Dear Progressive Reader,
Deaths from the coronavirus have now surpassed the total reported deaths from the 1918 “Spanish Flu” of 675,000—making this the deadliest pandemic in U.S. history. The population of the United States, of course, is much larger than it was one hundred years ago (333 million today, 103 million in 1918), but in 1918, influenza vaccines did not yet exist! Today we have several available vaccine options for COVID-19, yet many people in the United States still refuse to get one, even though they are free and (unlike in many parts of the world) readily available. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, this also impacts the rest of the globe, especially as people are again flying in airplanes. This week, Evangeline Lawson also looks back on the history of HIV/AIDS, which has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States since the 1980s (although the World Health Organization still classifies it as a “Global Epidemic” rather than a pandemic). “Regardless of improved information and medical progress, HIV/AIDS continues to take a terrible toll, and resources are not reaching the people who clearly need them. This is similar to what we are witnessing now with COVID-19,” she writes. “In my years of life, I have survived overlapping pandemics. That feels miraculous—and exhausting.”
Just as Ronald Reagan’s refusal to even mention the term “AIDS” until 1985 led to a slower than necessary U.S. response to the crisis, so too Donald Trump’s attitudes about the coronavirus are generally accepted as a key reason the United States remains in the current crisis. Meanwhile, Trump continues promote lies and conspiracy theories about the results of the 2020 election, and has even spurred several states to continue expensive “investigations” into the results (of course, Arizona Republicans just found that Trump had fewer votes than he thought in that state).
The next big election-related battle of 2021 may well be redistricting, as states work to redraw electoral districts following the receipt of the results from the 2020 census. Here in Wisconsin, as Ruth Conniff writes this week, Republicans seem to have scored a victory by getting the state Supreme Court to agree to take on a potential case, should one be brought, about new state voting maps. “Previously,” Conniff notes, “conservatives and liberals alike on the Wisconsin Supreme Court have repeatedly rejected the notion that the state Supreme Court is the proper forum for drawing political maps, saying that doing so would drag them into partisan politics.” However, she continues, “If the state court comes up with a map that is challenged under federal voting-rights law, the federal court will review it.”
Across the ocean, Europe’s largest democracy votes tomorrow on a change in its political leadership, as Michael Makowski reports from Berlin. Meanwhile, closer to home, Margaret Cates and Kaitlyn Farley look at the ongoing struggles by Indigenous communities against the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline. Following President Joe Biden’s speech to the United Nations, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies describe how cutting the military budget could go a long way toward achieving Biden’s stated climate goals. And climate scientist Diana Bernstein pens an op-ed this week declaring, “We don’t have another decade to implement these measures and meet the 2050 goal. The climate window simply won’t allow it.”
Our new 2022 Hidden History Calendar is being printed and should be ready soon. One of the dates it includes is September 28, which is the anniversary of the day the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the injunction blocking The Progressive from publishing its story on H-bomb secrecy. Bill Lueders wrote about this in August 2019 for the fortieth anniversary of the case. And if you missed our great virtual book event last week with author Dave Zirin, speaking about his new book The Kaepernick Effect with The Progressive’s editor Bill Lueders, you can watch it at: <https://youtu.be/A0PM-cKK_yg>. And you can get a copy of the book with a donation to The Progressive by clicking here.
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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