Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Tuesday, February 11, 2014
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The Day We Fight Back: Activism Sweeps the Internet with Global Action Against Mass Surveillance
Nearly a decade after the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless spying program came to light, the issue of mass government surveillance has again sparked a global outcry with the disclosures of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Leaks of National Security Agency files have exposed a mammoth spying apparatus that stretches across the planet, from phone records to text messages to social media and email, from the internal communications of climate summits to those of foreign missions and even individual heads of state. Today privacy advocates are holding one of their biggest online actions so far with "The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance." Thousands of websites will speak in one voice, displaying a banner encouraging visitors to fight back by posting memes and changing their social media avatars to reflect their demands, as well as contacting their members of Congress to push through surveillance reform legislation. The action is inspired in part by the late Internet open-access activist Aaron Swartz, who helped set a precedent in January 2012 when more than 8,000 websites went dark for 12 hours in protest of a pair of controversial bills that were being debated in Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The bills died in committee in the wake of protests. We discuss today’s global action with Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: Next year will mark a decade since the Bush administration’s warrantless spying first came to light. The news the White House authorized surveillance on Americans without court approval shattered the secrecy around the National Security Agency. Until then, many were either unaware of the NSA or just saw it as another outpost of a bloated national security state. But the exposure of its warrantless wiretapping was arguably the biggest scandal of the post-9/11 era—that is, until last year. That’s when Edward Snowden came forward to reveal a mammoth spying apparatus that spans the globe, from phone records to text messages to social media and email, from the internal communications of climate summits to those of foreign missions and even individual heads of state. These revelations have sparked intense public scrutiny, and today advocates are holding one of their biggest online actions so far.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s called "The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance." More than 6,000 websites are taking part, including Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union. The websites will display a banner encouraging visitors to fight back against surveillance. Internet users are encouraged to post memes and change their social media avatars to reflect their demands.
Organizers announced the action on the eve of the death anniversary of the Internet open-access activist Aaron Swartz. He helped set a precedent for such Internet-based protests in January 2012 when over 8,000 websites went dark for 12 hours in protest of a pair of controversial bills that were being debated in Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA. The bills died in committee in the wake of the protests. This clip from the new documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, describes the successful campaign against SOPA and PIPA.
AARON SWARTZ: Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill that they were promoting just a couple days ago. And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this, we had won. The thing that everyone said was impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream, had happened. We did it. We won.
DECLAN McCULLAGH: This is a historic week in Internet politics, maybe American politics.
PETER ECKERSLEY: The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from staffers on Capitol Hill, was they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA blackout day than they’d ever received about anything. I think that was an extremely exciting moment. This was the moment when the Internet had grown up politically.
AARON SWARTZ: It’s easy sometimes to feel like you’re powerless, like when you come out in the streets and you march and you yell, and nobody hears you. But I’m here to tell you today: You are powerful.
AARON MATÉ: That’s a clip from the new documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last month. Swartz inspired organizers to create today’s "The Day We Fight Back" protest—thousands of websites speaking in one voice against mass surveillance by the NSA.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to San Francisco, where we’re joined by Rainey Reitman. She is the activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Rainey, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this day, and particularly what you’re targeting in what you’re doing.
RAINEY REITMAN: Thanks so much for having me.
So, The Day We Fight Back is a digital protest, and over 6,000 websites have signed on. And we’re pushing for a number of things, but for people within the United States, we’re really pushing people to contact their members of Congress. We are at sort of a real interesting point in the NSA debate. We have Obama making a few key concessions towards reform. We have review groups and the congressionally appointed oversight board for civil liberties demanding that fairly extensive reforms be made to NSA spying. And we have polls of public opinion showing that overwhelmingly the American people do want reform. And in this landscape, we really have an opportunity to push for congressional action.
And that’s what we’re doing. We’re asking for people to call on Congress to promote the USA FREEDOM Act, which is a very moderate bill that would help to rein in NSA surveillance, and then push for additional reforms to that bill, such as privacy protections for people overseas and ensuring that Internet encryption standards aren’t undermined by the NSA, and then also defeating a bill known as the FISA Improvements Act. That’s a bill that would actually attempt to codify into law mass surveillance, to legalize some of the worst mass surveillance that we’ve seen from the NSA.
AARON MATÉ: Rainey, talk about what visitors to websites are going to be seeing today. And what has the response been of the major Internet companies—Google, Microsoft, Apple—who have been caught up in spying programs but now claim that they want to see reforms, as well?
RAINEY REITMAN: Well, the visitors to websites all over the world, on over 6,000 websites, will see a banner, and within the United States, that banner is going to give them an opportunity to call their member of Congress. It’s actually going to have a script there—you give it your phone number, and then it calls you—or you can email a member of Congress. If you’re coming from overseas, that banner is going to show a global petition against mass surveillance that you can sign onto with thousands of other people around the world. And that petition will then be used to kind of move forward policy debates around opposing mass surveillance
And interestingly, we have seen a lot of these tech companies starting to stand with their users. And this is something that they were a little bit slow to the gate, but in fact, big companies like Facebook, like Google, like Microsoft, like Yahoo, they’ve endorsed this action, in addition to pushing for reform more generally. You can see it—they have a coalition website that they put together called Reform Government Surveillance. That website’s running a banner itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Last month, President Obama unveiled his long-awaited review of the NSA surveillance programs, after Edward Snowden exposed them to global scrutiny. In a move denounced by privacy advocates, Obama refused to end the bulk collection of telephone metadata, saying only he’ll modify it from how it currently exists.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists, and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata. This will not be simple.
