Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan People around the globe have been watching the blockbuster musical film “Wicked” this holiday season. Based on the Broadway musical, it serves as a backstory to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, casting that film’s villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, in a positive light, as a misunderstood and bullied child who goes on to challenge authority and expose wrong-doing. From the mid-1950s until the early 1990s, long before streaming platforms and video on demand, television audiences dependent on just a few major broadcast networks had to wait for the annual chance to see The Wizard of Oz. The much-anticipated special broadcast would typically air between Thanksgiving and Christmas, attracting millions of viewers across the country. This shared cinematic tradition popularized the fantastic tale of Dorothy, her dog Toto, and the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion. The film also brought global acclaim to its musical score, with iconic songs like “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” and the world-renowned classic, “Over the Rainbow.” Less well-known is the writer of the lyrics to those songs: E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. In an era of rising authoritarianism, growing inequality and an ascendant billionaire class, Yip Harburg’s socially-conscious songs, and his own struggle to overcome poverty during the Great Depression and then blacklisting during the McCarthy era – even as “The Wizard of Oz” gained fame – serve as both an inspiration and a warning. Yip Harburg was born in 1896 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to poor Jewish parents who fled the anti-semitic pogroms of eastern Europe along with so many others. In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin. They began a friendship that lasted a lifetime and shaped 20th-century American song and culture. Ernie Harburg, Yip’s son and co-author of the biography “Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?,” said in a 1996 interview on the Democracy Now! news hour, “Yip knew poverty deeply … it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.” Yip Harburg was deep in debt after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Gershwin suggested Harburg write song lyrics. Before long, he wrote the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which became a national hit and remains a timeless anthem for hard times, corporate greed and the dignity of working people: Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime? “The Wizard of Oz” was based on the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. Prior to the commercial success Baum enjoyed from the book, he worked an array of jobs, including a stint in South Dakota owning the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper, from 1890-91. There he wrote editorials, including two that called for genocide against indigenous people. Just days after the Wounded Knee massacre of December 29, 1890, in which an estimated 300 Lakota elders, women and children on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation were slaughtered by the US Army, Baum wrote, “Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians…wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” Yip Harburg’s writing, conversely, dignified the downtrodden, the working class, immigrants and other marginalized groups. These themes were central to the two Broadway hits Yip wrote, Bloomer Girl, about the women’s suffrage movement, and Finian’s Rainbow, which celebrated immigrants and the struggle against racism. His lyrics attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who led a deeply destructive “hunt” for communists within the government and leading institutions, including Hollywood studios. McCarthy was aided by the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn, who would later serve as mentor to a young Donald Trump. Yip Harburg was among hundreds of writers, actors and others banned from working in film and television for the duration of the 1950s. McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade were eventually discredited, and Harburg continued his creative human rights work, until his death in 1981, aged 84. Yip Harburg’s best-known and most loved work remains his lyrics for “The Wizard of Oz.” The film was released in the tumultuous year of 1939. Fascism was on the march in Europe and Asia, the economic impacts of the depression still plagued the working class, and racist Jim Crow laws oppressed millions of people of color. With just weeks from Donald Trump’s inauguration to his second term as president, and with a timely focus on challenging authority ushered in by the hit movie “Wicked,” now is a good time to recall the incredible work and lyrical lessons of Yip Harburg, the man who put the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Christmas marks the birth of Jesus of Nazareth over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, Palestine, in what is now the Israeli Occupied West Bank. The occasion is both solemn and celebratory. The Church of the Nativity now stands on the site considered to be Jesus’ birthplace, in an animal stable, where the newborn is believed to have been placed in a feeding trough, or manger, as depicted in creches the world over. “Christ in the Rubble” is the name of one such creche, located a short walk along an ancient stone-paved street from Jesus’ recognized birthplace, inside Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. There, the baby Jesus, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh, rests atop a pile of rubble, depicting Israel’s relentless attack on the people of Gaza. Last year, the pastor of that church, Reverend Isaac Munther, gave a sermon that went viral, called “Christ in the Rubble.” As the bombardment of Gaza nears its 450th day, and with well over 45,000 Palestinians killed there since October, 2023, Munther’s latest Christmas sermon was titled, Christ is Still in the Rubble. “‘Never again’ should mean never again to all peoples,” Munther said in his sermon. “‘Never again’ has become ‘yet again’ — yet again to supremacy, yet again to