We are on a 100 city tour.
I think it's hard to say what city we're at now.
We did a benefit earlier today for a radio station that summed up how I feel, which was
the station you probably know in Olympia called Chaos.
Another great Pacific Northwest institution.
We started with the idea of covering the election in a way that went beyond the daily horse
race, the daily pole watching, and now it's morphed since that famous macaque moment in
Virginia years ago into this, the daily gaff watch.
Which one of these tired, constantly monitored and videotaped candidates is going to say
the wrong thing or which one of their proxies utters an outrage.
Of course they do and it's relevant and needs probing for the bigger picture, but really
what's happening with this collection of more than 300 million people that goes beyond what
these networks serve up to us in between a barrage of negative ads funded by secretive
organizations.
That's what's happening in the swing state where I live, Colorado.
Also where marijuana will be decriminalized.
It's already available for patients there.
But the, so this course of the tour followed loosely the swing states and it doesn't follow
it strictly, but we started in Florida at the Republican convention and Amy and I have
been more or less on the road since August 25th or so with a few stops and two stops
in New York and one in Denver where I live as part of the trip.
But the trip went from Florida to North Carolina, the Democratic convention.
Then we went, well in Florida interestingly there was, you know we now have this Franken
storm bearing down on the east coast.
The perfect, more perfect storm than the perfect storm.
And I was, like I do every morning, I was watching Fox and Friends this morning.
And they're just wondering what's going to happen.
Is it really going to cost, how are the Democrats going to use the storm to steal the election?
So the, or I think it was that it's going to interrupt the early voting, which of course
is a Democratic plot.
So at any rate, the, back in August we had a hurricane threatening the Republican convention
and while the Republicans canceled the first day of their convention, the protesters who
were there did not cancel.
Much like protesters here in the Pacific Northwest, it takes more than some rain to deter the
fight for justice.
So we went to a drenched protest encampment called Romneyville.
There were many people there, Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Sherry Honkalo
was there, many people working with her from the Kensington Welfare Rights Association
and others.
And we met four people from Freeport, Illinois, workers at a automobile parts plant.
They made, they make sensors for automatic transmission.
So fairly high tech electronic components to cars that millions of people rely on.
And those parts are made in Freeport at a plant owned by a company called Sensata Technologies.
It was for many decades owned by Honeywell and most of these people are from this town.
They went to high school there, they got out of high school, they got a job at the plant
and had worked there for 20 years, 30 years and one woman had been there for 43 years.
And after Honeywell sold the plant to this company called Sensata, the new employers
said we're going to be shipping your jobs within the year to China.
Certain of those employees had to go to China to train their replacement workers.
A lot of the specialized manufacturing equipment was unbolted from the floor and started being
shipped to China and some of those Chinese workers were brought over to the plant in
Freeport to actually, to learn, to get training.
And we met these workers in Tampa at Romneyville and they were very clear they didn't bear
any ill will against the replacement workers.
They knew that they were just being played against each other in the kind of the chase
for the most profit from their labor.
But they did hope that either of the two major party candidates could help them save their
jobs.
They asked Mitt Romney to save their jobs in part because Sensata Technologies is a
wholly owned subsidiary of Bain Capital.
And they thought he might have some influence with them as he and his running mate pledged
to create 12 million jobs, this 175 jobs paying at about $14 or $15 an hour after decades
of work there would be a leg up.
It's a good strong start to 12 million by saving 175.
But after the Romneyville, after the DNC, they went back to Freeport to go back to their
jobs and we went on the tour, went across Pennsylvania, Ohio.
We went to Michigan, drove through Chicago, an hour after the Chicago teachers union strike
ended, which added an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm to our event and we got to
interview Karen Lewis, the Karen, I know it's been such a long trip, the president of the
Chicago teachers union the following morning.
And then due to gross mismanagement on my part, we actually had a night off from the
tour.
So Amy's like, what can we do?
And I was like, well, so we discussed it.
It turns out that Freeport, Illinois, where these workers were from, was only two hours
west of Chicago.
So and by that point, those workers had actually created another encampment in Freeport across
from their factory.
It was called Bainport.
So about 10 of them, 10 or 15 of these workers had set up tents on the county fairgrounds
directly across from the Sensata plant, which actually Sensata was so intent on just stripping
the company and shutting it down that they didn't even take down the Honeywell sign.
So it's still there.
But the so we went and visited, got there about 1030 at night and they were some of
them were still around the campfire.
Some of them had to get up at 5am to go to their shift.
Others at 7am.
A guy that we had on the show got off his second shift.
So he got off at 11.
So we caught him for a few minutes that night.
And then we met a satellite truck three or four in the morning, set up an ad hoc studio
in the field and broadcast those interviews from the field across with the plant in the
background.
And so it was, I think, an example of the kind of coverage that we're attempting to
do on this 100 City Tour around the country.
So it is a book tour, the Silence Majority, Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance
and Hope with that nice photo of Amy on the cover.
It's put out by a great nonprofit small press called Haymarket Books, of course named after
the martyrs who were executed during the struggle for the eight hour workday in Chicago.
And it's printed by a union print shop.
And so we're very happy with the book and invite you to take it home or give it as a
gift.
We're planning after in the lobby, I believe.
And Amy and I will stick around as long as it takes to meet all of you.
It's a collection of columns.
I'm going to, if I'm not sure what is the status of the Seattle PI, it was in the PI
in years past and then it's, I don't know if it's still readily available on a weekly
basis in print here in Seattle.
But the collection of columns is about three years worth.
It's 300 and something pages.
And it really, for me, is already turned into a great reference on kind of where we as a
country and a world have been in the past three years, during the Obama administration.
I'll read a sample just to give you a flavor of the book.
But it's really my privilege to work with Amy Goodman on this every week on these special
projects at Democracy Now.
These live broadcasts are always kind of, when we're traveling, it's always crazy.
We have help from some of the producers and staff come along producing these expanded
presidential debates that we've been having are pretty complex and technically complex.
This morning, we broadcast from Portland and had been meaning to bring this long form speech
from Noam Chomsky to the public.
And so we did that today.
But as an example, like this is what can go wrong.
The studio that we use, it's both radio, TV, which is kind of a difficult production style
to make audio that runs for TV, that also runs well on radio.
And we also use a teleprompter for the TV.
And the studio didn't have one, so we actually have one in the trunk.
And I had to throw it together at 4 a.m.
And there were some snafus with the prompter getting it together.
And our wonderful general manager, Julie Crosby, whose partner Rebecca is here somewhere tonight.
Nice to see you out there today, Rebecca.
Julie and Rebecca's family, including our brilliant IT manager, John Wallach, is here.
Well, Julie called me at 20 minutes before the show goes live, which is, you know, with
a live broadcast at 20 minutes out, you better be right on, you're ready to go.
And she said, just checking in, I noticed the camera appears to be on its side on the
floor right now.
And it was.
And I was messing with this contraption.
And anyway, as it turns out, we got it together with minutes to go.
And the show did go on.
When we were in on Columbus Day, so-called, the Indigenous Peoples Day, October 8th of
this year, we were in Durango.
There's a college there, Fort Lewis College, that graduates.
It has a history, first as an oppressive boarding school, but it's kind of that was used to
assimilate Indigenous young people.
But now it's become a school that's more true to their interests and aspirations and graduates
the highest number of bachelor level people who identify as Indigenous or Native American
out of all the institutions.
We were there broadcasting KBCS as a great sister station, KDUR, so we were doing an
event there.
And the students and faculty and staff had created a day of programming to counter the
myth of Christopher Columbus called the Real History of the Americas.
And our goal was to, we did the broadcast that morning with some of those organizers
and speakers to kind of share what they were doing with the audience.
And I got there at 3 a.m. to meet the satellite truck.
And our host from the, to set up, you know, had to set up lights, cables, cameras, teleprompter,
get the satellite truck going, everything, microphones, all the work that has to happen
between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.
So at 3 a.m., our host at the building said, we can't go in yet, which is not what you
want to hear at 3 a.m.
And this was in the high country of Colorado, and where I spend a lot of time.
And she said, at least not until that bear gets off the loading dock.
So that was another add that to the things that can go wrong.
And then her two cubs appeared out of the dumpster.
But eventually they were convinced with a lot of hand clapping and shouting to wander
off.
And really, it's only like having, living out there, I know that our snowpack was very
light last year.
The bears woke up early, they're hungry, there's a drought, so they don't have a lot of food.
So they risk their lives crossing our busy roads to pick through our trash.
So it's unfortunate, you know, and it's probably another emblem of the climate havoc that we're
wreaking that these bears have to do that.
But that show went off as well.
So we're always happy when the show goes off live at the appropriate hour.
So here's a quick example, then I'll bring Amy out.
This is from May of this year.
It's called Memorial Day, honor the dead, heal the wounded, stop the wars.
And I mentioned this because the other night I read it, and it was in Palo Alto, where
there were two gold star mothers, mothers whose sons have been killed in our current
ongoing wars.
One is fairly well known, Mary Tillman, whose son, Pat Tillman, was killed.
And the other one, I think, is, Amy will tell you her name, Meredith, her last name is Meredith,
her son was killed in Iraq on Memorial Day.
And that was two days after we spoke in Oakland, where another veteran was present, Scott Olson,
who's been on Democracy Now.
He was protesting as part of Occupy Oakland.
And you probably remember when he was shot in the head by a Oakland police projectile
and suffered serious head injuries.
He's fine.
He's well enough to be speaking here in Seattle on Veterans Day, Sunday, November 11th, 430,
730 at the Seattle Labor Temple.
So you can probably get information.
It's a benefit for Coffee Strong, the soldier support cafe outside of Fort Lewis-McChord.
So check out that information and come here, Scott Olson.
All that is just a lead in to this column.
General John Allen, commander, U.S. forces Afghanistan, spoke Wednesday at the Pentagon,
four stars on each shoulder, his chest bedecked with medals.