AMY GOODMAN: In an interview on the German channel ARD, Edward Snowden reacted to Obama’s speech.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: It was clear from the president’s speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don’t need. The president created a review board from officials that were personal friends, from national security insiders, former deputy of the CIA—people who had every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no value. They’ve never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States, and they have marginal utility, at best, for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone metadata program—actually, it’s a broader metadata program, a bulk collection—bulk collection means mass surveillance—program—was in stopping or detecting a $8,500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California. And it’s this kind of review where insiders go, "We don’t need these programs. These programs don’t make us safe. They take a tremendous amount of resources to run, and they offer us no value." They go, "We can modify these." The National Security Agency operates under the president’s executive authority alone. He can end or modify or direct a change in their policies at any time.
AARON MATÉ: That’s Rainey Reitman—I’m sorry, that’s Edward Snowden reacting to President Obama’s speech last month. Rainey Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, your group gave Obama a score of 3.5 out of 12, 12 points that you wanted to see him make in reforming NSA surveillance. Where did you think he met the bar, and where do you think he failed?
RAINEY REITMAN: Sure. When it came to Obama’s promises for NSA reform, I want to acknowledge that he did do a couple of things. I mean, one thing that he clearly did do was he worked to reform the FISA court, that he—that’s the secret court that signs off on the NSA surveillance programs right now and has been heavily criticized by civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because it’s so untransparent and because it’s been creating case law and not making it available to the public. And Obama did a couple good things there. He put a individual into the FISA court who would champion civil liberties, and that’s a really important first step, and I don’t want to under—I want to underscore that. And then he also insured that the FISA court would have a certain amount of transparency, so that once a year they would look to declassify some of the FISA court opinions. So that was an important step. And here and there we gave him credit for a few other things.
However, one thing we were particularly looking for from Obama was a promise that even as he transitions out the telephone metadata program, the program collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans who aren’t suspected of a crime—and he’s been under so much pressure for that—and as he’s transitioning away from that program, which I think we absolutely should applaud, that he isn’t going to turn that into a tech mandate, a mandate that technology companies like AT&T serve as our technological Big Brother, forced by the government to maintain the records and then tasking them to basically serve the same function that the National Security Agency was serving, where they were collecting a database of people’s phone records and then making that available to the government later. And he didn’t make that promise. In fact, that’s very much still on the table, and it’s something that civil liberties advocates are pushing back against in every way imaginable.
AMY GOODMAN: Rainey Reitman, this day of action is opposing the FISA [Improvements] Act. You’re speaking to us from San Francisco, where Electronic Frontier Foundation is based. It’s also the state of California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is the sponsor of this bill. Can you explain exactly what your concerns are?
RAINEY REITMAN: Well, Amy, the concept of the FISA Improvements Act can seem kind of appealing: At first you might think it’s a reform bill. But, in fact, what the FISA Improvements Act does is it attempts to codify into law, so it attempts to make legal, the types of mass surveillance that have so outraged people around the world. So, the telephone metadata program, that’s something that under the FISA Improvements Act, if it were to pass, the government could argue would be legal. And it would also sort of give a green light and encourage the National Security Agency to engage in even more types of surveillance. For example, an Internet metadata surveillance program could be seen as legal under this, if this bill were to pass. That’s a program that the National Security Agency tried years ago and then abandoned because it was useless. And so, this is exactly what we don’t want to see as a response to the recent revelations about our government surveillance programs. We don’t want to lose this opportunity to reform on a basically—what many people are calling a "fake fix" bill.
AARON MATÉ: Rainey, on the issue of the bulk collection of phone records, you’ve had two courts so far saying it’s legal, one federal court saying it’s not. In Obama’s speech, he said that these records are only queried if there is a specific lead. So, what is your problem with that? Why should the government not be able to hold records, when, as they say, they’re only looking at them if they have specific intelligence to go after criminal activity?
RAINEY REITMAN: Well, I understand what the president is trying to say, and I do think that, you know, the instinct is good. They are trying to protect the privacy of people. But it’s important to remember that, you know, the thing here is that the Fourth Amendment isn’t about when you search records, it’s really about the point of collection. The Fourth Amendment is very clear that you can’t walk into people’s houses and collect all their papers and then, you know, as long as you put them in a drawer and don’t look at them, it doesn’t actually count as being invasive to people’s privacy. If we want to have a strict understanding of the constitutional protections that Americans have, we really need to ensure that we aren’t engaged in dragnet surveillance programs that collect information on people who aren’t suspected of any crime. That’s, in many ways, the core complaint that people from both sides of the political spectrum have about this program, in addition to ongoing concerns that it’s frankly not proven to be useful in seven years.