racism and yet again to genocide. And sadly, ‘never again’ has become yet again for the weaponization of the Bible and the silence and complicity of the Western church, yet again for the church siding with power, the church siding with the empire.” The reports from Gaza are grim. Israel continues to attack the besieged enclave’s ailing healthcare system, detonating remote-controlled explosives just outside the Kamal Adwan Hospital and forcing the removal of sick and wounded patients from the Indonesian Hospital. Israel also shelled the Al-Awda Hospital, one of the Gaza Strip’s main obstetric facilities. Jesus’ mother, Mary, was lucky to find a quiet stable in which to give birth. Now in Gaza, babies are delivered with a complete lack of sanitation, clean water, or proper medical care. Most agricultural infrastructure, including stables and mangers, have been systematically leveled in Gaza, in what Oxfam has labeled “the late stages of ethnic cleansing.” “So, today, after all this, of total destruction, annihilation,” Munther continued, “Gaza is erased — millions have become refugees and homeless, tens of thousands killed. And why is anyone still debating whether this is a genocide or not?” Expanding on his sermon, Rev. Issac Munther spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour. He said, “We’re still seeing images of children pulled from under the rubble. It’s unthinkable to me that it’s been more than 14 months now into this genocide, and we’re still seeing the same images. It seems like we’re powerless, and it seems that the world is content with letting this go on. And here in the West Bank, as we watch from Bethlehem what’s happening in Ramallah or Hebron, we wonder, 'Are we next?' Israel has made it clear they plan to annex the West Bank next year. What would this mean on the ground?” He added, “Our fear here in Bethlehem is that there is no one who’s going to hold Israel accountable.” Israel notoriously ignores international law, with full support, militarily and diplomatically, from the United States. South Africa, joined now by 14 other nations, has a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Gallant recently made a trip to Washington DC, where he met with high-ranking Biden administration officials, all of whom ignored the arrest warrant. Netanyahu, however, reportedly won’t attend the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, given that Poland says it will honor its obligations to enforce ICC arrest warrants. Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, wrote this week in the newspaper Haaretz, “Eighty years ago, Jews were given a choice between two legacies: Never again, the Jews will never face a similar danger, or – Never again, no one in the world will ever face a similar danger. Israel clearly chose the former option, with a fatal addition: After Auschwitz, Jews are permitted to do anything. Israel has implemented this doctrine in the past year as it never has before.” In one of only a handful of times in the last century, Christmas this year coincides with the first day of Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. In that spirit, let there be light. Let there be life. There must be a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, now.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Water is Life” became the anthem of the water protectors protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. Now, a cruel negative variant of that phrase applies to Gaza: “No water is death.” Two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been subjected to an Israeli military assault for close to 14 months, including the purposeful denial of water. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a damning, 184-page report on this manufactured water crisis, titled, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” The report details how Israel has systematically deprived water to Palestinians in Gaza, and quotes Israeli officials who, in their own words, define this crime as official policy. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9th, 2023, two days after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, “We are imposing a complete siege…No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and must act accordingly.” The Israeli military dutifully followed its orders, so much so that, on November 21st of this year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes. “What that statement of his [Gallant] and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent, and they were also carried out by the military and by the authorities,” Bill van Esveld, HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine Associate Director, who helped produce the report, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. What they said was actually what they did. That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. One of the ways that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water.” van Esveld went on to explain HRW’s damning conclusion, accusing Israel of genocide: “Extermination is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and indeed in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide, deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.” HRW has made this charge only three times previously in its almost 50 year history, as van Esveld explained: “it is not an accusation that we level lightly…We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017 and we found full blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 80s and we found genocide also in Rwanda.” The report details the many ways that Israel denies water, from its intentional destruction of water infrastructure, holding tanks, pipelines and desalination plants, to actively blocking donated water tanker trucks from entering the Gaza Strip. “The results are horrifying,” van Esveld said. “The lack of water kills you in a million different ways.” Babies die of dehydration, others die after unwashed wounds become infected, all while over a quarter of a million people suffer from skin diseases caused by the inability to bathe. While HRW’s report focuses specifically on the denial of water, their conclusion mirrors one made more broadly two weeks ago by Amnesty