Democracy Now

Bald, brave and beautiful: Those words can’t begin to capture the remarkable Eve Ensler. She sat down with me last week, in the midst of her battle with uterine cancer, to talk about New Orleans and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eve, the author of the hit play "The Vagina Monologues" and the creator of V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls, told me how “cancer has been a huge gift."

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New York City Taxi Driver Ahmed Sharif and his supporters hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall on August 26th, just days after he was attacked by a passenger for being Muslim.

Speakers include Ahmed Sharif, Bhairavi Desai of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and CAIR-NY Civil Rights Director Aliya Latif.

What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.
While scores of brands have been recalled, they all can be traced back to just two egg farms. Our food supply is increasingly in the hands of larger and larger companies, which wield enormous power in our political process.

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Democracy Now!'s award-winning host Amy Goodman appeared on CNN's John King, USA, on Monday, August 23rd at 7pm Eastern Time.

Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman appeared on CNN’s John King, USA, on Friday, August 20th at 7pm Eastern Time.

Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman will appear on CNN’s John King, USA, on Friday, August 20th at 7pm Eastern Time.

Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman will appear on CNN’s John King, USA, on Thursday, August 19th at 7pm Eastern Time.

Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman will appear on CNN’s John King, USA, on Thursday, August 19th at 7pm Eastern Time.

Salman Hamdani died on Sept. 11, 2001. The 23-year-old research assistant at Rockefeller University had a degree in biochemistry. He was also a trained emergency medical technician and a cadet with the New York Police Department. But he never made it to work that day. Hamdani, a Muslim-American, was among that day’s first responders. He raced to Ground Zero to save others. His selfless act cost him his life.

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Our daily weather reports, cheerfully presented with flashy graphics and state-of-the-art animation, appear to relay more and more information.

And yet, no matter how glitzy the presentation, a key fact is invariably omitted. Imagine if, after flashing the words "extreme weather" to grab our attention, the reports flashed "global warming." Then we would know not only to wear lighter clothes or carry an umbrella, but that we have to do something about climate change.

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The Modern Day Slavery Museum explores the history and evolution of modern day forced labor in the agriculture industry and the long legacy of slavery in the food that we eat. The Museum is the latest campaign by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Housed in a box truck, the museum is on a sixty-stop tour across the country. Democracy Now! caught up with the tour in front of Judson Memorial Church in New York City and was given a tour by Julia Perkins, who has been organizing with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida for the last ten years.

For more information, visit their website at www.ciw-online.org

JULIA PERKINS: The centerpiece of the museum is the box truck that you see behind me. It’s a replica of a produce truck that was used in a case that was prosecuted in 2008 in the federal court system. The bosses of workers who were picking tomatoes held them in a truck like this. They were locked in overnight to make sure that they’d be available to pick tomatoes the next day. Those workers had been beaten, chained, physically restrained by tying them to poles, by their bosses. They owed their bosses money for things like rent to sleep on the floors of trucks, money to—$5 every time they wanted to bathe after working for a long day in the fields, which was just washing off with a garden hose in the backyard, for food that the family would provide for them, because they didn’t have any money to buy their own food. So they weren’t paid. They were treated terribly. And that case went through the federal court system in 2007, 2008.

But that’s not even the last one. There are currently cases under investigation and the brand new case, that just came to light, with the unsealing of an indictment about two weeks ago, in which Haitian workers had been brought over on H2 agricultural worker visas, and where their documents were seized. The women workers were abused. No one was paid for the work that they were doing. And that’s as recent as a few weeks ago. So these are things that are happening now. This is not history. It’s living history. It’s abuses that are current and happening in the Florida agricultural industry today.

The shirt that you see here is a shirt that was worn by a young farm worker who, in 1996, was beaten bloody by his boss for just wanting to stop and drink water. At that time, it was commonplace for violence to exist in the fields. There were four or five reported cases every year. But in this particular one, the young worker went to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization that had really just started to come together of farm workers in the community. And they, in turn, marched to the home of that boss who had beaten him, saying, "To beat one of us is to beat all of us."

The Coalition has also fought back against the sub-poverty wages that have been stagnant since 1978. The bucket you see here, for example, that weighs thirty-two pounds when it’s full of tomatoes, is here for people to try to lift and with thirty-two pounds of rice in it right now. But for every bucket that a worker picks, they receive 40 to 45 cents, the same rate paid in 1978. That means that to make $50 a day, a worker has to pick two tons of tomatoes; to make the equivalent of minimum wage, two-and-a-half tons.

The agricultural industry is complex, and it’s built complex for a reason. Workers are working for large producers of tomatoes but are recruited by crew leaders, who serve as the middle men. But in the end, the large buyers of tomatoes are really forcing the wages to remain low by demanding volume, volume of tomatoes at the lowest possible prices. So the only ones who really suffer that are the workers, whose wages remain stagnant because of those conditions. And when we have degraded conditions and sub-poverty wages in an industry, that’s when we see cases of forced labor come to light. We do have a long legacy of forced labor in the agricultural industry. In fact, it’s hard to say that Florida has ever been free from forced laborers since the agricultural industry has existed in Florida, And so it’s this ongoing mentality that workers are less than human beings that really helps to perpetuate the current situation for farm workers, workers who are enslaved and also workers who are free but working under conditions that are like sweatshops in the fields.

