Democracy Now Report
by Ronald Bleier
Editor, DESIP, http://desip.igc.org

Archive: http://dnreportcard.blogspot.com

Democracy Now’s website: www.democracynow.org

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Wednesday 2.19.03
The whole show was devoted to a recent anti-war speech by Dr. Helen Caldicott. Ho hum. I gather that instead of producing timely segments, Amy and her staff have concluded that these set pieces bring in more revenue for WBAI’s current fundraising effort. Let’s hope they know best.

Topic suggestion: NYT article today on critics of new Shuttle investigative board. Apparently the powers that be are intent on whitewashing a good part of the truth behind the latest shuttle tragedy. What are they hiding? DN could be in the forefront of those trying to get solid answers.

Tuesday 2.18.03
Most of the program was devoted to a very good speech by Noam Chomsky at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil, in February 2003. Professor Chomsky focused on the threat that the Bush administration is posing to world peace even to the point of hinting a comparison to Hitler.

"The most powerful state in world history has proclaimed that it intends to rule the world by force: that is the dimension in which it reigns supreme. The war in Iraq will teach some lessons about what lies ahead when the Empire decides to strike a blow. That is surely one of the main reasons for the war.

The Empire has also declared explicitly and precisely that it will tolerate no competitors, now or in the future. Its leaders believe that the means of violence in their hands are so extraordinary that they can dismiss with contempt anyone who stands in their way.

That doctrine is by no means new but it has never before been proclaimed which such brazen arrogance at least not by anyone who we would care to remember"


He quoted from a paper from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace asserting that the Bush administration is a “menace to itself and mankind under its present leadership.” Chomsky made the important point that the lesson to be drawn from the current Iraq/North Korea triangle is that it is important for non nuclear nations to procure nuclear weapons so as to deter the U.S. from attack. Chomsky might have continued that in contrast to past administrations where nuclear proliferation was an more or less unintended consequence of U.S. arms sales and U.S. foreign policy, the Bush administration actively encourages such proliferation because it advances their ideological goal of destabilizing the international system, greasing the way for military action.

Chomsky also said that the way to confront the Empire is to create a different world, one not based on violence and subjugation, or on hate and fear.

Yes, we might add, it would certainly be a different world. It would be a dream world where population pressures don’t lead to environmental degradation and scarcity, where there are no requirements for hierarchy, for order and stability, and no struggles for power and dominance.

Monday, 2.17.03
Today’s program was devoted to the Feb 15 protests in NYC and to the UN debate at the Security Council. Highlight the French speech: France is an old county. In the headlines Amy said worldwide tens of millions protested. That seems a bit high. She also said that estimates of the crowd in NYC were half a million or even a million people in the streets. For my part, I interviewed two cops, one on Lexington where I got off the train, and the other on Third Ave. I asked them what they thought of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision not to allow a march. The first cop was very defensive, arguing that due to the huge numbers, it was better not to have a march. The second cop readily agreed that from a crowd management point of view, it would have been much better to have a march to Central Park.

Friday, 2.14.03
Another fundraising program where aside from the good headlines, there was no produced material. The program started with an excerpt from Mandela’s recent speech properly castigating Bush for his war plans. However, the part where Mandela speculated that Bush was ignoring the UN because Kofi Annan is Black was an embarrassment and unworthy of Mandela, and is one reason that the speech can be dismissed by the opposition.

Much of the program –before the cutoff for fundraising—was given over to an excellent speech by Arundhati Roy who spoke feelingly about the perpetrators of the Gujarat massacres freely holding high office, with no repercussions for their actions. Referring to Bush’s threats to Iraq, Roy said: “It’s not the lies we’ve been told, but the quality of the lies which is truly insulting.” Roy is one of those rare wonderful people who are a treasure to humanity. Nevertheless, there was no hint in her talk of the constantly growing pressure of population on limited resources, a topic that is taboo on Pacifica, Earth First! the Sierra Club and Republican and Democrat circles. In other words, there is an effective wall to wall consensus that we must ignore the elephant in the living room. In 1950 the population of India was 380 million and Pakistan, 36 million. Today India= almost1.1 billion and Pakistan 156 million, almost triple the total population of about 50 years ago. Clearly this kind of growth is unsustainable and the ethnic violence now underway can be seen as the political consequences of the struggle over limited resources.