FEATURING ALEXII SIGONA – The Washington NFL team after decades of being pressured into changing its racist name this week announced it would be dropping it. The team’s spokespeople in a statement said they would be retiring the name and working on a new one. The announcement came after the shipping company FedEx, which is a major sponsor of the team warned that it would, “terminate its business and public relationships” unless the name was dropped. 

Meanwhile, as statues of confederate leaders around the nation are being toppled and defaced in a new era of racial reckoning, historic figures linked to colonization and the oppression of indigenous people are also being marked for destruction. In California, Mission-era monuments including churches and statues of Father Junipero Serra are being targeted. 

Alexii Sigona, Amah Mutsun Tribal member and PhD student at UC Berkeley.

Tuesday’s primary election results from Alabama, Maine, and Texas are in and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has lost a bid to regain his Senate seat. The Alabama politician faced off against a candidate that President Donald Trump had thrown his weight behind as punishment for Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe during his tenure at the Justice Department. Still, in losing to former football coach Tommy Tuberville, Sessions remained loyal to Trump’s politics saying, “it’s time for this Republican Party to listen to the Donald Trump agenda.” Tuberville, who has no political experience and will face off against Senate Democrat Doug Jones in November declared victory. Trump reveled in Tuberville’s win on Twitter. In other election results, Trump’s former physician Ronny Jackson won a Texas GOP primary for a House seat and will face off against Democrat Gus Trujillo in November. And in Maine, Democrat Sara Gideon emerged victorious in a Democratic primary against two others. Gideon will challenge Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins. 

In a White House speech on Tuesday that went over an hour long and appeared to be a campaign-style address, Trump railed against his rival—the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. He claimed Biden had been co-opted by the “radical left,” would be “soft on China,” and that there is a “silent majority” that remains loyal to Trump. Poll after poll shows Trump losing to Biden – at least for now. In a new poll of six swing states, 55% of voters chose Biden over Trump. A large part of Trump’s dip in popularity is his response to the coronavirus pandemic as infections across the have risen so alarmingly that several state leaders are now mandating masks in places like Alabama and Texas. Walmart, one of the nation’s largest retailers, made headlines this week saying it will now require all customers to wear masks in its stores. Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has become the first governor to test positive for Covid-19. In spite of that Stitt insisted on not mandating masks across his state. Instead his only advice was, “if you aren’t feeling well, we want you to get tested.” A new study found that the residents of Arizona were the most resistant of all states to mask-wearing. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an editorial that it now officially recommends all Americans wear masks and CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview on ABC that,

FEATURING COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER – President Donald Trump late last Friday commuted the sentence of his longtime friend and colleague Roger Stone who was about to start a 40-month prison sentence for a conviction over lying to federal officials. 

No sooner did the commutation spark accusations of political corruption when Stone announced he would begin campaigning for Trump’s reelection saying, “I will do anything necessary to elect my candidate, short of breaking the law.” 

In response to the commutation, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke his lengthy silence by writing an op-ed in the Washington Post. In it Mr. Mueller said he felt “compelled” to respond and that “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.” 

Some have pointed out that because Trump didn’t pardon Stone, he can be tried again by a future Justice Department or be made to face a grand jury. Others, like my guest, say that Trump’s commutation is likely unconstitutional.

Read Corey’s article ‘The Traditional Interpretation of the Pardon Power Is Wrong,’ HERE.

Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University. He is the author of When the State Speaks, What Should It Say: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality. His latest book is called The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents.

FEATURING JUDITH BROWNE DIANIS – The Los Angeles Unified School District on Tuesday failed to come to agreement on a proposal to slash police funding in public schools by 90%. The proposal, brought by board member Monica Garcia laid out a 50% cut for next year, followed by a 75% cut the year after, and 90% the year after that. The funding freed up by police would go toward support services for Black students. But school board members did not have the appetite for such a move even though the nationwide demand to “Defund the Police” in US cities has gained political traction.  