AMY GOODMAN: The USA PATRIOT Act was sponsored by Senator Sensenbrenner. Now he joins with—Congressman Sensenbrenner. Now he and Senator Leahy are joining with together in introducing what’s called the USA FREEDOM Act. Explain how the interests of conservatives come together with people across the political spectrum on this and what exactly the USA FREEDOM Act does.
RAINEY REITMAN: Well, Amy, the bill is very much a bipartisan bill. It’s been extremely striking to see people who have been very far on either side of the political spectrum uniting in response to the NSA surveillance debate and pushing for fairly extensive reforms in the form of the USA FREEDOM Act. This is a bill that’s still in committee and is still seeking co-sponsors, but it seems to have a lot of momentum. And the implication is that this is a vehicle that might move forward and actually rein in National Security Agency abuses.
The bill would do a variety of things, and I would urge viewers to take some time to get to know it a little bit better. But to go through just a few of the things it would do, it would change the language of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. That’s the section of law that the government is arguing gives them the right to collect our telephone metadata, all our call records. It would change that to strengthen the language to make it more difficult for the government to sweep up the phone records of people not suspected of any crime. It would also make adjustments to additional parts of our surveillance law, and it would increase the amount of transparency we have around national security letters. Those are the secretive orders that the FBI will send out to service providers, such as email service providers, requesting information on their users. And it will give additional authority to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. That’s the oversight board that’s supposed to ensure that the government isn’t trampling on the civil liberties of Americans and people worldwide.
So, I do think that this bill does a few substantive things, but civil liberties advocates really see this as a floor and not a ceiling, that the USA FREEDOM Act should be a very moderate first step towards reforming NSA surveillance abuses, but it shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. In fact, what we really want are additional protections, protections such as ensuring that people all over the world are not subject to mass, suspicionless surveillance by the National Security Agency, and ensuring that, for example, the National Security Agency isn’t undermining Internet encryption standards, which we’re all relying on to ensure our communications are safe.
AMY GOODMAN: Rainey Reitman, we want to thank you for being with us, activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, speaking to us from San Francisco.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, you’ll find out what the "sixth extinction" is all about. We’ll speak with New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert. Stay with us.
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The Sixth Extinction: Elizabeth Kolbert on How Humans Are Causing Largest Die-Off Since Dinosaur Age
In the history of the planet, there have been five known mass extinction events. The last came 65 million years ago, when an asteroid about half the size of Manhattan collided with the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and bringing the Cretaceous period to an end. Scientists say we are now experiencing the sixth extinction, with up to 50 percent of all living species in danger of disappearing by the end of the century. But unlike previous extinctions, the direct cause this time is us — human-driven climate change. In "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History," journalist Elizabeth Kolbert visits four continents to document the massive "die-offs" that came millions of years ago and those now unfolding before our eyes. Kolbert explores how human activity — fossil fuel consumption, ocean acidification, pollution, deforestation, forced migration — threatens life forms of all kinds. "It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion," Kolbert writes. "The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: In the history of the planet, there have been five known mass extinction events. The last came 65 million years ago, when an asteroid about half the size of Manhattan collided with the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and bringing the Cretaceous period to an end.
Well, we turn now to a new book that explores what scientists call the sixth extinction, the massive dying off of animal and plant life that is happening today. Up to 50 percent of all living species are in danger of disappearing by the end of the century. But unlike previous extinctions, the direct cause this time is us: human-driven climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: In The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Kolbert visits four continents to document the massive "die-offs" that came millions of years ago and those now unfolding before our eyes. Kolbert explores how human activity—fossil fuel consumption, ocean acidification, pollution, deforestation, forced migration—threatens life forms of all kinds.
The figures are staggering. She writes, quote, "It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys," she writes.
Yes, Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and one of the country’s leading science journalists. Her previous book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, explored the science and politics of global warming.
And now you take this a step further, Elizabeth. Welcome to Democracy Now! To say the least, a chilling title, The Sixth Extinction. So, take it forward. What does that mean, exactly?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, as Aaron mentioned, there have been, you know, five previous—I guess we call them major mass extinctions, because I should say there’s sort of an oxymoron—you can also have a minor mass extinction—but five major ones that we see in the fossil record, the most recent being the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. And so now human impacts on the planet—burning fossil fuels, acidifying the oceans, cutting down the rainforests, just altering the surface of the Earth—moving species around has enormous effect. You know, everyone has heard of invasive species, but we are moving so many species around the world, we’re really sort of reverse-engineering the planet, bringing—in effect, bringing all the continents back together. So, all of these things have the unfortunate side effect of causing extinction.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain what you mean by reverse—by spreading the species around the planet.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, we—you know, just in ballast water, for example, just to take an example, it’s estimated that 10,000 species are being moved around in ballast water in our—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what ballast water is.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: In our supertankers, you know, they have these huge tanks of water ballast to stabilize the ship, and they contain lots of creatures. You know, some are very, very tiny. Some are less tiny. But you’re moving them around, and that has—from ocean to ocean, right? So, imagine, you know, pre-Panama Canal, pre-people, the Atlantic and the Pacific, if you lived—had evolved in the Atlantic or evolved in the Pacific, you’d evolved separately for many millennia, millions of years. You bring these lineages together, and it can have many impacts, some of which can be quite devastating. And everyone has heard stories of invasive species.
There’s a very famous story, for example, of the brown tree snake, which has been told, you know, many times. The brown tree snake was brought from Guam—was brought, I’m sorry, from New Guinea to the island of Guam, probably in military cargo in World War II. Guam had only one tiny native snake about the size of a worm. This snake had no enemies. It went, you know, crazy, multiplied like crazy, and ate just about everything that it possibly could on Guam, so now a lot of Guam’s native birds are either gone or very, very critically endangered. So that’s an example of what happens when you bring together organisms that have evolved separately for a very, very long time.
AARON MATÉ: On the issue of the oceans, would you say that it’s an overlooked part of the global warming debate, the impact of carbon pollution on the oceans? And what should people know about the dangers of humankind to the oceans?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, yeah, that’s a really big issue. And Jane Lubchenco, who was head of NOAA until fairly recently, has called ocean acidification global warming’s equally evil twin. And I think because we are terrestrial organisms, we don’t appreciate it as much. But a lot of our carbon emissions, so a lot of what we’re putting up into the air, is ending up very, very quickly in the oceans. It’s absorbed by the oceans, and when carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it has the unfortunate effect of becoming an acid. So we drink that acid, this very weak acid, carbonic acid, and you drink it when you drink Coke, but it’s still an acid. And you put enough in the water, and it changes the pH of the water, the chemistry of the oceans. And that’s what we’re doing. And that has, you know, potentially enormous ramifications, because obviously if you’re a creature whose only contact with the outside world is through the water, it’s a very big deal.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us some stories that you learned, as you did this research from continent to continent, that most alarmed you.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, one of the trips I took, I got to go—sort of paradoxically, in, you know, chronicling this, The Sixth Extinction, I got to go to some of the most amazing places on the planet. And one place I went to was a cloud forest in the Andes. And we started out at about 12,000 feet on a mountain ridge and started hiking down the ridge. And one of the scientists I was with said to me, you know, "Pick out a leaf that has an interesting shape and watch it. And you’re only going to see it as we go down this ridge for maybe a hundred meters or so, because that tree has a very, very narrow range." Right? It only is adapted to this little band of altitude.
And I think what that lesson, and what he was looking at, why we were in the Andes, we were looking at these tropical species that tend to have a very narrow climatic range and the impact of climate change on these species. And I think that people are aware of the potential impacts of climate change on Arctic species. You know, everyone has seen the pictures of the poor polar bears, you know, as the sea ice shrinks. But really, where climate change could have an even more devastating impact is in the tropics, both because most species live in the tropics—that’s just where the abundance of life is—and also because these species tend to have a very, very narrow tolerance for climatic change. They’re used to a lot of climatic stability.
AARON MATÉ: You identify some key figures whose theories were initially mocked but have since been vindicated. Can you talk about Georges [Cuvier] and the Alvarez father-and-son team, and their findings and their work?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah, yeah, it’s a really interesting sort of history of science, you know, story, a rare instance where an idea came and went, and came again. And Georges Cuvier was a great naturalist from the beginning of the 19th century, so right around 1800, and he was the first person to really say organisms go extinct. So, to understand—you know, to appreciate how important that was, when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Northwest, he hoped they’d find live mastodons roaming around. He really just couldn’t believe, even though he was very interested in fossils—he had a fossil room at the White House when he was there—he couldn’t believe these animals had gone extinct. It just wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t what the creator, you know, had planned for them. And Georges Cuvier came along and said, you know, really, essentially, if they’re out there, we would have seen them. We haven’t seen them: They’re gone. And he posited this whole lost world, which he then proceeded to start to uncover. So a lot of the animal names that we have now—for example, pterodactyl—he came up with. He was the first person to identify a pterodactyl. And his theory was that animals only went extinct in these catastrophic waves—you know, something happened, the planet changed; otherwise, why else would they go extinct?
And then a naturalist named Charles Lyell, who was Charles Darwin’s mentor, came along, and he said, "That’s ridiculous. You know, we never see these catastrophes. They don’t happen. Only—the only way the Earth changes is very, very, very gradually, and things go extinct very gradually, and the world changes very gradually." And that became sort of the doctrine for a very long time, over a hundred years, until the Alvarezes came along and identified an asteroid impact as the event that had done in the dinosaurs—and many other creatures, I should say. The dinosaurs always get top billing, but they—that extinction event did in a lot of other groups, as well. That was resisted; that theory was resisted. But it was proved, and now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point of writing the book is that we are in one of those moments right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Panamanian golden frog.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: The Panamanian golden frog is a very sad story. The Panamanian golden frog is a beautiful frog. It’s sort of taxi-cab yellow color. And it lived—it was considered a lucky symbol in Panama. For many years you’d see it on lottery tickets in Panama. And this is in a case of an invasive species. A disease passed through Panama, a disease that affects amphibians, and it sort of raced through. And people watched these frogs disappear, not just the Panamanian golden frog, but many frogs disappeared. And they, fortunately, had anticipated this. They could actually watch it moving through. And they took some of them out of the rainforest, and they’re now in a conservation center. They can’t leave. They can’t go outside. But they’re in this little conservation center in a town called El Valle.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you a clip of Congressmember Paul Broun. He’s of Georgia, chair of the oversight and investigations for House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. This is video of him speaking in 2012 at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia.