Allen said the NATO summit in Chicago, which left him feeling heartened, was a powerful
signal of international support for the Afghan-led process of reconciliation.
Unlike Allen, many decorated U.S. military veterans left the streets of Chicago after
the NATO summit without their medals.
They marched on the paramilitarized convention center where the generals and heads of state
had gathered and threw their medals at the high fence surrounding the summit.
They were joined by women from Afghans for Peace and an American mother whose son killed
himself after his second deployment to Iraq.
Leading thousands of protesters in a peaceful march against NATO's wars, each veteran climbed
to the makeshift stage outside the fenced summit, made a brief statement, and threw
his or her medals at the gate.
As taps were played, veterans folded an American flag that had flown over NATO military operations
in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya and handed it to Mary Kirkland.
Her son, Derek, joined the Army in January 2007 since he was not earning enough to support
his wife and child as a cook at an IHOP restaurant.
During his second deployment, Mary told Democracy Now!, he ended up putting a shotgun in his
mouth over there in Iraq and one of his buddies stopped him.
He was transferred to Germany and then back to his home base at Fort Lewis, Washington.
She said, he came back on a Monday after two failed suicide attempts in a three-week period.
They kept him overnight at Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis.
He met with a psychiatrist the next day who deemed him to be low to moderate risk for
suicide.
Five days later, on March 19, 2010, he hanged himself.
Said his mother, Derek was not killed in action.
He was killed because of failed mental health care at Fort Lewis.
On stage, Lance Corporal Scott Olson declared, today I have with me my Global War on Terror
Medal, Operation Iraqi Freedom Medal, National Defense Medal, and Marine Corps Good Conduct
Medal.
These medals, once upon a time, made me feel good about what I was doing.
I came back to reality and I don't want these anymore.
Like the riot police flanking the stage, many on horseback, Olson also wore a helmet.
He is recovering from a fractured skull after being shot in the head at close range by a
beanbag projectile.
He wasn't shot in Iraq, but by Oakland, California police at Occupy Oakland last fall, 2011,
where he was protesting.
On stage with the veterans were three Afghan women holding the flag of Afghanistan.
Just before they marched, Democris now asked one of them, Soraya Sahar, why she was there.
She said, I'm representing Afghans for peace and we're here to protest NATO and call on
all NATO representatives to end this inhumane, illegal, barbaric war against our home country
and our people.
It's the first time an Afghan-led peace movement is now working side by side with a veteran-led
peace movement.
And so this is the beginning of something new, something better, reconciliation and
peace, she said.
The night before the protests and the summit, General Allen threw out the first pitch at
the Crosstown Classic baseball game between Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs.
Members of the teams joked that General Allen could join them in the dugout if he would
only quit his day job.
We dare say the members of the Iraq veterans against the war wish he would.
After the march and the return of the medals, Amy caught up with Kirkland's mourning mother
as she embraced her new family, those who were protesting the wars that had taken the
life of her son.
Amy asked if she had any message for President Obama and the NATO generals.
This quiet, soft-spoken woman from Indiana didn't hesitate.
She said, honor the dead, heal the wounded, stop the wars.
And it was Karen Meredith who introduced herself to us in Palo Alto whose son, First Lieutenant
Ken Ballard, was killed while serving in Iraq, she told me, on Memorial Day.
And she asked Amy and me to sign this page of her book.
And it was one of those moments on the tour that stick with you.
The intro I could have written for Amy would not compare in any way with this, which is
a forward contributed by a long-term friend of Amy's.
It's written by Michael Moore.
So I'll bring her out with some words from Michael Moore, because why not?
I have to say I met Amy not far from here.
I was at the Indy Media Center in 99.
Was anyone here during that?
I know.
So it was, I think it's very appropriate to be introducing her these years later.
But it was my privilege to be here with all of you protesting against the WTO back then.
Michael Moore says, I first met Amy Goodman in the first month of the first Palestinian
Intifada.
It's where I usually go to meet people.
You throw an Intifada?
I'm there.
And so is Amy.
In fact, if you're in the middle of any sort of rebellion, revolution, uprising, or you're
just getting the familiar everyday ass whoopin' by forces that seem much greater than yours,
that is where you'll find the fearless Amy Goodman.
It's safe to say that she lives by the promise Tom Joad made to his mother at the end of
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
I'll be everywhere.
Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.
Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there.
If there's one thing you can trust, it's that Amy Goodman will always be there.
The weeks we spent together in the West Bank and Gaza were, to say the least, quite harrowing,
and yet they had a profound impact on both of us.
It was just after Christmas 1987, and the Palestinian people had decided to rise up
and resist their Israeli minders with protests, civil disobedience, and stones.
Stones.
Ah, remember the days of stones?
Such an innocent time it was back then.
Ralph Nader had asked a group of us, mostly writers and journalists, to go over to the
occupied territories and bring back to the American public the truth about what was really
going on.
Little did we know that we would be witnessing the first weeks of what sadly is now a 25-year-long
resistance.
Here's the dominant image in my head of Amy Goodman during that month in Palestine, when
the Israeli soldiers started firing their rubber bullets at us and a group of unarmed
Palestinians, we would all run the other way, i.e. away from the bullets.
And Amy Goodman would be running the opposite way, straight into the melee.
She appeared as if she were invincible, and while I did not want to imply she's some sort
of superhero with supernatural powers, I will say that I'm glad she's on our side, and leave
it at that.
Two years later in 1990, Amy Goodman and fellow journalist Alan Nairn traveled to East Timor
to cover their independence movement, and it was there that she personally witnessed
the murder and massacre of 270 Timorese civilians by the Indonesian Army.
And for bearing witness to this horrific event, she and Alan were beaten by the Army officials.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be present while 270 people are being killed.
But there was Amy again on the front lines, searching out the truth at great personal
risk.
Amy is a serious journalist who has won many of the nation's top journalism honors, including
the George Polk Award, the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Award, and the Robert
F. Kennedy Journalism Award, among others.
Amy's daily television and radio show, Democracy Now, is currently in its 16th year.
Now on Earth, she and her remarkable team pull this together day after day is beyond
me.
When I did a weekly TV show, I wanted to throw myself into the East River at the end of every
week.
Michael Moore goes on, I have been on her show many times, and I have seen backstage
the incredible professional operation they have over there in downtown Manhattan.
I don't know if they give tours like they do in NBC, but I would put the Demarxio headquarters
on any intelligent tourist must-see list.
And we do give tours.
This book contains many of Amy's commentaries and columns over the past years.
It is fascinating reading, a true chronicle of our times, and a real head-shaker as you
read it and wonder, how is it we're still here?
Back in early 1988, as we traveled the back roads of the West Bank, going from one village
to another, there was much that we saw that would make even the most committed among us
give up hope beset with the knowledge that true justice seemed like a faraway destination.
After all, this was a struggle between a massive military machine that had nuclear weapons
and children with slingshots.
Who wins that fight?
Well there was a day a long, long time ago when an oppressed people had a young boy with
a slingshot, and that boy used that slingshot, and for that, his people would be free.
So we didn't leave Palestine in total despair.
In fact, we were deeply inspired by the will and determination of the people we met, people
who had nothing, people who were in it for the long haul and had no intention of giving
up.
It was a good lesson for us to learn.
It would be another two years before I'd release my first film, Roger and Me, and it would
be eight more years before Democracy Now would go on the air.
We became committed to doing our best with the slingshots we have.
That's from Michael Moore, very kind words, I think, that eloquently sum up what I know
about Amy Goodman, a committed, disciplined, courageous journalist.
She was on that trip with another colleague who's here tonight, Brenda Murad, who Democracy
Now stole from Seattle and now works for many years with us in Democracy Now.
So thank you, Brenda.
And in tribute to KBCS, which is a slingshot of sorts that you have, that you have to care
for and use, please welcome Amy Goodman.
Wow.
Well, it is such a great honor to be here with all of you, to be here back at Town Hall,
to be celebrating KBCS and the wonderful work that your community radio station does.
Do not take it for granted.
KBCS has now just bought a new antenna, which will extend its reach to have a 40% larger
audience, which is thrilling, heading up to Spokane.
To be a part of that essential, well, I see it as a kitchen table.
I see the media as a 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 service men and women of this country,
especially on this 11th anniversary of the longest war in US history, the war in Afghanistan.
They can't have these debates on military bases.
They rely on us and civilian society to have the discussions that lead to the decisions
about whether they will live or die, whether they will be sent to kill or be killed.
Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.
So I want to thank KBCS for being there, for broadcasting Democracy Now.
I hope you pick up gobs of these flyers that show where Democracy Now broadcasts, but it's
also a way to get a lay of the land of independent media.
KBCS and KPTK and KSER and Bremerton Kitsap TV, Channel 12 and 3, Fuget Sound, Access
Comcast Channel 77, Satellite TV, Free Speech TV and Link TV.
These are a part of the independent landscape, media landscape in this country.
Democracy Now started, oh, 16 years ago as the only daily election show in public broadcasting
on a few dozen community radio stations.
We thought we'd only go until the election, but then after the election there was more
demand for the broadcast than before and it started to grow.
And the week of September 11, 2001, we went on one community television station, Manhattan
Neighborhood Network in New York City, because it had a line to the community media center
we were working in, an old firehouse just blocks from ground zero.
We were the closest national broadcast to the attacks.
We went on as emergency broadcasting and then public access stations around the country
started asking, can we run Democracy Now?
So we would send out, I didn't want to send it snail mail because it's breaking news,
so at least FedEx it.
And we would pack these huge garbage bags filled with, believe it or not, video cassettes
and the FedEx guys would come and they'd lug these bags away.
And that's how we were first broadcasting Democracy Now on television.
And each time we went on TV station, a local community station, and then NPR station would
ask can we broadcast Democracy Now?
And then the PBS stations were saying, how about us?
And now 16 years later we're broadcasting on over 1,100 public radio and television
stations around the country and around the world.
