All eyes are on Iowa this week, as the hodgepodge field of Republican contenders gallivants across that farm state seeking a win, or at least “momentum,” in the campaign for the party’s presidential nomination. But behind the scenes, a battle is being waged by Republicans—not against each other, but against American voters. Across the country, state legislatures and governors are pushing laws that seek to restrict access to the voting booth, laws that will disproportionately harm people of color, low-income people, and young and elderly voters.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have just released a comprehensive report on the crisis, “Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America.” In it, they write: “The heart of the modern block the vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements. In a coordinated effort, legislators in thirty-four states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: ‘Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.’”
It is interesting that the right wing, long an opponent of any type of national identification card, is very keen to impose photo-identification requirements at the state level. Why? Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, calls the voter ID laws “a solution without a problem. … It’s not going to make the vote more secure. What it is going to do is put the first financial barrier between people and their ballot box since we got rid of the poll tax.”
The once-imprisoned U.S. activist Lori Berenson will be allowed to travel to New York City to spend the holidays with her toddler son for the first time since her arrest in 1995. Last week, three judges granted her permission to take the trip, but on Friday she was prevented from boarding a flight. Monday afternoon, the AP reported that Peruvian migration officials have given Berenson permission to leave the country.
Berenson was tried by a hooded military judge, and prosecutors used secret evidence against her. For three years, she was held in the frigid Yanamayo prison in the Andes mountains in an unheated, open-air cell without running water, where her hands swelled like boxing gloves from the cold, and she developed gastric and eye problems. She was later transferred to the warmer Socabaya prison, but she was held in complete isolation there for many months. She ultimately served three-quarters of her 20-year prison term.
Accused whistle-blower Pvt. Bradley Manning turned 24 Saturday. He spent his birthday in a pretrial military hearing that could ultimately lead to a sentence of life … or death. Manning stands accused of causing the largest leak of government secrets in United States history.
More on Manning shortly. First, a reminder of what he is accused of leaking. In April 2010, the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released a video called “Collateral Murder.” It was a classified U.S. military video from July 2007, from an Apache attack helicopter over Baghdad. The video shows a group of men walking, then the systematic killing of them in a barrage of high-powered automatic fire from the helicopter. Soldiers’ radio transmissions narrate the carnage, varying from cold and methodical to cruel and enthusiastic. Two of those killed were employees of the international news agency Reuters: Namir Noor-Eldeen, a photojournalist, and Saeed Chmagh, his driver.
Renowned whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers that helped end the war in Vietnam and who himself is a Marine veteran who trained soldiers on the laws of war, told me: “Helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded … that shooting was murder. It was a war crime. Not all killing in war is murder, but a lot of it is. And this was.”
The WikiLeaks release of the Afghan War Logs followed months later, with tens of thousands of military field reports. Then came the Iraq War Diaries, with close to 400,000 military records of the U.S. war in Iraq. Next was Cablegate, WikiLeaks’ rolling release (with prominent print-media partners, including The New York Times and The Guardian in Britain) of classified U.S. State Department cables, more than a quarter-million of them, dating from as far back as 1966 up to early 2010. The contents of these cables proved highly embarrassing to the U.S. government and sent shock waves around the world.
Among the diplomatic cables released were those detailing U.S. support for the corrupt Tunisian regime, which helped fuel the uprising there. Noting that Time magazine named “The Protester,” generically, as Person of the Year, Ellsberg said Manning should be the face of that protester, since the leaks for which he is accused, following their impact in Tunisia, “in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt … which stimulated Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. So, one of those ‘persons of the year’ is now sitting in a courthouse.”
“You’ve been negotiating all my life,” Anjali Appadurai told the plenary session of the U.N.‘s 17th “Conference of Parties,” or COP 17, the official title of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Appadurai, a student at the ecologically focused College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, addressed the plenary as part of the youth delegation. She continued: “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before.”
After she finished her address, she moved to the side of the podium, off microphone, and in a manner familiar to anyone who has attended an Occupy protest, shouted into the vast hall of staid diplomats, “Mic check!” A crowd of young people stood up, and the call-and-response began:
Appadurai: “Equity now!”
Crowd: “Equity now!”
Appadurai: “You’ve run out of excuses!”
Crowd: “You’ve run out of excuses!”
Appadurai: “We’re running out of time!”
Crowd: “We’re running out of time!”
Appadurai: “Get it done!”
Crowd: “Get it done!”
That was Friday, at the official closing plenary session of COP 17. The negotiations were extended, virtually nonstop, through Sunday, in hopes of avoiding complete failure. At issue were arguments over words and phrases—for instance, the replacement of “legal agreement” with “an agreed outcome with legal force,” which is said to have won over India to the Durban Platform.
The countries in attendance agreed to a schedule that would lead to an agreement by 2015, which would commit all countries to reduce emissions starting no sooner than 2020, eight years into the future.
It was no simple task. Despite the morning sun and blue sky, the wind was ferocious, and the group hanging the banner wasn’t exactly welcome. They were with Greenpeace, hanging off the roof of the Protea Hotel Edward.
Inside, executives gathered at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), an organization that touts itself as “a CEO-led organization of forward-thinking companies that galvanizes the global business community to create a sustainable future for business, society and the environment.” Down at street level, as the police gathered and scores held signs and banners and sang in solidarity with the climbers, Kumi Naidoo lambasted the WBCSD, labeling it one of Greenpeace’s “Dirty Dozen.”