REP. PAUL BROUN: I’ve come to understand that all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology, Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Republican Congressmember Paul Broun of Georgia, denying climate change exists, coming up right now.
REP. PAUL BROUN: Now we hear all the time about global warming. Well, actually, we’ve had a flat line temperatures globally for the last eight years. Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax.
AMY GOODMAN: Those clips also highlighted on Bill Moyers’ program on PBS. Congressman Paul Broun is not only just just a congressman from Georgia, but he’s chair of the oversight—chair of oversight and investigations for the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The significance of what he is saying, both on the issue of evolution and climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, it’s hard to overstate it. I mean, you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation.
AMY GOODMAN: And what are the implications of this for policy?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, we all know what the—you know, we all see the implications for policy: There is no policy. So, you know, people have essentially given up in this Congress on getting any kind of meaningful legislation through. And the only hope of getting any kind of action on climate change now rests with the administration. And the administration, the Obama administration, knows that. Everyone knows that.
AMY GOODMAN: What needs to be done?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, you know, massive things need to be done. Obviously we need to start transitioning our whole economy off of fossil fuels. That’s not—that’s not a small thing. That’s a big thing. And if you were going to ask, you know, policy experts what we should do, they would say, "Well, we need some kind of price on carbon." Now, that is—that requires legislative action. In the absence of that, in the absence of putting a price on putting CO2 into the atmosphere, there are things the administration can do and that they are supposedly working on—you know, power plant regulations that would reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s very difficult to get the kind of action that we need without any hope of getting anything through Congress.
AARON MATÉ: On this issue of action, in 2012, David Suzuki, one of Canada’s leading environmentalists, told Democracy Now! that we need a radical shift in our economic system to save the planet.
DAVID SUZUKI: We need to shift that to a better understanding that we are part of a vast web of interconnected species, that it is the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land, where all life exists. It’s a very thin layer around the planet. Carl Sagan told us that if you shrink the Earth to the size of a basketball, the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land, where all life exists, would be thinner than a layer of Saran Wrap, and that’s it. That’s our home, but it’s home to 10 to 30 thousand—30 million other species that keep the planet habitable. And if we don’t see that we are utterly embedded in the natural world and dependent on nature, not technology, not economics, not science—we’re dependent on Mother Nature for our very well-being and survival. If we don’t see that, then our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets. Those are all human-created things. They shouldn’t dominate the way we live. It should be the biosphere.
AARON MATÉ: That’s David Suzuki speaking at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit. Now, your book leaves the issue of what to do largely up to the reader, but I’m curious, in your research and in speaking to scientists, to people out there working with biodiversity, whether you came across any thoughts on whether our very economic system is tenable, one that subordinates resources to profit, whether people feel that we also need a fundamental shift in how we organize our economy.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, I think if you’re out there in the field with scientists, they will say something really big needs to change, you know, if we just continue on the same trend lines we’re on, that a lot of things, including potentially ourselves, are in deep, deep trouble. But scientists don’t tend to, you know, get involved in the question of whether we need to reorganize our economy. I’m going to be, you know, frank with you: When you’re out in the Andes, that’s not the topic that they’re discussing.
But what you do hear them say, you know, a lot is that we need to—we’ve already set so many changes in motion, right? I mean, climate change is occurring; whatever anyone in Congress says, it’s occurring right now. You can watch, and scientists are watching, tracking species on the move all over the planet, trying to track the climate as it changes, so either moving upslope or moving toward the poles. And to the extent that we can preserve any parts of the planet that are not being chopped up or chopped down, so that we can allow species to move where they need to go, to track climate change, that is one thing that we can do, even as climate change unfolds. And unfortunately, climate change has been set in motion so that, really, though we desperately need to reduce our carbon emissions, we’re not stopping that process anytime in the near future, so that we need to start thinking about, you know, a world in which everything is on the move and preserving corridors that things can migrate through.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, one thing that might unite people is, whether they disagree over the issue of evolution and climate change—and I’m not talking about scientists here, since the mass—
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah, that would be tough to find one.
AMY GOODMAN: —mass consensus of scientists around the world believes that humans are causing climate change—but are these issues, like in West Virginia and North Carolina, when you have unregulated industry, fossil fuel industries, that are destroying these states. I mean, the fact that there was this major hearing yesterday, and none of the health—the officials in West Virginia could say whether the water is safe, kids being closed out of their schools one after another because the water is smelling like licorice. And then you have Duke Energy in North Carolina and this terrible spill that has polluted so much of the land there.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, I also think another thing that can unite people, you know, despite the clips that we just heard, is, you know, we are—we are caring. You know, these are all our fellow creatures on the planet. And the pope, for example, is working on an environmental encyclical, I read, and he has a great quote from just a couple months ago, where he said, "God always forgives. People occasionally forgive. But nature never forgives. You drive a creature extinct, that creature is not coming back." This is, you know, not me; this is the pope. And so, I think that there is a potential—I do think people care. You know, basically, it cuts across a lot of different ideologies and groups about, you know, this planet. As David Suzuki said, this is where we—you know, this is your home. And if you don’t care about that, you know, what do you care about? It’s hard to fathom.
AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth Kolbert, we have to break. When we come back, we’re going to switch gears—
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: —because you also wrote a very interesting piece in The New Yorker on the Port Authority and Governor Chris Christie. Latest news out of New Jersey: Many more subpoenas have been issued as the governor is on the run around the country—let’s put it that way. I don’t know if he would describe it as on the run, though many have, as he heads up the Republican Governors Association trying to raise money for the Republican Party. The money is being raised, but not a lot of candidates are interested in having their pictures taken with Governor Christie—quite a change from just a few months ago. Our guest is Elizabeth Kolbert. Her new book that was just published today is called The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Stay with us.
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Bridgegate Scandal Grows as NJ Lawmakers Issue 18 Subpoenas to Christie's Office, Port Authority
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s "Bridgegate" continues to unfold, as a legislative panel investigating the scandal has issued 18 more subpoenas. They include one for the head of the state’s police aviation unit, who could offer details about whether Christie shared a helicopter with David Wildstein on the same days Wildstein oversaw the closures of traffic lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge for four days in September. Wildstein was Christie’s former Port Authority appointee. A photograph taken on the third day the lanes were blocked shows Christie walking with Wildstein and other close allies at the authority. Christie has denied having any knowledge of the closures as they happened, saying he only found out when the scandal broke open last month. But last week, Wildstein said "evidence exists" that Christie was aware at the time, contrary to his public statements. We speak with Elizabeth Kolbert, whose recent article for The New Yorker, "Red Light," looks at the Port Authority’s evolution from progressive government experiment to patronage mill stacked with Christie loyalists.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: We’re speaking with Elizabeth Kolbert, who is a staff writer with The New Yorker , where she recently wrote about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and "Bridgegate" in a recent commentary called "Red Light." Well, the scandal continued to unfold Monday as a panel investigating the scandal issued 18 more subpoenas, including one for the head of the state police’s aviation unit, which could offer details about whether Christie shared a helicopter with David Wildstein on the same days Wildstein oversaw the closures of traffic lanes heading to the George Washington Bridge for four days in September. Wildstein was Christie’s former appointee at the Port Authority. A photograph taken on the third day of the lanes closure shows Christie walking with Wildstein and other close allies at the authority. Now, Christie has denied having any knowledge of the closures as they happened, saying he only found out when the scandal broke open last month. But last week, Wildstein said evidence exists that Christie was aware at the time, contrary to his public statements. Now—
AMY GOODMAN: You have written this piece, Elizabeth Kolbert, that looks at both Governor Christie and what’s—and the Port Authority. Talk about the significance of this now new slew of subpoenas and what they mean.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, it’s really a fascinating story to watch unfold. And what seems to me to be really interesting about this story is we really have two alternatives, right? One, that Governor Christie was told directly, and, you know, "I approve of this message, I approve of these bridge closings," or he had a bunch of people in there who thought—you know, were acting completely without telling the governor, but thought that this was something that was good to do. Either one does not reflect, you know, terribly well on the Christie administration.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of David Wildstein, his childhood friend, who—a statement was issued out of the Christie administration saying he hardly had seen him in years, and then you’ve got this photograph from September 11th of them standing together—and then this subpoena that’s going out to the helicopter aviation unit, the idea that he may have actually flown over the George Washington Bridge to survey the traffic jam, when he says he hardly knew anything about it?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, you know, I don’t know if you read the—and anyone can access them, the massive documents that were released last month that sort of began this whole slew of news coverage, but there were huge portions that—or, I shouldn’t say huge portions—significant portions that were redacted. And we would all like to know, you know, what were in those redacted portions. And now you have a bunch of people also pleading the Fifth. That was rejected yesterday. That was part of yesterday—you know, in the midst of issuing this flurry of subpoenas, they also rejected the idea of two people, I believe, that they could legitimately plead the Fifth in this case. So, there are lots of fascinating aspects to this that we haven’t seen play out yet.
