Dear Progressive Reader,
On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to release $3.5 billion of frozen funds to Afghanistan. “As part of our ongoing work to address the humanitarian and economic crisis in Afghanistan, President Biden signed an Executive Order (E.O.) to help enable certain U.S.-based assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (“DAB”), to be used to benefit the Afghan people,” read the White House statement on the order. But this is less than half of the total amount of money that is being held. In a country where as many as nine million are on the brink of starvation, and twenty-three million more face extreme hunger, the withholding of the additional funds is being viewed as a form of theft from the Afghan people. Kathy Kelly writes this week, “People in the United States must recognize the suffering their country continues inflicting in Afghanistan.” Kelly goes on to urge, “After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.”
Meanwhile, tensions continue to increase in Ukraine. On Friday, the United States urged all U.S. citizens to leave the country or risk being abandoned there by the Biden Administration. Meanwhile, as Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies report this week, there is a diplomatic alternative that already exists, but seems to have been forgotten in most media coverage and Congressional debates. “Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s failed efforts to browbeat the Russians,” they point out. “There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine: a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).” As numerous polls and recent demonstrations have shown, the American people do not want another war—maybe their representatives in Congress should listen.
In Minneapolis last week, yet another young Black man fell victim to a police officer’s bullet. Amir Locke was killed in a “no-knock” raid on an apartment he was visiting on February 2. Amanda Calhoun looks at how this killing, and so many other recent tragic deaths, have been documented in body-camera footage. “Why must we, as Black Americans,” she asks, “continue to televise our murders in order to mobilize U.S. society to end racist laws?” And Estelle Timar-Wilcox covers the response in Minneapolis, after so many recent killings by police officers that have received so much local and national attention. “[D]espite those victories in court [such as the convictions of Derek Chauvin and Kimberly Potter],” she says, “many of the long-standing demands of Minneapolis’s racial justice movement—like shuttering the police department in favor of a department of public safety—have gone unfulfilled.”
Roger Bybee examines the funders of the so-called sedition caucus. While initially withholding funds after January 6, these corporations have now renewed a “torrent of funding to members of Congress who sought to deny election results.” And cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the awkward repurposing of vocabulary required by today’s Republican Party following the censure of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger by the RNC.
Also this week, Paul Buhle remembers fellow SDS member Todd Gitlin, who passed away on February 5; Ed Rampell reviews a new film on student activism today at Hampshire College; Jeff Abbott reports on the inauguration of a new left-leaning president in Honduras; and Christopher Blackwell shares his experiences of living inside a Washington State prison, where he is currently serving a forty-five-year sentence.
And finally, editor Bill Lueders reports an update to his investigation into the illegal eviction of elderly persons from nursing homes and other facilities. In the case of his mother, Elaine Benz, on Thursday after extensive efforts, “The Regency was served a ‘Notice and Order’ [by the State of Wisconsin Department of Health Services] giving it forty-five days to stop breaking the law, and ordered to pay fines totaling $1,500. As is typical for fines imposed by the division, the violator was offered a 35 percent discount, to $975, if the amount is paid within ten days.” As Lueders noted in a separate article last week, there were only two other such fines in Wisconsin reported during the past three years. In those cases, the facility was also offered a “discount” for early payment of the already small fines.
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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