Corporate power is everything everywhere all at once
The movie is good, the power of elite donors is bad
Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.
It may sound counterintuitive, but I can actually understand why so many Americans don’t bother to follow current events with anything more than a passing glance at a cable news broadcast or the odd political rant on TikTok. Even for me, the sheer number of highs and lows produced by a country as vast and culturally diverse as the United States means that it’s almost impossible to assess the general direction of society.
Medical debt is down, but millions of Americans will soon be booted from Medicaid. Some states are extending more protections to LGBTQ+ people and enshrining abortion rights in their constitutions, but there are also further restrictions being placed on abortion and pseudo-intellectual bigots taking control of public education in red (or politically rigged) states. Voting numbers are up, but voting rights continue to come under assault.
Zoom out a bit, though, and there’s one factor in particular that matters more than anything else.
I’ve spent the past few days working on two stories that are immediately unrelated but politically intertwined. One story is about the sudden opportunity for labor unions and progressive Democrats in Michigan to repeal the nefarious “right to work” law that Republicans passed behind closed doors in 2012 as a gift to their corporate patrons.
Designed to stop the advance of labor and civil rights in the South in the New Deal era, the law has crippled working class-led movements over the past 70 years. There are 27 states with RTW laws on the books, and Michigan would be only the second state to repeal one (Indiana shed it for about a decade before Republicans reinstalled it).
A victory here would be a critical first step toward rebalancing an economy so deeply dominated by corporate board rooms and financial institutions.
That story will be out soon, and I’ll send it your way.
The other story on which I’m plugging away is the nascent unionization effort at a Tesla gigafactory in Buffalo, NY. On Wednesday, just a day after workers went public with their campaign, Tesla suddenly and without warning fired 27 people from the division that had started to organize. The only surprise was the timing of the unambiguously anti-union bloodletting, as companies generally like to target specific workers and concoct some kind of half-assed probable cause. (I’ll have a story on this tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled for that.)
Tesla released a statement tonight meant to assuage the immediate suspicion that the firings were an anti-union bloodletting, but the timing, eyebrow-raising circumstances, and Elon Musk’s track record of gleefully firing organizing workers are together too damning to ignore. Musk’s Tesla plants have mass manufactured unfair labor practices over the past decade, and unlike the company’s cars, there’s no voluntary recall on them.
Backed by the barista-organizers who launched the Starbucks union, Tesla Workers United is in for a long slog against a company run by the richest and most narcissistic man on earth. It shouldn’t be quite so daunting in a place like New York, where workers have additional legal protections and popular support, but the state essentially begged and bribed Musk with nearly a billion dollars to build the factory in Buffalo.
The only real condition on the money was that Tesla had to employ at least 1460 people; nothing in the agreement insisted that the company would be required to treat them with respect. These kinds of deals are proliferating all over the country, both for Tesla specifically and other corporate manufacturers. Incentives are not inherently bad — they make up the bulk of the infrastructure and IRA laws — but they’re increasingly used as secretive slush funds for major corporations.
Our lives are defined by corporate interests, which control the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the reality we experience. The more power they have, the less free we are.
The Tesla deal was signed by the Cuomo regime, which was also responsible for the endless giveaways to corporate real estate developers. His successor, Kathy Hochul, has thus far continued that gravy train, albeit with far more pushback; the stadium she secured for the Buffalo Bills was very galvanizing.
Her tax and developer subsidy-driven housing plan is divisive on several levels, and the war she picked with the rest of the party over Hector LaSalle, the terrible conservative judge that she nominated for Chief Justice of the state’s highest court, will only exacerbate that situation.
Which is great news, especially because LaSalle bit the dust on Wednesday. (I actually felt a bit bad for him, having to sit alone in the Senate chamber, surrounded by cameras seeking to capture his dejected grimace, but I’m still glad he got soundly rejected.)