There is a hunger for independent, authentic voices.
Instead of what you get on the networks, that small circle of pundits who know so little
about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.
This trip has been amazing.
As Dennis said, it's a 100 city tour.
We're somewhere in the 60s there.
And the other day someone asked me, what city are you at?
I said, I think it's 60.
And they said, you only have 40 more to go?
I found that a very negative comment.
The first station we did a fundraiser for was WSLR in Sarasota, Florida.
We were about 20 minutes late.
We just come from the Republican convention.
And I said to Dennis, oh my gosh, by at this rate, the first station, 20 minutes late,
by the 100th city, we will be months late.
We didn't do too bad today, although I don't know how you guys do it.
Starting from Olympia here, what should have been, what, an hour, it became three and a
half hours.
My God, talking about a large parking lot.
But the trip, the journey has been remarkable.
One of the places we went to before the first presidential debate was Blacksburg, Virginia,
Virginia Tech, where we spoke to Colin Goddard.
He's one of the survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre that took place in 2007.
He came down to back to his alma mater when we were there.
And he showed us Norris Hall, which was the site of the worst part of the massacre.
He was shot four times in his hips and in his shoulders.
And he took me through the cinderblock tiled floor hallway of the typical college building.
And then we came on the walkway, which was where the killings took place.
And they've now turned it into a center for peace and nonviolence and taken away the numbers
on the room where he had taken his French class.
He wasn't going to go to class that day.
He was going to go to breakfast instead with his friend.
But then his conscience got the better of him.
And as usual, he was late to class, but he did get in.
His French professor rolled her eyes because there was Colin rolling in late.
But there was a student later than him.
And it was Karen, who is the best student in the class.
He'd never beat her to class.
She was frazzled.
She said that the authorities had kept her in her dorm because there had been a shooting
in the dorm earlier in the morning.
And they were all shocked.
They said, shooting?
What are you talking about?
And they heard this fast snap, snap, snap of bullets.
But they didn't know it was that.
They thought it was maybe construction outside.
But then it came closer.
And the French professor looked out the door and turned back and said to the class, jump
under your desks now.
And she was shot and killed.
And Colin was under his desk.
He pulled out his next telephone.
He said he had never done this before.
Called 911 on his phone.
He said, quick, Norris Hall.
There's been a shooting.
And they said, Norris Hall, where's that?
And he said, Norris Hall, Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech, where's that?
He said, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Blacksburg?
He said, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia?
He didn't know where he was calling when he called 911.
And somehow the phone got knocked out of his hand.
And he later learned that the young woman under the desk next to him had grabbed it
and was then narrating to the authorities.
Somehow she had made it through what was taking place.
And he saw the camouflage pants of the shooter come in.
And that's when he felt the pain in his own body.
But he was lucky, though you can't call it lucky, because there were 16 people
in his classroom, including his professor.
Only seven survived.
But then before I spoke to Colin, I talked to Nikki Giovanni, the great poet.
And I went to her office, the university distinguished poet professor.
And she was full of being.
She was so excited because, well, just about now at Virginia Tech,
she was planning a big celebration of Toni Morrison, her friend.
She lost her son, Slade, who Toni Morrison had dedicated Sula to.
And so she just wanted to make Toni Morrison happy.
She wanted to celebrate her life, even as she mourned the death of her son.
And she said, so me and Doc, she was making phone calls
as we were setting up the cameras.
She said, me and Doc, prepare the celebration.
I said, who's Doc?
She said, Dr. Maya Angelou.
So can you imagine together in the big auditorium at Virginia Tech taking place
just about now, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison.
So she was excited.
And we talked about her poetry, her craft, her activism.
And I knew she didn't like to talk about the shooting.
But there's something so intimate about appropriate technology, radio
and television, not the satellite studios, but being, well,
Virginia Woolf described it well, in a room of one's own.
And there, Professor Giovanni was.
And I asked her.
And she said, well, I was in San Francisco right before the shooting.
And she said, I just felt something.
And I was there for a meeting.
I said, I'm leaving.
And they said, but you just got here.
Should I know?
I'm going home.
She didn't know what was going to take place.
It didn't happen yet.
And she flew home.
And when she landed in Virginia, she was racing to the Blacksburg exit
in her car.
But there was a TV broadcast car that was racing 120 miles an hour past her.
And she thought something's happened.
She turned on the radio.
And she heard the news that there had been a massacre.
She saw the police at the Blacksburg exit.
She wasn't able to pull off there.
And she said, it's Joe.
It's Joe, her poetry student.
She had taught the shoot of poetry.
And she had described him as mean and menacing.
In the class, he wore sunglasses, wore a hat over his face.
She couldn't reach him.
I mean, she had taught many difficult students, kids with autism, kids with Tourette's.
That wasn't the issue.
She even felt challenged and invigorated.
She was a teacher after all.
She is a professor.
But she said she could not reach this young man.
She was scared of him.
And she said, I want you out of my class.
He said, you can't make me.
She said, you're right.
If you don't leave, I quit.
And she told that to her heads of the department.
This was a year before the shooting.
He went on to stalk and harass young women on campus.
He was institutionalized.
How was it conceivable that he could legally get a gun?
And that's why Colin Goddard was there.
Colin was extremely compassionate about Joe.
He said, how is it he didn't get help?
How is it every red flag that could have gone up went up?
This wasn't a person who just snapped.
Everyone knew he was trouble.
How could he legally get a gun?
And that's why Colin Goddard is devoting his life now.
He's in Washington at the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, founded by Jim Brady, the press
secretary of President Ronald Reagan.
With the attempted assassination of President Reagan, Jim Brady was shot through the head.
And he and his wife, Sarah, set up the Brady Campaign.
And they have led with Colin a campaign to get the presidential debate moderators to
ask a question about gun violence, especially the first presidential debate that was taking
place at the University of Denver.
I mean, Denver, Colorado, down the road from Aurora just a few months before the killings
at the movie theater and a decade ago, Columbine.
Why would it be so tough?
They got tens of thousands of names.
But Jim Lehrer, the PBS moderator of the first debate, ultimately didn't ask that question.
Though in the second debate, the town hall debate in Hofstra University, it wasn't one
of the moderators.
It was one of the regular people who ask a question about gun violence.
And this goes to an issue larger than gun violence, but to who controls the democratic
and electoral process?
Who were the forces and the powers that be, for example, going to the issue of the power
of the National Rifle Association?
So we went from Blacksburg, Virginia.
And I encourage you to watch that amazing show with Professor Giovanni and Colin Goddard.
We flew to Denver because we were going to cover the debate.
We were going to broadcast the debate, and that's just what we did.
You know, it took place at the University of Denver, so we set up just down the road
in Littleton at a Comcast facility.
We went online that day, and we looked up how the workers were decorating the set, because
we wanted ours to look just like theirs.
And we saw the bright blue backdrop with the writing, and Democracy Now's backdrop says
democracynow.org all over it.
It looked perfect.
We set it up.
And then we saw that they had these podiums.
And so we went out and rented podiums that looked kind of like the presidential debate
podiums.
I want to thank Brenda Murad, my colleague, who was dressing it up through the day.
The Comcast workers got so into this.
And why were we doing this?
We were expanding the debate.
We invited the third party presidential candidates to participate in the debate.
How is it that the debates have gotten so narrow?
Do you remember decades ago, or for young people, you remember reading about it in the
history books when the League of Women Voters used to control the debates?
A truly independent body?
And then in the 1980s, somehow the control of these debates, after they included a third
party presidential candidate in one of them, just got wrested from the ladies, right?
And given to the big boys, to the major political parties.
They took over the debate.
Most people don't know this.
You think that it's run by this independent commission on presidential debates.
The CPD sounds sort of governmental body or an independent body.
Uh-uh.
It's run by the two parties.
What happened to the League is the two parties handed them a 12-page secret contract and
said, you've got to sign this.
They said, we will not only not sign that, but they hold a news conference and release
the secret contract to the public.
And that was the end of them.
So the two parties took over.
Frank Farakoff was the head of the Republican Party at the time.
He headed the Republican side.
He still does.
And Paul Kirk headed the Democratic Party at the time.
He headed it then.
Now it's Mike McCurry, the former press secretary for Bill Clinton, who's the chief, one of
the chief lobbyists for the telecoms in this country.
He runs the Democratic side.
This is such a good bet for the two parties to keep out all the others.
And Frank Farakoff appreciates a good bet because he is the executive director of the
American Gaming Association.
He's the chief lobbyist for gambling in this country.
That's who runs the debates.
And multi-page secret contracts are signed.
We usually don't know what they are.
This year, Time Magazine got ahold of one and released it right before the last debate.
And this private corporation is funded by private corporations like, oh, Anheuser-Busch
funds the debates, the International Bottled Water Association funds the debates.
But interestingly, a big citizens movement is challenging this and trying to wrest back
control of the debates.
And this year, this year, in the last month or two, the YWCA has pulled out from supporting
these debates.
Phillips North America has pulled out of supporting these debates.
So when we were setting up our debate studio to be parallel to the one at University of
Denver, I wasn't sure whether we should put Bud Light on the podiums or should it be bottled
water?
We couldn't decide.
But we did know we were having the third party candidates.
And we had Dr. Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party.
We had Rocky Anderson, the presidential candidate of the Justice Party, the former mayor of
Salt Lake City.
We invited Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, who's the libertarian candidate,
but he declined.
So we had the two podiums just like they had the two podiums.
And that night we began our broadcast.
And it was broadcasting on PBS stations.
Democracy Now now broadcasts on scores of PBS stations, some of the largest in the country,
like KQED in San Francisco runs a number of times a day.
We just went on the Howard University PBS station in Washington.
And we're broadcasting throughout the country on every level of public media and of course
at democracynow.org.
So the debate began and Jim Lehrer, the moderator of the debate and the PBS NewsHour anchor
welcomed everyone to the University of Denver.