About 90 percent of the tomatoes that are consumed on the East Coast during the winter months come from Florida-based companies, come from the area of Immokalee. And so, that means that any—most consumers, at one point or another, have encountered tomatoes picked under sweatshop conditions by farm workers. And so, the workers have decided to try to use the volume-purchasing power of large corporations, large buyers of tomatoes, to change the conditions that they face every day in the fields, and, to date, have agreements with eight corporate buyers: McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Taco Bell’s parent company Yum! Brands, Subway, Burger King, Whole Foods Market, Compass Group, Bon Appétit and Aramark, who have all agreed to pay a little bit more for the tomatoes that they buy to make sure that workers are making a little bit more money, that that money gets passed on to workers in their paychecks, and also to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in implementing a code of conduct that protects workers’ basic human rights and gives them a voice in the workplace, and also sets out zero tolerance for conditions of forced labor in any of those buyers’ supply chain.

With those eight corporate buyers who are participating in these fair food agreements, there are actually many corporations that still have not come to the table, including some of the major supermarket chains, including Ahold, which owns Stop & Shop, Giants, Martin’s, and are all throughout the Northeast; Kroger in the Midwest and South, Southeast; and also Publix. It’s the main supermarket chain in Florida. And we’ve been asking them and Trader Joe’s, as well as most of the other supermarket chains in the United States, to come on board, to be part of improving conditions for farm workers.

“As we mark the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq,” President Barack Obama said this week, “a grateful America must pay tribute to all who served there.” He should have added “unless you’re gay,” because, despite his rhetoric, weeks earlier the commander in chief fired one of those Iraq vets: Lt. Dan Choi.
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Wikileaks.org has done it again, publishing thousands of classified documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The website provides a secure platform for whistle-blowers to deliver documents, videos and other electronic media while maintaining anonymity. Last March it released a video shot from a U.S. military helicopter over Baghdad, exposing the Army’s indiscriminate killing of at least 12 people, two of whom worked for the Reuters news agency. This week, WikiLeaks, along with three mainstream media partners—The New York Times, The Guardian of London and Der Spiegel in Germany—released 91,000 classified reports from the United States military in Afghanistan. The reports, mostly written by soldiers on the ground immediately after military actions, represent a true diary of the war from 2004 to 2009, detailing everything from the killing of civilians, including children, to the growing strength of the Taliban insurgency, to Pakistan’s support for the Taliban.

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Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman appears live from Las Vegas on CNN’s John King, USA, on Thursday, July 22nd at 7pm Eastern Time.

Indian troops and police have killed fifteen people in Kashmir since June, sparking widespread protests. The Indian government has imposed a strict military curfew in the area as well as a media gag order on local journalists. The international community has remained silent on the human rights abuses in Kashmir.

Watch Part I of this conversation here

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Anjali Kamat, and we’re bringing you today part two of our discussion about the conflict in Kashmir. Anjali?

ANJALI KAMAT: Well, yesterday there was a protest outside the United Nations organized by a group of Kashmirian solidarity activists here in New York.

MOHAMMAD JUNAID: My name is Mohammad Junaid, and we are organizing this protest here today against the continued oppression of Kashmiri people by the Indian state and the military governance that has been imposed on that region. And we are here to petition the United Nations, which has so far been silent on the issue, and although they have said that they are aware of what is happening there, but they have kept silent. So far, twenty people have been killed in Kashmir—young boys, teenagers. Even one of them was nine years old. And for no reason but for expressing this end.


SHUBH MATHUR: My name is Shubh Mathur, and there are terrible things happening. One thing that I think the world needs to understand is this is not a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. What we’re seeing here is a popular uprising under Indian rule, and it’s—against Indian rule, and it’s being crushed by the military. That’s what those pictures are. There are teenage boys being killed. There are people under lockdown, tanks in the city streets. And this is not about—it’s not even remotely about two equal powers facing off. It’s an unarmed population facing a very well-armed state.


MADHUR RAI: My name is Madhur Rai. This is an opportunity for President Obama perhaps to change tack and not to work on the South Asian region only through the Indian state. Something has to be done in terms of rescuing the way the United States thinks about that region, rescuing Kashmir from sort of, you know, the Indian perspective of Kashmir. The Indian government’s stance has been that this is an internal matter, that the problem in Kashmir is an internal matter, and it will not sort of consider sort of any kind of interference from the outside world. It cannot be an internal matter.

ANJALI KAMAT: Some voices from a protest on Kashmir outside the United Nations Tuesday.

Well, for more, we’re joined here—we continue our conversation with Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, the author of Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love and War in Kashmir.

