Mobley did something extraordinary. She said she wanted his casket opened for the funeral. Her son, whose head was distended ten times its size. She wanted the world to see the ravages of racism, the brutality of bigotry. Thousands streamed by his casket and so on. Then JET magazine and other black publications published those photos, and they were seared into the consciousness and history of this country. Mamie Till Mobley had something very important to teach the press of today. Show the pictures, show the images. That is what we have been missing. When you look at the US Media's role in this war, it is shameful. The embedding process has brought the media to an all time low. You know, reporters embedded in the front lines of troops. What about reporters embedded in Iraqi hospitals and communities in the peace movement around the world to understand the effects of this war? Fairness and accuracy in reporting. A media watch group in New York did a study of the two weeks around February 5, 2003, right before the invasion, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his push for war at the United Nations. In that two week period, there were four major nightly newscasts that they counted. And they counted the number of interviews that were done around war. 393 interviews done by CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 393 interviews done around war. Only three were with anti war leaders.

Three.

Three of almost 400. That is unacceptable. That is no longer a mainstream media. It doesn't reflect the way people felt in this country. Because those who are opposed to war do not represent a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority silenced by the corporate media. And we have to to take it back. The media are the most powerful institutions on earth. More powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile. And the Pentagon's deployed the media. Yes, we have to take it back. We have to challenge the corporate media because they are using our property, public property. It's not private property. When you have weapons manufacturers like General Electric owning a network like NBC, it doesn't mean that they can do anything they want with that property. They are simply leasing the airwaves. And they have responsibility to bring out the full spectrum of opinion or their licenses should be challenged. And it has happened before. And we have to build up independent media in this country. And it is growing in leaps and bounds. There is a media democracy movement that is now flourishing. People who are recognizing that with the media being so powerful, it is key we make our own media. We open up the floodgates, we break the sound barrier so that the voices of people at the ground zeroes around the world can be heard at the target end to understand the true effects of war. We begin our book with New Orleans. We begin our book with Hurricane Katrina. Yes, it's a story of horror, but also hope because grassroots activists are trying to rebuild that drowned city. How could it be that we lose an American city in the 21st century. And yet in those waning days of August, when President Bush was on one of the longest vacations and presidential history in his estate in Crawford. We won't call it a ranch because it isn't. You have Hurricane Katrina hitting. He was warned in advance. Make no mistake about it. This was not a surprise. He was warned by video conference on his vacation. Did he set off immediately to go to Washington or be near New Orleans or be in command and control? No. He flew off to California and had a photo op with a country music star whose signature song was Wish youh Were Here could have been the theme song of the people of New Orleans. I've just come from New Orleans. Yes. More than two years later, we began the book tour in the Lower Ninth Ward, devastated to this day, more than two years later. But there was a remarkable event at the Superdome that was led by Eve Ensler and her V Day events around the world fighting violence against women and girls. And they brought together more than 1,000 women from the New Orleans diaspora. Can you imagine? We are talking about a diaspora from an American city, yet they haven't come home. And in the last New Orleans City Council election, for the first time in 20 years, a majority white city council was elected because the demographics of this cultural mecca have so drastically changed, with the poorest not being able to return their homes devastated, not having the resources to come back. And yet people are fighting back now. When the hurricane struck, something very significant happened. A side effect of President Bush and his administration not responding, not sending the troops in to help in this time of natural disaster was that, well, the corporate media did the right thing. They simply went to New Orleans and there were no troops to embed with. And we saw something remarkable. We saw something very raw. We saw unembedded, unspun reporting bodies floating by. One of the first demands of the Bush administration was, you will not show the bodies. To which the editor of the Times Picayune said, you've got to be kidding. I remember seeing a young CNN reporter, A man walks up out of the water holding his boy's hand. He said his wife's hand had just slipped out of his and she told him, take care of the children. He turned around after talking to this reporter and walked off into the water with his boy in shock. And this young CNN reporter starts to cry. That's reporting from the victim's perspective. And it galvanized this country. We will never forget those images. Could you imagine if for just one week we saw those images? In Iraq, we saw the babies dead on the ground. We saw the women with their legs blown off by cluster bombs. From Iraq to Lebanon, we saw the soldiers dead and dying for just one week. Americans are a compassionate people. They would say, no, war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century. But where are the images? And with the hundreds of channels we have in this country and means of getting information, it's almost reassuring to people. If you don't see the images, then maybe somehow it's not that bad. We have been in Iraq longer than the U.S. was involved in World War II. The casualty figures are astonishing. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died. Tens of thousands have been critically wounded medevaced out of Iraq. More than a million have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the estimates are now that perhaps a third of them are suffering from post Traumatic stress Disorder. Coming back home, I encourage you to read Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, the Harvard economist and Nobel laureate economist's book the $3 trillion war. $3 trillion. That is the cost of war today and the cost of taking care of these soldiers, the lucky ones who have come home. Now the stories are out there. They are simply not being reported. Democracy now went down to Silver Spring, Maryland a few weeks ago to the National Labor College, to the most remarkable gathering of active duty soldiers and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who'd come to tell their own stories, talk about atrocities they themselves had committed in Iraq. You couldn't get a story closer to the heart of what is happening in this country. At Democracy now, we thought we're going to have to get there early. We have to set up everything in advance because all the media is going to be there. You know, these young men and women have the videotape, they've got the photographs. They tell the firsthand accounts of what was happening. This rarely happens in this country. But we had nothing to worry about when it came to having space to report and talking to the soldiers and vets who were there. That's right. There was almost no corporate media in the room. The Washington Post did a story that appeared in the Metro section of their paper. Where were the other papers? Where were the networks? The stories were frightening. The stories told by the young men and women themselves or their parents, like the Lucy's who lost their son Jeffrey. He went to Iraq, he made it back. And for the next year they watched his personality disintegrate until he was wearing full camo, his full military uniform to go out and buy beer in the street. And as they Begged the Veterans Administration to take their boy in. The grandfather taking his grandson right to the state step of the VA hospital. They realized they were losing their son. On one evening, Jeffrey asked his father. This young man of 23 or 24 years old asked his father if he could curl up in his lap. His father rocked him silently for 45 minutes. The next day, his dad came home from work, called for Jeffrey. He didn't respond. He saw the door open to the basement, walk down and there was his son hanging from the pipes. It was the last time he cradled his son Jeffrey. These were the stories that should have been broadcast all over this country because this is the real cost of war. And yet we have a media that unfortunately has been such a disservice to a democratic society, broadcasting the voices of people who have experienced the pain. And it is so critical right now. David and I wrote an earlier book called Static. And the reason we called it that because in this high tech digital age with high definition television and digital radio, all we get is ever more static. That veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half truths that obscure reality. When what we need is the media to give us the dictionary definition of static. Criticism, opposition, unwanted interference. We need a media that covers power, not covers for power. We need a media that is the fourth estate, not for the state. And we need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history. And you all can be a part of that. We have to challenge the corporate media and we have to build our own media. And that media extends all over the globe, especially through the Internet, which is why it is so important to preserve net neutrality. From here we will go to Stanford. In two days, there will be an FCC hearing on net neutrality. We have to ensure that everyone gets involved in that global conversation. We have to protect our airwaves. We have to fight against the clear channeling of America. When corporations can take over more than a thousand radio stations, sponsor pro war rallies and kick off broadcasters, as one in South Carolina who was broadcaster of the year, worked for a Clear channel station, dared to voice an anti war point of view and was forced off the air and sued. The airwaves must be protected for all of us. I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day, war and peace, life and death. And anything less than that is a disservice to the servicemen and women of this country, is a disservice to a democratic Society, Democracy Now.

Hi. We actually have the room for until 2:30 so if people had want. If people want to ask a couple questions. You guys willing to entertain that?

Yes.

Oh, oh, sorry. And please use the mic. There's a mic up there.

Are you broadcast to the armed forces at all in Iraq?