And I think he said that President Obama won the coin toss.
So he would answer the first question on the economy.
He said, President Obama, you have two minutes and President Obama spoke and then Mitt Romney
spoke for two minutes and then we paused the videotape.
And I said, Dr. Jill Stein, you have two minutes on the economy.
And after her, Rocky Anderson, two minutes on the economy.
And at the end of that, back to my colleague, back to my colleague, Jim Lehrer at the University
of Denver.
And that's what the debate.
That's how we expanded the debate.
That's what democracy sounds like.
And why is it so important?
Well, how is it that climate change was not raised by the presidential candidates?
And when they addressed the issue of foreign policy, the last debate, the one they had
in Boca Raton, we were in, we were broadcasting from San Rafael, California from the Marin
Osher Jewish Community Center.
And the place was packed with folks who come to the community center there in front and
center in the front row was Hank.
He turns 105 on November 20th.
Big democracy now fan.
He works out at the community center three times a week and drives himself home and back
and to the center.
Rocky Anderson and Jill Stein came to that debate as well and we sat at a table because
they sat at a table in Boca Raton.
They raised the issue of climate change in every debate.
And they raised the issue of drones.
Now the presidential candidates of the major party did get asked about drones.
But they don't disagree.
And that's very significant.
Because I really think that most people in this country on many different issues are
outside the consensus in Washington.
People talk about gridlock and the bickering that takes place in Washington being the problem
today for this country.
I don't think the issue is partisan bickering and gridlock.
I think it's the bipartisan consensus on all of these on many of these critical issues.
It's why we called our book the silenced majority.
Because I really do think that those who are concerned about war in this country, those
who are concerned about the growing inequality, those who are concerned about climate change,
about the extreme weather from Washington to New York, the drenching rains in Florida,
the dust bowl conditions of the Midwest, the fires from Washington to California to Colorado.
Those who are concerned about the fate of the planet are not a fringe minority, not
even a silent majority, but the silenced majority silenced by the corporate media, which is
why we have to take it back.
We went from the debate at the University of Denver to Colorado Springs, because it was
the eve of the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.
Colorado Springs is a heavily militarized city.
It's got Fort Carson, it's got NORAD, it's got the Air Force Academy.
We broadcast from the Tim Gill Center for Public Media, which is run by Rocky Mountain
PBS.
It had just been opened.
And we brought in Dave Phillips.
He was nominated for a Pulitzer for a series in the Colorado Springs Gazette about a unit
that called itself lethal warriors.
They went to Iraq, they came back, they went back to Iraq for another tour of duty.
They came back and they just didn't know how to turn off the kill switch.
And they were killing their girlfriends.
They were killing their wives.
They were killing other soldiers.
They were killing strangers in the streets.
The murder rate in Fort Carson, 114 times that of surrounding Colorado Springs.
You could only imagine what they were doing in Iraq.
And then we had on a man named Andrew Padani.
He's a veteran.
He also served in Iraq, but he's counseling soldiers and veterans now.
His experience in Iraq had happened within the first few days of arriving.
He was taking lariam, the anti malaria drug, and he was hallucinating and he saw, but actually
did see a Bradley tank explode in Iraqi and he just completely fell apart.
Emotional, mental breakdown appealed to his commanding officer for help.
Instead, he became the first soldier since the Vietnam War to be charged with cowardice.
Do you know what a soldier faces when charged with cowardice?
The death penalty.
We then headed back from that broadcast to Denver because I was invited by Al Jazeera
English to debate David Weston, the former president of ABC World News Tonight.
So I was in the PBS NewsHour studios in Denver and David Weston was in New York and Shahab,
the moderator, was in Washington and he was asking us about the war and elections and
the media's coverage.
And, you know, I talked about what we did expanding the debates and David Weston said
he felt that the media did do a good job in raising the issues around elections and war.
And I said, I beg to differ.
And I referred him back to the six weeks before the invasion of Iraq and remember March 19th,
2003.
Three days before March 16th, 2003, Rachel Khoury was killed in Gaza, in Ra'afah, when
she was trying to defend a Palestinian pharmacist's home from an Israeli military bulldozer and
it crushed her to death.
Three days later, the U.S. would attack Iraq.
So I talked about the six weeks before this when Colin Powell, General Colin Powell, then
the Secretary of State, gave his push for war at the United Nations.
You know, he was considered very credible because he didn't immediately buy the WMD
argument.
You know, this is at a time when half the population was opposed to war.
But when Secretary of State Powell gave his speech, he said the evidence was in.
And this was the final nail in the coffin for so many.
February 5th, 2003.
So FAIR, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting, FAIR.org, did a study
of the two weeks around Powell's address at the UN.
And they looked at four major nightly newscasts, the NBC Nightly News, the CBS Evening News,
the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and the ABC World News Tonight, David Weston's organization.
And they looked at this two week period of the four nightly newscasts.
There were 393 interviews done around war.
Guess how many were with anti-war leaders?
Three.
Three of almost 400.
And half the population was opposed to war.
That is no longer a mainstream media.
That's an extreme media, beating the drums for war.
That's what I said to David Weston.
And he replied, Amy, it may surprise you to know that I agree with you.
And I was very surprised.
He was in charge of the ABC World News that time.
He said he will forever regret that Peter Jennings, who was the news anchor, you know,
died of lung cancer, did not buy the weapons of mass destruction argument.
But he prevailed on him, Weston did, to hold back, not to move forward with that, not to
make that public.
And David Weston said, I was under a lot of pressure.
This is why we need independent media in this country.
We then went from Colorado to New Mexico and broadcast from Los Alamos, from the birthplace
of the nuclear age, from Fuller Lodge.
Fuller Lodge was built in 1928 as an elite boys' school and a very disgruntled young
man named Gore Vidal went to school there and hated it.
And then in 1943, it was taken over by the US military, by the US government to be the
to bring in scientists for the top secret Manhattan Project to build, develop the atomic
bombs that would later be dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is where the scientists first lived.
That's where we broadcast from.
You know, where people like J. Robert Oppenheimer from UC Berkeley, that's where they first
came.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would later say, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, I am the shatterer
of worlds.
Back in World War II, the Secretary of War was Henry Stimson.
He was handed a list of possible targets to drop the first bombs on, the uranium bomb
and the plutonium bomb.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto.
He said, we're going to cross off Kyoto.
Why?
Because he and Mrs. Stimson had visited Kyoto.
It was a beautiful city, the food delicious, the people wonderful, the art magnificent.
He didn't want to destroy the city.
If only the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been lucky enough to host the Stimson's.
But the point is profound.
He didn't want to destroy the city because he had come to know it.
What's the power of independent media?
How do we learn about the rest of the world?
Through our friends, our family, maybe someone comes from another place, but much more often
we learn about it through the media.
And it is so important that that education, that knowledge comes from something other
than a corporate lens.
And in terms of our national security, perhaps even more important, that the rest of the
world learns about us through a lens and a microphone, not brought to you by the weapons
manufacturers when we're all learning, when we're all discussing war.
Not brought to you by the insurance industry and big pharma, the drug companies when we're
talking about healthcare.
Not brought to you by the oil and the gas and the coal and the nuclear companies when
we're talking about climate change.
Or perhaps we won't talk about climate change, but brought to you by listeners and viewers
like you.
Secretary Stimson did not want to destroy Kyoto because he knew it.
We need a media that allows people to speak for themselves.
And when you hear a Palestinian child or an Israeli grandmother, or if only you could
hear Rachel Corey in her own words today, when you hear an aunt in Afghanistan and uncle
in Iraq, it breaks down bigotry.
It breaks down caricatures that fuel the hate groups.
You know, it's the reason Pacifica was founded more than 60 years ago.
Pacifica in Berkeley, California.
At least it's not Bud Light.
Founded by a war resistor.
After World War II, Lou Hill came out of the detention camps and said there's got to be
a media outlet not run by corporations that profit from war, but run by journalists and
artists.
That's how Pacifica was founded.
Not run by corporations, George Gerbner said, the late dean at the Annenberg School of
Communications at the University of Pennsylvania said not run by corporations that have nothing
to tell and everything to sell that are raising our children today.
First station, KPFA in Berkeley, 1949.
Second station, 1959, KPFK in Los Angeles.
We were just celebrating KPFK Friday night and Sunday night, KPFA in Oakland.
And not run by corporations that profit from war.
The third station, WBAI, my station in New York.
The fourth station, KPFT in Houston.
The fifth station, WPFW in Washington.
That's the family of five Pacifica stations.
KPFT in Houston.
Went on the air in 1970 in the spring.
Within weeks it was blown off the air by the Ku Klux Klan.
They strapped dynamite to the base of the transmitter and blew it to smithereens.
And when they got back on their feet, when they rebuilt their transmitter and started
broadcasting again, it was right in the middle of Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant
when they blew it up again.
And I don't know if it was the Grand Dragon or the Exalted Cyclops or the Imperial Wizard
because I often confuse their titles, but he said it was his proudest act.
I think because he understood how dangerous Pacifica is, how dangerous independent media
is, dangerous because it allows people to speak for themselves.
Which reminds me of a moment at the Democratic convention this year.
You know, we covered the Republican convention and followed the money and went to the Democratic
convention in Charlotte, this city rich with civil rights history.
You know, the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, the young people who went to integrate the
lunch counters at Woolworth's inspired the students at the historically black college,
Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte.
They did the same in Charlotte.
Well, on the first day of the Democratic convention, I got a text.
We were about to go inside.
They were going to gavel it open.
But I get this text and it says that on a particular corner an action was going to take
place so we raced over to the corner and we see the Undocu bus pull up.
As the bus covered with butterflies filled with undocumented immigrants who were challenging
the Democratic party to pass a compassionate, fair, rational immigration policy in this
country.
And, you know, and they were inspired by the young dreamers, young people who were sitting
in on President Obama's campaign offices and other senators and Congress members' offices.
