The following is [excerpted] from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final essay, A Testament of Hope:
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This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?
The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people.
White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.
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The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions are nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment—a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change—has included damages to the ocean. Global coral loss, fisheries disruption and coastal infrastructure destruction are estimated to cost nearly $2 trillion annually, fundamentally changing how we measure climate finance.
“For decades, we’ve been estimating the economic cost of climate change while effectively assigning a value of zero to the ocean,” said Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, who led the study during his postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps. “Ocean loss is not just an environmental issue, but a central part of the economic story of climate change.”
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SOMEONE ALERT the Norwegian Nobel Committee: Against the odds, Donald Trump has succeeded in peacefully uniting the world.
Unfortunately, the world has been united against us.
This Pax (Ex) Americana era was illustrated Friday, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrapped up a trip to China. This wasn’t just any old visit, either: It marked the first time a Canadian PM had been to the world’s second-largest economy since 2017—and based on the glamorous video Carney’s team released, it was a smashing success for Beijing.
Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a “new strategic partnership” between the two countries.
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Paul Robeson was a superstar of the stage and screen, a talented football player and a music hitmaker. Then, amid the “anti-communist fervour” of the US in the Cold War, came a dramatic fall from grace.
Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans was an unlikely pop smash. A 10-minute-long patriotic folk cantata, it offered an inclusive version of the US story, from fiery formation (“In ’76 the sky was red”) to a pan-ethnic present, as articulated by a narrator who reveals himself to be America itself.
Warning: This article contains use of an antiquated racial term that some readers may find offensive
Yet when the celebrated baritone first performed the song on a national CBS radio broadcast in 1939, it became an instant sensation. The studio audience cheered for 20 minutes. Letters and phone calls flooded into the station and the show was repeated throughout the following year. Already a star of stage, screen and the football field, the broadcast and subsequent single release of Ballad for Americans cemented Robeson’s status as the most famous black person in America.
A mere decade later however, he had been branded not just “un-American” but an effective non-person, barred from television, expunged from textbooks, his passport revoked. As the Cold War took hold and the US political and cultural establishment was gripped by anti-communist fervour, Robeson’s civil rights activism and socialist solidarity made him a prime target.
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At surprisingly short notice, Denmark and Greenland has obtained military support on the ground in Greenland from European and NATO allies. The Greenlandic and Danish foreign ministers met Washington.
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President Donald Trump met with major U.S. oil companies to discuss Venezuela’s oil future. But during the meeting, one executive acknowledged that his company didn’tleave Venezuela because of the Venezuelan government, but due to U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump himself six years ago.
Halliburton Company’s CEO confirmed their operations in Venezuela ended in 2019 after sanctions made it legally impossible to stay, despite decades working in the country and hundreds of Venezuelan workers employed by the company.
The contradiction is not unique to Venezuela. The same dynamic has played out in Cuba: the U.S. imposes “maximum pressure” sanctions that drive out U.S. companies, destroy the economy, and immiserate the population. Then the U.S. points to the resulting collapse as proof of failure and the reason why the doors need to be opened to U.S. companies — except the U.S. was the one that closed them in the first place.
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Joe Thompson, the career U.S. Justice Department attorney best known for prosecuting social services fraud in Minnesota, has resigned along with other experienced attorneys at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The move comes after top Justice Department officials pushed the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate the widow of Renee Macklin Good, the person shot and killed last week by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, MPR News has learned.
Thompson, 47, also objected to the DOJ’s decision to exclude the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation into the shooting and the department’s reluctance to investigate Ross, according to a person familiar with Thompson’s decision.
Veteran assistant U.S. attorneys Melinda Williams, Harry Jacobs, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez also resigned.
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NUUK, GREENLAND (The Borowitz Report)—In a friendly gesture by Greenland, on Monday a special envoy from the territory offered to meet White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
“Our envoy has expressed a strong desire for face-time with Mr. Miller,” said Greenlandic government spokesman Hartvig Dorkelson. “He’d like to meet Mrs. Miller as well.”
The spokesman did not elaborate on logistics for the meeting, saying only that it would “most likely involve lunch.”
“If the meeting goes well, we hope it will whet our envoy’s appetite for other members of the Trump administration,” Dorkelson said. “We would enthusiastically welcome JD Vance.”
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The man who notoriously said in his first campaign for president that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue without losing a vote is now effectively murdering Americans on the streets of our cities and murdering Venezuelans and Cubans in Caracas and the Caribbean Sea, and doesn’t have to face voters in another presidential election.
He is unconstrained in every other way as well: not subject to congressional oversight because supine Republicans are in control. Not subject to judicial oversight because the Supreme Court has given him a pass. Not subject to international law because the U.N. charter has no teeth.
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We will strive for a nation and a world governed by laws, rules and norms that constrain the powerful, including Trump and his thugs.
We will stop Trump not with violence but with our steadfast dedication to democracy, the rule of law, and social justice. We will stop him with our determination that our children and grandchildren will not live under a dictatorship. We will stop him with our power, our courage, and our resolve.
We will not succumb to despair or doom. We will not become paralyzed with fear. We will not abandon our principles or abdicate our power.
We will win this, but winning is not enough. From the rubble Trump and his thugs are making of our laws and values, we will also rebuild.
We will build an America whose strength comes not from its bombs and bullets but from its moral authority. An America whose greatness comes not from the value of its stock market or the wealth of its billionaires but from laws and values that serve us all.
My friends, we will win and we will rebuild. We have no choice.
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