Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Friday, February 6, 2015
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Stories:
Exclusive: Deported Palestinian Scholar Sami Al-Arian on His Chilling Post-9/11 Prosecution
FCC's Net Neutrality Shift a Victory for Open Internet & Grassroots Activism Against Cable Giants
Juan González: Overhaul of NYC's 911 System Woefully Mismanaged & Nearly $1 Billion Over Budget
Stories:
Days after his deportation from the United States, the Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian discusses the end of his ordeal as the target of one of the most controversial prosecutions of the post-9/11 era. Sami was accused of ties to a militant group, but a Florida jury failed to return a single guilty verdict on any of the 17 charges against him. After prosecutors refiled charges, Sami chose jail time and deportation rather than face a second trial. For much of the three years following his arrest in 2003, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement and reportedly abused by prison staff under conditions Amnesty International called "gratuitously punitive." In a broadcast exclusive, Sami joins us from Turkey for his first broadcast interview since being deported. We are also joined by his daughter Laila Al-Arian, a Peabody Award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian has been deported this week from the United States. In one of the most controversial prosecutions of the post-9/11 era, Al-Arian was jailed in Florida for five-and-a-half years on what many described as trumped-up charges. He was arrested in 2003 at a time when he was one of the most prominent Palestinian activists in the United States. In addition to teaching at the University of South Florida, Al-Arian was a frequent media commentator and speaker at antiwar rallies. He co-founded the Tampa Bay Coalition for Peace and Justice and the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Between 1997 and 2001, he visited the White House four times. He actively campaigned for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. But life for Sami Al-Arian changed after the September 11th attacks.
AMY GOODMAN: On September 28th, 2001, Sami Al-Arian was interviewed on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly about former University of South Florida professor Ramadan Shalah, who went on to become the leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Beginning the next day, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian worked, was overwhelmed by hundreds of threatening letters and emails. Thirty-six hours after the interview, the university put Professor Al-Arian on paid leave. In October of 2002, I interviewed Professor Al-Arian here in New York when he spoke at the Not in Our Name rally in Central Park. I asked him about his appearance on Bill O’Reilly.
SAMI AL-ARIAN: The way it was—the interview went, the guy attacked me viciously. So, many emails and threatening phone calls came to me personally at the department. So the department put me on paid leave, and then they banned me after that from coming to campus, within three months, because of the—you know, the orchestrated campaign by pro-Zionist groups and also by some politicians and some appointed people, people appointed by Governor Bush, particularly members of the board of trustees at the university. They voted to terminate my employment in December of 2001. It hasn’t been finalized, because faculty unions and other professors from around the country, as well as the American Association of University Professors, have been protesting. And the AAUP has threatened that if they do terminate my employment, they will be censured, which is a black mark. So, eventually, the president opted to sue me in court, to get me fired through the court system.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the university has banned you, on what grounds?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: It’s not really clear, except, you know, they say that the campus was disrupted. And it goes like: Since people have threatened my life, the campus has not been secure, and the best way to secure it is to terminate my employment. I don’t think—it’s a bogus argument. I don’t think it’s going to fly. But that’s the essence of what they’re saying.
AMY GOODMAN: So the university is saying because your life has been threatened, they’re banning you.
SAMI AL-ARIAN: That’s right, exactly. Instead of going against the real terrorists, the perpetrators of the threats, they’re going after me.
AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian speaking in October 2002. Four months after our interview, in February 2003, Al-Arian was arrested and accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Justice Department handed down a sweeping 50-count indictment against him and seven other men, charging them with conspiracy to commit murder, giving material support to terrorists, extortion, perjury and other offenses. He was held in solitary confinement leading up to the trial. This is an excerpt from the documentary USA vs. Al-Arian."
SAMI AL-ARIAN: And I was put in solitary confinement 23 hours a day—and sometimes, for weeks, 24 hours a day. I wasn’t allowed even to see my attorneys, when she comes in. I wasn’t allowed to call my family. For six months, I was not allowed to make a single phone call.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: At the end of his trial in December 2005, the jury failed to return a single guilty verdict. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of 17 counts against him, and the jury deadlocked on the rest. Four months after the verdict, he agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges in exchange for being released and deported. He was later found guilty of civil contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in another case. In the end, Al-Arian was jailed from February of 2003 until September of 2008. For three-and-a-half years, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement. He was then held under house arrest until this week, when he was deported to Turkey. Last year, a federal court dropped all charges against him.
AMY GOODMAN: Sami Al-Arian joins us now from Istanbul, Turkey, in his first broadcast interview since being deported. And we’re joined by his daughter, Laila Al-Arian, a Peabody Award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C., co-author with Chris Hedges of the book Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Sami Al-Arian, how does it feel to have left the United States, to have been deported to where you are right now in Turkey?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: It feels like I’m free, finally really feeling freedom for the first time in 12 years. I don’t have to watch over my back or my head, or think that someone is trying to monitor you or get you. So, it feels like you’re free.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole period that you’ve been under, essentially, house arrest, could you talk about that experience, as well?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: I mean, it’s much better than prison, of course, but you’re under house arrest, so basically you’re confined to your living environment. And though there were no restrictions, other than that you can’t leave the house, you still know that you’re being monitored all over you. So it’s not really total freedom. And unfortunately, after 9/11, many Americans feel that they live in surveillance and police state, and that’s a very discomforting feeling.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you choose to move to Turkey, Sami Al-Arian?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: Well, I actually applied to many countries, some in Latin America, some in the Middle East and Turkey. And I have friends who actually talked to the Turkish authorities, and they immediately made the decision to accept me. So, it’s a tribute to them and to their thinking, of that they value people who fight for freedom or have been dealt with unjustly. And I’m very grateful for that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Laila Al-Arian, your daughter. Laila, what’s the most important thing for Americans to understand about your father’s case and the injustices that occurred here?
LAILA AL-ARIAN: I think what’s really important to take note of is the fact that when my father was arrested nearly 12 years ago in February, on February 20th, 2003, John Ashcroft went on national television and made pretty extraordinary claims about who my father is, completely distorting and outright lying about my father, calling him a terrorist on national television. And, of course, years later, none of that has borne true. My father was acquitted by 12 ordinary jurors in Florida. He said from the very beginning this is a political case. And I think what people should take away from what has been a nightmare for our family is the fact that in the United States of America there’s no room for political prisoners, there’s no room for politically motivated prosecutions. And, you know, my father was vindicated, even if he did have to eventually leave the country. I think when we look back at this case in history, we’ll see that, you know, it’s really a shameful part of our history. And, you know, it won’t be—it won’t be something that anyone will look at with any kind of pride. So, I hope we learn the lessons from this case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Laila, the impact on you and the other members of your family, the many years of this ordeal?
LAILA AL-ARIAN: Of course it’s impacted us personally. My sister, the youngest sibling, was nine years old when all of this began. She’s now about to graduate college. So you can just see how long this ordeal has lasted for us. You know, it’s been, in many ways, pretty destabilizing, feeling that we’ve been—not feeling, knowing, actually, that we’ve been under surveillance, even as children. So, when we were going over—you know, when my father was preparing for his trial, and his attorneys, we learned that, in fact, all of our phone calls were recorded, even as children. We had the opportunity to even listen to some of the phone calls between us and our friends when we were in grade school. It’s something that’s pretty psychologically jarring and traumatizing. So I think really feeling that every aspect of your life is under surveillance by the government, simply because my father was an outspoken Palestinian advocate, is something that I’ll never truly get over.
But at the same time, there’s been a lot of positive things that have come out of this case, a lot of the relationships we’ve formed with many supporters, many activists, who have really, you know, shown tremendous courage in standing up for my father and his rights, and that’s what we’ll really remember more than anything else.
AMY GOODMAN: Sami, if you could talk, from your own perspective, about what happened to you? I played that clip from 2002, when I interviewed you at a big peace rally that you were addressing here in New York. You would soon be arrested. Your case factored into a Senate race in Florida. Talk about your journey.
SAMI AL-ARIAN: It’s really a story of what happened after 9/11. After 9/11, for whatever reason, the forces of intolerance, exclusionary politics and hegemony really took center stage, where rational people were no longer able to advance any kind of dialogue or rationality in their dealings. So what you have here is people who pressured the government just to take retaliatory action against any activists. And if they had the opportunity to do that, they just went for it.
For instance, you know, my case was celebrated as being the first case after the PATRIOT Act, meaning—you know, they said that the intelligence people did not speak to the prosecution’s, and therefore the government, to actually prosecute criminals, they didn’t know anything about my activities. And that was patently false, because during my discovery I saw an earlier version of the indictment back in 2000, when we were very active politically and my brother-in-law was in immigration court. They really wanted to indict me and stop what—you know, the activity that we were doing. But somehow Janet Reno, Department of Justice, refused, refused to prosecute that case. And it was every other act that they said the prosecution didn’t know from the intelligence people, was there up to 2000, so that was patently false.
And it was so political case that, you know, all legal standards were just—were just ignored. You know, my speedy trial—I was denied speedy trial. You know, the judge asked me in April of 2003 if I’m going to waive my speedy trial. When I said no, that meant that they had to try me within 70 days. The government immediately objected and said they were not ready. And if they were not ready to try the case, why did they indict?
So if you go back and see the political nature of the case—when USF was in hot water because they wanted to terminate my employment, and they couldn’t do it because of the pressure that was coming from all over the place, we found, for instance, that the president of USF went to the U.S. attorney, in public, asking him to investigate. And at the end of the meeting, the U.S. attorney announces, in February of 2002, the empaneling of a grand jury. Now, grand juries are supposed to be in secret. And here we had the university president going to the government, asking them to bail her out, and at the end of the meeting, they announced the empaneling of a grand jury. And then nothing happens.
And I saw in discovery, for instance, when the government wanted to settle—I mean, sorry, when the university wanted to settle with me, and they offered me almost a million dollars to resign, the board of trustees chairman objected, because he had been calling me, you know, all kind of names up to that point. And he was the governor’s appointee, Jeb Bush’s appointee. So he goes to Jeb Bush, basically—and we have that information from their lawyer—and he asks to bail him out. And then, somehow, instead of offering me a settlement, they sue me in court in order to fire me. It was a delaying tactic. And I could see, during my discovery, how the speed-up of the grand jury went in August, September, October and so on, until the indictment came back in February.
And then, we saw, you know, that the—you know, during the superseding indictment, when they indicted earlier in 2003, they had 17 counts against me. But they knew that half of these counts, the statute of limitations had run out. And the judge kept telling them, "When are you going to supersede?" But they didn’t want to supersede with less counts, so they added more counts on some transactions that took place in Chicago that I had no knowledge of, and they knew that I had no knowledge of it. And when we went to trial, they produced zero evidence of that. And then the person who was actually on the phone calls, on the transactions, on the bank account, on the—on everything that had to deal with Chicago, was soon acquitted, and I wasn’t, because two jurors couldn’t bring themselves to acquit on all counts. So, you know, from start to finish, it was a political case, unfortunately, that took a very ugly turn. And, you know, thankfully, we had great jurors who could see through that, and they would not, at the end, go along and support the government’s case.
AMY GOODMAN: Sami Al-Arian, we have to break, but we’re going to come back to this discussion. Sami Al-Arian, prominent Palestinian activist and professor, has lived in the United States for the last 40 years, on Wednesday was deported to Turkey. He was previously accused of ties to the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but a Florida jury failed to return a single guilty verdict on any of the 17 charges against him. We’re talking to Sami Al-Arian in Istanbul, Turkey, and his daughter Laila, the Peabody Award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C. We’ll continue with them in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to an excerpt of the film, USA vs. Al-Arian. Sami Al-Arian’s son, in this excerpt, his son Ali, describes the night his father was arrested in February of 2003.
ALI AL-ARIAN: I woke up to—there was a guy just searching all over my room with a flashlight. And he had just like—I don’t remember. He was wearing just like all black. So he just starts going like this, like with the flashlight everywhere he put. And I guess he just saw me for a second. He just put it in my face, and I wake up. And I look, and the door was already open. And then, I was the last one to wake up. So I saw my dad. He was standing where the AC blows. He was standing on the wall with his hands up like this. So then I went to the living room, and I just see all these guys scattered all over the living room, like one police cop and just a million guys in suits. And then I just see like my mom and my two sisters crying and everything, and I knew what was going on.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Ali Al-Arian. We’re joined by Sami Al-Arian, who has just been deported to Turkey on Wednesday from the United States, after being held in prison for more than five years, and more three of those years in solitary confinement, then in house arrest for many years. We’re also joined by Sami Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, who is a prominent journalist. She’s speaking to us from Washington, D.C. How old were you then, Laila, when your brother Ali is describing what took place? And where were you when your dad was arrested?
LAILA AL-ARIAN: I was actually the same age as my youngest sister is now. I was 21, studying at Georgetown University. And I actually heard the news in a phone call from an administrator who worked in the same office where I had my work-study job. And she called me to convey her sadness over the arrest. I had no idea, so of course I was really shocked to learn what happened and, you know, just tried to focus on graduating, really, at that point. And then, after that, I really started becoming involved in advocating for my father and raising awareness, not just about his case, but about the atrocious prison conditions that he was suffering under, which we talked about a little bit earlier. Throughout that time, he also went on three different hunger strikes to protest his prison conditions, but also the fact that a vindictive prosecutor, long after my father was acquitted by a jury, tried to ensnare him in another case up here in Virginia unrelated even to his own trial. So, you know, there were a number of times when we really had to raise awareness about his case, and that kind of became a full-time job for our family.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sami Al-Arian, the fact that you had lived in the United States for 40 years and that you had been invited to the White House four times during the Bush years, the impact on you of this sudden turning against you by the government?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: Well, of course, I’m aware of the pressures that they were facing, as I said, after 9/11. But unfortunately, you know, most of the rules that govern the relationship between the citizens and the government were just scrapped. You know, the government has now—or at least after, shortly after 9/11, they just did whatever they thought they can get away with. You know, I remember one of the lawyers, who had access to some information, was that even the prosecutors themselves, when they went, before indictment, to Washington, D.C., telling Chertoff, who was at the time the head of the criminal section of the Justice Department, that some of these charges they couldn’t prove. He said, "Everything stays. Everything stays." So, you know, it’s very sad that you had to go through this.
