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The Voice of the Silenced: Speaking Truth to Power
Amy Goodman's "The Silenced Majority" arrives at a crucial moment in American history. As corporate media consolidates into fewer hands and prioritizes profit over public interest, this collection of stories gives voice to those typically excluded from mainstream discourse. Named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people, Goodman has built Democracy Now! into what Noam Chomsky calls "a national treasure" and what millions of listeners consider essential daily journalism. The book captures the spirit of resistance movements worldwide-from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, from the halls of power to the streets where ordinary people fight for justice. Through these collected essays, Goodman demonstrates why independent media matters now more than ever: because democracy cannot function when the powerful control the narrative.
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Obama's Wars: The Broken Promises of Hope
When Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008, he positioned himself as the anti-war candidate who would bring troops home and restore America's moral standing. Yet once in office, he expanded the war in Afghanistan, sending 30,000 additional troops into a conflict that had already lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined.
The human cost of this decision was staggering. In Afghanistan, civilian casualties mounted as drone strikes increased. Military commander Stanley McChrystal admitted with shocking candor, "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Meanwhile, U.S. military deaths approached 2,000, with thousands more suffering life-altering injuries both physical and psychological.
Obama's rhetoric of change contrasted sharply with his continuation of Bush-era policies. Despite campaign promises to close Guantanamo Bay and end torture, his administration continued indefinite detention and used the "state secrets" privilege to avoid accountability. The case of Maher Arar exemplifies this hypocrisy-a Canadian citizen seized at JFK Airport, denied legal counsel, and secretly rendered to Syria where he endured ten months of torture in a grave-sized cell. Though Canada investigated, apologized, and paid him $10 million, the U.S. offered no apology and kept him on a terrorist watchlist.
In Iraq, the transfer of prison control to the Iraqi government merely shifted responsibility for continued torture. Rabiha al-Qassab's husband, a 68-year-old former Iraqi general, was held in a secret prison and subjected to horrific torture including rape with a stick and electric shocks. When confronted with these abuses, the U.S. dismissed them as "an Iraqi issue" despite continuing to fund the Iraqi government.
Perhaps most troubling was the administration's treatment of whistleblowers. When WikiLeaks released the "Iraq War Logs"-nearly 400,000 secret Pentagon documents detailing violence, murder, and torture inflicted on Iraqis-the response was to target the messengers rather than address the crimes. One report described U.S. helicopter gunships killing surrendering Iraqi men after being told, "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
What became clear through Obama's first term was that the military-industrial complex remained firmly in control regardless of who occupied the White House. The wars continued, the defense contractors profited, and the promised change remained elusive. As Lt. Col. Daniel Davis wrote after traveling 9,000 miles across Afghanistan and interviewing over 250 people, senior leaders had "an obligation to tell Congress and the American people the unvarnished truth"-a truth that contradicted the rosy assessments being offered to the public.
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The Forgotten Casualties: America's Veterans
"Every day in this country, 18 veterans are committing suicide. Seventeen percent of individuals in combat in Afghanistan are on psychotropic medication."
These sobering statistics, shared by Iraq Veterans Against the War organizer Aaron Hughes, reveal the hidden cost of America's longest wars. While the nation rallied around supporting troops with magnetic ribbons and patriotic displays, the actual care for returning veterans told a different story.
When Army Reserve Specialist Chancellor Keesling committed suicide in Iraq in 2009, his parents Jannett and Gregg discovered they wouldn't receive a presidential condolence letter due to longstanding policy excluding suicide deaths. Chancellor had joined the military out of high school despite his parents' concerns. After a troubled first tour where he was briefly on suicide watch, he declined reenlistment but was deployed again with the Reserves, who lacked his mental health records.
The Pentagon acknowledged a mounting suicide crisis, with numbers climbing from under 100 in 2005 to nearly 200 in 2008. At Dover Air Force Base, a master sergeant told the Keeslings, "I'm greeting a suicide body almost every day." This epidemic reflected a military healthcare system ill-equipped to handle the psychological wounds of war.
The story of Mary Kirkland's son Derrick illustrates this failure. After his second Iraq deployment, Derrick hanged himself in 2010 following inadequate mental health care at Fort Lewis. At a protest during NATO's Chicago summit, veterans marched to return their medals in disgust. As taps played, they folded an American flag from NATO operations and handed it to Kirkland, whose grief embodied the human cost of these conflicts.
