Dear Progressive Reader,
 

Bill Blum reminds us this week about how far the U.S. Supreme Court has come from the time of its 1962 decision in Baker v Carr, presided over by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren, that “established the doctrine of ‘one person, one vote.’ ” Today, Blum writes, “To appreciate just how far our highest court has fallen, you only need to replay Warren’s [1969] McClatchy interview. If Warren were alive today, he would likely be a vocal advocate for court reform. But, alas, his voting rights legacy is looking more and more like a mournful epitaph.”
 

In an interesting side note, in 1955 Earl Warren also delivered an address in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of this magazine’s founder, Robert M. La Follette. La Follette, he intoned, “believed implicitly in our system of government . . . but he believed it belonged to the people, that it should not be shackled, and that every hindrance should be removed from it.”
 

The Reverend William J. Barber II, along with colleagues the Reverend Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes are announcing a “Mass Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly and March on Washington on June 18, 2022.” This effort coincides with efforts in Congress to revive the Child Tax Credit which expired in December. Senator Joe Manchin of Virginia wants these funds to be “means tested” but as Barber, et al. point out, “These often burdensome requirements already limit access to Medicaid, food stamps, public housing and more.” The Child Tax credit was essential over the past year in helping families: “It lifted millions of children above the poverty line, as parents put this money toward basic needs including food, clothing, water, heat, housing and electricity,” they note. (Another real world example of the benefits of guaranteed income programs is shown by the test project in Stockton, Califorina. I interviewed former mayor Michael Tubbs for the current issue of The Progressive about the successes of this program and how it was designed to not be restricted by “means testing.”)
 

Dianne Clausen writes this week about the struggles of artists and cultural workers over the past two years, but also the efforts and gains being made today for better working conditions in the industry. Sarah Lahm reports from Minneapolis on teachers struggling for better conditions in their workplaces. Mily Trevino-Sauceda pens on op-ed on women farmworkers like herself seeking better and safer working conditions. And Edward Hunt looks at the recent statements and actions this month of U.S.-controlled island territories seeking the right to self-determination in a “cry against colonialism.”

Finally, as our Hidden History of the United States Calendar indicates, today is the eightieth anniversary of the tragic signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt that created internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent. More than 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry (more than 70,000 of whom were full U.S. citizens) were imprisoned in those camps between 1942-1945. At the time, editor Morris Rubin wrote in The Progressive: “The mass internment of men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry would not shorten the war by a day or save the life of a single American boy. It would launch this country on a wave of hysterical intolerance whose end no man could foretell.” One reader, in another 1942 issue of the magazine, would note in a letter, “I am glad one of your correspondents has brought into the open the case of the Japanese internees. Many reports from absolutely irrefutable sources bear out the fact that, in our treatment of these citizens, we are aping the Nazi technique in relation to the Jews. . . If we are going to set ourselves up as a monitor to the rest of the world, we would do well to practice here at home the principles which we would inculcate elsewhere.” The unjust executive order would not be officially repealed until 1976, and the United States government would not officially apologize until 1988 with signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1987.
 

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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