SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
January, 19 2021, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Ryan Thomas
ryan@standupamerica.com
(763) 954-0470
SUA Congratulates President Biden And Vice President Harris, Celebrates End Of Trump Administration
Following the swearing in of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Stand Up America Founder and President Sean Eldridge released the following statement:
"As an organization founded in the days after Donald Trump's election, our two million members have spent the last four years resisting his corrupt, racist, and anti-democratic agenda--and this moment could not have come soon enough. Congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on this historic day.
WASHINGTON
Following the swearing in of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Stand Up America Founder and President Sean Eldridge released the following statement:
"As an organization founded in the days after Donald Trump's election, our two million members have spent the last four years resisting his corrupt, racist, and anti-democratic agenda--and this moment could not have come soon enough. Congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on this historic day.
"Thanks to the tireless work of grassroots organizers, volunteers, and the more than 80 million Americans who turned out to vote for Biden and Harris, we're turning the page. But as this month has clearly shown, Trumpism and the threat it poses to our democracy are not disappearing, and the work ahead to build our democracy back better is more urgent than ever.
"That's why our two million plus members will continue organizing and making our voices heard in the months ahead to ensure the new administration and Congress prioritize bold structural reforms needed to build a truly representative democracy and pave the way for progress for the American people."
If you would like to speak with a Stand Up America spokesperson about the incoming administration or progressives' priorities for a Democratic Congress, please email Ryan Thomas at ryan@stanupameria.com.
Stand Up America is a progressive advocacy organization with over two million community members across the country. Focused on grassroots advocacy to strengthen our democracy and oppose Trump's corrupt agenda, Stand Up America has driven over 600,000 phone calls to Congress and mobilized tens of thousands of protestors across the country.
LATEST NEWS
Trump Threatens to Sue BBC Over Jan. 6 Video Clip in Latest Attack on Press
In a letter to the British public broadcaster, Trump cited a memo from a Conservative Party-linked former BBC adviser who claimed the network displayed an "anti-Israel" bias, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Nov 10, 2025
The BBC in the United Kingdom is the latest target of US President Donald Trump's attempts to root out all unflattering portrayals of him from media coverage, with the president citing a memo penned by a former BBC adviser reported to have ties to the British Conservative Party.
Trump wrote to the BBC Monday, warning that he would file a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages unless the publicly funded broadcaster retracts a documentary film about him from last year, issues a formal apology, and pays him an amount that would “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”
The president gave the network until Friday to act in regard to Trump's complaint about a section of the film Trump: A Second Chance? by the long-running current affairs series Panorama.
The film was broadcast days before the 2024 US election, and included excerpts from the speech Trump gave to his supporters on January 6, 2021 just before thousands of them proceeded to the US Capitol to try to stop the election results from being certified.
It spliced together three quotes from two sections of the speech that were made about 50 minutes apart, making it appear that Trump urged supporters to march with him to the Capitol and called for violence.
"We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you... and we fight. We fight like hell," Trump is shown saying in the edited footage.
In the unedited quote, Trump said, "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”
BBC chairman Samir Shah said the network's standards committee had discussed the editing of the clips earlier this year and had expressed concerns to the Panorama team. The film is no longer available online at the BBC's website.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity. It’s a power play... It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
“We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action," said Shah. "The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgment.”
Two top executives, director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, also resigned on Sunday under pressure over the documentary.
The uproar comes days after the right-wing Daily Telegraph published details from a memo by former BBC standards committee adviser Michael Prescott, "managing director at PR agency Hanover Communications, whose staff have gone on to work for the Conservative Party," according to Novara Media.
Prescott's memo took aim at the documentary as well as what he claimed was a pro-transgender bias in BBC news coverage and an anti-Israel bias in stories by the BBC's Arabic service.
According to the Guardian, Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who previously worked as a communications official for former Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, "amplified" the criticisms in Prescott's memo in key board meetings ahead of Davie's and Turness' resignations.
Deadline reported Monday that "insiders" at the BBC have alleged that Prescott's memo, the resignations, and Trump's threat of legal action all stem from a right-wing "coup" attempt at the broadcaster.