The military's approach to mental health prioritized duty performance over soldier welfare. At Joint Base Lewis-McChord-described by Stars and Stripes as "the most troubled base in the military"-285 PTSD diagnoses were mysteriously reversed, possibly to avoid paying medical benefits. Kevin Baker, a former staff sergeant who refused deployment after being denied PTSD treatment, argued the military must be held responsible for these tragedies, comparing the denial of psychological help to refusing medical treatment for physical wounds.
The Obama administration finally reversed the policy denying presidential condolence letters to families of soldiers who committed suicide in 2011, acknowledging the epidemic. Yet this policy change didn't apply retroactively, meaning families like the Keeslings still received no official recognition of their loss.
The treatment of LGBTQ service members further demonstrated the military's callousness toward its own. Lt. Dan Choi, an Iraq War veteran, West Point graduate, and Arabic linguist, was discharged under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" after publicly declaring "I am gay" on television. Choi faced losing his benefits despite his service, writing in an open letter to Obama that the policy "forces American soldiers to deceive and lie about their sexual orientation." Though Obama had promised to end the policy, he provided no timeline while continuing to discharge valuable personnel during wartime.
These stories reveal the profound disconnect between America's rhetoric about supporting troops and the reality of how veterans were treated. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a generation of wounded warriors whose needs were subordinated to budget concerns and political expediency.
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The War on the Public Treasury: Guns Over Butter
While politicians claimed America couldn't afford social programs, the military budget remained the untouchable "third rail" of U.S. politics. Obama's war budget for fiscal year 2011 included $548.9 billion in base funding, plus $33 billion in supplemental funding and $159.3 billion for "overseas contingency operations." Beyond this public war budget lay a secret "black budget" of approximately $75 billion for clandestine operations.
The Washington Post revealed that over 2,000 for-profit firms and 850,000 people with top-secret clearance worked in this largely privatized security enterprise with minimal oversight. Meanwhile, the U.S. spent approximately $2 billion weekly in Afghanistan alone-about $104 billion annually-while 45 states faced combined budget shortfalls of $125 billion.
The human cost of these priorities became clear during budget battles across Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Idaho. As politicians targeted public employees, education, and social services for cuts, the enormous costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars remained largely absent from national debt debates. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated the total cost of these wars would exceed $5 trillion, yet politicians instead targeted Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security for cuts.
The corruption within this system was exemplified by whistleblower Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse's case against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Greenhouse was demoted after challenging a no-bid $7 billion contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR for the "Restore Iraqi Oil" project before the Iraq invasion. The contract, approved by Donald Rumsfeld's office, was particularly egregious as it was "cost-plus," meaning KBR earned more profit the more they charged.
Obama's debt ceiling deal in 2011 further revealed these skewed priorities. The Budget Control Act created a "Super Congress" of twelve members to identify $1.2 trillion in cuts, with mandatory across-the-board reductions if they failed. While the Pentagon appeared protected, the defense industry's influence remained strong through key congressional allies like Armed Services Committee chair Buck McKeon (whose biggest donor was Lockheed Martin) and Randy Forbes (representing Newport News Shipbuilding's district).
The deal was "a historic defeat for progressives," attacking New Deal and Great Society achievements while leaving corporate tax loopholes untouched. The choice to prioritize military spending over domestic needs represented a fundamental failure to address America's most pressing problems.
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Money in Politics: Democracy for Sale
The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision fundamentally transformed American politics by allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections. The consequences became immediately visible in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's recall election, where he outspent his opponent by more than seven to one thanks to unprecedented out-of-state funding.
Walker had stripped public employees of collective bargaining rights-something he hadn't campaigned on-triggering massive protests with tens of thousands occupying the state capitol. Despite gathering over 900,000 signatures for the recall, the movement couldn't overcome Walker's financial advantage, demonstrating how elections could now be bought with help from a few billionaires.