Basharat, say a little bit more about what you think the international community should be doing. They’ve been largely silent on the abuses in Kashmir, both the spike in abuses that’s taken place in the past month, but also over many decades.

BASHARAT PEER: That’s—I agree with you completely, but I think there’s two things that the international community can and definitely must do, is to raise the question of human rights abuses in Kashmir, to talk about the presence of these laws, which essentially, you know, equip soldiers to kill civilians and get away with it, to have an idea of justice there so that, you know, people get a sense of justice and that this excessive militarization is put an end to. And another factor the international community should definitely raise, and it does raise that, is the question of Pakistani support to Islamist groups which operate in Kashmir. I mean, that violence has lessened, but—and the United States and UK have been putting pressure on Pakistan to withdraw their support to these groups. I think that should definitely be done more, but—and so shall be the question of human rights abuses in Kashmir be taken up seriously, because it’s not just only affecting things in Kashmir, but it’s also these images of rights abuses in Kashmir become the images that various jihadist groups use for recruiting younger people to militancy, which poses a danger not only to Kashmir but to anyone around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Islamabad rejecting Pakistan’s request to mediate in the Kashmir conflict?

BASHARAT PEER: I think that’s a story that’s been going on for the last twenty years. Pakistan—India keeps on insisting that it’s an internal matter and will not involved outside powers, and Pakistan pushes for internationalizing the question of Kashmir.

AMY GOODMAN: How was Kashmir, India, Pakistan—how did they first become countries, India and Pakistan, and where did Kashmir fit into that?

BASHARAT PEER: There was only India, and the British were ruling it. And within, there was a part of the British— you know, India that British ruled that was directly ruled, that’s called British India, and then there were these various princely states ruled by maharajas, but that finally paid obeisance to the British. And when India was partitioned and the state of Pakistan was created and the British left in 1947, most of these princely states had a choice: to either go with India or Pakistan. It was largely done on a religious basis. If you were a Muslim-majority princely state or a place you would go to—Muslim majority would go to Pakistan, Hindu majority would go to India. But Kashmir was a peculiar situation. It was a Muslim-majority princely state ruled by a Hindu king. And he was—he bought time from both sides before he could make the decision. And Indians were working on him, Pakistanis were working on him, both trying to get Kashmir, while there was a—the leadership in Kashmir was more, you know, inclined towards independence, but the main leader was friendly with India. At this time, in October 1947, two months after, you know, Indian and—formation of Pakistan and Indian independence, there was tribal raiders from Pakistan who came in and tried to wrest control of—to get Kashmir with Pakistan through force. And at that point, the maharaja of Kashmir signed a treaty with India, and Indian forces came in, and like, that was how Kashmir got divided into two parts, you know, who took over how much became the two parts of Kashmir. Like, the area that Indian forces could control at that time has become the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir; the rest of it is with Pakistan, and it’s the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. And between these two runs this like mountainous border, which is also now one of the most militarized borders, called Line of Control. And this—on the Indian side, this treaty of accession that the maharaja signed, it basically gave Kashmir very, very wide autonomy, and India just controlled like difference in foreign affairs and telecommunications. But sadly, that autonomy was eroded over the years, and, you know, popular leader were arrested and jailed, and sort of rubberstamp puppet governments installed.

AMY GOODMAN: And is there conflict on the Kashmir—on the Pakistani side of Kashmir?

BASHARAT PEER: There’s not much conflict on the Pakistani side, but there’s not much freedom either. It’s really run under the writ of Pakistani military and the federal government. They don’t really have an autonomous government, or like they don’t really have much freedom to choose their own path.

ANJALI KAMAT: And what do the people of Kashmir want? They’re always forced to choose between loyalties to India or Pakistan. But as a Kashmiri, as someone who grew up there, what’s your sense of the popular sentiment?

BASHARAT PEER: I think the people of Kashmir, more than anything, want to be left alone by India—both by India and Pakistan. I mean, if there’s one line that’s true about Kashmir, that’s it. They just want to be left alone by both countries and, you know, be able to take charge of their destinies for once. It’s always bracketed between these two countries and a territorial dispute. But there are people who have urgency, who have desires, who have political dreams, and they just want to, like, you know, be able to take political control of their own place.

AMY GOODMAN: Be independent? Be an independent nation?

BASHARAT PEER: That’s always the slogan, an independent nation. But freedom can take many forms. A lot of people in Kashmir are not even thinking about broad, genuine autonomy, but the desire is that of independence.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the conflict in Kashmir compare to the conflict in Punjab?

BASHARAT PEER: Punjab was a, I mean, different story. It’s just different political histories. Also, Punjab didn’t really have this international dimension of like one part of Punjab being under Pakistan and the two countries being legally involved. I mean, that was an internal politics story led by various failures of the state. But in Kashmir there are international ramifications, and the area is like—you know, on the books, it’s a disputed territory.

ANJALI KAMAT: To come back to the current situation in Kashmir, if you can talk a little bit about the gag order that’s been imposed on local media. There’s also reports that India is trying to control Facebook users in Kashmir. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happening in this sense?

