noam chomsky

President Obama visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time since his election in 2008 to deliver a major policy speech on comprehensive immigration reform. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and 38 New York state lawmakers have asked to withdraw from Obama’s flagship immigration enforcement program, Secure Communities, which has led to a record number of deportations. We get reaction from Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, and Sunita Patel, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. A march against the U.S.-backed war on drugs drew 20,000 people into the streets of Mexico City on Sunday, calling attention to the country’s gruesome drug war-related violence that has claimed more than 38,000 lives since Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the campaign against drug traffickers and cartels in 2006. We speak with Molly Molloy, an expert on the drug war and U.S.-Mexican border issues, and co-editor of the new book El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin. A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. We speak with Smita Narula of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, co-author of a new report on farmer suicides in India. Speaking at the 25th anniversary celebration of the national media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky analyzes the U.S. response to the popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Democracy Now!, a daily independent newshour.

"In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia," says Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, one of the three newspapers given advanced access to the secret U.S. embassy cables by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. In a national broadcast exclusive interview, we speak with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky about the release of more than 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks. "What this reveals," says Chomsky, "is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership." Democracy Now!, a daily independent newshour.

Actress and writer Najla Said discusses the Arab characters she plays in the new play Prophecy, and why she was careful to ensure that they were two separate individuals with motivation. GRITtv with Laura Flanders brings participatory democracy onto your computer screen and into your living room, bridging the gap between audience and advocates.

On this Memorial Day special, we spend the hour with the world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred books. He spoke recently here in New York addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum. He began by discussing the case of Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. "Democracy Now!" is a daily independent newshour.