Dear Progressive Reader,
“The Afghan war is over, so what about Iraq and Iran?,” ask Nicolas J.S. Davies and Medea Benjamin in a new article this week. “It’s time for President Biden to realize that the United States should stop invading and attacking other countries,” they state. U.S. troops are almost completely withdrawn from the twenty-year battlefield of this country’s longest war, but, as Kathy Kelly writes in another piece, “The troop withdrawal negotiated by President Joe Biden and U.S. military officials is not a peace agreement. Rather, it signals the end of an occupation resulting from an unlawful invasion.” Moreover, she continues, “U.S. citizens ought to consider not only financial recompense for destruction caused by twenty years of war but also a commitment to dismantle the warfare systems that brought such havoc, chaos, bereavement, and displacement to Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile in Cuba, the legacy of sixty years of U.S. trade embargoes and other restrictions are now playing out in a series of protests fueled by scarcity. As Leonardo Flores and Medea Benjamin note, “Anti-Cuba propaganda is being pushed by the right, but the protests in Cuba are more of a condemnation of U.S. foreign policy than a reflection on the Cuban government.” As they point out, “This was laid out clearly by the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory in 1960, when he explicitly called for ‘denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.’ ” And, as Emilio Leanza points out in his review of the new book Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, this attempt to influence populations and change governments is not new. “Once nothing more than a lowbrow form of pop culture,” he writes, comics in the twentieth century “were adopted by the government as a strategic weapon in the battle to sway populations to embrace a U.S.-led future.”
And as gun violence continues to rise across the United States, Sarah Lahm says, “The President is likely to respond to the national crime uptick with more police, more prisons, and more punishment—but what we really need are more Pell Grants for the incarcerated.” Bill Blum reports that we should not expect any positive action from the U.S. Supreme Court either. “In any sane democracy, one might expect the highest court in the land to step in and do something to uphold sensible gun-control regulations when given the opportunity. But in fact, our Supreme Court is poised to do just the opposite in a case it will hear next fall,” Blum explains. And a new film chronicles the history of the nation’s largest pro-gun group, the National Rifle Association. “Judd Ehrlich’s riveting new documentary, The Price of Freedom,” writes reviewer Pamela Rafalow Grossman, “is named for the phrase the NRA uses to gloss over this country’s wretched record on mass shootings and gun deaths.”
Finally, in the wake of a huge disruption to our educational system during the past sixteen months of pandemic lockdowns and “hybrid” learning, many so-called education reformers have called for the development of more “charter schools.” But as Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show in their forthcoming book, School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Enrollment, “something that is public should be broadly accessible. And charter schools, in many ways, are far from public.” They describe their work in a new article for our Public Schools Advocate project. Look for a whole series of articles on education and schools in our forthcoming issue of The Progressive that will be out in early August.
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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