BASHARAT PEER: Well, what happened was that the publication of all newspapers in Kashmir—and there are many—it’s a very vigorous, if low-budget, press and a lot of independent papers—they were stopped. They were not allowed to publish or to go to press. And most journalists weren’t, even Kashmiri journalists weren’t, allowed to go and report on what was happening around them, because it was a way to manage the—what comes out of the protests or what was happening around you.

Two very senior journalists were attacked and beaten by the Indian security forces. One was Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times, who’s their South Asia correspondent, and another was Riaz Masroor of the BBC. And at another moment, a point when there was a funeral that was attacked by the forces in Srinagar, the main city, there was a group of photojournalists who were capturing these images of this body lying and this father, you know, trying to save his son from—son’s body from being kicked by the soldiers. And they captured those moments, but most of those photojournalists were attacked, and I think around twelve were badly beaten.

So there was very intense pressure on the local media, but they continued to get some of the stuff out online, like this particular incident of this attack on a funeral. A local Kashmiri magazine called Kashmire Live actually ran a very powerful photo essay on their website, which is [kashmirlive.com], with the firsthand account of the photographer of what he witnessed and how the event unfolded. So they have been finding ways around it, but the pressure is high to sort of tone down the criticism of the government or not to publish things.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s a piece in the New York Times today called "Water Dispute Increases India-Pakistan Tension." And it says, "In this high Himalayan valley on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, the latest battle line between India and Pakistan has been drawn." And it says, "This time it is not the ground underfoot [...] but the water hurtling from mountain glaciers to parched farmers’ fields in Pakistan’s agricultural heartland. Indian workers here are racing to build an expensive hydroelectric dam in a remote valley near here, one of several India plans to build over the next decade to feed its rapidly growing but power-starved economy." And this piece comes out of Bandipore.

BASHARAT PEER: Yeah, this is—this is not so much on the minds of the general populace, but it is one of the questions that has been getting increasing attention as the resources are drying up. And the rivers that go to Pakistan, you know, do run from the Himalayas, and one of the main rivers, the Jhelum, it goes from Kashmir into Pakistan. And there is a lot of this construction, which also has very strong adverse ecological effects on Kashmir, but this building of these dams and this construction goes on. But this is a fight that has continued for a while. At the moment, it’s really the series of clampdowns in Kashmir and the abuse of civil liberties that has been—and the resultant sort of breakdown in India-Pakistan peace process, which has not really gone anywhere since it stopped in 2008 after the bomb attacks on Bombay. So I think those are things which are foremost on the minds in South Asia at the moment. The water crisis is aside like—which is very important, but it’s not the top priority at the moment.

ANJALI KAMAT: India likes to call itself the world’s largest democracy. It prides itself on its free press. How is Kashmir talked about in the rest of India? How does the Indian media cover Kashmir? You mentioned there’s more than half-a-million Indian troops in Kashmir; it’s 700,000 troops in Kashmir. Tell us what the ratio is of how many soldiers to each civilian. And is there an anti-occupation movement in India?

BASHARAT PEER: You don’t really have that kind of a movement in India. I mean, there are individuals, like intellectuals, some writers or just honest journalists, and it’s a number you can count on your fingers—it’s a very small number—but who do advocate, you know, that India should deal with Kashmir not just through force, but as a proper democracy, and listen to people, consider their political and democratic rights. But unfortunately, Kashmir has become this—it has become like the litmus test of jingoism when it comes to India. And most people take the sort of—the argument of the state and that it has to be held onto, these are just Muslims creating trouble, and Kashmir is the jewel in the crown. It’s also looked at through this strange lens of this is the paradise. It’s a beautiful place. It’s almost like depopulating that place and just thinking of the beautiful mountains and the lake that you need to control.

AMY GOODMAN: How does Kashmir fit into the overall so-called war on terror?

BASHARAT PEER: I think one of the ways that Kashmir has been talked a lot, and especially in the United States in the last few years, is that United States needs more cooperation from Pakistan in the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan. And the argument Pakistan is making is that there’s a theory of insecurity, they feel, on the Indian border and also with the growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. India is involved in a lot of developmental projects, road building, in Afghanistan. And Pakistanis have been making the argument that we are being sandwiched between this Indian presence in Afghanistan and the massive armies they have on the borders, and that to be able to devote more attention to our Afghan border and in the fight against the Taliban, we need to be, you know, secure with the Indian border. It’s a claim that has been disputed by many, but that’s an argument that to be able to help Pakistan fight the Afghanistan fight, Kashmir should be resolved so that they can move troops away from the Indian border and devote more energies to the Afghan sector.

ANJALI KAMAT: And what are the militant groups that are still operating in Kashmir? Everyone talks about Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. What are the threats posed by these groups? Who are they funded by? You talked about how the continuing occupation provides fodder for jihadi recruitment. Explain this.

