Federal agents lined up in Portland, Ore. Photo by Tuck Woodstock
On this show:
0:08 – Trump’s Postmaster General, a major donor to the Trump campaign, is cracking down on work hours by deliberately instructing USPS employees to cut their routes short and delay First Class mail. Why is the agency deliberately underfunded, and what does this mean for its future? Philip Rubio is professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and author of the book Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service.
0:34 – Santa Rita is reporting over 100 cases of Covid-19. For more on the outbreak we talk with Jose Bernal of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Sikander Iqbal of Urban Peace Movement, who has a friend inside the jail, and Darby Aono (@darbyaono), a student at Berkeley Law who has been tracking the cases inside.
1:08 – Federal agents made national news for snatching protesters off of Portland, Oregon streets and tear gassing crowds at uprisings for racial justice and against police repression. But Portland independent journalist Tuck Woodstock (@tuckwoodstock) says the frightening tactics of the federal agents are not that different from those of the Portland Police Bureau or Multnomah County Sheriffs, which residents have already been enduring. Woodstock, who has covered the protests since May, gives us an on-the-ground update.
1:20 – Ken Klippenstein is a D.C. correspondent with The Nation. He obtained an internal memo about the role of Border Patrol agents in cracking down on protesters in Portland. Read his recent reporting here.
1:45 – Tonight, Oakland’s city council will finally vote on a possible significant reduction in the police budget. James Burch is Policy Coordinator with the Anti-Police Terror Project, he joins us to talk about the vote. Community members who want to attend the meeting can download the agenda here.