Democratic leaders are paralyzed. Workers are pointing the way forward.

It's the one alternative to fascism

Welcome to a Tuesday morning edition of Progress Report.

Consider the frog officially boiled.

While it would be convenient for a terminally cautious media and obtuse public, there is no town crier that heralds the official arrival of fascism. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, fascism is more of a “know it when you see it” situation, and as much as Americans might find it painful to admit, the past few days have made it hard to look away from the reality. Here’s just a partial summary of what Donald Trump has gotten up to since late last week:

• Promised to stage military takeovers of several major American cities;

• Defied the Supreme Court and attempted to fire a Federal Reserve governor

• Signed an executive order that purports to criminalize flag burning;

• Demanded that NBC and ABC lose their broadcast licenses for critical coverage;

• Launched politically motivated investigations of rivals;

• Seized a 10% stake in Intel;

• Stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union rights;

• Pressured more Republican-run states into gerrymandering maps;

• Declared war on mail-in voting;

I’m not particularly interested in any academic debates over the exact definition of fascism — again, I’ll rely on the Potter litmus test — and if you’re still not entirely convinced, just be aware that Trump himself has been musing aloud about how many Americans might want to live under a dictatorship (one of our rare points of agreement, sadly).

The situation isn’t irreversible, but I do fear that the media’s lack of urgency and the relative normalcy of day-to-day life will together last long enough to take us past the point of no return.

And on that note, today we’ll run through a bunch of news stories; tonight we’ll look at the results of the special election in Iowa; and later this week, we’ll have two new interviews, including one with a very compelling down ballot candidate.

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Populism is popular

Shocker: Hundreds of workers at Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks have voted to unionize, marking the first time in several years that staffers at a national park or monument have voted to unionize.

I broke the news over at More Perfect Union late yesterday, having gotten word from an organizer with National Federation of Federal Employees; the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which oversees the union process for government workers, certainly has no intention of making this triumph public. After all, the agency’s purview continues to shrink, as the Trump administration engages in mass layoffs and tries to break collective bargaining agreements.

Those circumstances were both the impetus for the organizing and the major obstacle to reporting on this unionization campaign. Rangers, biologists, and other workers at Yosemite and Sequoia, along with many other parks, began organizing after the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre, which saw thousands of federal employees laid off in one fell swoop.

What began as an informal group aimed at protecting the parks from funding cuts and land sales — they called themselves Resistance Rangers — evolved into a unionization effort that has quietly spread to upwards of one hundred parks, which are being organized by several different federal unions, including the NFFE and AFGE.

Between the Resistance Rangers’ advocacy and an early court order, many of the fired workers were hired back, an early win for the movement. But the Supreme Court’s subsequent blessing of mass layoffs has complicated the organizing process to some degree, even though the National Parks Service hasn’t re-fired them yet. While union campaigns begin in secret, once they announce themselves, workers rely on public awareness to prevent management from unjustly punishing or firing them.

In this case, the Trump administration’s open hatred of unions and the impunity granted it’s been granted by the Supreme Court have forced workers to keep the organizing underground, to the point that none of the pro-union employees at Yosemite or Sequoia were willing to go on the record, much less appear in an upcoming video about the campaign.

Such reticence even from the most engaged supporters usually doesn’t augur well for a unionization effort, but things have been bad at the NPS — including severe staffing shortages and gross underpaying — for long enough that workers are past the point of hunkering down and waiting for the storm to pass. Workers at Yosemite voted in favor of the union by 97%, an incredible margin at any moment, and even more so now. Expect more parks to start going public in the next few months.

Another rare bright spot: The Trump administration’s defenestration of the NLRB and other workers’ rights agencies has led to a serious slowdown in both union filings and legal challenges, it having become clear that the regulators who gave workers a leg up by simply enforcing the law have been replaced by pro-business officials with little interest in fairness.