US public school budgets are often dominated by armed law enforcement officers at the expense of teachers, counselors, nurses and support staff. Advocates of defunding school police point out that while the justification for a police presence was to prevent mass shootings, in reality, police have simply replicated in school what they do on the street: criminalize and violate black and brown people.

For more information visit https://wecametolearn.com and keep an eye out for www.Policefreeschools.org.

Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of Advancement Project National Office.

**This segment was originally broadcast on June 24, 2020.

FEATURING ERIN HATTON – The National Archives recently announced it had found an original hand-written military order dated June 19th, 1865 that read, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free.’” It went on to state, “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” The order’s date marking freedom for enslaved people went on to be remembered as Juneteenth. 

And while slavery has been dead for more than a century, many argue the hallmarks of the deadly institution are still alive – through prison labor and our system of mass incarceration. 

Erin Hatton is an associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research is centered in the sociology of work, while also extending into the fields of race and gender, social inequality, culture, labor, law, and social policy. She is author of Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment.

** This segment was originally broadcast on June 19, 2020.

The Washington Post documented that President Donald Trump has officially surpassed 20,000 documented lies or misstatements in his tenure as President. Trump passed the milestone on July 9th. The paper found that Trump had upped his pace of lying with 10,000 lies or 12 lies per day in the first 27 months of his presidency, and then reached the 20,000 lie-mark only 14 months later at a rate of about 23 lies per day. “The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a whole new genre of Trump’s falsehoods,” said the paper. The nation’s leading scientific expert on the Covid-19 pandemic – Dr. Anthony Fauci – is now the target of Trump’s falsehoods with the White House releasing a list of Fauci’s statements over several months with an accompanying statement saying, “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” On Monday Trump retweeted a fellow former reality show host named Chuck Woolery who said, “Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most ,that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election.” 

In reality President Trump has been suppressing data particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The New York Times over the weekend obtained an internal CDC document that said fully reopening schools and universities would be “highest risk,” and that, “the longer that interaction, the higher the risk of Covid-19 spread.” The CDC’s “lowest risk” scenario would be for schools to return to online-only classrooms. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in an interview on Fox News on Sunday defended Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding from schools that choose safety by remaining shut down and went as far as claiming that CDC guidelines were, “meant to be flexible.” In speaking with CNN she said schools should deal with Covid-19 hotspots on a case-by-case basis. That’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on CNN. Neither CNN nor DeVos raised the fact that the entire state of Florida is now a “hotspot,” with 15,300 new cases documented in a single day on Sunday, shattering all records. 

The President on Saturday wore a face mask for the first time in front of reporters during a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after months of refusing to. Changing his tune on masks he said, “I love masks in the appropriate locations.” Trump supporters around the country have been documented flouting mask requirements in indoor locations like grocery stores. US Surgeon General Jerome Adams has also reversed his past position on mask-wea...

FEATURING MARA EINSTEIN – President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that he would be instructing the Treasury Department to examine the tax-exempt status of universities saying, “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education.” The news came on the same day that the Catholic Church was revealed to have successfully lobbied for $1.3 billion in Covid-19 related relief funding. 

The move is just the latest in attacks facing institutions of higher education in the US. Just as K-12 schools are facing massive budget shortfalls, colleges and universities are threatening to lay off faculty, reduce salaries of already-underpaid adjunct instructors and more. 

Add to that is the recent announcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that international students may be deported to their home countries, or not even let into the US if they are incoming freshmen, if their universities switch to online-only courses during the pandemic.

Mara Einstein, Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and an independent marketing consultant. She has been working in, or writing about, media and marketing for more than 25 years, and been an executive at NBC, MTV Networks, and at major advertising agencies. She is the author of a number of books, including Black Ops Advertising: Native Ads, Content Marketing, and the Covert World Of the Digital Sell.

