We spoke with Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, about the massive police corruption trial underway in Baltimore and why the national media’s not talking about it. Full interview here.
We spoke with Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, about the massive police corruption trial underway in Baltimore and why the national media’s not talking about it. Full interview here.
America needs slave labor. Since the dawn of America, since it began, we have had a slave labor class. What we see now is the privatized prison system… If you can name a corporation right now, they are profiting off of labor, enslaved labor, given by privatized prison systems. To fill those spots, they need to be able to put bodies into those prison systems. And those bodies right now are being collected on the streets of America through cannabis arrest.
Wanda James, CEO of Denver-based cannabis company Simply Pure and Colorado’s first Black woman pot entrepreneur.
Read the full interview: Colorado’s First Black Woman Pot Entrepreneur on Edibles, Incarceration & the Industry’s Whiteness
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights advocate and the best-selling author of The New Jim Crow.
Watch the full interview from Friday’s show → Michelle Alexander: We Must Respond Forcefully & Challenge Jeff Sessions’s New War on Drugs
Neuroscientist Carl Hart: We Need to Stop Jeff Sessions from Escalating the Racist War on Drugs
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rescinded two Obama-era memos that encouraged prosecutors to avoid seeking inordinately harsh sentences for low-level drug offenses. He also instructed Justice Department prosecutors to pursue “the most serious” charges for all drug offenses.
Carl Hart, chair of the Department of Psychology and a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, spoke out against the drug policy changes on the Democracy Now! news hour:
“Let’s be clear: Everybody knows that the war on drugs, as has been fought since the 1980s, has had a disproportionate negative impact on specific community: black communities, Latino communities. Everyone knows that. So, what Jeff Sessions is doing is advocating being engaged in racial discrimination. So let’s call Jeff Sessions what he is. Jeff Sessions is a racist, if he takes on this action. It’s clear. We know it. So let’s stop playing around with it. …
If we allow Sessions to turn back the hands of time, then shame on all of us. The blood is on all of our hands, because we know the consequences of his proposed actions.”
The thing that helps protect trans students is respecting who they are and treating them like their other—like their peers… We know that with support and protections, trans students have comparable mental health outcomes to non-trans students, and, without them, they face rates of suicide attempts nine times their peers… The reality is that kids will be harmed by this. And, you know, I can’t say it more strongly, but the blood is on the hands of these lawmakers, who are making it a priority to make vulnerable kids feel less safe.
Sessions—it’s not enough to call him like racist, but some combination of Federalist Society and the Confederates. He has a point of view about women and labor and people of color, and it’s a very dangerous point of view. And it is the most powerful job in the country, just like Tillerson, the most powerful job, as secretary of state, outside the country. It would stick a knife in the crown jewel of Dr. King’s work, inhibiting the protected right to vote.