Dear Progressive Reader,
The Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the official name of the virus that causes COVID-19) is now well established in the United States, with cases in eleven different states. Meanwhile, infections from the Delta variant continue to overwhelm local hospitals. (Some reports on the Internet have noted that the World Health Organization skipped the Greek letter “xi” in the naming of variants, possibly to avoid confusion with the president of China, in whose country the virus was first identified two years ago). Here in the United States, the new variant arrives at a time of increases in the politicization of science. Cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates this week that, in some states, Republican legislators are even offering compensation to people who lose their jobs for refusing to comply with vaccine requirements.
Meanwhile, this past Wednesday was World Aids Day, the first global day (when it was created in 1988) to recognize public health. This year’s World Aids Day campaign slogan is “End inequalities. End AIDS. End pandemics.” The total deaths in the United States from this global epidemic exceeds 700,000, and many of the lessons learned over the past forty years can be applied to our current pandemic as well. As Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher told NPR this week, “Looking back at AIDS, it took seven years from the time antiretroviral therapy came to market before it started getting to every country in the world. And during that time, HIV continued to circulate and, thus, continued to climb, so if we want to tamp down this virus [SARS-CoV-2], we need to have a transnational, international approach that's going to help the most vulnerable all over the Earth unless we all want to be just in our houses and not traveling for the next few decades."
David Masciotra reports this week on continuing GOP efforts to redraw voting maps and add legal impediments to voter access. All of these efforts to suppress and undermine equal representation are being done using existing legal frameworks. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. tells Masciotra, “The Electoral College, the filibuster, and the gerrymander—all ‘laws’ that have historic racism at their core—are structural minority rules that allow a minority to exercise disproportionate power, and overrule the will of the majority.” In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt discuss possible scenarios following the 2020 election. Republicans, they predict, could “use the techniques of constitutional hardball to manufacture durable white electoral majorities. This could be done through a combination of large-scale deportation, immigration restrictions, the purging of voter roles, and the adoption of strict voter ID laws.” And, they continue, “These measures may appear extreme, but every one of them has been at least contemplated by the Trump Administration.” One such example comes from inmate Ryan Moser who pens an op-ed this week in which he describes how Florida, in spite of the overwhelming victory of a state referendum in 2018, continues to restrict the voting rights of former felons. “At the heart of the issue is a fundamental question: is suffrage a privilege or a right?” he asks.
In another op-ed for our Progressive Perspectives project, Jasmine Banks, director of UnKoch My Campus, describes the ways in which rightwing ideologies are gaining a secure foothold in academic institutions. As scholar and author Nancy MacLean told me in an interview for our April/May issue, “it is a kind of Trojan horse in higher education and it really needs attention. And faculty and students need to organize to expose it.” Our December/January issue also features an excerpt from the new book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, which looks at this topic. This important book was also reviewed on our website by Eleanor J. Bader. The latest issue of the magazine should be reaching subscribers and newsstands this week.
Finally, as our 2022 Hidden History of the United States calendar reminds us, today is the anniversary of the police murders of Black Panther activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. The story of Fred Hampton was recently chronicled in the film Judas and the Black Messiah, reviewed here by Ed Rampell. And as Frances Madeson and I wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of this tragic event, quoting attorney Jeffrey Haas, “The need to protest, expose, and hold accountable those in power who violate our laws and personal liberties continues and remains a fundamental struggle of our society and any society.”
The Progressive also wishes a happy birthday to scholar and activist Noam Chomsky who will turn ninety-three on December 7. 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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