More money, more freedom in pivotal states

Plus, Sam Alito publishes his own "If I Did It"

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

Lots to discuss tonight, so I’ll eschew any long-winded opening. Instead, I’ll simply recommend you check out my latest scoop on Starbucks’ quiet war on its LGBTQ employees, which is being waged out of sheer spite for union members.

OK, time for news!

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What We’re Tracking

Pennsylvania: What a difference a few seats (and some smart political machinations) can make.

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania House voted to raise the minimum wage from the current disgraceful rate of $7.25 to $15-an-hour by 2026. Two Republicans voted for the bill and one Democrat voted against its passage, resulting in a final tally of 103-100. That’s one more vote than Democrats currently have in their bare minimum majority, and had one close race finish differently last year, this raise doesn’t even get a vote.

The onus is now on the state Senate, which is narrowly controlled by Republicans. That may not be the kiss of death, thought, because bill’s sponsor in the upper chamber is a labor-friendly Republican (a very rare breed these days). Labor unions and grassroots advocacy groups are going to be pushing hard for the GOP majority leader to at least bring it up for a vote, so anything could happen.

Side note: The $15 standard should be more like $18 now, given inflation and the passage of time, and if Democrats in deep blue states, such as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Worst Governor in America™, backed higher raises, it would put further impetus on states like Pennsylvania to do more.

Amazon: Bernie Sanders today announced that the Senate HELP committee is launching an investigation into the criminally dangerous conditions faced by workers at Amazon facilities nationwide.

The mega-behemoth’s countless warehouses, last mile depots, and air hubs average far more worker injuries than similar workplaces, and as I’ve discovered again and again in my reporting, so many of those injuries are sinfully preventable. Every station is fraught with regular danger.

Workers have shown me footage and photos of rows and rows of metal walls, shelves bulging with piles of unorganized products, stacked up to the ceiling, heavy inventory wobbling high above the heads of the pickers who sort through the chaos to find products at unsustainable rates. They fall at random, sometimes crashing into the heads of unsuspecting workers. Sorters move boxes far too heavy for them, beyond the limits of what their line is supposed to handle.

It’s not just a matter of a hazardous workplace producing more accidents normal. Injuries are “treated” whenever possible at an internal clinics designed to clear people back to work. Managers often ignore notes from doctors requesting lighter (yet still exhausting) work when necessary; I’ve spoken with more than one person that lost a pregnancy during that sort of situation.

Sanders’ investigation is geared more toward exposing this information and shaming Amazon into making a change, which is right now the most powerful tool available when OSHA’s max fines are equivalent to the cost of one dinner on Jeff Bezos’s yacht. The hearings could also breathe new life into the Amazon Labor Union, which has been dealing with internal strife amid the corporation’s steadfast refusal to bargain a contract for the history-making warehouse in Staten Island.

It could also provide some further impetus for the Teamsters after they reach a contract with UPS, most likely after holding the largest single-employer strike in US history.

Supreme Court: If there’s one thing that conservative Supreme Court justices hate more than equal rights, it’s the mere suggestion that they don’t have the right to do whatever they want at any given time.

Now that Clarence Thomas’s outrageous corruption has been fallen out of the headlines, the incredible investigators at ProPublica have set their sights on Samuel Alito, the author of the Dobbs decision and now perhaps the most ill-conceived and incriminating op-ed in the history of the Wall Street Journal.

Alito’s op-ed, published earlier this evening, was ostensibly meant to get ahead of and discredit a report from ProPublica on his friendship with a right-wing billionaire who has business before the Supreme Court. Whereas Thomas released only a few short statements about the comically long list of uber-expensive gifts given to him by Nazi aficionado Harlan Crow, Alito went guns-a-blazing to defend each and every one of the gifts, trips, and other benefits given to him by billionaire Paul Singer. And, most importantly, drew far more attention to the story than it would have gotten otherwise.

Worse, Alito’s arguments are all tortured wrecks that ultimately serve as proof of his guilt, like the OJ Simpson book If I Did it but written by a high school sophomore on a rant about white collar crime and ethics violations.

There he describes taking a free flight to Alaska on a swanky private jet as being “allowed to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight,” as if the offense was allegedly manipulating the passenger count or cutting people in line.

At one point, he tries to absolve himself of failure to disclose vacations by parsing the meaning of the word “facility” through referencing Webster’s Dictionary and suggesting that he was under no obligation to report a trip due to the specific accommodations he received. The list of idiotic arguments runs nearly as deep as what you’d find in one of his Supreme Court decisions.