International when it became the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. “It’s a damning indictment of the United States’ failure to stop Israel’s violation,” Budour Hassan, an Amnesty International researcher, said on Democracy Now! when Amnesty’s report was released. “If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tool to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.” Efforts to halt US support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza continue. Palestinian American Ahmed Moor and others recently sued the US State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to enforce the Leahy Law, prohibiting military aid to foreign military units accused of human rights violations. “The basic conditions of life in Gaza aren’t being met,” Moor told Democracy Now!, “[a] policy that our government is supporting.” The people of Gaza need a permanent ceasefire now, an end to the flow of US arms to Israel, and a massive flow of clean water and humanitarian aid.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The Syrian government has been overthrown and dictator Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow. Assad, and before him, his father Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria with extreme brutality for over 50 years. “Syrians have been subjected to a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale,” said Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard in a statement following the government’s collapse at the hands of several rebel factions. “This historic opportunity must be now seized and decades of grave human rights violations redressed.” The people of Syria have taken to the streets, tearing down every visible remnant of Assad’s rule and opening up the regime’s countless prisons, freeing thousands from hellish confinement. The armed group that led the final offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was only a decade ago an al-Qaeda affiliate, and is still considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, the UK and Turkey. HTS’ leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who now goes by his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa, claims he is focused on rebuilding Syria inclusively. The question is, will the US, and major regional neighbors like Turkey and Israel allow Syrians to build the independent state they deserve? “The general atmosphere is an atmosphere of relief, of joy, of celebration, but also there is this background of apprehension, of uncertainty,” Marwa Al-Sabouni, Syrian architect and writer said on the Democracy Now! news hour, speaking from Homs just days after it was liberated by HTS’ lightning assault. “There are a number of dangers around us, mainly by foreign powers, looking at the map of Syria, proposing division, also planning the future of Syria, mostly by the vacuum and the absence of Syrians from the political scene due to the oppression.” Joseph Daher, Swiss-Syrian activist and scholar, also speaking on Democracy Now!, said, “For the first time in decades, Syrians have a hope for the future to build a more equal, democratic social society. Obviously, there is fear, but fear was existing for the past five decades…there will be a need to rebuild [a] democratic movement, new popular organization, trade unions, feminist organization, and to rebuild, basically, struggle from below, to build the possibility of an alternative political structure.” While the Syrian people react on the streets to their fragile new freedom, Israel has engaged in a fierce assault on Syria, with close to 500 strikes destroying what it says are military targets across the country, as well as sending troops deeper into territory it has occupied for decades, in the Golan Heights and on the slopes of Mount Hermon. “One should not ignore the fateful damage which this ugly pillage could entail in the long run,” Haaretz columnist and editorial board member Gideon Levy wrote on Thursday. “The damage to Israel resulting from seizing this territory is certain to come. These territorial swipes will be the pretext for another war…They end up as a sore that never heals.” Joseph Daher points to Turkey in the north of Syria, attacking the Kurdish population there, and Israel, as imminent threats to a new, free Syria. “Israel has no interest to see a democratization process in Syria, just as in the larger Middle East, because it knows it will bring more solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” Daher said, adding that the military strikes serve two purposes: “To make the future Syrian state weaker, and also send a political message to the future people that will be empowered [in] Syria, that any kind of hostile and belligerent position to Israel will be attacked.” In addition to Syrian factional rivalries and aggression from Israel, and Turkey, Russia has two major military bases in Syria which it hopes to maintain, and the United States also has troops deployed there. The US has occupied Syrian territory since at least 2016, ostensibly training and supplying various forces to combat the Islamic State but also to exert control over Syria’s oil fields. In a December 6th report to Congress, mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution, President Biden wrote, “a small presence of United States Armed Forces remains in strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces.” Like Israel, the US also bombed sites following Assad’s fall. The Pentagon’s Central Command, or CENTCOM, said in a press release it had “conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria, Dec. 8,” adding its usual claim, “there are no indications of civilian casualties.” The Syrian people are emerging from a half-century of repression and authoritarianism and close to 15 years of civil war that killed at least 500,000 and displaced as many as 14 million people. As Syrians rebuild their society, they will need global solidarity and grassroots support, to ensure that their new state does not fail.