Journalists including Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News and Mikey Smith of The Mirror noted that while Panorama's editing of Trump's speech could be seen as misleading, the documentary wasn't responsible for accusations that the president incited violence on January 6, which pre-dated the film.
"To understand how insane it is that the BBC is being accused of ‘making it look like’ Trump was inciting violence with their bad edit, as opposed to Trump actually having incited violence, we know even his own kids that day were desperately trying to get him to call off the mob," said Hasan.
Others suggested the memo cited in Trump's letter to the broadcaster should be discredited entirely for its claim that the BBC has exhibited an anti-Israel bias—an allegation, said author and international relations professor Norrie MacQueen, that amounted to "an entirely new level" of George Orwell's "newspeak."
While the BBC "has been shaken by one of the smallest of its sins," wrote media analyst Faisal Hanif at Middle East Eye, "the greater one—its distortion of Palestinian reality—goes unpunished."
Hanif pointed to a report published in June by the Center for Media Monitoring, which showed that despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel since October 2023, the BBC "gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanizing victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs. 201 Israelis)."
The network also used "emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims" and shut down allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as well as "making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements," even as Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity," wrote Hanif. "It’s a power play: the disciplining of a public broadcaster that still, nominally, answers to the public rather than the billionaire-owned media. It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
"The BBC is punished for the wrong things. It loses its leaders over an editing error, while escaping accountability for its editorial failures on Gaza," Hanif continued. "The Trump documentary might have been misedited, but the story of Gaza has been mistold for far longer. If the BBC still believes in its own motto—'Nation shall speak peace unto nation'—then peace must begin with honesty."
Keep ReadingShow Less
UN Climate Chief: Refusal to Halt Planetary Destruction Will 'Never, Ever Be Forgiven'
"We must move much, much, faster on both reductions of emissions and strengthening resilience," Simon Stiell said at COP30 in Brazil.
Nov 10, 2025
At the opening of the United Nations summit known as COP30 on Monday, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell warned those gathered in Brazil of the "indisputable" dangers of inaction.
"Ten years ago in Paris, we were designing the future—a future that would clearly see the curve of emissions bend downwards," he said, referring to the interntaionl agreement to reduce planet-heating pollution in hopes of keeping temperature rise this century at 1.5°C, relative to preindustrial levels. The global average temperature last year was above that limit.
"The emissions curve has been bent downwards. Because of what was agreed in halls like this, with governments legislating, and markets responding. But I am not sugar-coating it. We have so much more work to do," Stiell stressed. "We must move much, much, faster on both reductions of emissions and strengthening resilience."
"The science is clear: We can and must bring temperatures back down to 1.5°C after any temporary overshoot," he continued. A UN assessment from last week found that under Paris Agreement countries' recently submitted plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the global temperature could soar to 2.3-2.5°C.
Stiell said: "We find ourselves here in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon. And we can learn a lot from this mighty river. The Amazon isn't a single entity, rather a vast river system supported and powered by over a thousand tributaries. To accelerate implementation, the COP process must be supported in the same way—powered by the many streams of international cooperation."
"We don't need to wait for late NDCs to slowly trickle in, to spot the gap and design the innovations necessary to tackle it," he noted. "To falter whilst megadroughts wreck national harvests, sending food prices soaring, makes zero sense, economically or politically. To squabble while famines take hold, forcing millions to flee their homelands, this will never be forgotten, as conflicts spread."
"While climate disasters decimate the lives of millions, when we already have the solutions, this will never, ever be forgiven," he argued. "The economics of this transition are as indisputable as the costs of inaction. Solar and wind are now the lowest-cost power in 90% of the world. Renewables overtook coal this year as the world's top energy source. Investment in clean energy and infrastructure will hit another record high this year."
Highlighting a previous agreement to deliver at least $300 billion in climate finance, with developed countries taking the lead, Stiell called for moving toward $1.3 trillion, along with progress on adaptation and inclusive and just transitions. He declared, "In this arena of COP30, your job here is not to fight one another—your job here is to fight this climate crisis, together."
UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Brazilian leaders, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also emphasized the importance of collaboration at the summit to take on the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
According to the Associated Press:
André Corrêa do Lago, president of this year's conference, emphasized that negotiators must engage in "mutirão," derived from a local Indigenous word that refers to a group uniting for a task.
Complicating those calls is the United States, where President Donald Trump has long denied the existence of climate change. His administration did not send high-level negotiators and is withdrawing for the second time from the 10-year-old Paris Agreement, the first global pact to fight climate change.
As Common Dreams reported last week, Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard urged all governments attending COP30 "to resist aligning with the Trump administration's denial of the accelerating climate crisis and instead demonstrate true climate leadership."
"In the face of President Trump's rejection of science coupled with the intensified lobbying for fossil fuels, global leaders must redouble their efforts to take urgent climate action—with or without the US," Callamard asserted.
An analysis of COP26-COP29 published Friday by Kick Big Polluters Out coalition found that "over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations in just four years, with 90 of the corporations they represent responsible for nearly 60% of all global oil and gas production."
"Three decades of climate negotiations have failed to justly end fossil fuels, scale up real solutions, and deliver climate action that centers people and the planet, not Big Polluters' profits," the coalition said. "Until the well-evidenced obstruction of the fossil fuel industry is addressed and strong, lasting protections are in place, COP30 and all future COPs are pre-destined to fail."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Reign of Terror' in Chicago as Locals Suffer Under 'Secret Police' Sent by Trump
"I am flooded with stories. There are so many I cannot remember them all; cannot keep straight who was gassed, beaten, abducted, or shot."
Nov 10, 2025
Chicago residents are increasingly resisting operations being conducted by federal immigration enforcement operations being conducted in their city, while at the same time warning the rest of the country about the trauma federal agents are inflicting on their communities.
In a lengthy article published in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend, journalist Andrew Carter documented how residents of the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago, which has been the target of multiple raids over the last month, have created a network of neighbors who carry whistles with them at all times so they can alert people when federal agents are in the area.
Baltazar Enriquez, president of the community counsel in Little Village, told Carter that he began walking around wearing a whistle this past June, and he said that since then "it grew like wildfire," and spread to other neighborhoods in the city.
One person who has joined in the resistance to the immigration raids is Lisa Porter, a 53-year-old suburban mother who told Carter that she had never been much of an activist until she found herself horrified by videos of masked agents snatching people off the streets.
Porter said that she's been following the lead of other Chicagoans in trying to warn people in her neighborhood whenever federal agents are in the area. In one particularly memorable instance, Porter said she saw a young man mowing a lawn in her neighborhood and told him to keep an eye out for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols that she'd seen earlier.
"They came and took my dad 10 minutes ago," the young man said in reply.
Kyle Kingsbury, a Chicago-based computer safety researcher, wrote on his personal blog over the weekend about the pervasive sense of fear that has consumed his community ever since immigration officials began ramping up operations earlier this fall.
In his lengthy essay, Kingsbury said that he is constantly receiving messages from neighborhood watch groups alerting him about masked federal agents detaining people while going about their daily lives, including one notorious recent incident where officials dragged a woman out of the local childcare facility where she worked.
"This weight presses on me every day," he explained. "I am flooded with stories. There are so many I cannot remember them all; cannot keep straight who was gassed, beaten, abducted, or shot. I write to leave a record, to stare at the track of the tornado. I write to leave a warning. I write to call for help."
Kingsbury also warned that federal immigration officials, whether in the form of ICE or the US Border Patrol, are acting like an unaccountable secret police force akin to those typically seen in totalitarian states.
"I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police," he wrote. "What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink."
Chicago Alderman Mike Rodriguez, who represents Little Village, told Block Club Chicago on Monday that recent Border Patrol operations in the neighborhood have been like a "reign of terror," and he noted that agents once again deployed tear gas while making arrests over the weekend.
Despite angry condemnations from local officials and residents, US Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino appears completely unbowed.
As Block Club Chicago reported, Bovino brought dozens of agents with him on Monday for a photo-op at the famous Cloud Gate sculpture—often called The Bean—in Millennium Park in which they smiled and collectively said "Little Village," in mocking reference to the neighborhood they've been raiding, as photographers snapped pictures.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular