Amy Goodman has hosted Democracy Now! since 1995. It’s heard and now watched across the world on the web, and broadcast from over 1200 stations. Harvard graduate Goodman first received widespread attention for her work while she was covering the Indonesian army’s mass-killing of Timorese demonstrators.
Increasingly since 1995 she and Democracy Now! have been at the forefront of American progressive reporting on war, peace, and social justice issues that corporate news cannot or will not cover. Amy Goodman is the author of four books including Breaking the Sound Barrier, an anthology of her columns. She’s won numerous awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize.
This episode’s conversation is from the archives of the Grand Lodge of Imhotep in Edmonton. Amy Goodman spoke with me by telephone on February 17, 2011, a mere 15 days after the Canadian magazine Adbusters called on pro-democracy activists to occupy Wall Street, more than a year before the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, and two years before the seemingly unstoppable rise of DAESH or ISIL.
We discussed:
Democracy Now’s pioneering use of then-new file-sharing hacks back in 2003 to smuggle footage out of US-occupied Iraq, and their workarounds to get news out of Egypt during the kill-switch blackout of the anti-Mubarak uprising
The relationship between the Egypt Revolt and the occupation of Palestine
The scam of so-called “foreign aid” that instead of helping poor people overseas is actually corporate welfare feeding the super-rich at home
How and why Democracy Now! is available to more people than is MSNBC
Her commentary during the Egyptian Revolt as to its nature, aims, and likely results, and why she chose to call the ouster a revolution, and
Whether major change to the United States will come from progressives, or from fascists
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