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Column — Biden's Pardon Power and the Last Federal Pot Prisoners by Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While many brace for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, let’s remember that until Monday, January 20th, Joe Biden is still president, with all the power that confers. The Constitution grants the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” to remedy a criminal justice system riddled with faults. One strong candidate for presidential clemency, as recently called for by Amnesty International USA, is 80-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota elder Leonard Peltier, who has been incarcerated for close to half a century for a crime he maintains he did not commit. This Thanksgiving weekend, when people across the US enjoy a holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between native people of Massachusetts and the English settler-colonists who would later violently displace them, President Biden should free Leonard Peltier. The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of genocide launched by Christopher Columbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was born. In 1973, AIM went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where a corrupt tribal government was working in league with federal and local authorities to violently suppress a growing movement to restore traditional practices – and to block extractive industries from exploiting traditional lands. More than 50 Lakota people and their allies were murdered there over a three year period. On June 26, 1975, Leonard Peltier was present at an AIM camp on the property of a targeted family. The camp was fired upon by unknown assailants, and the AIM members returned fire. In the ensuing minutes, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed. Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury agreed that they had fired in self-defense and acquitted them. Leonard Peltier, arrested later, was tried separately and convicted. Peltier’s trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, with the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony, and suppressed exculpatory evidence. When Peltier was on trial in 1976, Joe Biden, then a young US Senator, was a founding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was created after the explosive Church Committee hearings that investigated the unconstitutional and criminal conduct of the FBI and its “COINTELPRO” operations against civil rights leaders and organizations, including AIM. A global movement grew, demanding justice for Leonard Peltier. Human rights icons like South African President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his release, as did one of the federal judges involved, and, years later, one of the prosecutors who tried the case. Amnesty International has campaigned for Peltier’s release for decades. The group recently sent a letter to President Biden, reiterating their demand. “Over the decades at Amnesty, we have been calling on administration after administration to do the right thing by Leonard. He was in hospital in June, he was in hospital again in October. It’s time to give him a chance to spend his last days with his family and with his community,” Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. In late October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, to formally apologize for the US government’s treatment of indigenous children forced into boarding schools. “All told, hundreds and hundreds of Federal Indian Boarding Schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said. Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, responded on Democracy Now!, saying, “What this means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is a beginning of an era of repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land…He [Peltier] was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, in South Dakota. Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted.” If President Biden’s apology at Gila River was genuine, he could demonstrate it by commu

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan BAKU, Azerbaijan – COP29, the 29th United Nations’ “Conference of Parties” to the climate convention, convened this year in Azerbaijan, a small, authoritarian petrostate wedged between Russia and Iran on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The worsening climate catastrophe, fueled by the world’s centuries-long embrace of fossil fuels, demands a united, world-wide response from all nations, including authoritarian ones. But does the conference itself have to be held in a country where dissent is criminalized, protests are banned and there is no free press nor right to free speech? The world’s oil addiction arguably began in Baku. It was here, in 1846, that the first industrial oil well was drilled. As revolution swept through Europe and beyond in 1848, and Karl Marx’s newly-published Communist Manifesto reminded workers that they had nothing to lose but their chains, humanity was busily chaining itself to fossil fuels. More than 175 years later, our ever-increasing burning of coal, oil and gas has heated the planet with a cascade of catastrophic consequences, from more frequent and intense hurricanes and typhoons to wildfires, droughts, and tornadoes – increasing human suffering and driving mass migration. This crisis will only accelerate unless a comprehensive solution is negotiated, implemented and enforced on a global scale. Which brings us to Baku, and the fundamentally flawed decision to hold these vital talks in a place where speaking freely can get you arrested by the government of President Ilham Aliyev. “Azerbaijan has had an abysmal rights record for many years, but it has dramatically deteriorated in the run-up to COP29,” Giorgi Gogia of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He noted HRW has “documented 33 cases of arrests and imprisonment of journalists, activists, human rights defenders and government critics on various bogus charges…think about what this COP would have been like if they were there to voice their criticism, for their voices to be heard by the globe.” Others say the number of arrests prior to COP29 is closer to 300. Gubad Ibadoghlu, an anti-corruption economist who’s taught at the London School of Economics, is currently under house arrest. His crime? Demanding greater transparency