Look out, robber barons.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE - Column

Welcome to the brand new, redesigned, and reinvigorated Progressive.

I hope you are as excited as I am by our new look, and by the fantastic articles in this special issue.

As I was reading page proofs just before we went to press, I had an overwhelming sense of pride in our magazine, and in my new colleagues from the Center for Media and Democracy.

No one in America has done more to expose ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, than Lisa Graves, our publisher and president, and the mighty little staff at CMD. But Lisa is also among a small handful of people to whom we owe everything we know about the Kochs. Wait until you read her piece on page 25--particularly the part about how Charles Koch (not just his father) joined the John Birch Society and continues to carry out that radical rightwing organization's nefarious work.

Mary Bottari, our projects and investigations editor, first thought of the idea for this issue, and invited our all-star panel of activists to nominate their favorite robber barons. Mary writes an excellent introduction to their picks on page 37.

There are too many other inspiring voices in this issue to name them all--from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Matt Taibbi to Senior Editor Matt Rothschild's incisive review of Thomas Picketty's Capital on page 83.

Since our merger, The Progressive is more modern, more focused, and, at the same time, as aware as ever of the great historic tradition we are carrying forward.

It was a joy to dig through our archives and look at old editorial cartoons, one of which we reprint here along with John Nichols's great piece on progressive history on page 17. Beneath that cartoons, torn from the pages of the January 14,1933> issue, was an article headlined "Wisconsin Progressives in Permanent Headquarters." The article...