BASHARAT PEER: So, in a sense, there’s like only one major group. That is, Lashkar-e-Taiba. It’s the Lahore-based group which was supposedly behind the attacks on Bombay. Most of its—

ANJALI KAMAT: Lahore, Pakistan.

BASHARAT PEER: Lahore, Pakistan. Most of its recruits come from the like poorest of the districts of the Punjab province in Pakistan. And the rallying cry—Lashkar came into being talking about Kashmir, talking about Kashmir as its main fight. But it doesn’t—its members, very, very few of its members, would be from Kashmir. And there is a Kashmiri group, which is called Hizbul Mujahideen, which is led by a man from Kashmir and who is now based in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir, but that’s—there’s not much left of that group. It has a very small presence now and maybe just works with Lashkar in terms of logistics in operations. But really the main group that has the ability to destabilize anything in South Asia is Lashkar, and some of the sort of people in the strategic studies circles are describing it as the neo-al-Qaeda. And for them, they are slightly getting a little involved in Afghanistan now, there have been reports, but the main thrust has been Kashmir, and it remains a Kashmir-focused group. So the threat remains. And even its head, the chief of the Lashkar, has repeatedly—you know, he would give talks and talk about Kashmir and say, "As long as there is Indian military in Kashmir and as long as civilians are killed in Kashmir, we will continue to fight."

ANJALI KAMAT: Do they have a lot of support inside Kashmir?

BASHARAT PEER: They don’t—it’s not that they don’t have—they do have popular support, but there are times when you see people on the streets raising a slogan in favor of Lashkar, because they’re so angry with something that the Indian military has done, not because, you know, they espouse that worldview. More like a reaction to something that’s very adverse.

ANJALI KAMAT: Basharat, explain why this issue has gotten so little attention in the United States. What power does the Indian lobby have in all of this?

BASHARAT PEER: There are many things that play. The factors—one of the factors is, in the sort of post-9/11 world, there was a very strong degree of Islamophobia, and India was very successful at conveying the sense, because of the involvement of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, that, you know, whatever is happening in Kashmir is because of Islamist terrorism, in which the entire population of Kashmir, which is largely, you know, a group of unorthodox Muslims and has like just very secular demands about political rights, was lumped with jihadist groups who sort of usurped their cause, in some ways. So that was one of the factors.

Then the second is the soft power of India, the idea of rather vibrant democracy, even though vigorous half-democracy, but at least a place that has regular elections. And the fact that, you know, the other examples in the neighborhood weren’t very good helped the Indian lobby.

But then the third and more important and pragmatic point, I guess, is that it’s also—India is also a huge market for American firms, from all kinds of—from technology to, you know, household goods to, now increasingly, the defense industry. I mean, the Indian army is in a phase where it’s talking a lot about organization, and there are purchases that Indian companies—Indian government will be making in billions of dollars for defense equipment. And that has—that has an effect because the people who will be selling them those arms will be major American companies, who are already camped in—been camped in five-star hotels in India and lobbying hard that they should be the ones getting the deals.

AMY GOODMAN: Like who?

BASHARAT PEER: I have heard about Lockheed Martin and Halliburton, but there would be many more. And a very renowned political scientist from India called Sunil Khilnani recently wrote in a major paper in India, saying what we are seeing in India is sort of this emergence of a new—the danger of an emergence of a new military-industrial complex, and whether just—and raised the question that whether just arming and getting more weapons will make India a safe country, instead of like moving forward in terms of giving people political and democratic rights.

ANJALI KAMAT: How much money does India spend on its defense budget, spent in Kashmir?

BASHARAT PEER: I don’t have the exact figures, but the numbers are huge. I mean, it’s much more that’s—than that is spent—if the same money would have been—it runs in billions of dollars, of what Kashmir has cost India so far. I mean, just the money spent on running a counterinsurgency campaign and controlling, maintaining all the forces there, the money is in amounts that you could easily use to alleviate like the most—the absolute poverty that we see in wide, you know, spaces in India. Like, recently there was a report from the UN which said, in the eight Indian states, there are more poor than in twenty-six of the poorest of the African countries. So the money that’s being funneled into getting more high-tech equipment and running and maintaining half-a-million soldiers to control another population could easily be funneled into developmental projects, but that doesn’t seem to be the thinking.

ANJALI KAMAT: But we’re looking at a situation where American arms might be used by Indian soldiers against Kashmiri civilians.

BASHARAT PEER: Not just against Kashmiri civilians. There is a—in various other places in India and throughout central India, there’s a Maoist rebellion going on. The poorest of the poor, whose land and resources have been exploited by various companies for years, have now basically, under the banner of Maoist insurgency, started challenging the Indian state and the companies. So that’s another major, major war going on in the heart of India. And then there’s the northeastern states where troubles have been going on for a long time. It does, unfortunately, look like—that the biggest democracy is at war with its own people.

AMY GOODMAN: Basharat Peer, can you explain why you decided to write this memoir, Curfewed Night?

