“Who Is the DNC Loyal To?”: Dahr Jamail Questions DNC Veto of Primary Climate Debate

On so many levels this is an excellent and deeply important interview with Dahr Jamail —

1. Dahr Jamail has long been a strong and prolific voice and award winning independent investigative journalist, first reporting for years as an unembedded reporter from the Middle East, and now for years reporting about the climate and ecological crises. If we had been exposed to the work of Dahr Jamail over all these years, our whole framework as Americans regarding our understanding of the Middle East and endless war AND our understanding of human caused climate disruption would be vastly different because we would have been empowered by the truth. It is vital that we inform ourselves about the most dangerous threat to our nation and world. Many think it’s Trump. It is not.

2. We Americans have not been exposed to the excellence of those independent investigative journalists such as Dahr Jamail and Amy Goodman and so many others. These are voices that we do NOT hear in the mainstream corporate media exactly because they report the facts and the truth of the larger pictures and issues that are most critical for us to know and understand — AND because if we had this information the neoliberal multinational free market capitalist system that has long been destroying our country and the planet would be taken down and replaced with systems which value life rather than reward greed. I have been listening to both independent media such as Democracy Now! and corporate media such as NPR and CNN for many, many years now. This interview highlights the difference in reporting and our critical need to seek independent rather than corporate funded media for our information.

3. This interview also highlights yet one more time why I am relentless in exposing the fossil fuel lobby’s influences over the DNC. The climate crisis, the ecological crisis, the immigration crisis, the crisis of endless war, the crisis of extreme poverty and the vast redistribution of wealth upwards, and other crises are all interconnected AND have absolutely been perpetrated by the influences of huge financial interests — from Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial complex, etc. — for decades and within BOTH major political parties and our corporate funded mainstream media. We Americans need to understand that if there is to be any chance of a livable planet, then we must free ourselves, our government and media, our belief systems and values, our stories that we live by AND transform all of this into that which cherishes rather than destroys life.

The eyes of the children are watching. And the day will come where we’re all held responsible for what we are doing or not doing. Of course, that’s already happening. Just listen to Greta Thunberg, inform ourselves about the lawsuit of Juliana vs the United States, and become aware of — and support! — all of the children who are rising up globally demanding that we adults act NOW to stand in protection of them and their futures. The eyes of the children are watching. — Molly

** Please consider sharing this important interview. Please feel free to copy and paste my comments. Thank you. We’re all needed in this greatest struggle of our times and all times.

 

In our extended interview with independent climate journalist Dahr Jamail, he talks about the Democratic National Committee’s decision not to have a debate on the climate crisis, and to bar anyone who participates in an unsanctioned debate from participating in future official Democratic primary debates. Jamail is a staff reporter at Truthout and author of “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with independent climate journalist Dahr Jamail. As Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Louisiana this weekend, cutting power to well over 100,000 people, as we follow this storm into Arkansas and Alabama and other places, still flash flood alerts for millions of people, an even greater climate catastrophe is slamming Asia, where ongoing heavy rain and flooding have killed well over a hundred people, in Nepal, in India, in Bangladesh, monsoon rains displacing 1 million people.

Dahr Jamail is author of the new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. Last year, he won an Izzy Award for his ongoing coverage of human-caused climate change.

If you can talk about the links, Dahr—and I think that’s where our media falls short, well, because they don’t use terms like “climate catastrophe.” They bring you weather reports, “extreme weather,” “severe weather,” they flash across the screen. But when, in the corporate media, have you seen the words “climate catastrophe” or “climate change” or “global warming” flashing as they’re giving us a weather report? What are the links between what happened in Louisiana and the Gulf area with the catastrophe that’s taking place right now in South Asia?

DAHR JAMAIL: Well, you’re so right, Amy, as we simply don’t see the links drawn by the corporate media with what’s happening in front of our faces and the climate crisis that’s driving it. So, if we talk about just using these real-time examples that you just mentioned, with Hurricane Barry, which is causing flooding—it’s caused flooding all across the coast and is now moving inland and dumping more rain on an already-swollen Mississippi River, which is a huge part of the problem of the flooding downstream—well, we’ve known for a long time now—there’s been numerous scientific studies that show that as the atmosphere warms and other impacts from the climate crisis are escalated, then, of course, hurricanes and flooding events are going to escalate, as well. You know, just even recently up in part of Canada, we saw 100- and 500-year floods occurring almost back to back, you know, and that nomenclature used for these types of flooding means, on average, that that intense of a flooding event should only happen once every 100 or 500 or 1,000 years, as the case may be.

So, we’re going to see larger hurricanes. In some places of the world, they’re going to become more frequent. And like this one, much like Hurricane Harvey, that dumped so much rain in Houston just a short number of years ago, they’re slow-moving. They sit there, and they dump enormous amounts of rain, over very, very concentrated amounts of time. And then we see the flooding. We see the Mississippi. We see all these other consequences like all of the fertilizers and pesticides and all of these chemicals used in industrial farming across the Midwest, now those are flushing down the Mississippi, causing dolphin die-offs and increasing amounts of dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

So, all of these, we can trace back to amped-up impacts from climate disruption on what it’s causing in hurricanes, how it’s impacting the monsoons over in Asia, as we’ve talked about. And the result is massive environmental degradation, massive loss of human life and, of course, increasing displacement of people in areas where that’s already a major problem.

Please go here for the full transcript and video: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/16/who_is_the_dnc_loyal_too?fbclid=IwAR3ttqQFJgmohZo7WwSUUQikS9G9xYw7RylE-komsBdZEHLqvxU5EldFFe8.  

Please go here for more from Dahr Jamail: https://www.dahrjamail.net/