Block Report Radio’s JR Valrey speaks with former Congresswoman Barbara Lee on her fight to end the 63-year US blockade on Cuba, her role in Biden’s brief removal of Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List, and Trump’s reversal. As Barbara Lee runs for Mayor of Oakland, California, she also discusses policing contradictions, ICE crackdowns, and Oakland’s housing crisis.
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The terrorism of the growing immigration raids has already affected farmworkers and the farmworker community near Visalia California. Mary Jane Galviso grew up in a Philippine American farmworkers family and now works in a co-op farm set up by Filipino farmworkers. She spoke to Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer.
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Gabriella Lopez is the former San Francisco Board of Education president who was recalled, with two other members of the board in 2022, after fighting to integrate San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School. Speaking to JR Valrey, Lopez discusses the measures San Francisco teachers are taking to protect immigrant students. She also weighs in on the Trump administration’s war on the US Board of Education. Since the recording of this interview, the San Francisco School District began considering cutting 800 jobs.
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Activists protested the National Basketball Association’s relationship with Rwanda outside the NBA All Star Game at San Francisco’s Chase Center on Sunday. The NBA has a longstanding relationship with Rwanda, despite decades of UN documentation of its human rights crimes in Rwanda and the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Rwandan troops and the Rwandan-commanded M23 militia are now occupying the capitals of Congo’s North and South Kivu Provinces.
In 2021, the NBA chose to inaugurate its affiliated Basketball Africa League in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. In a 2024 expose titled “How the NBA got into business with an African dictator,” sports media outlet ESPN accused the NBA of “sportswashing” Rwanda’s reputation. Activists and even two US Senators have called on the NBA to cut its ties with Rwanda, but an NBA spokesperson told ESPN that the US government had encouraged them to do business with Rwanda and that they would continue to follow its guidance. Pacifica’s Ann Garrison spoke to Stanford graduate student and activist Fatoumata Barrie.
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We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates who contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from JR Valrey, Steve Zeltzer, and Ann Garrison.
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening!
Music:
Johnny Was (1976) – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Huelga en General – General Strike (United Farm Workers Song)
