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"The longest-lived country in the world is Japan, has been since 1978. And when I learned that three times as many men smoke in Japan as in the United States, and yet they're the longest-lived people in the world, I had to change my mind about what really mattered." - Stephen Bezruchka

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FEATURING STEPHEN BEZRUCHKA - Americans have higher rates of chronic illnesses compared to other wealthy nations. They also have higher death rates and shorter life spans. How does the world’s most expensive healthcare system result in such terrible outcomes? 

Most progressives attribute this to our lack of a single payer healthcare system. According to a new book, it’s even bigger than that and can be traced back to inequality, including capitalism and individualism. 

Stephen Bezruchka is Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Health Systems & Population Health and Global Health at the School of Public Health, University of Washington.  At UW he received the 2002 Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2008 Faculty Community Service Award, the 2017 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and the 2018 Communicating Public Health to the Public Award. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his new book, Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, we certainly know that the US has terrible health outcomes, and as I mentioned, many of us attribute that to the lack of a single-payer healthcare system. Why do you say it is bigger than that in your book? You wrote a whole book about how our entire system, but it also seems as though our cultural approach to how we exist in the United States is all part of why we have such terrible outcomes. So lay out your thesis for us, please. 

Stephen Bezruchka: So, healthcare really contributes very little to the health of a population. Studies in the United States from my medical school at Stanford said healthcare here averts about 10% of mortality. That leaves 90% to be explained by other factors. And I like to simplify things, so two factors really matter most. 

One is the amount of attention we pay to early life, because as we go from the erection to the resurrection, about half of our health as adults is programmed in the first 1,000 days after conception. So healthier countries privilege that period in various ways. 

One example is to give a working woman who's pregnant paid time off as a national policy after she has her baby. Only two countries in the world do not provide, as a national policy, paid leave. One is, of course, the United States, and the other is Papua New Guinea, half of a big island north of Australia. So while about eight states have a modest program of paid parental leave, California and Washington, where I am, being examples, it's only 12 weeks, and that's at the low end of all the other countries in the world. 

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"There are more and more communities across the country where courts are saying that they have a right to go toward trial. And in response, the fossil fuel industry is in absolute panic mode." - Mike Meno

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FEATURING MIKE MENO - A Washington woman is suing major oil companies such as Exxon Mobil over the death of her mother in 2021 when a massive heat dome in the Pacific Northwest resulted in her mother’s death. A judge just ruled that the case can go to trial in what may be one of the first such lawsuits of its kind. As the US remains in the grip of a deadly heat wave this summer, could such lawsuits help stop the on-going destruction of our climate?

Mike Meno is the communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports communities in their efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their climate deception and the resulting harms. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the case of Misti Leon and other lawsuits aimed at Big Oil.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So tell me first about Misti Leon. This is the woman who I referenced, whose mother passed away in 2021. What were the circumstances of her mother's death, and how is she making the case that it's linked to the actions of oil companies like Exxon? 

Mike Meno: Well, across the United States right now, there are dozens of state and local governments that are fighting in court to put companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell on trial for deceiving the public about the harm of fossil fuels, and to make them pay for the resulting damages that their deception caused. 

But Ms. Leon's case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual's death in a climate-related disaster. So as your listeners may know, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome was a massively destructive event. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people died across the Pacific Northwest in the United States and Canada. And it was an event that climate scientists determined would've been virtually impossible without fossil fuel climate change. 

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"[B]ecause many of these new efforts seem targeted, we're encouraging people to do things like not have a routine. We've seen a lot of instances where people have been grabbed at a coffee shop that they go to every morning before they go to work, or they've been grabbed when they get in their car to go to work." - Gabe Gonzales, Protect Rogers Park

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FEATURING GABE GONZALES - Donald Trump’s 2025 playbook on high-profile immigration raids provoked public outrage and turned the tide against harsh enforcement. In city after city last year, from Los Angeles to Chicago, Minneapolis to Memphis, people organized. They developed community-defense tactics involving patrols and trainings.

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But this year, particularly since the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security has changed tactics. ICE agents are no longer announcing their presence, and they are arresting more people per day on average. The killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine illustrate that ICE’s tactics are no less deadly than they were. How are community organizers pivoting?

Gabe Gonzales is an organizer with Protect Rogers Park and has helped build neighborhood communication networks that verify ICE sightings, alert residents, and connect families with legal and community resources. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how he and others are changing tactics.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So how has the presence of ICE agents changed on the ground in Chicago? What are you seeing differently being done now than, say, a year ago or even six months ago? 

Gabe Gonzales: Yeah, it's more like six months. It actually looks a little bit more like it did at the beginning of the reign of terror that Trump wanted to inflict on communities, which is that when most people, when they think about the ICE raids, they think about what the border patrol was doing here in Chicago and in Minneapolis and New York and other places where there were very large numbers of heavily armed, sort of tactical gear, mostly men, going into communities using sub-lethal, they called it, weapons like tear gas and pepper balls and arresting people in large numbers and also being met with very large resistance because come to find that people don't like men with guns coming into the neighborhoods and kidnapping their neighbors. 

So it doesn't look like that anymore. What it looks like now in many communities, and not just those two cities that I've mentioned, I live in Chicago, but also in places like Memphis or in smaller cities across the United States, is teams of ICE agents, usually operating in somewhere between four and six. 

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FEATURING JOYCE AJLOUNY - Our nation and our world is overrun by 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.

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This week on Rising Up for Justice, Joyce Ajlouny, a Palestinian-American activist and social justice leader, joins us. For the past decade she has led the American Friends Service Committee as their General Secretary. The American Friends Service Committee - also known as AFSC - is a Quaker organization that has been working across the United States and around the world for over a century.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I was so fascinated with the work that AFSC did when I first heard about it many years ago. As a young journalist, I've been following AFSC's work for many years, and it was my first exposure to a Quaker organization. Friends is a word that's very unique to that organization. Tell us, for people who've never heard of AFSC, or maybe have just heard of it but don't really know that much about it, what does it do? What are its main goals?

Joyce Ajlouny: Great. We are a 109-year-old Quaker peace and social justice organization, and we work to challenge systems of violence, of inequity, of exclusion, and oppression. We're grounded in that Quaker belief that there is that of God or the divine in every person, and so that every human being deserves dignity and respect and the opportunity to flourish. So AFSC works globally. 

We have robust programming in the United States, but also globally in about 17 countries, and we work on a peace building agenda, migration justice, economic justice, and human rights. 

So yes, the work has been ongoing for a long time, and it changed through the years. But it's really rooted in what our faith is calling us to do, which is to alleviate suffering, but also not to stop at suffering, but to look at the root causes and confront the systems that create and build the unjust systems around us. 

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I asked Candice Fortin of 350.org, "How do you respond to some of the op-eds and editorials that we're seeing in the major media, that the reason why so many Europeans are dying in record-breaking heat waves, isn't climate change, it's the fact that they eschew AC, that they have essentially relied on getting by without air conditioning?"

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FEATURING CANDICE FORTIN - Heatwaves all across the northern hemisphere are smashing weather records as the long-predicted impacts of climate change emerge. In Europe, studies show thousands have already lost lives from climate-change-related impacts.

Scorching heat and humidity from Asia and Africa to the United States are testing the limits of the human body’s ability to adapt to excess heat. And still, fossil fuel companies continue to reap massive profits from energy sources whose emissions could kill off the human species. While politicians claim that transitioning away from fossil fuels is not possible, pundits claim that the solution is more air conditioning. 

Candice Fortin is the US Campaigns Manager with 350.org, a global climate justice organization. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what it will take to adopt real climate solutions.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So it is definitive that climate change is at the heart of this, even though we don't often see it being mentioned in news coverage of these record-breaking heatwaves. Yeah. Let's first start with all of the ways in which we could be doing better just in terms of dealing with climate change. Could reporting and journalism on our heatwaves be better? 

Candice Fortin: I really appreciate that question. And I can say this, starting from the US context, I think, first of all, it's important to position the federal administration that we're operating under right now. Drill, baby, drill, bring back coal, et cetera, tends to take the headlines and that's the Trump administration, et cetera, that are really pushing that messaging, and they're serious about it. 

They do not want to permit new renewable energy projects or anything else. But I think, essentially where we are as far as the media, we oftentimes do feed into what people want to see and the immediacy. So, we're a consumer-oriented sort of culture in the US.

The Los Angeles Police Department just announced it would not renew its contract with Flock, the controversial company whose AI-powered cameras surveil the public.

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According to Lauren Bonds, "ICE isn't acting differently than what ICE has always been designed to do, which is to target immigrants, often people who have never been accused of a crime, people who have maybe broken a civil law but aren't suspected of violence or any kind of large-scale misconduct."

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FEATURING LAUREN BONDS - On July 7, 2026, federal immigration agents shot and killed a 52-year old Houston man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Less than a week later, authorities killed another man, 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine. The two killings are part of an on-going pattern of murder and mayhem by immigration forces, who also killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles, and Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. Growing numbers of people are also being killed through abuse and neglect inside ICE detention centers. 

👋🏽CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER a SIGNED COPY of Sonali's new book Breaking ICE: Community Self Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. In it, Sonali interviews anti-ICE organizers from all over the US who are fighting police violence and defending their communities.

The Department of Homeland Security, under the leadership of Markwayne Mullin, responded to public outrage over ICE’s blunt force tactics this past Spring, not by ending raids, but by ostensibly making them quieter–and just as deadly. What will it take to actually end the federal government’s war on people?

Answering that question is Lauren Bonds, Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project, with a background as Legal Director of ACLU Kansas and Assistant General Counsel at SEIU litigating civil rights and voting rights cases. A Kansas native, she now leads NPAP’s police accountability work from Kansas City. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the ICE shootings.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about these two killings. They came back to back. It feels like we are back in January when we saw Keith Porter, and then Renee Goode, and then Alex Pretti within the span of just a few weeks being shot and killed. And we are expected to believe that ICE has learned its ways. Two men killed within days of one another in different parts of the country. What does this say to you about what ICE is doing? Is it any different? It's really not different in any really impactful way, right? 

Lauren Bonds: I think that we're still seeing a lot of the same tactics, just maybe at a lesser scale in particular communities. What we were seeing at the end of 2025, at the beginning of this year, were these large-scale surges in particular cities. Now, it's just a bit more dispersed in terms of where ICE is going and what they're doing. 

But as you know, we've seen more people arrested by ICE, more ICE enforcement actions in the last couple of months than we have at any time previously. So, it's really not slowing down. The tactics really haven't changed in any recognizable way. What we're really just seeing is it not being really hyper-focused on a particular city or a community right now. 

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FEATURING ALEX LAWSON - Our nation and our world is overrun by 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.

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This week on Rising Up for Justice, our guest is Alex Lawson, the Executive Director of Social Security Works. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I gave the brief description of Social Security Works right now. Contrary to its name, it goes a little bit beyond the social safety net program that most of us hope we will live long enough to take advantage of. But let's start a little bit with the history of Social Security Works. When was it founded and why was it founded? 

Alex Lawson: So Social Security Works was founded in 2010 to fight against the austerity movement that was happening at that time, mainly in the form of the BS Commission, the Bowles-Simpson Commission. That was a long-held dream of DC elites and Wall Street billionaires, is the so-called grand bargain, which is actually just a grand betrayal of the American people, and it's just a way of achieving Social Security cuts, which are deeply unpopular. 

So they create undemocratic, unaccountable methods, a closed-door commission, to achieve those incredibly unpopular goals. And we were formed to shine a light on it. We were very little at the time, and I will just say, one of the first things I did was just stood outside the closed door with a cellphone, live streaming the closed door of the commission every week as they gathered, and getting little interviews as Paul Ryan and his ilk entered and exited, and that busted the whole thing open. 

Alan Simpson, the late Alan Simpson got fed up with it, gave us an impromptu interview where he admitted that what they were doing was plotting on how to steal our Social Security benefits, and then we defeated that. 

And there's a lot more history in there, but that is the origin story of Social Security Works.

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FEATURING PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE - What does the nation’s tax code have to do with the US’s 250th anniversary? It turns out, quite a lot.

How we collect and distribute our collective resources remains trapped in a familiar, unjust pattern. Civil rights attorney and racial justice leader, Portia Allen-Kyle writes in a new story, “a fairer [tax] system could help repair the fractures of American democracy.”

Portia Allen-Kyle is a nationally recognized civil rights attorney, a tax fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and the former interim executive director at Color Of Change. She is the author of the recent Dame Magazine piece, "The Tax Code America Needs for the Next 250 Years" and of the forthcoming book, From Write-Offs to Riches: How Tax Policy Perpetuates the Racial Wealth Gap and Undermines Our Democracy, to be published under The New Press. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why the nation's tax code is linked to democracy.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: When we think about taxes, often in our popular culture, people think of it negatively, right? They don't like the fact that their paychecks get shortened, that they have to get gouged at the grocery store because their bill is higher than they expected because of sales tax. All sorts of taxes that are collected from ordinary Americans, we have a negative response to them. But is that because we've sort of forgotten about what taxes actually do, the role they're meant to play in our society, a sort of redistribution of resources, of our resources?

Portia Allen-Kyle: Yeah. I think, to your question, the reaction that folks have is not necessarily wrong, but I'd probably say it's more of an attribution error. The problem in general is not necessarily that we all pay taxes, and in fact, healthy democracies, everyone pays in and pays their fair share. Our problem here in the United States is that we have a system that essentially favors the wealthy, allows them, through loopholes, et cetera, to not pay their fair share, and instead have this very regressive system of taxation that falls the hardest on people that have the least, when the reality is that corporations and the very wealthy just need to do more. 