Montana's century-old Corrupt Practices Act, passed by citizen initiative in 1912 to prevent copper mining magnates from controlling elections, was struck down by the same Supreme Court majority. The law had been a response to corruption exemplified by William A. Clark, who famously boasted, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale." Despite Montana's defiance and support from 22 other states arguing that state elections face unique risks from wealthy outside interests, the Court reaffirmed that corporations could make unlimited "independent expenditures."
The decision transcended partisan lines in Montana, with Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer and Republican Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger jointly condemning it. Schweitzer quipped, "Corporations aren't people, and they should not control our government... I'll believe that when Texas executes one."
The 2012 election became the most expensive in U.S. history, potentially exceeding $5 billion, with most money going to TV political advertisements. Following Citizens United, spending not only increased but changed in nature. One analysis of a Pennsylvania congressional primary found over 3,300 political ad spots compared to just "occasional news reports" with little substance.
Though the FCC voted to require stations to transition from paper to online filing of political ad purchases, the files wouldn't be standardized or searchable. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which lobbied against these disclosure rules, faced scandal in Britain for phone hacking and police bribery. While bribing police was illegal, spending billions to influence U.S. elections remained perfectly legal.
The silver lining in this dark cloud was a growing movement for a constitutional amendment specifying that constitutional references to "people" or "persons" do not include corporations. Four states had already supported such an amendment with more ballot initiatives pending. As Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig observed, this issue had the potential to unite Americans across the political spectrum who recognized the danger of allowing our democracy to be sold to the highest bidder.
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Climate Crisis: From Copenhagen to Cancun
As the European Union phased out inefficient incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-saving alternatives, the world prepared for the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to update the Kyoto Protocol. With greenhouse gas emissions accelerating and atmospheric carbon dioxide at 387 ppm (well above the sustainable 350 ppm), the conference represented a critical opportunity to establish binding global action before climate change became irreversible.
The stakes couldn't have been higher-particularly for vulnerable nations like the Maldives, whose fifteen-year-old climate ambassador Mohamed Axam Maumoon asked if industrialized nations would "commit murder, even while we are begging for mercy." In Alaska's Arctic Village, indigenous elder Sarah James described melting permafrost, summer-long fires, and villages that never received their fish.
Despite these urgent pleas, the Copenhagen summit ended in failure. President Obama declared "We will not be legally bound by anything that took place here today" before rushing out. Outside the Bella Center, NGO representatives stripped of their credentials staged a somber protest by shaving their heads, one tearful woman holding an empty sign with just quotation marks because she "didn't know what to say anymore."
The non-binding "Copenhagen Accord" merely acknowledged the need to keep temperature rise below 2C and pledged $100 billion annually by 2020 for developing countries. Climate scientist James Hansen noted the U.S. share should be 27% based on our carbon contribution, but American negotiators showed little interest in accepting responsibility.
This failure was followed by the 2010 Cancun conference, where WikiLeaks cables revealed troubling U.S. diplomatic tactics. Cables showed U.S. officials like Jonathan Pershing offering financial aid to vulnerable nations like the Maldives in exchange for support, while cutting aid to opposing countries like Bolivia and Ecuador. European Commissioner Connie Hedegaard suggested working with small island states as "best allies" given their need for financing, while U.S. officials discussed how to "neutralize" or "marginalize" uncooperative countries.
When questioned, U.S. negotiator Todd Stern denied accusations of bribery while ignoring questions about aid cuts. Bolivia's UN Ambassador Pablo Solon called it plainly: "That is blackmail."
By the 2011 Durban conference, the situation had grown more desperate. Torrential rains killed ten people including seventeen-year-old Qodeni Ximba, crushed by a collapsing wall while sleeping. Seven hundred homes were destroyed by floods after Durban received twice its normal November rainfall. The IPCC and World Meteorological Organization confirmed 2011 as the tenth-warmest year on record, with thirteen of the warmest years occurring in the past fifteen.
Student activist Anjali Appadurai confronted climate negotiators with an Occupy-style "mic check," declaring "You've been negotiating all my life" and demanding "Equity now!" The Durban Platform merely committed countries to reach an agreement by 2015 for emissions reductions beginning no earlier than 2020. Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey called this "a death sentence on Africa," while former Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon described the Kyoto Protocol as now a "zombie agreement."
The United States, historically the world's largest polluter with per capita emissions four times China's and thirteen times India's, remained defiant in its unwillingness to address its fossil fuel addiction. This American intransigence effectively killed Kyoto in Durban, prompting climate activists to decry what they called "climate apartheid."
