Dear Progressive Reader,

The Democratic Nation Convention wrapped up with a resounding speech by nominee Kamala Harris to a capacity crowd at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. More than 23,000 people were in attendance, an I witnessed dozens of additional guests (including press and delegates) waiting in line outside one gate hoping to get in if another person happened to leave, The television viewership exceeded 26,000,000 (a healthy million beyond Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention in nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin the previous month). Harris used her acceptance speech to paint a picture of what she would do if elected in November.

Outside the gated community that was the DNC, however, several issues remained unresolved. As Elio Leanza reports, a group of pro-ceasefire delegates never achieved their goal of getting a recently returned medical volunteer or a Palestinian American to speak from the podium. Similarly, as Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies point out, “Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome issues, which ‘the greatest military in the history of the world’ can surely deal with.” Meanwhile, as Kerem Gençer illustrates with photos from the streets, police and protesters clashed numerous time during the convention—although nowhere near a repeat of the street battles in Chicago in 1968.

Meanwhile, inside the Convention halls, Democrats did seem to be turning away from the embrace of neoliberalism that the Party has adopted over the past couple of decades, and turning back toward the “kitchen table” economics that it embraced in the middle of the last century. As Thomas Nelson writes in those two stories from the Convention’s first days, “As the Democratic Party remakes itself in the wake of a change in the ticket, it must listen to working people to hear what matters.” And, as Ruth Conniff reports from the Harris-Walz rally that took place in Milwaukee on Tuesday (in the same hall where Trump has spoken the month before), Harris said “the question facing voters in November is ‘What kind of country do we want to live in? . . . Do we want to live in a country of chaos and fear and hate, or a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law?’ ” With less than seventy-five days to go until Election Day, Harris has the shortest time in recent history of any U.S. presidential candidate to make her case.

Elsewhere on our website this week, Jeff Abbott reports on a new effort coordinated between Panama and the United States to deport migrants, and Michelle Chen brings news from the strike of Cornell University workers that was mentioned by the UAW’s Shawn Fain in his speech at the Convention.

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

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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