The UAW, however, is still moving forward with its effort to unionize BlueOval SK, the electric car battery-maker that just began production in Kentucky. A joint venture between Ford and a South Korean conglomerate called SK On, the factory should ultimately employee around 5,000 workers, and given its location (the South) and what it manufactures (electric car parts), successfully unionizing it would set an important precedent for the UAW going forward. The vote began on Monday.

A new era of candidates: Sen. Bernie Sanders will hold rallies with Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, the populist Marine veteran and oyster farmer who announced his campaign for Senate against Susan Collins last week.

Platner is running as a Democrat, but using every opportunity to create distance between himself and the party — not by moving to the right like most candidates, but by coming out swinging from the populist left, arguing that the centrist gerontocracy must go. During an interview on CNN today, Platner disavowed Chuck Schumer and Gov. Janet Mills, who Schumer has been trying to recruit for this Senate race.

On Schumer: “We need leaders that have vision and, frankly, the ability to fight. The things that I've seen recently don't show me a Democratic leadership that has that.”

On Mills: “If we keep having DC choose candidates for Maine … then we run the risk of having another 2020,” referring to Susan Collins’ somewhat surprising win that year.

As I noted last week, Platner is one of a growing number of independent-minded populist Democrats running in blue states, alongside a cadre of Democratic-minded independents who are running in red states.

Today, the nonprofit outlet NOTUS picked up on the trend:

South Dakota Senate candidate Bengs is part of a wave of independent candidates running for office this year — many of whom say they were inspired by [Dan] Osborn’s campaign.

In Idaho, independent candidate Todd Achilles is challenging Sen. Jim Risch. In Mississippi, Ty Pinkins is running an independent bid against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Osborn is also running again, this time against Sen. Pete Ricketts in Nebraska. And nonpartisan gubernatorial candidates have emerged in states like California and Michigan.

In Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, Matt Cavanaugh, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, is moving closer to launching an independent bid in a district held by Republican Rep. Jeff Crank.

Many of the independent candidates were former Democrats, and in most states and districts, they’re being tacitly “endorsed” by the Democratic Party, who are avoiding running candidates against them.

Death Sentence: Rural hospitals are already beginning to feel the impact of the GOP’s big, blasphemous reconciliation law, which took a hacksaw to many of their traditional funding sources. Republicans thought they were being clever by scheduling the Medicaid and SNAP cuts to start after the midterm elections, but because hospitals budget one or more years in advance, the anticipated collapse in patients with insurance and other financing mechanisms are causing serious problems and potential closings.

Voting Rights and Elections

The saga goes on: The Tacoma City Council’s failure to advance a proposed Workers’ Bill of Rights in time for it appear on the ballot in November was no accident, a new lawsuit alleges.

Turning down the heat: Activists in Michigan can now start collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that would ban regulated utility companies and large government contractors from spending money elections. A 100-word summary of the proposal was approved late last week by the Michigan Board of Canvassers after a brief delay.

This guy again: Leonard Leo, architect of the Christian right’s takeover of the United States judiciary, is tossing some of the money he swindled from old conservative billionaires at a variety of candidates in the upcoming elections. The list of recipients include Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a nominally pro-choice Republican who votes for every Leo-supported judge anyway.

Self-sabotage: Nearly 60% of Americans are supportive of mail-in voting, an inconvenient rejoinder to President Trump’s recent declaration of war against the perfectly legal, safe, and fraud-resistant way to cast a ballot. After railing against the approach in 2020 and perhaps losing the election because of it, Trump and the GOP embraced it last year and rode it to a convincing victory.

It’s unclear why Trump is so against it at this point, other than the fact that he’s an ill-tempered idiot.

Haha: RFK Jr. and his ilk love to promote grifty supplements, which led the dietary supplement industry to eagerly anticipate serious deregulation and Trump-led sales boosts. Instead, very little has happened thus far, causing consternation among people who sell snake (and fish) oil. Check out my report on this cozy relationship:

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