RECENT SHOWS
Thursday, July 02, 2009
- Headlines
- “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”
- John Pilger Calls UK National Health Service a Treasure, Blasts US Lawmakers for Being “in Bed with Powerful Interests” and Neglecting “Their Own People’s Basic Human Rights”
- Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire Speaks from Israeli Jail Cell After Arrest on Boat Delivering Humanitarian Aid to Gaza
- Up in Smoke: How the Tobacco Industry Shaped the New Smoking Bill
- Zelaya Vows to Return to Honduras Despite Threats of Arrest by Coup Leaders
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
- Headlines
- “Change to Win is Dead”–Juan Gonzalez on Labor Movement Struggle
- Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas
- How Can We Have Sovereignty When We Don’t Have Electricity or Water to Bathe? Iraqi Reporter on US Troop Pullback
- Military Using “Brutal” Force Against Anti-Coup Protests in Honduras
- What’s Behind the Honduras Coup? Tracing Zelaya’s Trajectory
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
BLOG
-
Coup in Honduras: See full Democracy Now! coverage
Check out all of our coverage of the first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century.
Filed under News
-
“Undo the Coup”
The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.
Filed under Weekly Column
-
“Free Speech vs. Surveillance in the Digital Age”
Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
Filed under Weekly Column
-
EPA Declares Public Health Emergency in Libby, Montana
The Environmental Protection Agency has declared a public health emergency in the town of Libby, Montana, where hundreds of people have died from asbestos contamination. It is the first time such a declaration has been made by the EPA. For decades, W.R. Grace and Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby.
See extended Democracy Now! coverageFiled under DN Archives
-
“Congre$$, Heal Thyself”
As the Obama administration pushes for a vote on health-care reform before Congress recesses in August, has health-industry money too thoroughly polluted the process for anything good to come of it?
Filed under Weekly Column
-
“The Free Market’s Marked Men: From the Niger Delta to the Amazon”
Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.
Filed under Weekly Column
-
“Dr. George Tiller Didn’t Have to Die”
Dr. Tiller was assassinated while in church in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday, targeted for legally performing abortions. His death might have been prevented simply through enforcement of existing laws.
Filed under Weekly Column
-
“Chevron, Shell and the True Cost of Oil”
Profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell. Yet across the globe, from the Ecuadorian jungle, to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, to the courtrooms and streets of New York and San Ramon, Calif., people are fighting back against the world’s oil giants.
Filed under Weekly Column
-
More Blog Posts »
Podcasting & Torrents
A Taste of Slavery: Child Slave Labor and the International Cocoa Trade, From the Ivory Coast to the Mouths of Babes Here in the U.S.
There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. Slave labor.
Forty-three percent of the world’s cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor West African country. And on some of the farms, the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or tricked into slavery. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9.
The lucky slaves live on corn paste and bananas. The unlucky ones are whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children in Europe and the United States.
Americans spend $13 billion a year on chocolate, but most of them are as ignorant of where it comes from as the boys who harvest cocoa beans are about where their beans go.
This is how Sumana Chatterjee and Sudarsan Raghavan, two reporters for Knight Ridder Newspapers, began their ground breaking investigation of the cocoa trade in the Ivory Coast and the child slave labor that it depends on.
Guests:
- Sumana Chatterjee, reporter for Knight Ridder
- Sudarsan Raghavan, reporter for Knight Ridder
- Susan Smith, a spokesperson for Chocolate Manufacturers Association
- Peter Leon, legislative director for New York Congressperson Elliot Engel, who has introduced an amendment to an Agricultural spending bill calling for anti-child slave labor labels on chocolate products.
202-224-3121 Congressional switchboard–to urge your Congressperson to support the amendment
Related links:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org
. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions,
contact us.