in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas revenues. In July, 2023 Ibadoghlu and his wife were violently arrested. He faces up to 17 years in prison. Their daughter Zhala Bayramova was also arrested and tortured. “I’m a human rights lawyer, but I was also working as an activist, observing elections, writing cases to the European Court of Human Rights,” Zhala said on Democracy Now!, from outside Azerbaijan. “As a result of all this torture, I cannot sleep without a neck pillow, as they injured my neck discs. They also crushed my ribs and my kneecaps.” Zhala continued, “before Ilham Aliyev, it was his father who was also president of Azerbaijan, and during the Soviet Union, a KGB general. And Ilham Aliyev, it seems, is getting his son ready to succeed himself. His wife is the vice president of Azerbaijan. So, it’s more like a monarchy. It’s a family affair, in a sense, and they own everything.” The climate summit is housed in Baku’s main sports stadium and several adjoining temporary structures, in a secure space dubbed “the Blue Zone,” where the UN controls security and sets the rules. In this Potemkin village, protest is tolerated if pre-authorized and then only at specified locations and times; at one official site, protesters can make noise, give speeches, or even sing. At the other site, only silent protest is permitted, with allowances for soft humming and finger snapping, due to its proximity to meeting rooms, the UN says. But behind the closed doors of those meeting rooms, where the future of the planet’s climate is being decided, the more than 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists registered for COP29 are able to speak freely, to mingle with government delegations, to influence the course of the negotiations, uninterrupted by the silent protests outside. Global petroleum production and consumption are at an all-time high, while 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, trumping last year’s record heat. Science tells us that the worst impacts of the climate emergency still can be avoided, if urgent and ambitious action is taken. Autocrats like Ilham Aliyev, and aspiring autocrats like Donald Trump, love the wealth and power that flow from oil. Trump has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement…again. Grassroots movements and global solidarity will be needed as people fight the twin threats of authoritarianism and climate change in these coming crisis years. These difficult times recall the words of twentieth-century philosopher Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the Italian fascist Mussolini for twelve years, until his death. In his Prison Writings, translated from Italian, Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and th

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President-elect Donald Trump’s long history of vilifying immigrants is reaching a dark and likely violent escalation as he nominates to key White House cabinet and staff positions a slew of “America First” extremists and white supremacists. One of Trump’s central campaign pledges was to deport at least 12 million people, who he refers to as “illegals.” Trump’s election win drove up the stock prices of private prison corporations but it has also triggered grassroots mobilization to confront Trump’s cruel plans. “The United States is now an occupied country…nine days from now will be Liberation Day in America,” Trump said at his racist rally at Madison Square Garden (MSG) on October 27th. “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out…kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.” Except for Trump himself, no one in his circle spews anti-immigrant hate with more zeal than Stephen Miller, Trump’s nominee for Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. At that MSG rally, Miller warmed up the crowd, bellowing, “America is for Americans and Americans only!” Miller was the architect of the anti-immigrant policies during the first Trump administration, like the Muslim ban and family separations. He’s had four years to plot, and has developed a broad plan to deliver mass deportations. Miller detailed his plans last February, speaking at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference: “Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That’s very straightforward [with] a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies…You have ‘Remain in Mexico,’ finish the wall. You have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens. You do interior repatriation flights to Mexico, not back to the north of Mexico. It’s very important. You reimplement Title 42.” “Title 42” refers to a 1944 public health law that allows the president to restrict immigration and deport anyone deemed a health risk. It was deployed by Trump during the COVID pandemic and continued by President Biden into 2023. Miller continued, “The travel ban authority…You would bring those back and add new ones. You would establish large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.” “Staging grounds,” not to be confused with concentration camps. Trump’s also named a so-called “Border Czar,” Thomas Homan. Homan was Trump’s acting director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He’ll be in charge of Trump’s planned mass deportations. In an interview with 60 Minutes’ Cecilia Vega, Homan dodged the price tag of mass deportations: Vega: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year. Homan: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. Vega: Is that what American taxpayers should expect? Homan: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it? Vega: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? Homan: Of course there is. Families can be deported together. Homan was referring to deporting children who were born in the US, thus legal US citizens, with their undocumented parents. Trump also nominated South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to be Secretary of Homeland Security. She has scant national security experience yet several times deployed the South Dakota National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border in Texas. Trump, who plans to use the US military to mass deport, has nominated Pete Hegseth, a Fox News’ weekend host and military veteran, to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is known to have numerous white supremacist tattoos including a Christian nationalist “Jerusalem cross” inspired by the Crusaders. People are organizing across the country in advance of this coming wave of raids, roundups, concentration camps and mass deportations. Alejandra Pablos is a reproductive justice community organizer and storyteller based in Arizona, who successfully fought against her own deportation for a decade. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, she described her efforts with a rapid response network, “working with people on the ground, trying to inform folks on their rights and what they could do to protect each other.” The ACLU has prepared for a year, and has teams of lawyers ready to fight Trump and his deportation team in court. Trump, Miller, and Homan have tried mass deportations before. They were met with massive resistance, in the streets and in the courts. The opposition forced Trump to reverse an executive order, halting the separation of families. The challenge now is for people with the privilege and protections of US citizenship to act in solidarity with the millions of our threatened, undocumented neighbors, and confront Trump’s planned mass depo

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Donald Trump will become President of the United States on Monday, January 20th, 2025. Until that time, though, President Joe Biden remains in the Oval Office. Biden spoke to his cabinet and staff Thursday in a Rose Garden address: “Now we have 74 days to finish the term, our term. Let’s make every day count. That’s the responsibility we have to the American people.” There is much Biden can and should do in this “lame duck” period, before disappearing over the horizon in one final trip aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One (unless he takes the train to Delaware, as he proudly did throughout his Senate career). He has a narrow window in which to act, and could do significant good, repairing some of his own mistakes and blunting some of what Donald Trump has pledged will begin on Day One. First and most importantly, Biden should suspend all arms shipments to Israel. Period. Not one more bomb, not one more bullet. Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is increasingly described as outright, livestreamed genocide. The Israeli military is now forcing the entire population of the northern quarter of the Gaza Strip to leave for the south. This follows the release of “The Generals’ Plan,” drafted by retired Israeli military officers, calling for the systematic denial of humanitarian aid in the north, which has been labeled ethnic cleansing. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week, “The army has begun the stage of cleansing the northern Strip while it prepares to hold onto the area for a long time to come.” Israel is using US taxpayer-funded arms to decimate Palestinians in Gaza, in clear contravention of US and international law. The people of Gaza are trapped, under siege, surrounded by the Israeli army and navy, with armed drones, helicopters and military jets overhead. They are being driven from their homes, starved, bombed, shot by snipers, killed by tank shells, and forced to live without clean water, sanitation, functioning hospitals, or the basics of survival. Every aspect of their society, their culture, their history, is being erased by Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and by smiling, selfie-snapping IDF demolition crews. None of this would have been possible without Biden’s support. Haaretz also reported, in early September, that a “senior air force official told Haaretz that without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.” A leaked letter to Israel from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanded Israel immediately allow US humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza or face an interruption in arms shipments. They gave Israel until November 13th to comply. But the laws governing arms shipments don’t include a month-long grace period; the cessation is supposed to be immediate. Nevertheless, as the deadline approaches, and with the situation in northern Gaza becoming more catastrophic by the day, it seems that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch Trump ally, has no intention of allowing in aid. Domestically, Biden could preempt some of the violence expected from the incoming Trump administration. Biden promised to end the federal death penalty when he was campaigning in 2020, after President Trump ordered the execution of 13 federal death row prisoners in his final six months in office. With the stroke of a pen, Biden could commute the sentences of the forty current federal death row prisoners to life in prison. This would empty federal death row, denying Trump the opportunity to engage in another killing spree. Biden could also commute the sentences of the four prisoners awaiting execution on the US military’s death row. Biden could also impact Trump’s anticipated mass deportation that was a central pledge of his campaign. Law professors Peter Markowitz and Lindsay Nash from the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York have revived an argument proposed by scores of advocacy groups in the waning days of the Obama administration, that “the President possesses the constitutional authority to categorically pardon broad classes of immigrants for civil violations of the immigration laws and to thereby provide durable and permanent protections against deportation.” Biden could act on the admittedly novel legal theory, by granting millions of undocumented immigrants relief from the myriad and often violently inflicted injustices of the US’s failed immigration policies. Such a move would certainly be challenged in court, but would potentially slow down what will almost certainly be a horrendous attempt by Donald Trump to deport up to 12 million US residents. People are organizing now on how to resist the incoming Trump administration. Biden could join them, by using the constitutional powers of the office of the President of the United States, the most powerful positi