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FEATURING KRISTIN POWELL - The Black to the Future Action Fund released a report called “The Black Economic Agenda” on August 8, a set of key economic priorities for Black communities across the United States. The fund hopes to guide elected officials and political candidates seeking office on how best to court Black voters ahead of the November 2024 election. 

The report comes just months after the release of data from the 2023 Black Census, a poll of more than 200,000 Black people across all 50 states, considered to be the largest such survey of Black Americans in U.S. history. The census results were used to guide the economic roadmap. 

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FEATURING BRIAN WILLIAMS - On August 9, 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed a Black teenager named Mike Brown in the middle of the street. His body lay where it fell for four hours in the hot sun. Residents posted details about the gruesome murder to social media and called local news outlets and soon protests began and ballooned into what became known as the Ferguson uprising. The slogan Black Lives Matter, which had been coined a year earlier when Trayvon Martin’s killer was exonerated, became a popular rallying cry in Ferguson and beyond. Brown’s killing alerted the nation to the fact that Ferguson’s Black residents had been subjected to decades of systemic harassment, targeting, and discrimination by police. Now, on the 10th anniversary of the summer that set the stage for the 2020 racial justice uprising, we look back at where Ferguson is now.

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, members of both major parties denounced “political violence,” saying it was “unAmerican.” But the NDN Collective, an Indigenous power-building organization, issued a statement saying, “Today’s shooting is yet another consequence of building and maintaining a nation based in violence, control, and bloodshed.”

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Eight activists affiliated with the youth-led Sunrise Movement were arrested on Monday in Washington D.C. They were protesting outside the offices of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate over his close ties to the fossil fuel industry. The actions came a week after Earth’s hottest day ever recorded, a stark indicator of catastrophic climate change. 

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FEATURING CAT BROOKS - Marches and rallies were held across the United States this past Sunday July 28 to demand justice for the police killing of a Black woman named Sonya Massey near Springfield, Illinois. Massey, a mother, had called for help thinking there was an intruder in her home. 

Body camera footage shows Illinois Sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson asking her to remove a pot of boiling water from her stove and then shot her in the face, killing her. Grayson also refused to issue immediate help as Massey lay dying. He was fired and has been charged with three counts of first degree murder. 

Massey’s 4-year old cousin Terrell Miller had also been killed by law enforcement this past March. Prosecutors refused to charge the killer.

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When the great sci-fi writer Octavia Butler wrote her seminal book, Parable of the Sower, in 1993, she imagined 15-year-old protagonist Lauren Olamina starting her Earthseed journal on July 20, 2024. That date has just passed, and, according to youth reporter Aina Marzia, Butler’s work strikes a powerful chord with Generation Z readers.

In an in-depth report for YES! Magazine, probing the source of this affinity, Marzia makes the case that Butler’s solutions to late-stage capitalism are inspiring a new generation grappling with our contemporary dystopian reality. She asks, “Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than to build a socialist framework?”

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FEATURING DORTELL WILLIAMS - While politicians like to say they’re “tough on crime,” especially during election years, it’s clear they don’t mean corporate crimes, white collar crimes, and those committed by the wealthy and powerful. Our criminal justice system ensnares low-income people, people of color, and those from marginalized communities in general. What does someone personally trapped by this system say about it? Our regular commentator Dortell Williams joins us once more from inside Mule Creek State Prison where he is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Williams has been incarcerated by the state of California for more than 3 decades. 

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FEATURING AIMEE ALLISON - After weeks of internal and external pressure, President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race last weekend and endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party nomination. Harris quickly received enough delegate pledges to become the likely nominee at the Democratic National Convention in August. Her campaign announced it raised a record breaking $100 million in donations in just days. In 2020 Harris became the first woman and the first woman of color to ever be Vice President. If elected this November, her Presidency would be equally ground breaking on the issue of demographic representation. 

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FEATURING HEIDI BEIRICH - “Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening,” write the authors of Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise on page 6 of their 922-page document. The so-called Mandate is the centerpiece of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to rewrite the rules of government in a second Donald Trump administration. These days it seems everyone is talking about Project 2025. But the former president claims he knows nothing about it even though more than a hundred people who once worked for him are involved in it. 

In fact, in 2022, Trump spoke at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation where he said, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

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FEATURING KAMAU FRANKLIN - Among the themes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week is “Make America Safe Once Again,” which apparently refers to “supporting law enforcement, border security and battling human and drug trafficking.” According to a press release from the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, his plan is to end “the endless crime spree and drug flow that plague America.” This, in spite of the fact that crime levels have dropped dramatically since the 1990s. 

There seems to be little concern about young disaffected Republican men as the source of violence however, just days after Trump survived an assassination attempt. The man suspected to have been the shooter was a 20-year old registered Republican who used a legally obtained AR-15 rifle. The odds that gun violence will be on the RNC agenda, in light of the fact that gun-related deaths are rising each year, are slim to zero.

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