Dear Progressive Reader,
Monday is Labor Day. It will be the 125th anniversary of the first celebration of this day as a national holiday honoring workers. In what may be an unintentional but symbolic error, the U.S. Department of Labor’s website on the history of the holiday was inaccessible this morning. Writing for The Progressive last year, Yohuru Williams notes “Our collective amnesia about the history of the holiday is dangerous.” Williams explains, “Labor Day celebrations once represented a critical touchstone for the labor movement, an occasion to celebrate the dignity of working people and promote worker solidarity as a key to building a better America.” He goes on to highlight the struggles and victories of campaigns like the Fight for $15, and voices like A. Phillip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Delores Huerta, and Cesar Chavez. We at The Progressive celebrate those movements and that history. As Fighting Bob La Follette wrote in December 1920, in an essay titled The War of Organized Capital Against the People, “out of it will come a common understanding for the common good against the common enemy. Organized labor, organized farmers, and organized consumers will survive.”
Earlier this week, Dr. Dan Murphy stopped by our office for a visit. Murphy is a physician who has worked in East Timor for more than twenty years. Today he runs the Bairo Pite clinic serving a population in desperate need of simple, practical health care solutions. Writing in The Progressive in December 2013, Dr. Murphy advised young United States physicians, “I urge you to look beyond the narrow horizons and search out a practice and a calling that can have the most impact on people’s lives—including your own.” August 30 was the twentieth anniversary of East Timor’s historic independence vote that led to brutal violence by the Indonesian government. New documents released this week by the National Security Archive indicate that the U.S. government bears some responsibility for the extent of that violence. Writing in The Progressive in November 1999, Mathew Jardine reported on the vote and its violent aftermath in the context of Indonesia’s longer history in the region. “The Indonesian forces left the way they came: savagely,” he said. “Indonesia invaded East Timor on December 7, 1975, with a green light from Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, who had visited Jakarta just hours before. As a result of the invasion and occupation, more than 200,000 people—about one-third of the population—died.”
Here in the United States, this past week marked a dark moment in our collective history—the arrival, four hundred years ago, of the first enslaved Africans at Jamestown colony in what is now Virginia. Activist and author Kevin Powell writes, “So, if 1619 should mean anything now, it should mean it is past time to pause, to be equally comfortable and uncomfortable in our American skin, as we face this tragic history, and ourselves, once and for all. Otherwise, it is just another celebration, another anniversary, that will fade away like the haunting cries of those packed at the bottom of those slave ships so long ago.”
Sarah Jaffee writes this week as fires rage from the Amazon to the Arctic, and corporate industrialists continue to look the other way. “The people at the helm, around the world, would watch us all burn rather than shake up the way things are,” she says. “If we want to do more than watch those fires helplessly, we are going to have to demand much better, and fast..” As protests continue in Hong Kong, Reese Erlich looks at the roots of these protests through a different lens. And, Amitabh Pal takes a look at the global context of the current crisis in Kashmir where the nuclear nations of India and Pakistan are clashing over a small mountain region. “The rightwing populist project beleaguering our planet,” he observes, “is taking its toll around the world.”
By the way, if you are reading this in the Madison area (or plan to be here in the next few weeks), The Progressive has some great events coming up. On September 6 we will kick off our annual Fighting Bob Fest at the Barrymore Theatre at 7pm, and the following weekend we are hosting a panel at the Capital Times Idea Fest to remember the fortieth anniversary of our historic free speech court battle with the U.S. Government over the printing of a story on nuclear secrecy.
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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