Dear Progressive Reader,

President Joe Biden addressed the nation in a prime time speech from Philadelphia on Thursday night. The theme of the speech was the defense of the idea of democracy, an idea that is very much currently under attack. “We, the people, have burning inside of each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall. A flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, civil rights,” Biden said. By highlighting, alternately, crises and achievements, he was very much speaking to today’s dual struggles of pandemic and climate crisis paired with struggles for equality, voting rights, and environmental justice. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” he continued—uncharacteristically calling out the former President three separate times during the twenty-four-minute speech.

It was somewhat unfortunate that the set designers chose to give Biden a background of eerie red lights, and that he was visibly flanked by two Marines in dress uniform. “Like watching the beginning of a movie where a country collapses into a dystopian military nightmare,” commented one viewer of the Canadian live video coverage. U.S. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, told the rightwing Fox News show “The Ingraham Angle” that “the lighting and all sort of looked like Darth Vader, it seemed to me.” However, Republicans could not say much about the content of Biden’s speech since these threats to our democracy are very real, and they are very real-ly promoting them in so many ways in so many states. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates this week, many, including U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, have indicated that if justice is pursued in the case of Trump’s theft of classified documents (including, apparently, about four dozen empty folders marked “classified”) from the White House, there would be “riots in the street.” Jeff Bryant of our Public Schools Advocate project also reports this week on the recent Netroots Nation conference, where there was an “underlying theme of how progressives can effectively respond to the current rightwing assaults on democratic governance and the common good, which have only grown louder and more extreme since 2016. In session after session,” he says, “panelists and speakers exhorted progressives to counter these assaults by asserting their positive progressive values and by calling attention to the villains leading these assaults and what motivates them.”

NASA’s launch of the Artemis 1 rocket is scheduled for today, barring any delays due to weather or technical problems (of which there have been many). A deeper question of how money is being spent on this project has plagued the process since its start—with each launch costing more than $4 billion, and the rockets themselves being single-use. In 1964, legendary political folksinger Phil Ochs penned the lyrics of the song Spaceman about the early days of the space race. “Can you see the hunger there/Strike without a sound?/Can you see the food you burn/As you circle round?,” he sang. This question has been continuously echoed throughout the history of space flight—why spend so much money to look for solutions in space when we could be addressing problems here on earth? As James Jeffries chronicled for the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing, author Kurt Vonnegut, commenting live on CBS on July 20, 1969, said, “For that kind of money, the least [NASA] can do is discover God.”

Also on our website this week, Mike Ervin looks at the essential program for disabled people that was cut from the final version of the Inflation Reduction Act; Alyssa Garza and Ennedith López point out that reproductive rights must also include environmental justice; Jeff Abbott looks at the reasons people are migrating from a Guatemalan tourist destination; and Pamela Grossman speaks with the producers of the new full-length documentary film, Kaepernick &America, about football activist Colin Kaepernick. “The intersection of Kaepernick and Trump really gives a window into a moment in America,” co-producer Gary Cohen tells her. “That to me was the opportunity that we dove into.”

Finally, two legendary figures passed away this week. On Tuesday, Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of Soviet reform in the 1990s, died at the age of 91 (current Russian president Vladimir Putin chose not to attend his funeral, although he did release a 38-second film clip, showing himself paying respect to the former leader, whom he has often criticized for “selling out” to the West). Between 2003 and 2019, Gorbachev appeared five times in The Progressive. I chronicled that history in this obituary.

Also this week, we learned of the passing of the passionate activist, journalist, and author Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich died following a stroke at the age of 81. For two decades, Ehrenreich wrote regular columns for The Progressive (as well as authoring numerous books and other articles in various national publications). In her memory, we reposted this column from May 2000. “The disappearance of the poor from the media is easy to explain: The advertisers who support most corporate media outlets are interested only in reaching the affluent, and media decision makers oblige them,” she wrote. “With companies so desperate for employees that they're recruiting retirees, stay-at-home moms, and citizens of countries as far away as Vietnam, there's no excuse for not demanding a living wage for every job.”

And speaking of jobs, Monday is Labor Day—a day to celebrate the efforts and struggles of organized labor: “the folks who brought you the weekend.” The unionized staff of The Progressive will be taking the day off to celebrate with their colleagues. As Marcy Golstein-Gelb and Jessica E. Martinez of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health write in an op-ed this week, “We learned during the pandemic just how much all of us rely on frontline workers. It’s great to honor them on Labor Day —and even better to join their campaigns for fair pay and safer working conditions all year long.”

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. - Next Saturday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m. Central Time we will broadcast our annual “Fighting Bob Fest” live on Facebook and YouTube. Fighting Bob Fest, a gathering of progressive speakers and activists, has been virtual for the past few years due to the pandemic. We hope to return to in-person gatherings in the future, but this year, please join us via the Internet, live or in archive form, for a great program as always. Speakers this year are scheduled to include Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, U.S. Representative Mark Pocan, journalists Ruth Conniff and John Nichols, and many more. As Jim Hightower says, it is “the best political party in America.”

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