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Dear Progressive Reader,

There are times when world events seem to knock all other news out of the headlines. Such is the case with the crisis precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beginning a little more than a week ago. Of course the climate crisis continues, and must be addressed for the survival of humanity; of course the COVOD-19 pandemic, while infections and deaths have declined in the United States, still persists and remains a threat; of course the political partisanship that is slowing real legislative change and threatening our democracy through attacks on voting rights still looms; and so many other issues remain unaddressed and unresolved. But the largest military actions that Europe has seen in more than three-quarters of a century, the largest refugee crisis in modern memory (with more than one million fleeing the violence in Ukraine), and the deep fear created by images of military attacks on the region’s largest ([link removed]) operating nuclear
power facility have all drawn this unprecedented attack into sharp focus.

This week, on our website, we offer several perspectives. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies look at ([link removed]) how actions by the United States and NATO dating back to a 1990s agreement may have contributed to current Russian attitudes and actions. Stephen Zunes points out ([link removed]) that in the current war of aggression, “responsibility rests unequivocally with the Kremlin.” But, he continues, “ the double standards and hypocrisy coming out of Washington, D.C., are quite striking.” There have been many times when the United States has not stood up for sovereign nations, he explains, such as “Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and Morocco’s annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara, both seized by force in defiance of the United Nations.” And Brendan Oswald, a journalist based in Slovakia who formerly worked in Ukraine,
breaks down the ways in which the current military attack is a miscalculation and could lead to Vladimir Putin’s downfall. “The Russian people are being forced to look at the death and destruction their leader has wrought as sanctions crash the country’s economy,” he writes ([link removed]) . “Russians are seeing their nation turned into a pariah state, denied financial, sporting, and cultural contact with the rest of the world.”

Also this week, cartoonist Mark Fiore unpacks ([link removed]) Donald Trump’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. And Jeff Abbott reports from Guatemala on the ways in which the current crisis in Ukraine is already rippling into impacts on poor working people in Central America. “The main effect . . . [is] on the cost of transportation, and the transfer of that increase in gasoline [prices] will be multiplied to the price of products,” one analyst tells him ([link removed]) . “Already in real life prices have been going up.”

The United Nations released its latest report ([link removed]) on climate change this week. Since the very first ([link removed]) Earth Day (and even before ([link removed]) ), The Progressive has focused attention on efforts to cleanup, preserve, and sustain the environment that we as a species have sullied. Our editorial staff are actively working on assembling the upcoming April/May issue of the magazine, which will focus on the climate crisis and a range of groups working on actions to try and avert global disaster. In an op-ed this week, Kimi Waite writes about the need to center racial justice in the work of addressing climate change. “[A]chieving environmental justice,” she writes ([link removed]) , “is essential to sustaining the life, culture and language of frontline communities.
To not take race into consideration when discussing environmental justice is to deny someone’s lived experience and reality.”

This weekend, a series ([link removed]) of commemorative events will be held in Selma, Alabama, marking the fifty-seventh anniversary of the start of the 1965 march for voting rights. As organizers painfully note, voting rights are again in jeopardy ([link removed]) more than a half-century later. Now, as then, we still have a long way to go in the United States to address and remedy the long history of racial disparities and injustice. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in The Progressive shortly after the historic voting rights struggle, “[E]ven when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person. . . . when Jimmy Lee Jackson, a brave young Negro man, was killed and when James Reeb, a committed Unitarian
white minister, was fatally clubbed to the ground. . . . President Johnson sent flowers to the gallant Mrs. Reeb, and in his eloquent ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech ([link removed]) paused to mention that one person, James Reeb, had already died in the struggle. Somehow the President forgot to mention Jimmy, who died first. The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – Thank you to everyone who donated last week during “The Big Share,” organized by Community Shares of Wisconsin (of which The Progressive is a proud member). The online portal is still open for another week if you did not get a chance to join in, you can still click on the link at: [link removed]. Thank you for donating, sharing, engaging, and helping to make The Progressive a better publication!

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