FEATURING STEPHANIE ABRAHAM – Fans of musical theater were thrilled when the wildly popular play Hamilton by Lin Manuel-Miranda was released on the Disney Plus channel on July 3rd far ahead of schedule. The boundary breaking musical has earned rave reviews for years for retelling the story of American independence in a fresh manner, using a non-white cast and through cutting-edge clever hip hop rhymes. 

But today, as demands for racial justice reach a boiling point with a long-overdue reckoning of the US’s racist history, some are calling on fans of Hamilton to view it with a critical eye. Not only was founding father Alexander Hamilton’s link to slavery controversial, the play as a whole makes many gestures toward anti-racism without casting much criticism on the ugly legacies of founding fathers themselves. 

Stephanie Abraham is a writer, media critic and the marketing and communications specialist at Cal Poly Pomona. Her writings have appeared in numerous publications, such as Al Jazeera, Ms. Magazine and the Arab American journal Mizna. She was part of the editorial collective who founded the feminist magazine Make/shift and the founding editor of the feminist magazine LOUDmouth. She is the Pop Culture Correspondent and Film Critic for Rising Up With Sonali.

The US has once more broken a record for coronavirus infections in a single day, surpassing 60,000 for the 6th time in 10 days. While infections had been declining nationwide in the face of some states seeing rising numbers, now even the nationwide downward trend appears to be reversing. The New York Times explained that, “States that were among the earliest to reopen have driven the surge in cases in the U.S.” The result was exactly what scientific experts had warned would happen when states like Georgia, Florida, and Texas decided to throw caution to the wind. Now, many counties and cities are reversing orders on reopening businesses and even some governors considering state-wide shutdowns such as the Nevada Governor’s order to re-close bars. 

The Florida County of Miami-Dade is particularly worrisome. On Thursday County officials reported that more than one third of all people who got tested had positive results. In addition to the patchwork approaches to shutting down and reopening businesses, the Trump White House has not had a systematic approach to testing for the coronavirus. Increasingly states are frustrated and the Washington Post reports that as per a new report, “The Trump administration’s erratic approach to testing for the novel coronavirus has left state leaders and commercial laboratories confused, frustrated and unprepared for the fall.” Sen. Patty Murray who led the report said, “several interviewees, including large clinical labs, reported that despite the Administration’s assurances, they did not see how the United States would reach even a million tests per day by the fall.” The White House insists that it has been a global leader despite evidence to the contrary and despite Trump’s open declaration that he has asked to slow down testing due to the poor optics of an out-of-control disease. A Trump backing Republican state senator in Ohio, Nino Vitale, demanded that his constituents must “Never get tested,” claiming that somehow doing so means we are living in a “dictatorship.” In California, where just a few weeks ago there were a large number of testing sites but little demand has now suddenly begun running out of tests leaving residents waiting days and weeks to obtain a test. 

The Los Angeles Times has conducted an investigation into how federal officials are refusing to invest in research that has promising results for staving off the virus. Scientists have proposed several times that the blood plasma of recovered Covid-19 patients could offer significant immunity when injected into healthy patients, for at least many months. The method could potentially protect healthcare workers in particular as they treat Covid-19 patients. According to the LA Times,

FEATURING KEVIN KUMASHIRO – President Donald Trump railed this week against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s guidelines for schools to reopen in the fall. Trump has made it clear that in order to maximize his chances of reelection in November, American society and economy must return to “normal,” in spite of a massive resurgence of the coronavirus. 

On Wednesday, just hours after Trump denounced the CDC school guidelines on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence claimed, “Well the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough… That’s the reason why next week, the C.D.C. is going to be issuing a new set of tools.” But CDC Director Robert Redfield said a day later that the guidelines would not be weakened. 

Meanwhile Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who has emerged as one of Trump’s strongest allies, also insisted that schools must reopen. The proponent of so-called “school choice” insisted against given educators and parents a choice on whether kids should go back to school. 

For more on his work, visit https://educationdeans.org.

Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, a leading expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice and the education correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali.