Dear Progressive Reader,
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would be moving forward with the drafting of articles for the impeachment of Donald Trump. The main focus of this process has been centered around the President’s July 25 phone conversation with the president of Ukraine. But as Brendan Oswald and Sergiy Rachinsky, writing from the region, point out this week, “the Ukrainian people are tired of being in the middle of an American political melodrama.” In many ways, President Zelensky is walking a tightrope, and “he risks losing the opportunity [to create change in his country] if he cannot retain the optimism that swept him to power.” In the meantime, here in the United States, a similar tightrope is being walked as the impeachment process moves toward a trial in the U.S. Senate and, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, Senator Mitch McConnell holds a lot of the cards in that game.
This week, Senator Kamala Harris announced her departure from the still very crowded field of Democratic presidential hopefuls. Another televised debate is scheduled for December 19 in Los Angeles and Harris, who had qualified, will not be on that stage. But neither will many other contenders. As Mark Fiore notes, a process is underway to find the “most electable” candidate, but this process may well not be the same that voters will use to pick their preference. “Enjoy the debates,” he says, “and let’s hope we find someone who can beat our current disaster of a president.”
Civil society protests are currently erupting across the globe, and like all of the various “Occupy” groups that emerged in different cities in 2011, each movement has its own unique issues and form, but all are, at their root, about people rising up against inequality and unjust rulers at a time when the planet is at stake. “Enough is enough” is the common cry. Jeff Abbott reports this week on the various movements around Latin America, and Maxine Lowy analyzes the particular history (and the role of the United States in it) of the current protests in Chile which even led to the cancellation of the United Nations climate conference (COP25) which is now taking place in Madrid, Spain instead. James Goodman also reminds us that the impact of U.S. actions, combined with the ever-growing climate crisis, are the main reasons that people are “fleeing” not merely “migrating” to the United States.
Two historical events were noted on our website this past week. David Bacon shared his reporting and photos from the protests at the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle twenty years ago. And, Frances Madeson and I remember the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police, aided by the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO operation. In an interview, attorney Jeff Haas recalls, “Now we’re in a counter-revolution, yet we see that people are arising everywhere. Fred and the Panthers didn’t say they were going to make the revolution, they said ‘we’re going to educate the people and the people are going to make the change.’”
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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