FEATURING MARGARET KLEIN SALAMON – A new global survey about climate change questioned 80,000 people in 40 countries and concluded that 70% consider global warming, “a very, or extremely serious, problem.” But the results varied wildly by nation, with very low numbers of concern in the US, Sweden, Australia and other Western countries. 

For those of us living in the West, these results are yet another obstacle in the grim journey to fight for climate justice. Now, a new book, written by a clinical psychologist attempts to make climate warriors of all of us. 

For more information about her book, visit https://facingtheclimateemergency.com.

Margaret Klein Salamon, clinical psychologist turned climate activist, founding director of The Climate Mobilization and Climate Mobilization Project and author of the new book Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on policing in the US that, among other things, restricts the conditions under which law enforcement can use chokeholds to restrain people. In a speech that amounted to a campaign rally address, Trump claimed, without details, that nobody has come close to delivering the successes his administration has. Trump also bizarrely claimed that school choice was the civil rights issue of our time, and that before the pandemic just about everybody had high paying jobs. The executive order on policing that Trump signed fell far short of what activists who have been leading the national uprising against racist police violence have asked for. Rather than ‘defunding the police’ as the prevailing rallying cry has demanded Trump’s order would make available more federal grants to police departments for training – which has already been tried for years and failed. 

Meanwhile the GOP-led Senate on Tuesday held its first set of hearings on policing since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Senator Lindsey Graham, heard from civil rights groups as well as police advocates. And Democrat Joe Biden, who is vying for the Presidency, is now facing pressure from progressive organizations for promoting a platform that they say is too weak on police brutality. In a letter signed by 50 organizations including Black Voters Matter, Working Families Party, Roots Action, Mijente, Black Youth Project (BYP100), and Dream Defenders, advocates wrote, “In the course of your career, you have designed and endorsed policies that have significantly exacerbated these problems [of police violence].” They demanded that Biden, “put forward a transformative and comprehensive policing and criminal justice platform,” that includes incorporating policies laid out by the Movement for Black Lives and denounced his recent op-ed in USA Today that called for an additional $300 million in funding for police. 

In other news, California representative Barbara Lee, a longtime social justice advocate, introduced a resolution that defunds the US military. Echoing the domestic calls to defund the police in order to increase funding for social programs, Lee wrote in a statement, “For years, our government has failed to invest in programs that actually keep our country safe and healthy,” said Lee. “By over-prioritizing the Pentagon and military solutions, our country is drastically underprepared for any crisis that needs a non-military solution.” 

As part of the national uprising against police brutality activists across the country have been tearing down statues of historical racist leaders and on Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the process of bringing down a colonizer’s statue, a rightwing white militia member shot and i...

FEATURING CLIFF ALBRIGHT – The police killing of Rayshard Brooks last Friday in the parking lot of a Wendy’s has kept lit the flame of protest around the nation against racist police violence. Mr. Brooks fell asleep in line at a Wendy’s drive-through and after police were called, video footage shows him cooperating peacefully. Still, the police decided to arrest him at which point Brooks struggled and tried to run away with one of the officers’ tasers in his hand. A coroner’s report on Sunday ruled his death a homicide. The Wendy’s outside where the killing took place became the site of protests a day later and the restaurant was burned to the ground. Atlanta’s police chief has resigned and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said the use of force was not justified. 

Cliff Albright, Co-founder of Black Voters Matter, Radio Host, Writer, Consultant, Social Justice Activist.

FEATURING MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA – Coronavirus infections have sharply risen in Brazil, where the spread of the disease has been described as a “free fall.” In the country’s favelas, home to many of the nation’s poorest, residents have taken to organizing their own response to the virus in the absence of leadership from Brazil’s authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro. 

The Bolsonaro government recently came under fire for manipulating Covid-19 data and was forced by the nation’s supreme court to restore a national tracking database. Most troublingly there are now reports that Bolsonaro’s government is exploring the use of the military in order to hold on to power. Bolsonaro’s own son, who is an admirer of Brazil’s former military dictatorship said, “It’s no longer an opinion about if, but when this will happen.”

Maria Luísa Mendonça, Director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, and Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

The US Supreme Court on Monday decided in a 6-3 ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1967 applies to LGBT workers. In what was hailed as a major victory for civil rights, justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas were the only dissenters in the case. Explaining the ruling, conservative justice Neil Gorsuch said, “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex… Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.” Justice Alito denounced the majority ruling as “preposterous,” saying, “Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of ‘sex’ is different from discrimination because of ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity.’” The ruling comes just days after Donald Trump’s administration formally rescinded the gender identity anti-discrimination aspect of the Affordable Care Act. 

In other news from the Supreme Court, justices declined to rule on several challenges to state-level and federal gun control bans. Associated Press explained, “justices left in place restrictions on the right to carry weapons in public in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey. They also declined to review Massachusetts’ ban on some semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity ammunition magazines, a California handgun control law and a half-century-old federal law banning interstate handgun sales.” The court also held back from ruling in a case brought by the Trump Administration challenging one of California’s “sanctuary laws,” that shield undocumented immigrants, leaving in place a lower court ruling that limits cooperation between police and federal immigration agents. And, on a challenge to the immunity that police enjoy for violating people’s constitutional rights, the US Supreme Court also declined to rule. In that case, conservative justice Clarence Thomas, who is the only African American on the court, indicated his dissatisfaction with the legal status quo that has enabled police to avoid prosecutions and convictions for killing unarmed Americans. 

The court’s refusal to rule on police immunity now puts the onus squarely on Congress to tackle an issue that a majority of Americans are deeply disturbed by and demanding change on. The Senate, which Republicans control, is considering a bill shaped by the lone GOP African American Senator Tim Scott that would among other things, restrict chokeholds, but that does not go as far as the House Democrats’ Justice in Policing Act of 2020. Black Lives Matter activists have said that even the Democrats’ bill does not go far enough. Meanwhile the latest flashpoint over racist police brutality is unfolding in Atlanta, Georgia where police on Friday evening shot and killed a black man named Rayshard Brooks in the parking lot of a Wendy’s. Police shot Brooks multiple times in the back as he was fleeing with only a poli...

FEATURING KSHAMA SAWANT – President Trump has demanded that the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, Washington be cleared away by local and state authorities. The area, dubbed CHAZ, is a multi-block region of the city that was taken over by those protesting police brutality, after Seattle police abandoned their precinct building. The occupied space is functioning as a unique community with an altar to those who have been killed by police, free food distribution, poetry readings, and more. 

Meanwhile Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who pushed back at Trump’s demand to crackdown on the CHAZ saying, go back to your bunker,” is facing her own set of problems. City Council member Kshama Sawant has called on Durkan to resign over her handling of police violence against protesters.

Kshama Sawant, a member of Seattle’s City Council and the first socialist to be elected to that body. She is affiliated with the Socialist Alternative party and has led the fight to hold Amazon accountable. She has also called for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s resignation.

FEATURING DR. YOHURU WILLIAMS – Donald Trump, siding with the KKK and self-proclaimed Nazis and fascists shocked many with his defense of confederate statues when he tweeted, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

Many cities around the country are removing Confederate-era statues of historical figures like Robert E. Lee and white supremacist groups and the President don’t like it.

While the statues represent the “history and culture of our great country” for some white Americans, for African Americans in particular, it represents the defense of mass enslavement, repression, and violence.

Read Dr. Williams’ article in The Progressive HERE.

Dr. Yohuru Williams, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2006) and Teaching U.S. History Beyond the Textbook (Corwin, 2008). He is the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present, Documents and Essays. He recently wrote an article in The Progressive entitled, “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down”.

**This segment was originally broadcast on August 21, 2017.

As protests against police brutality continue around the nation, one of the increasingly common expressions from protesters is aimed at historic statues celebrating confederate and colonialist leaders. And some elected officials are on board. In Houston, Texas, Mayor Sylvester Turner has approved the relocation of two confederate statues that currently occupy public spaces to locations where their historical framework is more relevant. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced her support for the removal of confederate statues from Washington DC and for the renaming of military bases. She said, “The American people know these names have to go. These names are white supremacists that said terrible things about our country.” Her remarks come at the same time that the Congressional Black Caucus introduced a bill to remove confederate statues from Washington DC. Senator Cory Booker who introduced companion legislation in the Senate said, “Those who committed treason against the United States of America and led our nation into its most painful and bloody war to preserve the institution of slavery are not patriots and should not be afforded such a rare honor in this sacred space.” Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico thousands signed a petition to remove two statues of Spanish colonizer Juan de Oñate. ABC News explained that, “In the last two weeks, locations such as Richmond, Virginia, Jacksonville, Florida and Indianapolis, Indiana, have quickly moved to remove Confederate statues and memorials from public places.” Bucking the Democratic Party trend, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he opposes the removal of Christopher Columbus’s statues because apparently they, “represent and signify appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York.” Several of Columbus’s statues have been destroyed – beheaded, splashed with red paint, or torn down and dumped in a lake.

President Donald Trump who has expressed support for the confederate symbols of white supremacy faced an awkward interview from a Fox News host. Harris Faulkner, a black female Fox host asked him during a sit-down interview about recent statements he made against protesters of police brutality. Trump’s claim that former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo made the statement he echoed has been proven false. Meanwhile Trump is moving ahead with his controversial choice for his first political rally in months taking place on Juneteeth in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When Faulkner asked him about the rally he confirmed that the location and date were chosen on purpose and said, “Think about it as a celebration. They’re always a celebration.” It has now emerged that the Trump campaign will be requiring attendees to absolve the campaign of liability if they become infected with...

Every Wednesday afternoon for more than 2 years activists with Black Lives Matter have gathered in downtown Los Angeles to demand that District Attorney Jackie Lacey prosecute police officers involved in killings. Tired of her refusal to take action against even a single officer out of the hundreds that have killed, BLM-LA has demanded she step down and organized against her reelection. Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, LA like other cities around the nation have seen a massive expression of protest against police brutality and the weekly BLM-LA actions have taken on a new significance. The Rising Up crew masked up and headed to downtown LA this week to bring you a special report.    

FEATURING E. DOLORES JOHNSON – June 12th is a little-known commemoration of a day that has taken on special significance in 2020. It is known as Loving Day – a day of celebration to mark inter-racial love and family, honoring the aptly named Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple whose marriage successfully challenged the US’s anti-miscegenation laws in 1967.

But 25 years earlier my guest’s parents challenged those same racist laws by marrying one another across racial lines. Writing about it in a memoir, essayist and author E. Dolores Johnson now joins me. Her book is called Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love.

E. Dolores Johnson, essayist and author, whose latest book is called Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love.