You know, you’re right, I went to the White House several times, not just during the Bush, but even the Clinton administration. I was able to communicate, and that’s a tribute to the system, in fact, that I was able to go and meet with all kinds of leaders. You know, I met with Bush, Hillary, you know, Bill Clinton, all kinds of people in Congress, chairmen, speakers and so on and so forth. And the whole point was to engage politically, because there are certain causes that were of concern to me at the time. A lot of it has to do with civil rights and secret evidence. And I thought that we were making progress, that the politicians were really responsive to our plea and to our campaign against the use of secret evidence.
Even in the—a lot of people ask me, "Why did you support Bush?" Well, it wasn’t really supporting Bush per se. You now, I approached both the Gore campaign and the Bush campaign, and the Gore campaign, whose administration at the time was using secret evidence, against mostly Arabs and Muslims, they just ignored our pleas, whereas the Bush campaign gave us lip service, except at the last month, when the race was neck to neck. So I get a call from someone who was very close to Karl Rove, asking me personally how we can get the endorsement of the Muslim community. And my answer was that you need to—so he needs to say—the candidate, Bush, needs to say publicly that he’s against secret evidence and that he is for the bill that we were advancing in Congress. And to my surprise, the following day, during the second debate, he said these two things. You know, he was asked about racial profiling, and he came in saying, you know, "There’s another form of racial profiling used against Arab Americans. It’s called secret evidence. And I support the bill in Congress." And I get a call back, and said, "Now I delivered. Are you going to deliver?"
So it shows that empowerment of communities does work when you are active. And the Muslim leaders, the Arab—the Muslim American leaders actually met and decided to support Bush based on his stand on secret evidence. And the following week, they met and endorsed him, and they identified six states as being the swing states. And Florida was my—because I lived in Florida, it fell into me. And we did a lot of programs, again, based on this; it wasn’t based on Iraq or Palestine or other things. It really was based on that one issue. And he won by 537 votes. And obviously, we proved later on that we delivered to him 14,000 extra votes than what he would have got had we not intervened.
And then, the following month, you know, I get invited to the inauguration, and I get a thank you from Newt Gingrich and John Sununu and Tom Davis, that we really delivered that to Bush. And then we asked them to deliver for us secret evidence, you know, the bill against secret evidence. And they tell us that the Bush—because Ashcroft was delayed, his confirmation was delayed, he said it’s going to take time to study the issue. But I get a call back in August of 2001 basically telling me, from the same person, that they’ve studied the issue, and we were going to get—to hear good news. And he asked me to invite all the Arab and Muslim leaders to Washington, D.C., at the White House, in which that news would have been announced.
AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened? I think it might have—our feed to Istanbul, Turkey, might have frozen, but let’s see if he came back. Sami, you left us by saying then you got a call where you were supposed to invite everyone to Washington for an important announcement.
SAMI AL-ARIAN: Right. And I did invite everybody, and I briefed them, and I told them that there will be an announcement, an important announcement, against the use of secret evidence by Bush that afternoon. And everybody was in town. Unfortunately, it was on 9/11. It was 3:00 on 9/11. So that meeting never happened. But everybody was asking, "How come all these Arab and Muslim leaders were in Washington, even though the airspace was closed for several days?" And the reason they were behind Bush when he visited a mosque and when he went to the National Cathedral is because they were already there. They were going to meet with him for that announcement.
AMY GOODMAN: Wow! And did it ever happen?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: It never happened, of course. You know, at the time, we were protesting secret evidence. What happened after 9/11 is that they were arresting people with no evidence. I mean, we really went totally backward. And as I said, all the rules were no longer valid. So, you know, it’s a sad story in the history. One day it will be written.
But, you know, I’m so happy that a lot of people are pushing back. You know, at the beginning, there was this shock, where everybody was afraid, everybody was angry, everybody was stepping back. But after the abuses that we’ve witnessed in the past 10 years, a lot of people are stepping up. A lot of people are protesting. A lot of people are speaking out. We saw even some government contractors or officials, like Snowden, is crying out against what’s taking place. And hopefully, you know, the excesses of the surveillance and police state will be put in place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, this is really an astonishing story. I don’t think anyone has actually heard what happened in those days leading up to the September 11th attacks and that you’ve told here. But I wanted to ask you, have you noticed any change whatsoever since the Obama administration came in, in terms of how some of these issues are being handled?
SAMI AL-ARIAN: You know, I’ve heard a lot from Obama, but it’s all rhetoric. You know, when it comes to actual policies, I haven’t seen much change. I mean, at the beginning, I give him the benefit of the doubt. You wait for a couple of years. He’s busy with the economic program. He’s busy with, you know, trying to get elected for the second term. But after six years, I haven’t really seen much change. And that is very distressing.
And I tell people, you know, change should come really from the bottom up. Very rarely you get change from the top down, until people stand up and speak out and campaign and go to their congressmen and senators and administration and voice opposition to these policies, that not only is going to affect Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, it’s going to affect every American. And we can’t advocate a policy where, you know, the rights of the minority could be taken out so that the majority could feel at ease, because eventually any—any things that will restrict—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Sami Al-Arian, we’re going to have to leave it there. We seem to have just lost the connection, as well, in this exclusive broadcast with Professor Sami Al-Arian, who has just been deported from the United States after years in jail and then under house arrest, though a Florida jury refused to convict him on any count against him. And I also want to thank Laila Al-Arian, his daughter, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.
That does it for our broadcast. I’ll be interviewing Cecile Richards on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Check our website at democracynow.org.
After much anticipation, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission has unveiled what he calls "the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the [agency]." Tom Wheeler backed the regulation of Internet service like a public utility in order to uphold net neutrality, the principle of a free and open Internet. The new rules would prevent Internet service providers like Comcast from blocking access to websites, slowing down content, or providing paid fast lanes for Internet service. It would also extend such protections to Internet service on cell phones and tablets. The proposal comes after the FCC received a record-setting number of public comments — nearly four million, almost all in support of strong protections. President Obama also released public statements in support of Internet protections. The FCC will vote on the plan February 26, ahead of an influx of lobbying by the telecom industry, which has also threatened to sue if the measure passes. We are joined by Tim Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press, one of the main organizers of the Internet Countdown campaign leading up to the FCC’s net neutrality vote.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: After much anticipation, this week the chair of the Federal Communications Commission unveiled what he calls, quote, "the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the [agency]." In a blog post published Wednesday on the website of Wired magazine, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler backed the regulation of Internet service like a public utility to uphold net neutrality, the principle of a free and open Internet. Noting he used to think that the FCC could assure Internet openness through a determination of commercial reasonableness, Wheeler wrote, quote, "While a recent court decision seemed to draw a roadmap for using this approach, I became concerned that this relatively new concept might, down the road, be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers. That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections."
AMY GOODMAN: Wheeler’s plan will let the agency prevent Internet service providers like Comcast from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for Internet service. It would also extend such protections to Internet service on cellphones and tablets. Wheeler discussed the plan on PBS NewsHour.
TOM WHEELER: What we’re doing is we’re taking the legal construct that once was used for phone companies and paring it back to modernize it so it specifically deals with this issue. So it’s not really utility regulation, but it is regulation to make sure that there is somebody watching out for the consumer, that, like you said, there’s no paid prioritization, there’s no blocking, there’s no throttling. And, most important, there will be ongoing rules, in perpetuity, so that there will be a yardstick to measure what’s fair for consumers.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cellphone and cable industries, was not initially expected to take such a strong stand on net neutrality. His proposal comes after the FCC received a record-setting number of comments—nearly four million, almost all in support of strong protections. By comparison, Janet Jackson’s accidental exposure of her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl triggered 1.4 million comments to the FCC. On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts hailed Wheeler’s proposal.
SEN. ED MARKEY: Today is a day where consumers and innovators, entrepreneurs, anyone who counts on the Internet to connect to the world, is going to now be protected in the 21st century. Reclassifying broadband under Title II is a major victory for our economy, for our consumers and for free expression of ideas.
AMY GOODMAN: The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal February 26, ahead of an influx of lobbying by the telecom industry, which has also threatened to sue if the measure passes.
For more, we’re joined by Tim Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press. They are one of the main organizers of the Internet Countdown campaign leading up to the FCC’s net neutrality vote on February 26.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Tim.
TIM KARR: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about this. Is this a complete turnaround? And talk about the significance. What does it mean to be a—to regulate it? Is it, under Title II, a public utility?
TIM KARR: This is a remarkable victory. It is a true David-and-Goliath story, except in this instance there are four million Davids who contacted the FCC. There are hundred thousands more who have been calling members of Congress. And we’ve turned conventional wisdom on its ear. And everybody thought at the beginning of the year that the phone and cable lobby would simply write this rule and be done with it. That has changed completely.
What Chairman Wheeler has done is proposed Title II protections, which are not public utility protections in the sense. Where he’s focused is on the issue of discrimination. And the reason that they call this "new media" is it’s not like old media: It’s not like television, it’s not like radio, it’s not like newspapers. Those are one-way medias. This is a two-way communications media. And the rule that he proposes protects two-way communications. It will make sure that the provider, the carrier of that information, cannot discriminate in any way.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Tim, Verizon released a statement calling FCC Chair Wheeler’s proposal counterproductive. It said, quote, "the FCC can address any harmful behavior without taking this radical step." And the company warned that "heavy regulation of the Internet will create uncertainty and chill investment among the many players."
TIM KARR: Well, the irony about Verizon is that this whole process began when Verizon sued the FCC on an earlier rule that was insufficient—it didn’t use the Title II authority. The FCC lost that lawsuit and is now proposing Title II, which is the proper solution. Now Verizon is claiming that they want to go back to the old system, the one that they sued for. So, Verizon has put forth all sorts of arguments. They’ve said that it will cripple investment, and then their CFO went before investors and said, "Title II won’t in fact affect investment in any way." So, you will be hearing this sort of noise from the phone and cable lobby as February 26 approaches. That is the day of the vote. What Wheeler has done is simply announced his intentions via Wired, PBS and some other outlets. But we don’t really know the fine details of the order.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it seems to me one of the interesting things about this in terms of the public response is that we’ve now seen, over the last decade or so, numerous major battles occur over the question of media policy and communications policy in the country, usually not covered by the commercial press. Yet I’m thinking back to 2002 with the whole—
TIM KARR: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —major media mergers under Chairman Powell during the Bush administration; two million people commented to the FCC, opposed to it. Now we’ve had this four million people on the issue of net neutrality. So you’re seeing this enormous public movement, despite the fact that it’s not being—the commercial media are not paying attention to these major policy battles.
TIM KARR: Well, there’s an explanation for that. Oftentimes the commercial media has a stake in the outcomes of these policy fights, so oftentimes you will find them undercovered. But the public does understand what’s at stake here. And what’s at stake is their ability to connect and communicate without interference from these providers. And it’s really—this movement for media reform has really picked up steam in the last five years. We saw millions of people protesting PIPA and SOPA legislation in 2011. They managed to kill a bill that had very draconian copyright legislation written in—rules written into the legislation. And now we’re fighting for net neutrality. So what is really happening is that the Internet—the Internet public is truly a constituency. We are a group of millions of peoples, who come from all different backgrounds, who must be dealt with before Congress writes any laws that threaten our rights to connect and communicate.
AMY GOODMAN: In November, protesters called on Wheeler to favor net neutrality as they blockaded his driveway when he attempted to go to work.
PROTESTER: I’m sorry, but we can’t let you go to work today, because you work for Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, and not for the people. And so, we can’t let you go there, because you’re selling us out on Internet neutrality, and that’s not OK with us. So, we want to know which side you’re on, Tom.
AMY GOODMAN: Which side are you on, Tom? And then, back in May, we were in Washington, and we went over to the FCC, and there was an Occupy-like encampment outside of the FCC.
TIM KARR: Yes, I mean, the creativity of the grassroots has been really remarkable. There have been events around the country. There have been marches. There was a cat parade recently, where you had numerous cats, or representations of cats, stake out the lawn of the FCC. Cats, of course, are considered the mascot of the open Internet. So, there has been a sort of million points of pressure against the agency, that goes all the way up to the White House.
The president in November, of course, sided with net neutrality advocates and said Title II is the way that you solve this problem, is the way that you protect Internet users. So, this has been a very momentous occasion. We still have three weeks left before the vote occurs. After that, Congress will likely get engaged with this. And so, while we’re very happy today, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the amazing change in Wheeler’s position on this, because, you know, he was—he’s, I think, the only person ever elected to both the cable industry hall of fame and the telecom industry hall of fame. He was a lobbyist for the industry for many years. And yet he has gradually shifted, even perhaps now promulgating a stronger policy than even President Obama was talking about. And can you talk about that shift? And also, in his statement, he said that his own experience as an initial entrepreneur, when he was starting a small—a company back several decades ago, showed him the dangers of the cable industry being gatekeepers to the Internet. Could you talk about that?
TIM KARR: Well, he could certainly draw from that experience. It’s interesting with Chairman Wheeler, because what usually happens at the FCC is that you’re a public servant first, and there’s this thing called the revolving door which then spins you out into jobs in industry. The person who’s the top lobbyist for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association is a former chairman, Michael Powell, who you probably remember from those fights in 2003.
And Wheeler is at the end of his career. He’s a very dedicated Obama supporter, who was appointed by the president. He raised money for President Obama’s elections, or his campaigns. And so, he feels, I think, an allegiance both to Obama—he’s received a lot of pressure from the public. We’ve kind of narrowed his options for him, and he’s finally come to a point of realization that Title II is actually the best solution.
AMY GOODMAN: And four million responses on the FCC website, that’s more than any response to any government agency in history.
TIM KARR: Yes, this has been a remarkable mobilization. And it’s not just groups like Free Press, but there are groups—Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Color of Change—that really cover the political spectrum, that have gone out to their constituents and engaged them in this process. And they’re still very engaged. People should really—do really have reason to celebrate today.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Karr, I want to thank you for being with us, senior director of strategy for Free Press, one of the main organizers of the Internet Countdown campaign leading up to the FCC’s net neutrality vote on February 26.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, a Democracy Now! exclusive. A former Florida professor has been deported this week from the United States. We will speak to him in Istanbul, Turkey. Stay with us.
In a front-page report for the New York Daily News, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González exposes the troubles plaguing New York City’s overhaul of its 911 communications system. The NYC Department of Investigation found the administration of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg mismanaged the upgrade with multiple layers of unaccountable private consultants and vendors, putting the project nearly $1 billion over budget and 10 years behind schedule.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, you have a cover story in the New York Daily News today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, yes. Well, I’m reporting in today’s Daily News on a new report by the New York City Department of Investigations on something I’ve been covering now for over five years, which is the massive overhaul in the previous Bloomberg administration of the city’s vital 911 emergency communications system. And it’s a really startling report.
It shows that—among other things, the report shows that the city—that the project is 10 years behind schedule and has increased by over a billion dollars in cost during the period since it began in 2005. It also—the report also finds that the city officials tried to order their employees to sanitize their reports to minimize the problems that the program had. It found that officials also hid about $200 million in additional costs on the projects in the budgets of different city agencies, so no one could really know how much the costs—the project was spiraling out of control. And it finds that the private consultants were running amok, basically with very little control, driving up the prices to the city, sometimes as much as—mark-ups of 600 percent. And we’re talking about major companies. We’re talking about Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Northrop Grumman, Verizon. These were the companies that were devising this system.
And it’s another example of what I’ve been calling one of the biggest scandals in modern government, local and state government, which is these huge technology projects that are supposed to create efficiencies in government, but actually end up as boondoggles. This is now the latest one. Thankfully, the new de Blasio administration has sent a whole lot of those private consultants packing now and is bringing a lot of the work in-house to have government workers and government managers in charge of it. And we’ll see if that makes a big difference in the future. But it’s a really astonishing report of a decade-long project that went awry.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I hope you continue to give us reports like this, and the biggest one you broke was CityTime. That was the biggest financial scandal in New York.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, actually, this is bigger in money, but in CityTime, about a dozen people ended up being indicted.
AMY GOODMAN: Which was about the?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was the city’s payroll system, computerizing the payroll system for 300,000 city workers. And that ended up with a dozen people arrested and most of them sent to long prison terms as a result, because that was outright fraud. This is just rampant mismanagement at this level, not direct fraud.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll link to your piece at democracynow.org.
Headlines:
German, French Leaders Visit Kiev & Moscow in Push to Revive Ceasefire
The leaders of Germany and France are in Russia for talks on ending the renewed violence in eastern Ukraine and restoring a September ceasefire. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande are meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss an initiative partially based on Kremlin proposals. Merkel spoke earlier today ahead of her trip to Russia.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "It is a question of peace and preserving the European peace order. It is a question of free self-determination of the people as part of this European peace order. And we are doing what we believe to be our duty at this time, namely trying to do everything in our power to end the bloodshed."
Ukraine Arrests Top Officer on Charges of Russia Spying
Merkel and Hollande met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev on Thursday. Dismissing rebel demands to account for recent territorial gains, Poroshenko called for a return to the ceasefire terms agreed to in September.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko: "The Minsk plan is very simple: immediate ceasefire; releasing all the hostages; closing the border, or renew the internationally recognized border on Ukrainian (side); withdrawal all of the foreign troops from the Ukrainian territory; launching very important process of the political regulation by the election on the municipal election, local election, under Ukrainian legislation in the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk."
On Thursday, the Ukraine government said it had arrested a senior military officer on charges of spying for Russia, raising new concerns about the infiltration of Ukraine forces.
Kerry: U.S. Nears Decision on Arming Ukraine Against Russian "Aggression"
The Obama administration continues to consider sending military aid to the Ukrainian government in Kiev, in what would be a major escalation of U.S. involvement. In meetings with Ukrainian leaders on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia of "aggression" in eastern Ukraine, and said he expects a decision on U.S. military aid "soon."
Secretary of State John Kerry: "We talked about the largest threat that Ukraine faces today, and that is Russia’s continued aggression in the east. There’s no other way to call it. We’re not seeking a conflict with Russia. No one is. … The president is reviewing all of his options. Among those options, obviously, is the possibility of providing defensive — defensive — assistance to Ukraine. And those discussions are going on. The president will make his decision, I am confident, soon."
The weaponry under consideration includes antitank missiles, battlefield radars and reconnaissance drones.
White House Admits Concerns Arming Ukraine Could "Expand Bloodshed"
Speaking in Washington, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged internal concerns that sending weapons could worsen the crisis.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest: "One of the concerns that we have about providing military assistance is it does contain the possibility of actually expanding bloodshed. And that — that’s actually what we are trying to avoid. The whole reason that we are trying to encourage both sides to sit down and hammer out a diplomatic agreement is to end the bloodshed and end the escalating conflict in that — in that — in that country."
Kremlin: U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Would Threaten Russian Security
On Thursday, the Kremlin said the U.S. arming of Ukraine would threaten Russian security. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has opposed calls to send military aid to the Ukraine government in Kiev.
NATO Ministers OK Largest Collective Defensive Reinforcement Since End of Cold War
At a meeting in Belgium on Thursday, NATO defense ministers signed off on a plan to establish a network of command centers in eastern Europe and a large rapid reaction force to counter Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the measures mark the alliance’s biggest reinforcement of collective defense since the end of the Cold War.
Jens Stoltenberg: "We decided on the immediate establishment of the first six multinational command and control units — in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. If a crisis arises, they will ensure that national and NATO forces from across the alliance are able to act as one from the start. They will make rapid deployment easier, support planning for collective defense, and help coordinate training and exercises."
Jordan Expands Anti-ISIS Strikes to Iraq After Pilot’s Killing
Jordan has intensified airstrikes on the Islamic State following the immolation of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot in Syria. Jordan says dozens of fighter jets struck ISIS sites on Thursday in Syria and, for the first time, in Iraq. Jordan has vowed to expand its role in the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition following the pilot’s death. Jordan’s announcement followed reports that the United Arab Emirates, a key coalition member, suspended its airstrikes in December over concerns for its pilots’ safety.
Scores Killed Around Damascus in Gov’t, Rebel Attacks
Scores of people were killed in and around the Syrian capital of Damascus on Thursday when rebels fired a barrage of rockets into several neighborhoods and government warplanes bombed opposition-held areas.
Greece, Germany Spar over Austerity as Syriza Gov’t Ends Europe Tour
Greece’s new finance minister has wrapped up his inaugural tour of Europe following the Syriza party’s historic election victory last month. Yanis Varoufakis visited European countries as part of his government’s push to roll back austerity and renegotiate Greece’s international bailout. On Thursday, Varoufakis was met with a chilly reception in Germany, Greece’s biggest creditor and the leading European backer of its austerity. At a news conference with German counterparts, Varoufakis made a direct appeal to German taxpayers.
Yanis Varoufakis: "My message to the average German hard-working taxpayer is that you have given us too much money in the last five years, not too little. Unfortunately, this was not an act of solidarity, although it was portrayed as one, to the Greek people. Ninety percent of that money never came to Greece. It was a cynical transfer of banking losses, initially onto the shoulders of the Greeks. Everybody knew that the shoulders of the Greeks were not strong enough to sustain that weight and that it will spill over to you. … We are coming here to begin for the first time a dialogue about how to minimize the cost of the Greek crisis to the average not only Greek, but also German, Slovak, Finn, Spaniard, Portuguese and so on and so forth, so as not to mention every member state of the eurozone."
German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel countered Varoufakis by saying that Greece must be held responsible for its previous commitments.
Sigmar Gabriel: "Every country has the right to democratically elect a new government, and of course every government has the right to determine a new policy course, certainly if it has a clear mandate. But it must also be clear that the consequences, particularly the financial consequences, of a new direction in Greek policy cannot be transferred to other countries and financed by the taxpayers in these countries."
Germany says it has offered Greece a contingent of 500 German tax collectors to help Athens recover taxes from wealthy citizens. The two sides say they have "agreed to disagree."
Thousands Rally in Athens as Greek Prime Minister Vows to Reject Austerity "Orders"
In Athens, thousands of people rallied outside parliament Thursday in a show of support for the government’s anti-austerity campaign. In an address shortly after his own return from a European tour, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greece will not be bullied by its creditors.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras: "Greek democracy does not take orders, and certainly not through emails. Greece has a clear position. Greece has its own voice. Greece has its own negotiating strength. … It is our obligation and duty not to allow our citizens to be deceived once again. We are a sovereign country. We have a democracy. We have a program and an agreement with our people, and we have to honor this agreement."
The European Central Bank has rejected Greece’s initial demands for help, tightening rules that will make it harder for Greek banks to obtain loans. Greece’s bailout with European and IMF creditors is due to expire at the end of the month.
IMF Grants $100 Million in Debt Relief to Ebola-Stricken Countries
The International Monetary Fund has granted partial debt relief to the three Western African countries worst hit by Ebola. IMF chief Christine Lagarde announced Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone will be reprieved of around $100 million in debt payments.
Christine Lagarde: "The IMF is giving debt relief to these three countries through the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust, which will provide grant aid used to relieve the debt for the next two years. … I have actually received already from one major donor a commitment to provide additional funding, and I hope that he will not be the only one, that there will be more that will follow suit."
The $100 million figure amounts to about one-fourth of the total the three countries collectively owe. The joint debt is set to jump to $620 million over the next three years because of previously announced loans. In a statement, the group Jubilee Debt Campaign said: "Grants should be given to cope with the impact of Ebola, not more loans which leave an unjust debt to be repaid over the next decade."
Obama Admin: Guantánamo Recidivism Has Declined
The Obama administration says the recidivism rate of Guantánamo Bay prisoners has fallen since President Obama took office. According to the White House, just six Guantánamo prisoners have engaged in militant activity after their release since 2009, for a rate of under 7 percent. The comparable rate under President George W. Bush was 19 percent. But even the lower new rate could be too high. According to Al Jazeera America, there has been only one case of a Guantánamo prisoner turning to militancy after release that can be independently confirmed. The groups CAGE and the Center for Constitutional Rights say they know of zero cases.
GOP Senator: More Prisoners Should Be Sent to "Rot in Guantánamo Bay"
At a Senate hearing this week, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton spoke out against President Obama’s call to close Guantánamo Bay, saying he believes the prison’s only problem is "too many empty cells."
Rep. Tom Cotton: "In my opinion, the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell. But as long as they don’t do that, then they can rot in Guantánamo Bay."
2 Dead in Murder-Suicide at University of South Carolina
Two people are dead after an apparent murder-suicide at the University of South Carolina’s school of public health. One of the victims was a school professor. The campus was put on lockdown for about an hour on Thursday.
3 Democratic Lawmakers to Skip Netanyahu Speech
Three Democratic lawmakers have announced they will skip Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress on Iran. Congressmembers John Lewis, G.K. Butterfield and Earl Blumenauer say they oppose Netanyahu’s visit at a time when Washington seeks a nuclear deal with Iran. The trip has caused a major rift with the White House. On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she hopes the address is canceled, but dismissed talk of a boycott.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi: "I’m seriously considering going. I mean, I am — as I said, as of now, it is my intention to go. It’s still my hope that the event will not take place. There’s a serious unease. But don’t even think in terms of the word boycott. Members will go, or they won’t go, as they usually go or don’t go."
Pope Francis to Become 1st Pontiff to Address Joint Congressional Session
House Speaker John Boehner has announced another foreign guest who will address Congress this year. Pope Francis will become the first-ever pope to address a joint session of Congress when he visits the United States in September.
House Speaker John Boehner: "On September 24th, His Holiness Pope Francis will visit us here at the United States Capitol. That day, His Holiness will be the first pope in our history to address a joint session of Congress. We’re humbled that the Holy Father has accepted our invitation, and certainly look forward to receiving his message on behalf of the American people."
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Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Thursday, February 5, 2015
democracynow.org
Stories:
Inside the Vaccine War: Measles Outbreak Rekindles Debate on Autism, Parental Choice & Public Health
Stories:
The federal government has confirmed more than 100 people across 14 states have now developed measles. Public health officials suspect the outbreak, which is concentrated in California, began when an infected person visited Disneyland in Anaheim in December. In recent years, a growing number of parents have opted not to have their children vaccinated, claiming a link between vaccines and autism. The prestigious medical journal Lancet published a study in 1998 showing such a link, but the study was later retracted and has been widely discredited. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 12 children born in the United States is not receiving their first dose of MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine on time. Several potential Republican presidential candidates have weighed in on the debate. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, an ophthalmologist, said he had heard of instances where vaccines caused "mental disorders." New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said vaccinating kids is a matter of "parental choice."
We spend the hour discussing the vaccine debate and public health with three guests: Dorit Rubinstein Reiss is a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and co-author of the report, "Funding the Costs of Disease Outbreaks Caused by Non-Vaccination"; Mary Holland is the mother of a child with regressive autism who, she believes, was injured by the MMR vaccine. She is also a research scholar at New York University School of Law and co-editor of the book, "Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children"; and Dr. Paul Offit is chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of "Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure" and "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The federal government has confirmed over a hundred people across 14 states have now developed measles. Public health officials suspect the outbreak, which is concentrated in California, began when an infected person visited Disneyland in Anaheim in December. On Wednesday, Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, Los Angeles County’s interim health officer, updated reporters on the outbreak.
DR. JEFFREY GUNZENHAUSER: The outbreak of measles that we’re currently experiencing is the largest that we’ve had in this county and in this state in 15 years. Public Health is doing all we can to identify cases and to isolate contact so as to prevent spread; however, to end this outbreak, we need to do more, and we need help. I encourage everyone to review their vaccination status and, if needed, to get the vaccine now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fifteen years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaimed victory over measles, but in recent years there’s been an increase in outbreaks as a growing number of parents have opted not to have their children vaccinated, claiming a link between vaccines and autism. The prestigious medical journal Lancet published a study in 1998 showing such a link, but the study was later retracted and has been widely discredited. According to the CDC, one in 12 children born in the United States is not being vaccinated as recommended.
On Wednesday, two California lawmakers announced a bill to eliminate, quote, "personal belief exemptions" that allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their children. The state has allowed such exemptions since 1961, when it first required all public school teachers and students to be inoculated against polio. But since 2000, the rate of parents seeking exemptions has tripled to about one in every 40 children. Meanwhile, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer asked state health officials to go further and eliminate, quote, "religious exemptions."
AMY GOODMAN: Several potential Republican presidential candidates have also weighed in on the debate. On Monday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, said he had heard of instances where vaccines caused "mental disorders."
SEN. RAND PAUL: The hepatitis B vaccine is now given to newborns. We sometimes give five and six vaccines all at one time. I chose to have mine delayed. I don’t the government telling me that I have to give my newborn hepatitis B vaccine, which is—
KELLY EVANS: Understood.
SEN. RAND PAUL: —which is transmitted by sexually transmitted disease and/or blood transfusions. Do I think it’s ultimately a good idea? Yeah. And so I had mine staggered over several months. I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea; I think they’re a good thing. But I think the parents should have some input.
KELLY EVANS: OK.
SEN. RAND PAUL: The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children. And it is an issue of freedom.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Rand Paul on Monday. Since then, he has backtracked on his comments. On Tuesday, he was photographed receiving a hepatitis A booster shot at the Capitol to show his support for vaccinations. But Senator Paul has deep ties to vaccine skeptics. For 20 years, he was a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which has backed a moratorium on vaccine mandates.
Meanwhile, another possible Republican presidential candidate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, was questioned about vaccines during his trip to England.
REPORTER: Do you think Americans should vaccinate their kids? Is the measles vaccine safe?
GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE: Well, all I can say is that we vaccinate ours. And so, you know, that’s the best expression I can give you of my opinion. You know, it’s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. ... What I said was that there has to be a balance, and it depends on what the vaccine is, what the disease type is and all the rest. And so, I didn’t say I’m leaving people the option. What I’m saying is that you have to have that balance in considering parental concerns.
AMY GOODMAN: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s spokesman later said the governor believed kids should be vaccinated against measles.
Well, for more, we’re joined by several guests today. Later in the broadcast, we’ll speak with Mary Holland, the mother of a child with regressive autism who, she believes, was injured by the measles, mumps, rubella vaccination, known as the MMR vaccine. And we’ll speak with Dr. Paul Offit, professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But first we’re joined now from San Francisco by Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Hastings College of the Law. She specializes in legal issues related to vaccines, including exemption laws. She co-authored a report last year about, quote, "Funding the Costs of Disease Outbreaks Caused by Non-Vaccination."
Professor Reiss, welcome to Democracy Now! So could you lay out for us what you think the key issues are regarding exemptions on children getting vaccinated?
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: Of course. So, first, thanks for having me. The starting point is that we have a tension between three important values. The first is parental rights. Parents have rights. We care about their ability to take care of their children, guide their children. The second is the public health. We want to make sure that the public is protected against infectious diseases and other problems. And remember, the public includes other people. Other parents and other children have rights to be protected against diseases, as well. And the third is the right of a child. Given the incredible imbalance between the risks of vaccines and the risks of not vaccinating, with the risks of vaccines very small and the risks of not vaccinating much larger, there’s a strong argument that the right of health—right to health of a child means that the child should be vaccinated.
The combination of that is part of what supports the state’s right to impose school immunization requirements. School immunization requirements have been in the states since the 19th century, at least. And in the first years, we didn’t have exemptions. Exemptions are relatively new, during the 20th century. And in terms of exemption, as you probably know, we have three types. We have medical exemptions, which all states have. We have religious exemptions, or personal belief exemptions, also known as philosophical exemptions. And 48 states, every state except as West Virginia and Mississippi, have either a personal belief exemption or a religious exemption or both. The issues that come up is how much—how broad should the exemption be? And states vary dramatically on that. California, for example, is right now one of the broadest. And that’s part of the reason behind the change.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this issue, for example, of Mississippi, even though something like two dozen lawmakers wanted to support this exemption based on conscientious beliefs, they are in the vast minority here of states—48 states, as you said, allow for a conscientious objection—saying no public or private school student can go without a vaccine.
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: That’s correct. Most states allow either personal belief or religious exemption, and that has been—started around the '60s, as well. Mostly, my best reading, it's because of the high value we place on personal freedom and on religious values. And I would expect that most states that adopted religious exemption expected them to be very limited, mostly to Christian Scientists and other small sects. That’s not what happened. In many states, religious exemptions are used much more broadly than by the very small sects that have strong views against vaccination. And our jurisprudence makes it very hard to limit religious exemptions only to those religions that really object to vaccination.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But do you believe, Professor Reiss, that with the latest outbreak, now states will reconsider the extent and range of these exemptions?
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: Yes, I think we are already seeing that. We’re seeing several states consider following the Western states—California, Oregon and Washington—and adopting an educational requirement, in addition to the personal belief exemption. We’re seeing this discussed in Maine, in Minnesota and in other states. And as you’ve seen, California has recently been reconsidering its own exemption law. So I would expect a move to more restrictive exemptions. And given what we’re seeing, the rise of outbreaks, that’s all for the good.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain why that is so important, why parents shouldn’t be able to opt out. In a moment, we’re going to hear from a parent who feels very differently from you.
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: So, remember what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about telling parents, "Whether you wish to or not, we’re going to tie your child down and vaccinate them." That’s something that, if done, is done in only extreme circumstances. We’re talking about the question whether a parent can send a child to a school, a public or private, unvaccinated. If a child is sent to school unvaccinated, first of all, the child herself is at risk. But in the atmosphere of the school, this child also puts others at risk. First, directly, if the child who is unvaccinated and higher risk of disease contracts the disease, they may infect someone else. And second, by reducing the level of immunity at the school by undermining herd immunity, the school is more vulnerable to an outbreak. And then—
AMY GOODMAN: When you say that—just for people who are not familiar with this debate, Professor Reiss, when you say "herd immunity," explain what you mean.
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: I hope Dr. Offit will talk about this more in detail, but basically the idea is that if we have a certain number of people immunized in the school, those people form kind of a ring around the few that aren’t immunized and prevent the disease from reaching them. That’s the idea of herd immunity. If you have enough people immunized, even if one person who is infected comes into the school, the disease won’t spread.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You’ve also suggested, Professor Reiss, that parents who choose not to have their children vaccinated are almost always negligent under the law. So do you think that there should be legal consequences for parents who choose not to have their children vaccinated?
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: Yes, I do. And my point of view is less focused on the parent that doesn’t vaccinate—we need the behavior to be negligent to impose consequences—but more on those harmed by the decision. If one parent chooses to reject expert opinion, to choose for their own child the bigger risk, the risk of not vaccinating, over the smaller risk of vaccinating, and something happened that harms another family, I think it’s unfair to make the other family pay for the costs of the first family’s decision. Again, think about the situation. A child is left unvaccinated, contracts measles, passes it to an immunocompromised child that suffers serious complication. The family of that child has emotional costs. The child that suffers pays a physical price. And they have financial costs. Why should they have to pay for someone else’s choice?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is there any kind of legal precedent for that, though?
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: Not at this point. The case has simply, to my knowledge, not come up. We have other cases of a liability for infectious disease. We have a case of a liability when someone went into a boarding house that has—produces whooping cough and wasn’t told that there was whooping cough, and his children caught whooping cough. We have liability for sexual-transmitted diseases, if there was negligent nondisclosure. So we have a history of liability for infectious disease, but this context hasn’t come up yet.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying that parents—what should happen? What should be the consequence for a parent who doesn’t immunize their child, vaccinate their child? Are you saying they should be jailed?
DORIT RUBINSTEIN REISS: No, I’m not. There’s a whole range of possible consequences. I’ve heard the idea of jailing parents in that situation, and I think that’s going substantially too far. A parent making the decision is making the decision on their best judgment. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. And it’s natural for the parents to make their own decision for their child. And it’s a decision that puts their own child, first and foremost, at risk. I don’t think the level of culpability is high enough to justify criminal law.
But I think it’s fair to tell the parents, "You made the decision, you internalize the consequences. Take personal responsibility. Nobody else should have to pay for that. You’re going against expert opinions. You’re going against the science. You’re going against the credible data. Why should others carry the cost?" And that’s true for another family, if they’re infected, or the public health. These outbreaks cost a lot of money to contain. And that money comes from somewhere. Public health departments are cutting other budget and not doing other things in order to track down and contain measles. Why should the public pay, rather than those that made the decision that led to the outbreak?
AMY GOODMAN: Dorit Reiss, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of law at UC Hastings College of Law, specializing in legal issues related to vaccines, including exemption laws. We’ll link to your piece, "Funding the Costs of Disease Outbreaks Caused by Non-Vaccination." When we come back, a very different view. We’ll be joined by another lawyer, by Mary Holland, a research scholar at NYU School of Law, adviser to Health Choice. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As a growing number of parents raise concerns about vaccinations, we speak now with Mary Holland. She’s the mother of a child with regressive autism who, she believes, was injured by the MMR vaccination. Holland is a research scholar at NYU School of Law and adviser to Health Choice. She’s also a contributor to the blog, "Age of Autism," and the co-editor of the book, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children.
Mary Holland, welcome to Democracy Now! Could you talk about your position on vaccinations?
MARY HOLLAND: Yes, absolutely. So, all vaccines, like prescription drugs, are considered unavoidably unsafe. They carry known risks and unknown risks. There’s no question—and I don’t believe Professor Reiss or Dr. Offit would disagree—that death is caused by some vaccines to some children, and severe injury, brain damage in particular. That’s indisputable. And for that reason, industry and the medical profession were given by Congress virtually blanket liability protection. So we have now an industry with high profits and exceedingly low litigation risks. I think that should set off some alarm bells for us, as it is. I also think that the global standard for ethical medicine today is prior, free and informed consent. And what Dr. Offit and Professor Reiss are suggesting is that there should be no free consent for vaccination. I think that’s a very serious departure from medical ethics, and we have to look at it for what it is. This is not just about tort liability. It’s about informed consent.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of when a child goes to school, who might be infected because they have not had a vaccine, that they then will infect other kids?
MARY HOLLAND: Yeah. I think infectious disease is real, Amy. Infectious disease is a serious problem. I think what you do when a kid is sick is the kid stays home from school. You make sure that you have medical leave for parents. You make sure that there’s healthcare for children. And I believe in quarantine. I have no problem with the government, in certain circumstances that warrant it, saying people must stay home, or they even must go to other places. But I absolutely have a problem with the idea that the state can force, through criminal and civil sanctions, that—or failure to educate children, that they have to take compulsory medical interventions.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your own personal story, Mary Holland.
MARY HOLLAND: Oh, just very briefly, my interest in this, as a lawyer and as an advocate, stems from my personal experience. I watched a child reverse in their development. That’s one of the most horrible things any adult or parent can see. You don’t want to see, and it is not normal to see, a child lose all speech, lose all sleep, lose all bowel function, lose all eating function. And that’s what I lived through.
AMY GOODMAN: With your child.
MARY HOLLAND: With my own son. I’m very fortunate that my son has substantially recovered over the years, but through painful efforts, great expense. And his injury is not categorized anywhere. Doctors don’t generally perceive things as vaccine injury. But there is no other plausible explanation for what happened to my child.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened?
MARY HOLLAND: So there was a temporal association. He had received his standard vaccines, all of which—most of which contain thimerosal, so that’s mercury, ethylmercury. There’s no question that that can compromise the immune system. And then he received the MMR vaccine, which is three live viruses simultaneously. And he, within a very short period, regressed precipitously. Precipitous regression.
AMY GOODMAN: At the age of?
MARY HOLLAND: Two-and-a-half. He got his vaccine slightly before that juncture. It’s the only plausible explanation for what happened to him. He had EEGs that were abnormal. He had epileptiform brain waves. This was all in very close temporal association. So, then, when I studied what do—what does brain injury look like? And I studied the federally funded Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Lo and behold, encephalopathy, brain swelling, brain damage is a common side effect among side effects from vaccines, as is autism. That is covered up. The federal government doesn’t track it. They would say that there’s no association. If you look at compensated cases of brain injury in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, you will see autism left, right and center. So, I think what happened to my son is what I’ve heard happened to thousands of parents. I work in this area. It’s not an atypical story. One story is an anecdote. What then should happen is there should be rigorous science. That science hasn’t been done.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Why do you think that science hasn’t been done?
MARY HOLLAND: I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a question I’d love to hear you put to Dr. Offit. He would say that that science has been done. One of the key scientists in the autism-vaccine science is Poul Thorsen. He’s an indicted felon. He’s in Denmark. The Department of Justice has done nothing to bring that man back. Another key question about the corruption is Dr. William Thompson, in the CDC, has come forward and said that he colluded with other key scientists to mask a signal that vaccines and autism are linked in African-American boys who got the MMR before age three—before age five. He has now been granted, according to one report, immunity and can testify in Congress. I hope to God we have that hearing. This is critical. One in 68 kids has autism. There’s plausible science that there’s a link. It needs to be followed up, not suppressed.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the most convincing scientific study, to you, that makes a link?
MARY HOLLAND: Ah, there’s many. There’s many in my book. We include 20 scientific abstracts. One is Ray Palmer’s work showing environmental mercury. The closer somebody lives to the environmental source, the higher the rates of autism. Another is related to special education reports. Boys, neonates, who received the Hep B vaccine were nine times more likely to end up in special education, three times more likely to have an autism diagnosis. There are many pieces of science that suggest to us that there is a link. We need to look at the children who regressed. We need to look at the crash reports, the people in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Just last year, in 2014, a child was compensated $500,000 because she died after getting the MMR. This is not controversial.
AMY GOODMAN: So what should happen with the crisis of measles outbreak right now in this country? Are you opposed to children getting the MMR vaccine?
MARY HOLLAND: No, I’m not. I’m pro-choice, Amy. I’m not anti-vaccine. That label is thrown around as a way to marginalize people like me. I’m not anti-vaccine in the slightest. I’m pro-choice. I think parents have to make informed choices. That’s the standard of ethical medicine.
So what should happen right now? Yeah, look at your titers. See if you need a measles vaccine, if you think you should. I think the industry should make measles, mumps and rubella available separately. If somebody has a low titer for measles, why should they go get an MMR? They should get what they precisely need. I think people with young children, who are too young to be vaccinated because the risks of injury are so great, they probably should go to places like Disneyland, where there will be people from foreign countries where measles is endemic. We don’t have herd immunity for measles. We don’t have herd immunity for any of these childhood diseases.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, explain what you mean by "herd immunity."
MARY HOLLAND: What I mean by that, herd immunity means that everybody is—that because most people vaccinated, it’s not possible that people—that the disease will spread. That’s just not possible when something like measles is in the Philippines, it’s in Germany, it’s in France. People come and go. Unless you’re going to seal the borders, we don’t have herd immunity. And no vaccine is perfectly effective. There may be 85 to 95 percent effective. They wear off over time. That’s why there’s a mandated MMR booster. We don’t have herd immunity. We have herd effect. So people have to make up their own minds. And voluntary choices, like in Australia, like in the U.K., like in Japan, like in Sweden, like in France, like in Germany, they achieve the same results as we have. We would be so much better—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, in all those countries—
MARY HOLLAND: There is not mandates for school. In none of those countries are there mandates. In most of those countries, there are blanket rights of conscientious objection. We should have the same thing. There should be a right of exemption that is federal in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: So this has entered into the presidential debate.
MARY HOLLAND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Possible presidential candidates.
MARY HOLLAND: Yes. Yes, it has.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Christie—
MARY HOLLAND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —ironically, the governor of New Jersey, who said that the medical professional who came back from Africa, who was Ebola-free, should be quarantined, then said he—well, he’s had to walk back these comments about parents having choice around vaccine. Then you have Kentucky senator and doctor Rand Paul making the point you do. He says that kids who have had vaccines have then had mental disorders.
MARY HOLLAND: Well, I didn’t use the term "mental disorder." He did. But this is not my opinion, Amy. If you look at the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, people have been compensated by Health and Human Services, with their counsel Department of Justice, for brain damage, for encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is cognitive impairment usually associated with behavioral disorders, OK? So, I think it’s great that this is a 2016 presidential issue. I think that childhood health is critical. I think the role of vaccines is grossly understudied, and we must look at this. Chronic health disorders are about 50 percent of American kids today. Is there a relationship with vaccines? I don’t think we know the answer to that. We don’t even have a decent study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated health outcomes in children.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
MARY HOLLAND: Rudimentary science. We have not looked, either retrospectively or prospectively, at what is the health of children who have gotten the CDC-recommended schedule, what is the health of children who have gotten a state mandate, and what is the status of children who are unvaccinated. That’s a totally doable study, and that’s never been done.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to those who call you and the people, the organizations you’re a part of, "anti-vaxxers"—
MARY HOLLAND: Mm-hmm, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —sort of see you as kind of climate change deniers, that the overwhelming scientific body of evidence goes in the other direction, and that the time when a child is getting these vaccines is also the time if they might develop autism, and so the fact that these are, you know, contemporaneous—
MARY HOLLAND: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —does not mean that one causes the other?
MARY HOLLAND: Amy, I agree that, you know, correlation is not causation. We have to study this. I couldn’t agree more. But in the 1980s—that’s a mere 30-plus years ago—the rate of autism was one in 10,000. It’s now, according to the CDC, one in 68. And that’s looking at eight-year-olds, you know, and it’s four years to do the study. We don’t even know what the rate is among two-year-olds today. To say out of hand that vaccines could be playing no role, in my view, is reckless and irresponsible, and it’s not looking at the existing science. In our book, we include 20 abstracts. There’s far more. There’s good science that shows how plausible a connection is. But it needs more rigorous study.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you talk about—you’ve mentioned this—the importance of the schedule of vaccines? So it’s not so much that certain vaccines necessarily not be given at all, but that they be spaced differently.
MARY HOLLAND: Well, yeah. I mean, there’s not a lot of rigorous science showing why the schedule is what it is. The way that vaccines are tested, before they’re recommended and then mandated, is they’re tested individually. They’re not tested as part of a schedule. As Senator Rand Paul said, he criticized the recommendation, and the mandate in most states, for a hepatitis B shot for infants, you know, one and two days old. Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. What is the rationality for giving a baby a vaccine that will wear off by the time they’re sexually active?
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by the single doses rather than MMR, M then M then R?
MARY HOLLAND: Well, MMR is measles, mumps, rubella. But at the day of—while a baby is in the hospital, the federal recommendation is that they receive a hepatitis B vaccine. That, to me, is irrational. And that’s one example of what’s wrong with our vaccine schedule. Again, many other developed countries have no mandates for hepatitis B. It’s something you give to somebody whose mother is Hep B-positive or somebody who’s engaging in very risky behaviors where there might be transmission.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your comment on President Obama—
MARY HOLLAND: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: —who talked about—has said his message to parents was, quote, "get your kids vaccinated."
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Measles is preventable. I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations. The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated. There aren’t reasons to not get vaccinated.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Are you telling parents, "You should get your kids vaccinated"?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You should get your kids vaccinated. It’s good for them. But we should be able to get back to the point where measles, effectively, is not existing in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Mary Holland, what’s your response to President Obama?
MARY HOLLAND: I think it’s extraordinary that we need the president to tell parents to get their children vaccinated. I think that if you look at it in isolation, yes, the vaccine usually works against measles. Are there risks with the vaccine? Yes, there are. And should we look at that in isolation? No.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you getting your kid vaccinated?
MARY HOLLAND: My child has been vaccinated with the MMR, obviously. He suffered—he suffered developmental regression shortly thereafter.
AMY GOODMAN: But for other parents, would you say do or don’t?
MARY HOLLAND: I would say it’s up to them and their doctors and their healthcare practitioners. I think it’s an individual choice.
AMY GOODMAN: Mary Holland, we want to thank you for being with us, research scholar at NYU School of Law, adviser to Health Choice, a contributor to the blog, "Age of Autism." She’s co-editor of the book, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children. And she is the mother of a child with autism who, she believes, was injured by the MMR vaccine. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be joined by Dr. Paul Offit, professor at University of Pennsylvania, author of, among other books, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: We go to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Dr. Paul Offit, professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Offit is also professor of vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC, author of numerous books, including Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure and Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.
Well, Dr. Offit, you have heard our show today. Can you talk about why you feel vaccines are so important?
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Well, because they’ve saved our lives. If you look at how long we lived, say, a hundred years ago, we lived 30 years less long—less long then than we do today. So, the reason—the main reason for that is vaccines. We no longer have to see 50,000 children hospitalized and 500 die from measles every year as we did before the vaccine. We no longer have to see diphtheria as a common killer of teenagers. We no longer have to see 20,000 children suffer severe and permanent defects caused by rubella virus, so-called German measles virus. We no longer have to see children die or suffer permanent disability from bacterial meningitis from diseases like meningococcus, pneumococcus, Haemophilus influenzae type B. Vaccines, I think, were the single best preventive measure that we’ve ever had. The problem, as clearly reflected by your previous caller, is that we don’t appreciate them. I think vaccines are a victim of their success, and they’re obviously being blamed for things that they don’t cause.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about the issue of the connection between MMR and problems in children? Our last guest, Mary Holland, talked about her own son who ended up with autism, and she feels there was a direct connection between MMR and autism.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a parent to ask the question: "My child was fine, they got a vaccine, then they weren’t fine anymore. Could the vaccine have done it?" As Ms. Holland has argued, it is a temporal connection. But it’s not a causal connection. I mean, there have now been 14 studies done, looking at hundreds of thousands of children either who did or did not receive the MMR vaccine, and the results have been clear and consistent and reproducible: MMR vaccine does not increase your risk of autism. All you do by choosing not to get an MMR vaccine is increase your risk of getting measles, mumps or rubella.
You know, what is upsetting to me about this—and I honestly think the last 10 minutes of your program set a new record for consecutive statements that were incorrect—is that when you do the science, when you do these excellent, retrospective, huge studies that answer the question, that people don’t believe them. And the reason Ms. Holland doesn’t believe them is she’s a conspiracy theorist. I mean, listen to what she says. There’s this guy who was a fraud, and then there’s this whistleblower at the CDC. I mean, there are 14 studies on three continents involving hundreds of thousands of children. Is she claiming that there is a massive international conspiracy to hide the truth? I think she is. And that’s what makes her, to me, a classic anti-vaccine person.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about the issue, for example, of the combined vaccine, the MMR—measles, mumps, rubella—the argument for separating them? And what was the—why were they put together? Talk about how vaccines came to be what they are and why they are mandated or not mandated in this country.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Right, so, the measles vaccine was developed in 1963, the mumps vaccine in '67. There was a second measles vaccine, the last, best vaccine, in ’68. And then we had the rubella vaccine in ’69. In 1971, those three vaccines were put together because you could, because you could do it safely, as was proven, that when you combine those vaccines, that you didn't interfere with or change the safety profile or immunogenicity profile of those vaccines when they were given separately. So now you had to give one shot instead of three. Now we have a two-dose vaccine, so that means you give two doses instead of six. There’s no reason to separate those vaccines out, because all you do by separating them out is increase the number of shots without in any way changing the safety profile.
In terms of mandates, your question about mandates, I think you’re starting to see why it is that mandates are so important. There is no good reason to choose not to get a vaccine. If you’re choosing not to get a vaccine, then you’re basing it on a misperception or a series of false beliefs, as Ms. Holland has, about vaccines. She says, for example, that vaccines are never tested together. Of course they’re tested together. You cannot put a new vaccine on the schedule without proving that your vaccine doesn’t interfere with the safety and immunogenicity profile of existing vaccines, and vice versa. Those are called concomitant use studies. Ms. Holland says that there have been no studies looking at sort of relatively vaccinated or unvaccinated children. That’s not true. There are several studies that have looked at that, including that of Peter Aaby, which suggests that the highly vaccinated child has better health than the child who is less vaccinated.
I mean, Ms. Holland says that the hepatitis B virus is only transmitted by sexual contact. That’s not true. Children less than 10 years of age in this country, before the hepatitis B vaccine, 18,000 would suffer hepatitis B. Half got it by traveling through a birth canal that was infected with hepatitis B, but the other half got it from relatively sexual contact—relatively casual contact. You know, those children who were less than 10 weren’t getting it from getting tattoos or using intravenous blood, intravenous blood transfusions or intravenous drugs, and they certainly weren’t getting it from sexual contact. They were getting it from Uncle Bob, who had hepatitis B but didn’t know it, who gives them a little kiss. That’s how they were getting hepatitis B.
So there’s so much misinformation out there that causes people like Mary Holland to make bad decisions for her children. If vaccines were unsafe, I think this would be an interesting and reasonable discussion. But vaccines are remarkably safe and remarkably effective. And when you watch herd immunity erode, as it clearly is in this country—we eliminated measles by the year 2000, and now, because parents are choosing not to give vaccines based on their false, or at least ill-founded, concerns, other people are suffering. I think Professor Reiss, who was just spot on, on what she said earlier, I think, said it best. Is it your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? I think the answer is no.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But, Dr. Offit, can you explain how it is that so many parents came to make an association between vaccines and autism, given all of the scientific research and the studies that you cite? Is it because such a large number of children were suffering after having received vaccines? Or what do you attribute this to?
DR. PAUL OFFIT: I think it’s—the analogy could be made for diabetes in the 1800s. In the 1800s, people suffered diabetes, and nobody knew why. And many things were blamed, including vaccines, right? "I got a vaccine. Now, you know, within six months, my child has type 1 diabetes. I think the vaccine did it." And at the time, it was a smallpox vaccine or the rabies vaccine, which was introduced in the late 1800s. Vaccines are always sort of the universal scapegoat. Then, in 1920, Banting and Best isolated insulin, and all that nonsense went away.
I think maybe this nonsense doesn’t go away until we clearly have a cause or causes for autism or, I think much more difficult, a cure for autism. Then it will all go away. I mean, clearly, if you look at the science of autism, it’s clearly at least genetic. I mean, we know that it appears to be an in utero event. So, I don’t think there’s any evidence that an environmental influence, especially vaccines, have ever been shown to increase the rate of autism.
But, you know—and I think the answer to the question, "Why is it that people aren’t convinced?" I think the media is perfectly willing to put the sort of, you know, man-bites-dog story out there, which is Mary Holland’s rant that vaccines cause autism, and she knows it because that’s what she saw. You know, I’ll give you a story. My wife is a private-practicing pediatrician. She goes into the office one day, and she’s helping the nurse give vaccines. There’s a mother who has a four-month-old that’s sitting on her lap along the side wall. While my wife was drawing the vaccine up into the syringe, the four-month-old had a seizure, went on to have a permanent seizure disorder, epilepsy. If my wife had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, I don’t think there are any amount of statistical data that would have convinced that mother of anything other than what she believed to be true. "What do you think? I’m stupid? My child was fine. They came in here, they got a vaccine, now they have epilepsy. I know what I saw"—even though it was a temporal association.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, to be fair, we wanted to have both of you on together to have a conversation, because there are many in this country, and a growing movement of parents, who are deeply concerned. But you wanted to have this conversation separately, Mary Holland and you separately. So, it’s important to, I think, have this kind of dialogue on all of these issues. Dr. Offit, on this issue of vaccines now being—
DR. PAUL OFFIT: I’ll tell you—can I just address that?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, sure.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Can I address that for one second? I think that it is not important to have a debate about the science with someone who clearly doesn’t know the science. I’m sorry, Ms. Holland misrepresented the science again and again and again. I don’t think that in any way helps your viewer. I don’t think it’s fair to have a debate where two sides are presented, when only one side is really supported by the science. I think—I’d like to think we’re beyond that.
AMY GOODMAN: But I think what’s—
DR. PAUL OFFIT: If you ask the question, why is it that—go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Offit, what I think is important, it’s not only about science. We’re talking about science. We’re talking about the practice of medicine in this country. We’re talking about public policy. I mean, after all, this has now become a presidential campaign issue, with possible presidential candidates taking on the issues. And I want your comment on that. But you’re combining all of this, and it’s important to bring all the various expertises of parents, of lawyers, of doctors together in a conversation on these issues.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Right, but what Ms. Holland does is she presumes to represent the science. I actually agree with you. I think we’re at a tipping point. And I think the critical discussion now is the one that was brought up by Professor Reiss, which is: How far do we go here?
I mean, I happen to have survived the 1991 Philadelphia measles epidemic. I was a doctor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. During a four-month period in Philadelphia in 1991, we had 1,400 cases of measles and nine deaths. And it centered on two fundamentalist churches that chose not to vaccinate their children. We got to the point of compulsory vaccination. And believe me, no one in Philadelphia had a problem with that. It was—people were so scared of that disease, because it was so common and so fatal, that we got to compulsory vaccination. By that, I mean those children in that school who were unvaccinated were made wards of the state, vaccinated, and then given back to the parents. And the American Civil Liberties Union, who is perfectly comfortable representing pretty unpopular causes, never stepped in. They were asked to step in by Charles Reinert, who was the pastor of one of those churches. And remember, there was a religious exemption to vaccination on the books for 10 years at the time this happened. And the American Civil Liberties Union said, "While we believe it is your right to martyr yourself to your religion, we don’t believe it is your right to martyr your child to your religion." And I give the ACLU credit for that, at the time. But you had to be here. I’m not sure they would feel the same way.
