Dear Progressive Reader

The conditions of literal starvation in Gaza are at unimaginable levels. “Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation. People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days,” the United Nations World Food Programme said in a statement this week. The small amount of food aid getting into the besieged region is being distributed by a joint U.S.-Israeli program called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (which includes private military contractors who have been accused of involvement in the shooting of Palestinians seeking that food aid). Speaking in New York yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for immediate action to end the starvation.

It is also becoming even more difficult to get news of what is occurring in Gaza, as foreign journalists remain locked out of the area and their local Palestinian staff are succumbing to the same effects of starvation as their fellow Gazans. In a rare action on Wednesday, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) issued a joint statement raising awareness of the conditions their reporters are facing. Earlier in the week, AFP sent a strongly worded statement to the Israeli government asking to evacuate their reporters and noting “without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die.” Correspondent Nourdine Shnino, who writes regularly for The Progressive, last week told the heart-wrenching story of trying to keep his own baby fed. “No parent should ever have to watch their child waste away with nothing to give them,” he wrote. “No father should have to watch his baby suffer simply because his child was born during a time of war."

With more than more than 186 journalists killed so far in the conflict since October 7, 2023, the added peril of starvation for simply remaining in their home to report the news has now been added for these Gazan journalists. In a recent paraphrase of the familiar quote from German cleric Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the journalists, after that, we do not know what happened.”

Elsewhere this week, President Donald Trump issued a new Executive Order basically criminalizing homelessness and mental health issues. The Order read, in part, “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.” The order equates the state of being unhoused, and perhaps suffering from mental health conditions, with criminality. It further empowers Federal, state, and local officials to move “them into treatment centers or other appropriate facilities via civil commitment or other available means” (with no definition of the frightening tern “available means). This latest action follows on the 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case which allowed city and state governments to dismantle homeless encampments. New laws in 150 communities in thirty-two different states now criminalize in some way the act of sleeping outside. In 2024, Jesse Fairbanks wrote in an op-ed on our website, “Ending unsheltered homelessness among people with severe mental health or substance use challenges requires the government to first provide permanent housing, then offer treatment that’s voluntary and community-based.” The Trump Administration has now made it clear that it plans to go in exactly the opposite direction.

On our website this week, Paul Von Blum reviews the new book of graphics by artist Eli Valley Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque; Sam Stein reports on attacks on the hometown of Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal; Eleanor Bader describes on the ways “abortion clinic staff and volunteers are working to protect patients as the anti-abortion movement mobilizes against providers;” Michael Atkinson reviews the new film about former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich; and Marium Zahra looks at how Texas is allowing some parents to determine what all students in that state can read. Plus, Stephanie Drenka pens an op-ed showing how today’s surveillance of immigrants has its roots in nineteenth century racism; David Young opines on how cutting funds for housing counseling is a bad idea; and Linnea Saxton writes that “Multilingualism is a gift to students, communities, and our country [but now the] Trump Administration is trying to hinder it.”

Finally, today marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the postal service by the Second Continental Congress. As I noted in 2017, “Privatization of the Post Office has long been a goal of Donald Trump.” Now he seems to be working hard toward actualizing that goal. But, as Bill Lueders noted in 2021, “The battle to protect the future of the U.S. mail system is winnable.” As columnist Jim Hightower reminds us, “The humble Post Office is a community fixture, a civic inheritance, a rural lifeline, and one of the last vestiges of a shared civic culture in America. Tolerate it, treasure it, and don’t let the vicissitudes of global capitalism, contempt for government, or a viral outbreak take it away.”

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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