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Dear Progressive Reader,

Momentum continues to build in the U.S. House of Representatives as hearings in various committees focus on finding evidence of Donald Trump’s impeachable acts. These efforts are aided by members of the President’s own administration who, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates ([link removed][UNIQID]) this week, keep confessing on live television. However, Trump’s supporters have the answer—attack the process, not the substance of the issues under investigation. In a display that had echoes of the November 2000 “Brooks Brothers Riot ([link removed][UNIQID]) ” (where Republican operatives, led by ([link removed][UNIQID]) Roger Stone, sought to disrupt the recount of votes in Florida) some two dozen Republican members of the House stormed into a closed hearing room on Wednesday, claiming the hearings should not be held in private. The testimony of one witness was delayed by more than
five hours, and then resumed after the disruption. Like the incident nearly two decades ago, this disruption seemed to have been organized to stall the process, not to “call for transparency ([link removed][UNIQID]) ” (since many of the members involved in the incident on Wednesday are already on the committees conducting the inquiry).

Donald Trump, on the other hand, took to twitter (his medium of choice) to denounce the Constitutional process as “a lynching.” As Yohuru Williams writes ([link removed][UNIQID]) , “One cannot decouple the word ‘lynching’ from its history.” Further, he continues, “given the history of race relations in this country and the President’s own problematic habit of weaponizing racism to promote his agenda, his tweet was at best insensitive and at worst horribly offensive to the memory of the nearly 3,500 Americans of African descent who suffered barbarous torture and death at the hands of lynch mobs in the United States.” One of the most read stories on our website this week was historian Brandon Weber’s look back ([link removed][UNIQID]) at the way that addressing this history through the performance of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” led to attacks by Fed
eral officials on the career of award-winning jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Elsewhere on the web this week, Aaron Fernando describes ([link removed][UNIQID]) the new Public Banking Act just signed into law in California, Mike Ervin writes ([link removed][UNIQID]) about the notion of Medicaid block grants that keeps rising from the dead; Sarah Jaffee reports ([link removed][UNIQID]) on power-building efforts in the Chicago Teachers Union; and Ed Rampell reviews ([link removed][UNIQID]) a new film on Afghanistan and interviews ([link removed][UNIQID]) the producer of another, media critic Jeff Cohen.

Finally, if you are in Arizona, New Mexico, or Colorado, please come join us at a series of events – especially on November 4 in Tucson ([link removed][UNIQID]) with Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, plus two free events on November 7 in Colorado Springs ([link removed][UNIQID]) and November 8 in Boulder ([link removed][UNIQID]) , where I will join David Barsamian in speaking about “the role of independent media in 2020.” More details to follow next week.

Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – We have begun our annual “Fall Harvest” fundraising drive, where we seek to reap the harvest of all the seeds we have planted during the past year with hard-hitting, independent reporting on issues that matter to you. Your donation today will help keep us on solid ground and help us continue to grow in the coming years. Please use the wallet envelope in the current issue of the magazine, or click on the “Donate” button below to join your fellow progressives in helping sustain The Progressive as a voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.


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