Protecting kids has never been so violent
It's open-season in the workplace, on campus, and on TV
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
I’m working on several longer features at the moment, one of which will be complete and sent out later tonight. But with so much chaos unfolding here in Manhattan and International Workers’ Day upon us, there are a couple of key news stories worth covering and discussing.
Before that, a quick and exciting announcement: Progress Report was nominated for an award! GAIN Power, a prominent progressive organization, informed me on Monday that we are nominated for Best Political Newsletter at its annual Powerful IDEA Awards, which are being held in DC in June.
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There are some real heavyweights among the other nominees, so I have no real expectation of winning. Then again, the nomination came as a complete surprise, so we’re playing with house money. The public can vote on these awards, so if you’ve got a spare minute, I’d be grateful for your support. The Best Political Newsletter category is near the very top of the page once you’ve signed in.
OK, with that out of the way, let’s get to business — there are spiraling wars at home as well as abroad, some eye-popping numbers, a scoop on a Congressional effort to help workers, and more.
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💰 For businesses, it pays to commit crimes against workers
Yesterday, I published a scoop at More Perfect Union about a new Congressional report on the toothlessness of the nation’s labor laws and how it regularly endangers American workers.
Child exploitation, catastrophic accidents, injuries, and even death are now just a cost of doing business, rounding errors for major corporation. Even mid-sized companies see getting caught by underfunded federal agencies as a low-risk proposition.
The report lays out all manner of dismal examples, including this triple play of labor violations in Utah discovered by federal officials in In March 2022: Standard Restaurant Supply was caught illegally employing nearly two dozen 14- and 15-year-olds, who were forced to work punishing overnight shifts that sometimes added up to more than 40 hours per week.
A year later, when it was time to face the consequences, Standard Restaurant Supply was assessed with a $16,595 fine, which amounted to $754 per child. Based on how little they likely paid them, it’s likely that exploiting eighth graders and freshmen was, profit-wise, still a sound business decision.
Standard Restaurant Supply is no outlier, either. Child labor violations have risen by more than 470% since the beginning of the pandemic, driven by unscrupulous employers and temp agencies looking for solutions to a worker shortage that don’t involve paying people fair wages.
You can read the whole report over at More Perfect Union.
Quick Hits:
Activists in Missouri just submitted more than 210,000 signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would raise the minimum wage and allow workers to accrue paid sick leave.
Democrats in Michigan once again have a trifecta. The winners of two special state House elections were sworn into office on Monday, giving Democrats a 56-54 majority in that chamber. They’ve got a budget to pass, and hopefully more than that.
Mississippi Republicans have reached a Medicaid expansion deal that probably won’t ever expand Medicaid. Its 100-hour work requirement will be rejected by the Biden administration and would take a long time and entire philosophical shift for a second Trump administration to give the green light.
In other states, Medicaid continues to expand bit by bit. There are now 12 states that offer low-income children fully paid-for health insurance, regardless of their immigration status. Things are a bit more stringent for undocumented adults, who are only given help in six states.
Campus crackdowns discredit Democratic warnings
Last night, hundreds of NYPD cops in riot gear swarmed the campus of Columbia University, arresting student protestors in scenes that looked like what so many Democrats warn will happen under Donald Trump.
Classes are finished for the semester, but the school’s president, Minouche Shafik, today nonetheless requested that the police occupy the campus for the next 18 days. The request came one day after 21 Democratic members of Congress, led by Reps. Josh Gotheimer and Jared Goldman, wrote a letter demanding either a crackdown or Shafik’s resignation. The onslaught of billionaires making the same request has not stopped since the fall, either.
It’s been said that liberals are people who oppose all wars but this war, and support all protests except this protest. There’s always some asterisk that they swear makes this time different, except history unfolds in real-time and generally repeats itself. Anyone who wants to believe that these are special circumstances should know that Hamilton Hall, the Columbia building that the cops just swept, was also occupied by student protestors during the Vietnam War. The school even has a tribute to those students on its website.
Students again occupied the building in 1985, when they demanded that the school divest from companies that do business with South Africa in protest of its apartheid government. School officials opposed divestment, but months later that the board of trustees voted to sell the holdings as students demanded.
