Amy Goodman was in Kansas City last night for a CPB/PBS meeting at the Hyatt Regency, and broadcast Democracy Now! from Kansas City this morning. Right before heading to the airport, she made a quick visit to Occupied Kansas City in Penn Valley Park, and I had the chance to talk with her for a few minutes.
Tom Klammer: Amy Goodman, welcome back to Kansas City.
Amy Goodman: Oh, it’s really great to be here, and to see this encampment is very interesting, here at Occupy KC. I’ve just come from New York, and the Occupy Movement is going strong, thousands of people have been a part of it over the last month - it turned one this week - that’s one month old. The people who stay there, the community that’s been built with the media area, the library, the place where people sleep, the food kitchen, it’s a real community right there next to Wall Street. And there are the thousands upon thousands, sometimes tens of thousands who march to show support, like the union rally last week with all the local union leaders leading tens of thousands of people from Foley Square which is the court area to the Occupy Wall Street encampment. This weekend thousands marched up to Times Square to express their dissent about what’s happening in this country and were met by a pretty steady police force. Some police are sympathetic. Others can be quite brutal. Actually there’s one who’s been brought up on police charges for pepper spraying a group of young women. His name is Anthony Bologna, and we’ve been following that case, he’s being internally investigated… But to see this, what’s important here, as I look at the sign that says “The revolution will not be televised - occupyKC.com,” in fact Democracy Now is a daily grass roots global un-embedded international investigative news hour that airs on KKFI, but also on close to a thousand stations, many of them public television stations, so perhaps the revolution will be televised.
TK: Well, we’ll see, and it least it will be televised on dish networks on Democracy Now!
A couple of Sundays ago we had in the neighborhood of 600 people participating, a really good cross section of age, and viewpoints, and primary issues and another 400 or so last Saturday.
AG: They start here?
TK: Yes.
AG: And do they march, or do they stay here?
TK: Well, two Sundays ago they marched to the Country Club Plaza, about 2 miles south of here, and back, and last Saturday they marched east from here, about 300, maybe 400, …
AG: And where is the food coming from?
TK: Donations, as I understand it...
Kansas City is not the vanguard for huge activism, but five and six hundred is pretty good for Kansas City. Do you have anything to say to the nearly 2 million in the region who haven’t marched yet?
AG: Well, I’m a journalist who covers these kinds of movements and I do see that these movements make an enormous difference, after all, this past weekend the monument of Dr. Martin Luther King was dedicated in Washington DC, and Dr. Martin Luther King represents those movements - I think that’s what’s so significant - it makes a huge difference. And we need a media that covers these grassroots movements, because change doesn‘t just happen. It happens because people get together and they determine what they think needs to be changed, and then they battle it out over solutions, they debate and discuss the critical issues of the day. That’s what democracy is, and to go from one city to another in this country and see this happening is quite a remarkable phenomenon, development. You never know when that moment will come, but when it does, as it clearly has in these last weeks, it is something to be documented, and to record, and we will see what happens and where this goes from here.
http://www.occupykc.com/
http://www.democracynow.org/
http://www.kkfi.org/
http://www.tellsomebody.us/
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