And these young people risk more than arrest for their civil disobedience.
They risk deportation, sometimes to countries.
They don't even know.
Maybe they came here when they were six months old or a year old.
They might not even have known they were undocumented until they're older and they apply for a driver's
license or perhaps they don't even know.
They think they're just a supporter sitting down, but in fact they themselves are undocumented.
But they sat in on these offices and this wasn't lost on President Obama.
I mean, that this is the modern day civil rights movement.
And I think it shamed him because this summer he conceded and he passed a kind or he issued
a kind of executive order that said that undocumented immigrants 30 years or younger who fit a certain
criteria could get deferred action, could get a reprieve from the threat of deportation
for two years so that they could work here, so they could go to school here.
Okay, they couldn't get health insurance, but they could get these other things.
This inspired this new group to come to Charlotte.
It was the Young Dreamers and their parents now.
And they pulled up in front of the convention and they got out real quickly and they were
very energetic and they were chanting, no papers, no fear, no papers, no fear.
And I was interviewing one of the leaders, Rosie Karaskow.
I recognized her because we had her on the show that morning.
It's often interesting to watch Democracy Now and see who's on and what they do.
So Rosie Karaskow got out of the bus and I was asking her why she was doing this.
And a media personality came up to me, well known.
It's hard to call them journalists, but so he came up to me.
He was on his way into the network.
He was going to the convention.
And he said, what are these people doing?
And I said, oh, it looks like they're about to get arrested.
And he said, what do they want?
What are they calling for?
Now, I am interviewing Rosie.
And so I say to him, well, why don't you ask her?
And he said, no, Amy, just tell me.
I'd been on panels with him.
Just quickly summarize what is it that she wants.
And I said, Rosie, why don't you tell this gentleman what it is you want?
And she said, I want to know what kind of legacy President Obama wants to leave.
I want to know if he wants to be remembered as the president who deported more immigrants
than any other in US history or who sided with the immigrants.
Pretty eloquent.
And he actually took out his reporter's notebook and started taking notes.
Why is it so difficult for them to talk to people at the heart of the story who are at
the target end of policy?
And her husband came out of the bus and he said, I've paid taxes in this country for
18 years, which is more than Citibank can say.
And so Rosie and her husband, Martin and Zueta, and their daughter, they were going to get
arrested.
And then there was this young woman who had her arm wrapped around an older, shorter woman.
She would not let go of her.
She came out of the bus.
They marched down the street.
They went to the gates of the convention.
They all unfurled this big banner with a big butterfly on it.
And she and her mother sat down.
And I said to this young woman, you kind of look like you probably would fit into this
new criterion that could get you deferred action and you could stay in this country.
And she said, I can.
But my mother can't.
And if she gets deported, I might as well go with her.
And then there was another young woman kneeling down.
The rain was pouring down and the police were pouring in.
And I asked her, why the butterflies?
Why these butterflies on the undocumented bus?
Why this big butterfly on this banner?
And she said, because butterflies know no borders.
Butterflies are free.
And with that, nine or 10 of the young people and their families got arrested.
These are the movements that make this country great.
And I want to talk about movements.
It's so much what we focus on at Democracy Now.
Let's go back to December 2010, the uprising in Tunisia, sparked by a young man named Mohamed
Bouazizi who comes out of university, has no opportunity.
So he goes into the market to sell fruit and vegetables.
And the authorities are harassing him.
They steal a scale.
He can't take it anymore.
And he sets himself on fire.
And that ignites the frustration of a generation, of a nation.
And I think there was also something else that sparked the Tunisian Revolution.
And that was WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website.
We can't say enough about how important this website is in a time when governments are
cracking down on information, in a time especially of war, when we need transparency more than
ever.
How important it is to see these documents that have been released by WikiLeaks.
I mean, there's a reason why all the top news organizations, the New York Times and the
Washington Post and El País and The Guardian, all these top newspapers, Der Spiegel, around
the world work with WikiLeaks because they felt they were important too.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is in a lot of trouble.
He is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
He's been granted political asylum by Ecuador.
He's wanted for questioning in Sweden for two women who say he sexually abused them.
And that's serious and that should be dealt with.
But what the media gets wrong is they say he's been charged.
He hasn't.
And even if you're charged, you have to go to trial.
That doesn't mean you are guilty.
But whatever the evidence is, it hasn't even risen to the level of charges being brought
against him.
He is wanted for questioning.
It's something he says he will do and the Ecuadorian government has backed him up and
reached out to Sweden and said, how can he answer your questions?
He will do that.
What he's concerned about is if he is extradited to Sweden, it's not being in Sweden.
He said he would do that.
He wants a promise for the U.S. government that they will not then extradite him to the
United States because we know that there was a secret grand jury impaneled in Alexandria,
Virginia that's been going after Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks volunteers.
And the question is, has there already been a secret indictment that has a sealed indictment
against Julian Assange for treason in this country?
And why should he be afraid if he were extradited to this country?
Does the name Bradley Manning ring a bell?
When you think about what has happened to this young man, this U.S. soldier who was
in Iraq who has been charged with apparently, I mean, it's amazing to think he could be
in the desert in Iraq and he could bring in CDs that he labeled Lady Gaga and download
millions of pages of top U.S. government, secret government documents on Iraq, on Afghanistan,
secret State Department cables.
And why are these documents so important?
Well, I think if known, they could save lives.
Let's use one example.
February 2007 in Iraq, one of, and this is why this is so important.
You know, this all isn't about Julian Assange.
If he wrote the documents, it would be, and we should know all about him.
But no one refutes, no one contests the authenticity of these documents written by low level soldiers,
low level soldiers and officers, written by State Department officials, ambassadors in
the case of State Department documents.
So the ones in Iraq, February 2007, this incident where an Apache helicopter unit is hovering
over two men who, Iraqis, who put up their hands in a surrender sign.
And the soldiers in the helicopter aren't rogue.
They call back to base and they say, what should we do?
These Iraqis look like they're surrendering to us.
And the lawyer on the base says to them, this is according to the documents, the military
documents that were released, says to them, you cannot surrender to a helicopter.
And so they blow them away.
And you gasp.
And I think people all over would gasp.
And I think if we knew that at the time, that there would have been an investigation, you
know, there would have been an outcry and an investigation.
And so what happened six months later may not have happened.
And that was July 12th, 2007.
It was in an area of Baghdad called New Baghdad.
The same Apache helicopter unit is hovering overhead.
And below they see, and this is video released by Wikileaks, Wikileaks called collateral
murder.
This is a video of Iraqis on the ground or peace activists.
This is the video made by the Apache helicopter unit.
And it is filled with the soldiers laughing and cursing.
They call back to base again.
You know, they're not out of line.
They are always calling back for permission.
And they're calling back for permission to open fire on what they see below, which is
a group of men who are actually touring around, two Reuters employees, an up and coming videographer
named Namir Nur Eldin.
I think he was about 22 years old.
And his driver, Sayeed Chema, and they were there because the area had just been bombed
the day before and they were being shown around.
His driver, Sayeed Chema, but you know, drivers in wartime are not just drivers.
He was beloved by the Reuters community.
He's 40 years old, a father of four.
Because when Western journalists helicopter in, parachute in somewhere for a week, they
need to get a lay of the land fast.
And it's these drivers or fixers who are telling them what the area is about, who the people
are bringing them.
They're really like reporters themselves.
And so Sayeed and Chema are walking through this area.
The helicopter unit above calls back to base, asks for permission to open fire.
And they open fire on this group of residents below with the two, with the journalist and
his driver.
And they kill almost all of them.
Sayeed Chema is critically wounded.
He's dragging himself away.
And a white van pulls up from the neighborhood to help the wounded.
It's got two little kids in it.
It's got others in it.
And the helicopter unit opens fire and blows away the van.
Actually the two children survived, though they're critically wounded.
And Sayeed Chema is killed.
12 people were killed in all that day.
And I dare say, if we knew what happened in February, Namir, Sayeed, they'd be alive today.
That's why information is so important.
And it can save lives.
That's why WikiLeaks, I think, is so important.
So how does that relate to Tunisia?
Well, you know, the State Department documents that came out showed that, you know, Ben Ali,
the dictator of Tunisia, was corrupt and he was brutal.
It's not like the Tunisians didn't know that already.
But what they saw in the documents was that the U.S. government knew it.
And yet they continued to shore him up to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
And it just increased their rage.
And then the Tunisian Revolution fueled the Egyptian Revolution.
And how many of you experienced the Egyptian Revolution?
At least partly by the remarkable reporting of Democracy Now producer Sharif Abdel-Kadus.
Sharif is Egyptian-American, the son of an illustrious Egyptian family.
His father, his grandfather is the most famous writer of Egypt, Hassan Abdel-Kadus.
And Sharif started getting texts in January of 2011.
It was his friends, it was family, it was people saying, I'm going to die for my country.
He said, no, these are not political people.
What is happening in my country?
He said it's changing.
And he flew directly into Tahrir, okay, by way of the Cairo airport.
But he hardly left for the next 18 days.
And when he got there, Mubarak had plunged the country into digital darkness, turned
off the internet.
Well, Mubarak couldn't do that.
But he used a U.S. company, California company, NARAS, to turn off the internet.
And there was such an outcry when they flipped the switch that they issued a press release
saying we were only following orders, but we've heard that before.
But Sharif got around the digital blockade, and he became one of the top tweeters in the
world.
From the beginning, Democracy Now has always been very scrappy, relied on the internet
from the beginning to be able to transmit our broadcast quality radio.
At the time, it wasn't even a podcast.
That word wasn't around then.
But the MP3, so that radio stations could take it.
And then when we went on television, September 2001, and we were sending out those video
cassettes, we pioneered a way to send broadcast quality video through the internet.
And necessity is the mother of invention.
We weren't able quite to use, we couldn't afford to use the satellites.
And we use them sometimes now.