AARON MATÉ: It’s gotten very comical. After Wildstein came out saying that he had evidence that Christie knew, then Christie’s team came out with a press release saying that—trying to taint Wildstein, saying that as a 16-year-old kid, he sued over a local school board election. He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah, it doesn’t get more, you know, schoolyardy than the schoolyard, really. I mean, we are literally back in the schoolyard. And it’s—as you say, it’s got a really comical aspect. And when you’re in politics, you don’t necessarily want to be the butt of the late-night jokes.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, when you look at the gravity of what took place, and now the mayor of Hoboken, the mayor of Fort Lee, talking about the retaliation against them—I mean, in the case of Hoboken, trying to get funds for a city that was so deeply affected by Hurricane Sandy—that goes to, of course, the issue of climate change, as well—but having to agree to a local private development in order to get those funds. And then Fort Lee, just being a Democrat who wasn’t supporting the governor, he wanted the news to be massive landslide with a lot of Democratic support. But you talk about the Port Authority and Governor Christie. But the history of the Port Authority, what that means, and its significance for people who might be listening well outside of the range of this city?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Right. Well, that, I think, is a really interesting aspect of the story that the Port Authority itself has a long and distinguished history. So, the Port Authority, which controls the bridge, operates the bridge, runs the bridge, and which had to order the lane closings, also operates most of the big transportation hubs in the New York metropolitan area. And it was founded during the Progressive Era. It was really an outgrowth of this belief, interestingly, you know, that we had to take certain functions, these engineering functions, away from Albany and Trenton, which are known as soft of sinkholes of corruption, and always have been, to be frank. And we are going to put it in a very professional agency, and they are going to work in this different way. And they actually did. They completed the George Washington Bridge, for example, below cost and ahead of schedule, something we really can’t even imagine right now. And they were a very professional agency for quite a while. And in recent years, they have increasingly become this place, you know, where people like Chris Christie put people that they want to get jobs for, patronage jobs for.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we’ll continue to follow this issue, Port Authority, from progressive government experiment to patronage mill. Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. We’ll link to her latest article, "Red Light," and also her book, The Sixth Extinction, just out, An Unnatural History.
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Headlines:
Anti-Drone Activist Missing in Pakistan
An anti-drone activist and journalist has gone missing in Pakistan just days before he was due to travel to Europe to speak with Parliament members about the impact of the U.S. drone wars. The legal charity Reprieve says Karim Khan was seized in the early hours of February 5 by up to 20 men, some wearing police uniforms. He has not been seen since. Khan’s brother and son were both killed in a drone strike. He criticized the U.S. drone wars in an interview with filmmaker Madiha Tahir for the film, "Wounds of Waziristan."
Karim Khan: "You asked me a question about terrorism. Can I ask you one? What is the definition of terrorism or terrorist?"
Madiha Tahir: "I don’t know. What do you think it is?"
Karim Khan: "I think there is no bigger terrorist than Obama or Bush, those who have weaponry like drones, who drop bombs on us while we are in our homes. There are no greater terrorists than them."
Khan was also engaged in legal proceedings against the Pakistani government for their failure to investigate the killings of his son and brother. The executive director of Reprieve, Clare Algar, said in a statement, "We are very worried about Mr. Khan’s safety. He is a crucial witness to the dangers of the CIA’s covert drone program, and has simply sought justice for the death of his son and brother through peaceful, legal routes."
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Kabul Records 1st Polio Case Since 2001
A three-year-old girl in Kabul has been diagnosed with polio, marking the first case of the disease in the Afghan capital since 2001 when the U.S. invaded. The BBC reports the girl has been paralyzed by the disease. There were 14 polio cases reported in all of Afghanistan last year. The Afghan Health Ministry has launched a vaccination campaign in Kabul.
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Suicide Attack Kills 2 NATO Contractors in Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, a suicide car-bomb attack on a convoy killed two NATO contractors in Kabul Monday. The blast wounded seven Afghan civilians.
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Mass Protests Erupt in Bosnia over Corruption, Unemployment
Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing its largest anti-government protests in nearly two decades. The protests have spread across the country, shutting down the capital Sarajevo on Monday after erupting in the northern city of Tuzla last week. A Tuzla University professor described the protests’ launch.
Damir Arsenijevic: "What happened here is that the people of Tuzla, of the Tuzla region, finally said that they had had enough of the nepotist, the corrupt and the unprofessional government, a government that for the past 20 years hasn’t listened to the people and their anger and wrath, a government which does not see that the people are hungry and unemployed, that they have no chance for a future. And what happened is that the people took matters into their own hands and stepped up to take part in creating their own future. That’s what happened."
Bosnia’s unemployment rate is estimated to be between 27 and 40 percent. The political frustration stems at least in part from U.S.-brokered peace accords in the 1990s that established an unwieldy political system in Bosnia.
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Report: NC Regulators Shielded Duke Energy from Coal Ash Lawsuits
State regulators in North Carolina are facing claims they intentionally blocked lawsuits against Duke Energy, the company behind one of the worst coal-ash spills in U.S. history, in order to shield Duke, where Republican Gov. Pat McCrory worked for 28 years. Earlier this month, a Duke coal-ash pit spilled enough toxic sludge to fill more than 70 Olympic swimming pools. Now, the Associated Press reports that over the last year, following the election of McCrory, North Carolina’s environmental agency blocked lawsuits over Duke’s coal-ash pits three times, eventually shielding all 31 pits from potential lawsuits. The agency proposed settlements for a fraction of Duke’s worth that did not require Duke to clean up the pits. Beyond his work for Duke, McCrory’s campaign and affiliated groups have received more than a million dollars in recent years from Duke and related groups and individuals. The state agency has also admitted it wrongly declared arsenic levels in the Dan River safe after the spill; arsenic in one sample was actually four times higher than maximum levels for prolonged contact.
