Rising Up With Sonali

Listen to story:https://ia600206.us.archive.org/26/items/2025-09-09-RUWS/2025_09_09_Conrad_Corine.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 21:43) If independent journalists had a guaranteed basic income there would be no paywalls! 🤨 Subscribe now to access the video and transcript of this interview. Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING CONRAD SHAW & CORINE OLARTE-VANDERVOORT - What if everyone had a guaranteed basic income that covered their cost of living, without conditions, without means testing, without question? That’s the question an ambitious documentary called Bootstraps set out to answer over nearly a decade. Twenty individuals from all walks of life were given a basic income of $1000 a month over several years. Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed the filmmakers Deia Schlossberg and Conrad Shaw at The People’s Summit in Chicago in 2017. At the 2025 Netroots Nation conference, Kolhatkar reconnected with Shaw and one of the subjects of the documentary, Corine Olarte-VanderVoort, to find out how the experiment went and what the next steps are for the work of a Universal Basic Income. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: Conrad, we connected at Netroots and remembered that we had spoken at the People’s Summit about your documentary Bootstraps. First, remind our audience about Bootstraps and the idea that it was important to find out what would happen if people had a basic source of income that they knew they could rely on. Conrad Shaw: Yeah, what we found—and we were coming from filmmaking space—is that at the heart of the questions that people have about basic income,  once you get beyond sort of the wonky economics questions, it always boils down to can we really trust people? There're these human nature questions, human behavioral questions and that's what documentary is really equipped to explore. So, we decided instead of bringing out experts and talking heads that the best experts to look to with basic income would be those actually living and experiencing it. So, we put together a basic income program with people from all over the country receiving a basic income for a couple of years. So just so that we could do a sort of fly on the wall, verite coverage of it, just find out like what actually, what makes people tick and like how does it affect people's lives.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia600206.us.archive.org/26/items/2025-09-09-RUWS/2025_09_09_Robert_Steinbrook.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 16:11) Four out of five doctors say supporting public media is good for your health! 😉 Please upgrade to a paid subscription to access the video and transcript of this interview. Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING Dr. ROBERT STEINBROOK - In a contentious Senate hearing that, at times devolved into a screaming match, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. attempted to defend his record. Senators questioned his mass firings at the agency, his cuts to critical services including COVID-19 vaccine access, and his unscientific claims about public health. RFK Jr.’s testimony was riddled with contradictions. For example, he asserted that President Donald Trump deserved the Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, which yielded the COVID-19 vaccine. But he also claimed the vaccine didn’t work. Dr. Robert Steinbrook is the director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group and a Professor Adjunct of Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about RFK Jr.'s Senate hearing and what states are doing to fill the dangerous gaps in public health. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: Well of course, most of us who knew RFKs record before he was brought on by Trump to lead this agency were deeply, deeply concerned that here was an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who's going to be in one of the top health positions in the nation. Were you surprised at just how unscientific, to put it mildly, RFK appeared at his Senate hearing last week? Dr. Robert Steinbrook: Well, we opposed Secretary Kennedy's nomination. We spoke out urging the Senate not to confirm him. In fact, one of the statements from co-president basically said that no senator should have voted to confirm him, but he was confirmed. And in a sense, we would've been delighted to be proved wrong, in other words that our concerns were not justified. But I think you and everybody else who watched the testimony last week, this was what was to be expected, unfortunately. And it has put us in very much uncharted territory for the future of public health in this country.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia600206.us.archive.org/26/items/2025-09-09-RUWS/2025_09_09_Eduardo_Delgado.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 18:58) Become a paid subscriber to watch the video of this interview and read the full transcript! Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING EDUARDO DELGADO -  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducted the largest ever workplace raid in the US on September 4th. More than 500 federal agents descended in a military-style operation on a Hyundai EV battery plant in the town of Ellebell in south eastern Georgia, and carted off 475 people. CNN reports that many of those arrested had valid work permits and when they offered their paperwork to ICE agents, the agents marked them as unauthorized workers and arrested them anyway. The Department of Homeland Security claims all workers arrested were undocumented. About 300 of the workers are South Korean and are being flown to South Korea as part of a diplomatic deal with the U.S. The rest are largely Latin American. Eduardo Delgado is the Civic and Advocacy Coordinator at Migrant Equity SouthEast in South Georgia. His organization is working closely with families impacted by the raid, including raising funds for them. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what happened and how the public can support workers.ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: Tell me first what the situation was like. This is a relatively rural part of the state. I cannot imagine what it looks like to have a military style operation with 500 essentially armed agents of the state descending upon this, this campus, this work campus. How has the community been responding? What has the scene been like in that area? Eduardo Delgado: Absolutely. so yes, as you mentioned, Ellabell is a very rural community. The main town is comprised of a gas station and the Dollar General. So this is an extremely small community where, an operation like this wasn't really expected in the large number that we saw. Migrant Equity Southeast has been monitoring reports from community at Hyundai for a few months now, ever since the beginning of the second Trump administration. We have been in contact with many of the senator's office, Senators Warnock, and Ossoff to you know make sure that they pay attention to this issue, to make sure that community is protected. But when it came down to it, you know a lot of the folks that we were counting on let us down, a lot of folks in the government. And so, what the community is feeling right now, essentially is abandonment. They're, they're feeling persecuted. They feel hated and right now they're scared.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia601001.us.archive.org/13/items/rufj-liv-kunins-berkowitz/RUFJ_Liv_Kunins_Berkowitz.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 27:57) This BRAND NEW, recently launched series, is available to paid subscribers. Upgrade to paid subscription access it and support indie media. Now you get MORE CONTENT at the SAME SUBSCRIPTION RATE! Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) 🤩ENJOY THE LATEST EPISODE OF OUR NEW SERIES, RISING UP FOR JUSTICE!FEATURING LIV KUNINS-BERKOWITZ - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. This week, Liv Kunins-Berkowitz from Jewish Voice for Peace joins us. Liv is JVP's Senior Media Coordinator for Jewish Voice for Peace. They spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about JVP's work. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, let's begin by looking at the work of the organization. I'm sure pe anybody who's been interested in justice for Palestine over the past couple of years has likely heard of Jewish Voice for Peace. But for those who haven't, particularly for those who only get this view from our mainstream media, that all Jewish people in the US blindly support the state of Israel, how do you explain the work that your organization does and what your goals are for Jewish Voice for Peace? Liv Kunins-Berkowitz: Yeah. So JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the world. And our work is first and foremost about moving US Jews into solidarity with Palestinians to join the Palestinian freedom struggle. And our goal is to break the US-Israel alliance because we know that the occupation, apartheid, and now genocide is, is made possible by US political support, military support and funding. And, another essential part of our work is forging the Judaism Beyond Zionism, alongside many other Jewish organizations and cultural workers to put forth and practice and create communities where we can practice Judaism in alignment with our political values, our cultural values, and spiritual values.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia801600.us.archive.org/0/items/2025-09-02-RUWS/2025_09_02_Beverly_Daniel_Tatum.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 26:48) To watch the video and read the full transcript, please upgrade your subscription. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee a month! Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING DR. BEVERLY DANIEL TATUM - Nearly all schools reopen the day after Labor Day and, as students and teachers go back to school in the fall of 2025, on top of many people’s minds are the perils that modern-day conservatism poses to higher education in particular. From the push-back against affirmative action and diversity initiatives, to the attacks on campus free speech, politicians seem hell-bent on attacking colleges for precisely the reasons that make them centers of learning: critical thinking and the freedom to explore ideas.Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emerita of Spelman College, and author of four books, including the bestseller Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Her latest book is Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her new book. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: I don't want to spend too much time on the problems on the perils part of this question because this show is one that focuses on solutions, so I'm really interested in the promise, but how do you summarize the problems? I threw out a few things that are really impacting college campuses today, particularly the experiences of students, which is ultimately the most important thing. How do you summarize what you as President Emerita of Spelman are most concerned about what kids are facing, what young people are facing on campuses today? Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum: It's a great question because as you mentioned, there are many challenges that administrators, college leaders have to think about. But from a student perspective, I think what is probably most important is having access to education, both from an affordability point of view but also from a sense of belonging. If you enter into a campus community and don't feel like you belong there, you're not likely to stay there. And if you don't stay, you're not likely to complete.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia601600.us.archive.org/0/items/2025-09-02-RUWS/2025_09_02_Andreanecia_Morris.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 27:15) To access the video and transcript of this interview, please upgrade to a paid subscription! Us journalists need a living wage to keep doing what we do ;-) Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING ANDREANECIA MORRIS - This week marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States and especially the majority-Black city of New Orleans. When the city’s levee system broke, it flooded New Orleans leaving untold numbers of residents waiting for days for rescue. The official death toll was about 1,400 and the damage to homes and other infrastructure ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars.Today, housing remains the biggest challenge to a city that is one of the nation’s most treasured centers of culture and history. What is the status of housing in New Orleans and how are advocates working to renew and rebuild?Andreanecia M. Morris is the Executive Director of HousingNOLA, a 10-year partnership between the community leaders, and dozens of public, private, and nonprofit organizations working to solve New Orleans’ affordable housing crisis. She is also president of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what it will take to make housing in New Orleans affordable, especially for its original residents. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, when we think about the devastation, obviously the numbers of people lost and of course then the devastation to families at losing their loved ones is something that just can't be measured. And I'm wondering if we can start off with a general look at the pain, the scars, if you will, of Hurricane Katrina. It's been 20 years. A generation has grown up into adulthood since after the storm, and yet how deep are those scars still in the city? Andreanecia Morris: So there's been a lot of efforts mostly on people on the ground and some key leaders to take the time to address those issues, the inequities. But mostly we've just been fighting to rebuild and fighting to come home. And, and so that's one of the big challenges is that there was a generation of children. There was a recent documentary called Katrina Babies, the children who grew up, many of whom were in their formative years when Katrina happened and were evacuated and grew up with that trauma at that such a formative stage. It's, it's really similar to what people are seeing with COVID babies. What we, what we're gonna see is the COVID generation. And, so we've been talking about how we deal with that. This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia801600.us.archive.org/0/items/2025-09-02-RUWS/2025_09_02_Richard_Wallace.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 20:02) Independent media is struggling to survive. If you value such coverage through a uniquely solutions-oriented, racial justice lens, please upgrade now to a paid subscription. Only $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING RICHARD WALLACE - Thousands of people marched in Chicago on Labor Day against Donald Trump’s threats to deploy National Guard troops and ICE agents across the city. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson addressed protesters saying, “This is the city that will defend the country.” Trump has called Chicago a “hellhole,” “killing field,” and the “murder capital of the world.” But Chicagoans are determined to resist, in particular Black-led abolitionist groups who have long fought against the over-policing of their communities. Richard Wallace is an author, organizer, and the Founding Executive Director of Equity and Transformation (EAT), an organization dedicated to advancing social and economic equity for Black informal workers. Under his leadership, EAT launched the Chicago Future Fund in 2021, a groundbreaking Guaranteed Income pilot for formerly incarcerated individuals. Wallace spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how he and others are leading Chicago's resistance to Trump's militarism.ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: So first let's just address Trump's obvious maligning of Chicago. He has used a lot of names against the city. What is your response to that? Richard Wallace: Yeah, I think my response like anyone else's is that this is one more soundbite to add to the many others that just creates a lot of fog around, like the reality that we're currently living in, right? Like, we don't know what's what, when, what is gonna happen or how it's gonna happen. But these threats are, I think they're centered around Chicago's most vulnerable communities. So regardless of when they happen, we have to be prepared and we have to educate our communities to the best of our ability on what they can do to keep themselves safe.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia801600.us.archive.org/35/items/2025-08-26-RUWS/2025_08_26_Shaun_Richman.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 23:27) Americans love unions. The idea of workers banding together to demand their rights from employers is so powerful, a recent poll found that unions are more popular than big corporations by a wide margin. In fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute, 16 million more workers joined unions in 2024, and millions more wanted to join unions but couldn’t. Ahead of Labor Day 2025, we’ll turn to Shaun Richman, a former labor organizer turned academic and author who teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University. He is the author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century.His latest book is We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953. The book is a seminal history of how hotel workers in New York City organized more than a hundred years ago, offering a powerful history lesson for today, especially in light of the anti-worker, anti-union policies of the Trump administration. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's talk about the origins of the industry, where this group of workers whose history you write, originated. We think today of hotels—your story is about hotel workers—we think today about, of hotels as being very much part of any modern society. But in New York, in the early 1900s, it was, and even nationwide, really, it wasn't a very common thing to have big hotels. And which of course then begins the impetus for workers wanting to organize. So tell us that origin story of the industry itself. Shaun Richman: Right. Well, you had, you had public houses and you had inns, which was, you know, a person would have a house with an extra room or two. And that was very common, very connected to either a railroad travel or stagecoach travel. What New York invented, and really it was, it was the first families of New York that invented it were factories of pleasure. And, what they did is they actually, they cannibalized their own real estate. Ffifth Avenue from like 35th Street to 42nd Street was a row of just millionaires’ mansions until William Astor tore his own home down and turned it into the Waldorf Hotel.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia801600.us.archive.org/35/items/2025-08-26-RUWS/2025_08_26_Stacy_Suh.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 21:15) I need 300 of you to upgrade your subscription from free to paid in order to keep doing this program. Please consider subscribing now. Sign up for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING STACY SUH - The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda requires the funneling hundreds of billions of tax dollars into recruiting new ICE agents. It also requires the ramping up of a vast network of detention centers–in other words, prisons–to house people caught up in immigration enforcement. It’s not just the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” center in Florida. A former World War II Japanese internment camp at Fort Bliss in Texas is being built up to imprison 5,000 people–at a cost of $1.2 billion of tax payer funds. Now, the Detention Watch Network has compiled data to create a map of new and existing detention centers around the United States, hoping to shine a light on this vast architecture of incarceration. Stacy Suh is the program director at Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States. They are also a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national organization working to end the criminalization of domestic and sexual violence survivors, and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the vast network of detention centers in the US and how people are fighting back.ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:Sonali Kolhatkar: I want to start with just talking about language. We say “detention,” we say these “centers” but really they are simply prisons, right? This isn't just a detention network. It is a network of chambers of incarceration, spaces that are used to imprison, confine people, right? Stacy Suh: Yes, absolutely. So, the immigration detention system, it is a wide network of facilities across the country using county jails state and federal prisons, as well as military bases now to really rip immigrants, away from their loved ones, away from community while they are navigating their immigration case.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in

Listen to story:https://ia801600.us.archive.org/35/items/2025-08-26-RUWS/2025_08_26_NeeNee_Taylor.mp3Download: mp3 (Duration: 19:42) Free the video and transcript of this interview from behind a very low paywall. Upgrade to a paid subscription now! Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial) FEATURING NEENEE TAYLOR - President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to create specialized military style police for domestic deployment whose goals include “quelling civil disturbances.” The news comes as Trump ordered the National Guards he had deployed to Washington D.C. to begin carrying arms, even as he openly mulled sending National Guards to other cities, such as Chicago and Baltimore. Those deployments come alongside a massive expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump has claimed the deployments are necessary to civil law and order in the face of documented evidence of falling crime rates and border crossings. But, in Washington D.C. and around the country, people are fighting back enthusiastically, organizing spirited protests against Trump’s expanding policing and militarization. Among the organizations leading such resistance is a Black-women-led abolitionist community defense hub called Harriet’s Wildest Dreams.Neenee Taylor is a native Washingtonian, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black-led abolitionist community defense hub. She is also the Co-Founder and Organizing Director of the Free DC Project. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what people can learn from the D.C. resistance.ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:Sonali Kolhatkar: Can you tell us how Harriet's Wildest Dreams, your organization, and the Free DC project are resisting and responding to Trump's militarization? What does it look like on the ground for those of us outside DC because you know, we are just getting the news headlines and they're not accurately capturing the spiritedness, the sounds and the sights of the resistance. What is it like?NeeNee Taylor: So, we have a problem with, you know, as we know, white supremacy owned media. And so, the stories that's been told and shown doesn't really show what's going on in DC as well as the steps and how people are resisting the takeover of Washington DC. On the ground, we have at FreeDC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams, we have like rapid response teams that actually go out. We have cop watch w teams that are actually resisting and actually moving ICE, FBI, you know, standing up against them trying to kidnap our neighbors, our migrant neighbors who ICE are just snatching up. We have people that just try to push out ICE, who are United States citizens and like, you know, tell, get out of off our streets.  This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in