Dear Progressive Reader,

Shortly after I sent out last week’s newsletter, a horrendous racist shooting took place in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Ten people were killed and three others wounded by a shooter wielding a legally purchased semi-automatic weapon. This should not happen in America, or anywhere else, but it does, all too often.

Raza Rumi writes this week, “The horrific massacre on May 14 in Buffalo, New York, is yet another reminder of how racist ideologies pose the most severe danger to the contemporary United States. . . . If racial fears, divisions, and hatred continue to drive mainstream rightwing politics, then more violence seems inevitable.” Cartoonist Mark Fiore also provides a graphic explainer of the “Great Replacement” theory espoused by the shooter, fueled by rightwing television and radio personalities. In the United States today, racist ideologies combined with easy access to military-style weapons are a fatal mix. As Griffin Dix noted in an op-ed just a little more than a month before the Buffalo killings, “There were 45,222 U.S. gun deaths in 2020, an increase of almost 14 percent from the year before.” This must change.

The final decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on a case that could overturn fifty years of abortion rights is expected in the next few weeks. As Steph Black tells us, activists are already organizing. “Federal protections of abortion rights have always been limited, but community care and support are the future of reproductive freedom,” she says. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies have apparently been “collecting and selling the location data of people who visit abortion clinics.” Now some in Congress are pushing to end this practice. A letter from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and twelve other Democrats “called the data brokers SafeGraph and Placer.ai practices of selling location data to anyone ‘appalling,’ ” Henry Redmond reports. “It is difficult to overstate the dangers of SafeGraph’s unsavory business practices,” the letter continued.

And this week, Mike Kuhlenbeck brings news of labor organizing in another unexpected sector—Dollar General stores. (I also interviewed one of the Dollar General workers on WORT-FM community radio this week.) Plus, Jessica Martinez and Marcy Goldstein-Gelb of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health pen an op-ed on the importance of organizing to “reduce [workplace] risks and eliminate hazards.”

Also, Edward Hunt describes efforts to create a “truth commission” to look into the terrible legacy of Indian boarding schools; Jeff Abbott reports on efforts in Central America to address the causes of migration; Peter Greene looks at the myth of “parent empowerment” being pushed by school choice promoters; and Harvey Wasserman argues that nuclear power is not the answer to climate change.

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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