Can they hear you through the Internet? Since we. Video and audio both podcast and stream, but not on Armed Forces Radio. But of course soldiers coming home and I've spoken with many of them can listen all over the country. And democracynow.org by the way, if you go to our website you can see our four days of coverage of Winter Soldier. Just see the raw testimony of these young men and women and those that spoke for them when those young men and women didn't make it.

Just a bit of a fan question I guess. The funk guitar music that opens Democracy now, what is that piece of music?

Incognito.

By who?

The group is called Incognito.

Okay, thanks.

Any other questions?

It seems like we. It's obviously a constant battle to try to make these large scale changes before they just become so institutionalized that people don't even notice they're there anymore. But do you see any, I mean, you know there's these cases being fought against, particularly the Patriot Act. Do you see particular strides being made? Especially after we saw just a slap in the face of it being passed and the sunset being taken away just recently? Like I want to know what your thoughts are in the next few years in regards to that specific bill and what are the real high impact changes that we can strive to make?

Well, I think that President Bush has managed to unite people across the political spectrum against him. And I think the USA Patriot act is one example of that. There are slight changes in it, but people are getting fed up as one after another people are targeted. I mean you have whole populations since 9, 11 Arab Americans, Muslims, people of South Asian descent. We have just heard and we hope it is the case tomorrow in Iraq. AP Pulitzer Prize winning photographer will be released from prison for more than two years held by the U.S. and then the U.S. s Iraqi surrogates. His name is Bilal Hussein. Unfortunately, Arab journalists have been particularly hard hit in Iraq. There's another one that people should pay attention to. His name is Sami Al Hajj. He is an Al Jazeera cameraman and he has been held at Guantanamo for more than five years. Doesn't know the charges against him and we know the problems with Guantanamo and the lack of charges yet the hundreds of men who have cycled through and have been held there. But one case after another is being thrown out. I wanted to just read a little segment from the book that has to do with, well, a man not far from here. Last night we were in Portland, Oregon. His name is Brandon Mayfield. He learned what happens when you're falsely accused. He's a lawyer in Portland and a convert to Islam. He was mistakenly linked by the FBI in May 2004 to a fingerprint found near the Madrid terrorist bombing two months earlier that killed 191 people, despite the insistence of Spanish authorities that Mayfield's fingerprints did not match what they had. But the FBI, using the expanded surveillance powers of the USA Patriot act, had all the evidence it needed to convince itself of Mayfield's guilt. Phone calls that he made to Islamic charities. Incriminating evidence that agents took when they broke into Mayfield's home without his knowledge. This included a Koran and Spanish documents, which turned out to be his son's Spanish homework. Mayfield, who's been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, its war on terror, spent two harrowing weeks behind bars, shackled, chained, placed in a five by eight foot maximum security cell, allowed out for one hour a day. Within hours of Mayfield's arrest, headlines blared as crime and linked him to one of Spain's worst terrorist crimes. He told us on Democracy now, the suspicion leading up to the arrest, the arrest itself, and the time I spent in jail in shackles and chains was the hardest time that myself, my family, ever had to endure. Mayfield was ultimately exonerated. He received a rare public apology from the FBI. He declared, I believe I was singled out and discriminated against because I was Muslim. Mayfield took his fight for justice further. He sued the federal government for false arrest and challenging the legality of key parts of the USA Patriot act that permitted secret searches and wiretapping. In 2006, a court awarded him $2 million in damages for the false arrest. And in September 2007, in a major blow to the Bush administration, an Oregon judge struck down two pillars of the Patriot act that the FBI used to conduct warrantless searches against Mayfield. The US District judge in the case, Ann Akin, wrote, For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law with unparalleled success. A shift to a nation based on extra constitutional authority is prohibited as well as ill advised. Stop. Vilified, burglarized, terrorized, locked down, isolated and exonerated. This is the real face of racial and religious profiling in the United States. Unlike Brandon Mayfield, many victims are not Fortunate enough to be free.

All right, one final question.

