By Ben Jealous

Vice President Kamala Harris is sure to be remembered every March in Women’s History Month as the first woman and the first person of color to serve our nation in that position. As notable as those two facts are, she may grow to be known just as much for a single vote in the Senate that helped save the planet.

Last August, she broke the 50-50 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. That historic package, along with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Harris had crisscrossed the country in 2021 to build support for, give us a once-in-a-generation chance to protect the climate and build a cleaner, fairer economy.

Both laws bear Harris’ mark. For example, the two packages provide billions to replace diesel school buses with electric ones and an additional tax credit for purchases that counties and cities make on their own. As a senator, Harris repeatedly sponsored bills to electrify the nation’s school buses. Similarly, she championed proposals to help recovery in low-income communities that bear a disproportionate burden of pollution and climate; the IRA includes $60 billion directed to help those places.

Harris’ role inside and outside Washington on environmental issues isn’t surprising. When she was elected San Francisco’s district attorney 20 years ago, she started one of the first environmental justice units in a prosecutor’s office. When she moved on to be California’s attorney general, she fought to protect the state from fossil fuel interests, winning tens of millions in civil settlements and a criminal indictment against the pipeline company responsible for an oil spill off Santa Barbara, as well as suing the federal government to block fracking off the coast. It’s a path others have been able to follow in the years since (Columbia University keeps a database of attorneys general’s environmental actions now).

It’s a concern that runs deep. Like I did, Harris grew up in environmentally conscious northern California in a household deeply involved in the civil rights movement. She learned early that conservation was a good thing, so much so that she has joked she couldn’t understand as a youngster why people she knew said conservatives were bad.

The Biden-Harris administration has provided leadership. With Congress, they’ve given us the tools to clean up pollution, to boost communities’ resilience to climate related natural disasters like wildfires, and to create good jobs in clean manufacturing across the country in unprecedented ways. Through the infrastructure and inflation reduction packages, the United States can spend more than double protecting Earth than we spent putting astronauts on the moon.

“I think we all understand we have to be solutions driven. And the solutions are at hand,” Harris said at a climate summit earlier this month. “We need to make up for some lost time, no doubt. This is going to have an exponential impact on where we need to go.”

It’s time for the rest of us to pick up those tools and build. There are powerful interests that would be more than happy to let the inertia that allows people and places to be treated as disposable continue indefinitely. Our planet can’t afford that, and we have to marshal a movement to prevent it.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

By Jose Dorado and Mariano Contreras

After a 30-day suspension and the inaction of the empowered Police Commission, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao made the difficult but necessary determination to administer discipline for the complicit cover-up actions of the chief of police.

The Latino Task Force supports Thao’s decision to fire Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong. All Oakland Police Department sworn officers who participated in concealing facts should receive similar discipline. Further, those officers who refused to engage in the cover-up should be recognized and commended.

Decades of cover-ups and no accountability in OPD were rampant before the Riders case gave way to the now 20-year-old consent decree. By firing the chief, Thao sent a clear message that the deep-seated blue wall of cover-up will no longer be tolerated in Oakland.

Thao displayed authentic leadership by weighing the implications and impact that police misconduct and untruthfulness have on all Oakland residents. Bold and necessary decisions are generally opposed by a few, while positively affecting many.

Only with accountability and resolute leadership can we achieve constitutional policing in Oakland. Just as important, the community’s involvement and oversight are necessary to ensure fair and sustainable policing.

Direct community involvement demanding OPD accountability and supporting the tough decisions necessary to achieve this must be emphasized.

The Latino Task Force unequivocally supports the mayor’s decision.

Jose Dorado and Mariano Contreras are members of the Latino Task Force.

I confess, I haven’t seen Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strip in ages. Who even gets a newspaper that carries it anymore? Alas, after this week, Dilbert is as dead as a dodo.

Hallelujah.

Adams use of a conservative poll as justification to make racist statements against Blacks is more than a little ridiculous. It’s also a little sad because Adams sounded serious.

Adams used a poll from Rasmussen Reports that showed 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement that it’s “OK to be white.”

That statement, “OK to be white,” has a history of being associated with white supremacy movements, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

So, Adams asked aloud on his YouTube video, if 53% of Blacks in the poll were good with the statement about whites, what about the others who weren’t sure?

Adams said the 47% who disagreed or weren’t sure, made the conclusion clear to him.

Blacks were a hate group!

He wasn’t joking.

Adams concluded in a video rant, “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

Adams was justifying segregation. From a falsely accused hate group in his mind —Blacks.

And he seemed adamant. “Just get away,” he said. “Because there’s no fixing it.”

Does he mean there’s no fixing Clarence Thomas? Because I believe that.

Still, the only fixing needed seems to be Adams’ warped perception.

Just seems like quite a leap to extrapolate all that he does from a simple public opinion poll.

But Adams seems to be showcasing an emerging tactic of the anti-woke, pro-white movement.

Just call your enemy a “hate group.”

It gives white supremacists in their minds the leverage of moral superiority. Imagine, a group that hates more than they do?

This is pro-fascist, pro-white logic in action. It’s worked for Fox News and Trump, so far. We’ll see how long it lasts after the Dominion Voting machines defamation suit against the conglomerate. Adams is simply showing how easy it is to call your enemy a hater.

Fortunately, sane people see it for what it is. Newspapers that have been carrying Adams for decades are cancelling ‘Dilbert.’

Not that Adams seems to care about losing business or money. He has enough. After more decades creating a newspaper panel strip about a workplace dullard in a far from diverse and sensitive worksite, it may be that Adams was just looking for a way to go down with a bang, a way to say goodbye, as his strip was becoming more and more irrelevant.

And Adams only seems to be implying a half-hearted first amendment argument. Probably because it falls flat. No one stopped Adams from saying what he wanted to on his video. Besides, free speech laws apply to government business not to the private corporate world Adams deals in. Businesses have a right not to work with self-declared public racists. Nothing wrong there.

So, Adams was either bored with Dilbert, or he was just modeling behavior for the other male and female Ken/Karen-types, conservative whites who feel threatened by a diverse America, not just of Blacks but the entire BIPOC community.

Adams was the role model with the hot take: it’s OK to hate a hate group.

These are the sentiments of a paranoid anti-Woke crowd. Maybe Dilbert wants to run for office?

I really had to think hard the last time I even saw the Dilbert comic strip. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen a person of color in any Dilbert panel cartoon? Sadly, you can still get away with segregation in the comic strips. But sure enough, the first Black character in Dilbert, was Dave the engineer in 2022.

He’s much darker than Dilbert and in his introduction, Dave delivers the punchline, “I identify white.”

And I’m positive it wasn’t a matter of affirmative action, but of merit. Still, Dave needed the help of a white man. Adams had to draw it.

And maybe that’s the point. Dilbert, a white drone in a diverse work force, may have run out of funny things to say — that weren’t racist. In a work force of aggrieved whites quietly quitting, Adams had to go out loudly.

Adams’ rant was a nostalgic cry not for a brighter, optimistic America, but for the way things used to be in the 1950s. Only with faster computers. And decent Wi-Fi.

Adams and Dilbert deserve what they’re getting.

If they wanted to be cancelled, I’m more than happy to oblige.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator and storyteller. See him at www.amok.com.