Dear Progressive Reader,
A government shutdown was avoided this week when Democrats and Republicans were able to agree on a stopgap funding bill. President Joe Biden signed the bill on Thursday night, just hours before a looming deadline, and punting this issue down the road for another nine weeks when we can expect another showdown. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, much of the opposition comes from newly minted frugal Republicans who were fine with raising the debt limit when their guy was in the White House. Meanwhile, as humor writer Maura Quint notes in an op-ed this week, “To really build back better, we need to raise taxes on large corporations, including a minimum tax rate. . . . And we have to close giant tax loopholes for corporations that earn profits abroad.”
The battle now moves to an infrastructure package that is already significantly smaller that the spending initially sought by Senator Bernie Sanders and progressives in the House, and probably will need to shrink more before it can move forward. As John Nichols asks in his cover story for our new October/November issue of The Progressive, “Biden [and the] Democrats face a ‘pivotal moment’ - can they be pushed into doing the right things?” And as the Reverend William J. Barber II and colleagues indicate in their contribution to this issue, "As the civil rights leaders of the 1960s so well understood, we cannot secure a bright economic future for all when so many of our people cannot exercise their most basic democratic right because immoral forces still try to deny and abridge the right to vote."
Across the country, state legislatures and participants in local school board meetings are targeting what they see as the real enemy—education about the past. As Henry Redman reports for the Wisconsin Examiner, last week, “Joining states such as Texas, Wisconsin passed a bill that bans the teaching of critical race theory.” But, have no fear, he tells us, “The bills [that] would ban the teaching of so-called critical race theory in classrooms, [would also] require cursive [handwriting] to be taught to elementary school students.” Meanwhile, as Andy Heintz writes in an op-ed, “This is being done at a time when students and youth have little knowledge about the history of slavery. . . . instead of equipping students with this information about these historical blemishes, the right—ironically in the name of truth-seeking and objectivity—has opted to use the state to punish those whose work undermines the reductive form of patriotism they are determined to preserve.”
The Progressive and our Public Schools Advocate project will be hosting a panel at this year’s NetRoots Nation virtual conference. Our panel, called “The Truth About the Attacks on Teaching Critical Race Theory in Public Schools,” will take place on Saturday, October 9 at 3:45 p.m. Eastern Time. You can get a discounted registration to access more than 100 hours of panels and workshops at this link (courtesy of The Progressive).
In international news this week, Michael Makowski continues his reporting from Berlin on the recent German elections, which favored a center-left coalition over the outgoing conservative party. Jeff Abbott looks at the recent deportations of Haitians from the Texas border, and sets it in the larger context of a long failure of U.S. policy toward Haiti. “Despite the changes in administrations,” he notes, “U.S. policy in Haiti has not changed in decades. The support of democracy has rung hollow, with the United States pushing through their candidates, and civil society being largely left behind.” And James Goodman reports from last week’s Immigrant Justice rally of more than 10,000 in Washington, D.C. “A pathway for undocumented immigrants is essential,” he says. “A ‘no’ [ruling] by an unelected Senate parliamentarian should not be the last word.”
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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