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 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” (where Republican operatives, led by 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” (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, “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 at the way that addressing this history through the performance of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” led to attacks by Federal officials on the career of award-winning jazz singer Billie Holiday.
Elsewhere on the web this week, Aaron Fernando describes the new Public Banking Act just signed into law in California, Mike Ervin writes about the notion of Medicaid block grants that keeps rising from the dead; Sarah Jaffee reports on power-building efforts in the Chicago Teachers Union; and Ed Rampell reviews a new film on Afghanistan and interviews 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 with Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, plus two free events on November 7 in Colorado Springs and November 8 in Boulder, 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
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