Let me add something I think you were also asking about. What can people do? You know, what small steps can people take? Actually, the last chapter of our book is called we are the Heroes we have Been Waiting for or we are the People we have Been Waiting For. And we try there to distill some of the things that we feel these very ordinary folks have done and what were key elements of their success. We would ask them when we would talk to them. Because I think the whole point of. So there is a practical component of this as well as just reading it. I hope you really do get a sense of just people like you. When we were telling that story about the National Security Letters and I could see on some people's expressions the shock of what this thing that I was describing. Well, the bigger shock is that last year the Justice Department revealed that at least 150,000 of these things have been issued just in a three year period. So there could be right in this audience somebody who has received an nsl, but they can't tell you about it. In fact, do the math. 150,000. There may well be people, you know in your community who have received these things. So the stories we're describing are people getting parts of these things struck down. But you know, our whole point here was just to say these aren't all stories of Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandelas. It's just people like us and someone knocked at the door and basically the issue came to them and they had to respond. So I do hope people take that away. And as hard as some of these messages are, we ultimately feel this is a very, very hopeful book and that you get out of this what just regular folks in regular towns have done and what a huge impact it made often just beginning as those librarians, you know, with their knees knocking did, just when they said, no, we're not going to give you what you want.

Hi, it's good to see you in person. I've been a listener to, to Democracy now back in the 90s in New York City and listening to that as part of what inspired me to become a human rights worker for about five years before I moved to, moved back to the private sector and came here to work at Google. I've had an interesting time. I moved down to Washington D.C. and sort of got to see a little bit of how Washington works from something of the inside. And, and it's really had a lot of a pretty profound influence on how I think about the world and how I See things in addition to what I used to get from listening to Democracy Now. It's very interesting that recently there's been, you know, I've been involved with some high profile stuff where there's been controversy on the part of Google. And you know, it's interesting going into the media and reading what people have to say about Google and.

The way.

That they attribute a certain kind of thinking that I know does not exist. And I sometimes feel like. Listening to Democracy now can sometimes come to some of those conclusions. Like before, David, you were talking about the, these librarians who were being gagged. And your assumption was that the trial, the whole trial and the gagging was specifically in order to act as a screen for the repasses of the Patriot Act. And just having seen different events from different angles, I mean, do you really know that for a fact? By all means you should come to editorial conclusions. I have no objections.

That's what both the ACLU and the librarians said. So that it wasn't our theory. It became, as you read the details of the story, it became very clear that the main, you know, what happened early on here in this case was they were saying you couldn't know who these people are because it's a national security secret. Within the first month, their name was published five times in the New York Times because of government blunders. So the name was out there. The only thing left, the whole national security fig leaf got blown away right at the start. So then there was only a free speech issue left. Now, clearly these librarians and the FBI knew this very well, had no knowledge of anything. It was some technical item. They were after tracing names, so they had no personal knowledge. They were not defending an individual. They were defending a principle that patron privacy is paramount and should not be infringed in a public space like this. So it was their conclusion, we quote them talking about, that it was the ACLU's argument in the cases. Frankly, it's the only thing that common sense, the only conclusion common sense could lead you to. But if you, you know, if you have, if there's something else you can. I'm curious, is there some other reason that you could conjure for why it was lifted within weeks of the Patriot act being passed? No, I don't know.

No, I don't know. I don't know. I haven't followed the entire case and I, I haven't heard this point of view of the government, the attorneys who were involved. I just know that sometimes the public perception can be very different from what actually decisions are made internally. And you're also attributing I think most flatteringly to the government a level of competence that may actually not be there.

I think the important point here is the effect that it had and it squelched debate and it prevented the people who could talk specifically to for example the attorney General John Ashcroft alleging that librarians were not being served with these NSLs. They couldn't respond. They couldn't testify before Congress and say in fact that is not the case. So whether whatever the government's intentions were I think we can't absolutely. Absolutely no you're correct but the effect of them was to undermine democracy.

I want to say thank you very much to David and Amy.

Thank you. Oh and just remember another effect that you can have is community media, your community radio stations and television stations, Democracy now itself. We are nonprofits and we survive on the listeners and viewers contributions. So think about it especially because you get yours matched.