Dear Progressive Reader,

Several hours after I completed last week’s newsletter, President Donald Trump launched unprecedented military strikes against Iran’s three largest nuclear facilities. The bombing was conducting without authorization from Congress, and in fact without informing Congressional leadership until after the planes were returning to their bases. On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted down a “war powers” resolution authored by Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, that would have blocked Trump from carrying out further actions against Iran without Congressional approval.

On Friday the staff of The Progressive published “A call for an immediate end to unlawful military action and a move toward peaceful diplomacy.” In an article that looked at the recent history of other military actions that were begun based on false information, we noted “The Progressive, throughout its 116-year history, has always stood against war and militarism and for peaceful solutions to conflict. As our former editor Erwin Knoll wrote of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, ‘There’s no such thing as a just war. Never was. Never will be.’ ”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir, two independent journalists based in India and Kashmir report on the recent conflict in their region; Glenn Daigon looks at the need for public grocery stores; Matt Minton reviews a new film about astronaut Sally Ride; Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright discusses the new book released this week by Wen Stephenson; and Mike Ervin examines the lag in making crosswalks safer—even after thirty-five years of the ADA. Plus, Jacob Goodwin writes for our Public Schools Advocate project about a new book on equitable funding for schools; and Danny Cherry reports on the push back against rightwing efforts to erode the separation of church and state in public schools. Also, Mandy Bryant pens an op-ed that tells the story of the eviction of unhoused people (including Bryant herself) from public lands in Oregon; and Gina Ramirez of the NRDC opines on the need to “go local to save the environment.”

Finally, The Progressive sadly notes the passing of journalist Bill Moyers who died at the age of ninety-one on Thursday. Moyers was a legend in public media. In my 2017 article on the history of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (now threatened with defunding by President Trump), Moyers said “This was no immaculate conception . . . We had a fight on our hands. A zealous band of opponents tried to kill the idea altogether. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina said public television would be taken over by communists.” It was not. The airwaves were instead populated with people like Moyers, who wanted to make them “more diverse, exposing us to the experiences and thoughts of people living on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe.”

Moyers was also a fierce advocate of small “d” democracy. Writing in The Progressive in 1990 about the opportunities for accountability lost in the wake of the Iran-Contra hearings, he noted, “Now the lessons of Iran-contra are also clear. We have learned this: that a President who lies to Congress and to the people will feel free to joke about it. . . . An administration, in short, that lies to Congress and to the people is the accepted order of things. And a Constitution designed to prevent exactly that order is a mere scrap of paper.” Later, in a 2004 article, he continued, “[O]ur nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive ‘half slave and half free,’ and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work—our work.” And, in 2011, he wrote, “The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a ‘massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich’ . . . under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush . . . and by 2007 the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans were taking in 50 percent of the national income.”

In a 2014 interview with Peter Dreier for The Progressive, Moyers explained, “Journalism’s been a continuing course in adult education for me. And I’ve lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. See the party of working and poor people become a sycophant of crony capitalism. Watch the union of church and state become fashionable again. Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn’t drift; I moved left just by standing still.” The passion and conscience of Bill Moyers will be sorely missed as we move forward confronting the current issues of our nation, our society, and our world.

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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