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Dear Progressive Reader,

For someone whose entire candidacy and term in office were filled with (shocking) “firsts,” Donald Trump has now ticked off another—becoming the first-ever former U.S. President to be indicted for a federal crime. Much of the indictment, which was opened to the public ([link removed]) on Friday, is filed with examples of Trump’s cavalier attitude and almost boyish fascination with power. “In September 2021, Trump showed a classified map of another unidentified country with an ongoing military operation to a representative of his political action committee,” reports ([link removed]) the Wisconsin Examiner. “Trump told the representative that he ‘should not be showing the map,’ according to the indictment.”

Trump is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in federal court in Miami for arraignment on the charges. It remains to be seen how the federal trial will play out, and on what sort of timeline (given the concerns about the upcoming 2024 election season), but as Bill Blum wrote ([link removed]) last August, “Like [Al Capone,] the infamous mobster who was convicted on tax evasion, Trump may go down for stealing documents instead of his more serious crimes.”

It is perhaps only a small historical coincidence that Friday, June 9, was also the sixty-ninth anniversary ([link removed]) of the televised comments by attorney Joseph Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency sir?” McCarthy’s key aide was, of course, a young attorney named Roy Cohn, who later would become a mentor ([link removed]) to a young Donald Trump and help shape his approach to both truth and the justice system. It is quite clear, both from the current indictment, and from his previous years in political office (as well as a decades-long career in business and television) that Donald Trump indeed learned from his mentor to “have no sense of decency.”

Many of our articles on the web this week look at various aspects of labor and the economy. Jeff Abbott reports ([link removed]) from Guatemala on the role of remittances to families, which far outweigh the much smaller investments by the Biden Administration in addressing local economic needs. Ed Rampell reviews ([link removed]) the new film AMERICONNED which drills down on the inequities in our economic system. Mike Kuhlenbeck looks at ([link removed]) current organizing by workers at Dollar General stores. Saurav Sarkar interviews ([link removed]) a fired Starbucks worker on how the coffee giant has betrayed its employees. And Greg Mitchell describes
([link removed]) his new book and PBS documentary on the role of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. (son of this magazine’s founder) in bringing to light the brutal attack by Republic Steel on its striking workers at a Memorial Day picnic in 1937. You can watch ([link removed]) the full twenty-six minute film on our website.

Plus, peace activist Kathy Kelly reviews ([link removed]) a new book about the war in Afghanistan, where she has spent a lot of time over the past two decades. Educator Kimi Waite pens an op-ed ([link removed]) on the importance of teaching Black and Asian American history in the classroom. And Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education showcases a new report on the takeover of the charter school movement by those promoting a rightwing and Christian nationalist ideology. “As our report chronicles,” she writes ([link removed]) , “charter schools have taken a sharp turn to the right and now serve a purpose never imagined by their early proponents. The only question that remains is whether progressives and neoliberals recognize where the runaway
charter movement is headed before it’s too late.”

Last month I was honored to serve as emcee for the annual Veterans for Peace Memorial Day event. The keynote speaker was Matt Rothschild, former editor and publisher of The Progressive. The whole event can now be viewed ([link removed]) on our YouTube channel, along with many other Progressive events and interviews from the past several years.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The new 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now on sale for half price!. You can still order one online ([link removed]) .

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