Dear Progressive Reader,

As I watch the preparations for Monday’s second Inauguration of Donald Trump as President, I can’t help but think of the images, shown repeatedly on the news last March, of the container ship MW Dali as it lost power and slowly drifted toward the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, Maryland. While it was clear that something awful was about to happen, it had really become inevitable and the only thing possible was to try and get as many people as possible off the bridge before they were injured or killed. Today it seems that everyone can see the inevitability of bad things occurring during the incoming Trump Administration (he has been telling us about his plans for months), but the slowly moving, heavily laden ship cannot be halted in the short term.

The Inauguration ceremony has now been moved indoors due to cold weather forecast for Washington, D.C., on Monday. In someways the change will benefit Trump, who is ever-concerned about crowd size. Even though Barack Obama’s 2008 Inauguration featured similar temperatures, it garnered crowds much larger than Trump’s 2016 event. This year, the comparisons will more likely be focussed on Ronald Reagan’s second Inauguration in 1985 (the last time an Inauguration ceremony was moved indoors due to weather). Like Reagan, Trump has been described as one of the most influential political figures of his century. And similar to Reagan in 1981, it appears that Trump is anxiously hoping for television images of the release of hostages (this time Israeli hostages) to coincide with his acceptance speech (during which he is sure to claim credit for the just-agreed ceasefire deal in the war against Gaza).

The final agreement for this ceasefire (actually an initial six-week truce) has raised further questions about why President Joe Biden was unable to push this deal through last May when the same terms were first put on the table. Since that time, more than seven months ago, thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of additional lives have been lost. This discontinuity is fueling anger and frustration with the outgoing President who is working hard to secure his legacy in his final days in office.

I and others have compared Biden to President Lyndon Johnson, whose very significant domestic policy achievements were significantly obscured by his foreign policy actions in the increase of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Like Johnson, Biden stepped aside from the presidential campaign in 2024, handing the role to his sitting Vice President, Kamala Harris, who would ultimately lose to a Republican challenger. Stephen Zunes this week makes another comparison. “Both administrations,” he writes, “supported unconditional military aid to far rightwing governments engaging in major war crimes while denying and downplaying major human rights abuses. Both administrations vetoed otherwise-unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions seeking to end deadly conflicts. Both administrations attacked the credibility of reputable human rights organizations and the International Court of Justice when they tried to uphold international humanitarian law. Both administrations refused to condition military aid to the recipients’ adherence to these principles. Both of their foreign affairs policies were opposed by most U.S. allies as well as a majority of the American people.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Nourdine Shnino reports from Gaza that “Despite the recent ceasefire agreement, hunger and malnutrition remain acute for thousands of families in Gaza;” Melinda Tuhus describes the preparations to defend immigrants in one Connecticut city for Trump’s anticipated deportation efforts; and Dave Zirin talks about his recent trip to Puerto Rico where the current power outages form a backdrop to memories of the humanitarian icon Roberto Clemente. Plus, Emma Lucía Llano provides an update on union organizing by Amazon workers; Glenn Sacks shares his own personal story about the health care giant UnitedHealth; and John Thompson raises the curtain on an “education reform” group founded by the former Florida Governor Jeb Bush that is seeking to influence education policy in the new Trump Administration. Also, Karen Dolan of the Institute for Policy Studies pens an op-ed on the ways Trump’s promises will become betrayals; David Helvarg opines on how rising ocean temperatures have fueled the California fires; and James Hassett explains that improvements to the power grid are key to a clean energy transition.

Monday is the national holiday honoring the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As I wrote in 2018, the road to that holiday was a long one. King wrote numerous times for The Progressive over the years of his short life (he was assassinated at the age of thirty-nine), but it was his work in his final year that was most provocative and often least remembered. As Rann Miller wrote last year, the “ongoing attempts by conservatives to remold King’s legacy are rooted in cognitive dissonance. They feign a reverence for King’s words and mission as they labor to enact inhumane immigration policies, roll back health care protections, undermine Black history and the teaching of it, and erode the Voting Rights Act, which King was instrumental in pushing for.” An important book published in 2019 by Sylvie Laurent examines King’s final year and his radical economic agenda. “King’s interracial Poor People’s Campaign offered an alternative to the facile dichotomy between social and economic justice,” Laurent concludes. “It was an attempt to anchor poverty in the realm of universalism and a demand for cultural recognition. It was race- and ethnic-conscious as well as class-conscious. It refused to choose between economic equality and specific anti-discrimination demands.”

Finally, with sadness we note the passing of Chicago activist José "Cha Cha" Jiménez. Jiménez was the founder of the Young Lords organization, modeled on the Black Panthers. Jiménez was also a key figure in the development of the first “rainbow coalition” in Chicago that brought together Black, Latinx, and Appalachian white activists in a coalition of unity around social and political issues in their community. The story of Jiménez and Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton is depicted in the 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah and told in greater depth in the excellent 2019 independent film The First Rainbow Coalition by Ray Santisteban which aired on PBS five years ago this coming week.

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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