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Dirty Energy: Nuclear, Fracking, and Oil Disasters
President Obama's announcement of $8 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, with plans to triple existing guarantees to $54.5 billion, faced opposition across the political spectrum. The economics simply didn't work-no private investors would fund nuclear plants because the risks were too great, forcing taxpayers to shoulder the burden.
Energy expert Amory Lovins argued nuclear power "weakens electric reliability and national security" and actually "worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options." The administration was dedicating just one-tenth the nuclear funding to renewable energy, while simultaneously canceling the Yucca Mountain waste storage facility without an alternative plan.
The Fukushima disaster in 2011 demonstrated the catastrophic risks of nuclear power. Radiation levels at the plant spiked to literally off-the-charts levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour-brief exposure would be fatal. Japanese officials suppressed projections of nuclear fallout paths to avoid relocating hundreds of thousands.
Despite this disaster, Obama announced $8 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors at Georgia's Vogtle plant-the first new U.S. nuclear construction since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters. NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko voted against the Vogtle licenses, saying "I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened." Critics noted the financial risks dwarfed Solyndra's, with taxpayers backing loans "15 times larger than the Solyndra loan, and probably 50 times riskier."
Meanwhile, the hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" boom proceeded with minimal regulation. Reports indicated nearly 600 different chemicals were used in fracking, including diesel fuel and known carcinogens. Dr. Theo Colborn, zoologist and expert on chemical pollution, stated that "Every environmental law we wrote to protect public health is ignored." Out of thirty-one states examined, twenty-one had no regulations specific to hydraulic fracturing, and none required companies to report how much toxic fluid remains underground.
The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico revealed the catastrophic risks of offshore drilling. Dean Blanchard, owner of the largest shrimp business in Grand Isle, took journalists by boat to witness the devastation. Like all fishermen, he spent January through April preparing for the May-July harvest season, only to see his livelihood vanish when the Deepwater Horizon exploded.
Meanwhile, BP CEO Tony Hayward, who earned $4.5 million in 2009, lamented, "I'd like my life back." Fishermen hired for cleanup reported being prohibited from wearing protective masks despite respiratory problems. "They're scared to talk," Blanchard explained, "because BP has threatened them that if they talk to the media, they're going to be fired."
Despite President Obama's claim that "BP will be paying the bill," the 1990 Oil Pollution Act capped additional financial liability at just $75 million-a pittance compared to the economic damage. Senator Robert Menendez introduced the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act to raise the cap to $10 billion, but the legislation failed to pass.
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Race, Racism, and the Myth of Post-Racial America
W.E.B. Du Bois opened his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk declaring "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." A century later, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in his own home despite providing both Harvard ID and driver's license proving his residence. Officer James Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct after Gates questioned his motives, asking "Why? Because I'm a black man in America?"
This incident revealed that despite having elected the first Black president, America remained deeply divided by race. The Trayvon Martin case further exposed this divide. On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida. Despite witness statements, 911 recordings, and outrage that went global, police released Zimmerman claiming self-defense.
The recordings revealed Zimmerman calling Martin "suspicious," muttering racial slurs, and saying "these a--holes always get away" before pursuing him against dispatcher instructions. Witnesses Mary Cutcher and Selma Mora Lamilla heard crying that stopped immediately after the gunshot, contradicting Zimmerman's self-defense claim. Police labeled Martin a "John Doe" despite having his cell phone, tested his corpse for substances but not Zimmerman, and let the shooter leave town. Civil rights leaders called this "a modern-day lynching."
Similar racial bias appeared in the case of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., a 68-year-old African-American Marine veteran and retired corrections officer. On November 19, 2011, Chamberlain accidentally triggered his medical alert pendant. Within two hours, White Plains police broke down his door and shot him dead. The LifeAid system recorded the entire incident, capturing Chamberlain saying "I'm a sixty-eight-year-old man with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me?" and an officer responding with a racial slur.
Despite Chamberlain's niece and sister attempting to intervene, police refused mediation. Body camera footage showed Chamberlain shirtless in boxer shorts with no weapons when police burst in, immediately tasering him without commands. The recording was then shut off, and minutes later, Officer Anthony Carelli shot Chamberlain twice.
The systemic nature of racism extended to voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures pushed voter ID laws that disproportionately restricted voting access for people of color, low-income citizens, and young and elderly voters. The NAACP reported that legislators in 34 states introduced restrictive ID requirements, many modeled on legislation from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose founder admitted "our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
These laws created financial barriers to voting, effectively reinstating poll taxes. Even 86-year-old WWII veteran Darwin Spinks and 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell, who cleaned the state capitol for decades, were denied voting rights under Tennessee's new requirements. The Justice Department blocked South Carolina's voter ID law after data showed minority voters were 20% more likely to lack acceptable ID. With an estimated 5 million voters potentially disenfranchised, the NAACP organized thousands to march on Koch Industries, whose billionaire owners helped fund these voter suppression efforts.
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WikiLeaks and the Crackdown on Dissent
WikiLeaks' release of classified documents fundamentally changed the landscape of journalism and government accountability. The "Collateral Murder" video showed an Apache helicopter gunship killing Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, his driver Saeed Chmagh, and at least eight other civilians in Baghdad. The video revealed soldiers laughing while killing and following strict authorization procedures through their chain of command.
When Chmagh survived the initial attack and civilians in a van attempted to rescue him, the helicopter received permission to fire again, killing the rescuers and seriously injuring two children in the van. Despite the Reuters news agency filing Freedom of Information requests, the military denied access to the video and cleared the soldiers of wrongdoing in its internal investigation.
WikiLeaks followed this with the release of 91,000 classified U.S. military reports from Afghanistan covering 2004-2009. The documents detailed civilian casualties, Taliban's growing strength, and Pakistan's support for the Taliban. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange highlighted how the reports show daily civilian killings, including a "Polish My Lai" where Polish troops killed six people at a wedding party in apparent retaliation for an IED attack.
The Obama administration responded inconsistently, claiming the leak threatened national security while also saying it contained "no broad new revelations." Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, praised the release as the first of similar scale in 39 years.
The government's response to these revelations was to target the messengers rather than address the crimes. Bradley Manning faced a pretrial military hearing that could lead to life imprisonment or death for allegedly causing the largest government secrets leak in U.S. history. Manning was held in harsh solitary confinement that the UN investigated as torture, possibly to pressure him to testify against Assange.
Meanwhile, Assange faced his own legal troubles. Despite being granted bail, he remained imprisoned in London awaiting extradition to Sweden while facing death threats from American commentators and politicians. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel suggested on Fox that "special ops forces" should "illegally shoot" Assange, while Representative Peter King called WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization."
The crackdown on dissent extended beyond WikiLeaks. FBI raids targeted anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago, with agents spending hours searching homes and confiscating computers, phones, and personal documents. Jess Sundin, lead organizer of the 2008 Republican National Convention protest, had her home searched for four hours. The FBI's dragnet included activists supporting changed foreign policies toward Israel-Palestine and Colombia.
These raids occurred just after an Inspector General report revealed illegal FBI surveillance of peaceful groups like Greenpeace and the Thomas Merton Center. This surveillance extended through "Joint Terrorism Task Forces" that labeled legal activism as "domestic terror," as seen when Pennsylvania's Homeland Security monitored anti-fracking groups for showing the documentary Gasland.
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From Arab Spring to Occupy: Global Uprisings for Democracy
The Arab Spring and Occupy movements connected through figures like Asmaa Mahfouz, the 25-year-old Egyptian activist who posted a video calling people to Tahrir Square in January 2011. Nine months later, she was giving teach-ins at Occupy Wall Street. Despite facing arrest by Egypt's military government, Mahfouz expressed solidarity with American protesters, telling them "the power to the people, not for the U.S. bullets or bombs or money."
In Egypt, blogger Kareem Amer, who spent four years in prison for his writing, disappeared after leaving Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution. His blog honored the White Rose Collective, anti-Nazi pamphleteers executed in 1943. Meanwhile, Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who administered the "We are all Khaled Said" Facebook page (named after a young man killed by police), was released after 12 days in detention. His emotional TV interview, where he broke down seeing photos of killed protesters, swelled the crowds in Tahrir Square.