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Congressional Hearing Fails to Conclude if Water in West Virginia is Safe After Spill
In West Virginia, Freedom Industries, the company responsible for last month’s chemical spill that left 300,000 people without drinking water, decided to skip a congressional hearing on the fallout Monday. During the hearing, Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito questioned the president of the water utility, West Virginia American Water.
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito: "Is the water safe to drink?"
Jeff McIntyre, president of West Virginia American Water: "As a water company, we don’t set the safe standards, but we are in compliance with all the standards set by the health-based agencies, like the CDC, the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health, and we have been since the 13th of January. Yet I recognize the customers’ fear associated with the smell of something in their water."
The hearing in West Virginia failed to definitively establish whether the water is actually safe to drink. The state’s highest health official, Letitia Tierney, said she believes the water is "usable," but added, "everybody has a different definition of safe." There are reports the water still smells like licorice — a sign of contamination by the chemical MCHM.
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Healthcare Rule Delayed for Some Employers
The Obama administration is delaying new requirements for employers to provide health insurance to workers under the new healthcare law. The new rule had already been delayed until January 2015. Now, medium-size employers will have until 2016 to comply, while larger employers will only need to cover 70 percent of full-time workers by next year.
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Contractor Pleads Guilty in Fox News Leak Case
A former government contractor whose case ignited a firestorm over the Obama administration’s targeting of journalists has pleaded guilty to leaking documents on North Korea to Fox News. Stephen Kim faces a likely sentence of 13 months in prison under the plea deal. Kim was charged under the Espionage Act, the nearly century-old law which was also used to classify Fox News reporter James Rosen as a "co-conspirator" in the case. Outcry over the government’s seizure of phone records from both Rosen and the Associated Press –- in an unrelated case –- prompted a change in Justice Department guidelines last year.
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Video Shows U.S. Abduction of Terror Suspect from Tripoli Street
Newly released video shows U.S. forces abducting a terrorism suspect from outside his home in Libya last year. Abu Anas al-Libi was snatched from the streets of Tripoli and interrogated for a week aboard a U.S. warship following his capture in October. He is accused of helping plan the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and is currently awaiting trial in New York. Video from a closed-circuit camera, obtained by The Washington Post, shows men with guns jumping out of a van after trailing al-Libi, while another car blocks al-Libi’s path. The video also shows the panicked reaction of those in al-Libi’s home, who rush into the street after his capture.
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OWS Activist Cecily McMillan Faces Up to 7 Years in Prison for Alleged Assault of Cop
In New York City, the trial is underway for an Occupy Wall Street activist whose March 2012 arrest ignited allegations of police brutality. Cecily McMillan reportedly suffered a seizure when she was arrested during an attempt by protesters to re-occupy Zuccotti Park six months after the start of Occupy Wall Street. When she appeared on Democracy Now! days later, she was limping and suffering from bruised ribs and what appeared to be a hand-shaped bruise over her right breast.
Cecily McMillan: "I ended a 40-something-hour stay in jail and ended up with all these bruises. I mean, that’s — I have an open case, so I can’t talk more about it, and I’m sure you can tell that it would be difficult for me to remember some things. But I have these."
McMillan now faces up to seven years in prison on charges of second-degree assault. Police say she elbowed an officer in the head, but her attorney, Martin Stolar, says she was reacting to someone grabbing her right breast from behind, not realizing it was a police officer. The attorney said, "The main issue here is the heavy-handed, over-policing by the NYPD during the Occupy Wall Street protests."
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NJ Lawmakers Issue New Subpoenas in Christie Bridge Scandal
In New Jersey, state lawmakers investigating the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge by an ally of Gov. Chris Christie are issuing 18 new subpoenas in the case, including to Christie’s office, members of his inner circle and the state police unit overseeing Christie’s helicopter travel. Christie fired a top aide last month after it emerged she ordered the lane closures in an apparent act of political retaliation. Christie’s former ally at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, has since claimed Christie knew about the lane closures at the time, a claim Christie has denied. Christie, who is head of the Republican Governors Association, is in Illinois today to raise money for his Republican colleagues. Amid the bridge scandal, none of Illinois’ Republican candidates for governor are expected to attend Christie’s events.
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Barclays Bank Cuts Thousands of Jobs, Raises Bonuses
Barclays bank is planning to cut up to 12,000 jobs while raising bonuses for its investment bankers. Barclays says up to 9 percent of its workers may lose their jobs, even as the bank raised bonuses at its investment bank by 13 percent, paying out nearly $4 billion last year.
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"Godfather of Multiculturalism" Stuart Hall Dies at 82
The cultural theorist Stuart Hall has died at the age of 82. Dubbed the “godfather of multiculturalism,” Hall was a Jamaican-born sociologist who lived and taught in Britain for decades. He was a founding editor of the journal New Left Review and a key figure in the development of cultural studies. He discussed cultural studies in a 2012 interview with Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation.
Stuart Hall: "I’ve always thought that cultural studies had to have a political dimension. By that I don’t mean that it had to be recruited to a particular party line or particular political position, but that if your task was critical thinking, you were bound to question the boundaries, the hierarchies, the orthodoxies, the established views, and that was itself a political project, a challenge to existing forms of knowledge."
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