How are you marking the big 2-5-0 this Saturday? Fireworks? A little fife and drum? Just another day? Here in the U.S. capital, I’m taking a pass on Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall. I’ll let others gawk at his model for a proposed new “Triumphal Arch.”

But I did check out an exhibition at the nearby Library of Congress. This 250th event doesn’t gloss over our colonial history’s dark side. Displays feature newspaper ads that George Washington, our “nation’s father,” placed back in the day. The ads offer bounties for the return of his escaped slaves.

At this historic moment, I’d like to salute all the enslaved who dared to flee their captors — and all those who dared to aid in their escapes. I’d like to salute not just the revolutionaries of 1776, but all those who’ve risen up against economic tyranny in the years since. The workers who’ve battled for union rights. The activists who’ve taken great risks to combat discrimination of every sort.

These fighters for our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness stand as our American history’s real heroes. Pretty self-evident, don’t you think?

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Confronting the Ugly Secret Behind the Silk and Lace of Victoria’s Secret 

This week’s frontline face: Prarthana Gurung, a senior garment campaign organizer at Global Labor Justice, pictured above in the green shirt. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Gurung is pushing global brands like Victoria’s Secret to crack down on gender-based violence and harassment in their supply chains. 

Last year, a worker producing Victoria’s Secret apparel in a Sri Lanka factory, Paramasivam Pushpalatha, fell ill and requested medical leave. But her manager ordered her to finish her shift. Pushpalatha died just hours later. 

A union organizer leafleting about the incident later found herself confronted by men wearing shirts with the supplier company’s logo. They threatened her with rape and murder. Pushpalatha’s family has also faced intimidation. 

Gurung recently helped lead a protest outside a flagship Victoria’s Secret in New York City. The protesters demanded that the company sign agreements with its suppliers that ensure basic rights to the women who make the products Victoria’s Secret sells, including the right to report and eliminate gender-based violence. 

What makes this fight so important to her: Gender-based violence and harassment have become “a pervasive part of the global garment supply chains,”  Garang explains in a new interview with Inequality.org.  

“When a worker like Pushpalatha” she adds, “is unable to take medical leave when feeling ill, when union organizers are threatened with rape for handing out flyers, and when a grieving husband is warned to stay quiet or risk 'an accident,’ Victoria's Secret has an obligation to take action.”

On This Historic Anniversary, Let’s Truly Embrace ‘We the People’ 

Celebrating America can be hard enough in an average year. But getting into a celebratory mood for our 250th anniversary as our federal government brutally cracks down on our immigrant neighbors at home and funds an ever-expanding genocide in Palestine and Lebanon can seem like an impossible task. 

In a new blog, communications strategists Michael Chameides, Meg Bostrom, and Elaine Mejia suggest going back to America's founding for inspiration. In the famous words "We the People," the trio note, Americans now can find a powerful promise worth fighting for.

Putting the people — not billionaire oligarchs and their bought-out politicos — back in charge won’t be easy. But it’s already happening all across the country, via mobilizations that range from local campaigns against data centers to rural community battles for environmental protections. "We the People" can be so much more than just mere words.

Could This Billionaire Eventually Become MAGA’s Philosopher King?

This week’s dour deep pocket: Alex Karp, the 58-year-old chief executive of Palantir Technologies, an enterprise software provider — now deep into AI — that he co-founded with, among others, Peter Thiel, the ultra-secretive billionaire right-wing activist investor.

What has Karp sour: any hint that he doesn’t rate as a deep thinker.

Karp as a young man actually studied with one of our last century’s deepest thinkers, Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who died this past March at age 96. Habermas, notes a just-published New Yorker profile, won world renown championing “a feisty, principled public sphere” that can “draw attention to economic inequality, ecological crisis, civil rights, and technological threats.”

Leading voices within Germany’s current far-right cheered Habermas’s passing. One deemed him “dangerous.” But an “equally obnoxious obituary,” the New Yorker observes, came from Alex Karp’s “billionaire pen.” Karp, after waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, declared that our public discourse must take root in a more “traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.”

The last word: Karp’s perspective, sums up the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, essentially just mirrors “the language of MAGA.”

On July 23, the Institute for Policy Studies, alongside The Nation, We Build Progress, and the Wallace Global Fund, will host the 3rd Annual Henry A. Wallace Symposium: Forging A Democracy That Works for All. 

Throughout the event, we will hear from movement leaders fighting to protect hard-earned rights and frontline communities, policy experts advancing a bold agenda to confront corporate and Pentagon power and create shared prosperity, and elected officials working to renew our democratic institutions from within. 

Confirmed guest speakers include Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD), Sulma Arias (People’s Action), Aru Shiney-Ajay (Sunrise), Lindsay Owens (Groundwork Collaborative), Erica Smiley (Jobs With Justice), Keya Chatterjee (Free DC), and Shane Larson (Communications Workers of America).  

This year’s Wallace Symposium will run from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. EST at The Eaton DC. The event will also be live streamed. To attend in-person or virtually, please register below.

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