These uprisings spread globally. In Madison, Wisconsin, 80,000 marched against Republican Governor Scott Walker's anti-union legislation, with protesters carrying signs reading "Walker: Mubarak of the Midwest" and Egyptian activists showing solidarity with Wisconsin workers. Similar protests erupted in Ohio against Governor Kasich's anti-union measures.
When 2,000 protesters occupied Wall Street in September 2011, they received far less media coverage than a comparable Tea Party protest would have garnered. The demonstrators, identifying as "the 99 percent," protested Wall Street's unregulated speculation that caused the global financial meltdown. Mayor Bloomberg compared the protests to "riots" in Cairo and Madrid, unwittingly acknowledging the inspiration many protesters drew from the Arab Spring.
Protest organizer David Graeber pointed out the hypocrisy in how financial institutions' debts to each other were renegotiated during the 2008 crash, while debts owed by ordinary people to the wealthy suddenly became "sacred obligations." Meanwhile, Republicans opposed Obama's proposed "millionaire's tax" despite its endorsement by billionaire Warren Buffett.
As Veterans Day 2011 approached during America's longest war, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans increasingly joined the Occupy Wall Street movement. Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former Marine who served two tours in Iraq, was critically injured by police during an Occupy Oakland protest. Video showed Olsen standing calmly with a Veterans for Peace flag bearer when he was hit in the head by a police projectile, suffering a fractured skull.
When police raided Zuccotti Park just after 1 a.m., hundreds of riot police surrounded the area as sanitation workers threw protesters' belongings into dump trucks. Inside the park, 200-300 people locked arms, refusing to leave their two-month encampment. Media access was severely restricted-police buses were positioned to block journalists' view.
Among the debris was a single book marked "OWSL" (Occupy Wall Street Library): Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited. The irony was profound as the 5,000-book People's Library was being destroyed. The book, written in 1958, warned about society's march toward perfect consumerism with elites controlling mass communication. Reports emerged that eighteen city mayors had coordinated their response to Occupy protests with FBI and Homeland Security advice.
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Voices of Hope: The Silenced Majority Speaks
Throughout these essays, Goodman highlights the voices of ordinary people fighting extraordinary battles. From Haiti to Honduras, from Detroit to Durban, people are organizing to reclaim their democracy from corporate and government power.
In Haiti, after the devastating 2010 earthquake killed up to 300,000 people, 1.8 million survivors languished in squalid tent cities with inadequate sanitation, no electricity, and little security. Despite the world's initial commitment to help Haiti recover, rubble remained uncleared while heat, rain, and despair blanketed the camps.
At Camp Corail, built on a treeless gravel expanse near Titanyen (once a body dumping ground during Aristide's first coup), residents like Romain Arius pleaded for the permanent housing they were promised. Shortly after journalists visited, a storm collapsed at least 94 tents, sending hundreds fleeing for shelter.
Haitians questioned where the billions in donations had gone. The Disaster Accountability Project found only six of 197 organizations that solicited earthquake money had publicly available activity reports. Of the $9 billion pledged by wealthy nations, only Brazil, Norway, and Australia had paid in full, while the U.S. pledge of $1.15 billion remained stalled in Congress.
In Honduras, the 2009 military coup against democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya represented the first coup in Central America in a quarter century. Despite the Obama administration's rhetoric about democracy, Secretary Clinton and lobbyist Lanny Davis pushed to legitimize the coup government despite the State Department's own WikiLeaked cable confirming the coup's illegality.
The coup occurred as Zelaya was gaining popular support for policies like increasing the minimum wage 60%, converting the U.S. Palmerola air base to civilian use, distributing land to peasant farmers, and joining ALBA to diminish U.S. economic domination.
When Zelaya finally returned to Honduras twenty-three months after his forced exile, he was greeted by tens of thousands of cheering supporters waving the black-and-red flags of the FNRP resistance movement he now led. His first stop was a memorial for 19-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, killed when the military opened fire on crowds awaiting Zelaya's first attempted return one week after the coup.
These stories of resistance and hope represent the true heart of "The Silenced Majority." Through Goodman's journalism, we hear from those fighting for justice against seemingly insurmountable odds-the voices that corporate media often silences but that represent the true majority of humanity. As anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
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