BASHARAT PEER: I think it’s essentially the urge to tell a story. I was working as a reporter for a newspaper and writing about Kashmir, among other things, traveling across India. But every time I would go to a bookshop, really, I would read books from all parts of the world about conflicts, about people fighting political battles. And there was hardly—there were many books on Kashmir which were written by Indians, by Pakistanis, by British journalists. And there was so much that, you know, my generation remembered, even before we became journalists. We had seen a lot. And those stories seemed to be nowhere. And what Kashmir had gone through was never told through our eyes. So there was this intense longing. When somebody asked me a question, "What’s Kashmir like?" there’s hundreds of images and stories that came to the mind. You couldn’t really explain it. And then one day I just gave up my job and returned to Kashmir and thought, "I’ll do this."

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we thank you for doing it.

BASHARAT PEER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And thank you for sharing your life with us and your homeland. Curfewed Night is the name of the book, One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love and War in His Homeland. Thank you so much.

BASHARAT PEER: Thank you for having me.

Getting out of the red is the new black. Deficit hawks have swooped down on the U.S. budget. This week, they attacked unemployment benefits.

Ultimately, they are going after Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, the venerable programs once considered untouchable “third rails” of U.S. politics. These have been replaced by a new third rail, the defense budget. To really deal with annual deficits and a surging national debt, we are going to need to cut military spending.

We need some deficit doves.

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Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman appears on CNN’s John King, USA, Monday, July 19th.

The attacks on Social Security have steadily intensified in the past few months. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently called for a higher retirement age and House Minority leader John Boehner suggested raising the retirement age to seventy. Meanwhile, President Obama’s bipartisan eighteen-member commission dealing with the nation’s public debt is due to come out with a report in November that is expected to recommend cuts to Social Security. We speak with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This is Part II of the conversation. Watch Part I Here

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Dean Baker, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The big buzz is privatizing Social Security, that Social Security is what’s breaking us, it’s not affordable.

Dean Baker, I’d like to ask you what I asked you during the broadcast, that it’s not affordable. Explain your response to this.

DEAN BAKER: Well, it’s really absurd on the face of it. I mean, the program has a separate stream of financing. We all pay a Social Security tax when we work, 6.2 percent of our wages, and employers contribute 6.2 percent on behalf of workers. And that actually has been running a surplus. We’ve been paying more into the program than benefits have been paid out. This was a design that was put in place by the '83 Greenspan Commission. They raised taxes. They also raised the retirement age. It is going up to sixty-seven, now sixty-six. And the result of that is that there's been this huge surplus run, over two-and-a-half trillion, over the last roughly twenty-five years. And the program is supposed to continue to run a surplus for a bit more than a decade, at which point we’re supposed start drawing down on the money in the trust fund, the money that we’ve accumulated. So this idea that somehow we can’t afford this, we’ve actually been paying more than was need for benefits, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, the program, as it currently stands, could pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2039 with no changes whatsoever.

Now, when you go further out—2049, '59, ’69—at some point you are going to be facing shortfalls. The main issue there is people are living longer. And at some point, you're either going to have to increase what you pay in, some source of revenue—you could raise the cap, there’s different ways you could do that—or some cut in benefits or raise the retirement age. But this is well into the future. So the idea that, you know, five years, ten years, fifteen years out, that we’re facing some crisis, that’s just simply not true. And everyone who’s familiar with the situation knows that.

AMY GOODMAN: Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has warned that entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare will have to face cuts. This is what he told the House Budget Committee last month.

BEN BERNANKE: The type of programs are not self-funded. They’re unfunded liabilities to a significant extent at this point. They are the biggest single component of spending, going forward. Now, there are various ways to address this. You can restructure entitlement programs. You can cut other things. But at some point, you need to address the overall budgetary situation. If you don’t, you’ll get a picture like this one, where interest rates are rising, interest payments are rising, because the debt outstanding is growing exponentially, and at that point, things will come apart. A famous economist once said, anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. And this will stop, but it might stop in a very unpleasant way in terms of sharp cuts, a financial crisis, high interest rates that stop growth, continued borrowing from abroad. So, clearly we need to get control of this over the medium term, and we’re certainly going to have to look at entitlements, because that’s a very big part of the obligations of the federal government, going forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Economist Dean Baker, your response?

DEAN BAKER: Well, this isn’t the first time Mr. Bernanke has misled Congress on something very important. You recall, he was a big factor in pushing for the TARP and fundamentally misrepresented the situation in financial markets to get Congress to approve it. But he’s done the exact same thing here again. He uses the term "entitlements" a lot. People here in Washington do that. They know better. Again, the story with Social Security, we’re all looking at the same numbers. Ben Bernanke would not, if he had him here, tell you anything other than what I just told you, that the Congressional Budget Office says the program could pay all benefits through the year 2039 with no changes whatsoever. Relatively minor changes would keep it fully solvent decades more into the future. The bigger problem is Medicare and Medicaid. But again, Mr. Bernanke knows full well, it’s not that those programs are out of control; it’s that our healthcare costs are out of control. So the real problem is that we have to fix our healthcare system. We pay more than twice as much for our healthcare per person as people do in Germany, in Italy, France, Canada, whatever country you choose to pick. If our per-person healthcare costs were the same as what they are in those countries, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses for the indefinite future, rather than deficits. The problem is that people like Mr. Bernanke don’t want us to challenge the insurance industry, the highly paid medical specialists, the pharmaceutical companies. Instead, they’re saying cut Medicare, Medicaid for the elderly. So it’s just really a dishonest story. The issue here is healthcare. That’s what we should be talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Dean Baker, what did the so-called landmark healthcare legislation do?