I never thought I’d say this, but Alito does make one very good point. The reason he could not have known from the case files that Singer was involved in the lawsuit before the Court, Alito argued, is that his name would have been buried inside a labyrinth of anonymous LLCs. It’s a system is abused by attorneys and businesses to hide the identities of owners and investors while shielding them from liability and minimizing taxes, and if not even a Supreme Court justice can crack the more sophisticated LLC chains, they essentially guarantee impunity to bad actors, money launderers, and tax cheats.

As Alito suggests himself, LLCs are far too powerful, and in the interest of both fairness and national security, should be subject to far more stringent rules around tax avoidance and transparency.

Now if only Dick Durbin cared about anything Alito or any of these corrupt Supreme Court justices have done and decided to investigate them.

Indiana Another 54,000 people were kicked off of Medicaid in the Hoosier State in May, bringing the total number of purged Indianans to just beyond the grim 100,00-person milestone. Worse, around 85% of them had their health care ripped away due to some technical issue, like a form not being filled out correctly.

New Good News

Michigan: It can be hard to grasp just how intensely and thoroughly former Gov. Rick Snyder targeted labor unions during his tenure, but the fact that Democrats are nearly six full months into their new Capitol trifecta and still unwinding the many awful anti-union laws passed during the Snyder era should give you a pretty decent idea of the damage.

Next up is repealing the law that prevents cities, towns, and counties from reaching project labor agreements that provide additional protections for contractors working on publicly-funded projects. Another target is a ban on municipalities setting minimum wage and benefits for projects made with public money.

Arkansas: The transparently discriminatory and extremely dangerous bans on gender-affirming care being passed in GOP states are now regularly being blocked by federal judges for being transparently discriminatory and extremely dangerous. Today a judge out-and-out ruled that Arkansas’s ban on gender-affirming care is unconstitutional.

US District Judge James Moody Jr.’s opinion defended the medical legitimacy of such care and discredited the quack right-wing doctors who testify for conservatives in these cases. It’s a precedent-setter, and while Arkansas is going to appeal, it takes a strong stand, far more so than temporary blocks on laws.

New York: The state Assembly is back in session for a few extra days in order to finish up the work that it didn’t get done last month. Among the key bills passed in the chamber today was a shield law that protects people in New York that send abortion pills to people in states where they are banned. New York is now primed to be a hub for organizations that want to continue distributing the pills, though the risk to those on the receiving end of the packages isn’t any different.

The Assembly also passed a ban on employer non-compete clauses, a form of business collusion and burden on workers that the NLRB has also been trying to ban on a nationwide level. It’s unclear whether Gov. Kathy Hochul will sign this bill, which takes us to our next section…

Fresh Hell

New York: The Assembly ‘s reconvening is no guarantee that all or even most of the Democratic majority’s priorities will get passed. Lawmakers want guarantees that their more contentious votes will result in positive new laws and not just attack ads, which at the moment gives Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Worst Governor in America, serious leverage over the legislature.

Case in point: Coverage for All, a bill that would guarantee access to health care for undocumented immigrants, is flailing due to Hochul’s evidently disingenuous negotiating with the lead sponsor. State Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas has grown frustrated with Hochul, who she says is “moving the goalposts” and expressing unfounded and cynical fears about the bill after winning concessions during initial negotiations.

Genocide by Capitalism: A new study estimates that poverty and the health problems that it causes or exacerbated, kills nearly 200,000 Americans every single year. And instead of directly addressing it, government is unwinding the expansion of anti-poverty programs that lifted so many people out of despair and kept them off the streets over the past few years.

Colorado: Anti-choice activists say they’re planning an effort to qualify an abortion ban referendum on an upcoming statewide ballot. Colorado, now firmly a blue state, just recently passed some of the strongest abortion rights protections in the country. Voters in the state, meanwhile, have regularly rejected ballot initiative-based attempts to ban abortion. Good luck!

Live Elections

Virginia: Tonight’s primaries delivered good news for progressive prosecutors in three of the state’s biggest counties. There have been and continue to be a lot of Democratic candidates challenging DAs from the right over the past few years, but aside from the national sandbagging of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco last year, these challengers have not been particularly successful.

Maine: Power companies are throwing down shocking sums of money to defeat the upcoming public utility ballot initiative in Maine. And it’s easy to see why: Should voters decide to go the cleaner and cheaper route, the existing private utilities would be phased out in favor of two state-run, people-guided utility companies.

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