Were there any windows broken during those occupations? Almost certainly, but there were no dishonest social media trolls to spam people’s feeds with loops of misleading footage lifted off sensationalist cable news coverage. Were there some ignorant students who said idiotic and offensive things? I would imagine so! But these only reactionary cranks are sticklers for the rules years later, when civil disobedience has gone from vilified to the obvious moral position in the face of the great evils that people tell themselves they’d never countenance.
It’s also important to note that these escalations don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s been six months of unfettered genocide, with 35,000 Palestinians — well over 10,000 of them children! — now dead and at least double that seriously injured, with Israel now pummeling Rafah. That hasn’t gotten much coverage during the hand-wringing about angry college kids, but it’s happening. It doesn’t excuse or justify Hamas’s vile and horrific day of terror on October 7th, nor does it signal support for its depraved antics, to protest against an ongoing genocide being carried out by a more powerful nation.
The atrocities that students warned against in October and November, when they were excoriated by politicians, billionaires, and mainstream media, have all come to pass. They occupied Hamilton Hall because the school was too concerned with the bad faith criticism of politician and big donors to consider real negotiations, so it began suspending students and having them arrested en masse instead.
If the revisited location feels too contrived, feel free to substitute in a lunch counter, bridge in Alabama, or park in lower Manhattan. Few people with any sense of propriety or shame would consider the politicians who ordered police to drag and beat protestors out of those places the heroes of the story. Unless they’re watching cable news, that is.
Columbia is not an isolated incident, but the tip of the spear both for student protestors across the country and the authorities who are indulging in violence against them in the name of suddenly inviolable rules around quad access and campus speech.
In some places, the crackdowns in places like New York, California, and Connecticut, ostensibly some of the most progressive states, gave given permission to red state leaders to send in troops with every protest, arrest dozens peacefully assembled on public property, and issue warnings condemning speech before a protest even happens. It’s gotten to the point where it’s essentially impossible to tell the two apart or even keep track of all the assaults; little attention has been paid to the invasion and shutdown of City College that went down overnight:
During the arrests Tuesday night, cops slammed protesters into cars, pulled them to the ground, knelt on top of them, and targeted protesters seemingly at random for arrest who had linked arms or were standing on the sidewalk in front of campus.
There have now been over 300 protestors arrested and facing charges in New York alone. This is a bipartisan attack, and every day it goes on, it makes a mockery of the urgent appeals to prevent GOP fascism that have become default Democratic rhetoric. Yes, Donald Trump and his cronies want to dismantle the federal government and all the ways that it regulates business and protects individual liberties, and yes, Republicans must be stopped. But any suggestion that merely voting blue will solve this crisis isn’t paying attention to what so many Democratic members of Congress, governors, and city officials are saying and doing.
For the past six months, any criticism of Israel from anybody outside an official power structure has been called antisemitic, which has rendered the word all but meaningless. The notion that these students are presenting a threat to Jewish classmates by asking for their schools to stop investing in arms producers, military contractors, and Israeli security tech firms is ludicrous, and the frequency with which it continues to be trotted out has become insulting and frankly dangerous.
The cynical genocide apologists don’t speak for me as a Jewish person; the pro-Israeli impunity thugs who attacked camping students and beat up old women at UCLA last night most definitely do not speak for me.
Pro-peace students aren’t protesting because they don’t like Jewish people; many of the encampments are led or populated by Jewish kids themselves. Is all of their rhetoric great? No, and there’s no excusing it, but it’s also escalated in response to police beat downs and disregard from the most powerful people in the country.
The fact that we are even discussing it is a victory for cynicism. There are 35,000 Palestinians dead, double that number injured, and the US has just sent billions of dollars to Israel to continue a genocide that has become a mission of total ethnic liquidation for the country’s maniac far-right government.
“There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday. “'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven."
Maybe a student should put that on a sign; it’s the only way it’ll get any attention right now.
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"'There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation,' Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday. ''You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven.'
Maybe a student should put that on a sign; it’s the only way it’ll get any attention right now."
What a stinging rebuke. What an absolutely absurd time to be alive.
I think we all know that the 35,000 figure is a fantasy. The incessant bombardment has likely led to a multiple of this figure. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, the mortality rate will skyrocket.
Any shred of credibility we had with the African continent has been decimated.
Meanwhile, Biden is barrelling toward a Democratic convention in Chicago that will end in disaster...between bad-faith media, bad-faith right-wingers, and a wilfully blind administration, the signs all point to a domestic wildfire.