But when the internet went back up, the thugs took down the satellites for the major networks,
broke into the U.S. news offices and the international TV offices, and broke down the satellites.
And so I remember seeing Anderson Cooper in his hotel room in a sort of old Democracy
Now, sort of very fuzzy, Skypey look, with a lower third that said, reporting from an
undisclosed location.
And there was Sharif in the middle of Tahrir saying exactly where he was, saying it was
the safest place to be in all of Egypt.
And he was bringing you the voices of the networks are showing you that bird's eye view,
which was very impressive.
But there was Sharif on the ground.
And he was with Hani Massoud, our video producer, who is also Egyptian American.
And Hani leaps tall buildings in a single bound.
And he was filming Sharif's interviews.
And Sharif was interviewing Ahadef Suef, the great Egyptian writer who wrote Map of Love.
And Nawal Sadawih, the 79 year old former presidential candidate, author, psychiatrist,
imprisoned under Sadat, exiled under Mubarak.
She was holding salons for young people before Tahrir when they were so dispirited and disillusioned
and saying, we will win, she would say, we will win.
And Sharif was interviewing the young high school student who is publishing a broadsheet
Voices of Tahrir in the shadow of the state media building that had spewed lies for so
long.
And Hani would video these interviews.
And then he would jump over burning barricades.
He would get around the camels that were brought in to trounce the protesters.
And he would make his way to Sharif's family's house.
And he would put together these 20, 25 minute reports of these interviews.
And because the satellites were down, because now we can use them too, but because they
were down, he would then send these reports through the internet.
And we would broadcast them on Democracy Now the next day.
And soon Sharif and Tahrir was being interviewed by all of the networks, by NBC, CNBC, MSNBC,
CNN.
We call that trickle up journalism.
And then Egypt, I think the Arab Spring, partly inspired Wisconsin.
The largest uprising Wisconsin's ever seen.
Okay, so did Governor Scott Walker inspire the Wisconsin uprising.
But I mean, Democracy Now, of course, flew directly to Madison because this is a huge
grassroots movement.
I mean, it was a cross section of Wisconsin society.
When they took over the state capitol building, I mean, I went in there and I saw some of
the biggest guys I had ever seen, the Oshkosh prison guards.
And I went up to them and said, who did you vote for?
And they said, Governor Walker, of course.
So I said, so what are you doing here?
And they said, protesting Governor Walker, of course.
And I said, well, why?
And they said, he didn't say he was going to go after our wives, the teachers.
He didn't say he was going to go after our neighbors, our community.
And then outside freezing cold, 150 people marching.
I go up to this older gentleman with white hair and glasses.
He's sloshing through the snow with a sign that says IRS auditors against Walker.
And you knew the governor was in trouble.
I mean, I never saw such scenes as, you know, Governor Walker assured the police and the
firefighters he would not go after them.
I mean, he was what he was trying to do is eviscerate the collective bargaining unit,
the collective bargaining rights of public unions.
But he told the police and firefighters, not them, just the nurses and the teachers.
But the firefighters and the police said, uh-uh, if you're going after them, you're
going after us.
And so the scenes in front of the governor's office, amazing.
You'd have the young people with dreads who were drumming outside the governor's office.
And you'd have the police next to them rocking out to the music.
And then let's move forward to August and September, right?
The thousands of people went to Washington to form a ring around the Rose Garden to get
President Obama to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of
Mexico.
And 1200 people got arrested there.
And then people headed up to New York.
And, well, September 17th, 2011, thousands of people marched to Wall Street and ended
up at Zuccotti Park and formed the first Occupy Wall Street encampment and made history.
I remember how the corporate media dealt with it.
Nothing.
Not the first day, not the second day, not the third day.
They just didn't mention it.
I mean, here they were, under their noses, right?
This is the media metropolis of the world, New York, and they're down the street.
And these media personalities just don't talk about it.
And then the second week, well, they have to say something.
And so they start ridiculing them.
I remember watching one of the morning talk shows and they're saying, who are these people?
They can't get it together enough.
I mean, everyone's got a different sign.
They can't even get it together enough to choose a spokesperson, because if they did,
we'd have him right here in the studio.
But what do they want?
What are their demands?
And I thought, really?
Any Madison Avenue PR exec would drool to be the one credited with perhaps the most famous
slogan in US history.
We are the 99%.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, this is a slogan, a motto that resonated across
this country.
The word occupy occupied the language, not only the English language, but languages all
over the country.
And then I want to talk about the pizza.
Egyptians were calling into the local New York pizzerias ordering pizzas to be sent
to Zuccotti Park to feed the occupiers.
Wisconsinites were calling into the local pizzerias, feed the occupiers.
So these pizzas were flying into Zuccotti Park at such a rate.
And of course, the occupiers called them occupies.
And there were so much pizza coming in.
They would hold these huge buffets.
Hundreds of people would line up.
And this was right next to Wall Street.
I saw bankers online.
They heard there was a free lunch.
And then they were conservationists, the occupiers, if nothing else.
They would use every aspect of these pizzas.
They would eat the pies.
And then they would use the lids of the pizza boxes to make signs.
I remember this freak snowstorm in October.
And everyone goes under the tarps.
They clear up all the signs because they don't want them to get soggy.
But they have one sign out, hell snow, we won't go.
They had other signs too, like I'll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes
one.
And now I want to talk about the other signs that people carried into Zuccotti Park on
September 17.
There were many of these.
They said too much doubt.
And I am Troy Davis.
I am Troy Davis.
See Occupy was September 17.
Four days later, Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die.
So Democracy Now flew from Zuccotti Park to Jackson, Georgia, where the death row prison
was.
And I want to read an excerpt from the column Dennis Moynihan and I wrote, Troy Davis and
the Machinery of Death.
Yes, on September 21 at 7 p.m. Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die.
We were reporting live from outside Georgia's death row in Jackson, awaiting news about
whether the Supreme Court would spare his life.
Davis was sentenced to death for the murder of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark McPhail
in 1989.
Seven of the nine non-police witnesses in his trial later recanted or changed their
testimony, some alleging police intimidation for their original false statements.
No physical evidence linked Davis to the shooting.
Davis was one of more than 3,200 prisoners on death row in the United States.
He'd faced three prior execution dates.
With each one, global awareness grew and all sorts of groups took up his cause.
Amnesty International, the NAACP, the Pope called for clemency for Troy Anthony Davis.
So did William Sessions, the former FBI director.
So did Bob Barr, the former Republican Georgia Congress member.
So did Alan Ault, the former death row prison warden of this prison and five other prison
wardens like Jeanne Woodard, who we interviewed yesterday morning at Stanford University.
She was the former prison warden of San Quentin.
She joined with other prison wardens.
These other prison wardens were not against the death penalty, but they were against it
in the case of Troy Davis.
They said, as Jeanne Woodard said yesterday morning, too much doubt.
And this is particularly significant as California weighs on November 6th whether to overturn
the death penalty in California, which will have such repercussions for the rest of the
country.
But we race to Jackson, Georgia.
If we could have been in the execution chamber broadcasting, we would have been.
I really do believe we must show the images.
Most people in this country do not understand how alone we are in the United States, the
only industrialized country in the, the only country in the industrialized world to execute
the death penalty.
We should show exactly what the execution protocol is.
Show the prisoner strapped down on a cross like Gurney with the needle injected in his
arm and at the last minute the window that overlooks his Gurney opens and you see the
curtains are pulled back, the family of the murder victim and the prisoners' guests, if
they're allowed, and the reporters there.
We should show this whole scene.
Well, we couldn't be there, but we were on the prison grounds.
The Department of Corrections immediately said when we were going over to the protest
pen that they erected on the grounds, they would allow 150 protesters there.
But of course there were more than a thousand, so they were held across the street.
The students from the historically black colleges, Morehouse and Spelman holding candles, and
on the grounds were the human rights leaders, heads of Amnesty International, NAACP, the
family of Troy Anthony Davis, people from around the world.
Now they said that we as journalists could not go near them.
We would have to stay on the outskirts of the property.
And I looked over at the elite journalists and I thought, why aren't they pushing back?
I mean, if we're going to broadcast for hours, I'm not going to talk the whole time.
I mean, it's our job as journalists to go to where the silence is, to interview the
people who have come here to make a statement.
These journalists, though, I guess the reason they weren't fighting back, I mean, if they're
going to be broadcasting for 30 or 60 seconds, it's not that hard to fill the time.
But then our broadcast truck pulled up, you know, like one that Fox would get the next
day, CNN would get the day before, and we needed a broadcast truck.
How many of you watched our broadcast that night from death row or the next morning when
we played the highlights?
I encourage everyone to go to Democsnow.org.
It was astounding to be this witness to history that night.
If journalism is the first draft of history, it's critical that we as journalists be in
these places to document what happens in all of our names.
So when the broadcast truck pulled up, I saw the power of big.
I mean, the guys in the truck were bigger than the Oshkosh prison guards.
They pulled down the window and they said to me, where do you want the truck?
And I'm looking nervously at the prison guards.
I said, well, they're saying, they said, Miss Goodman, you're paying for the truck.
Where do you want it?
I said, well, I was actually thinking about that protest pen if and they barreled this
truck over to the pen.
This is what they do for CNN and they do for Fox.
And then they drive over to the truck and then they say, where do you want to stand?
I said, well, I was thinking of just standing against the rope so I could interview the
people.
They hand me the microphone.
They say, start broadcasting.
And so we did.
Now, we had been given a press packet by the Department of Corrections.
The press packet was thin.
It described how Troy Anthony Davis would spend the last day of his life.
It said his schedule was nine to three.
He could see family.
Then at three o'clock, they would have to clear out for a routine physical.
Routine physical?
You know what happened to a Texas man a while ago.
He was on death row.
He attempted suicide.
They raced him to the hospital.
They got him better and then they executed him.
And then another of the pages in this press packet described what Troy Anthony Davis would
have for dinner.
