Dear Progressive Reader,
Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murders in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests and two women who worked with them. I covered this story in 1989, and again for the twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries of this atrocity. This morning, The Tico Times in Costa Rica republished a long piece that I wrote in 2014. A commemorative gathering is taking place this weekend in Fort Benning, Georgia where nineteen of the soldiers who took part in the killings were trained at the School of the Americas. The photo above of the memorial rose garden at the UCA in San Salvador was taken by Joeff Davis in 2009. ¡Presente!
The House of Representatives began the public portion of its impeachment inquiry this week. A long day of testimony on Friday by Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine, was preceded by a protracted speech and passionate transcript recitation by Devin Nunes. Nunes, who had been chair of the House Intelligence Committee until Democrats flipped the House in 2018, is otherwise best known for his $250 million lawsuit against Twitter and a fake cow account that mocked him. Our cartoonist Mark Fiore could not resist, and shared this look at Nunes and his cow.
Friday also marked the forty-fourth shooting at a school so far this year. Columnist and civil rights activist Kevin Powell has a cousin who lives near that high school. “Hurt people hurt other people, and we are a badly hurt America,” Powell says. “Yet we refuse to collectively see what all this gun violence truly is: a massive public health epidemic that is destroying us bit by bit with every mass shooting.”
A new report shows that Wisconsin has “the nation’s worst black-white achievement gap.” Our Public School Shakedown intern Alexandria Millet says she is not surprised; she grew up in Milwaukee. “This issue,” she writes, “has reverberated among educators and advocates for many years.” And, to make things even worse, she notes, “Following the release of the report card, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos inaccurately interpreted the achievement gap data to push her education reform agenda, in a way that suggested the problem was with public schools.” It should be no surprise to readers of The Progressive and our Public School Shakedown writers that the Secretary of Education has some learning to do.
In Bolivia, protests against the ouster of the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, are being met with violent repression. We republished an open letter this week, signed by many current and longtime Progressive contributors and others. It denounces the violence and calls for “the United Nations to make a statement denouncing the undemocratic nature of the coup and the strong-arm tactics of its backers.” Reese Erlich this week reports on the current pro-democracy movements in Iraq and Lebanon. And, on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gary Paul Nabhan writes about responses to the construction of a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and its impacts on communities and the environment.
Finally, if you are in the Madison area, mark your Progressive calendars to “save the date” for a special event. Legendary actor and television star Ed Asner will be in town for two performances of his new political comedy for the stage, God Help Us!, on December 12 and 13 at the Bartell Theater as a benefit for The Progressive. I hope you can join us.
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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