‘ON THE GROUND’ SHOW FOR JUNE 2, 2017: Trump Withdraws from Paris Climate Agreement…Bernie Sanders Addresses the Class of 2017…Headlines on Hate Crimes, Solidarity with Venezuela and More


On today’s show, a tale of sorts of two speeches and of two very divergent world views. On June 1, in a surreal scene at the White House, Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. We talk to Scott Edwards of Food and Water Watch about what Trump’s announcement means and does not mean.
The other speech this week was by Sen. Bernie Sanders, before the graduating class at Brooklyn College in New York City. It’s obvious that Sanders reads science, history and understands something about the humanities. In the second half, we hear his message to the class of 2017. Headlines on the proliferation of hate crimes, changing international political alignments, solidarity with Venezuela and Brazil, the upcoming online forum “Gerald Horne’s Black Radical History” and more.
On The Ground”Voices of Resistance from the Nations Capital (www.onthegroundshow.org) is a weekly show produced for WPFW Pacifica Radio in Washington, DC devoted to activists for social justice, those who are in the DC area and those who come to DC from across the nation or from across the globe to speak truth to power. Esther Iverem, creator, executive producer and host, is an award-winning journalist, poet, visual artist and activist. Her most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies (Hatchette Book Group).