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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Election Day approaches, and with it a test of our election system’s integrity. Who will be allowed to vote; who will be barred? Who will get paper ballots; who will use electronic voting machines? Will polls be open long enough to accommodate what is expected to be a historic turnout?
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President Bush arrives in Nigeria today.
As he wraps up his five-day Africa tour, he is accompanied by a large entourage of corporate executives. Front and center are the oil executives. Bush is set to meet with Chevron Texaco CEO and chairman Dave O’Reilly. Other transnational corporations attending include Exxon-Mobil and Shell Petroleum.
Bush is joined by his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice. Rice is a former board member of Chevron. The company named an oil tanker after her, the Condoleezza Rice.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, cranking out more than 2 million barrels a day. Nearly 750,000 barrels of Nigeria’s oil go to the United States every day. That is 8 percent of total U.S. crude oil imports.
A former U.S. diplomat in Africa, Vincent Farley told Cox News Service: “If the U.S. intervention in Iraq does not bring peace in the Middle East, then the U.S. may have to look to other sources of oil.” He said, “And Africa is at the top of the list.”
Today, we spend the hour with the Democracy Now! documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship.”