How bad does it have to get before you say, you know, it is your right to swing your fist wildly, but that right ends at the tip of my nose? And I think that’s what’s true here. We were offended when that man got on a plane with tuberculosis and was coughing and had, you know, so-called multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. We thought he had done something that was awful. And I think this is no different. I don’t think it is your right to expose your child needlessly to infection and to expose those with whom they come in contact needlessly with infection. And if vaccines were a safety issue, I would get it. But it’s not. They’re remarkably safe.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the vaccine compensation board? Talk about what that is all about, how families get compensated.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Yes, so, in early—in the early 1980s, there was born the notion, which was since refuted by scientific study, that the whole-cell pertussis, or whooping cough vaccine, caused permanent brain damage. It was a documentary that was made by Lea Thompson, a veteran newsmaker from NBC, called DPT: Vaccine Roulette. And it showed a series of children who supposedly were permanently brain-damaged by pertussis vaccine. Now that was wrong. Study after study showed it was wrong, but it was a vivid image, and it brought a ton of litigation against pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines, to the point that they were out. I mean, they weren’t going to make vaccines for American children anymore, because they didn’t want to have to fight all this in civil court based on a false notion, that was vaccines were causing permanent harm. And, you know, juries were perfectly willing to side against the pharmaceutical companies. And so, what was put in place was the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in ’86, which became the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1988, to basically give people who may have suffered a permanent harm from a vaccine compensation. Fair enough. But that is not the place to determine scientific truths.
I mean, the—so, for example, there was a rotavirus vaccine that was introduced in this country in 1998. It was on the market for a year. It was found to be a rare but real cause of intestinal blockage, something called intussusception. I think parents were fairly compensated for that, because I think if we’re asking our citizens to get vaccines, there should be this sort of compensation system. But believe me, there are many compensations in that program that are wrong. I mean, they have compensated people for multiple sclerosis caused by hepatitis B vaccine, when it clearly doesn’t do that, and two New England Journal of Medicine studies show it don’t, which is to say that the courts are not a place to determine scientific truths. Scientific studies are the place to determine scientific truths. The courts are simply a place to settle disputes. A lawyer shouldn’t be making a decision about whether or not one thing causes another. I think that’s the province of scientists and academicians.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Offit, yeah, just very quickly before we conclude, do you think that there should be compulsory vaccination across the U.S. now?
DR. PAUL OFFIT: I agree with—I agree with Professor Reiss. I think we should certainly, as a first up, make it much more difficult to get a philosophical or religious exemption, both of which, as far as I’m concerned, are misnamed. I mean, philo, love, sophos, wisdom—
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.
DR. PAUL OFFIT: Where’s the wisdom that says—sorry. And, you know, it’s an unreligious act to get—to not get a vaccine. But I think we should make that harder. And yes, I think, eventually, we should make it so that you pay some sort of price for doing something that puts your child and other people at risk.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Paul Offit, we thank you for being with us, of the University of Pennsylvania.
Headlines:
FCC Proposes Historic Open Internet Protections
The chair of the Federal Communications Commission has unveiled what he calls "the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the [agency]." FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has backed the regulation of Internet service like a public utility to uphold net neutrality, the principle of a free and open Internet. The plan will let the agency prevent Internet service providers like Comcast from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for Internet service. It would also extend such protections to Internet service on cellphones and tablets. Wheeler discussed the plan on PBS NewsHour.
Tom Wheeler: "What we’re doing is we’re taking the legal construct that once was used for phone companies and paring it back to modernize it so it specifically deals with this issue. So it’s not really utility regulation, but it is regulation to make sure that there is somebody watching out for the consumer, that, like you said, there’s no paid prioritization, there’s no blocking, there’s no throttling. And, most important, there will be ongoing rules, in perpetuity, so that there will be a yardstick to measure what’s fair for consumers."
Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cellphone and cable industries, was not initially expected to take a strong stand on net neutrality. His proposal comes after the FCC received a record-setting number of comments — nearly four million, almost all in support of strong protections. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts hailed the proposal.
Sen. Ed Markey: "Today is a day where consumers and innovators, entrepreneurs, anyone who counts on the Internet to connect to the world, is going to now be protected in the 21st century. Reclassifying broadband under Title II is a major victory for our economy, for our consumers and for free expression of ideas."
The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal on February 26.
Cameroon: Boko Haram Massacres 100
The militant group Boko Haram appears to have conducted another massacre. A local source told Reuters news agency the militants killed more than 100 people in the Cameroonian town of Fotokol, murdering people inside their homes and a mosque. This comes as the Chadian government claims to have ousted Boko Haram from the Nigerian border town of Gamboru Ngala, which the militants have held for months.
Ebola Drug Shows Promise as Weekly Death Toll Rises in West Africa
In other news from West Africa, a medication has shown effectiveness in treating some patients with Ebola. The drug, favipiravir, appears to have cut the mortality rate in half for patients with low to moderate levels of the virus. The news comes as the World Health Organization has announced a rise in weekly cases of Ebola for the first time this year, with 124 new cases confirmed last week in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. About 9,000 people have died in the outbreak.
Kerry, European Leaders in Ukraine as U.S. Mulls Sending Arms
Secretary of State John Kerry has arrived in Ukraine for talks as the United States considers arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed rebels. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande are also traveling to Kiev today to float a new peace proposal before continuing on to Moscow Friday to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The talks come as renewed fighting has killed more than 200 people in the past three weeks.
Obama’s Pick for Defense Secretary Backs Arming Ukraine
President Obama’s nominee to lead the Pentagon has voiced support for providing arms to Ukraine. During his confirmation hearing, Ashton Carter also said he would consider recommending changes to President Obama’s plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year. Carter has a long history at the Pentagon, where he once served as the chief arms buyer. In 2006, he backed a pre-emptive strike against North Korea if the country continued with plans for a missile test. On Wednesday, Carter was asked by New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte if he would resist pressure from the White House to transfer prisoners from Guantánamo.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte: "I would ask you to tell us and to make a commitment to this committee that you will not succumb to any pressure by this administration to increase the pace of transfers from Guantánamo. Will you commit to that?"
Ashton Carter: "Absolutely, Senator."
U.S. Diplomat: Return of Guantánamo Off the Table in Cuba Talks
The U.S. diplomat leading historic talks with the Cuban government has rejected Cuba’s calls to return Guantánamo Bay. President Raúl Castro has said restoring Havana’s control of the bay is a prerequisite for normalizing ties with the United States, which has controlled the area of Cuba since 1903. But Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson said the Obama administration has refused to consider it.
Roberta Jacobson: "The issue of Guantánamo is not on the table in these conversations. I want to be clear that what we’re talking about right now is the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, which is only one first step in normalization. Obviously the Cuban government has raised Guantánamo. We are not interested in discussing that. We are not discussing that issue, or return of Guantánamo."
Pentagon Given Deadline in Case over Withholding of Torture Photos
A federal judge has given the Obama administration one week to explain why it has failed to comply with a court order to outline its justification for withholding more than 2,000 photographs showing the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. For over a decade, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting for the release of the photographs, which are said to be more disturbing than the famous images of torture by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. In October, the judge ordered the government to outline, for each photograph, its reasons for keeping the images secret, but the government has not done so.
Palestinian Scholar Sami Al-Arian Deported After Controversial Prosecution
The prominent Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian has been deported from the United States. In one of the most controversial prosecutions of the post-9/11 era, Al-Arian was accused of ties to the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but a Florida jury failed to return a single guilty verdict on any of the 17 charges against him. After prosecutors refiled charges, Al-Arian chose jail time and deportation rather than face a second trial. For much of the three years following his arrest in 2003, Al-Arian was imprisoned in solitary confinement and reportedly abused by prison staff under conditions Amnesty International called "gratutiously punitive." Wednesday night, Al-Arian told the news site The Intercept, "I came to the United States for freedom, but four decades later, I am leaving to gain my freedom."
NBC’s Brian Williams Apologizes for False Story on Helicopter Attack
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has apologized for falsely claiming he was on a helicopter hit and forced down by fire from a rocket-propelled grenade during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Soldiers from the helicopter which was hit had publicly challenged Williams’ account, saying he was actually nowhere near the aircraft that came under fire. One posted, "Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened." Williams apologized on his show Wednesday night.
Brian Williams: "I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed after the ground fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert. This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and, by extension, our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not. I hope they know they have my greatest respect, and also now my apology."
Williams blamed the "fog of memory" for causing him to misremember the event. But he has made the claims before, including during an interview with David Letterman in 2013. Two days after the 2003 attack, Williams described it differently, saying, "the Chinook [helicopter] ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky." But NBC archives show a clip from that day titled "Target Iraq: Helicopter NBC’s Brian Williams Was Riding In Comes Under Fire."
Health Insurance Firm Anthem Reports Massive Data Breach
The health insurance company Anthem has reported what may be the largest data breach of a healthcare firm to date. Anthem says hackers managed to penetrate a database with up to 80 million customer records, accessing personal data like names, birthdays, addresses and income information.
Indiana Woman Faces Up to 70 Years in Prison for What She Says Was a Miscarriage
In Indiana, a jury has convicted a woman of feticide and felony neglect following what she says was a miscarriage. Purvi Patel was convicted of taking drugs to induce an abortion, even though no drugs were found in her system. She says she miscarried and disposed of her dead fetus in a dumpster. A state pathologist used a scientifically contested "float test" to claim Patel’s fetus was born alive, while a defense expert said the fetus wasn’t viable. The charges appear mutually exclusive, since feticide applies to a fetus which dies in the womb, while felony neglect applies to live children. But Patel was convicted of both. She faces up to 70 years in prison. Reproductive health advocates say her case is part of an increasing criminalization of pregnant women.
Utah GOP Lawmaker Apologizes for Questioning If Sex with Unconscious Spouse is Rape
A state lawmaker in Utah has apologized for publicly questioning whether sex with an unconscious spouse should be considered rape. Republican state Representative Brian Greene made the remarks Tuesday during a debate over a bill on consent.
Utah state Rep. Brian Greene: "Because it looks to me now like sex with an unconscious person is, by definition, rape. I hope this wouldn’t happen, but this opens the door to it. An individual has sex with their wife while she is unconscious, or he, you know, the other way around, if that’s possible — I don’t know — but a prosecutor could then charge that spouse with rape."
State Rep. Greene issued an apology Wednesday, saying, "I abhor sexual assault under any circumstances, including within marriage."
Report: College Completion Gap Between Rich and Poor Doubles
A new report finds the college completion gap between rich and poor in the United States has doubled over the past 40 years. The study by two educational research groups found that since 1970 the percentage of students from the wealthiest families who obtain a bachelor’s degree has risen dramatically, from 44 to 77 percent. But the percentage of the poorest students who obtain bachelor’s degrees has risen just three points over the same time period, to 9 percent. Federal Pell grants for students have not kept pace with rising tuition costs. The news comes as President Obama has proposed making two years of college free.
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Net Neutrality, Back by Popular Demand By Amy Goodman
In January 2011, thousands gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, threatening for the first time the 30-year dictatorship of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Decades of suppressed dissent was finding an outlet in the streets and online as well. Six months earlier, in Alexandria, 28-year-old Khaled Saeed was dragged out of a cybercafe and beaten to death by police. Photos of his corpse, released by his family, went viral on the Internet, fomenting discontent. Wael Ghonim, an Internet engineer and activist, created a Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Saeed,” serving as a platform for hundreds of thousands to organize.
As the crowds swelled in Tahrir, the power of the Internet as a force for social change was being demonstrated hour by hour. In response, Mubarak shut down the Internet, as well as most cellphone service. Universal outcry forced him to turn it back on.
Which brings us to net neutrality: the fundamental notion that anyone on the Web can reach anyone else, that users can just as easily access a small website launched in a garage as they can access major Internet portals like Google or Yahoo. Net neutrality is the Internet’s protection against discrimination.
During the past two decades, as the Internet flourished and transformed our society, several major corporations have assumed dominant “gatekeeper” positions, threatening net neutrality. Among them, the large Internet service providers, or ISPs: AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast. These four phone and cable companies make massive, multi-billion-dollar profits while charging enormous fees and providing, at best, lackluster service.
In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission, under its then-chairman, Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, set forth principles for an “open Internet.” In practice, these favored those very corporations that profit from a regulatory “light touch.” Powell left office and became the head of the cable industry’s lobbying organization, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), demonstrating clearly the corrupt revolving door between federal regulators and the industries they are supposed to oversee.
Nearly 10 years later, President Barack Obama named Tom Wheeler, the former head of the NCTA, to lead the FCC. Wheeler was a major donor to Obama’s presidential campaigns. After a federal court struck down the “open Internet” rules, Wheeler announced that the FCC would be making new ones. Advocates for a free and open Internet were worried that this former lobbyist would end the Internet as we know it, handing the keys over to the major telecom and cable corporations.
This announcement sparked a massive protest movement. Led by organizations like Free Press and Public Knowledge, people camped out in front of the FCC for days. More than 4 million people commented on the rules, making this the largest response to any federal request for public comment in history.
In a blog post on the website of the magazine Wired this week, Wheeler made a stunning revelation. “Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure Internet openness through a determination of ‘commercial reasonableness,’” he wrote. This is what had worried proponents of network neutrality. Major ISPs would be allowed to discriminate, favoring some websites over others, as long as they weren’t being “unreasonable.” Wheeler continued in his Wired piece, “I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open Internet protections.”
What Wheeler means by “Title II authority” is that he has made an about-face and will propose rules that the Internet be regulated like a public utility, as are other central pillars of our society like power utilities, water systems and the telephone system. Imagine if the water coming out of your tap was less clean than water at a neighbor’s house, because the neighbor pays for premium water. Public utilities are regulated. People get the same service, without discrimination.
The large Internet providers will be prevented from discriminating against people who publish on the Internet, or against those who seek out information on the Internet. All must be treated equally, regardless of race, color, beliefs and, perhaps most importantly, how rich they are. The major corporate ISPs have lobbied hard to create a multitiered Internet to squeeze more profit out of this public treasure. Tom Wheeler and the other commissioners have listened, not only to President Obama, but to the public, millions of people who have demanded the fundamental right to communicate without discrimination.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2015 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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Dean Baker: New Leftist Greek Leaders Being "Very Smart" to Challenge German-Imposed Austerity & An End to "Mindless Austerity": Obama Pushes for Taxing the Rich to Fund New Spending Programs
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Dean Baker: New Leftist Greek Leaders Being "Very Smart" to Challenge German-Imposed Austerity
Economist Dean Baker discusses last month's victory of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece. This marked the first election victory in Europe of an anti-bailout party bent on ... Read More →
An End to "Mindless Austerity": Obama Pushes for Taxing the Rich to Fund New Spending Programs
Stories
Economist Dean Baker discusses last month’s victory of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece. This marked the first election victory in Europe of an anti-bailout party bent on reversing deep cuts demanded by international lenders. Baker praises the initial moves by the new government but warns Greece needs an "exit option" to leave the European Union.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I also wanted to ask you about another country, where new leaders are trying to push back against austerity: Greece. The country’s newly elected left-leaning government has opened negotiations on its bailout package with European partners. It says it refuses to cooperate with the troika of European and International Monetary Fund lenders. This is the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: [translated] Our government will proceed seeking the utmost cooperation with the legal institutions of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund. But with the tripartite committee, the troika, which aims at implementing a program whose logic we consider anti-European, with this committee, which according to the European Parliament is poorly structured, we do not aim to work with.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dean Baker, you’ve written that Greece needs an exit option. Could you explain?
DEAN BAKER: Yeah, just very briefly. Greece has been in a situation where it’s had austerity been imposed on it over the last five years, and its economy has suffered horrendously. The drop in the size of its economy, from its peak to where it is today, is about 23 percent. By comparison, at the trough in the Great Depression, we were down 26 percent, and we bounced back 10 percentage points the next year, and seven years out from the downturn we were above where we were in 1929. Greece is still 23 percent below where it was in 2007. Its unemployment rate is about 25 percent, youth unemployment over 50 percent, massive cutbacks in government services. It really has been hell for the Greek people.
And Germany is really behind this to the largest extent, saying, "No, no, no, you have to stay with the program." The Greek government, I think they’re being very smart. They’re trying to say, "OK, we’ve got to move away from this. You have to give us room to grow." And they’re trying to press the case, with obviously Germany being the main party on the other side, at the end of it—I mean, it’s behind the European Union, European Commission, but really it’s Germany. And they’re hoping to get allies among Spain, Italy, France. They’re trying to push that line.
What I was arguing is that they also have to be prepared—and I understand they may not want to say this—they have to be prepared to say, "We’re going to leave the euro." Now, there’s no doubt, if they were to leave the euro, there would be massive disruption. There would be a period of financial panic. The good side in this story is that the European Union has already wreaked so much havoc on Greece’s economy, it doesn’t have far to go down. And I think that if it were to actually go that route, they would likely rebound fairly quickly—a model here being Argentina in 2001. They broke with their link to the dollar, defaulted on their debt, December 2001. By the fall of 2002, they were growing rapidly. And by 2003, they made up all the lost ground and then some. I don’t know if Greece would rebound quite that quickly, but that was a very impressive performance.
And I think it’s important to hold that out, because that’s something that would scare Germany, not so much because they care about Greece, but if Greece were to do that and rebound, there will be tremendous pressure on Spain, probably Italy, other countries, to also leave the euro, and Germany’s going to be sitting there with a rump eurozone at the end of the day. So I think it’s important there be pressure on Germany that they understand this is not working. It’s not working for Greece. It’s not working for Spain. It’s not working for Europe. They have to move away from these policies.
AMY GOODMAN: In 30 seconds, you were quoted in a piece about Croatia, which has cancelled the debts of its poorest residents. Can you explain, and what we can learn from this?
DEAN BAKER: I don’t know a great deal about that. I was called by a reporter, and I just said, you know, "You do have to worry." They proposed—I shouldn’t say "proposed," they instituted a cancellation of the debt to its poorest residents. And in principle, that sounds good. But the point I was making is, well, you have to see how that’s being done, because what that might mean, if people expect it again, no one is going to lend them money. And at the end of the day, that probably is not a good policy. Now, I don’t know the details on it. They may have a way around that. But if we just say cancel debt for poor people, well, they’re never going to be able to borrow again, and you’ve helped them today, not tomorrow.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it says their debts are absorbed by creditors including local banks, major telecommunication providers, city governments. The move comes as more than 300,000 Croatian citizens saw their bank accounts blocked last summer due to debt.
DEAN BAKER: Yeah, well, I mean, again, that’s going to help them today, but these people are probably going to want to borrow in the future. And if there’s concern on the part of creditors that the government will do this again, then they’re not going to lend them money. I mean, again, I don’t know the specifics. I was arguing for some sort of debt moratorium in the context of the collapse of the housing bubble, because that’s a pretty unique event. We don’t anticipate we’ll have another collapse of a housing bubble, at least not anytime soon. And maybe there was a similar justification in Croatia. But if it’s just "we have a lot of people in debt, let’s cancel their debt," you may, at the end of the day, not be ending up doing the low-income people a favor.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dean Baker, I want to thank you for being with us, economist, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, author of Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People.
When we come back, Johann Hari joins us on Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Stay with us.
Economist Dean Baker discusses last month's victory of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece. This marked the first election victory in Europe of an anti-bailout party bent on ... Read More →
President Obama has unveiled a $4 trillion budget proposal for next year Congress that calls for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to help fund education and fix crumbling infrastructure. The plan includes tax cuts for some poor and middle-class families. It also seeks to recoup losses from corporations that stash an estimated $2 trillion overseas by taxing such earnings at 14 percent, still less than half of the 35 percent rate for profits made in the United States. Obama’s proposed budget also takes aim at the high cost of prescription drugs, proposes a new agency to regulate food safety, and seeks $1 billion to curb immigration from Central America. It also calls for a 4.5 percent increase in military spending, including a $534 billion base budget for the Pentagon, plus $51 billion to fund U.S. involvement in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Speaking at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama said across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would hurt the military. We speak to economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama has unveiled a $4 trillion budget proposal for next year that calls for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to help fund education and fix crumbling infrastructure. The plan includes tax cuts for some poor and middle-class families. It also seeks to recoup losses from corporations that stash an estimated $2 trillion overseas by taxing such earnings at 14 percent, still less than half of the 35 percent rate for profits made in the United States. Obama announced his plan Tuesday.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The budget I’ve sent to Congress today is fully paid for, through a combination of smart spending cuts and tax reforms. Let me give you an example. Right now, our tax code is full of loopholes for special interests, like the trust fund loophole that allows the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying taxes on their unearned income. I think we should fix that and use the savings to cut taxes for middle-class families. That would be good for our economy.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama’s proposed budget also takes aim at the high cost of prescription drugs, proposes a new agency to regulate food safety, and seeks a billion dollars to curb immigration from Central America. It also calls for a 4.5 [percent] increase in military spending, including a $534 billion base budget for the Pentagon, plus $51 billion to fund U.S. involvement in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Speaking at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama said across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would hurt the military.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Just last week, top military officials told Congress that if Congress does nothing to stop sequestration, there could be serious consequences for our national security—at a time when our military is stretched on a whole range of issues. And that’s why I want to work with Congress to replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America. And we can do so in a way that is fiscally responsible.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined from Washington, D.C., by the economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People.
First, your overall assessment of the budget that President Obama has presented, Dean?
DEAN BAKER: Well, on the whole, I’d say it’s probably the best budget he’s had since he’s been in office. I’m ignoring the—you know, the first one with the stimulus, which had a lot of good things in there, but, you know, since then. He has some good spending in there, in the sense he’s trying to increase spending on infrastructure, education, other areas that are both—we could think of as investment for the future, but also will help people, help a lot of low- and middle-income people. He also has some pretty good tax increases for the wealthy. He’s raising the tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 28 percent from—currently it’s about 22 percent, I believe, its latest number. It had been as low as 15 percent—that’s why I’m hesitating a second. And, you know, that’s a big tax increase. You know, these are—middle-income people don’t have a lot of capital gains, you know, or dividend income. So that’s a big deal. And he’s increasing the corporate tax. He’s proposing that you would have a tax, one-time tax, 14 percent on the foreign earnings of U.S. corporations that are already stashed overseas, and then 19 percent thereafter. That’s not ideal, in my book. There’s other ways you could structure that. But that’s a lot more than people have been talking about. So, that’s kind of the positive.
The negative is that we’re still, to a large extent, on an austerity path. He said he’s against mindless austerity. That’s good. So, this is maybe more thoughtful austerity. I’m saying that a little cryptically. But the point is, one of the reasons we’ve had such a slow recovery is that the government hasn’t been prepared to spend more, hasn’t been willing to increase the stimulus it gives to the economy, following a very severe recession. Every other recession, we’ve done that. In this case, instead of spending more, we’re spending less. We’re cutting back government employment. That’s hampered growth. And we’re still well below full employment, well below the economy’s potential. The Congressional Budget Office puts us at about 4 percentage points below the economy’s potential. That means, in effect, we’re throwing $720 billion a year in goods and services that we could be producing into the garbage. So, that doesn’t really change. And in terms of the spending in the investment portion of the budget, domestic discretionary spending, that’s not going down as fast as it would absent the increases President Obama has proposed, but we’re still looking at spending less in that category of the budget relative to the size of the economy than we did at any point in the '90s, the ’80s, the ’70s—I don't know how far back you’d have to go to find us spending less. So, there’s more investment, given his proposed spending, but it’s still not a lot, because the baseline was very, very low. So, on the whole, very mixed story.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dean, I wanted to ask you, first, about the military part of the budget. We’re talking about here $51 billion for ongoing activities in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, even though that supposedly the United States is withdrawing troops and ending those wars, and we’re still talking about spending $1 billion a week, essentially, next year?
DEAN BAKER: Yeah, well, you know, I don’t know when we’re going to see an end to those wars. I mean, you know, had my choice, it would have been a long time ago; we wouldn’t have been there, to begin with, but, you know, no one asked me. We are spending less. You could be happy about that. I mean, we had been spending, at the peak, about $180 billion, $190 billion a year, so we’re clearly spending a lot less. But, you know, $50 billion is not an inconsiderable chunk of change. So, you know, I mean, to my view, the bigger issue is the war than the spending. We could afford $50 billion. But the point is, you know, is this a good use of resources? Are we doing something positive for the world, for the country? That, to my mind, is much more important.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does sequestration fit into this? I wanted to turn to President Obama speaking about his budget proposal, addressing the issue of sequestration and claiming Republican lawmakers are playing politics with funding the Department of Homeland Security.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I’m not going to accept a budget that locks in sequestration going forward. It would be bad for our security and bad for our growth. I will not accept a budget that severs the vital link between our national security and our economic security. I know there’s some on Capitol Hill who would say, 'Well, we'd be willing to increase defense spending, but we’re not going to increase investments in infrastructure, for example, or basic research.’ Well, those two things go hand in hand. If we don’t have a vital infrastructure, if we don’t have broadband lines across the country, if we don’t have a smart grid, all that makes us more vulnerable. America can’t afford being shortsighted, and I’m not going to allow it.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama on sequestration. Dean Baker, how has sequestration affected the economy in this country?
DEAN BAKER: Well, sequestration was basically a phasing down of spending, both on the military side and domestic discretionary, so that was a damper on economic growth. Again, we’re in the situation—to my mind, a very perverse one—where you have people running around Washington—certainly the Republicans, but unfortunately many Democrats, as well—saying, "Oh, we want to get the budget deficit down," and they’re patting themselves on the back, you know, "We reduced the budget deficit so much." And I’m going, "Well, we need demand in the economy, so what you’re patting yourself on the back for is pulling money out of the economy, reducing growth, reducing employment. I’m not happy about that. That’s not a good story. You threw people out of work." But in Washington, in the debates here, you know, getting the deficit down is a goal in itself, so it doesn’t matter how many people you throw out of work.
So, sequestration is a big part of that story. You know, it has both military budget and domestic discretionary on this downward path over the next decade, and that’s certainly slowed demand, slowed economic growth, and meant fewer jobs. So, President Obama is proposing to move away from that, and he’s throwing out—you know, he’s saying, "OK, I’m going to spend more on the military side. I also want to spend more on the domestic discretionary side." Whether that’s political, I mean, you know, I can’t speak to his motives, but presumably that makes it easier to—for Republicans to accept that he’s giving ground on the military side and not just asking for spending on the domestic side. Whether—you know, what he’ll end up coming out of Congress, who knows? But, you know, I’d have to say, realistically, it’s hard to imagine he could have gotten more domestic discretionary without making at least some concessions on the military side.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dean, I’d like to get back to this issue of the tax holiday for overseas corporations. There’s $2 trillion that Microsoft and General Electric and all these other companies have been parking overseas for years because they don’t want to have to pay the U.S. a 35 percent corporate tax. But now President Obama is saying, "OK, we’ll let you bring that back for 14 percent." And you’re right that’s higher than the last tax holiday, when it was 5 percent, but you know, and I think a lot of people in Washington know, that that’s his opening number and that the Republicans are probably going to whittle that down even further. And that’s probably the only aspect of his proposal, other than reducing the corporate tax, that the Republicans are going to actually pay much attention to. And so, my concern is, some people have said this is—his proposal, especially the 19 percent ongoing on those foreign profits, will actually set a minimum corporate tax, and more corporations in the U.S. will shift as much as they can outside of the country and then claim this 19 percent tax, and that will become the floor for corporations.
DEAN BAKER: Well, I’m actually not too upset about that proposal. Again, it’s—both parts of it. It’s not my ideal. You know, there’s this idea of a unitary tax. A number of states—I believe California has it, but a number of states in the country have this, where they tax companies based on their worldwide earnings, and then they just say, you know, "If 10 percent of your sales are in the state of California, we’re going to say 10 percent of your profits are. We don’t care what you say. We’re going to treat it that way, and that’s what we’ll tax." You could do that. I think that would be the best route. But absent that, I don’t think this is too bad.
Now, you’re absolutely right. Fourteen percent is his starting offer. If you go back to '05, President Bush had amnesty where it was just 5 percent, so we're much better off at 14. Where does that end up? You know, presumably, Republicans aren’t going to say, "14 percent, fine." If it ends up close to 5, that’s a real bad deal. If President Obama says, "Well, maybe I’ll go to 13," you know, that—12—you know, that’s not too bad, because realistically we’re not getting it now. So, I’d rather see us get 12 percent than sit around and hope for the messiah that one day will have it taxed as, you know, ordinary income or ordinary profits. That’s not going to happen.
In terms of the 19 percent rate going forward, it’s actually a little higher than that, because they only give an 85 percent exemption on foreign taxes paid. So it ends up being—we could do the arithmetic—probably around 21, 22 percent. Companies—almost no companies actually pay 35 percent. That’s the marginal tax rate. If you look at the average tax rate, it varies year to year, but it is around 19, 20 percent. So, I’m not really worried about companies en masse, you know, shipping—trying to arrange to shuffle their profits overseas. They have been doing that, because, you know, as it stands now, you could basically defer them to eternity or hope 'til you get someone like President Bush give you a 5 percent tax holiday. So, this makes that less desirable than it is today. So if we actually got the 19 percent rate, I don't think the Republicans are going to jump and grab that, but if they did embrace that, I think you’d see less of the sort of tax shifting that we’ve been seeing over the last 15 or 20 years. So I consider that overwhelmingly a positive story.
AMY GOODMAN: Dean, during his State of the Union address, President Obama called for taxing the rich.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top 1 percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth. We can use that money to help more families pay for child care and send their kids to college. We need a tax code that truly helps working Americans trying to get a leg up in the new economy, and we can achieve that together.
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about this thrust of President Obama and how it expresses itself in the economy. And how different is this than presidents past?
DEAN BAKER: Well, there’s a few things in here. I mentioned before that he’s proposing to raise the tax rate on capital gains and dividend income from 22 percent to 28 percent. That’s a big increase for wealthy people, because that’s where—you know, you think of the Bill Gateses, the Warren Buffetts—that’s where most their income is coming from. They own a lot of stock, and they’re getting dividend payouts. They sell it for a profit. And as it stands, they paying less, a lower tax rate than—you know, middle-income people are paying 25, 28 percent. So, this is a very big step in the right direction. You know, The New York Times had a piece: this is spreading the wealth around; they had this being socialism or whatever. I like to point out, 28 percent is the rate that Ronald Reagan signed off on back in 1986 in the tax reform. So, that’s hardly an exorbitant rate. We’ve been there before. But I’m glad to see him go in that direction.
He has a few other things in there. As it stands now, if you have someone—they die, pass on the estate to their heirs, there’s something called the step-up basis for capital gains. So let’s say this person, this wealthy person, had made $100 million on owning Microsoft stock, or whatever it might be. They pass it on to their children. Well, their children never pay tax on that capital gain. It’s treated, OK, $100 million. If they sell it the next day, they don’t pay any tax on it. If they wait a few years and it’s worth $120 million, they just pay tax on that $20 million. One of the things he proposed is that that money would be taxed at the point the estate would be passed on. So if you had $100 million in capital gains, that would be taxed at the capital gains rate. So that would be a big hit to a lot of wealthy people—and, to my mind, totally justified.
There are a few other odds and ends. People talked about when president—Governor Romney was running in 2012, he had over $100 million in an IRA, a tax-sheltered account. He proposed limiting that—I forget, $3 million, $4 million, something that, you know, any middle-income person is going to be under. So, you know, this is supposed to be a middle-income savings vehicle, not something for the richest in the country to shield their income from wealth. There are a few other things in there of that nature. Individually, they don’t amount to much; even collectively, they aren’t that huge. But it’s the sort of thing that, you know, frankly, it’s just kind of obscene. I mean, the rest of us are paying our taxes; Mitt Romney’s got $100 million in a tax-sheltered IRA. Very hard to justify that. So, to my mind, these aren’t necessarily huge things, but they’re definitely in the right direction, and I was very glad to see President Obama propose them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the issues of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? The Republicans are always talking about the need for the government to rein in future—future budget costs for what they call the, quote, "entitlement programs." How does the budget deal with that?
DEAN BAKER: Well, one very positive thing: Social Security is not mentioned here. In years past, President Obama had proposed changing the cost-of-living adjustment formula so that people would get less year by year. It would be roughly—his proposal would have reduced the annual cost-of-living adjustment by about three-tenths of a percentage point a year. That might sound trivial, but over 10 years it’ll be 3 percent; 20 years, 6 percent. So, someone’s, you know, in their nineties, been collecting Social Security for 30 years, they’re looking at about 9 percent less benefits. And that’s a big deal for a lot of older people whose Social Security is the bulk, if not their entire income. So that would have been a big deal. That’s not there, so that’s a very good story.
He had some proposals on Medicare, a mixed bag. I mean, some of these will—he’s proposing some reductions in payments to drug companies—good thing; reductions in payments to insurance companies through the Medicare Advantage program—again, a good thing, this is a subsidy for insurance companies that has no rationale. On the other hand, he’s proposing some increased cost sharing, and he talks about for higher-income beneficiaries. And we’re talking about people $50,000, $60,000 a year—these are not ordinarily people we talk of as wealthy. So, that, to my view, is not a good story.
But one thing that I think people should realize—and this is a change, whether President Obama deserves credit for it or whoever; you know, one could quibble about that—but we’ve seen much, much lower growth in healthcare cost over the last five or six years. And you’re now seeing that included in the projections. And, you know, for what that’s worth, that makes the story look, 10, 20 years out, much, much more manageable. So, before, we used to have these people running around: "Oh, my god! You know, the debt’s, deficit’s exploding! We’re going to have these huge, huge burdens." Well, as it stands now, you know, if you look out a decade, you look out two decades, the story—you know, they’re projecting deficits, but they’re very much manageable deficits. So, the story of, you know, the baby boomers, people like me, retiring and bankrupting the government, it doesn’t make any sense—not that it ever did make any sense, but, you know, there’s just no story there. And I think we could at least be happy about that, that whatever problems we face, in terms of being able to pay for these programs, they’re very manageable.
AMY GOODMAN: Dean Baker, I wanted to ask you about infrastructure, the economy and also climate change. I mean, you have this horrendous accident that happened last night in New York, Westchester, seven people dead. A train hit a car. But that goes to a bigger issue. I mean, they have had increasing accidents on the Metro North line, which was once considered one of the safest in the country. In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the national infrastructure an overall grade of D+. And then climate change of course affecting infrastructure across the country. Your comments?
DEAN BAKER: Well, you know, President Obama has proposed some additional spending, but, I have to say, these are really kind of baby steps. I mean, maybe he couldn’t get more through Congress, but, you know, we know he’s not going to get his proposal through Congress in any case, so you sort of think, "Well, why not think big? Why not put more on the table?" So, we’re on a path of declining infrastructure spending. His proposals make the decline less rapid, but it’s really going the wrong way. I mean, we should be looking to spend more both for creating jobs today, but also because it’s needed. We need to upgrade our infrastructure. Instead, we’re letting it deteriorate.
And in terms of climate change, again, we have—I’m not going to say "infinite" need, but we have tremendous need for retrofitting our buildings, for developing a more energy-efficient infrastructure, mass transit, on down the list, because we should be treating climate change with urgency. Again, the Republican Congress doesn’t want that, but I think it would have been more helpful if President Obama had put some really big things on the table. There is some money there, so I’m not saying he’s doing nothing, but, you know, like an order of magnitude too small to address the problem.
Headlines:
ISIS Burns Jordanian Fighter Pilot Alive
The Islamic State has released a video showing a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive inside a cage. First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh was captured in December when his F-16 crashed in northern Syria during an airstrike as part of the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State. Speaking before the video was confirmed, Obama said it would only increase U.S. efforts against ISIS.
President Obama: "I don’t know the details of the confirmations, but should in fact this video be authentic, it’s just one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization. And it, I think, will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of a global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated."
Jordan Executes 2 Prisoners After Burning of Pilot by ISIS
Jordan had hoped to free the pilot by exchanging a female prisoner held for an attempted suicide bombing. Early this morning, Jordan executed Sajida al-Rishawi, along with another prisoner. Jordanian government spokesperson Mohammad al-Momani has vowed to wage a firm response to the burning.
Mohammad al-Momani: "Whoever doubted that Jordan’s response would be firm, tough and strong, we will show them the proof, and they will learn that the anger of Jordanians will shake their ranks. The martyred pilot does not belong to a specific tribe, and he is not a son of a specific governorate, but he is the son of all Jordanians, being united as they have been throughout their history."
Sunni Islam’s most prominent educational center, Al-Azhar, has issued a call for the "killing, crucifixion and chopping of the limbs of Islamic State terrorists." The burning of the pilot has ignited particular outrage since Islam forbids the cremation of the body. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates, a key ally in the U.S.-led fight against ISIS, has suspended its role over concerns about pilots’ safety. Unnamed officials told The New York Times the country stopped airstrikes in December.
Imprisoned Operative Says Saudi Royals Backed al-Qaeda
A jailed former al-Qaeda operative has issued new allegations about ties between al-Qaeda and the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Zacarias Moussaoui volunteered to testify as part of a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of the victims of 9/11. His testimony, gathered inside a U.S. supermax prison where he is serving a life sentence on terrorism charges, was submitted as part of a legal brief Tuesday. Moussaoui said in the late 1990s he had created a database of al-Qaeda donors, which included then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal; longtime Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, known as Bandar Bush; and top investor Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. He also described meeting with an official who worked for the Saudi Embassy in Washington to discuss a possible plan to shoot down Air Force One. The revelations come just days after President Obama visited Saudi Arabia, where he welcomed the new King Salman.
Somalia: U.S. Drone Strike Targets Al-Shabab Leader
A U.S. drone strike in Somalia targeted a top leader of the militant group al-Shabab on Saturday. The Pentagon did not confirm the attack until Tuesday, and has not said whether it killed the target, Yusef Dheeq. Unnamed officials have said Dheeq and at least one other leader were killed.
Ukraine: Heavy Shelling Kills at Least 5, Damages Hospital
In eastern Ukraine, at least five people have been killed amidst heavy shelling that damaged a hospital and several schools. Renewed violence between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels erupted last month. More than 200 people have been killed in the past three weeks alone.
Draft of Arrest Request for Argentine President Found in Late Prosecutor’s Home
In Argentina, a draft request for the arrest of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been found at the home of a late prosecutor who was investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center that killed 85 people. Prosecutor Alberto Nisman had accused Fernández of helping to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing in a bid for oil. He was found dead of a gunshot wound the day before he was due to testify before Congress on his findings. The request for the arrest of Fernández and her foreign minister was found in his trash. So far two judges have refused to take up Nisman’s findings, and the prosecutor investigating his death has announced she will take a two-week vacation.
Pope Francis Declares Slain Archbishop Óscar Romero a Martyr in Step Toward Sainthood
Pope Francis has declared Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero a martyr to the Catholic faith, a step that paves the way for Romero’s beatification and possible sainthood. Known as the "voice of the voiceless," Archbishop Romero was a prominent advocate for the poor and a leading critic of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military government. He was killed nearly 35 years ago, on March 24, 1980, by members of a U.S.-backed death squad while he delivered mass at a hospital chapel. His assassination was ordered by Salvadoran military officer Roberto d’Aubuisson, a graduate of the U.S.-run School of the Americas. In the 1989 film "Romero," actor Raúl Juliá reenacts a dramatic moment in Romero’s life — one day before his assassination, when he called on the Salvadoran army to heed the words of God: "Thou shalt not kill."
Raúl Juliá: "No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. In his name, and in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: Stop the repression!"
Romero’s supporters have long called for him to be placed on the path to sainthood, but his case has been blocked by right-wing church leaders who oppose his ties to liberation theology, a religious movement which seeks to end economic and political injustice.
CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Released from Prison
In the United States, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou has been released from prison. Kiriakou exposed the Bush-era torture program and became the only official jailed in connection with it. In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years after pleading guilty to confirming the identity of a covert officer to a reporter, who did not publish it. His supporters say he was unfairly targeted as part of the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers. In 2007, he became the first CIA official to publicly confirm the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. A Twitter post Tuesday shows Kiriakou smiling with his children, with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote "Free at last, free at least, thank God almighty, I’m free at last." He remains under house arrest for three months.
Obama Admin Touts Surveillance Tweaks, Leaves Bulk Spying Intact
The Obama administration has announced a series of minor surveillance reforms that leave its bulk spying operations in place. The reforms tighten how agencies use the communications of foreigners and place a three-year limit on gag orders for people who receive secretive subpoenas known as national security letters. Obama has called for Congress to end the bulk spying program exposed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, but critics point out Obama could end it himself.
EPA Warns Keystone XL Pipeline Would Fuel Climate Change
The Environmental Protection Agency has warned the Keystone XL pipeline would fuel climate change by increasing oil production in the Canadian tar sands. An earlier State Department analysis found the pipeline would not have an impact, because the oil would be transported through other means. But the EPA concludes the recent drop in oil prices means much of the oil would otherwise remain in the ground. It estimates the pipeline could increase greenhouse gas emissions by about as much as eight new coal-fired power plants. Obama has said climate change will play a key role in his final decision on whether to approve the pipeline.
Congress Unanimously OKs Bill to Address Veteran Suicides
Congress has approved a bill to address suicides among military veterans. An estimated 22 veterans kill themselves each day. The measure would impose independent reviews of VA suicide prevention programs, launch a peer support program, and gives incentives to psychiatrists who work for the VA. President Obama is expected to sign the bill, which passed both houses unanimously.
New York City Police Officer Indicted for Stomping on Restrained Man’s Head
A New York City police officer has been indicted for assault after he was caught on video stomping on the head of an unarmed African American who was pinned to the ground and pleading for help. The attack took place in Brooklyn July 23, less than a week after the police chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island. Garner was also pinned to the ground while pleading, "I can’t breathe." A grand jury declined to indict a white police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, for Garner’s death. But on Tuesday, Officer Joel Edouard, who is black, was arraigned on charges that could carry up to a year in jail. Cellphone video shows Edouard and another officer pinning Jahmiel Cuffee to the ground while he pleads, "Help me."
Jahmiel Cuffee: "Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me!"
Bystander: "The nigga just took his gun out, man!"
Edouard briefly removes his gun before replacing it in the holster. He then walks away, returns to Cuffee and stomps on his head. Cuffee was charged with resisting arrest. Police accused him of drinking on the sidewalk and trying to throw away a joint. His case was later dismissed.
Alabama Poised to Become 37th State to Allow Same-Sex Marriage
Alabama is poised to become the 37th state to allow same-sex marriage. A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected the state’s request to stay a lower court ruling that struck down its same-sex marriage ban. The ban will remain in effect until Monday as the state appeals to the Supreme Court.
Harper Lee, Author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," to Publish 2nd Novel
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee will publish a new novel this summer. Lee, who is 88 years old, says she wrote a novel in the mid-1950s called "Go Set a Watchman," which focuses on an adult woman named Scout. But her editor persuaded her to focus on a younger Scout, and that novel became the classic, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee says she thought the old manuscript was lost until her lawyer discovered it. Both novels are set in the fictional town of Maycomb, based on Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
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