Last week, Republicans in the state Senate sued the Democratic majority in an attempt to win a full floor vote on LaSalle’s nomination, which had been blocked by the Democratic majority on the Judiciary Committee. It was clear that LaSalle had nowhere near the votes to win confirmation, but that wasn’t the point of the gambit. Hochul herself had threatened to sue Senate Democrats to give a full floor vote to LaSalle, the one potential nominee that every major stakeholder under the party umbrella warned the governor not to choose.
Hochul claimed that the GOP lawsuit came as a surprise to her, but not an unpleasant one; not only did she not pull the nomination, which would have rendered the suit moot, but she also suggested she could join it in the future. That was enough to unify Democrats to the point that they decided to put the final nail in the coffin.
The overwhelming rejection — all but one Democrat voted against LaSalle — could herald in a new era of politics in New York.
Long dominated by the sort of corporate centrists that put Republicans in charge of the legislature and state’s highest court, the NY Democratic Party has decisively shifted to the left thanks to an infusion of young progressive energy and frustration with the abusive tactics of the Cuomo/Hochul/Jay Jacobs regime.
It’s not exactly a legislature filled with AOCs, but it’s far closer to representing the interests of the party’s major coalitions. With the all-important budget fight coming up, progressives need to stay aggressive to take advantage of the governor’s miscalculation. This sort of momentum is not common in an era of big money campaigns and state party power brokers.
Senate Democrats didn’t apologize for taking the stand against LaSalle after the vote on Wednesday, and some of them even broke free of the cautious tiptoeing that lawmakers so often perform around a court system that has not been deserving of such deference in decades.
“We’re not asking for a judge who calls balls and strikes,” State Senator Shelley Mayer said, casting aside the neutral euphemisms that do nothing to communicate their principles. Instead, Mayer said, Democrats want a judge who deeply understands “what the implication of a decision means for thousands of New Yorkers.”
Siding with the public interest requires a clear-eyed understanding of the powers and interests that structure our society.
In nearly every case, corporate power is jockeying for policy that would hurt the public, and while they may be occasionally more subtle about it, many lawmakers are also ultimately pursuing policy and cultural shifts that prize private profits over public good.
Look no further than the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, OH, a small town that is now a toxic disaster zone. Ohio officials have insisted over and over again that the chemical-burnt air and murky poisoned water are safe to breathe and drink, which is hard to believe even before considering the state’s ongoing embrace of dirty energy and loosened environmental regulations.
The toxicity of corruption is now burning the lungs of working families
Just a few years ago, the Ohio legislature was mired in the biggest corruption scandal in state history, a pay-to-play bribery scheme that saw lawmakers take $60 million to send a billion dollars in subsidies to two nuclear energy plants, slash renewable energy requirements, and ensure that coal plants continued to poison the air.
It should come as no surprise that Norfolk Southern, the railroad company that scorched East Palestine at the request of Gov. Mike DeWine, has also been quite generous to politicians across Ohio. Norfolk Southern has deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of Ohio politicos, including DeWine himself, a largesse matched only by the expenditure on lobbying the state government against upping safety regulatory standards.
Workers warned that a tragedy like this would happen with so few of them assigned to run so many cars on their own; the creakiness of the outdated technology and the cost-cutting that put two workers in charge of 150 cars were significant aspects of the railroad workers union’s efforts to win a much-improved new contract last fall, an effort that was ultimately sabotaged by a federal government more concerned with market slowdowns than human and environmental meltdowns.
One scan of the headlines can leave you with the feeling that we live in two different countries. I don’t think corporate power is the only reason for the disconnect, and the growth of so many businesses are essential to a healthy economy. But capital interests have hijacked our existence in ways big and small, overt and subtle, and our political battles going forward will be as much about recognizing and neutralizing their control as conflict with any particular politician.
Think of it like this: Ron DeSantis is probably the worst person alive, but he’s really only powerful because he’s got an unprecedented campaign war chest that’s funded by the corporations and billionaires that he has given $6 billion in tax breaks. We have to fight back against DeSantis’s white nationalist aspirations, but turning off that financial spigot is how the bigger battle will be won.
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