Naidoo is no stranger to action on the streets of Durban. While he is now the executive director of Greenpeace International, one of the largest and most visible global environmental organizations, in 1980, at the age of 15, he was one of millions of South Africans fighting against the racist apartheid regime. He was thrown out of high school and eventually had to go underground. He emerged in England, living in exile, and went on to become a Rhodes scholar. Naidoo has long struggled for human rights, against poverty and for action to combat climate change.
A colleague and I scrambled up to the roof to film as the seven banner-hanging activists were arrested. South African climber Michael Baillie, one of them, told me: “Our goal here today was to highlight how governments are being unduly influenced by a handful of corporations who are trying to adversely influence the climate negotiations that are happening here in Durban. They are holding the climate hostage.”
Later, at the U.N. conference inside the Alfred Luthuli International Conference Center, named after an early president-general of the African National Congress and the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Naidoo told me about that morning’s action: “We are not opposed to the idea of dialogue with corporations, but clearly corporations are not actually moving as fast as we need them to move and, in fact, are actually holding us back. Therefore, we think that calling them out, naming and shaming them, is critically necessary so that people know why these climate talks here are not actually going as fast as we need them to go.”
Johannesburg, South Africa — Democracy Now! speaks with Mohawk youth activist Jessica Yee about what brings her to attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa.
In this interview, Yee describes how South Africa based the legal framework for apartheid on U.S. and Canadian laws dealing with indigenous peoples. She is attending the climate conference as a member of the global indigenous youth caucus. Yee is the founder and executive director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.
She spoke to Amy Goodman at the Johannesburg airport.
Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live from the climate conference Dec. 5 through Dec. 9. Stream live 8am EST.
To see all of Democracy Now!’s reports on global climate change, including live reports from previous U.N. Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, visit our news archive
Defense lawyers for the alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning are accusing the U.S. government of withholding key evidence that could help Manning’s defense at a pre-trial hearing later this month. Manning’s attorneys say U.S. officials are refusing to hand over internal government documents that assessed the impact of the release of thousands of diplomatic cables that Manning allegedly passed on to WikiLeaks. Published reports suggest the U.S. government’s own analysts concluded that the leaking of the cables posed little threat to national security.
Manning’s hearing is set for December 16th. He’ll be flown from the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to Fort Meade, Maryland, to make his first court appearance since his arrest in May 2010. Manning spent the first part of his imprisonment in harsh conditions including solitary confinement, leading to allegations of cruelty and torture.
Ahead of Manning’s first court date, the indie musician Cass McCombs stopped by the Democracy Now! studio to debut a new song he wrote for Manning. The song is called "Bradley Manning."
Less than a month after Occupy Wall Street began, a group was gathered in New York’s historical Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. This was a moment of critical growth for the movement, with increasing participation from the thousands of students attending the cluster of colleges and universities there. A decision was made to march on local branches of the too-big-to-fail banks, so participants could close their accounts, and others could hold “teach-ins” to discuss the problems created by these unaccountable institutions. READMORE
Clashes have erupted in Bahrain ahead of today’s release of a report that investigates the crackdown on the pro-democracy uprising earlier this year. The Bahraini monarchy commissioned the supposed independent probe after crushing protests with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia. At least 26 people were killed, more than 1,500 people were arrested, and thousands lost their jobs when protests erupted in February. Bahraini activists have questioned the report’s credibility.
For more on the situation, Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat spoke to Bahraini activist Ala’a Shehabi who was briefly in Cairo last month. She is the wife of a Bahraini political prisoner seized and jailed during the uprising.
More than 10,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., last Sunday with a simple goal: Encircle the White House. They succeeded, just weeks after 1,253 people were arrested in a series of protests at the same spot. These thousands, as well as those arrested, were unified in their opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline, intended to run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas. A broad, international coalition against the pipeline has formed since President Barack Obama took office, and now the deadline for its approval or rejection is at hand.
Bill McKibben, founder of the global movement against climate change 350.org, told me: “This has become not only the biggest environmental flash point in many, many years, but maybe the issue in recent times in the Obama administration when he’s been most directly confronted by people in the street. In this case, people willing, hopeful, almost dying for him to be the Barack Obama of 2008.”
The president, until recently, simply hid behind the legal argument that, as the pipeline was coming from Canada, the proper forum for the decision fell with the U.S. Department of State and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That was until a key Clinton insider was exposed as a lobbyist for the company trying to build Keystone XL, TransCanada. The environmental group Friends of the Earth has exposed a series of connections between the Clinton political machine and Keystone XL. Paul Elliott is TransCanada’s top lobbyist in Washington on the pipeline. He was a high-level campaign staffer on Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2008, and worked as well on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1996 and Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2000.
Friends of the Earth (FOE) received emails following a Freedom of Information Act request, documenting exchanges in 2010 between Elliott and Marja Verloop, whom FOE describes as a “member of the senior diplomatic staff at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.” Verloop in one email cheers Elliott for obtaining the buy-in on Keystone XL from conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, writing: “Go Paul! Baucus support holds clout.”
Another person arrested at the White House during the August-September protests was Canadian author Naomi Klein. Of the cozy email exchange, she said, “The response of the State Department was, ‘Well, we meet with environmentalists, too.’ But just imagine them writing an email to Bill McKibben: when he says, ‘We got more than 1,200 people arrested,’ and they would write back, ‘Go Bill!’? The day that happens, I’ll stop worrying.” Klein went on to explain the environmental impact of the project: “Tar sands oil emits three times as much greenhouse gases as a regular barrel of Canadian crude, because, of course, it is in solid form. So, you have to use all of this energy to get it out and to liquefy it.”