Dear Progressive Reader,
This past week, most of the talk in the news was about the anniversary of January 6 and the Trump-inspired insurrection against democracy. But as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, January 6 was just a point in time; the attacks on voting rights and fair elections started before that day, and have gone on at a rapid pace since then. Many voter suppression laws have already been adopted by states, and others will go to the courts at some point. On the bright side, former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold writes this week, “The Biden-Harris Administration has shown a commitment not just to filling judicial vacancies, but to doing so with diverse candidates. Their goal is to achieve a federal judiciary that actually reflects the diversity of the public it serves.”
Another issue that occupies the attention of most Americans, and indeed the whole world, is the raging pandemic with record numbers of new cases each day. As Sarah Lahm reports from Minneapolis, “As the Omicron variant surges, hospital beds, substitute teachers, and consistent education have become sparse.” Jake Jacobs tells a similar story from New York City where, he notes, “Omicron has also exacerbated a shortage of substitute teachers. Despite lofty promises by school administrations of an ample reserve of substitutes, the reality is that no subs have answered our calls for help this year.”
And Stephen Zunes looks at the foreign policy legacy of the late Senator Harry Reid who, he reminds us, “repeatedly backed military aggression and spurned international law.” This week Zunes also pens an op-ed on the U.S. stance on the Western Sahara, in which, he points out, “Biden’s recognition of Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara is a gift to Russia’s autocratic president Vladimir Putin, who can now portray U.S. opposition to Russian claims on Ukrainian territory as simply rooted in geopolitical rivalry rather than principled opposition to illegal territorial expansion.”
Tomorrow marks the 113th anniversary of the birth of this publication. The Progressive began its career as La Follette’s Weekly on January 9, 1909 when Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette and a small group of progressive activists (including his wife and partner, suffragist and human rights activist Belle Case La Follette) founded a magazine that, as he said in the inaugural issue, “recognizes as its chief task that of aiding in winning back for the people the complete power over government—national, state, and municipal—which has been lost to them by party machines [and] corporate and unincorporated monopolies.”
La Follette’s Weekly, its founder declared, was meant to be “a publication that will not mince words or suppress facts, when public utterance demands plain talk,” and it became the vanguard of the insurgent progressive movement. Bob La Follette died in 1925 and the magazine was renamed The Progressive in December 1929.
In June 2019, before the pandemic restricted such public gatherings, I noted at the celebration of the anniversary of La Follette’s birth that we need his voice now more than ever. “Today, we are again faced with a great political crisis. With economic inequality rivaling the days of the ‘robber barons,’ redistricting and voter ID laws impeding the ability of citizens to vote, and corporate influence skewing our electoral system with volumes of cash unimaginable in La Follette’s time, once again, people are calling for a return to a truly democratic system of governance ‘by and for the people.’ ”
And as I wrote in an article celebrating our 110th birthday: “From all of the staff here, thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting this progressive voice."
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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