DEAN BAKER: It extended coverage to a lot of people that wouldn’t have had it otherwise. So, in that sense, I think it was a very good thing. It also established community rating, so that people who get sick and lose their job could still hope to get covered, because otherwise typically people, when they lose their job, no one is going to cover them if they have a serious health condition. So, in that sense, I think it was a big step forward. But in terms of covering—controlling cost, it’s really hard to see that accomplish much. We have to go back to the drawing board. And what’s really pernicious is you have all these people running around Washington saying, "Oh, we tried that. We didn’t get anywhere, so now we have to cut Social Security, we have to cut Medicare." That’s not acceptable.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve just put out a report on Social Security. You look at the impact of the three common proposals for cutting Social Security and the impact they’ll have on retirees. Tell us.

DEAN BAKER: Yeah, well, we looked at three things that are often suggested: one, raising the retirement age—and this is an accelerated increase, because, as I said, it’s already scheduled to go up to sixty-seven for workers who hit age sixty-two after 2022, so it is already going up, but they propose to accelerate that and push it up to seventy; secondly, a change in the benefit formula so that workers will be getting less who retire, say, three, five, ten years out, than they otherwise would have; and the third one is a change in the annual cost of living adjustment. Currently it’s tied to the Consumer Price Index; there are proposals actively being debated that would reduce that by about three- or four-tenths of a percentage point a year. Not too long ago, they were talking about doing it by one percent a year.

Now, all of these would lead to substantial cuts in benefits, and the point we make in this report is not just that they cut benefits, but it’s a very large cut in retirement income. The big issue here is that most middle-class workers have taken a very big hit to their retirement income as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble. For most middle-income workers, most of their wealth was the equity in their home, which in many cases got wiped out with the plunge in house prices. In addition, they lost money in their 401(k)s, as well, if they had any. And remarkably, when people talk about cutting Social Security down here, almost no one seems to have noticed that we had this huge collapse of the housing bubble that’s destroyed much of the wealth of these near retirees who they want to cut benefits for. So if you want to talk about cutting benefits, you know, thirty, forty years out—and we could have that discussion—I still wouldn’t be terribly anxious to do it. But we could see these people. We know that someone who’s fifty-two, fifty-three, and basically has almost nothing, the typical wealth of someone in their—between forty-five and fifty-four is about $80,000, counting the equity in their home. That’s a middle-income household. They’re not going to have much for retirement. We know that. They don’t have many more years in the work force. They’re not going to be able to have huge savings. So when you talk about cutting their Social Security, in many cases, that’s almost one-to-one a cut in their income. If you cut their Social Security five percent, you’re cutting their income five percent. That’s a very big hit.

AMY GOODMAN: Dean Baker, put all of this in the context of the passage last week of what is called the landmark financial regulation bill.

DEAN BAKER: Well, I mean, I guess what I’d say, the regulation bill, again, it had some good aspects, but I think, long and short, the banking industry or the financial industry got off incredibly cheap, because here was—we’re suffering incredibly. I mean, it’s—you know, again, I hang out with people in Washington who are all employed, but, you know, you look around the country, we have an unemployment rate that’s close to ten percent, and what’s more, it’s expected to stay there long into the future. Those people didn’t do anything wrong. You have people who lost their jobs in the construction industry, in the manufacturing industry, retail trades, every sector of the economy. They can’t find other jobs. It’s not that they’re lazy, they’re not willing to work, or they don’t have the skills. It’s we messed up, "we" meaning the people who run economic policy. They’re sitting there unemployed, and the people who made out like bandits from it are those on Wall Street, and what they get with the financial reform is, you know, they can’t do a little of this, they can’t do a little of that, but basically their profits, their bonuses, are going to be largely unaffected. They’re still going to be incredibly wealthy. I suspect most of them are laughing pretty hard right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Wall Street deals, what about the deal with Goldman Sachs, that they would pay—what was it?—$550 million as a fine?

DEAN BAKER: Well, you know, that’s a tough one. You get to some technical issues. You know, suppose the SEC had carried this suit through, they had brought suit against Goldman Sachs, could they have gotten more money? It’s hard to say. You know, if you actually carry these things through, they get fairly complex. You don’t know what judges will rule. You don’t know what—if it went to a jury, I don’t know how the trial would proceed. But in any case, I don’t know what they would have come up with at the end of the day, so I can’t necessarily take issue with the $550 [million], saying it was too small or too large. I wouldn’t say one or the other.

