This Valentine's Day, people around the world are taking to the streets to protest violence against women and girls. From the Philippines to India to Italy to Bolivia, thousands of women in more than 100 countries will reclaim public space through dance and performance as part of a global movement called One Billion Rising. The movement takes its name from the shocking statistic that one in three women across the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. One Billion Rising started on Valentine's Day 2012 and has continued to grow every year since. Participants say they won't stop dancing until violence against all women — cis, transgender and those with fluid gender identities — has ended. We speak with Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright and author of "The Vagina Monologues." She is the founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising. We're also joined by Taína Asili, a Puerto Rican singer, filmmaker and activist whose song is the One Billion Rising anthem.

We continue our conversation with Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress. She responds to President Trump's Middle East plan, under which Israel would gain sovereignty over large areas of the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem would be under total Israeli control, and all Jewish settlers in the occupied territory would be allowed to remain in their homes. Tlaib says the plan was formulated with a "racist lens" that ignores Palestinian lives and aspirations. Tlaib says she wants people "to know what the human impact is of taking people's land, taking people's livelihood away from them."

In Detroit, a showdown between progressive lawmakers and the city is taking on racist housing policies that robbed African Americans in Detroit of their homes and widened the racial wealth gap. On Thursday, the Coalition for Property Tax Justice announced a class-action lawsuit against the city of Detroit, Wayne County and the state of Michigan in response to unfair property tax foreclosures. One in four Detroit properties have been subject to property tax foreclosure, a level comparable only to tax foreclosure rates during the Great Depression. According to legal experts, many of the foreclosures were caused by illegally inflated property taxes that violated the state's Constitution, which says that no property can be assessed at more than 50% of its market value. Detroit is now 80% African-American, and 40% of the city's residents live below the federal poverty line. But as downtown Detroit becomes increasingly gentrified, thousands of the city's longtime residents, mostly African-American families, have lost their homes to foreclosure for property taxes they should not have been paying in the first place because the poverty tax exemption excuses those in poverty from paying. From Detroit, Michigan, we're joined by Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who has worked on this lawsuit from before the time she entered Congress, and Bernadette Atuahene, a professor at IIT, Chicago-Kent College of Law, and research professor at the American Bar Foundation. She is a member of the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, and her forthcoming study, to be published in the UC Berkeley Law Review, is titled "Predatory Cities."

Billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is rising in the polls in the wake of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González speaks with us about Bloomberg's approach to campaign spending, the administration's policies during his three terms as mayor of New York City and the scores of lawsuits filed against Bloomberg and his company. "It's amazing to me that Michael Bloomberg is getting as much attention as he is," González says.

In Spite of Pompeo's Gloss, Estrangement Between the US and Europe; The Growing Rift Between Between Centrist and Progressive Democrats; A Portrait of a Rising Political Leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

A Way to Rein Trump In; Trumps Vengeance Tour and His War on the Worlds Most Powerful Office backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

Barr Violates Everything the DOJ Stands For; Xi Jinping's Gamble to Revive the Economy Risks Spreading the Virus; An Analysis of Trump's $4.8 Trillion 2021 Budget backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

The Incoming Results from New Hampshire; Barr Has Turned the DOJ Into Trump's Law Firm; Voting Should Be a Right But It Is NOT Guaranteed in the Constitution backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

FEATURING ANU JOSHI – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo met with President Trump on Thursday to negotiate a resumption of the “trusted travelers” programs that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had recently suspended in his state. In a letter to New York State officials, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said that the move...

FEATURING RICHARD CAHAN – Seventy five years after the end of the Civil War, a group of writers hired by the Works Progress Administration set out to document American slavery from the points of view of its survivors. The Slave Narratives as the resulting work came to be called, was based on the words of...

Attorney General William Barr gave an exclusive interview to ABC News on Thursday in response to the growing scandal over President Donald Trump’s seeming intervention to reduce the DOJ’s sentencing recommendation for his friend and convict Roger Stone. Mr. Barr, who faces accusations of doing Trump’s bidding reportedly pulled his own federal prosecutors back, all...

FEATURING JENNIFER WICKHAM – Protests are taking place across Canada in solidarity with First Nations protectors against a major pipeline project by multinational corporations. The Wet’suwet’en First Nation hereditary chiefs and land defenders have been opposing a fracked gas pipeline in Northern British Colombia that cuts right through their lands. The land protectors have set...

* * * Perry Dorrell blogs as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, usually on topics concerning the strange brew of Texas politics. He's also on Twitter @PDiddie.

It's NICOLE SANDLER, back in to guest host today's BradCast. We begin with an update of the latest news. My guest is journalist ASAWIN SUEBSAENG of the Daily Beast, whose first book, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington is newly released and full of the kind of stories you'd expect from [...]

On October 24, 1998, a group of activists from across the United States gathered in Washington DC to protest the Ken Starr investigation into Bill Clinton in the first rally ever organized on the Internet. Darrell Hampton's umbrella group "We the People" was generally outraged at Starr's excesses; White House staffer Bob Weiner railed against Ken [...]

Although I didn't reference Adam Schiff's remarks from just two weeks ago during the impeachment trial on the "the normalization of lawlessness," about which he presciently warned "that way madness lies". But, upon reflecting on today's BradCast, it seemed an appropriate headline. It was only one week ago that corrupt and cowardly Senate Republicans had [...]