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"We were able to talk to people about losing SNAP, losing healthcare or healthcare costs going up, losing housing programs, and connecting all of these to, at first, an authoritarian federal regime, and then a set of corporations that were pillars of support for that regime, that profit from a taxation policy that is easy on them." -- Carlos Fernandez, Exec. Dir. of Grassroots Collaborative

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FEATURING CARLOS FERNANDEZ - Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker in June of this year signed a bill into law that slaps a tax on tech companies’ ad revenues. The movement that led to SB 3019 was many months in the making and involved a coalition of grassroots organizations working to mitigate the damage of the federal government’s tax cuts on corporations and cutting of social services. When enacted, this tax is expected to bring in $800 million in revenues for Illinois. 

Carlos Fernandez is the Executive Director of Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of Chicago labor and community organizations who have worked together for racial and economic justice for over 25 years. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the new tax.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I explained in very broad terms what the tax is, but why don't you tell me? You're obviously a lot more familiar with it than I am. What exactly is this tax? When will it get enacted? 

Carlos Fernandez: Well, there's a couple of scenarios for when, but as far as the what, this is a tax on the digital advertising revenues of the largest corporations that sell digital advertising. So, the great majority of this would be paid by Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google, Meta, parent company of Facebook, Amazon, which does a lot of digital advertising, and similar corporations that sell to other corporations mostly, but to all sorts of businesses and individuals, the ability to advertise on their platforms, Instagram or what have you, Google Search. 

And so in Illinois, most services are not taxed, and so this is a tax on the revenue that those companies generate. So, whatever portion. I'm forgetting right now the exact. It's a small amount. It's a small percentage of every dollar that they generate. So, it really is only significant for those companies that sell millions or hundreds of millions in advertising. And it's only on their revenue in Illinois. 

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"This World Cup alone is supposed to be $11 billion plus in revenue for FIFA, more than any sporting event in the history of humankind... Infantino has long been an enabler of sportswashing." -- Jules Boykoff, author of Red Card.

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FEATURING JULES BOYKOFF -  When a US Men’s soccer team player was called out for a foul during a World Cup 2026 match, the player was penalized from playing one game. But, President Donald Trump reportedly personally called Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA to protest and the foul was reversed. For those who have closely studied FIFA and the corruption of organized sports, this was not surprising. A new book by former US Men’s Olympic soccer player Jules Boykoff traces the troubling history of FIFA. 

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According to sports analyst Dave Zirin who wrote the book’s foreword, “This book is for leftists who love soccer—and may even plan on watching the 2026 World Cup—who want to understand how authoritarians like Trump use the people’s game to engage in sportswashing.”

Jules Boykoff is the author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine (OR Books, 2026) and Kicking (Duke University Press, 2026), a memoir about his former life as a professional footballer and his current life as an academic, critical of sport.

He has also written six books on the politics of the Olympics, most recently, What Are the Olympics For? (Bristol University Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in outlets such as The Nation, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Folha de São Paulo, and Common Dreams. He teaches political science at Pacific University.

He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about FIFA and his new book.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So it shouldn't have surprised us that Trump was just able to call his buddy and get this foul reversed. But for people who were watching the game thinking that there ought to be this fair standard, that in sports it's just about the rules and about sportsmanship and playing, it was shocking. How buddy-buddy is Trump with Infantino, and why did this probably not shock you? 

Jules Boykoff: Well, there's no question that this was the rescinded red card heard round the world, and it got a ton of attention. And just like US President Donald Trump wanted, it put him at the center of attention at the world's most popular sporting event. Now, for those who've been following Mr. Trump in the lead into this tournament, you're right. It wasn't a huge surprise. We've been expecting him to jump in perhaps even more than he has to this point to try to avail himself of the power of this tournament for his political advantage. 

Let's not forget that Donald Trump is the president in recent history in the United States that has used sports to his political advantage more than any other. He's the guy that held the big UFC mixed martial arts battle three days into this World Cup on the White House South Lawn. So he weighs in. He clearly knows nothing about soccer, unfortunately, and that became immediately clear when he said it wasn't even a foul at all. 

I can tell you, as a soccer person, I not only thought it was a foul, but I actually thought it was a red card offense. The bigger point is that President Trump has a penchant for using sports to his advantage, and he really tests the idea that you can be more politically effective by being less explicitly political, and sports provide the perfect vehicle for testing that theory.