What I would say is the question is, do we really think that this is going to change practices on Wall Street? This particular case was so egregious, I mean, it was almost Goldman Sachs put it up on a billboard: "We’re ripping off our clients." The vast majority of cases where they’re engaged in improper behavior of different types, it’s not so egregious, it’s not so clear cut, there’s not such a clear trail. So I was glad to see them pay what I consider a reasonably, you know, stiff fine. Goldman, you know, they aren’t going to—I don’t think anyone is going to, you know, go hungry because of this. I mean, it’s a company that’s going to make, you know, somewhere in the order of $10 billion a year in profit, their bonus pool somewhere in the order of $22 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they made it back in after-hours trading. They made it back in after-hours trading that night.

DEAN BAKER: Yes. Yeah, so this is not—this is not going to hurt them in a big way. The question is, is it the sort of sanction that’s going to make them think twice about engaging in improper behavior? My guess is that basically what it does is it tells them, you’ve got to be a little more careful; don’t—you know, don’t put up neon signs. You know, cover your rear.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re coming up on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Social Security. Can you talk about why FDR originally established it and what you see, in the next few years under President Obama, will actually happen?

DEAN BAKER: Well, Social Security was started in the context—of course, it was the middle of the Great Depression. At that point, being old meant being poor. You know, if you couldn’t work any longer, the vast majority of people had not put aside significant savings during their working careers. Pensions were held by relatively few people. So the poverty rates among the elderly were well over 40 percent. And to a large extent, if people were able to get by, it was only with the help of their children. And Roosevelt set this up with the idea this was going to provide insurance, this was going to provide security, for both the elderly but also disabled, people who get injured during or hurt during their work, or sick during their working career. And also people who die young, it supports their families.

And it was a remarkably successful program, by almost any reasonable measure. We have poverty rates among the elderly, now it’s about ten percent, basically about the same as for the adult population as a whole. People who are disabled have some protection. Any number of my friends I know or have were assisted by it, because they had a parent die when they were still young, and it helped support them as they were growing up. So it was an enormously successful program.

It’s also incredibly efficient. People don’t appreciate this, but the administrative costs of Social Security are just about a half of one percent of what gets paid out in benefits each year. And if you compare that to the private sector, it’d be twenty, thirty times as much gets eaten up in administrative expenses.

So, it was about providing security for people who are working, in their old age, against illness, against early death. And it’s been a great success that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a different trend under President Obama than under President Bush in terms of what will happen to Social Security? Ultimately, President Bush didn’t succeed in cutting it.

DEAN BAKER: Well, I worry about what will happen under President Obama. You go back to when President Clinton was in the White House, President Clinton proposed cuts to Social Security. He was recently on a panel here at a program put on by the Peterson Foundation, and he just got right up, and he said, "I wanted to cut Social Security, but, you know, they wouldn’t let me." Dick Gephardt, you know, at that time the leader of the Democrats in the House, and he said Dick Armey also opposed it. He goes, "They wouldn’t let me, but I wanted to do it." You know, he just said that in very open terms, which is something we knew back in the '90s, those of us who were fighting against it. But it was just quite striking that this was one of the regrets of his presidency, that he wasn't able to cut Social Security.

And you have a lot of the same people that were in the Clinton administration who are back working with President Obama, and I do worry very much that many of them want to cut Social Security. One of the things that I—you know, I’m not longing for President Bush to be back in the White House, but, you know, there was a relatively unified stand among Democrats against President Bush’s plan to cut Social Security. And that made it more difficult for him to get very far, and of course he never actually introduced a plan. Nothing ever got voted on by Congress. It didn’t come that close to being done. When you have a Democrat in the White House and he says he wants to cut Social Security, or at least people close to him say that, then it becomes much more difficult, because it’s not clear how you organize against that, because certainly you will have Democrats who want to support their president. So, again, I find it very worrisome that—you know, you’re looking at his deficit commission, he appoints his two top appointees, the Republican and Democrat co-chair, who he picked. Both were quite explicit: they want to cut Social Security. So I do think we have to be very worried about cuts to the program under—during the Obama administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Dean Baker, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, thanks very much.

Southern District of New York Judge John G. Koeltl decided today to increase attorney Lynne Stewart’s sentence from 28 months to 10 years. Stewart was found guilty in 2005 of distributing press releases on behalf of her jailed client Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the "Blind Sheikh." Tune in Friday for full coverage on Democracy Now!

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—July 12 marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake here in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people and left much of the country in ruins. Up to 1.8 million people are living in squalid tent cities, with inadequate sanitation, if any, no electricity and little security, or any respite from the intense heat and the worsening rains. Rape, hunger and despair are constant threats to the people stranded in the camps. Six months ago, the world seemed united with commitments to help Haiti recover. Now, half a year later, the rubble remains in place, and misery blankets the camps, layered with heat, drenched by rain.

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