He'd already turned down the special meal.
The press kit described the standard tray Davis would be offered in detail.
It said he would get grilled cheeseburgers, oven brown potatoes, baked beans, coleslaw,
cookies, and a grape beverage.
Then there was the next page, which listed the lethal cocktail that would follow.
It was like when you go to your eye doctor's office, big letters, four lines to see what
you can read and see.
The first line said pentobarbital.
The next line, pancoronium bromide, potassium chloride, and adavan in parentheses, a sedative.
The pentobarbital anesthetizes.
The pancoronium bromide paralyzes.
The potassium chloride stops the heart.
The only two things Davis had a say over, whether he take the sedative or the last supper,
he refused.
By 7 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court was reportedly reviewing Davis' plea for a stay.
The case was referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas hails from Pinpoint, Georgia, a community founded by freed slaves that's near Savannah
where Davis had lived.
The eyewitness, the Supreme Court denied the plea.
Davis' execution began at 1053 p.m.
A prison spokesperson delivered the news to the reporters outside time of death, 1108
p.m.
The eyewitnesses to the execution stepped out.
According to an Associated Press reporter who was there, these were Troy Davis' final
words.
He said, I'd like to address the McPhail family.
Let you know I'm not the one who killed your son, your father, your brother.
I am innocent.
I did not have a gun.
All I can ask is you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the
truth.
I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight.
And then he turned to his executioners and said, for those about to take my life, God
have mercy on your souls and God bless your souls.
The state of Georgia took Davis' body to Atlanta for an autopsy, charging his family for the
transportation.
On Troy Davis' death certificate, the cause of death is listed simply as homicide.
As we stood on the grounds of the prison just after Troy Davis was executed, the Department
of Corrections threatened to pull the plug on our broadcast.
The show was over.
And I was reminded of what Gandhi reportedly answered when asked what he thought of Western
civilization.
He responded, I think it would be a good idea.
One of the movements that fueled the Occupy movement and such a significant movement it
was.
And now I want to talk for a moment about something that I've been deeply concerned
about in these years, and that is the militarization of police and the crackdown on dissent in
this country.
We have something in this country called the Posse Comitatus Act, and I think most people
think it's a good idea.
The idea that soldiers shouldn't march through the streets of the United States.
But I feel the way that the authorities are getting around this is by militarizing the
police.
And this is a very serious issue, this crackdown on dissent, because dissent is what will save
us.
I mean, since 9-11, billions of dollars have been poured into local police departments.
They are buying tanks.
They are buying drones.
I understand that right here in Seattle there's a controversy around this.
The level of surveillance is unprecedented.
We have been focusing on a series that the AP, the Associated Press did this year, for
which they won the Pulitzer Prize, on one police department, the New York Police Department.
And the level of surveillance they have engaged in over the years, working with the Central
Intelligence Agency of the Arab American and Muslim community in the greater New York area.
I say greater New York area because the New York police are going beyond the boundaries
of New York.
They're going into New Jersey.
They're going into Connecticut.
The Yale University president was so enraged by this.
He issued a statement saying, you have no right to come and surveil our students.
In New Jersey, officials said the same thing.
One of the ways this case was cracked was a New Jersey landlord discovered all the surveillance
equipment in one of his apartments.
He got so nervous he called the police.
But it was the police.
And I mean, we had on a CUNY student, City University of New York, a Muslim student whose
name appeared in the police documents.
And his parents didn't want him to come on, didn't want him to do any media.
They were afraid.
But he said, no, we're already identified.
Our only protection is if I speak out.
So he went on Democracy Now.
And he talked about how the documents described a camping trip he took one weekend with his
friends.
And he talked about the details of this camping trip from beginning to end.
Obviously, one of the people in the trip was an infiltrator, the think tank guy that drove
him, one guy they didn't know as well.
And yet, young people, it's good not to be in cliques, to be welcoming to people who
want to join you.
And yet, this is what happened.
And this student said that the police documents said these students were so extreme that they
prayed four times a day.
He said this infiltrator was so stupid, he didn't know we prayed five times a day.
But what happens when this happens?
What happens when communities feel under siege, feel they're targeted?
This doesn't increase our national security.
In fact, it makes things much more dangerous.
Because when you're in a targeted community and you're afraid, you see something and you
should say something, you're not going to say it to the people who are targeting you.
This only decreases our national security.
I was invited on one of the networks recently and a reporter said to me, the interviewer
said, but you know, 9-11 happened and we have to be very vigilant.
And I said, that's true.
But we have to have a uniform standard of justice.
I mean, think about when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, right?
He's charged, he's tried, and he was convicted.
After he did this and killed more than 160 people, did police departments around the
country infiltrate, surveil, and monitor all white Christian communities?
Hardly.
We have to have a uniform standard of justice.
And this kind of targeting only leads to bigotry and stereotyping that ultimately will make
us less safe.
And on the issue of police violence against protesters, I mean, we saw it so much at Occupy.
I mean, some of the largest mass arrests in US history, I mean, the Brooklyn Bridge arrest
of more than 700 people, the students at UC Davis who were pepper sprayed, point blank
range protesting budget cuts, now they've won something like $30,000 a piece.
But you know, to talk about this in Seattle is so significant because, I mean, let's go
back to the Battle of Seattle.
You know, Democracy Now is there was when we were first broadcasting on TV as well as
radio.
I mean, the level of violence that was directed at the peaceful protesters, I think there's
no one who describes it better than your former police chief, Norm Stamper.
I mean, at the time, he tried to stamp out all dissent.
Effectively, that's what he tried to do.
He met these peaceful protesters, you know, high school students with their teachers,
environmentalists, union activists, French farmers, doctors, nurses, who were concerned
about the World Trade Organization that was having its meeting here, concerned that this
supranational organization could overturn the laws of democratically elected legislatures.
Like in California, they're trying to pass, some people are trying to pass the GMO labeling
act, right, a proposition that would label GMO foods.
Just let me use that as an example.
So if they pass that, the concern is that a country could file a complaint with the
World Trade Organization that says California has now introduced an obstacle, a barrier
to trade that's WTO illegal.
The idea that this organization, unaccountable, largely accountable to corporations, could
then overturn the laws that are passed by the population of a state, this is what concerned
people.
This is just an example.
Now, Norm Stamper, who was really forced out because of what he did, has become one of
the most eloquent spokespeople against the militarization of police, saying he made a
tragic error at that time.
He had the police separate from the protesters, from these peaceful protesters, meeting them
with a level of force.
I mean, within the first two days, they were going out to other states to find more, what,
pepper spray and gas, whatever it was that they were using, because they had used it
all up.
The mass arrests that were taking place, hitting the protesters with these rubber bullets.
At first, Seattle was denying they were using rubber bullets.
This is really when indymedia.org came into its own, because they were showing the photographs
of the rubber bullets.
CNN.com was repeating the words of power, saying they weren't doing it.
And indymedia.org was getting more hits than CNN.com, just showing the evidence on the
ground.
We had Chief Stamford on Democracy Now, along with a police spokesperson for the Police
Foundation, this was not so long ago, who had organized a call of 18 police chiefs on
how they would deal with the Occupy encampments.
And he said to Chief Stamford, I am so honored to be on Democracy Now with you.
We see you as the model.
And Chief Stamford said, the model?
No, I am not the model, what we did in 1999.
We made a tragic mistake.
And this is extremely serious for the police to separate themselves like this.
I mean, they have not only face shields, they have full body shields.
They move in as a wall on these protesters.
That's if you're lucky, if they're not using horses and dogs, as so often happens.
Now, you know, we had our own experience with the police four years ago at Democracy Now,
and we were covering the Republican Convention in St. Paul, and I'll just briefly describe
this.
It's not dissimilar from the experience a lot of journalists and others have had.
But it was the first day of the Republican Convention.
We come from Denver, there were mass peace protests there.
We flew into St. Paul.
It was Labor Day, September 1st, 2008.
The convention was going to begin in the afternoon.
It was the Palin-McCain Convention.
And 10,000 people marched on this beautiful blue sky day for peace.
It was like 10 in the morning.
They marched from St. Paul City Hall to the Excel Center.
We were covering the protest, interviewing people.
It was led by soldiers, some in full military regalia, which is very brave.
I mean, they faced consequences for this.
Some were refusing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Some were still going, but felt it was wrong.
Some had never gone, had said no.
And there were thousands of civilians.
And then I went to the convention floor to interview delegates as the convention began,
it's from the hottest state, from Alaska.
And my colleague, Sharif Abdel-Kadus, Nicole Salazar, a multimedia producer, went to the
TV station to start preparing the show for the next day.
And I get a call on the floor of the convention from Mike Burke, our senior producer.
He says, come quickly to 7th and Jackson.
Nicole and Sharif have been bloodied and beaten by the police and arrested.
I said, what are you talking about?
They're in the TV studio.
That's where we had just left them.
He said, get to 7th and Jackson fast.
So we race off the floor of the convention.
I was working with Rick Rowley, a great filmmaker, who did 4th World War and Zapatista and other
films with Jackie Swinn.
And by the way, speaking of films, everyone should see the new film based on my colleague,
Democracy Now cohost Juan Gonzales' groundbreaking book, Harvest of Empire.
The film, I hope you could screen it here at Town Hall or at a film festival here, is
called Harvest of Empire, the untold story of Latinos in America, is very important to
see.
It casts an entirely different, tells a different story about why immigrants come to this country,
particularly focusing on US military intervention as well as US economic policies in Central
America.
It opened in New York and Los Angeles to sold out audiences, held over now opening in San
Francisco and Washington, get that film, Harvest of Empire, to Seattle.
So Rick and I raced off the floor of the convention.
We went to 7th and Jackson.
And there we see riot police have fully contained the area.
I've got the credentials that allow me to interview presidents and vice presidents,
the top security credentials.
And the police see that.
These are the credentials they recognize.
