AMY GOODMAN: We only have two minutes, and I want to get to the election. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said you wouldn’t support either main-party candidate at the time. What are your thoughts today for 2020?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, my position really hasn’t changed. I’m not going to actually support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election. I mean, that isn’t to say that I won’t vote for the Democratic candidate. What I’m saying is that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold.

So I think that we’re going to have to translate some of the passion that has characterized these demonstrations into work within the electoral arena, recognizing that the electoral arena is not the best place for the expression of radical politics. But if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I want to thank you so much for this hour, world-renowned abolitionist, author, activist, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of many books, including Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us. Stay safe.

It looks like the transfer of more than 900,000 acres of Nevada public land to military ownership just got less likely.

The Senate Armed Services Committee advanced the National Defense Authorization Act last week authorizing $8.15 billion for military construction for the coming fiscal year, but those plans did not include the controversial land expansions of the Naval Air Station Fallon and the Nevada Test and Training Range.

The committee, led by Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, advanced the proposed legislation on an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 25-2. The bill is now headed to the Senate floor for consideration.

“Senator Cortez Masto celebrates the language she helped craft with the Senate Armed Services Committee that secures a status-quo extension of the Nevada Test and Training Range (and the Fallon Naval Air Station),” said Ryan King, communications director for Cortez Masto in an email.

Neighboring tribes, conservation groups and some rural towns have opposed the expansion of both training ranges asking that any existing land withdrawals in Nevada with the military only be extended, not expanded.

Nevada tribes — including the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiutes and the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe — have strongly opposed the expansion of both training ranges.

Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribal Chairman Len George has said the expansion of Navy training on Paiute Shoshone traditional lands would destroy burial grounds and other sacred cultural sites while cutting off public lands for religious and cultural activities like gathering, hunting, ceremonies and burials.

The Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, which represents 27 member tribal nations in Nevada, wrote a resolution supporting the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe and other tribal nations in opposition to the planned expansion.

Laura Parry, chairwoman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, said that while the tribe takes matters of national security very seriously, a lack of proper consultation left them with “no other choice than to vehemently oppose the expansion” of the Nevada Test and Training Range.

As mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the country, 4chan, a notorious alt-right troll hub online, is trying to meddle in protesters’ online operations.

On Sunday night, users of 4chan made several highly trafficked posts with links to dozens of Black Lives Matter channels on Telegram, a privacy-oriented, encrypted messaging app that has been used for organizing protests across the country. Users on 4chan encouraged others to post disinformation in the groups, find “incriminating” information that they can pass to law enforcement, and trawl the channels for as much personal, identifying, and organizational information as they can about people in the groups.

Some have already posted the phone numbers of volunteers organizing food and water for protesters, and phone numbers for jail support for arrested protesters. The 4chan posts didn’t include instructions for what to do with the numbers, but based on 4channer’s normal behavior, it’s possible that the implication is to harass the person on the other end of the line. In some cases, users in the threads are also doxxing what they believe to be “Antifa safehouses” by posting addresses of these homes.

The leisure and hospitality industry accounts for one of every four jobs in Nevada. Or it did, anyway...

For all the hand-wringing over Nevada’s failure to diversify its economy because uh-oh now look where we are, well, here we are. Nevada’s economy hasn’t diversified in a statistically meaningful way, it isn’t going to anytime soon, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Despite the earnest efforts of the state’s growing economic development industrial complex over the last few years, battery factories and data centers and all the other ventures Nevada has attracted by doling out publicly subsidized handouts — even the holy sacred football field amen — have created a workforce that is still dwarfed by the number of people directly and indirectly employed in what is — or was — the state’s primary industry.

And now, in Nevada’s greatest economic crisis ever, the economic development crowd is saying what we need is more financial enticements to lure new firms to come to Nevada.As one economic development official explained to business allies last week, “The strategy is to push and push hard for new job creation.”

With incentives.

In other words, more of the same.

First, economic development groups and their “partners” should marshal their formidable collective resources to reform systemic policies and practices that make life harder for working people than it needs to be. Unaffordable child care, poverty-level wages, erratic working conditions, skimpy or non-existent health, sick leave, vacation and retirement benefits, ruthless banking options, a dearth of public transit, a profit-driven court system, one of the nation’s most thread-bare safety nets — all those create broad workforce instability and erode the purchasing power of the consumer core of working Nevadans, which in turn hinders, to borrow a term, economic development.

Those barriers to prosperity and well-being also block performance in one area that every economic development organization in Nevada and the nation unanimously agrees is a tip top priority, education.

Second, if Nevada’s politically juiced-up and much-admired economic development movers and shakers want to do something that would make a difference but quick, they shouldn’t be dreamily promising to attract new jobs (however few) with tax cuts and giveaways. They should be identifying the most expeditious way possible for the state to reverse the tax cuts and giveaways that have already been bestowed to companies that never needed them in the first place, and then lobby like hell to replace those race-to-the-bottom “incentives” with responsible policy.

Amazon, Tesla, Google, Apple, Switch — and yes, even the football team — don’t need the goodies Nevada has given them. But the state does.

The chambers of commerce, higher education institutions, and politicians have all been staunch allies of the economic development set. And they all know prosperity isn’t shared in Nevada. They shouldn’t be whining for tax breaks and pining for deals, begging for grants, and smiling at ribbon-cuttings.

They should be pushing economic development policy that helps people who work in the jobs Nevada has (or had, but will someday have again), not cheering on economic development agencies as they muse about how wonderful it will be when every Nevada child learns to code or whatever.