Tag: Democracy Now!

I think that the key thing to understand about Bolsonaro is that he really comes not from this modern ‘alt-right’ movement of the type of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, but the Cold War far right that carried out enormous atrocities in the name of fighting domestic communism, which is what Bolsonaro believes his primary project to be. He recently vowed to cleanse the country of left-wing opposition, which he sees as a communist front. And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world.

Journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, speaking on Democracy Now! Monday about the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. (via democracynow)

I’ve never seen a purge operation this wide, this big. And this one thing that Stacey Abrams was mentioning during the debate, it’s not just the 53,000 names pending, it’s the 340,000 people purged. That is, their registrations have been canceled.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast, who is suing Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp over allegations of voter suppression and vote purging. Kemp is running for Governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. Read more coverage here: Greg Palast Sues Georgia’s Brian Kemp for Purging 340,000 from Voter Rolls Ahead of Election
(via democracynow)

Climate Scientist: California Wildfires Are Faster, Stronger, Deadlier & Will Continue to Intensify

Rob Nixon: Gov’t Inaction on Climate Change Is “Slow Violence” That Hits World’s Poor the Hardest

“Losing Earth”: How Humanity Came to Understand Climate Change & Failed to Act in Time

Extreme Weather Is Exploding Around the World. Why Isn’t the Media Talking About Climate Change?

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Of course Kavanaugh is going to overrule Roe v. Wade. They’ve got four votes already who are willing to uphold a Texas law that was just a sham law intended to shut down abortion clinics. Kavanaugh is going to be the fifth. He has criticized Roe v. Wade. He said that it was a freewheeling decision. He wrote an opinion just last year that took a very aggressive posture, said that the Trump administration could literally imprison women to delay their ability to have an abortion… There’s two Republican senators—Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski—who claim to be pro-choice. And at the very least, they want to have deniability if they vote for Kavanaugh. But there’s no deniability here. This guy is the fifth vote to overrule Roe v. Wade, period.

Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress on Trump’s nomination of right-wing Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Yesterday we spent the show looking at Kavanaugh’s record—watch or read the coverage here. (via democracynow)

democracynow:

Meet the Migrant Child Detention Center Whistleblower Now Speaking Out Against Family Separations

A youth care worker who quit his job at a Tucson detention center for unaccompanied minors is speaking out about inadequate facilities, untrained staff and inhumane policies, after witnessing the devastation of family separations firsthand. Antar Davidson says he quit after he was forced to tell three tearful children who were separated from their mother not to hug one another. The facility is run by Southwest Key, a nonprofit that operates 27 facilities and has recently signed a lease to detain hundreds of separated children, including many who are a younger than 12 years old, in what’s being called a “baby jail” in a former warehouse and homeless shelter in Houston.

Antar Davidson told Democracy Now!:

“I realized that if I were to continue with Southwest Key, at least here in this facility, that I’d be told to do things that were… against the code of all humans’ morality… We’re not talking about an organization that was good. We’re talking about an organization that, for the past five years, has made millions of dollars in basically the detention of youth.”

Watch the full interview here.

Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist. Everybody wants to think that if they were active during the time of lynching, they’d be rallying against and trying to prevent lynchings. Most of us believe that if we were alive and in a position to march in the 1950s, we’d be on the side of Dr. King. But today, we are in the face of all of these problems. One in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison. There are these constant shootings of unarmed black people. And the question is: If we’re not prepared to respond to these issues, if we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the first-ever national memorial to victims of lynching in the United States, in Montgomery, Alabama. See the full interview, starting with Part 1: “Talking About History Is Way We Liberate America”: New Memorial Honors Victims of White Supremacy
(via democracynow)

Look at what Western discourse says about what Palestinians are permitted to do… When Palestinians kill military soldiers occupying their land, they’re called terrorists. When Palestinians advocate a nonviolent boycott of Israel in order to pressure them to end the occupation, the way people did in the ‘80s successfully against the South African apartheid regime, that’s called anti-Semitism. When Palestinians nonviolently protest at the border, they’re accused of being agents of Hamas who deserve to be slaughtered. The discourse of the West is that Palestinians have no right to resist or protest this decades-long occupation. They don’t have a right to do so violently, and they have no right to do so nonviolently. The only thing Western discourse tells Palestinians they’re permitted to do is to meekly acquiesce and submit to and obey the dictates of the Israeli government. And I think the world is finally starting to wake up to the fact that this discourse is incredibly immoral and that Palestinians have just the same rights as everybody else to protest and resist.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, speaking today on Democracy Now!. Watch or read the full interview: “Apartheid, Rogue, Terrorist State”: Glenn Greenwald on Israel’s Murder of Gaza Protesters, Reporter
(via democracynow)