And I came up to them, I said, I've just come from the convention.
Two of our reporters are inside.
They have the same credentials I do.
Can I speak to your commanding officer?
We need to have them released.
It wasn't seconds before they ripped me through the police line, twisted my arms back, slapped
the handcuffs on, pushed me up against a car, against the wall and onto the ground, charging
me with a misdemeanor, interfering with a peace officer.
If only there was a peace officer in the vicinity.
And from my vantage point on the ground, I'm still desperately looking for Sharif and Nicole.
I see Sharif across the parking lot.
His hands are behind his back.
I demand to be brought to him.
Finally, the police do.
We're standing next to each other.
His arm is bleeding.
He's handcuffed too.
We've both got our credentials around our neck and the Secret Service come and rip those
credentials from around our necks.
Then I'm brought into the police van and that's where Nicole is.
Her face is bleeding.
She has credentials on.
I said, Nicole, what happened?
And I said, I thought you were in the TV station.
And she said, we were.
But we heard this commotion outside, so we grabbed camera and microphone.
We raced downstairs.
And we saw some protesters, but we mainly saw police.
She said, I was in the parking lot against the parked cars.
And all of a sudden, this phalanx of police came at me.
This formation of police, of riot police.
She said she was filming and she was holding up her press pass.
She didn't plan to film her own violent arrest.
The police are shouting, on your face, on your face, whatever that means.
And she is shouting back, press, press.
And she didn't know what hit her.
They hit her from behind and in front of her and they took her down on her face.
They had knee or boot in her back.
They were pulling on her legs, so they're dragging her face through the gravel.
The first thing to go down is her camera.
It tumbles down and they pull the battery out of her camera.
If you're wondering what it was, they want it to stop happening.
Now Sharif is a very cool guy, right?
Two years later, he'd cover the Egyptian revolution and he doesn't get arrested in Mubarak's
Egypt, but he gets arrested in the streets of the United States covering what's supposed
to be a celebration of democracy, the Republican convention.
So he goes up to the rioting police and he says, calm down.
And they take him, they throw him up against the wall, they kick him twice in the chest
and they take him down.
And Nicole and Sharif face PC felony riot charge.
That's probable cause felony riot.
So I am taken to the police garage where they've erected cages to put the protesters in.
And Sharif and Nicole are taken to jail.
The video of our arrests went viral.
Most watch YouTube video of the first two days of the convention.
And this shows how activism can truly be liberating because within a few hours we were liberated.
I mean the thousands of people who wrote and called and faxed and tweeted in the Twin City
authorities, it freed me and then Nicole and Sharif.
Sharif was in jail with an AP photographer in the same cell.
Sharif was released before the AP photographer.
There were more than 40 reporters who were arrested that week.
So then I'm taken back to the convention center.
It's late at night, the convention's over for the first night because the networks want
to interview me like what happened?
And I'm in the NBC skybox and after the interview an NBC reporter comes up to me and he says,
why didn't I get arrested?
And I said, I don't know, were you out there covering the protests?
He said, no.
So I said, well I don't get arrested in the skybox either.
You know, as Woody Allen says, 90% of life is just showing up.
You got to get out there.
And you know, it's our job to interview people on the convention floor, to try to get into
the corporate suites, to see who's funding these conventions, but also to get out into
the streets where the uninvited guests are, sometimes thousands of them.
You know, democracy is a messy thing and it's our job to capture it all.
And we shouldn't have to get a record when we put things on the record.
So the next day, Police Chief Harrington, the police chief of St. Paul, held a news
conference to announce how successful the first day of the police operation had been.
And I went to the news conference and the officer who opened the door of the news conference
was my processing officer the night before.
And I said to him, you not only have to let me into this news conference, you have to
let me out when it's done.
So I raised my hand and I asked Chief Harrington, I described what happened to us and said,
what have you instructed your officers to do and how do you expect us to operate in
this environment?
And he said we could embed with the mobile field force, embed with the police mobile
field force.
Embed.
I mean, the next day I saw a Fox reporter with this Fox baseball cap in the middle of
this moving police organism going down the streets of St. Paul.
Embed, like reporters embed in the front lines of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm not saying those reporters who do that aren't brave, but I think the embedding process
has brought the media to an all time low.
The Pentagon calls it a spectacular success, which is why it's a total failure.
I mean, as my colleague, journalist Alan Neran says, what are you going to get when you are
covering the war from the trigger end of the gun?
You are sleeping with the troops, you're eating with the troops, your life is in their
hands.
How do you expect you're going to cover it?
If you're going to do that, you have to embed with Iraqi, in Iraqi hospitals and Afghan
communities in the peace movement around the world to understand the full effects of war.
And the problem isn't only embedding with soldiers, it's embedding with the establishment
in Washington.
I mean, my brother David and I wrote a book called Exception to the Rulers, and that should
be the motto of all the media.
We should be the exception to the rulers.
And the second book we wrote was called Static, and the reason we call it that is that's what
the media should 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 for the state, not for the state.
And we need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history.
So we sued the Twin City authorities and the Secret Service, and this took about three
years.
And we felt it was absolutely critical for none of us to get used to this, to send a
message.
Last year, a Minneapolis judge called us back to Minneapolis.
Sharif flew back from Egypt.
Nicole and I came in, and we ultimately settled with the police and the Secret Service.
The Secret Service were furious.
They wanted to be severed from the case, but we had figured out who it was who was involved
in our arrests.
And it's very hard to do this in these what are called national special security events.
Every level of authority is joined together, but it's critical to figure out who is involved.
And who is involved with this overall crackdown of dissent.
And so we ultimately got an unprecedented settlement, a six-figure settlement, along
with an agreement by the St. Paul police that they would develop a protocol for how to deal
with reporters.
And when we settled, we wanted to send this message to police.
Where would be the largest gathering of police that we could address?
So we flew back to New York and held a news conference at Occupy Wall Street.
We knew there would be many hundreds of police there.
And it's not only about the unlawful arrests of journalists, but the unlawful arrests of
people everywhere.
This all must be challenged because dissent is what will save us.
I just wanted to end with two stories, and I know I've told this before, but this issue
of movements is so important right now.
As people weigh who to elect to be the most powerful person on earth, the President of
the United States, ultimately what matters most is movements and the kinds of demands
you make before and after elections.
And that's why I wanted to very quickly tell the story of Rosa Parks.
And quickly, because you all know the story, but the reason I tell it is because the media
gets it wrong every time.
You know, Rosa Parks sits down on the bus December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, refuses
to get up for a white passenger, and in so doing, she launches the modern-day civil rights
movement.
A few days later, she goes to court, and the Montgomery Improvement Association holds their
meeting to elect a leader that will lead the bus boycott, that will lead to the desegregation
of the transportation system, and they elect a young minister who just came into town,
Dr. Martin Luther King.
Dr. Martin Luther King was, well, Rosa Parks helped to launch Dr. King.
And when she died, Democracy Now raced to Washington.
She was the first African-American woman to lay in state in the Capitol rotunda.
Then her body was brought to Washington Church.
Thousands came out.
Oprah was inside.
Cecil A. Tyson was inside.
They erected these loudspeakers so that people outside could hear what's happening inside.
We were interviewing a young woman outside, said, why are you here?
She said, I emailed my professors.
I said, I won't be in class today.
I'm going to get an education.
And I remember CNN that day.
They said Rosa Parks was a tired seamster.
She was no troublemaker.
No, that's where they got it wrong.
Rosa Parks was a first-class troublemaker.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She was the secretary of the local NAACP.
She worked with Edie Nixon.
He came out of radical labor politics.
He was the president.
He worked with A. Philip Randolph, who together they had helped organize the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, the black train conductors.
Some of them had been enslaved themselves, and their fathers had been.
They were all called George for George Pullman, who owned the trains, which showed you why
they needed to be organized.
And A. Philip Randolph went on to organize the 1963 march on Washington, the greatest
organizer of all time.
Edie Nixon worked with him, and Edie Nixon worked with Rosa Parks, and they were working
to most effectively strategize to change the law.
She trained at Highlander Center, as Dr. King had been there also, black and white together
to change the South, to change this country.
You know, Rosa Parks sat down on the bus before and refused to get up, as had other young
women.
You never know when the magic moment will come.
But if you're involved with social change, you will help to build a foundation that will
determine the future, that will make history.
And to show how brave Rosa Parks was, I mean, the media denigrates activism, but what can
be more noble than dedicating your life to making the world a better place?
To show Rosa Parks' bravery, just go back a few months before to an incident that deeply
affected her.
And that was the murder of Emmett Till, the summer of 1955.
Fourteen-year-old African-American boy, his mother Mamie Till wanted him out of Chicago
for the summer, sent him to be with his aunt and uncle and cousins in Money, Mississippi.
And he was asleep in their house at night, and a white mob came and ripped him out of
bed.
They said he wolf-whistled at a white woman.
Emmett Till was a stutterer, and his mother Mamie taught him, when you stutter, whistle.
He ended up in the bottom of the Tallahatchie River.
When his body was dredged up, his mother Mamie Till did something incredibly courageous.
She said she wanted his casket open for the wake and the funeral.
Thousands streamed by his casket and saw.
And then Jet Magazine and other black publications took photographs of his distended, mutilated
head.
And they were actually published.
And they were seared into the history and consciousness of this country.
Mamie Till had something very important to teach the press of today.
Show the pictures.
Show the images.
On this 11th anniversary of the longest war in U.S. history, the war in Afghanistan, could
you imagine for just one week if we showed the images of war?
Above the fold of every surviving newspaper, a photograph and a story about a baby dead
on the ground.
The top news story of every radio and TV newscast about a soldier dead and dying.
On everyone's Facebook wall, every email, every tweet talked about a woman with her
legs blown off by cluster bombs or a family killed in a drone attack.
For just one week, Americans are a compassionate people.
They would say, no, war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.
Democracy now.
Thank you.