RECENT SHOWS
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
- Headlines
- Change or More of the Same? Obama Introduces National Security Team
- Chevron Cleared in 1998 Shooting Deaths of Protesters in Niger Delta
- Israeli Reporter Amira Hass Forced Out of Gaza by Hamas, Detained by Israeli Police For Entering Gaza Without Permit
Monday, December 01, 2008
- Headlines
- Toll From Deadly, Coordinated Mumbai Attacks Tops 170, Two Top Indian Officials Resign, Tensions Rise Between India and Pakistan
- Wal-Mart Worker Crushed to Death in Early Morning Stampede of Shoppers on Black Friday
Friday, November 28, 2008
BLOG
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Amy Goodman’s New Column, “Chevron in the White House”
President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national-security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. Perhaps the least well known among them is retired Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama’s pick for national security adviser. The position is crucial—think of the power that Henry Kissinger wielded in Richard Nixon’s White House. A look into who James Jones is sheds a little light on the Obama campaign’s promise of “Change We Can Believe In.”
Filed under Weekly Column
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Amy Goodman’s New Column, “Tutu, Obama and the Middle East”
As President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You may not have heard much lately about the disaster in the Gaza Strip. That silence is intentional: The Israeli government has barred international journalists from entering the occupied territory.
Filed under Weekly Column
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“A View From the South”
Evo Morales knows about “change you can believe in.” He also knows what happens when a powerful elite is forced to make changes it doesn’t want.
Filed under Weekly Column
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“President Obama Can Redeem the White House”
Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a true story. The Obamas had just visited the White House. The first African-American elected president of the United States had visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves.
Filed under Weekly Column
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Amy Goodman on CNN Newsroom, November 10, 2008
Filed under D.N. in the News
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Anjali Kamat’s New Column: “Change We Can Believe In?”
Democracy Now! producer Anjali Kamat writes, “To all those for whom America has represented generations of racial injustice, the election of America’s first Black president marks the beginning of a new era…But unless the inspired millions who brought him to power continue to believe their demands matter and insist on holding him accountable each step of the way, it will be Obama’s corporate and hawkish friends who determine the domestic and foreign policies of the coming administration and our collective future.”
Filed under D.N. in the News
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“Organizer in Chief”
You could almost hear the world’s collective sigh of relief. This year’s U.S. presidential election was a global event in every sense. Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, represents to so many a living bridge—between continents and cultures.
Filed under Weekly Column
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Studs Terkel, 1912-2008
The legendary radio broadcaster, writer and oral historian Studs Terkel has died at the age of 96 in Chicago. Over the years Terkel has been a regular guest on Democracy Now!In 2005, Studs Terkel appeared on Democracy Now! shortly after undergoing open heart surgery. He told Amy Goodman, “My curiosity is what saw me through. What would the world be like, or will there be a world? And so, that’s my epitaph. I have it all set. Curiosity did not kill this cat. And it’s curiosity, I think, that has saved me thus far.”
Filed under DN Archives
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More Blog Posts »
Podcasting & Torrents
Did NYC Officials Deliberately Inflate Land Value of New Yankee Stadium to Turn Public Money into Private Profit?
In his latest column in the New York Daily News, Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez writes, “In January 2007, the city assessed land under the new Yankee Stadium at 10 times the market value of virtually all other land in the South Bronx neighborhood. The assessment—not including the new ballpark—worked out to a fair market value of $275 per square foot. But a Daily News analysis of city property records shows that city assessors said land on a dozen blocks around the site was worth an average of less than $25 a square foot.” [includes rush transcript]
Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist.
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: Juan, you wrote an interesting piece in the New York Daily News about Yankee Stadium.
JUAN GONZLEZ: Yes. Well, you know, Amy, we’re getting very close now to the final game being played in the most famous sports arena in the United States—Yankee Stadium—because a new Yankee stadium will open up across the street in the Bronx on next year. And I’ve been looking into the financing of the new stadium, which is the most expensive stadium ever constructed in America. It started out at $800 million, then it went to about a billion, and now it’s already escalated to at least $1.3 billion, and that’s not counting another about $300 million or more in public subsidies that are going into the stadium. It’s a huge, huge project that makes the Bridge to Nowhere look like minor league stuff.
But what my column today focuses on is how the city, apparently—the City of New York, apparently, grossly inflated the value of the Yankee Stadium land at ten times the value of any other property in the surrounding Bronx neighborhood. And it did so, because the Yankees needed a very high assessment of the land in order to be able to pay off nearly $1 billion in tax-exempt bonds that the team floated in 2006. And next week, Congressman Kucinich, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, is scheduled to hold a hearing in Washington looking into possible abuses of IRS regulations by city officials in the process of doing these evaluations of the land. There’s a separate investigation going on in the state assembly, and a report is going to be issued next week. And I look into—did city officials deliberately inflate the value of the land to benefit the Yankees?
And, of course, this is a major issue all around the country, because local governments are spending enormous sums in public subsidies and federally backed—federal tax-exempt bonds to create these huge stadium complexes. Here in New York alone, the Yankees have a stadium, a new stadium; the Mets are building a new stadium; the developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a new Nets arena. Across the river in New Jersey, the Giants and the Jets are building new stadiums. Minnesota, Washington—you go to any major city in America, they’re building new stadiums using huge amounts of public subsidies, and there are questionable practices, I think, in many of these cities as to how government officials are aiding these efforts.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll certainly continue to follow this.
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